Robin Christie: Play is the universal language of children. Therefore, if we wanna really communicate with them, if we really want to know them, to be able to be alongside them on their learning journey, then we’ve gotta speak that language of play as well.
Rusty Keeler: Hi, this is Rusty Keeler and you’re listening to the Play Nature Podcast where we talk about play nature, playing in nature. And the nature of play. I’m glad you’re here. Let’s have a listen. Hey, Robin Christie. Who’s that
Robin Christie: Kia? Rusty Kia, to all the, uh, people out there in Rusty Land, thank you for this opportunity to contribute in some small way to what you’re all up to in your spaces, wherever you are around the world.
My name’s Robin Christie. I’m an early childhood teacher by trade. Forgive my accent. I’m from New Zealand UA at the very bottom of the South Pacific Ocean. So please, rusty, perhaps you could help if I start to speak too clear or start to use, uh, too many flattened vowels, uh, please. Maybe just give me a signal, whatever it is.
So my wife, Tony and I, we are both early childhood teachers and at the end of 1993, we pulled our. What little money we had together bought a rundown house in a pretty rough part of Christchurch in the south island of New Zealand. We knocked all the walls out of it. We lived in one room in the corner and the rest of it became an early childhood center.
So we were both dropped into the deep end being 20 year olds. And, uh, we pretty quickly how to. Run an early childhood center and I had to learn how to use a whole lot of power tools and build playgrounds and do all the maintenance and, and all that sort of stuff. And we. Loved it. Just loved it. It’s fantastic opportunity to be around very young children, to learn from them as well as to help them and their a and their families a, a accomplish some, some really, uh, pretty special things for those young people.
So now we live in Wellington, which is in the north island of New Zealand. We have four small early childhood centers. They’re all in. Converted homes. So we’re very much going for sort of a homeliness, uh, a very much a home away from home sort of feel to our centers. In, in each center there’s between 20 and 30 children, depending on the size of the space.
And so my role now is when I’m teaching, I’m doing storytelling, I’m doing a little puppetry, music science with children, as well as doing all the maintenance around the centers and designing and building playgrounds and furniture and, and educational. Basically building respectful learning spaces for children under the age of five here in New Zealand.
So I love my job, rusty. I, I get to play with power tools. I’ve got two storytelling sessions today, including one on overhead projector. Mm-hmm. Uh, ’cause Ally’s coming up. So I’ve got one of our, one of our teachers is gonna be, we’re gonna be teach, telling the story of Ali together using sand as the medium on top of the overhead projector.
Rusty Keeler: Wow. Wow. You know what I’m going
Robin Christie: for. Cool. So, but, and even better, I get to start my day, uh, speaking to a friend that I, that I admire. So yeah, that’s, that’s what we’re up to.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah. Well, I’ll just tell all the listeners that I’m here speaking to one of my favorite people. On the planet.
Robin Christie: Yes. Oh, ke rusty. Yes.
Rusty Keeler: Yes. Our paths have crossed numerous times over the years on various continents and states and Yeah. Uh, islands here and there and yeah. So I’ve been to your place, you’ve been to my place. You’ve been to Ithaca. Fantastic. And we’ve, we’ve done some great, great things. I think last time was Bali. We were in Bali together.
Robin Christie: Absolutely. Yeah, that was inspiring and certainly going through the green school, it was great to be able to, to be able to walk around with you around that green school and, and perhaps pick out some of the details that everybody else that was there would, might not have seen. It was great. And when we finished with that huge jam on those great big bamboo instruments, um, yeah.
Really, really enjoyed that. That was a, a real blast. Yeah. But yeah. Yeah. And so what’s been on your mind?
Rusty Keeler: Oh, well, you know, nature play, uh, life the maybe mysticism of play. You know, you and I first bonded on the idea of, you know, design and building and environments and spaces and that kind of, you know, one of kind Yes.
Creativity and working with communities and all that. And, and then. I, I, we had a lot in common and then I realized, oh my God, you’re leaving me in the dust because you are building left and right doing all sorts of stuff. Take it to the next level. Always, always, always. So you’re always inspiring. And I always say like also like your, your work life balance is also inspiring of someone who loves play and loves work and loves all that.
And that is. That is also like your life, but it’s also your creativity. And then, but then at the same time, you’re all about, you know, fun and joy and music and art and, and everything in your,
Robin Christie: in your beautiful, you’re a charming fella, aren’t you? You’re a charming fella. I can, yeah. I can see, well that, that is one of the things that’s been on top of my mind for the last, uh, couple of years is, is we’ve.
Very good at, certainly in early childhood education here in Al, we’ve got a very, very strong early childhood system, well supported by the government, by global standards. I mean, we’re always complaining, but that’s, I think it’s the nature of being human. But one of the things that I keep coming back to over and over again is our role as playful adults.
How are we modeling the kind of learning dispositions based around play and curiosity and wonder that we’re inviting the children to. Engage in not everybody in early childhood education. Not all the teachers we’ve got here in early childhood here in New Zealand have the same sort of playful confidence that perhaps you and I have, and the idea of making a fool of yourself in front of children by falling outta the tree or, or dressing up as a banana on dress up day or something like that.
What is it about us as playful adults that we can bring to the table to make sure that the children can see us? Failing and bouncing back from that failure, uh, how we bring our own passions and our own interests into the space. Like you and I, we’re both very musical. It’s one of the things that we’ve always been, uh, enjoyed and I cannot wait to jam with you.
Yeah. Again, soon. Uh, soon. Rusty is, yeah, I, I mean, I’m quite happy to bring all my passions and I love to draw. I love to, um, dress up and make silly voices, and I like to tell stories and I like to build great, big, exciting things. Not all teachers have the confidence to bring those sort of elements from home, whether it be cooking or it might be throwing or playing the flute or something like that.
