Marc Armitage: Fact, we do quite often say that you actually can’t make a play worker. You either are or you’re aren’t. Play work is an attitude. It is a way of working, and it, it’s a form of working that some people just cannot do because they don’t have that mindset.
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. Mark Armitage. Hello, hello, hello. Great to see you.
Marc Armitage: Uh, it’s all right to see you. I wouldn’t say it’s great, but fine.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah,
Marc Armitage: it’s fine. It’s early in the ball.
Rusty Keeler: That’s right. That’s right. It’s early where you are. Are you in Melbourne? Now
Marc Armitage: I am indeed in Melbourne. Yes. At Home
Rusty Keeler: Australia. Yes. But you are not an Australian.
Marc Armitage: No, I’m from the, from the People’s Republic of Yorkshire.
Rusty Keeler: That’s right. I just saw, uh, uh, my Python meaning of life.
And it starts off, it was like in the third world, and then it’s like Yorkshire.
Marc Armitage: Yes, exactly. We’re very proud of that.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah, you made it. Yay. Yay. Well, I’m so excited, uh, to see you here face to face, uh, uh, to,
Marc Armitage: so you should be
Rusty Keeler: Yeah, that’s right. I mean, everybody is when they see you and Yeah. So, no, it’s, I’m, I’m super excited.
In fact, I think when I was first just dreaming of having a podcast, I was like, yeah, I could interview all those great people I know, like Mark Armitage.
Marc Armitage: I thought you were gonna say and all those great people and
Rusty Keeler: yeah. Right. And you know Mark Armitage too. Oh my gosh. Yay. Well, uh, here, I’ll just read your, your bio, which is short and sweet, but says it all here.
Mark Armitage is a play worker. Let that one sit, but play worker, play advocate and friend of play currently based in Australia. So maybe why don’t we just start off, uh, you know, our paths have crossed a few times, which has been awesome, both here in Ithaca and, uh, the States and some play conferences here and there.
And then I got to go to Australia on a trip and I got to hang out with you for a couple days in Melbourne too, which was awesome and amazing. Still inspired by, um, but why don’t. I think we can have a big talk about, I’d love to have a big talk about play work and play work in your background and, um, you know, what, what play is to you, what a play worker is and how you’re spreading that to Australia and the world and beyond.
Marc Armitage: Play work is, it’s two different things. It’s a profession and it’s a way of working and it’s a profession that has its roots going, uh, as far back as the 1860s and 1870s. But modern play work comes from the period immediately after the Second World War, so late 1940s, early 1950s. It begins in the United Kingdom mainly, but then as spread around the world, especially the, the modern form, including here in Australia and in the United States amongst other places.
But it’s also a particular way of working for. And the way that it, it, it’s slightly different to other fields of work, is that play work has no agenda to fill. Our only agenda, if you like, is to provide space and time for children to play in the way that they would play if they weren’t with us.
Rusty Keeler: Hmm.
Marc Armitage: And if we do have any form of outcomes to be achieved, it’s only really in terms of funding strengths and what the funders, uh, are looking for.
Rusty Keeler: Hmm.
Marc Armitage: Play work as a profession itself is not really interested in why children play. It’s more interested in whether they can or cannot.
Rusty Keeler: Hmm. And then how to create the conditions to help them.
Marc Armitage: Exactly.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah.
Marc Armitage: Yeah. Okay. The space is the thing that creates the play opportunities within a given space more than anything else.
Hmm
Rusty Keeler: mm-hmm. Yeah, that’s really interesting because so much we hear people trying to back up play plays, you know, it does this, it’s, you know, it stimulates that it’s this kind of growth and brain development and all that kind of stuff. But I, I think I’m kinda like with you, like I play for play sake, but play
Marc Armitage: Yeah, you could, you could summarize it by saying if you wanted to be really hard and purist about it, that we don’t really care if they can play that ticks the box for us.
Now, that’s not to say that we’re not interested in what positive and and negative results there are from children playing, but we’re more fixated on whether they can actually play or not than the reason why they would do it.
Rusty Keeler: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So how is it looking for play these days and that play work perspective?
Marc Armitage: Well, it, there’s obviously, there’s two different words there. There’s the play and the play work, which are both d. Today with the play work bit first possibly play work is struggling a little bit as a profession. At the moment in the United Kingdom, we’ve had an austerity budget for almost 20 years, uh, which, uh, has really cut local authority budgets to the bone and seen as local councils are the principal providers of play work provision.
It means that play work and play work jobs are really struggling in the uk. I know in, in the US there’s been a a huge increase in, in interest amongst people around play work for the last decade, 15 years. But that also seems to have slowed down a little bit. But I, I suspect that that’s just because people are, are tired after running like mad for 15 years and they’ve just entered a, a natural little dip.
In Australia, things are going great at the moment. There’s an awful lot going on nationally and within the states, uh, in terms of play work. So it, it’s a, a bit of a new wave going on in terms of play work in Australia at the moment.
Rusty Keeler: Hmm.
Marc Armitage: As for the word play Well, because plays like breathing, it’s never going away.
Despite the fact that we have plenty of people saying the children don’t play like they used to. They don’t play like I do when I was a kid. Well, weirdly, um, people have been saying that for as long as there have been children around, it isn’t true. It’s not going to be true. Play changes. The place where it takes place may change, but play itself as a behavior will never go away because it’s so integral to.
Both humans and other animals.
Rusty Keeler: So what is play?
Marc Armitage: Oh, the easy questions first. Honestly, that’s, I, I I like to start with the easy questions first. Well, the, uh, the answer to the question, what is play really depends upon who you ask.
Rusty Keeler: Okay?
Marc Armitage: Because play in terms of provision tends to be driven by agendas. So whatever the agenda is of people that you’re talking to is going to affect the way that they see the work play.
Rusty Keeler: Mm-hmm.
Marc Armitage: So, for example, in an early years con context, if you say to people what is play, they’re gonna turn around and say, well, play is learning. Learning and play are inseparable. Uh, the two are one and the same. Whereas if you go to a primary school, elementary school context and turn around to the educators there who are in many respects doing a very similar job to.
The fellow educators of the early year sector and say what is play? They’re gonna turn around and say, well, play is a break from learning that happens at recess play times.
Rusty Keeler: Hmm.
Marc Armitage: It’s got nothing to do with learning itself. So even just there you’ve got two work sectors, which are there is similar in practicalities, and yet they see players not to speak two different things, but two diametrically opposed things.
Rusty Keeler: Hmm.
Marc Armitage: In one case, play is learning and in the other play is a break problem.
Rusty Keeler: Hmm.
Marc Armitage: And we get that no matter which work sector you look at, everyone brings its own unique agenda. And so it has its own unique view, uh, of play. To, to give you another couple of examples, people in the physiological world, that’s the physical, uh, physical people will turn around and say, well, play is about building bones and muscles and heart loads, et cetera, et cetera.
So play has to involve lots of movement in order for it to work and to make sense. Whereas go and speak to the cognitive people and they will say, well, play is about building neurons and bridging between neurons. And the way that you do that is by thinking and heavily engaging in their in thought stuff, which doesn’t involve much moving around.
So again, to diametrically opposed, uh, ways of looking at word play. And it changes completely when you ask children what their opinion of play is. And there’s, uh, a very kind of, uh, common answer that children give Universal, which is different to these other work sectors because as I say, they, they give their definitions based on their agenda.
