Play Art Narrative (PAN) is a pedagogical practice that has evolved from the research, teaching and expressive art therapy work of Karen Wallace and Patrick Lewis. The three elements of PAN are often theorised, researched, practiced and/or taught separately whether in early childhood context or otherwise. We found in our work over the past 30 years with children, youth, and adults that the three are in fact not separate, they are in a tripartite reciprocity, a three-way symbiosis that works together in the journeyed experience of becoming human. PAN is the title of the Early Childhood Education Summer Institute that we guide each year over a three-week integrated graduate education experience. This book is born from that experience and our ongoing evolution of our praxis which draws upon the plethora of play, art, and narrative research that continues to augment the importance of play, art, and narrative in the lives of children, youth, and adults.
Although we introduce and discuss play, art, and narrative (PAN) in separate chapters at the outset of this book, the three actually form an integrated triad (see Figure I.1). The three rarely exist in isolation given both their intransitivity and transitivity in the lives of humans. Consequently, it is very important to keep in mind that play, art, and narrative work together both inside and outside of the classroom through a myriad of ways that we often give little attention or thought because it is so taken for granted. However, nothing could be further from the truth; play, art, and narrative are fundamental to human development. As Brian Boyd (2009) in On the Origins of Stories suggests, the myriad of things we attribute to culture and its development, like the arts and stories actually emerge together with and through play. Play does not happen without some kind of narrative and artistic process nor does narrative imagining exist without some art process or some kind of play process or playfulness, just as the art process does not exist without some form of play and narrative imagining. Children move through their inquiry of the world with this attitude and perception, it is the lens of childhood. Growing through childhood, adolescents and adulthood we become so deeply engaged with play, art, narrative that it recedes far into the background of our consciousness we no longer easily notice or attend to them; they are just there, like the air. As Fagan (1981) commented “play taunts us with its inaccessibility, we feel that something is behind it all, but we do not know, or have forgotten how to see it” (p. 493). Similarly, narrative imagining simply becomes the principal mode of human thinking as we develop and grow as outlined in Chapter 3. Stories are simply the way we make sense of experience and the world, it is the way we think and play the world and we tend not to give it much thought because it is so ubiquitous. Likewise, the art process travels with play and narrative as we explore and inquire into our experiences. As adults, we need to remind ourselves of the importance of this stance not just for the children we live alongside in school but for ourselves as we explore with children through play, art and narrative. Play art and narrative are fundamental ways of being and knowing for human creatures so it would make sense to take up this process with children to ensure they are successful learners as they travel through school curricula.
Play, art and narrative are in a three way-symbiosis, making it almost impossible for one to exist in isolation from the others because they feed and grow from each other simultaneously. This three-way symbiosis seems to develop “…spontaneously and without training in childhood in the form of pretend play” (Boyd, 2009, p. 189), that is to say that play initiates the process of development. PAN in early childhood is integral to children’s growth and learning through a process orientation springing from childhood’s inquiring mind, but more importantly PAN is central to development and growth of Theory of Mind (ToM). Theory of mind is to be able to see mental states—beliefs, intents, desires, pretending, knowledge, motives, feelings—in others as well as in oneself and to understand that others have mental states that are different from one’s own. This is the beginning of developing and learning empathy and compassion, the bedrock of humanity, the heart and soul of being human and from which notions of care, kindness, and love are born. What we suggest is that “we ought to approach children’s play and narrative as closely intertwined, and often overlapping, forms of socially situated symbolic action—and that one source of valuable theoretical resources for grasping the interplay between the two is Vygotsky’s sociocultural analysis of children’s play” (Nicolopoulou, 2005, p. 496). Vygotsky theorised that play is imagination in an externalised form in early childhood and that over time children’s outward play also moves inward through narrative creations; “imagination begins to develop through play… before play there is no imagination” (Vygotsky (1933), cited in El’konin, 2005, p. 14). He saw play as “a transitional stage” of the child’s perception of reality. Vygotsky referred to play as the leading activity—leading a child’s development. Teachers need to recall that children do not consciously separate forms of the arts, they are all one and the same in early childhood, just as play, art and narrative for children are all entwined. Vygotsky (2003) saw play and art as central to imagination development in children and that it is narrative imagination in the present that prepares children for the future. Vygotsky posited that imagination was the essence of all creativity regardless of it being artistic, scientific or technical, “the entire world of human culture, as distinct from the world of nature, all this is the product of human imagination and of creation based on this imagination” (Vygotsky, 2003, p. 10).
