Tuesday November 15 at 9:00 a.m. Pacific Time.
Register by contacting Francine Smolucha at lsmolucha@hotmail.com
This is the second presentation in the “Imagination and Creativity in Vygotsky’s Works” seminar series. This seminar continues our discussion on how pretend play contributes to imagination and international relations. Many different play curricula contribute to our understanding of how children learn story-telling narratives, using one object as if it were another, and role play. In this session we focus on Vivian Paley’s approach and how it relates to Vygotsky’s theory. There are two readings for this session:
“Mollie is Three” by Vivian Paley (The University of Chicago Press, 1984). You can find excerpts from the book here.
Abstract provided by Gillian Mcnamee: Vivian Paley’s Mollie is Three: Growing Up in School is a most remarkable memoir of a master teacher chronicling the experiences of three- and four-year-old children coming to school for the first time. The book is saturated with episodes of children figuring out how to converse and play with one another. This text provides ample data to discuss and debate the workings of imagination in the early years of a child’s life, and how imagination can be shaped and transformed by the group. Much of what becomes possible is shaped by the vision of the teacher. And she says about pretend play and imagination, “The issue seems to be control. What does it look like, who has it, and how far can one’s imagination carry it?” (p. 119). I recommend watching Christopher closely, a child’s whose imagination is the most confusing and difficult for his teacher to understand. What do the other children think about Christopher? How does Mollie make sense of him so readily? In addition, there are scenes where the children come to understand the word “curious,” “selfish,” and Valentine’s Day through pretend play. The Epilogue to the book contains brilliant material on how Mollie at age 4 inducts new 3-year-olds into the world of imaginary pretend play. How does that learning process work?
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[…] 2. Pretend Play in 3- and 4-year olds: Imagination at Workin a Real Pretend World by Gillian Mcnamee (Tuesday, November 15, 9am Pacific Time). […]
Folks
I received my copy of Creative Collaboration bought via Amazon for 8$. Perfect new copy. Its a fascinating read. Looking forward to the event on the 10th of Jan.
Thanks for the play links, Francine.
Just came across two interesting videos of lectures from 2018 at the University of Texas at Dallas Center for Values in Medicine, Science, and Technology
The first is a presentation by Sandra Russ on Pretend Play, Imagination, and Creativity –
she uses quantitative and qualitative assessments – at the very end of the video she states that parental involvement in children’s play from ages 2 to 4 years is very important
(gentle guidance).
https://values.utdallas.edu/sandra-russ-pretend-play-imagination-and-creativity-why-pretend-play-is-important/
The second video features Vlad Glaveanu on the connection between taking different perspectives during pretend play (both object substitutions and roles) and the ability to see things from different perspectives as adults.
https://values.utdallas.edu/vlad-glaveanu-culture-and-the-power-of-creativity-and-imagination/
I see important threads emerging here that can contribute to a theory of the development of imagination in babies, toddlers and preschoolers, and eventually getting us to a theory about the use of imagination in adult development with particular emphasis on guiding international relations, and hopefully before we get to major conflicts/war.
Object substitution: Francine, you have brought a wealth of resources together in your discussion contributions. I want to say, I agree with you about the importance of object substitution in the development of babies and toddlers development. I moved to fast to minimize this step. it is not a small step at all. V. Paley’s Mollie being more verbally oriented and drawn to expressing herself in words than many children her age lead me to generalize too far in downplaying its importance. You remind us to watch carefully the balance of objects, gestures and verbalizations.
“Sea of meaning:” I see Mike’s comment about the sea of meaning that pretend play floats in, is held by, as critical for this study as children in sustained pretend play are drawing from a word, a gesture, objects that can be adapted to fit the moment, and the element of timing: a moment in time, that can propel the moment forward into a new and imaginary possibility. All of this happens in a fluid, organic, constantly shifting and emerging train of thought. It’s hard to know how to pin down which sea of meaning is salient for whom at any particular point in the play episode. In the play scene we did the dramatic reading of in Mollie (p. 48 – 50), we see Mollie and Christopher focusing in on their growing clarity of being a boy and a girl in school about to have a birthday. For the older children, the four year olds, we see their effort to “call the shots” on who’s good and who’s bad, who goes to jail…
Role of adult and/or more capable peer: Francine, I appreciate your comments in this area too. I try to exaggerate the role children play in order that we not miss for a second the skills children bring to guiding and directing the flow of images and events in pretend play scenarios, and the huge work they do for each other in creating ZPDS. This is what i think Vygotsky wants us to appreciate. This is not meant to downplay or dismiss the huge and critical importance of the adult in relation to pretend play as exemplified by V. Paley’s work. I think the role of the adult in pretend play is different than what children offer one another, and trying to get our hands on all the invisible things she is doing is a big challenge. I think Beth gives us a beautiful way into appreciating where a skilled teacher’s role is to be found: listening.
