Pondering Pathways - Prerequisites to Play

In this solo episode, I introduce a mini-series that I intend to continue called Pondering Pathways, where I take a walk around my neighbourhood while reflecting on what is required to access play. I follow up from my questions about Treaty 3 from my first episode and then I contemplate some systemic limitations related to ability, race, socioeconomic status, and culture. I take a deep dive into some thoughts about music in early learning, seasonal outdoor play, and what is required to engage with sophisticated environments and tools. This episode is a little bit of an experiment… it’s a bit choppy or distorted at times and includes some input from the more-than-human world.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the playful podcast where we discuss lifelong learning by lingering at the intersection of recreation education and occupation. I'm your host, kim Barton. Welcome to the journey. I'm excited to play and learn along with you. 

 Welcome, welcome to episode two of the playful podcast. This episode is titled Prerequisites to Play and I'm going to be talking all about some accessibility considerations for engaging in meaningful play and what it means for educators or other professionals to really be providing opportunities and environments that are meaningful and accessible to children or students or other populations that we might be working with. Something I forgot to mention in the last episode that I'm going to try and remember from now on is that yes, my name is kim and my pronouns are she her hers at this time. This podcast is not affiliated or associated with or authorized or endorsed by any organization or individual other than myself and my future guests. Uh, so the views expressed here in this episode are my own. This episode is going to look a little bit different than the last one because I've decided that even though I'm only on episode two, I'm maybe having a bit of a sub series within this podcast where I do some trail walk recordings and I'm not sure what they're going to be called yet. Something like trail walks with kim or trail blazing podcast. I don't know. I'll find a fun name. So this episode sounds a little bit different. You can hear birds chirping in the background, sometimes there's background noise. Um, but it's super interesting because, well I think it's super interesting. Um I kind of focus this episode like many episodes on outdoor learning and what it means to be able to access outdoor environments to engage in learning and play. So in that way it's kind of fitting that I'm on a walk outside while I talk about what it means to access the outdoors and other kinds of learning opportunities. I said in the first episode, how I work play and live on Treaty Three lands. And I also had said that this is the territory of the Mississauga is of the credit. Um but I actually didn't know what this meant. I knew I didn't know what Treaty three really meant. Um but I didn't know that I was unaware what the territory of the Mississauga of the credit meant as well. So um I did my best to kind of look into this in terms of just the next step that I can bring to my own awareness about what it means to spend time on this land and to like walk the streets that are on this land as I do every day. And and this podcast is recorded on, on a walk that I take around my neighborhood. So throughout it, I was really curious about what it meant to be walking… walking and talking on this land and, I apologize, if you're familiar with this, then you probably know all the information I'm going to share. But… So another name for Treaty three is between the lakes purchase, which happened in 1792, which represents an agreement about this sort of section of land between some of the Great Lakes. I'm just reading off of an Ontarian article that I found from Dr. Britney Luby and Allison Norman, so it's saying how the lands include places like Perth, Hamilton, Burlington, London, St. Catharines, Woodstock and Grimsby, and that before 1792, I guess my understanding is this area was home to Mississauga of the Credit First Nation. And then at the end of the revolutionary war, there was an influx of people to this area from the United States and the British Crown at the time, wanted more space for these people to live on. And so they sought to I guess negotiate with uh Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, but for the purposes I guess of acquiring the land to allow settler colonialism basically. Um and my understanding too, was that this was meant to be an agreement that lasted forever. And the Indigenous perspective in this agreement was that the lands would continue to be stewarded and maintained, like, the relationship would be intact with the lands and that there wasn't it wasn't possible, I guess to have to own land or to have a hierarchical relationship with land, but the British obviously had a different idea as to what it meant to acquire land. Um and something I was reading in this article that really stood out to me was that… so this hasn't been articulated yet in my podcast, but so last summer I kind of went on this journey about all the ways in which I'm sort of in relationship with water in many different forms. And so I just wanted to read something that stood out to me from this article. This is a little excerpt from Caroline Bridge and it says due to the large bodies of water being dealt with in Treaty Three, we can speculate that input from the Nation's women was important. Women in our nation’s culture of which the Mississauga are part of our considered keepers of water, meaning that when it came to the usage of water, their word was likely to have been considered invaluable in 17 92. This stood out to me as a woman. For me, this really connects to this journey I was having last summer in terms of what it means to being relationship with many types of water as a settler. So what does it mean for me to enjoy canoeing on bodies of water in Canada? What does it mean for me to walk on frozen lakes to go into camping? What does it mean for me to cross country ski. Um and what does it mean for a lot of my family to have a history deeply connected to Whitewater kayaking across Canada, what does it mean to be working, playing and living on Indigenous land as a white settler woman who really benefits from the fact that this land and space has really been stolen from Indigenous groups that have historically and continued to steward this land. So yeah, that's, that's sort of where I met with that. I planned for my next episode to continue to learn a little bit more about this history because history is not really my strong suit or area of comfort. So I'm going to do a bit more reading but for now you can listen to me as I go on a walk on Treaty Three lands, particularly as I walked along the speed river, which is something else, I would like to learn a bit more about, you know, what was its name before, um I'm assuming white people called it the speed river. Um so yeah, stay tuned here it is. 