But as children, what plays, uh, and their common answer is, I dunno, no idea. And it’s ’cause they’re not interested. They really don’t care what it is or what it’s for. They’re really interested in whether they can do it or.
Rusty Keeler: Hmm mm-hmm.
Marc Armitage: Kids are weird.
Rusty Keeler: I remember when I was in kindergarten and there were adults that would come in with clipboards and kind of observe and study and you know, and they were asking us detailed questions.
They’d pull us aside and say, well, you know, like, what was going on with those blocks? What were you thinking? And what we, and I remember just thinking like this, we’re not doing anything. What do you mean we’re, we’re just, yeah.
Marc Armitage: Yeah.
Rusty Keeler: It’s not what you think it is.
Marc Armitage: Yeah. And if you think about it, if you are deeply engaged in something that you are enjoying and you get well into a bit of a flow state, time does very strange things.
It kind of disappears. And so if you’ve got a play space that’s actually working well, children will leave the thing believing that they’ve only actually been there five minutes.
Rusty Keeler: Mm-hmm.
Marc Armitage: So in that context, there is no point in turning around to children and saying, how is it going? What are you doing?
What are you learning? They’ve got no idea. Partly because they don’t care and partly ’cause they’ve only been there in the blink of an eye.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah. Yeah, the flow state. Okay. So then that’s the, so the child’s point of view is I’m just, I’m, I, I’m not even thinking about it. I’m just, I’m doing the thing. I’m, I’m involved in the thing and I’m being
Marc Armitage: Exactly.
Being in the moment. Yeah.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah. Okay. So what’s your def definition of play?
Marc Armitage: Uh, I, I kind of don’t have one. It, we have, um, a very small number of heroes within the Playworks sector, but one of those would be, uh, the British Colin Ward, who wrote a very famous book in the 1970s called, uh, the Child in the City.
Rusty Keeler: Okay.
Marc Armitage: And his book was radical in that it, it did something that, uh, people have not really done, uh, very often in the context of children and children’s lives, which is that he went to find where they were when they were not with adults to see what they were doing. And in terms of, um, where he found them, he describes finding them everywhere.
They were absolutely everywhere, including, of course, the places where they weren’t supposed to be.
Rusty Keeler: Mm-hmm.
Marc Armitage: But play work, if it takes a definition of play by any kind of degree, it goes down to Colin Wardroom and Colin Ward described play as the thing that children do. And it kind of neatly summarizes that fact that children do play.
It occupies more of their waking day than any other single form of behavior. But again, they’ve got no idea why they’re doing it. It’s just the thing that children do. In fact, we usually expand on that using Colin Ward’s own words, but paraphrase it a little bit by saying, play is the thing that children do all the time and everywhere.
Rusty Keeler: Hmm.
Marc Armitage: And notice, again, there’s no agenda in there. There’s no outcome. To be found. There’s just a recognition of the fact, excuse me, that children play.
Rusty Keeler: Mm-hmm.
Marc Armitage: It’s one of the very, very few universal behaviors in human life. So if you know that old fashioned, uh, quotation about, uh, which I think is a Matt Twain quotation, uh, the only, only sure things in life is death and taxes.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah.
Marc Armitage: Well, you, you could add play to that, to that world that work because it is the only universal behavior that’s common across human cultures all around the world.
Rusty Keeler: Hmm. Part of being alive as humans and, and other animals. Yeah. The univer universality of play.
Marc Armitage: Exactly. Yeah. And in the, in the non-human world, for example, especially amongst mammals.
In the 1970s, evolutionary biologists used to say most species of animal of mammals play. But now they’re very comfortable saying, all species of mammals play because we’ve simply never found a mam million species that does not play.
Rusty Keeler: Hmm.
Marc Armitage: And as we are mammals as well, it kind of brings up some very interesting parallels between us and other animals.
Rusty Keeler: We share it with them or, yeah. We think it’s, we think it’s a hu Yeah. Right. We think it’s a human thing, but it’s a, it’s a thing that we all, we humans also do.
Marc Armitage: Exactly. And the, the archeological evidence for plaguing as a long history goes back a long time. What sort of evidence in an archeological context, you, you used to say that there’s, there’s two different forms of evidence for playing one in the form of artifacts, objects.
Rusty Keeler: Okay.
Marc Armitage: And in terms of objects, we find toys going back 5,000, 6,000. Which have clear signs of wear and tear because they’ve been played with, and you could see them quite often as grave goods in, uh, prehistoric children’s graves. And I find it, I ironic that the oldest example of a working wheel is a toy and it’s around, uh, 10,000 years old from Turkey and it’s a little toy chariot.
So amongst objects like toys, we can see toys going back, uh, even further. But up, up to 20, 21,000 years is usually the figure given for the oldest toys. But then there are other objects that we can find. We can see evidence of collections of stones and piles of stones, uh, in the archeological record. And the best evidence that we’ve got is, is actually footprint evidence.
So, for example, there is a, a set of footprints that the archeologist Larry Leaky found in the 1970s, which quite clearly your children play. It shows exactly the same kind of signs that you would find if you took your own child to the beach because the footsteps are going all over the place, around and around.
And at one point the obvious child’s footprints in these disappear completely disappear. And it’s not until you look ca carefully that you realize that the footprints reappear in the footprints of one of the ab in this group. So they’re kind of walking in, in step exactly the same as we would see modern human children today do it.
Rusty Keeler: Mm-hmm.
Marc Armitage: And those footprints are conventionally dated at 2.1 to 2.2 million years old. Oh man. Because they’re actually a free homo, uh, species. It’s, uh, aen. And those are, uh, the oldest physical evidence that we’ve got for children playing.
Rusty Keeler: Hmm. Yeah. Thinking about play is like flow, but also like the, the spirit of, of movement or being alive or Yeah.
How you are Yeah. Moving through space. And it, it can be in a playful way.
Marc Armitage: Yeah.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah. Yeah.
Marc Armitage: Exactly. I mean, if you, if you think about it, I mean, kids get bored very easily.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah.
Marc Armitage: Which is why with this set of footprints and with others, the, the adult footprints are in a dead straight light because they’re going from here to be.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah.
Marc Armitage: And one of the things that gives away the, the fact that the children within these footprints are playing is the fact that they’re not going in a straight line.
Rusty Keeler: Right?
Marc Armitage: They’re all over the place. They’re disappearing at points to explore things and then coming back and then whizzing around the adults, et cetera, et cetera.
Just exactly the same way as you would see children on the beach death.
Rusty Keeler: Yes. Yeah.
Marc Armitage: And I can imagine that the, the adults in the, in those footprints, uh, are expressing exactly the same frustrations that the adults today express.
Rusty Keeler: Come on, quit fooling around. We’re late.
Marc Armitage: Exactly. Yes. What are you doing?
Rusty Keeler: It’s getting dark.
It’s B of bedtime. That is funny. Yeah. So the spirit, the spirit of play. Well, and then the adults. Okay, so you, you brought that up, the, the pre homo sapien parents or adults and Yeah. That’s interesting. It’s like the different world or the collision of worlds. Um, the child domain versus the adult domain or where, you know, where he was talking about children play everywhere.
But so much of Children’s Play Now or opportunities for play. Does involve being around adults, maybe more than, you know,
Marc Armitage: increasingly so,
Rusty Keeler: yes. So then that there, you could call that a collision with like the natural, the natural way of being, the natural flow of, of play and life and, uh, that is wired within, yeah, within like life on this planet.