Because when we’re bringing those interests in to the learning environment alongside the young children, and not only we’re succeeding, but we’re also failing. We are trying things and getting knocked back. It’s only then that they really get to see what resilience looks like. The idea of being able to bounce back from disappointment or bounce back from failure.
Mm-hmm. So for some teachers coming into the profession, the early childhood teaching profession, that’s something that’s missing from their. Teacher training, if you like. And so when they see other adults around, especially they, they become quite shy and they don’t wanna put themselves out there and take those risks that are so, uh, that are so strongly linked with, with play.
So that’s something that I’ve been thinking about. What, what, what you, I mean, you’re, you’re one of the most playful people I know.
Rusty Keeler: Well, I, I love that idea of, you know, you, you’re kind of also mixing. Play and vulnerability. Good. Cool. Right, right. To like be who you are. Yeah. But that idea of stumbling too, or that it’s okay, I’ll give it my best shot, but I don’t always, you know, it doesn’t always work out.
And so for the, you know, the, the early C child, the childhood, early childhood, the, the, their daily life probably, you know, is, is a lot of that like trying things and then it doesn’t work out or you get mud, you fell in a puddle or. Or, you know, or metaphorically. And so, yes. Yeah. So what does that look like?
And, and sometimes maybe it feels like the adults are the one, the serious ones, and they always have it under control, right? That’s right. But that’s not really true, is it?
Robin Christie: No. And, and something else I’ve been keep keeping, coming back to just as a little sideline, when Tony and I were, uh, teaching. Tony and I were the only teachers, so Tony’s my wife’s name as you know.
Yep. Uh, so Tony and I were the only teachers at Child Space when we first began, and we were trying a lot of experimental things. And one thing that we went through for about a year was this idea of philosophical questions with with children. And so we’d sit around with. Usually the older children, the four year olds, and we’d have a, a, a cup of hibiscus tea and, and a biscuit or something like that.
And we had all these philosophical questions that would, that we would then, the children would turn them over and we would read them. And the one that I kept coming back to over and over again was, are adults always Right? And you ask a bunch of four year olds that and Oh, you did, you boys, some of the answers that you get.
So yeah, I really like what you’re saying there because the idea that failure. Is baked into all learning for both children and adults. Uhhuh is quite a mind opening sort of concept, not only for some of our teachers, but certainly a lot of our parents and families who are bringing their children to child space because they think that we’re setting these children up for success.
Which we are, but we’re setting them up for failure as well. And so
Rusty Keeler: Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. We’re constantly
Robin Christie: having to push this idea to our families that failure is where the learning is, and it’s that, yeah. That bouncing back from failure.
Rusty Keeler: That’s okay. That’s okay. Right, right. Because often we just wanna, it’s vital.
Yeah. But we think we just wanna succeed. We wanna get where we’re gonna go and, and, and to fail is bad, but really that is, that’s how you like. Okay, pick yourself up. Or you can look, you reassess the situation or you, you see what it’s like. That’s right. And I think about that even like following your dreams of like, there’s some saying about like, you go for nos, how many nos can you get?
And like if you’re reaching for other people, like, you know, yes. I remember that early on for natural play stuff like. Okay. You gonna find, you just need to find the person that says yes. So it doesn’t matter how many nos, you can have a million nos, but you just want that. Yes. And if you can, if you can somehow have that experience of whether it’s in childhood failing, or you know, just believing in yourself and knowing that you can pick yourself up and, and keep trying.
How you go
Robin Christie: forward. That’s, that’s the, that’s the great gift. So yes. I mean, exactly. Because, so coming back to the idea of, of teachers and educators and the adults in the environment, bringing their own passions in, especially if it’s something that you are learning at the time. By modeling that kind of learning process in front of the children, you’re putting yourself in a position of the inexperienced learner.
And so you’re making the mistakes. You are doing this wondering, you’re going down dead ends while you’re trying to explore this concept. Whatever it is. The idea of being in the role of an inexperienced learner in front of children is a great way of bonding with them because that’s where they’re living their whole lives is in that space, and so it’s like being able to speak the language of play.
As you know, rusty, you know, we, we, we must be playful adults in order to properly connect with children because that is their language play is the universal language of children. Therefore, if we wanna really communicate with them, if we really want to learn to know them, to be able to, to be alongside them on their learning journey, then we’ve gotta speak that language of play as well.
Isn’t something that a lot of teachers, colleges or universities are teaching here in New Zealand might be different in the United States where you are?
Rusty Keeler: I don’t know. I don’t know. It doesn’t seem like that is, uh, a class of how to be play for oneself or, or to find the player within, I think I can imagine you.
Robin Christie: Right. You’d be a great professor in that. Oh yeah. There we go. I can see you in a tweed jacket. And you know the tweed jackets that have the leather patches on the elbows? Oh yeah. Oh yeah. You, you’d, you’d be all over it. You’d be great,
Rusty Keeler: huh? But well, it’s interesting when you’re say, well, thank you. Thank you.
I’d give it a try. Maybe when,
Robin Christie: one day when you grow
Rusty Keeler: up. Yeah, that’s right. But interesting to think about that idea of learning about play being different than learning about being playful. Or having that playful, that that playful heart, the playful spirit. And it doesn’t mean that you have to be overly silly or goofy.
I mean, I think children can like sense it just by looking at you like, Hey, this person’s, you know, they’re down with it. They’re down with the
Robin Christie: play. They’re down with the play. Exactly. Because I mean, one of the things about, um, one of the things about play in adulthood, hood is that. Because play is so strongly associated with dead ends with failure, with what could be described as a waste of resources.
Some adults. Think to themselves, well, this is going nowhere. I’m not, I’m not gonna put in the time and effort to try to hang this hammock between these two trees because I can tell it’s not gonna work already. So I’m not even gonna try, or whatever it is. That’s a, that’s a, that’s not terribly good example, but that’s an example of what I’m talking about.
Because players inherently risky, players inherently full of dead ends that go nowhere. Again, can be seen as a waste of resources. And so one of the things that we are trying to help the adults in our learning environments, uh, learn, is that there is no such thing as a waste of time. It’s all just learning.