Um so the whole reason I went, I became an early child educator is because I had the opportunity to facilitate outdoor plan learning with some local schools and I would take classes to urban wild spaces and we would integrate curriculum into our play out there. That was a huge influence on the way that I entered into education and early learning and for me, like outdoor education came first instead of being like an add on while I was training as an ec, I chose to attend some conferences on outdoor education because I was certain that as an educator, I want to be taking the children outside and finding meaningful ways to extend learning outside. So I wanted to kind of learn from the best and in Canada right now in the past few years there's been a fairly big movement, I would say to engage in outdoor play and I think like the movements not like selective to Canada, it's definitely the state, a lot of it's come from the UK and certainly like nordic countries in Australia also has a lot of sort of movement that's happened a bit more with their own indigenous philosophy and history and culture I think though. So I kind of got swept up into that movement and I was really interested in nature based learning. I felt really conflicted and a lot of conflicting feelings about being a settler and with the land or on the land, like I tried my best to re-prioritiz Indigenous knowledge in a way that wasn't extractive or co opted to sort of make up my own. So I kind of had these semi-clear intentions taking children outside and then my whole vision became a bit disrupted in 2020 certainly after the murder of George Floyd, the Black uprising from the Black Lives Matter movement because as I sort of did a lot of my own um learning relearning, I realized that I've been operating in systems of oppression that I benefit from. And one of them is this way that we go about facilitating outdoor education, assuming that everybody has access to appropriate clothing and gear for the weather, assuming that people have their ways to clean this clothing and dry it, assuming that people are neurotypical and benefit from... So like I want to be careful when I talk about neurodivergent on the outdoors because firstly it's like no divergence is a huge spectrum, but everybody has their own individual like preference and sort of like regulation. And I have learned that the outdoors and being nature can be like a powerful source of regulation, but I've also witnessed the way that it can be quite over stimulating and if folks haven't spent a lot of time outside their nervous system isn't yet in sync with the sensations of nature and so like the wind, like all the different sound of birds, the sound of trees, cracking, things like that can be um can make somebody quite hyper vigilant and then I've, you know, I think that there's quite powerful way that sensory integration can occur in the outdoors and that can kind of like strengthen our connection with some of our like inherent like rhythms, but so that's narrative regions and I talked a little bit about access to clothing. Um I also want to talk about how like back to the clothing a bit. So my like intro experience to sort of outdoor and experiential learning came with this quote that says there's no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing and it was meant to suggest that we could be outdoors no matter the weather, we just needed the right clothing. And even though I believe that to be true, mostly even for young children and I even think like in Canada, we tend to have a lot more hesitation about the really cold days and like exposing children like young infants to really frigid temperatures, but that's not the case around the world. And I think I want to say it's Norway, Finland, there's a different kind of culture are rapidly cold weather from my understanding, anyway, adults will take children in strollers to be outdoors for larger amounts of time than we do here. So that makes me think that there's not necessarily um anything natural or inevitable about the way that we approach cold temperatures with young children. It's more, I think of the cultural phenomenon like sort of a societal agreement, I think it would take a lot to change that. But the more I think about like being with children outside in winter, the more I feel compelled to advocate that we still have so much growth to do and like back to this thing about there's no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing, what is good clothing for children to wear in cold temperatures, what's good clothing for individuals to wear, who don't engage in a lot of movement outdoors. So like infants for example, um elderly who are maybe less mobile, but not only that the reason I bring this quotation is there is this assumption that everybody has access to what's considered good clothing I guess, but we know that good clothing not only is expensive and hard to find, but an additional layer for young children is that they grow so fast. So the cost of having good clothing at a young age is so high because they outgrow it by the next year. So this, to me is quite a dilemma because I don't think that every family has the resources to make these investments and not just financially. I mean also like culturally like spiritually like every family will have its unique sort of priorities, spending extended time outdoors may or may not align with family values. As professionals who work with children, how can we give children those opportunities without burdening families. So when I was at the Council for outdoor educators of Ontario, I attended a particular session run by, I think it's a company called outdoor playing learning and they were going to different like urban schools and helping to kind of change the culture around taking children outside by like educating, I guess more like working with educators to prompt some self reflection on each educators comfort with being outdoors and educator sort of perception of the children's competence in terms of playing with natural elements like walking on logs, climbing trees, playing in water. And another thing that they did that absolutely fascinated me was, um, developing clothing libraries, which meant that there was a range of clothing available for various weather conditions to like rain and snow, sun, different sizes. The children were empowered to choose. It wasn't designed just