Listening: I think Beth’s comments on listening as being perhaps the most sophisticated and complex set of skills with preschoolers as well as world leaders is brilliant. Francine mentions the process of children benefitting from other regulation while they are younger, and moving toward more states of self regulation as adults is the broad arc that we move toward in human development. Yet at all stages of development, under pressure and stress, we all experience becoming unregulated and in need of the help of those we trust to help pull and put us back together. We can all become tantrum-ing frustrated 2 year olds. In the long run, society and countries need bodies of expertise to listen and help us regain balance, perspective to “get back in the game,” whatever the game is. There are a variety of conflict resolution protocols and practices emerging where listening is key. I am now interested in examining the work of classroom teacher’s role alongside the work of UN negotiators, mediators in all kinds of conflicts in business, court and legal systems (including divorce agreements). Listening, active listening, that can seem passive and unimportant, turn out to be a gold mine of power, IF we know what is in that skill set, and how to develop it.
V Paley was a Great Books discussion leader fro many years in her local public library in New Orleans where she lived after college at the university of Chicago. Her interest in asking questions and listening to a line of thought and understanding what a discussion participant was saying was so deep and thoughtful, she made those around her feel tall in wisdom, being respected, and feeling heard. In such discussions, the goal is not to see participants come up with “the right answer,” or leading participants to the answer that i have arrived at, but rather, guiding the participants to a clearer understanding of what they are trying to figure out, to the participant’s richer insight into their own thinking which he or she then has more of to bring to the discussion itself. it is full of paradoxes, this listening business!
Inclusion: And back to Mike’s comments about inclusion, who speaks and who listens to whom, and when, is all worked out in an evolving culture whether it is in a classroom, a corporate board room, or a government office. The wiring for possibilities in discussion and listening are created. V Paley’s work gives us a chance to see one group leader with strong convictions about ensuring every single voice gets heard no matter how we view (and judge) it. This is her achievement – to give Christopher her full support to finding his way in this community without her labels and judgements diminishing his contributions.
Francine is ready to guide us to a next step in this work with Frame theory. I’ll be looking to see Frame theory reflects the often rapid, fluid, unfolding nature of an evolving co-constructed scenario. Our knowledge of classrooms and labor-intensive international relations negotiations tell us that the ground we stand on is always shifting. Can we define the ingredients of the rug that can support us long enough before we hurt one another irreparably when conflict breaks out – in a classroom or internationally?
YES!!!!!!!!!!!! To everything Gillian has just posted.
Gillian’s opening sentence is such a good statement of what we are trying to do that I will post it on XLCHC – to encourage our other members to visit our Cultural Praxis web-site.
My entire career interest was a reaction to a segment in the film short
“Why Man Creates”. I encourage everyone to view it on You Tube. As a high school
freshman in 1968, I found the film awesome and it provided a script for my life.
But when they talked about creative undertakings such as growing giant peas to feed the world, solving the question of the origin of the universe, and finding a cure for cancer –
I thought “We don’t have that much time – someone will blow it all up with a nuclear bomb.
To stop this, people need to understand their own unconscious motivations. I will have to go into psychology”. So I took out the encyclopedia, looked up psychology, and saw a photo from a sleep & dream lab of a human subject. One way to study the unconscious dreams (imagination) but when I got to graduate school I would not experiment on live healthy cats (required). So taking a course with Jack Getzels, I decided to study creativity. This is an example of how exposure to a particular ‘Frame’ in early adolescence can profoundly set someone’s life course. The Frame is that creativity is needed if we are to survive – but creative work is a decades long undertaking and you can expect that it will take society awhile to recognize the importance of the contribution.
What important threads do you see now, several months later?
Here is a link to a recent study from Jan 2022, that found that learning to use object substitutions during pretend play advances language skills in autistic children more than
role play or solitary pretend play. Researchers distinguish between role play and pretend play based on whether object substitutions are involved.
(PDF) Solitary symbolic play, object substitution and peer …
Here are links to two publications based on my dissertation that show how important it is
to look at the origins of pretend play in toddlers as young as 14 months.
Social Origins of Private Speech in Pretend Playhttps://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Social…
Feb 04, 2014 · DOI:10.4324/9781315807270-9 Corpus ID: 158490313 Social Origins of Private Speech in Pretend Play @inproceedings{Smolucha2014SocialOO, title={Social Origins of Private Speech in Pretend Play}, author={Francine Smolucha}, year={2014} } Francine Smolucha Published2014 Psychology View via Publisher Save to LibrarySave Create AlertAlert Cite
The social origins of mind: Post-Piagetian perspectives on pretend play.https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1997-36701-003
Briefly stated, Piaget regarded early pretend play as a solitary activity which served only to consolidate schema that the child already possessed, while Vygotsky regarded early pretend play as a formative activity directly associated with the development of the child’s higher mental functions. … Smolucha, L., & Smolucha, F. (1998). The …
I waited until I had time to watch Gillian’s presentation a second time before posting a comment. Gillian’s presentation and the discussion that followed raise several topics that warrant further investigation. I appreciate Gillian’s work and that of Vivian Paley, even though I have a different perspective on some matters.
