Play, Creativity and Popular Culture

Play,
creativity and
popular
culture
Jackie Marsh
university
of
sheffield, uk

Tuesday, 6 December 2011

Play?

eppe concludes that in the most
effective centres ‘play’
environments were used to provide
the basis of instructive learning.
The most effective pedagogy is both
‘teaching’ and providing freely
chosen yet potentially instructive
play activities.! ! ! ! !
(EPPE, 2003, p5)


Hong kong guide to the
pre-primary curriculum, 2006

Teachers should guide children
to pay attention to characters/
words, especially their structure, that
appear in their surrounding environment.
They may design a variety of play activities
that deal with the structure of
characters/words, such as strokes or
components, to promote children’s writing
skills.


The rhetoric of play as the imaginary
is... ‘characterized as an attitude of
mind that glorifies freedom, originality,
genius, the arts, and the innocent and
uncorrupted character of the
childhood vision’.

(Sutton smith, 1997:129).


Creativity?
‘imaginative processes
with outcomes that are
original and of value’
(Robinson 2001:118)


popular culture?
Perhaps part of our difficulty in using the
paradigm of elite/popular/mass/ folk culture
is that we have to tinker with it every time we
use it – we define and redefine these four
pigeon-holes so that we can sort things out
to suit ourselves…I do suggest that we
consider a new paradigm by which we first
view all culture as one expression of a given
society’s leisure needs and opportunities,
and then distinguish degrees of popularity
along two axes: synchronic and diachronic.

(Lally, 1980:205)


Children’s use of
virtual worlds

children’s
playground games
and rhymes in the
new media age


commercialised virtual
worlds

barbie girls...moshi monsters...webkinz

.....Club penguin


Over 200 virtual worlds exist or are in development
for under 18s...


Text
Text

Text
Text


Genres of play

Fantasy play

Games with rules

‘Rough and tumble’ play

Socio-dramatic play


Emily entered an igloo to face three avatars that were
running around. The users were using the chat facility to
signal their footballing moves:

Avatar 1: Misses
Avatar 2: U better
Avatar 1: Takes shoot
Avatar 3: Whacks round hed
Avatar 1: Heart stops
Avatar 2: Hands up
Avatar 3: Good
Emily’s avatar: How did you turn on your TV?
Avatar 1: Falls
Avatar 1: Waaaaaaaaa
Avatar 2: Catches
Avatar 3: I weaving


Steinkuehler (2005:12) noted
that ‘In-game social groups
devise rituals and
performances…and generate
in-game antics and adventures’
which develop social
communities of practice.


Owen: I go on YouTube sometimes
and they have like little
presentations on..it’s funny
because it’s like the funniest clips
of Club Penguin and stuff and they
fall and stuff.

Stacey: You can type ‘Club Penguin’
and it comes up and there’ll be like
and there’s music in the background
and it can show you slideshows.


play/ creativity/
popular culture

• majority of these CPMV / machinima developed
at home

• children produce for other children,
sometimes with dedicated fan bases

• children search youtube for child-produced
texts

• music central to peer-to-peer cultural
practices but often integrated with other
media


• Reading skills and strategies including: word
recognition (e.g. the vocabulary choices in ‘safe

chat’ mode; instructions; in-world environmental

text), comprehension, scanning text in order to

retrieve appropriate information, familiarity with

how different texts are structured and organised,

understanding of authors’ viewpoint, purposes and

overall effect of the text on the reader

• Writing/ authoring skills and strategies including:
using language for particular effect; writing/

authoring for known and unknown audiences


• Understanding of the affordances of different
modes

• Ability to understand salience of visual images and
icons

• Ability to manipulate images to achieve specific
purposes

• Ability to navigate within and across screens

• Use gesture/ sound appropriately for purpose and
audience


Lauwaert (2009:12)
suggests that the
‘geography of play is the
sum of core and peripheral
play practices and
consists of both physical
and digital elements, of
tactile and non-tactile
components,of objects
and connections’.