We have heard of Play based curriculum or Arts based curriculum or even a blend of the two. Not to take anything away from these approaches we propose that a Play Art Narrative approach takes up the best of both those approaches and much more. We delineate the importance and benefits of play, art and narrative in the first three chapters of this book. In the later chapters, we describe how a PAN approach facilitates trauma informed teaching and can ensure successful learning by all students. We show how to utilise play art and narrative in the classroom and the school to help all children learn, grow and develop. We also show how play art and narrative can be used to help children realise curricular learning outcomes while they are becoming creative and curious inquirers in their journey through school and life. However, we will also show how taking up the stance and attitude of PAN helps teachers in their well-being and practice. Reviews of research have established and continue to support the benefits of play, the arts, and narrative to the development and learning of children.
The book delineates the theoretical underpinnings, research evidence and practical implementation of PAN with children and practitioners. The work showcases the importance of this approach to the holistic development and learning of children both in early childhood and beyond. We draw upon recent brain research, life span psychology, ToM, narrative research, play research, pedagogical research, and research in the expressive art therapies to demonstrate how PAN facilitates and nurtures the development and learning of children. But the book does more than that, it is a clarion call to parents, teachers, all adults to re-centre play, art and narrative in children’s lives both in and outside of school. Over the past generation there has been a growing perception, concern of an erosion of play, the arts and narrative in the lives of children both in the school setting and outside it (Lewis, 2007, 2017; Hewes, 2006, 2010). In this text, the authors present a theoretical and practical framework for re-centring play, art and narrative in the learning and development of children and repair of trauma that many children bring to school. Although most Pre-k to 3 school jurisdictions operate within a standardised outcome based structure, this book offers some avenues to pursue with PAN that meet and/or exceed many of the learning outcomes delineated in education curricula guides.
1 Shape of the Chapters
The book is laid out in three parts, the first two parts explain and guide practitioners and parents toward centring PAN in children’s daily experiences, both adult orchestrated and child initiated. The third part has three chapters, one describes how to set up a trauma informed art and play environment, another is a guide filled with a series of exercises that are integrated with Mindfulness practice and Art Therapy, and the final chapter is a Trauma Resolution workbook full of exercises for working through trauma repair.
Part 1 begins with a chapter about Play, the theories, research and importance of the ludic form in the development and learning of a child’s “being and becoming” (Sturrock, 2007). Play is something easily recognised, assumed to be universal, considered predominantly the domain of children everywhere, and often taken for granted by adults. But play is actually rather complicated, not easily defined, abstract and fluid, and full of consequence in the journey of life; we just know it when we see it, however, when pressed to contemplate the ludic form we are often at a loss usually resorting to a play ethos we have learned from our particular socially constructed environment. Play is indeed universal; however, its representation, interpretation and appreciation are as varied as the cultural landscape of human being. As Johan Huizinga (1950) said, “all play means something. If we call the active principle that makes up the essence of play, ‘instinct,’ we explain nothing; if we call it ‘mind’ or ‘will’ we say too much” (p. 1). Almost anything in human activity could be play, it all depends upon the frame we bring to it, that is if we bring a play frame to it. Consequently, play has far reaching importance in the early life experiences of all humans and as we age.