But then the adults with the, like agendas, as you’re saying, the agendas. So it feels like you is circling back to play work a bit of like play work as a, you say mi almost a mindset.
Marc Armitage: Yeah. Yeah. In fact, we do quite often say that you actually can’t make a play worker. You either are or you’re not. Mm-hmm.
Rusty Keeler: Mm-hmm.
Marc Armitage: Because you can teach people all the technical stuff to do with play and playing until it’s coming out of your, out, out of your ears. But. Play work is an attitude. It is a way of working. And it, it’s a form of working that some people just cannot do because they don’t have that mindset.
Rusty Keeler: How does that mindset, uh, look, look on play?
Marc Armitage: Uh, that’s a tricky one. That’s, that is a very tricky, uh, but the, the late great. Bob Hughes did a, a little experiment at one of his playhead conferences in the, uh, in the late 1980s. He, he sent out, um, a questionnaire to, to the play workers that were in, uh, in the audience for the conference. And over the conference, he asked them to write down, how did you get into play work?
And there was a commonality, there was a common factor that came out. And the key word to summarize it was Accidentally.
Rusty Keeler: Accidentally,
Marc Armitage: yeah. Including, uh, myself and almost all the other play workers had never intended to become. Play workers, they’d, they’d fallen into it. And I think that’s partly to do with people finding a hope, find, finding somewhere that they feel comfortable with because their idea of, of play and playing matches, a play work ideal rather than the other way around.
And I use, I find it fascinating as somebody who’s had the opportunity to go around the world working with play workers in different countries, it always amazes me that they’re very, very similar people.
Rusty Keeler: Hmm.
Marc Armitage: They’re similar people, not just in terms of how they think, but they even dress in a very similar way.
Rusty Keeler: I was gonna say converse, Chuck Taylor
Marc Armitage: sneakers. Exactly. Torn down shirts, et cetera. And, and I think that is because the fact that play workers are a particular breed. Mm. And, uh, there are people that I, I can think of that have tried to be play workers and failed because. There is something within themselves that’s got in the way.
Rusty Keeler: Hmm. Another way of looking or, or a way that they think they’re supposed to be with children or they just Yeah, it’s, it’s like, yeah. It’s like you’re talking about like the way
Marc Armitage: Well, it is, I mean, there are some very secret, top secret phrases that we use in play work that we don’t discuss with non play workers because we know if we do, it will freak them out.
And so it’s not until you get to a particular level of knowledge that we start to talk about the really dodgy stuff.
Rusty Keeler: Are we there?
Marc Armitage: I mean, in many respects, uh, you, uh, one of those people that we’d hold up as a bit of a success story in terms of play work, because I know that when you first got introduced to the idea of play work, it was something quite.
Alien to you in terms of background and, and training, but you’ve got it, you’ve got it really, really quickly.
Rusty Keeler: Mm-hmm.
Marc Armitage: And people that are from outside the play work world, we could usually spot whether they’re gonna be into this thing or whether they’re gonna struggle with it, uh, or not. And some of our greatest successes have been in persuading people that are not play workers to actually understand what we do and how we do it.
Rusty Keeler: Mm-hmm. I just inter I, last interview was with, uh, this great place in Ithaca, uh, friend Eric Herman, who runs this free science workshop, and it is this wild and wooly place indoors, and it’s makerspace tools, materials, animals, you know, half mannequins, you know, the whole, the whole deal. And it’s, and it’s staffed by these amazing adults.
And I don’t think they’ve thought of themselves as play workers, but as soon as I came in I was like, this is a play work setting. Yeah.
Marc Armitage: It’s interesting because I, I, I work with the early years sector a lot here in Australia. And in some respects, you, you, you would kind of think that early years settings are the absolute worst places to do plate work because there is a very rigid, hierarchical kind of outcome based system going on.
And yet, play work works really well in a lot of the early years settings here because people can see the value in, in that kind of approach. And early years people might find it hard to take some of the play work principles on, because some of them are diametrically opposed to their own training, but once they get it, it’s, they just step back and they go, right, I, I understand this, I understand why this is, this is working the way it is.
And it’s been particularly successful.
Rusty Keeler: Hmm.
Marc Armitage: So it does work outside the play, work settings and outside of play work as a, as a profession. There are points beyond which some people just could not go. We have a thing in play work, for example, called the three threes, which we used to refer to as open access, which means that in order to be a proper play work setting, if you like, you children have to be able to tick off the three threes, which is free at the point of entry.
In other words, you don’t pay to get in. You are free to choose what to do and what not to do, which most non-player work settings can manage those first two fine without any problems. The third one’s a bit of an issue because the third three is that you are free to leave as and when you wish, and for somewhere like an early year setting, a primary school, any other kind of place within the care sector, that’s a complete no no, ’cause you’ve got to wait to be picked up at a particular time by a registered person.
So that’s, that’s a point sometimes when, uh, when you tell people about the idea of children just leaving when they want, they’re aghast. They say, well, how, how does that work? That’s surely that can’t work.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah.
Marc Armitage: But it works in a play work context.
Rusty Keeler: This free science workshop has that kids can wander in, they wander out, nobody’s signed in, nobody signs out.
It’s supposed to be part of the community access.
Marc Armitage: Yeah. Sounds very play worky,
Rusty Keeler: very play worky. I’ve seen that in, uh, certainly. Yeah. Adventure Playgrounds in London that are right smack in neighborhoods where kids are coming and going. I’ve, I’ve seen the same thing in Copenhagen, just like riding their bikes.
Kids just riding their bikes from school. Come to the adventure playground. That’s the place to be and leave whenever you want to.
Marc Armitage: Yeah. And I know in the, in the United States since the 1980s, 1990s, that increasingly children. Don’t get to travel to school on their bike because schools will insist on, have you got insurance?
Who are you coming with? Are you coming as a group? Are you coming as an individual? Whereas go somewhere like, uh, Holland and Germany and eight o’clock in the morning, it’s impossible to drive anywhere. ’cause the streets are full of kids on bikes.
Rusty Keeler: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I like that. Here in Ithaca, not as, not so many kids on bikes.
There’s some, I mean, it’s a super pedestrian friendly, it’s bike friendly, but
Marc Armitage: flat
Rusty Keeler: and flat right down here. But one thing that I do hear is because, uh, I, I live on the way to the skate park and I love hearing the sounds of the skateboarders on the road. Like there they are, they’re, they’re commuting themselves.
In some ways. That’s one of the. You know, few, three freeze also, like just as Oh
Marc Armitage: yeah, indeed. It’s often said that the, the sign of a healthy community is to be able to see children moving around in the local neighborhood, making use of the whole community space.
Rusty Keeler: Yes.
Marc Armitage: Uh, particularly on their own. It’s a sign that people feel comfortable, feel safe, feel able to move from A to B, et cetera, et cetera.
And in a world that’s dominated by the car, you don’t see that.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah. Yeah. Things weren’t designed, you know, Ithaca is lucky because it’s, you know, it’s one of those, you know, towns that were. Yeah. I guess that was originally laid out before the automobile, so it is, it’s a different scale. It’s more human scale and certainly, you know, more modern places are so spread out and you have to be in a car and there’s the, yeah.