Commercial practices related to the use
of Club Penguin across online/ offline
domains
•Playing games in the virtual world which earns coins
•Looking through catalogues/ buying items in the shops
located in the virtual world

•Buying food for pets (puffles) which appears when the
puffles are clicked on

•Reviewing purchases in avatars’ inventories
•Using online cheats to gain coins
•Selling unwanted Club Penguin items on eBay
•Buying toys/ games / collectors cards offline that
unlock coins in the virtual world

•Swaps e.g. sending information or artefacts to other
users who then send codes to unlock items in the
virtual world


Possessions are ‘... cultural
proxies for belonging...’

(Pugh, 2009: 57)


farmville - 26 million players daily


Yes No

% of 5 - 11 year
olds who had
used Facebook
(n = 157)

43%
57%


Yes No

% of 5 - 8 year
olds who had
used Facebook
(n =73)

47%
53%


Yes No
% of 5 - 11 year
olds who had
their own
Facebook/
MySpace page
33% (n = 168)

67%


Yes No
% of 5 - 8 year
olds who had
their own
Facebook/
myspace page
30% (n =77)

70%


jackie:! OK. So when you go on it, what are the
things that you do when you go on it?

kate:!You can play games, like there’s lots of stuff
to do like pets and stuff, there’s a game called
Happy Pets, Pet Society, Petville, and then there’s
something called Cityville, like you can make your
own city, and there’s Farmville.

jackie:! And do you play on all of those games?

kate:!Yeah.

jackie:! Do you send people messages?

kate:!Yeah.

jackie:! And what sort of messages do you send?

kate:!We just say “hiya” and we start like a normal
conversation as if we were talking to each other.


attraction of facebook
for young children

• they are embedding themselves in a family
practice - similar to watching TV programmes
together

• enables them to continue practices first
encountered in other applications, such as
microsoft messenger

• enables participation in games which have
similar features to their other uses of the
internet e.g. virtual worlds (Farmville)

• Part of community practice


Class 2 Ofﬂine Online
I (G)

A (B) O (G)
R (B)
J (B)

N (G)

B (G) M (B)

J (B)
G (G)
L (B)

C (B)

G (G)

J (B) B (B)
T (B)

B (B)

J (B)

B (B)
H (B)
L (G)
L (G)

C (B) T (B)
A (G)

K (B)
K (B)


online/ offline
friendships
• 68% of children had online friends in their class.

• Children who played online had a wider group of children they
played with in their class than children who just played
offline.

• Boys who played online had twice as many girls as friends
(average 4.6) as boys who only played offline (average 2.3).

• Girls who played online had almost twice as many boys as
friends (average 7.1) than girls who only played offline (3.6).


Carl, age 7
jackie:! Right OK. So when you choose children to play with
online what makes you choose them?

carl:!
Because they’re nice friends and I think they would
love to play with me lots of time.

jackie:! And when you play with children in the playground
what makes you choose them?

carl:! like them people but if they’re online I think they
I
would say bad words and that means they would get banned
from it.

jackie:! Who is that, who would do that?

carl:!Someone like casey because he’s naughty...
And if they’re going to say something like “I don’t like you”,
and like Casey, when I’ve gone to his house, my nan-nan
lives next door to him and I go to her house every night,
Casey swears when we go round to play football, and
that’s why I didn’t ask him to my accounts.


play, creativity and popular culture
in homes and community

•popular culture strong aspect of children’s
play from birth

•Popular culture integral to individual identity
construction and performance and construction
of social networks

•Children producers and consumers of popular
cultural texts Aimed at peer audience

•Boundary between online/ offline play becoming
less distinct


play, creativity and
popular culture in the
playground


PRETEND PLAY AND THE
MEDIA
• Films: Star Wars; Princesses Bratz; Disney Princesses; Batman; Bratz the
Movie; James Bond; Avatar

• Computer games: Pokemon; Formula 1 Racing; Transformers; Mario
Brothers; Halo 3; Dungeons and Dragons; Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

• Online games: Club Penguin; Moshi Monsters; Runescape

• TV shows: Ben 10; Simpsons; Hannah Montana; High School Musical; Doctor
Who; Britain’s Got Talent; X-Factor; Guilty; The Jeremy Kyle Show