And we, and you, you’re gonna fall on your face sometimes and you’re gonna end up with mud over your body and you’ve ripped your pants. You know, you’ve ripped your pants and you, you think everybody’s laughing at you. But here in this space, here at Child Space, we are gonna hug you all the way up no matter what you do.
And it doesn’t matter what you do. We are gonna love you anyway because our teams are so small, because we’ve got this culture of what we call FAA here in the Maori language. And forgive me if I keep saying Kda. Kda. Kda is literally here. Which means have life or be healthful, and it’s a very, very broad tune.
It can mean thank you, it can mean hello. It can be well said. Mm-hmm. So just for your listeners out there, when I say kda rusty, what I mean is you’re a flipping legend, rusty, but yes. This idea of having a culture, Kiara, Robin,
Rusty Keeler: Kiara, Robin, oh,
Robin Christie: well said rusty boy, uh, is that we’ve got a culture where not only is failure understood, but it’s expected.
We are looking for our teachers to push themselves beyond where they think their abilities are.
Rusty Keeler: Okay, so then how, how is that going with teachers or what’s that look like for a new teacher who’s like, wait a second, what I. I, I thought I was just gonna be here. The, you know, the mature adult in the background.
Absolutely. Yeah.
Robin Christie: Yeah, absolutely. Luckily we are putting this through right in the interview process. So our interviews for people who are wanting to come and teach at Child Space are, we actually call them play days. Where we pay the prospective applicant for the day to come in and actually be at one of our centers, preferably the center at which they are applying for the job.
Rusty Keeler: Okay.
Robin Christie: And there’s, there’s no faking that you can’t, you know, all the cvs in the world and all the Zoom interviews in the world are not going to take the place within 10 minutes. You can see if they’ve got it or they don’t. And that way they’re, they know, they’re embedded in this play culture. They can see other adults who are modeling exactly this.
Also, just like our families when they, when the families enroll. Their children at Child Space, they know right from the word go that their children are gonna be engaged in adult supported, risky play. And the reason why that adult supported risky play is so vital to their child’s development. They know that their child’s gonna be outside in all withers.
They know that they’re gonna be a lot of men in their children’s lives, and those men are going to. Taking part in all those care moments of nappy change and helping them to sleep to give them solace when they’re upset or at, or unhappy. You know those men. Who are teaching with us are gonna be part of that life.
And they know that, yeah, the adults in this space are gonna behave like goons now and again. Well, they have to. They have to. And we keep saying to our teachers, look, if you are dressed up as a, if you’re dressed up as a two can, like I was the other day, and you’re actually halfway up a tree going, Ooh, ooh, ooh, whatever.
It’s, and it. An adult walks in, a stranger walks in, they are looking at you, and they’re admiring and they’re respecting the fact that you’re dressed as a tuan. You’re halfway tree going, cool, cool, cool, cool. They’re not laughing at you. They’re not looking down at you. They’re looking at you as a, as an expert in human development, who they admire Uhhuh Uhhuh.
And that’s a bit of a mind change for some young teachers coming into the profession.
Rusty Keeler: Right. Right. So those people may wish, wow, look at that person up there. They’re free. Right. Right. They’re they’re being free.
Robin Christie: Yeah, exactly. Rusty. Well said.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah. And, and then maybe people wish they could be like that or, yeah.
Like that. I think they do. I They’re just jealous. Yeah. Of the banana suit.
Robin Christie: Yes. Uh, I’m, I feel very lucky that I’m one of the few adults that I know that has a, has a whole dress up rack, Uhhuh, so, yeah. Lucky. But one of, yeah, I mean, one of the, one of the ways that I’ve been starting to communicate with some of our teachers about our role as, as people who are actually engaged in play.
I’ll go back a step. The, the dominant. Pedagogical discourse, if you like, in here in New Zealand is the idea of the emerging curriculum. Whereby, and, and I’m sure, I’m sure it’s a term that that many of your listeners will be familiar with, and it’s the idea that the child’s interests and the child’s direction guides.
Guides the play and guides the learning at all times, which is great. And you know, we’ve been practicing that for coming up on 20 years now, where, where we throw out all the planning posters and, oh, it’s spring, right? We’re gonna do a hall of fame spring stuff. And we’re saying, right, what is this group of children into right now?
And how can we provision that play? How can we extend that play? How can we allow them the opportunity to explore these concepts from lots of different directions? So drawing. Making huge oversized models of ’em using our loose parts or whatever it is. The only thing is if the children get to drive are the only ones who are driving the lines of inquiry, then not only does that not give room for provocations from adults, but it also means that adults can’t bring their own interests in.
And again, coming to this, back to this idea of modeling. Yes, the children, the children’s drives and the children’s interests and the children’s urges are what’s driving. The main part of the program, but at the same time, they’ve gotta look at us as people who are exhibiting those exact same learning dispositions that we were talking about for them if we’re not modeling.
Curiosity and wonder and failure and all those things we’re talking about, then children must think we are just
Speaker 4: dead. Boring
Robin Christie: uhhuh. They’re
Speaker 4: saying, look at all these talk. They’re just following us around taking photographs and writing stuff down. I mean, oh holy, they’re boring. Why would I wanna hang out with them?
Rusty Keeler: Uhhuh Uhhuh, when the world is this fascinating, incredible wild place that makes no sense, or it’s weird, or you wanna find out what’s going on. Different every day.
Robin Christie: Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. There’s only one way that they’re gonna develop those working theories, and that’s by, by having sensitive adults who have their own questions and their own.
But yeah, curious adults are just as important as curious children in the learning environment in, in our opinion.
Rusty Keeler: I love that. I love that. It’s kind of like what we were saying just earlier about maybe think of beginner’s mind, right? Like, yes, the Buddhist, we all, we all have that beginner’s mind. Right.