Like there’s deserts, play deserts where you have to, how do you get there? How do you
Marc Armitage: Yeah, yeah. We, we see the rise of the, of the destination playground at about the same time as the rise in motor traffic and fears of parents. So that children being out and about within their local community.
Rusty Keeler: Mm-hmm.
Marc Armitage: Suddenly we get the destination playground where the only way of getting there is by car.
Rusty Keeler: Mm-hmm.
Marc Armitage: Which means that the amount of time that you spend there is dictated by adults rather than by children.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah.
Marc Armitage: And they’re not the same as the local community play spaces within 400 meters of your front door that.
Kids can easily get to themselves.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah. And then you talk about open access, who then can get to those ones if you have a car, if you have parents willing to, or parents that have time to get you there.
Marc Armitage: Yeah.
Rusty Keeler: Mm-hmm.
Marc Armitage: I, I, I found it, um, an enormous shock. I, I lived in Sweden for a long time. I lived in Sweden for about 12 years.
And one of the things that always surprised me there was you could turn around a corner in any housing state and there’s a play space. And it’s because the Swedish building regulations say that there has to be a play space for children under the age of six, within 50 meters of their front door. And for children over the age of six, there has to be a play space within 400 meters.
And this really confused me at first ’cause I thought, this is, this must be really, really expensive. I wonder how they managed to do this until I realized I was thinking with my British head, of course, because if you, if you look just on one of these states that, that I lived on. There were six times more play spaces than you would find in a typical British space, but the same number of pieces of play equipment, because play equipment wasn’t gathered into a single space surrounded by a fence that you had to go to play.
Equipment was dotted around all over the place.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah.
Marc Armitage: Uh, and that’s how you justified the idea of the 50 meter, 400 meter, um, kind of thing. And it meant that people got used to the idea that the whole community was effectively one big play space rather than having a single play space surrounded by a fence plumed on the edge of the housing estate where the land is cheapest.
Rusty Keeler: Yes.
Marc Armitage: It’s, it’s a complete change in, in mindset.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah. Yeah. And, and then that gets into the children playing everywhere all the time. Putting play, you know, interesting play things where children are, or where they can easily access everywhere all the time.
Marc Armitage: Yeah. I’ve just recently been writing about the linear playground and linear playgrounds are, instead of gathering all the play equipment into one of these single space playgrounds surrounding by fence, saying to children, if you want to play, that’s where you play.
You can’t play anywhere else. Linear playgrounds are based on the routes that children use on a regular basis, such as like the route to, to and from school, for example.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah.
Marc Armitage: And so the, the play equipment that would’ve been gathered together is now plunked along that route.
Rusty Keeler: Yes.
Marc Armitage: So that children effectively play on the way to school and on the way back from school.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah. Yeah.
Marc Armitage: I love that. Which is what they would’ve done.
Rusty Keeler: That’s right. That’s
Marc Armitage: right. A few generations ago.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah. They know all the places to, to climb, to balance, to hide, to go under the creek, the nearby creek to get through and yeah, for sure. That’s how I got to and from school, you know, thinking about that or the city, like an overview city of a city and how children move through it if they’re able to move through it, you know, and sometimes like with animals, they talk about like creating wildlife corridors.
So I always thought it’d be interesting to look at a city and look at the child life corridors. How do they move through and how can you.it and how can you Yeah. Have playful elements along the way.
Marc Armitage: There’s a very good example of that in, in London and in mile end, where Mile End Park, which is a really big, uh, Victorian park is on one side of a very, very busy road, but there’s a smaller park on the other side of the road and they’re joined together by bridge.
But the bridge is a green bridge. It has trees and grasses and flowers on the bridge. So you can effectively play as you go from one park to the other park without ever having to cross the road.
Rusty Keeler: Yes. Yeah. People are thinking about it. They’re definitely, yeah. Thinking about children in the space and in cities and knowing that, you know, we have, we have to think about it.
We, we don’t want them just inside and, yeah. Have, have you heard that organization? Eight 80 cities out of Canada?
Marc Armitage: No. What’s, what’s this
Rusty Keeler: one? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the idea is if you design a city for eight year olds and 80 year olds,
Marc Armitage: uh,
Rusty Keeler: it’s gonna be good for everybody.
Marc Armitage: Yeah.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah. Yeah.
Marc Armitage: I like that idea. That does make perfect sense.
It’s, it’s one of the reasons why I get very puzzled why people freak out about the idea of the 15 minute sitting. Because the 15 minute city just means that you’ve got everything that you need within a 15 minute walk of your own home.
Rusty Keeler: Oh.
Marc Armitage: Which is the way that we all live.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah. Yeah.
Marc Armitage: This idea of commuting for hours in order to get to a a place of work would’ve been completely alien at one, at one point.
And producing a, a city like that has massive benefits for children because everything that they need is within a 15 minute walk as well.
Rusty Keeler: Yes.
Marc Armitage: And it means the city can be greener and, uh, a nicest place to, a nice place to just chill out and spend time.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah. Yeah, I, uh, I, I saw, uh, I was at the Child and Nature Children in Nature Network conference, um, last year.
Minneapolis, Minneapolis, St. Paul. And, uh, you know, I’ve been following a bit of the work of the folks in Boulder, Colorado. ’cause they’ve been doing a lot of great, like child friendly city stuff, you know, in many ways leading the way over here in that and creating incredible stuff. You know, looking at the city as a whole, where’s play, where’s nature?
Uh, but they did a great presentation, uh, of a new project that they’re doing that instead of getting huge amount, trying to get huge amounts of money and create really amazing parks and, you know, place in different areas, it was the idea of doing. Lots of small, you know, this idea. Lots of small little place, little, you know, little pathways through developments, through housing, through, you know, the roots where children play and spending, spending.
Marc Armitage: Exactly.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah.
Marc Armitage: Yeah. The child, the child friendly, uh, cities network is a really good one to get into. People, uh, haven’t done so already. They’re very player friendly, very children friendly in there, in general, and they do an awful lot of work, uh, which is specifically to do with urban centers. And those urban centers are increasingly becoming the norm for children.
The UN calculates that by the year 2050, 80% of people around the world will live in a large city.
Rusty Keeler: Wow.
Marc Armitage: And that includes children. So increasing children’s, uh, natural environment will be brick, tarmac, concrete, steel, glass, et cetera, and greening up those cities. Doesn’t just make it better for adults, it’ll make it much better for children as well.
Rusty Keeler: Yes, absolutely. When I think about the Highline Park, the linear park in New York City and just, just how I, I love that play. I love it. And so special. It’s funny because it’s gotten to this high end, like all these architects from all around the world, famous people are like, so they’re building all, ’cause it’s really revitalized these certain areas and so it’s become like fancified.
But what it is itself is just like wild, like native plantings on the old railroad bridge right through, you know, elevated through the city and it’s like this wild thing and it’s almost like they just took like the random fields around here and plopped it there to pa, you
Marc Armitage: know? Yeah. Pasture. The most successful playgrounds I’ve ever visited anywhere around the world have been the simplest, simplest playgrounds that are.
Not just an architect’s wet dream, but are actually playable spaces.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah.
Marc Armitage: Are the ones that are more successful with children. We, we had a bit of a backlash against this in the 1990s, a bit of a difference between Scotland and England because the, uh, the idea of forest schools and the influence of forest schools that arrived in the uk, but in a slightly different way because the, the Scottish lot were more influenced by the Danish model than the English and Welch lot were more, uh, influenced by the, uh, Swedish and Norwegian model.