for children who didn't have access to particular clothing because what it was meant to do is empower children to choose the clothing that they wanted to wear that would best suit the kind of play they wanted to engage in. So children wanted to play in mud, then they could, even if it wasn't raining, they might choose to wear waterproof clothing. And then another example might be if it was, um, if children really wanted to play in like a wooded area or an area with a lot of long grass grass or like prickly brush than they could choose. Some longer pants that were a bit more durable to protect their legs. Um, if children really wanted to make snowballs in the snow, maybe they could choose some some waterproof. I just really thought that this was one of the best ideas I've seen in a long time to support children in like fostering their own ability to engage in play and develop some of that. I talked about this in my last episode, but you know, this idea of things being like voluntary and having choice and how I think that that's just such like an element of play and that's such for me at the end of the day, that's a prerequisite to play, having some choice. 

Another thing that comes to mind when I'm thinking of like a prerequisite to play is I think this is where my issue with games comes in (I'll have an episode later on). I really debate whether games are play because to me, like, includes high levels of agency and autonomy. Such that rules can be broken and the play can evolve to continue to support their own interests and follow their rise and fall of engagement or a natural rhythm of inquiry or energy rather than sustaining the same sort of set of expectations. And while I'm on this idea of sort of like autonomy, another essential element of play is long periods being uninterrupted. And if you're in education or if you're in early learning, you're likely familiar with this and you’re here in Ontario here, especially familiar with this because that wording is included in How does learning happen. It talks about this idea of for play to really unfold with all of its potential and affordanced. The individuals engaging and play require long enough durations without interruptions, that they are able to tune in to, like I said, they're sort of inherent levels of engagement that rise and fall and that continued choice is extended to the choice when I want to begin and engage in a certain type of play when I want it to evolve when I, when I, want it to end, or when I wanted to take a different shape or form or function when we give children or anyone a prescribed amount of time to play, and I know that there's a lot of this, but say we have, like, half an hour for free play. That to me isn't necessarily aligned with my internal clock and schedule or interest at that point in time, and it may take me 20 minutes to, like, tune in or settle into my interest. By that time, I have about five minutes of deep engagement or like, curiosity before I hear that there are only five minutes left. Now, I think this is relevant as an adult, because when I write songs rarely will choose to write songs when I have a specific amount of, like, free time, but if it's a saturday afternoon and I have three hours, even though writing the song or playing music, my only take half an hour. The feeling that I have, so I have all the choice I need about when to stop is what feels so empowering to me and what it's playful. I think I want to also talk about ability. Um and disability. I'm not an expert on disability or neurogiverence at all. Um I'm diagnosed with complex lifelong mental illness and uh for a long time I worked with children supporting full inclusion of children with a wide ranges of disabilities, disabled young adults. Um my sister has down syndrome. So I'm familiar with some of the family dynamics that go into supporting an individual. So I'm coming to this like with some prior knowledge. And so what I think about way from an ability level, I know that I draw upon my developmental knowledge in terms of like thinking about observing the current level of skills and individual has and then scaffolding from that level when it comes to an like, setting up an environment to be accessible. That can be really challenged when we're playing and learning outdoors in wild spaces. Because that setup is pre-determined by nature, ecosystems and the weather…I have two competing mindsets because on one hand, you know, unlike a playground, a natural wild environment doesn't have prescribed uses. So when a playground has like stairs and slide, it requires children to be able to like climb the stairs to go down the slide. And even though children may go up the slide and downstairs, that's kind of like the form and function of that equipment. But when we're outdoors and we see logs and all kinds of shapes, it invites us to engage with the environment in ways that aren't necessarily predetermined in that regard of a fallen log, what's on the diagonal could be walked along, It could be used to sit on as a train, children might want to try and push it and investigate the bark or see if there are any bugs on it. There are endless ways that children might engage with that environment. When I think of environments with that lens, I think that the outdoor environment can be so much more accessible because it doesn't require certain developmental skills to engage with the accordance is available and with that environment. But the competing lines that I have is that as an adult and as an educator, I'm less in control of the environmental set up outdoors for accessibility purposes. A default idea about this is that I can't guarantee every space is wheelchair accessible. There are so many other accessibility needs that should also be considered. Accessibility needs extend to educators as well. So we can't expect educators to want to take children outside or to be comfortable with less supervision. We need all the educators and then to like use everybody strikes appropriately. I think sometimes there's this attitude towards outdoor play that it's time to let off steam and this is talked about in many other podcasts. I'll just say that we have an expectation about play in certain spaces or like at certain times and the use children pick up on like going to operate within that framework and it may limit rather than liberate the playful opportunities that exist. 