The second chapter takes up the arts, in particular looking at the research, theories and practices of expressive arts. The arts—visual, music, dance, drama all garner space in school curricula including early childhood education. However, the actual weekly recommended times in curriculum documents is surprisingly low; on average 200 minutes per week for grades one to five (Saskatchewan Ministry of Education) and that is split evenly between the four areas. Because each area only receives 50 minutes a week more often than not it is the arts that tend to have their allotted times eroded by scheduling events and the perceived need to emphasise literacy and numeracy learning in the early years of schooling (Pre-k to 3). “The exploration of imagination through the arts and story are not perceived to be at the heart of schooling. They are perceived as fringe elements played at if there is time after the real business of education…” (Lewis, 2007, p. 42). Yet, research literature suggests the arts should be at the centre of early schooling experience because, like play there are developmental and learning benefits children derive from engagement with the arts. But it goes well beyond that modernist view of children’s art making that speaks to line, shape, colour, fine motor development, movement, voice etc. as some recipe or list aimed at a developmental learning trajectory. Rather imagination, creativity and mental well-being all work together through the art process given there is a supportive environment that facilitates play and exploration in the arts. The 4 year old artist begins with an idea as she takes up the medium of paint, clay, dance, music, or drama and sinks into an artistic inquiry without much thought to the end product. She is doing naturally what Shaun McNiff (1998) urges in Trust the Process, in that she is immersed in a process orientation wherein the ultimate goal of the creative process is the enlargement of imagination. What McNiff referred to as a “sensate orientation”—the place where the child artist begins and the adult artist strives to return.
Chapter 3 travels through the narrative process of being human and human being. We are storied creatures in that the narrative imagination both informs and forms our experience, both real and imagined otherwise. “Story and storytelling are simultaneously cognitive processes and products of cognition. Story is both art and quotidian, centripetal and centrifugal, running deep and wide through the human psyche” (Lewis, 2011, p. 505). Every civilisation throughout human existence begins and ends with story, we think and live the world through narrative. Narrative is perhaps the basic principal of mind, which is to say, “there is an abiding recognition that existence is inherently storied. Life is pregnant with stories” (Kearney, 2002, p. 130). Narrative understanding develops very early in human life with the rudimentary, yet complex knowledge of basic story structure existing in human infancy—beginning—middle—end. By age two or three years children are capable of creating what philosophers and psychologist call counterfactuals—imagining other possible realities, that is stories (Gopnik, 2009). Herein lies the importance of storytelling in helping children’s cognitive, social, emotional and spiritual development. Story is both phenomenon and process, “counterfactuals let us change the future. Because we can consider alternative ways the world might be, we can actually act on the world and intervene to turn it into one or the other of these possibilities” (p. 23). Children play cognitively and materially with stories to explore and experience counterfactuals to imagine possibilities. “Of all our cognitive capacities, imagination is the one that permits us to give credence to alternative realities. It allows us to break with the taken for granted, to set aside familiar distinctions and definitions” (Greene, 1995, p. 3). We do not have to remain who we have been.
The fourth chapter takes a turn into the idea of Trauma and how many children and adults are holding an often invisible disorder throughout their everyday lives. It explores the many forms and causes of trauma that often go undiagnosed or overlooked because the symptoms are misunderstood or not noticed. Trauma is not an event, but rather a person’s response to a dangerous experience that results in negative impacts emotionally, psychologically and/or physically. This chapter helps explain the complex nature of trauma and how it is held in different ways by people. The discussion also notes how it benefits everyone in the classroom when educators have the skills to provide support, safety, and empathy while creating environments for children to learn, emotionally regulate, and adjust their behaviours. When a traumatised child feels trust, acceptance, and safety, they can move towards academic success. Trauma affects every aspect of a child’s life: brain development, physiology, social skills, self-esteem, and ability to function as a healthy person in the world.
In Chapter 5 the authors take up the importance of teacher self-care and resiliency. If teachers and administrators are not aware of their own stress or trauma it will make it very difficult or nearly impossible to help children work through their trauma repair. This is integral for teachers to do so that they avoid succumbing to what Craig (2016) calls “compassion fatigue,” wherein professionals begin to feel helpless and that nothing they do will help or make a difference in the life of the children in their care. This chapter provides a framework and exercises/ideas for ensuring that teachers are grounded and self-aware as they move through the day-to-day practice of teaching alongside children.
The sixth chapter outlines through numerous examples how to be trauma informed through play art and narrative environments and practices. Many of these ideas are easy to facilitate in small and large groups. Furthermore, they should help teachers and others begin to build on the exercises and examples provided throughout the chapter.
Chapter 7 is a short chapter explaining mindfulness, how to integrate it in the classroom, and a long list of ways to teach and practice mindfulness with your children and for yourself. And finally, in Chapter 8 the authors set out a workbook for trauma resolution. It is a chapter full of ideas and exercises that can be worked through in small and large groups or one-to-one settings.
References
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