PLAY, CREATIVITY AND POPULAR CULTURE IN

THE PLAYGROUND

• Children draw from their everyday
‘mediascapes’ (Appadurai, 1990) in their playground
play

• Multimodal communication central to these
practices

• Children draw from multi-generational (and child/
adult specific) material

• The concerns of adults are examined, explored,
parodied, challenged

• This play is related to identity construction and
performance

Identity/consumption/
production/
representation:

Gender


Text


The effect of gender is produced through the
stylization of the body and, hence, must be
understood as the mundane way in which
bodily gestures, movements, and styles of
various kinds constitute the illusion of an
abiding gendered self...[it] requires a
conception of gender as a constituted social
temporality... a constructed identity, a
performative accomplishment which the
mundane social audience, including the actors
themselves, come to believe and to perform in
the mode of belief.
(Butler, 1993: 140-1)


Identity/consumption/
production/
representation:

Social class


• Wide range of types, from Oprah to The Jerry
Springer Show (so-called ‘trash TV’/ class
pantomime/ cruelty verite)

• Subject matter includes sexual infidelity,
criminal misdemeanours, drug addiction, physical,
emotional and sexual abuse.

• Use of lie detector tests and DNA tests on
children in order to attempt to present a ‘true’
picture of a specific situation, and the
participants are confronted with the outcomes
of these tests on the show.


The working-class appear to display
and dramatise themselves as
inadequate, in need of self-
investment. They are shown to have
not just deficit culture, but also
deficit subjectivity. ‘Reality’
television points to solutions, ways
to resolve this lack, this inadequate
personhood through future person-
production – a projected investment
in self-transformation – in which
participants resolve to work on
themselves and their relationships to
make up losses.
(Skeggs, 2009:638)


generic conventions

• introduction to problem

• accusatory stance of presenter

• aggressive interrogation

• animosity between participants

• involvement of audience

• use of drugs test/ lie detector test

• moral stance reinforced at end


Play is a deconstruction of the world in
which [children] live. If the world is a text,
the play is a reader’s response to that
text. There are endless possible reader
responses to the orthodox text of growing
up in childhood

(Sutton-Smith,1997, p.166)


…when you was acting out you could
actually feel it. When you got into
character properly it made you feel
like it did happen to you and it made
you realise what it’s like. When you
were looking at the other people and
you could see how devastated they
were and stuff like that, because it
was acting, it could make you feel like
you was in that position as like a kid
who that had happened to…

Yeah... there’s somebody in the audience Joe’s uncle
called Kate, her best mate’s sister is
16 and she’s pregnant.


When people play together as
they make meaning they can
co-author possible selves and
possible ethical identities…
when children are answerable
for their imagined actions
they are forming their ethical
identities.
(Edmiston, 2007, p. 22).


‘Reality’ television offers the
pleasure of watching the unexpected.
And it is in this affective seepage that
moments stand out against the
attempts to universalise the
particular, to place, contain and
devalue working-class people and
culture, where attempts to make the
middle-class particular universal and
normative are ruptured. This may be
only temporary, but at least it is
something, a start.
(Skeggs 2009:640)


Play, creativity and popular
culture in the playground

By virtue of its near-ubiquitous
presence, popular culture provides a
common ground and a set of systematic
differences through which consumers
can, as textualised agents, define
aspects of their cultural identities.
(Hills, 2005:140-1)


www.bl.uk/playtimes

http://www.bl.uk/playtimes

implications for the
curriculum


implications for the curriculum:
playful pedagogies

• Begin with principles of play i.e. time for
exploration, imaginative play before/
alongside/ following instruction - instruction
need not always be aligned with play

• enable the curriculum to reflect elements of
play - time, space, recursive practices, cross-
age group and intergenerational practices

• enable practices to challenge binaries e.g.
classroom/ out-of-classroom; online/ offline;
popular/ ‘high’ culture; academic/ non-
academic discourses


Play
creativity

Popular
culture


“There might as well be no colour
if you can’t play!”

Child in 2009 British Playday Study

(Kapasi and Gleave, 2009: 9)


Play, Creativity and Popular Culture

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