We can, we can cultivate that. Beautiful. Yeah. Is that a Buddhist term? A Buddhist concept you said? I see. That’s how I always
Robin Christie: thought of it, came from Yeah, it makes a lot of sense.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah. Like to, yeah, that’s
Robin Christie: not something I know a lot about. So that’s, that’s a, that makes, it does make a lot of sense.
Rusty Keeler: And so I think it’s also that childlike quality of like yeah, how do things work and why do they, why is, why is life the way it is?
And I wanna find out more. And, and we are, no matter how old we are, how much, much we’ve studied, how much whatever. I mean there really is, we don’t know. There’s, so we, we. What we don’t know compared to what we do know is so vast. Right. So, yeah. So we should always be curious in that sense of wonder.
Robin Christie: Yeah, absolutely.
And, and something really interesting that I’ve been doing, we, we hosted a national conference on the weekend and one of the things that. That, uh, I was speaking about was this idea of curiosity and especially curious what we call al. So that’s our, our teachers, basically curious adults and, and what does curiosity look like.
And one of the first things that I found out when I was making sure that I had a, a, a decent research based for what I was talking about was the idea of separating curiosity and wonder. A lot of people would say that they’re, they’re inter interchangeable concepts, but one way of looking at it is that curiosity is a, an intellectual state.
It’s a natural inbuilt part of children’s. Learning that says, I want to find out about these things, especially because by filling in the gaps in my knowledge, I reduce the uncertainty in my life. So here’s something I know something about. We were talking before, a little bit about working theories and how children understand the world.
Here’s something I know a little bit about, and yet there’s so many things I don’t know. It makes me feel uncertain. So that curiosity is an intellectual drive to fill in those gaps. This is the information gap theory. Forgive me, I should have my reference here in front of me, but yeah, so, so that’s the, the, the intellectual part, the curiosity part.
Okay. The wonder part is, wonder is a state of mind that touches our emotions. It’s a feeling. It’s, and so it contributes to the learning process by making sure that children are strongly engaged with whatever the learning is because of that feeling of awe or humor that they’re finding it funny. Maybe that’s what, maybe that’s the emotional connection or fear.
You know, so much about what children’s learning and play is about, is playing with things that scare them. Things that about which they don’t really know. I mean, you can, there’s a lot of cops and robbers play going on at the moment at Child Space because of course at the end of the day, the family’s going around locking all the doors and saying to the children, let’s just, just to keep the robbers out and off they go.
Everybody goes off to bed and the child’s lying in bed going. What are robbers, robs, what are they doing? Are they gonna come around here? I mean, I don’t know very much about robbers. Um, that’s why it comes out so much in their play because one of the, one of the emotions that drives children’s learning can be Yeah.
Confusion and fear about, about different things. So yeah, this idea of having an emotional component to. Learning. It fosters obviously empathy and imagination and, and a love of the world. But yes, that that separation between curiosity as an intellectual pursuit and wonder as an emotional pursuit and how they bounce off each other and how wonder that’s, that’s our role as adults a lot of the time, is to make sure that the wonder in the world.
Is obvious to children so that it sparks their curiosity. And you know, one of the things that I’m always doing, and I I must look like a complete goon, is when I personally am feeling a feeling of wonder or excitement or whatever it I, my whole body wears that stuff. Oh my
Speaker 5: God. Did you see that worm? I can’t believe we cut it in half with our spade.
Oh my goodness. What do you think about that?
Rusty Keeler: That’s a pretty gruesome example.
Speaker 5: Sorry, rusty. Yeah. Wow.
Rusty Keeler: I’m feeling some emotion. Yeah. Yeah.
Robin Christie: Well, luckily the side of the worm that’s still got the saddle on it. You know this already. Probably the saddle is the little fat. That at one end of the worm that’s gonna, that’s gonna regrow.
And in some worm species here in New Zealand, the other end will regrow as well. So essentially what we’ve got is now two worms that are gonna go off, and once they recover, they’re gonna grow up into, into two worms. And isn’t that cool?
Rusty Keeler: So there it is, it’s curiosity and wonder. There’s the wonder of like, oh my gosh, look at that.
Look what happened. And then curiosity be like, okay, well, well what scientifically, what’s, what’s going on there?
Robin Christie: Absolutely.
Rusty Keeler: Hey, just a little aside, are, uh, New Zealand, are they having trouble with. The jumping worms. Do you know about these? They’re jumping. Oh, my worms. There is. That’s somebody’s
Robin Christie: worst nightmare somewhere, isn’t it?
Rusty Keeler: Seriously? Well, it turns out in Ithaca, New York, I don’t know. It’s, they’re sounding alarms. Like there are these invasive worms that you go in the woods and you, and they, and they, they’re hurting the soil. They’re like eating the, they’re not from here. I don’t know how they got here more. No, that’s terrible.
So yeah, you see them all over the place and they’re like. Kind of changing the ecosystem and, and the real Wrigley and you know, so kids are finding a lot of worms, but there’s, they, they move differently. I did not
Robin Christie: know that. And do they actually jump up in the air? ’cause that would be worth seeing, just no legs.
I mean, I worth seeing
Rusty Keeler: they spring up. No, they definitely wriggle and move in ways that our normal native worms don’t. So it’s, yeah. Oh, I’m sorry to
Robin Christie: hear that because yes, a healthy, uh, worm. Ecosystem like a, like a healthy fungal. Ecosystem’s absolutely vital to forest health, isn’t it? So, yeah. Oh my golly.
I’m sorry to hear that. I wonder how they got there. Are there worm Fanciers out there who are importing, um, exotic worms for, I don’t know, whatever, whatever it is that worm fancies get up to?
Rusty Keeler: Yeah. Yeah. Maybe They just escaped. They jumped out. They just, I won’t, I won’t send any interest then gone. I won’t send any over to New Zealand.