And they both quite different. And it led to things like a lot of, um, Scottish playgrounds suddenly became completely devoid of anything that you would think of as a traditional player feature, a set of swings of climate, brain, et cetera. Everything was based on the idea of, uh, of the natural world.
Without realizing that that really confused children, the fact that there wasn’t something in that space that said this is a place that you can come and play. Really, it did confuse children. And so it was, it was suddenly realized that even if you made the greenest play space in the world, it needed some kind of boring, fatty, old, traditional piece of play equipment in it for children to be able to go, oh, this is a place to play.
It’s a kids place. Right, I get it. Yeah, exactly. And that’s the kind of thing that, um, architects wouldn’t necessarily think of. ’cause of course they’re thinking of the design perspective and that’s, that’s the thing that’s, uh, uppermost in their mind. It comes all the way back down to the, uh, the agenda, uh, conversation again.
Mm-hmm. They’re interested in something that is visually spectacular.
Rusty Keeler: Mm-hmm.
Marc Armitage: Wow. As well as something that might be used.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah.
Marc Armitage: Yeah.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah. Yeah. In the architectural book, architect Architectural Digest, looking to the, yeah, getting, getting awards. It’s fun to see, seeing that, the cre, creativity of the architects.
But you know, coming from the design world, same thing. I had that realization of like, wait, as a designer, I had the fun making, you know, making the thing, making models, doing, you know, thinking the ideas. But then once it’s planted in the ground, children can use it a few ways. Only a few ways. Versus the open-ended.
Marc Armitage: Yeah.
Rusty Keeler: Place a place of poss.
Marc Armitage: There was a, a time, many, many years ago, before you were born, when I used to do a lot of public playground work.
Rusty Keeler: Okay.
Marc Armitage: And one of the things that I used to try and persuade local councils to do was when it came to building and designing playgrounds, was to do a pre-use and a post use audit.
The pre-use audit been about actually working out, how is that piece of ground being used now and if it’s a playground that already exists and is just been redeveloped, how is that playground being used now and the post use audit been about really saying, has it worked? The stuff that we did, the change made, uh, has it, has it actually worked?
And that was a mindset that an awful lot of, uh, British playground designers and architects and local council providers found really difficult to get their heads around central continental Europe. Not a thing. In fact, in, uh, in Sweden where I spent an awful lot of time, it’s actually part of the law that if you make changes to an outdoor space, whether it be a playground or anything else, there has to be a children and young people’s impact assessment to say, well, what effect is this going to have on young people?
Uh, and that’s true within the play spaces as all the housing areas. And I, I’ll give you a practical example of that. There’s a place in, uh, in Stockholm called the, the Big Eastern Field. It’s part of the, uh, Stockholm’s medieval field system. And myself and a colleague were asked to do, uh, children, young people’s impact on this space because it was going to be developed as a housing area.
And pretty much everybody that we talked to about this space said, you just don’t see children, don’t use the space. But we found evidence of children’s play absolutely everywhere. Dens, cubbies, thoughts, bits of collections of stuff that children have made were absolutely everywhere. And you could, you could tell that the space was being used by different age groups because the evidence of the smallest, youngest children’s use.
Within the, the first edges of this space within about 50 meters. And the evidence as you got further and further into this space was of older children and teenagers. And you could see that the older children would go deeper into the, the, uh, the younger children. And it’s just an indication that unless you actually a look for these kind of things, you’re gonna find it.
But b, you have to ask the right people. You could, you could ask people that don’t get this to go and have a wonder and they would walk past a, a, a port within a bunch of bushes and never see it.
Rusty Keeler: That’s right. They haven’t been trained in play detective work,
Marc Armitage: forensic play work.
Rusty Keeler: That’s right. Forensic play work.
So it’s happening. Play is happening. I was gonna
Marc Armitage: say, what’s happening? Everything’s happening.
Rusty Keeler: What’s happening? Every, everything is happening, isn’t it?
Marc Armitage: Yeah. The o the only trouble is we have to, uh. It every five or six years because adults have a terrible habit. Get it. So you can tell them until you’re blue in the face.
Children still play. They still play like you did, but you as a kid, they’re still looking for the same, the same experiences. And they, and they go, I get that. And then five years later they forgot. There is a reason for this. And one of the, uh, analogies I’ve seen for this, I’ll describe an experiment here that was done in Manchester quite a long time ago, which I think is fascinating.
Rusty Keeler: Okay.
Marc Armitage: It’s a very, very long street in Manchester with children in the street playing and a set of researchers that either end the street who stopped adults that had walked down the full length of the street and said to them, without turning around, tell me what the children in the street that you just walked down were doing.
And the majority answer that they got from people was what children? I didn’t even notice them. And there is a suggestion that once adults get to a certain point, children become invisible. And one of the reasons why they become invisible is because your kind of head actually knows that if most adults knew what children were getting up to or where they were doing, they would stop them.
It would stop them from doing that because it would be dangerous or being done in the wrong place or whatever.
Rusty Keeler: Mm-hmm.
Marc Armitage: So by making them children invisible, they don’t get the chance to stop. It is, it’s probably one of the reasons why it’s very difficult for adults to drag up their own playtime. It’s hard to get adults to remember what it was like to be a kid Oh, what they did when they were children, because their heads are not working the same way.
The I, I have an analogy that I often use this, which only only people ever get young folk don’t understand this at. But it’s like turning around and saying that adult heads work in VHS kids head work in beta.
Rusty Keeler: Okay.
Marc Armitage: And if you are old, you’ll get that.
Rusty Keeler: Well, VHS and beta were competing and beta was like the better one.
But the VHS
Marc Armitage: Yeah.
Rusty Keeler: Ended up being the way
Marc Armitage: simple.
Rusty Keeler: So in the sense you’re saying that a, the adults’ perspective kind of ruled rules the day, even though it’s not, may not be connected to reality.
Marc Armitage: Yeah. If you think about it, it’s only in the last 3000 years or so that children have begun to learn more from adults than they do from, from other children.
Before that, before a day of organized school assistance, children spend most of their time in the company of other. Yeah. And learn more from those other children. They did from adults. If you look at small scale indigenous transported, moving around communities today, that’s still the case. And it’s still the case that children will be spending more time with children than they do with adults.
So our perspective has kind of changed because we now expect children to be with an adult pretty much all the time. Uh, forgetting that, that that’s a relatively modern thing.
Rusty Keeler: Oh my gosh. Okay. I just had a funny thought. Okay. So we, we, you know, we’re looking at children’s play or lack, lack of, you know, uh, access to play maybe is other generations or schools are different and, and, or social, you know, then we start to think about social media and children’s mental health and, you know, it’s declining and people are blaming the phone or blaming, you know, all these things.
But it could be that now children are just spending so much time with adults, it is making them depressed.
Marc Armitage: This is the Peter Gray route.
Rusty Keeler: Huh? Okay. Yeah. Maybe that’s not a funny thought at all, but just the idea that they’re hanging out with adults so much. Yeah. That it’s, that it, that they are controlling the, I mean, so then we can really talk about where it’s not funny, but it is true.
Mm-hmm.
Marc Armitage: Let, let me describe for you a, um, a piece of work that I mate Chris did who was also a, a, a British play worker Okay. For his play work, bachelor’s degree. He did a thing that he called his Three Streets Study.
Rusty Keeler: Okay.