And I guess I think for me this ties into the use of music in early learning. If we bring in music with an expectation that it's to dance to if we bring in instruments with the expectation that they're to be used like only at certain times of the day that really limits what I've always talked about. Empowering children have choice around how they respond to music and when and why they might want to use a musical instrument. But what I imagine to be a solution to really change our attitude around what we view to be musical because they're actually probably making music throughout the day with things like a paintbrush, started travelling time tapped on a garbage can. And he looked up at the educated with this huge smile and continue to tap and his dad is a drummer. And unfortunately I didn't really think about the fact that it was a garbage can. The educator responded saying like, oh that's that's yeah, that's a garbage can. You don't touch it? 

I was like really disappointed. What I would do next time is to say like, well like you're making such an interesting rhythm, why don't we use another material that's like similar in texture and sound to make the same rhythm so that we don't touch the garbage can. Anyway. What I imagine to be a solution for this idea of like sound being disregulating or over stimulating in classrooms is to have some soundproofing spaces that like dampen the sound a little bit because I know that with this large emphasis and focus on visual art. There's this focus on sort of like actually a like studio setups for children, some centers will have a whole art studio, we don't get have music spaces and so I'm I'm picturing or wondering about like headphones to protect kinds of instruments. Continue to think about it is feeding the vision that we can support musical play differently than the ways that it currently exists. 

When I'm talking about visual art supplies and thinking about how current ideal and early learning is that children have access to real art supplies for the majority of the day so that they can engage with these materials in response to their own desire to do. So these materials are accessible like physically. So they're at children's level and there's also not limitation posed by the educators of adults in terms of when or how to use these materials and I don't yet think we have the same kind of approach and attitudes towards the use of music. In early learning, we I think are a bit kind of like sound conscious still and in many ways rightly so because there are sensory considerations in terms of having sounds in the classroom particularly sounds that are quite loud or surprising like drums and or quite vibrational or like a cello um with some reasonable apprehension, I guess I would say in terms of the use of music because we don't want it to be overstimulating, but I still think that there is room for change. I've become quite curious about how we can think about music differently in early learning, like in particular how we might want to lead into more live music and I know that many educators do a lot of singing from my experience that tends to stop when children get into grade one to even we could be singing more. I in my opinion, like all avenues of our lives, I like keep music has an exclusive experience for some events or opportunities is really not letting us live up to music's full potential. Oh and the final thing I wanted to talk about as a prerequisites to play is having the support and scaffolding to use some materials in particular ways. An example is maybe like not smashing the guitar but like strumming it or like plucking the strings and learning to use a microscope or glass speakers, like sometimes to support children's play with highly technical equipment, there is sometimes some sort of pre-instruction I guess. I hate the word instruction; there's a like an ideal amount of learning that would happen ahead of time so that children can then take those skills and then engage in play without knowing how to use a saw. I find it hard to think that children can play with the saw because to play with the saw means that we can voluntarily engage with it in ways that are meaningful if I want to follow my like you know rising and falling levels of engagement in Korea. I want to be able to cut different materials in different ways and in order to like physically and emotionally be able to do that it may require that I have some prior experience with that tool and that I've been guided and supported in nurturing relationships to achieve that level of dexterity and skill. And I think I kind of talked about this in my first episode when I talked about how I write songs and how that is playful for me. And I forget sometimes that like playing guitar for me is a bit of a prerequisite for my enjoyment in the songwriting process because I've been doing it for so long and I just forget what it was like to like learn guitar, but I also forget that um like so much of my willingness to improvise comes from a bit of confidence in terms of playing different guitar chords and like an openness to using like I don't feel afraid to like play a wrong note. Like I have this confidence that if I want to play a