Yeah, they get out, they take over New Zealand. Oh, okay. So you, so there’s a sense of wonder and then the adult modeling. That kind of still also having that sense of wonder, or maybe these are qualities that, you know, not only do you look for in in one of your teachers, but just teachers in general. It’s nice to kind of yeah, develop that and the curiosity along with them, but also humor.
You talked about humor in there and, yeah.
Robin Christie: Oh look, absolutely. I, that’s something a, again, that I’m really, really excited about. There’s, there is actually quite a lot of research into human development. In children, but also in adults. There’s a, an academic journal called the Journal of Adult Playfulness and Okay.
There’s a lot of information there about how playful adults and playful children are using humor in lots of, lots of different ways. And again, it’s not something that was ever in my teacher training college. Nobody said a word about, uh, about human and yet. If you look around any interaction anywhere in the playground, at the pub, in the supermarket, wherever you are, humans use humor an enormous amount.
And I, I think sometimes we forget how important it is because humor creates a, creates connections between people. It’s a great way of displaying a shared understanding, especially if it’s a, if it’s a humor that’s incongruous, where the first part of the humor sets up. A situation where you think you know what the end of the, the situation’s gonna be, but it’s twisted.
Yeah. But the carpet’s pulled out from under you. Under you at the last minute. It’s that classic jokes. This is an example of what I’m talking about with the incongruity theory, where you say, okay, I want to die peacefully in my sleep like my grandfather. Not screaming and shouting like all the people in this car.
Okay. Terrible joke. Terrible example. It’s the only one I can think of. ’cause I’m looking at, you’re making me nervous with all your beauty, but you know, so that, so coming back to the humor, what it means is that if you can share a joke with somebody where you set up, you’re helping a child put their socks on, talking about like a 2-year-old.
Yeah. Instead of putting a sock on their foot, you put it on your ear.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah.
Robin Christie: Right. So that’s, that’s the incongruity when you can both laugh at that, what you’re doing is you’re displaying that you’ve got a shared understanding of what that should be and by changing it, and then, haha, we both get it, you have the relief of release of that, that, that energy of the incongruity.
So humor’s really, really amazing for connecting with other people. You’ve got this shared understanding. And also, you know, humor’s also incredibly important for diffusing tension. If you’ve got a, a tough situation and, and your, your listeners will be doing this a lot, I, throughout their lives, I’m sure you’ve got a tense situation with another adult or the child.
If you can somehow turn that into a joke, that tension, ah, is released, it might have solved the problems, but at least you’ve, if you’ve had a quick laugh together, then you say, right, this is a friendly encounter that now we can move forward and solve this disagreement that we’re having or anything like that.
It’s also, humor is also an amazing way for children and adults to gain attention. And for children, you know, a attention and the ability to have the serve and repeat with adults is incredibly important to their sense of belonging, to their sense of understanding. I don’t know how many of your listeners out there have children under the age of five who are learning knock, knock jokes.
Mm-hmm. Do you have knock,
Rusty Keeler: knock jokes in your power? The world? We sure. We sure do.
Robin Christie: Okay. Right. And you know, these knock, knock jokes. Go knock, knock. Who’s there? Table. Table who table went under the table and then the chicken got it, or whatever it is.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Robin Christie: And then we all laugh, not because it’s a funny joke, but because the serve and return of humor has allowed us.
To, to have that special moment together. It’s a great way of attracting attention for children and adults. So it’s a really, really useful for children to, to learn this sort of stuff. The other thing that we’ve been working out about humor is it’s allowing children to test concepts that confuse them or scare them, like we’re talking about before, in a, in a space that is safe, is in a space that is playful and has no consequences out in the real world.
You can be talking about concepts like. Your grandfather driving a carload of people off the cliff, which is not funny now. I’m so sorry I used that as an example. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Goy,
Robin Christie: you know, this is, humor is a space where we can play with ideas like that in a safe way. And of course humor’s really fun and humor’s really enjoyable and it’s distracting.
And, and if you’ve had a child who’s hurt themselves, my, my personal approach is not to come over and say anything, but just to be there. Often will have a hug. And then when I can feel their, you know, their, their sobbing. Subsided and their heartbeat slowed. You know, one of us might say something that is humorous, like, well, that’s the fastest anybody’s gone down that slide, isn’t it?
Yeah. And then we laugh. It’s okay, we have another hug. They go back to their place. So humor’s really important in that way. But, um, you’re a funny bloke. What’s on your mind?
Rusty Keeler: Well, I was just gonna say, I like that idea of it and being a connect, connecting, connecting force. And then it’s almost like a harmonic ance, right?
When, when there’s a humor or you break the tension, or just that you’re in on the joke, right? There’s a, there’s somebody. Yeah. When you’re in, on the joke, the sock on the ear or whatever it is, and you know, if you think you’re outside with kids and you’re in on the joke, whatever’s going on.
Robin Christie: Well said.
It’s special. It’s beautiful. Yeah, it’s great. And because we’re all about relationship building then. Yeah, I, I, I’m, I’m just trying to work out how to convince educators and teachers and adults that not only is using humor with children. A positive thing. It’s a vital thing. It’s like adult supported, risky play.
I mean, people sometimes think, oh yes, it looks so cute and lovely and we’ve got some planks and stuff like that. It’s gonna look great on Instagram. What people don’t realize is that adult supported risky play is vital for children’s development. It’s best practice. We must be doing these things. It’s not about whether we are going to allow children these sort of play experiences.
It’s how, because we must. The research from around the world is showing this. Yeah. And I have a funny feeling that humor is the same. You know, I’m designing a, I’m part of a team that’s designing a scape for children with autism at the moment, a public play scape. And one of the things, and I’ve, I’ve been talking to a lot of people about their experiences with young people with autism, and one of the things that I, that keep coming back to is that for a lot of these young people, the inability to.
Have humorous interactions with others is one of the things that very bright young people lot, you know, lot of love and things like that. Yeah, because, because humor is often non-literal, so you’re being right or you are, uh, you, you are messing around with the, with the order of the world and how it should be.
