Re: [xmca] Gratuitous Difficulty and Guileless Deceit

[mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>]

I would add, Rod, in this case, part of what is unusual owing to the nature
of the play world this scene is linked to is that the teacher is also a risk
taking co-player, in this sense/con-text a peer in the "safe space" of the
play where he takes risks that at times made the researcher's practically
drop their teeth!! All very difficult to get into a single article.
mike

On Sun, Feb 21, 2010 at 3:52 AM, Rod Parker-Rees <
R.Parker-Rees@plymouth.ac.uk> wrote:

> 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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