Marc Armitage: Which was a study of three streets in our home city that were very old streets, and he interviewed children who were eight years old with a big map and got them to say what they did, where they did it, where they went after school, et cetera, which he marked on this map.
But then he did the same interview with people who had lived down those streets when they were eight years old. But were of a parents group, so they were the parents of these kids that you spoken to, and their experience was very different. They spent much more time outside than the 8-year-old group.
They spent more time without the adult present with other children. They roomed for greater distances, so they were spending more time outside and more time in the company of other children. But then he did a grandparents group, and the grandparents group from those same three streets just were outside all the time.
Mm-hmm. Without adults ever around. But he did this in the late 1980s, and I pestered him lots to say, you need to do that again. Do that again now to see what the, what the answer would be like now, because I think we could guess that it would be even more different from, from then.
Rusty Keeler: Mm-hmm.
Marc Armitage: And one of the really interesting things that came out from, uh, from that thing was that the kids group came up with a character that they called the Red Bagman.
And the Red Bagman was a, was a homeless fellow who roamed the streets carrying all his possessions in these red bags. And when the adults were told about this, they got quite worried about this, said there’s some weird stranger wandering, wandering around the streets until some of them started to say, wait a minute, didn’t we have a character called the Bagman?
And the Bagman was exactly the same character, but without the red bags. They were now, uh, just playing bags. And the same character cropped up in the grandparents group as well. Clearly not the same person, but the same character that’s been transmitted from child to child.
Rusty Keeler: Mm-hmm.
Marc Armitage: And that child to child transmission, that book law or child law, uh, form of transmission.
Something that relies on other children to be able to spread those things too. And if children are spending more time in the company of adults than they are with children, it suggests that that kind of transmission would be in danger, which it kind of is. It doesn’t go away completely, but it, it certainly seems to have reduced a little bit.
Rusty Keeler: Hmm.
Marc Armitage: The whole idea, I think, is that children’s lives have changed, and despite the fact that people will point to the computer game, spending more time in out school services all listed, the thing that has changed more than anything else is the amount of time that they spend with other children and without an adult.
Rusty Keeler: Hmm mm-hmm. Agreed. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Parents are. I mean, it could be smaller families, right? What, what contributes to that? Um,
Marc Armitage: fewer cousins. Fewer, fewer brothers and sisters, fewer playmates. That’s bounce out the back.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah. Yeah. I’ve heard Peter Gray talk about bigger houses now. Uh, north America anyway, so there’s more rooms.
Parents aren’t like, get outside where the pa you know, all the other kids are Yeah. And kids as,
Marc Armitage: yeah.
Rusty Keeler: Being pack animals versus Oh, yeah. Being under, under the wing of the adult.
Marc Armitage: Indeed. There’s a, another one that comes to mind is a paper in, um, uh, a history archeological, uh, journal. Can’t remember the name of the person who wrote it, but she had a look at the remains of a colonial homestead in the US dating from the 16 hundreds.
And the buildings had gone, but you could still see where the buildings were, be. And this group of archeologists did a, a fines analysis, basically looking for objects, uh, in this space. And they found two clusters of objects relating to children. And one of the clusters was in the far corner of the field, the place where the homestead had been growing its own food.
So they were well away from the homestead, but still within eyesight. But the biggest cluster was around where the kitchen doorstep had been. So the kids had obviously been chased out of the house, uhhuh, but their main place to play was on the steps leading into the kitchen. So they were not that far away from, from home.
And I can imagine that if you have a bigger house and if you’ve got a gap, which, uh, many places still don’t have course. Then yeah, maybe there’s less encouragement for you to get out the house and go and play elsewhere. ’cause you’ve got, you know, what the adults think is what you need within arms Uhhuh.
Rusty Keeler: That is funny.
Marc Armitage: But it’s quite interesting to note that the, the world, the accredited first adventure playground in the world in, in, uh, in Copenhagen and Denver was started for a whole host of reasons. One of the reasons it started was because, uh, more than 80% of the children that were living in that area lived in Highrise accommodation with no garden.
Rusty Keeler: Okay.
Marc Armitage: So the only place that they had to play it was outside, away from the house in the little green spaces around the house instead.
Rusty Keeler: Mm-hmm. So they’d spill out and there they were.
Marc Armitage: Yeah. I know Sorenson was quite often quoted as saying that, uh, he didn’t build a, a playground with the expectation of children to go to it.
He built the playground where children already were.
Rusty Keeler: Mm-hmm. Hmm. Well, if children are, if we think where they are now, and they are around adults so much at home, after school, on weekends and school and early care, and there’s around with so many adults. Okay. So you, you mission seems to be to help those adults see the light, to give them tools, to give them ideas of like, okay, we know how important it is.
We know how historic it is, we know how it is, like the natural way, and we also adults we can get in the way. What is your mission and how are you helping people to Yeah. To embrace kind of play?
Marc Armitage: Well, if you, if you think about the, um, the early years context at the moment.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah.
Marc Armitage: One of the things I quite often say to early years places and to primary schools, elementary schools as well, is that many of the children that go to York Place.
Don’t get outside the house as often as they would like, and they don’t have the kind of neighborhood environments that they would like. So your place really needs to become something compensatory. It needs to make up for the fact that they’re not getting to go to the places and do what they want by choice.
So your places really have to be greener, more playable, and your children need to spend more time in those places than you might otherwise have thought.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah,
Marc Armitage: because you are literally giving them what they need that they can’t find anywhere else. Now, in an early years context, that’s easier because most of what an early years plays does, happens outside.
In a primary school, that’s trickier because play times, recess times have been drastically reduced since the 1970s. In the United States, that’s even more of a problem. And in, in most places around the world, people find, um, find this finding a bit shocking, but there is quite often no legal requirement for a school to provide recess or playtime periods.
There is usually a law that says you have to provide a lunchtime, but that’s quite often a historical throwback to the times when, um, schools had two sessions, a morning session and an afternoon session, which might have different children. And so the lunchtime session was time to eat a meal, but also time to reset the school to get ready for a new bunch of children coming.
Rusty Keeler: Hmm.
Marc Armitage: So that is a little bit of a, of an issue when it comes to primary schools because as soon as a learning issue crops up, schools quite often turn around and say, well, we need more time for instruction.
Rusty Keeler: Yep.
Marc Armitage: In the early years, that’s not so much an issue, although, again, it’s probably more of an issue in the United States than it is in other parts of the world because the word play is still quite often seen as a bit of a dirty word in some respects.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah.
Marc Armitage: And the United States has a real issue with the time thing because within the early years and the, and the primary years, there are results. The early year settings and schools in the US have to meet, meet, and they have to meet them within a particular timeframe. And sometimes the only way of doing that is by cramming learning and cramming learning not only is a short term thing, the effects just simply don’t last very long.
But it does get around this awkward problem of not knowing what children are doing when they’re playing.
Rusty Keeler: Hmm.
Marc Armitage: It’s very, very difficult to put a time restraints on children’s learning when it comes to playing because they’re not very good at sticking with a lesson plan. Lesson plans work for set piece lessons.
They don’t really work for play approaches.
Rusty Keeler: Hmm
Marc Armitage: mm-hmm. And so if, if we can persuade early year settings and schools, that learning is something which is good, and we know it’s good because governments put tax dollars into it, but some ways of learning are actually better than others if you take away this time constraint.