For some children with autism, where order is the vital. Structure upon which they can hang their understanding of the world. When you mess with that, it messes with their sense of balance and equilibrium.
Rusty Keeler: Uhhuh Uhhuh, this is
Robin Christie: that, this is a very heavy left turn on this conversation.
Rusty Keeler: Well, and no, I mean it’s, it’s almost like that idea of like we were talking about.
Resident resonance or that harmony. And, but if you’re, if you perceive your perceptions of the world or the way you interact, say if you’re on, you know, with autism, um. You interact in a different way. Mm-hmm. And so what is your connection to the world, to the physical world, or to the non, to the non-physical world?
And, uh, I like how you’re saying like, you know, different categories of, of thinking or ways to make your way in the world, but then the idea, you know, you, you’ve talked before with design and environments about the idea of respectful spaces and, and so that idea of like designing a space. With autism of like, okay, well what are their needs?
Or how do they perceive the world? Or how do you, yeah, what, what, what can you offer them in multisensory ways? Absolutely did. Did you know that I worked on a autism nature trail over here? No. Tell me please. Yeah, yeah. You should look this up. ’cause it is really special. I was really, it was an honor to be a part of this.
Project. It was a big project, a state park. One of the great state park in in western New York state here. Amazing. And it was a public private partnership. I guess it was these three women who got this idea for one was a former principal and other people in this district where like we want. To have children, you know, so often, like, okay, there’s a regular park and, um, families, you know, anybody’s welcome to a park, but you know, if you perceive the world or you act a different way, if you’re on a spectrum somehow and, and you’re d you know, you’re acting different.
Maybe families are, feel embarrassed or normal or people stare or whatever. So they wanted a space that is really designed for people on, on, on the spectrum, and they can be, it is for them however they want. Y however they wanna explore is okay. And whatever. Everybody else is invited also, but it was almost reversed.
So the, so the, yeah. Wow.
Robin Christie: That’s so cool, man. That is so cool. Yeah.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah. So you, you should check it out. Uh, the Autism Nature Trail, the Ant Trail, autism Nature Trail, a t. Very good. But we kind of very good, we kinda use that as a theme, and so some of the humor, some of my design, so it was like a one mile trail in the woods.
And with different stations along the way. Sensory station, music station, textures, there’s a like kind of anarchy zone design build area. Yeah. Beautiful. Um, some reflection areas and where you could be with other people or you could have alone zones if you wanna still do some music but not do it with other people.
So kind of absolutely like
Robin Christie: parallel play opportunities.
Rusty Keeler: Yep. Great. Yep. We did. Through kinda this way finding, uh, I, I kept thinking about like having like a, almost like that playful connections, but we like stacked rocks with rods in them. And it was like wayfinding, like when a trail turned, there’d be one of these, and it looked, it had a little personality.
Each one of these stacked rocks, right? Three rocks. And you, so you know, oh, that’s where the trail keeps going in this whole woods. And then you get to that one and you can see down the line, oh, there’s another one. And they’re almost like. Friends along the way, and then we did things with beautiful, with eight rocks that looked like ants, you know, stacked abdomen and thorax or whatever.
All the parts and just kind of how can the woods itself be a friend and how can Beautiful. Yeah. And how can, there could be a relationship and, and all different dimensions and levels and things.
Robin Christie: That is so gorgeous. Yes, please. I will look that up. Yeah. The a and t also, if we should go back and say that.
That was a very broad description of some children who are on the autism spectrum. Sure. When we were doing the, when they’re doing the design for this playground, working on, at the moment, I met two twin girls who are on the autism spectrum. They must have been about 16, and they were, ah, funny as hell.
And we just, that was the first way we connected was through humor. So forgive me if I, if I, if that what I said before sounded like a, a blanket description. It’s, it’s not.
Rusty Keeler: Of course. No, no. We’re, yeah, we’re all on a spectrum. We’re all in a Well, I like that idea though though of humor too. No matter where we’re at, like humor, often not for everybody, but often is that is that way in
Robin Christie: no matter where we’re at.
Absolutely. And like play like curiosity, like wonder humor. Expressed best in safe settings. And certainly that’s where it comes back to, at least partly to the physical environment, is how we creating spaces that make children and adults feel safe. They feel like they have control, they have a feel, they, they feel like the people around them can be trusted.
It’s only in those situations that we can be our best selves. And so that’s one of the reasons why we, we, we are making our early childhood centers as only as we possibly can, and I appreciate that there’s an. The American, uh, definition of homey means means basically this what I look like. Yeah. Like ugly, right?
Or Yeah. Whereas I So you’re
Rusty Keeler: saying what means the same as what we would say homey, homey, homey. Or you say homey. Yeah. Home net.
What are we doing to create spaces where a lot of those symbols and signals from home?
Are brought into that space? Are they physically soft and I’m talking spec especially about the indoor spaces. Yeah, because I have been to a lot of early childhood services in the United States, and especially when they get to be quite big. You might be talking about a hundred children or more in some of these spaces.
They’re an architecturally designed environments and everything is designed to be wiped down and sprayed, including the playgrounds. Yeah. It’s, uh, I, those, uh, can still be homely spaces. It’s, yeah, it’s how we bring in those signals from home. We are lucky in that we are in converted homes, so we are already looking like a home from the outdoors.
Yeah. But we are concentrating on things like having warm and muted. Colors. So for example, when we first started Child Space in our own home, again we were 20. We didn’t really know what we were doing, and it was the early nineties. We would just paint everything bright red, bright green, and it was the nineties.
So rag rolling was really big. I dunno if you had rag rolling in there, but you paint an undercoat and then you get a slightly darker or lighter color and you go tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, and you paint all over it to get that real dappled effect.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I
Robin Christie: think we were trying to. I don’t know. Anyway, some bright reds, bright blues, bright yellow stuff all over the place.
