Volume 2, Number 1

Published 2009

Interviews

Play, Healing, and Wellness as Seen by a Physician Who Clowns: An Interview with Bowen White

Bowen White is a physician. He founded the Department of Preventive and Stress Medicine at the Baptist Medical Center in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1983 and later established the center’s Department of Wellness and Health Promotion. White is also a clown who goes by the name of Dr. Jerko. For years he mixed these dual interests, skills, and egos while practicing medicine, and more recently he combines them as a writer, speaker, and consultant to a wide range of institutions and corporations. He is the author of Why Normal Isn’t Healthy: How to Find Heart, Meaning, Passion, and Humor on the Road Most Traveled and has lectured and clowned across the globe, in hospitals, rehabilitation centers, homes for the aged, hospices, schools, refugee camps, prisons, and more. Play and playfulness lie at the center of how he views the world, and here he discusses how, in his opinion, clowning, play, and playfulness intersect with healing and good health.

Articles

Orderly and Disorderly Play: A Comparison

Thomas S. Henricks

Play is sometimes said to be paradoxical because it displays one quality and the opposite of that quality at the same time. One of the best examples of this is the copresence of order and disorder. This article explores the differences between orderly and disorderly play. The author emphasizes the ways in which any event can be said to be orderly or disorderly; the identification of cultural, social, and psychological sources of order; and the importance of this theme in the work of some prominent play scholars. Following this, the author suggests a variety of functions for both orderly and disorderly play.

A Second Look at the Play of Young Children with Disabilities

Michelle Buchanan and Tricia Giovacco Johnson

The authors investigate the nature of child play for young children with disabilities using two different research models—the traditional psychoeducational research paradigm and the more recent interdisciplinary approach of the childhood studies paradigm. They base their discussion on a research study of toddlers with disabilities, and they review the history of the scholarship on the issue. In considering such matters as voice, agency, identity, and equity, which are typically concerns of the more recent paradigm, they find that the need young children with disabilities have for all kinds of play has been misrepresented by the more traditional approach. In fact, when viewed from the perspective of childhood studies, play appears to be as necessary to the quality of daily life for young children with disabilities as it does for all young children. The authors advocate the same right to play for children with disabilities granted to other children by society in general, a right acknowledged and codified in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Game Playing: Negotiating Rules and Identities

Ditte Winther-Lindqvist

Beginning with Lev Vygotsky’s long-established assertion that the play of children always involves both imaginary play and rules of behavior, this article argues for a theoretical framework that connects such play with the construction of social identities in kindergarten peer groups. It begins with a discussion of Ivy Schousboe’s model of the different spheres of reality in children’s play to explain symbolic group play and applies the model to the play of a group of five-year-old kindergarten soccer players. The article finds that the soccer games of kindergartners and their negotiations of play rules intrinsically involve their social identities, both those that are real and those that are imaginary.

Friedrich Froebel's Gifts: Connecting the Spiritual and Aesthetic to the Real World of Play and Learning

Eugene F. Provenzo, Jr.

Friedrich Froebel, the German educator and founder of the Kindergarten Movement, developed a series of play materials including geometric building blocks and pattern activity blocks designed to teach children about forms and relationships found in nature. Froebel’s notions about using activity and play in preschool education complement many principles of early childhood education used in contemporary schools. But few modern teachers and educators study the nineteenth-century education pioneer or his ideas. This article explores how his system of learning through directed play focused on his play materials, called gifts, is still important and relevant to children and learning today.

Book Reviews

Wagner James Au, The Making of Second Life: Notes from the New World and Exodus to the Virtual World: How Online Fun is Changing Reality

Henry Lowood

Carl Honoré, Under Pressure: Rescuing Our Children from the Culture of Hyper-Parenting and A Nation of Wimps: The High Cost of Invasive Parenting

W. George Scarlett

Marjorie Harness Goodwin, The Hidden Life of Girls: Games of Stance, Status, and Exclusion

Tracy Vaillancourt

Lawrence C. Rubin, ed., Popular Culture in Counseling, Psychotherapy, and Play-Based Interventions

Natalya Ann Edwards

Elizabeth Goodenough, ed., A Place for Play: A Companion Volume to the Michigan Television Film “Where Do the Children Play?”

Rhonda Clements

Leslie Paris, Children’s Nature: The Rise of the American Summer Camp

Jay Mechling

Tim Gill, No Fear: Growing Up in a Risk Averse Society

Mary Rivkin

Contributors

Michelle Buchanan is Associate Professor of Early Childhood and Early Childhood Special Education at the University of Wyoming. She has more than thirty years of experience in these fields, and her research and teaching interests include development and facilitation of play in young children with special needs, inclusion and blended practices in early childhood, and parent and professional partnerships in research and education. Her coauthored articles have appeared in, among others, Public Health Nursing, Young Exceptional Children, and the Journal of Early Childhood Teacher Education. Tricia Giovacco Johnson is Assistant Professor in Early Childhood and Early Childhood Special Education at the University of Wyoming. Her research interests include equity, social justice, and inclusion in early childhood; early childhood special education; and teacher education. She has contributed to Childhood Education and presented papers on topics as diverse as participating in the implementation of change and constructing curriculum that reflects children’s participation in local culture.

Thomas Hendricks is Distinguished University Professor at Elon University. His interests as a sociologist include social theory, modernization and change, popular culture, social stratification, race and ethnic relations, and particularly play and sport. He is the author of Disputed Pleasures: Sport and Society in Preindustrial England (1991) and Play Reconsidered: Sociological Perspectives on Human Expression (2006). Among his current research interests is change in the social organization of enjoyment in the last century.

Eugene F. Provenzo, Jr. is Professor of Teaching and Learning at the University of Miami. Author of numerous books—alone and in collaboration with others—his chief scholarly interest is education as a social and cultural phenomenon, with particular emphasis on the role of teachers in American society. He has also studied and written about the impact of computers and video games on children and education. Provenzo is general editor of the Encyclopedia of the Social and Cultural Foundations of Education and author, coauthor, or coeditor of Foundations of Educational Thought; Teaching Science in Elementary and Middle School: A Cognitive and Cultural Approach; Teaching, Learning, and Schooling: A 21st Century Perspective; and 100 Experiential Learning Activities for Social Studies, Literature, and the Arts, Grades 5–12.

Ditte Winther-Lindqvist is a graduate student in psychology at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, where she is completing her doctoral thesis on children’s develop ment of social identity during transitions. She has made presentations on children’s identity at scholarly conferences in Canada and the Czech Republic, and she has a chapter on symbolic group play and social identity in Symbolic Transformations: The Mind in Movement through Culture and Society, a forthcoming volume in the series, Cultural Dynamics of Social Representation.