And then if we get people used to the idea that your place has to be better than the, the local neighborhood where children are living in, in the context of playing, that’s a really important starting point because people begin to relax more into the idea that children are playing, uh, which otherwise would be interpreted as not doing anything.
Rusty Keeler: Okay. So we’re trying for hearts and minds here.
Marc Armitage: Exactly.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah.
Marc Armitage: Yeah. I mean, the legislative. Route is, is something that in a play work context we’ve tried to use in the past. For example, in the, in the late 1980s, we got very, very excited when the United Nations Convention on the rights of the child had an article in it specifically about play, article 31.
We got very excited because it meant that we could go to providers like local government and say, look, you have a legal requirement to provide this thing called play because it’s in the United Nations charter on the rights of the child.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah.
Marc Armitage: Uh, a document which only one country in the entire world has not ratified.
I don’t know if you can guess which one that is. What kind
Rusty Keeler: of country would not ratify the freights of the child.
Marc Armitage: Exactly. Exactly. But the, uh, that kind of backfired a little bit because despite the fact that governments may have signed up to it, it’s not very often included within sovereign legislation.
So there’s a bit of a, a mismatch. Article 31 has quite often been referred to as the forgotten article because it just, it doesn’t have the weight behind it that we actually expected it to. So the legislative thing is not necessarily the most effective way to do it, but it’s what you said earlier, it’s the hearts and minds thing.
It’s actually persuaded people that this is a good idea and once individuals think it’s a good idea, that’s when we start to win.
Rusty Keeler: Yes, yes. And, and so that’s where I see you. And, and so for listeners of this podcast, maybe this is their first time encountering Mark Armitage and they may see you, you know, this might be like he’s the Socrates of play, you know, with a, such, such knowledge and breadth and background and experiences.
And yet in Australia, or I should say, and in Australia you are, I, I think of you as like. Play rockstar that hosts that hold conferences. You do tours, you do speaking tours. People are following you on social media, you know, at your, you know, every, I wanna know the latest from Mark Armitage. And so you are inspiring.
And then you do a lot of work with your early years and they love you and they are, you’ve captured hearts and minds and, and that’s making the difference. So there’s the legislative that’s big, but then there’s also coming from those hearts and minds. But what are you telling those people? What, what are, how are you inspiring them?
What, what are your goals and what do they love about it and what are, what are they trying and what are they doing? What’s your successes or what’s your advice for all these people as you Yeah. Jet around.
Marc Armitage: Well, I, I do have merch, rusty.
Rusty Keeler: I want
Marc Armitage: it, I have a merch table at conference.
Rusty Keeler: Good.
Marc Armitage: Uh, both in the early years context and in other contexts.
I don’t really do anything that is. Particularly different from what other play workers in, in my position would do, which is we actually point out what children are doing.
Rusty Keeler: Hmm.
Marc Armitage: We actually encourage them to stand still and watch and listen and not dive in quite so much anymore. Yeah. And, and they suddenly realize that the thing that they constantly turn around and say children don’t do, they are actually doing.
Mm-hmm. And I always find it fascinating if I do professional development stuff or I do play audit or do any of these kind of things, if, if I’m saying to people now you need to spend a bit more time watching listing, that very act changes the way that people within that, that, um, that setting view questions are like, and it, it means kind of, it’s almost as if our work is done with that because they begin to work it out for themselves.
On the one I’m doing the technical stuff about showing people, this is how you do it, this is what you need to take into account, Uhhuh uhhuh. But as long as people have kind of got that, that thing broken, that uh, that false idea that children don’t play anymore, they need absolutely everything provided for, that’s the starting for other stuff.
Uh, kids are, I’ve lost count of the, the number of times I’ve done play audits within primary and elementary schools, ET and 4, 5, 6 years later, you could still see the effects of having told the advocacy school, this is the results of your play because, um, they’ve opened their eyes and their ears and noticed there is still bad thing that I said earlier though, that we have to constantly redo it.
Things change. Mm-hmm. I’ll give you a practical example. There was a, a primary school in Melbourne that I worked with quite a lot when I first got here in Australia, who became. Very, very player friendly. They went down the loose parts route. They lengthened the, uh, time for recess. Uh, in fact added a second recess period, but they didn’t before.
They chilled out about a lot of the risk and, and danger kind of elements and things were going really, really well. The staff really started to, to pay attention to what was going on around. And then one year they had a really bad NAPLAN score. NAPLAN in Australia is the, the kind of the national educational scoring of schools tests, standard assessment tests, I think.
And they had a really bad nap plan. Um, they got very bad scores, in particular for language literacy. And within literally months, the second recess period that they’d added was taken away. Ah, recess was reduced in time. Loose parts stuff started to be reduced and some staff left as a result at, at these changes.
But it went back to that because people went back to the idea that, well, we are a place of education. We have to teach people, we have the scores, uh, to keep up. And we’re, we’re not doing very well and so forth. We, we need to go back to the more teaching, but getting the fact that their children were downside happier
Rusty Keeler: Yeah.
Than
Marc Armitage: they have been
Rusty Keeler: Yeah.
Marc Armitage: Four or five years before. And they’d seen things like their attendance level skyrocketed because children wanted to go to school.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah.
Marc Armitage: Children were healthier, they were fitter. Uh, but those are the things that are not usually included within the national school’s. Scoring systems.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah. Happiness.
Marc Armitage: Who cares if kids are happy? Yeah. Who cares?
Rusty Keeler: Uhhuh, huh? Yeah. Thinking about that line of advocacy on, on the higher levels, huh?
Marc Armitage: Yeah. And. We do it through other events, we do it through conferences, events, and we do it from seminar events. And one of the things that I do, particularly in terms of going on tour, is I try desperately to get people from different work sectors in the same room at the same time.
Okay. Which is really, really hard to do. Particularly trying to get early years people and primary school people in the same room was really, really hard.
Rusty Keeler: Hmm.
Marc Armitage: But it’s valuable because as soon as you do that for one, the primary school people pick up on the, the emphasis on playing that the early years people are already doing.
Rusty Keeler: Mm-hmm.
Marc Armitage: And get very interested.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah.
Marc Armitage: But they also, they all start to realize that the issues are actually very similar from one sector to the other. And of course, if you don’t meet together and talk to each other, you don’t, you don’t realize that.
Rusty Keeler: Hmm.
Marc Armitage: And the, the biggest successes I think that we ever have is when we suddenly get early years, people being more involved in the first 1, 2, 3 years or so of primary scope.
Which suddenly becomes more playful and more relaxed.
Rusty Keeler: Mm-hmm.
Marc Armitage: And it works better for their kids.
Rusty Keeler: Hmm. Yeah. That’s great. ’cause then the, the primary schools can be inspired and, and remember play. Yeah. Right. Just just for the fact that people are talking about it. Yeah. ’cause it’s not what exactly. That might not be what they’re talking about at, at just the primary
Marc Armitage: Exactly.
Rusty Keeler: Meetings. Um, you know, it’s interesting with, you know, I’ve been reading some, you know, AI and jobs in the future and children and education and, and I just read something about that. What, what the future really is gonna need from people are, uh, the soft skills. Of like being human, of working together with others, right.
Collaboration, uh, resilience and, and those things that aren’t the reading, writing, arithmetic, even though that stuff of course is important. And it’s like, I think about like, you know, for me I’m always like, wait, that is play, that is, you know, just having that kind of freedom and working with kids and working things out and, and it seems like, you know, that could be a root in also.
