(A bit of a rant, delivered at ‘8 Weeks of Conference’ (play) and Great Ormond Street/Bloomberg University)
Ok. So you know how since the coronavirus has settled in to our lives like some malignant cuckoo, people have been having really vivid dreams?
Well this happened to me a day or so before making this presentation.
As usual I had spend a long time preparing a piece of writing like this.
It takes me a good week of work to chose my thoughts and the hone my words.
I thought that what I had originally prepared for you today was fairly good stuff.
Until that dream
I when I awoke the morning after it, I realised it was a real insight that I had had in my sleep.
I had almost Missed The Moment with the work I had prepared.
That is always a fear, that missing the mark, Missing The Moment.
To miss the privilege of an opportunity like this, the chance to say the thing that may be useful at this one unique moment in the history of the world…..no!
So no pressure then.
I am happy to share with you the transcript of the presentation that I was going to give. But just for now, here is a brief outline of it.
I talked about story telling and words, of how the power of the words that we pop together to make our stories emerge from our thinking. And how that thinking needs to be challenged if we are to tell stories that are useful in sharing inclusive Playwork practice with each other.
We also have to work with care at choosing our words when we are representing children with disabilities, well, all children for that matter.
To do this and indeed to be a successful inclusive Playworker/human being, we have to examine our thoughts and where they came from and how we use them.
I wanted to say that the starting point in our thinking about making. environments that are inclusive cannot be focussed solely on physical changes.
There are never ending tick lists of adaptations that we are required to make to our play places, like ramps and and grab rails, accessible toilets and such. But these are tokenistic shallow gestures unless we do the real work. It is only once we have tackled the prejudices we have towards impairments in our thinking that we can begin to find solutions to overcoming the disabling barriers in our physical environments.
Quoting directly from the presentation:
“It can be a very uncomfortable process to put ourselves through, to be self reflective. If they realise that they are Othering people with disabilities the inclusive Playworker may discover that they have a deep down feeling of personal guilt or pity for the child, or that they feel that they are ‘helping someone less fortunate’ or that they are doing something that will impress other people and make them think of the Playworker as someone saintly. Or they may find that they feel mentally and physically superior to the children that they work with. “
I drew a parallel with the message to white allies from Black Lives Matter.
Look at your life.
Look at what you have and what you have been taught to believe.
Now educate yourself.
Work hard at your thinking.
Use the resources that you have to become the best ally that you can be. Keep on questioning yourself.
This process is ongoing.
Using the old slogan… be the difference.
As Playworkers we use our reflective practice to question ourselves and each other to look at our thinking and to have a constant on-going process of thinking and rethinking and responding.
I finished with a story told by Claire from The Land Adventure Playground.
She told us how she had been doing the rounds on the estate of Plas Madoc, delivering food parcels and play kits and checking that everybody within their community was ok.
She met a mother and son who she was a little concerned about. They were all at a sociable distance and Claire said that it if felt as through the boy was a little awkward, feeling a bit coy and overwhelmed, seeing her away from the playground that was his community and that he was missing very much.
She handed over the delivery to mum and said ’Is there anything I can get for you?’
Then she stopped herself in her tracks. She had fallen into one of those heffalump traps and forgotten whose ally she was there to be. She had spoken adult to adult and ignored the child. Literally spoken over the head of the child.
It was the equivalent of talking to the person pushing the wheelchair instead of the person using the wheelchair. It is like asking the personal support worker ‘does he take sugar?’ And assuming that the disabled person cannot answer for themselves.
So she asked him the same question, ‘ is there anything I can get for you?’
And the boy said ‘can I have a bag of apples?’
Perfect story of inclusive practice.
Realising what is needed and what we can do to be of use as an ally.
Realising it.
Making it happen.
Realising.
Here is what I realised in My Dream.
The really important thing I had to talk about now, at this very moment, the important thing is inclusion.
I knew it when we played together at Chelsea.
I knew that every single person who was on that playground, that ‘Bubble of how the world should be’ was experiencing inclusion. Inclusion was not a thing that was being done to the disabled children.
Because we all played together and the most amazing and incredible things happen during playing, we all saw the most. amazing and incredible things about each other.
Every child there had the most extraordinary talent and zest for playing.
All the Playworkers saw this and revelled in it afresh every day.
It was the most creative and vibrant space and time I have ever encountered.
My head still zings when I think about it.
It was incredible precisely because it was inclusive.
Because your head was fizzling with the playing that was all around you and with the responses that you and everyone else was making to the playing and the play cues. Because of the interlacing of our minds and bodies and of our lives.
What if we had played with only siblings?