And these poor children, they’re, they’re wandering around. I look back now, they’re wandering around what must have been, felt like somebody else’s bad trip. You know, it’s just like, oh, what’s going on? Yeah. So we’ve, these days we’re using natural timber, natural wood, soft colors, creams, and, and everything’s both visually soft and physically soft.
So we have got. Pouches and we’ve got pillows and we’ve got blankets and the walls are hung with drapes and wilts and things like that. We’ve got curtains on all our on, on all our windows so that we can control the light, so the soft, the softness can even be, and the light. We’re making sure the places smell nice.
Each of our centers has the kitchen basically in the center, and there’s always kai, there’s always food being prepared. So when, when families first come in, they’ve got the smells from his home. Yeah, the sounds of home, the softness of of home. We’ve got a lot of adult and. Child scale furniture. So we’ve got adult-sized dining tables, for example,
Speaker 3: so
Robin Christie: that A and adult-sized couches all through the place so that the, as families are coming in, they feel welcome to come and stay, and they can stay all day if they want to, but they need to feel safe before we can really get to know them.
Same with children, same with teachers. It’s that safety. So yeah, a lot of living things. Lot of plants. Do you have any succulents in your part of the world there, rusty? You know, plants that are basically indestructible.
Rusty Keeler: Uh, not in upstate New York, that gets wiped out by, uh, the winters. But of course there are other places that are, they grow wild.
Robin Christie: Yeah, we a few on the window sill. Yes, exactly. I’m thinking more pot plants inside. Yeah. Yes. That, that has been one of the things over the last sort of four or five years that it’s been quite transformative before our learning spaces is just flooding them with plants, just every kind of pot plant. And for me personally, I can kill a pot plant.
Just by being in the same room as it, you know, it’s not, it, it’s, it’s something that I’m learning and I’m in that, uh, that new learner mode at the moment. Yeah. But the beauty of these succulents and these ice plants and things like that, it’s that they are, you just cannot kill ’em. Right. The whole place is just flooded with them and Yeah.
Macrame, macrame, pop plants. As a child of the seventies, I used to think that macrame was so dumb ’cause it was what my mom was into. And now I think macrame. Smart hangers are just the coolest thing. Ah, that is hilarious. Yeah. I middle aged,
Speaker 4: am I middle aged? That’s what happened to me.
Rusty Keeler: You like, we call it macrame.
That you like macrame.
Speaker 4: Oh, macrame. Yeah. Hey, that’s cool. Macrame.
Rusty Keeler: Macrame. Yeah. No, my mom did macrame. That totally takes me back to the seventies of, yeah, and, and, and Is that funny? It’s like macrame plant holders.
Robin Christie: Yeah,
Rusty Keeler: it’s
Robin Christie: the one. Yeah. And then, but just, they’re hung everywhere. So the whole place, it’s like, it’s like, uh, it’s like being in a little jungle.
Ooh.
Speaker 3: And the beauty is instead of
Robin Christie: having one pot plant on the, on the window sill. ’cause if that dies, everybody’s gonna notice. If you have 50 of them. Well,
Speaker 5: one goes,
Robin Christie: yeah, it’s okay. It’s like a Darwinian evolution thing. And we’ll just pop you away and we’ll get another one. The children. Children don’t mind.
But yes, 50, a hundred plants in every room, yeah. Is one of the things they’ve been doing, but also the quality of light. You know, sometimes in architecturally designed spaces, there are just. Fluorescent Spa of Satan. Yeah. Rip light. Exactly. Yep. There’s not, there’s nothing homely about that. So it’s one of the other things we’ve been concentrating on.
How are we dispersing the kind of light that we are using and how are we giving children control over that? So while all our power points, our hot points, things you plug. Up high. So they’re at 1.6 meters off the ground, which is five and a half feet. Okay. Lamp lamps that are coming off, those have their own switches are down at children’s lamps, so they get the opportunity to control the light in their spaces.
We’re also using a lot of fairy lights. Rope lights, uh, standing lamps, just as I’m sure your, your listeners out there in, in rusty Land actually. Do your, do your, do your fans have a special name like Taylor Swift and their swifties they call
Speaker 4: the rusties or something? The, the rust buckets? The rust belt?
Rusty Keeler: I don’t know.
Uh, if you’re listening and you good idea of a name for, for of the people that we are all together, our community, let me know. Um,
Robin Christie: but yes, a, a, again, coming back to things, things like curtains, so that as, for example, when we are having our meals together at lunchtime, the children may be coming out, out in, if we are eating inside.
Instead of outside. ’cause all of our, all of our children are doing as much eating, sleeping, and nappy changing and things like that out in the outdoors. Okay. So all our infants are sleeping under the tree.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah. Beautiful.
Robin Christie: Beautiful. When they’re coming in. But instead of just coming into another, yet another brightly lit space when they’re coming in for that.
Lunchtime ritual where we light candles and things like that. We’re actually closing the curtains. We’re lighting the candles on each table. We’re turning the lamps on. And just by having that sort of control over the light and by softening the light that’s slowing the play down and slowing the energy of the space, and, and then we wash our hands.
Hold hands, we do our Akia, which is our prayer of thanks. And then by that stage, the whole energy level’s just, yeah. And they’re ready for a more restful time after lunch. So yes, control over the light sources has been something that we’ve been concentrating on as well, as far as that hols goes. Yeah, holiness.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah. Yeah. I love it. The, the idea that environment has that effect on us. That, that we can create the moods that it and, and have that softness and warmthness and things can be stimulating or things can be soothing and, and that that can be a part of the rhythms of the day and that relationship with the Absolutely.
With the environment. Yeah.
Robin Christie: Absolutely. And even if you do have strip lights, that’s got, I’ve got, I’ve got a friend who teaches not far from here, and she’s got strip lights all through the front, quite a large center. Architecturally design,
Rusty Keeler: big fluorescent lights,
Robin Christie: big fluorescent lights. They never go on.
