RE: [xmca] Gratuitous Difficulty and Guileless Deceit

[Rod Parker-Rees <R.Parker-Rees@plymouth.ac.uk>]

I wonder how gratuitous the gratuitous difficulties introduced in play really are - if we see play as being (among other things) a way of organising, calibrating and revising our 'mental models' or theories about how the world works, these added difficulties can be seen as a strategy for testing the range of applicability of the model or of monitoring how it works in new situations. Bruner wrote about how adults 'up the ante' in their interactions with developing children, adjusting their level of support as children are able to take over more of a shared task and this aspect of play may be a way by which children can up their own ante. It is now easier to recognise that the relationship between child and adult is not 'one-way' - that even babies play a part in educating their parents, training them to develop mutually acceptable ways of interacting and one of the advantages of introducing 'guileless deceit' into play is that it affords opportunities for 'dressing up' in social practices associated with negotiation of interests. If maternal love serves to modify aspects of mothers' social monitoring (the 'love is blind' argument made by Fonagy, Gergely and Target  on p. 298 of their article 'The parent-infant dyad and the construction of the subjective self') this may provide a 'safe space' in which infants can play their way into social processes and indeed babies do appear to take on much more active, co-creating roles when playing with more familiar partners. Even playing at deceit may be considerably more risky when one's partner is less well known - familiarity provides a degree of security which allows social risk taking to be thrilling rather than frightening.

In the context of the playworlds paper, these children (and their teacher) are having to work out a space between friendship and the more formal, managed relationships between children and teacher to identify how much scope there really is for children to shape the future course of their activity. The question for me is how children can be helped to make the step from negotiation of play planning among peers to this more sophisticated way of 'playing the game', which involves awareness of the teacher's interests and constraints so that these can be negotiated. It seems to me that a factor which would support this transition would be the degree to which the children know the teacher, not only as a teacher (role-holder) but also as a person - what he likes and dislikes, how he reacts to teasing and challenging, how willing he is to respond to children's suggestions etc. Playing social games is supported by familiar 'more competent others' and develops skills which allow us to engage in interactions with less familiar, less congenial 'adversaries'.

All the best,

Rod


-----Original Message-----
From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On Behalf Of David Kellogg
Sent: 20 February 2010 21:55
To: xmca
Subject: [xmca] Gratuitous Difficulty and Guileless Deceit

Very well, let me try to take the play discussion in a rather new direction. So far we've mostly discussed how play manages to highlight the different e-motions of very young children and mostly speculated about how this might be developmental. 
 
In some ways it seems to me that the article is rather poorly suited to this view. First of all, the actual data is not play per se but only preparation for play. One can easily imagine this play taking place without this preparation and therefore it doesn't seem a necessary component. 
 
Secondly, even if we accept the preplay discussion as a necessary stage of this form of play, it's not clear to me how e-motion is a necessary part of the resolution of the discussion. One can easily imagine the discussion being resolved without reference to friendship or best friends, etc.
 
But take the following dialogue, from our third grade textbook:
 
Minsu: I like apples.
Julie: I don't like apples.
(Minsu's mother turns the plate so Julie can see some fresh Keobong grapes)
Julie: Grapes! I like grapes.
Minsu: I don't like ...
 
When we ask the kids to continue the dialogue (either as "volleyball" or "pingpong" they will go like this for hours. They will not stick to the concept of 'fruit' either (we don't teach the word fruit, because it presents a very difficult plural in English). They will extend the use of the verb to virtually any field of experience, at hand or not. 
 
In fact, the verb "like" turns out to be BY FAR the preferred verb in third grade; the verb which is most likely to be used when we put the kids in teams or groups and ask them to improvise on ANY dialogue. This is strange, because it's not at all frequent in the material we teach.
 
So I want to suggest two ways in which play per se requires emotion and in particular requires not only emotion but the mastery of emotion. The first we can call the principle of Gratuitious Difficulty, that is, the introduction of extraneous problems and unnecessary rules whose only apparent purpose is to complicate the game, rather like the introduction of obstacles between the hero and the goal in a story. 
 
The second we can call the principle of  Guileless or Guiltless Deceit, that is, the introduction of a conceit, or an imaginary situation which is shared but also contested in some way. I want to suggest that these two principles are common to all forms of play, but not the preplay activity which the article is concerned with.
 
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education 


      
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