Ifwe had played only with siblings on one day, with children on the autistic spectrum the next, then had a day for children who used wheel chairs, one for visually impaired children and another for Deaf kids, one for children with mild learning difficulties and another for children with profound learning disabilities, one for children with emmotional and behavioural problems ….oh and perhaps we should have had subsets of these days? A day for blind white children, a day for children of colour with Aspergers Syndrome, a day for Christian children with Down’s Syndrome (probably best this to split at lunch time and have separate sesssions for Protestant and Catholics.)
The list could go on and on and on.
We can narrow the world down and down into tiny tiny tiny specialist groups. Believe me I have seen projects that run play services of which this is not an extreme characature.
Near to my house is a huge state-of-the-art school for children on the Autistic Spectrum. The building is designed to a minute degree to be comfortable to children and cause them no sensory irritations.
What upsets me is that children start to attend the school very young and stay into their college years. They attend their breakfast clubs and afterschool clubs there and over the holidays there is playscheme provision there, in the same place with the same people.
It is an excellent school. There is no doubt about that. And it is a joy to see our brothers and sisters who are diagnosed as being on the Autistic Spectrum treated with due respect and honour. (Though one does feel for the child who lives next door and who does not fit the diagnostics of autism and just turns out to have some no name disability. They are perhaps missing out.)
But it frightens the bejezuz out of me when I look back to the zing and zap of the make-shift inclusive playground is that we all had to work at understanding and accommodating each other’s needs and it felt so very alive to be part of such a collage of children and adults.
No-one taught us how to do it. They couldn’t have done if they had tried.
Even now I am loathe to say to people, ‘this is how you play with a child with such and such condition.’ A child’s playing is never formulaic and it is always the person and never the condition that Playworkers are playing with.
So. All of this is, to me, glaringly obvious.
What was it about it that woke me from my sleep and urged me to rewrite a weeks worth of work?
It is this.
The world is filled with difference.
We see playing out on our streets the systemic manifestation of horrendous racial prejudice.
We see people with disabilities vilified and denied state support.
We see the poorest people in the world get poorer.
We see the richest people in the world get richer
We see power taken from people, taken, in stealth, by the most powerful.
We oppress our queer community, abuse women, exploit men, deny children their basic rights, tear them from their families and imprison them.
I could go on and on with this list.
Sadly.
I genuinely believe that if people knew each other, they would not behave like this.
And of course I also genuinely believe that the very best way for us to get to know each other is by playing together as children.
But I would wouldn’t I?
So for me it is hugely important to make use of opportunities like the one we have in Kings Cross with PlayKX.
We play with such a broad mixture of people who have nothing in common at all, except that they are playing with us there in that space at that time.
I won’t go through the list again… but all sorts of children and families mix there together.
Some of those families are powerful and wealthy.
We know that the children of the rich and powerful are more likely to be able to surf on that privilege and become rich and powerful themselves.
And to be brutally honest I think that if more people who are rich and powerful had played with children who were of a different skin colour or faith or gender or sexual orientation or who were trans, who had a learning disability or a physical diability or who are not rich or, dare I say it, poor, then we would find wiser, stronger, better people making wiser, stronger, better decisions, and perhaps even doing the unthinkable and deferring power to other people.
Of course I maybe still have been half asleep and dreaming as I wrote this. It is a time of extraordinary dreaming.
I do notice that I am referring to my current work as though it were still happening.
It is not.
We have not figured out a way to do all the things that we used to do together without doing all the things that we used to do together.
But we will discover something and it will have to be very soon, because now is the time my friends.
Now is the moment for us to find soloutions because far from being a great equaliser, coronavirus has segmented us and driven us into tiny tiny groups.
Like most of you I am desperately worried about so many of the children that I am not able to see.
How does it feel to be hyperactive or autistic living in a small flat with no outdoor space and neighbours complaining about the noise?
How does it feel to be in lockdown with not enough food and no WiFi?
How does it feel to be in lockdown with abusers?
Coronavirus has given all the people on the planet a new thing that we share.
Coronavirus has taught us that we cannot take care of ourselves without taking care of everybody else.
Today is ‘Play Day’. *
I cannot think of a better day to spend time with each other from all over the earth talking together about how to remodel our shared world as a waaaay more inclusive and playful planet..
It is within our power to make the world of difference.
We have the benefit of hindsight to plan for the future.
Now is the moment.
Let us not miss it.
Penny Wilson
First delivered July 21st 2020 (birthday of Bob Hughes. Playworker and play theorist.)
Second delivery August 5th 2020 (Play Day in the U.K.)