particular sound like I'll find a way to make that sound um even if it's not sort of musically theoretically like most correct. So I think that that like that's really what I wanted to like highlight at the end of this episode is just really that um you know, how else might that show up in life if we want children to be able to play safely, you know, in rivers or we want the elderly to be able to play with visual art? What prior experiences, what scaffolding might that require to best support what play truly is, which is voluntary and empowering, responsive to our own rising and following levels of interest and engagement. We might really have to think about sort of deconstructing many skills or like attitudes that come with successful use of certain equipment. If we're thinking about play within educational settings or really any institutions, we really have to be thinking about the harm that's been inflicted by these institutions and which populations have benefited. A big one that comes to mind for me is thinking about, um, you know, what does it mean to be an educator in an education system that previously included the residential school system? I recently did a virtual tour of closest residential school. To me, it really made me feel perplexed about what reconciliation looks like from an education perspective. I guess what I'm talking about prerequisites for play. How it connects to these institutions? I'm really thinking about, okay, what are we doing to be actively reconciling? How are we being antiracist? And if we're trying to make play accessible, how are we doing that in a way that doesn't perpetuate able as racist, colonial, capitalist cis-hetero, patriarchal hegemony, that is so deeply rooted in our society. And if we are really looking to like empower students, children, participants, clients, etcetera, then how are we ensuring that our not only our access to being able to play, I think without intention we easily end up perpetuating the racist systems, world views, attitudes and practices that have historically been perpetuated within institutions and still to this day are still perpetuate in many ways. And so like also how are we compensating for the harm that's been done to ensure that what we're offering is equitable opportunities. So like this isn't my idea by any means, but where might we have to adjust what we're expecting participation to look like? What we're expecting certain skills to look like? What are we expecting certain dispositions to look like? Anyway, I'm not really sure if I did this, this topic complete justice if you're still with me. 

Thank you so much for listening to the second episode of playful pedagogy podcast. Before I let you go actually wanted to follow up after listening to this podcast and say a few things that I wish I had included in the podcast when I was recording it and that hopefully in future conversations I can bring to the table more in this episode in particular. I wish I had more clearly called out the ableism that exists in our world and that continues to make spaces and places only accessible for some individuals, typically those who already benefit from having segregation in general as it exists today. And I wish it also more clearly identified the role of culture in finding outdoor play to be meaningful and interesting. And until I've spent more time immersed in other cultures, I really do need to continue my education in this area. It felt a little bit like tokenist too, I guess to kind of generally be like, oh yeah, and we need to consider ‘other cultures’, which is something I want to sort of invite myself into learning. And finally, in the future I plan to more clearly address racist systems of oppression that exists that I do benefit from and finally be willing to be wrong. Part of my discomfort was hearing some of this stuff back and kind of feeling a bit jarring or feeling like cringey, like that it came out like not quite right. So I clearly, you know, have to put a little bit more thought into this um get some feedback and um just continue my learning journey. So as always I accept full responsibility for any mistakes, inaccuracies, omissions, or oversights made in this episode in this podcast in general due to my own ignorance and privilege. Now one way that I'm working to rectify this and ensure that I am amplifying others voices who have lived experience in areas that I don't or who come from um equity seeking or marginalized groups or have identities that I don't hold. Um is that I'm looking to bring in guests who are interested in speaking from these places. But I'm specifically looking to be able to compensate them. And currently my podcast is not monetized. So I just started a Go fund me page to be able to pay guests for their lived experience expertise in time. If you're interested in contributing to that, the website is gofund.me/157a34a7. All lower case. Again, that's gofund.me/157a34a7. Additionally, you can reach out to me just to chat or collab or give feedback on instagram @playfulpedagigues, you can also find the show notes for this episode at playfulpedagogies.ca, and you can always email me at kem@playfulpedagogies.ca. Thanks so much for listening. Stay playful.