They just don’t go on. Yeah. Yeah. Basically what she’s done is she’s dispersed the lighting throughout the whole thing and she’s got some really beautiful hanging lamps and things like that, and they are what goes on. So yes, even if you, even if people out there are in spaces that have been designed by people who also designed hospitals and supermarkets, there are lots of things that we can do together to bring in that homeliness and again, softness and, and natural.
Thanks. Uh, Tony is into crochet talking about middle aged and she’s, you like crochet? How do you pronounce it? Oh yeah. Crochet or something to you. Not crochet.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah, we say crochet.
Robin Christie: Oh, crochet.
Rusty Keeler: Ah, wei. Everything sounds so much fan
Robin Christie: you when you say it Anyway, so there’s lots of crochet blankets all around the place, all around child space.
Oh, okay. Yeah. We’re, we are big op shoppers as well. So an opportunity shop, a thrift shop you might call
Rusty Keeler: it. Oh yeah. Yep, yep. Yep.
Robin Christie: Right. One by the Salvation Army or, or something like that.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Robin Christie: Yeah. Lots of the stuff around child space is coming from there. Our tables, our couches, our blankets, our cushions, uh, love it.
All the, all the children. There’s no plastic in, in our environments for the children. So the children are drinking out of China cups, for example. They’re pouring, you know, so there’s no, the China plates, China things, they’re all coming from the op shop. So they have, they have a great. Feel not only of Homeliness, but of, of a past story that’s coming in.
Some families will bring in their grandmother’s old China because they know that, that, that the children will appreciate it. Ah, yeah. And so there’s a lot of connection with families past and, and, and adults’ own childhood as well. And all of that is making children and their families feel safe, feeling.
Welcomed a feeling of belonging.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah. No, I can, I can picture it feels beautiful. Feel, feels like home. How about, so here’s the question that always people pop up when you start doing, uh, unorthodoxy. Beautiful but homey things. Uh, right. They, they wonder about, say, licensing of regulators who are used to those more hospital fluorescent wipe down the space spaces.
And here you have like. Macrame man and Right. And, and crochet. Yeah. So how, how, what did you, how do you work with your licensers to, to help them get on board? Oh yeah. Talk about this.
Robin Christie: Yeah. Really good question. The first thing is, the better we know our regulations. The better we can, uh, make sure that the regulations are, uh, are being enacted in a sensible way.
’cause what tends to happen, it’s the same with the playground safety standards and things like that. Is that because people, not everybody has taken the time to go through the regulations with a fine tooth comb and actually understand only what’s required people. There’s received wisdom that will come from a man, you know, a supervisor of the early childhood service who was here three years ago who said something, and that’s like, oh, we can’t have China cups with the children.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah.
Robin Christie: Anyway, said, oh, okay, well, that, that’s what, that’s what she said. So that’s what it is. And so that passes down from, from generation to generation of teachers until it’s embedded in the practice, but nobody knows why it’s there.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Robin Christie: So the better we know our regulations. The better we can serve our children and our families.
So that’s, that’s the first thing. So for us, for example, the China Cups, there’s nothing in our regulations that say we have to give children plastic. It just says that they have to be put through a dishwasher at minimum of 60 degrees Celsius. Great, right? Perfect China cups. Away we go. So that, that fits into that space.
Also, we are very lucky in that our early childhood regulations aren’t that prescriptive. They, they give a lot of space for individual interpretations of those, of those licensing criteria, of those standards. We’re very lucky here in as I’m, as I think you guys are in the United States, we, we have enormous diversity in our early childhood education, uh, services.
So yeah, there’s family run organizations like ours at Child Space. There are publicly run kindergartens. There are faith-based. Services. We are very lucky here in New Zealand that we have an absolute world-leading Maori early childhood system called, and for those families that choose those services, they’re often in full immersion.
Again, the idea is if you know your regulations inside out, then if somebody comes along with a red pen and a clipboard yeah, and a sour face and says, oh no, you can’t do that.
Our approach is, first of all, you say, well, this is why we’re doing it. This is intentional teaching. This is the rationale behind why we’re doing this. You’ll see this reflected in our policy, so our families all know why we’re doing this. Secondly, can you please show me right now in black and white where it says, I can’t do this?
Of course you, you lay on a lot more charm than that. By this stage. They’ve had a cup of tea and a biscuit and you know, the children have made them some cheese scones with, they still have lumps of flour in them, you know, that sort of stuff. So a lot of charms gone in before you get to that point.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So bringing them in to your philosophy and your intentionality and the, and the beauty of the space, but also, but at the same time, be standing up for what you’re doing.
Robin Christie: Absolutely. And don’t be afraid to push back if you have to. Yeah. ’cause you’re standing up for, uh, yeah. You’re standing up for something that is much more important.
You’re standing up for Children’s Agency Children’s Rights Children’s, uh, yes. Self-determination and, uh, yeah. That’s, that’s the whole, that’s the whole gig, rusty.
Rusty Keeler: That is, that is. Yay. Oh my gosh. Well, we covered some ground. Boy, you, you’re a great interviewer. You should be on, you should be on a telly. Come on.
I’m on Zoom. I’m on Zoomie. Much better. Uh, well, thank you so much for spending some time with me today, and thanks for the invitation,
Robin Christie: rusty.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah, I, uh, more, more and love to get Tony on here and then you and Tony together and yeah, take it to the next level.
Robin Christie: Yes,
Rusty Keeler: please. Yeah.
Alright. Thanks for listening. Do you have a comment or a question? Email me at Play Nature podcast@gmail.com. You know, I like talking about this stuff and maybe we could use your question on a future podcast episode. I. As always, I have some free goodies for you in the show notes, including my outdoor loose parts guide, fun stuff in there.
And so I wish you the best in your outdoor play adventures, and when it comes to adding nature to your yard or loose parts or saying yes to risky play, my favorite motto is dream big, start small. And never stop. Oh yeah. Woo, woo, woo. Let’s do it. All right. Have fun out there.