Marc Armitage: Yeah. That suggests a couple of one is, is, you know, that very, very famous Einstein quote, uh, that all children are scientists. What they do is science because of their exploration. Well, interestingly, of course, Einstein never said that, never said anything like that. It’s a completely made up quote, but it is completely true and an awful lot of that, uh, inquiry that children quite naturally do when they’re playing is a skill that many of us lose.
When we get into, into adulthood, whereas the thing that makes that work in childhood is the fact that life isn’t real. And if life isn’t real, it doesn’t have real consequences. And if it doesn’t have real consequences, you are free to experiment with things, knowing that even if it goes completely wrong, you’re gonna be fine.
Well, adults can’t do that. Adults are completely trapped into the real world with real consequences. And so find it difficult to do that kind of thing without worrying about what other people are gonna do. Is there great and good. Late American. Uh, Bernie de Coven said, uh, that playfulness is an attitude and playfulness is about not looking over your shoulder.
It’s about not worrying who’s watching and listening what you’re doing and getting on with it. Children, uh, are quite notorious a stopping plane. If they realize an adult is watching and paying too much attention to Exactly. Right. Quite there. Exactly. And so, um, in, in that context, children are quite naturally, many little explorers because it, it’s inherent in the fact that they, they exist within this not real world.
So there is, um, uh, an element there of saying that children need to be able to continue doing that because they are going to be the innovators of the things of the future. And if we restrict them from doing that, then it makes sense that it might restrict that possibility in the future. There’s a second thing which I, I, I find interesting in this.
There’s a regular gig that I do, uh, about the realities of playing, looking at how children have played in the past and comparing that to how children play. Now, of course, there difference between. The two, which people become surprised about. But I point out lots of the things that have been blamed for destroying childhood and destroying, uh, children, being able to play.
Uh, for example, when you and I were younger, it was very definitely the television that got the blame. Uh, television was teaching bad language. It was, uh, making us antisocial more violent, stopping us from going outside, et cetera. And those are exactly the same things that the screen device gets the blamed for.
So the handheld computer game, for example, gets lots of this, the iPad and other kind of, uh, pad type things. But in recent years, I’ve tended to finish those gigs by saying you can guarantee that the fear over the screen will also, will eventually be replaced, replaced by something. And we don’t know what it is, but we might not be able to predict it.
But something will take over the fear of the screen. Now I think, I think we can see what it is because we are starting to see more articles, more words being written about the dangers to children’s play from AI than anything else. And it looks as if the AI field is going to take over the fear of the screened in general, and that’s gonna be the thing that gets to blame.
Now the interesting thing of course, is it’s not gonna kill playing. Playing is gonna keep going whether we’ve got AI in the world or not. But what people kind of keep forgetting is in the context of things like ai, where is it coming from? And it’s coming from young, highly motivated engineer type, thinker type people who are capable of doing that because of the fact that they played when they were kids who invented all the interesting technological stuff that we blamed.
For the death of player. Very young people are the people that invent this stuff. And they do so largely because of the fact that they were, they played when they were young.
Rusty Keeler: Yes, yes. And they’re still playing with ideas. Playing with possibilities. Yeah.
Marc Armitage: Yeah. Which is the thing, I think that links it with the Einstein quote, because children are young explorers and young inventors, and that does travel with them through into adulthood.
So it would be wrong to stop children or restrict children from doing that kind of idea, because it would mean that we won’t have these new, interesting inventions in the future.
Rusty Keeler: Hmm. Future. Right. If one generation just cuts off the new, the new thing that’s happening, the new wave. Yeah. Well, mark, you’ve, you’ve given me a lot to think about.
Marc Armitage: Well, that makes a change.
Rusty Keeler: Oh, man. Well, you know, this is a conversation that could just. This could go on for days and years. And so I, I I hope it does.
Marc Armitage: Yeah.
Rusty Keeler: And
Marc Armitage: in the occasional pub between you and I, it has,
Rusty Keeler: yes, it has. Uh, the Melbourne, uh, rooftop. Rooftop pubs.
Marc Armitage: Yeah. Let’s not talk about Madam Brussels. What happens in Madam Brussels?
Stay with Madam Brussels.
Rusty Keeler: Oh my gosh,
Marc Armitage: man. And for people that are not aware of Melbourne culture, that’s a very, very famous roof rooftop bar in Melbourne.
Rusty Keeler: Ah, yes. I think we had a few CERs on one of those rooftops there. Yay. Well, uh, yeah. Well, might, we might as well just stop because we could just keep going.
But, you know, we gotta give people a, a break
Marc Armitage: and it’s gonna get warm here, so me staying outside.
Rusty Keeler: Oh man. Rubbing it in there. Summertime in Australia. Yes.
Marc Armitage: Yep. It’s going to be 34 degrees centigrade. Today.
Rusty Keeler: Okay.
Marc Armitage: For your American listeners, centigrade is the proper measurements we use. Oh, in most parts of the world.
Not, not your funny Faren
Rusty Keeler: Fahrenheit proper measurement. We, we got that from you Brits. Right?
Marc Armitage: God does.
Rusty Keeler: Oh my gosh. Well, uh, so great to chat. I have other questions for you, but let’s, we’ll, let’s do it again. Let’s do it again. Thank you so much. Do you have any parting thoughts for our listener?
Marc Armitage: Only that, uh, I’ve started recently started a new online thing called The Plague Glossary.
Rusty Keeler: Okay. Yes. What’s, what’s
Marc Armitage: that? Which is, um, it’s a list of over 300 words related to the play playing playbook, and it’s been populated by words bit by bit. So I think there’s about 20 words on there, which you can find on my website. Just search for Mark Armitage, and it’s marked with a c.
Rusty Keeler: Okay.
Marc Armitage: Uh, and it’s called the, the play glossary.
Rusty Keeler: Okay.
Marc Armitage: And there will be new words going on onto that this weekend as well. So eventually we’ll have 300 plus words on it and links to play theorists and to interest in books to, to things like that. Wow. And it’s effectively just a huge alphabetical list.
Rusty Keeler: Yes. Yes. Okay. What an amazing resource. I wanna dive in.
Do you have a favorite word that’s on there now, where it’s coming?
Marc Armitage: We had, um, we had a little thing here going on in Australia where I, I, I put the first set of words and a couple of people said, where’s the word annihilation? ’cause annihilation is a big thing in a, in a play work context.
Rusty Keeler: Yes.
Marc Armitage: So I had to put the word annihilation up.
Uh, so that’s, that’s a fun one.
Rusty Keeler: Is
Marc Armitage: that the But also I, I is it, I was say, is that the top of the list at the moment? Yeah,
Rusty Keeler: yeah,
Marc Armitage: yeah. But, um. I, I also, uh, had a little bit of a pull the other day and I gave people a choice of two terms. Did you want dark play or to deep play to be the next one and dark play one.
Rusty Keeler: Ah,
Marc Armitage: so that’s, that’s the latest word that went up the other day.
Rusty Keeler: Okay.
Marc Armitage: Uh, and I think there’s about, there’s about another eight or nine words planned for this weekend as well, so it’s getting bigger and bigger.
Rusty Keeler: Okay. Awesome. Well, we will, we will all go and search it out and learn some words. Dive deep in the world of mark arbitrage.
All right. Thank you. Thank you, rusty. Yeah, good seeing you.
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. 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.