First, there is the possibility that Christopher “is somewhere on the (autism) spectrum.”
Mollie certainly is more in tune to what Christopher says than the teacher is,and helps Christopher progress linguistically and socially. Perhaps Mollie has been providing such verbal guidance to a younger brother. In this regard, Mollie is the more capable peer creating the zone of proximal development (just as Vygotsky defined the ZPD in his work The Interaction Between learning and Development).
Second, although Gillian dismisses object substitutions in pretend play as “peanuts” in
regard to what is happening in the big picture – teaching autistic children how to use one object as if it were another during pretend play has become a central teaching method with autistic children that enhances their language skills.
Here is a link to this research field:
Increasing “Object-Substitution” Symbolic Play in Young Children …
Third, even though Gillian and Vivian make statements that the teacher (Vivian) doesn’t know how to teach the children what they need to know about fantasy play, it is very clear that Vivian has an active role guiding the children – not formal instruction but guided pretend play when “clarification is needed of who’s who and what the children want to happen next”.(videorecording at 20 minutes 10 seconds).
Fourth, Where did Mollie learn her skills at pretend play and how to play with other children? Vivian Paley says that to observe the beginnings of pretend play you have to have to watch three year olds (five year olds are already at the graduate level of preschool). But it is clear to Mollie has come into the class with a pretend play skill set. To understand how Mollie learned pretend play we would have to observe her
as a two year old (perhaps younger) most likely learning to play at home with her
mother, father, perhaps grandmother/grandfather, older sibling, or her nanny.
I will post a link to my dissertation observing the origins of object substitutions in the pretend play of toddlers 14 months to 28 months – that found the toddlers
learned from their mothers (if they had mothers who played that way) – by 28 months
those toddlers were as good at directing pretend play using object substitutions as
their mothers were.
Fifth, Mike makes an important point about the possible intervention by an authority figure in the classroom that is in sharp contrast to adults engaged in international relations such as conflict resolution. This is at the very beginning of the video and leads to a comment by Gillian about the possibility of some type of ‘world watch dog’ that would be more viable than the United Nations. I prefer my model (which I think is more in line with Vygotsky’s model) that the other-regulation of children becomes internationalized as self-regulation in adults. If the other-regulation is based on dysfunctional ways of dealing with disagreement than you get an adult who doesn’t have active listening skills, displays outbursts of temper, takes offense that requires retribution, and gets physical (pounding a shoe on the table). Functional modes of self-regulation would involve active listening, empathy, repeating back to the speaker what he/she said to clarify meaning, counting to ten before losing one’s own temper, thinking before speaking or acting, etc.
In our next session on Tuesday, Dec 6th we will talk about Frame Theory as it pertains to children framing pretend play, as it pertains to how psychologists (and educators) frame their theoretical constructs, and how internal relations can be viewed as
dynamic exchanges between people operating within cultural frames.
With respect to framing and play I recommend that anyone who is not familiar with Bateson’s classic spend a few minutes checking it out. Its only a few + one pages
long.
https://courses.bloodedbythought.org/play/images/7/7e/Bateson,_Gregory_A_Theory_of_Play_and_Fantasy.pdf
What would you include in Mollie’s skill set, Francine? The “whole” of which the items of the skill set are a part? If it is a zone of proximal development, it is one that cannot be said to be linear in any simple respect. I see ideas of movement within a Community of Practice as a productive tool here.
The link below list the types of skills that toddlers need to in order to do pretend play.It includes object substitutions that enable the field of perception to be separated from the field of meaning. As well as the narrative skills and role playing. Mollie already has these skills, that’s why she is such a marvel.
The 5 Stages of Pretend Play in Early Childhood
“Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees” is a book that interests me lately, it is far outside my field but the title makes me think about the Swedish/Reggio Emilia ‘Pedagogy of Listening,’ which focuses us on just how complicated it is to listen to young children. Mollie is Three is a book about a lot of things and I read it with the undergraduates in the foundations of early childhood education course I teach, twice a year: We always come up with new ways of reading it, but we consistently focus on listening. I think that what Paley offers future preschool teachers is that listening takes a lot work. It’s really hard to do. It looks quite passive when it’s done well, but it’s a form of being present, and this is something that we all know is very hard. Young children are by definition unknowable, they have so much potential and can go in so many directions, so one can only approach a child by treating him/her/them as unique. This takes a lot of work, especially when you have to simultaneously remember that they all have many similarities that we must keep track of if we are to get through the day: being grumpy usually means they are hungry, jumping from leg to leg usually means they need to be reminded to run to the bathroom, etc. I really don’t have any idea how to think about war but I always think that it’s the hardest times that require the most skillful listening — when you don’t speak someone’s language, or when they are so young or old they speak no words, or when someone is dying or in great pain, or feels too much shame to know what they want to say … What would it mean to have a UN where people were really the best listeners, really trained to listen? (Eleanor Roosevelt was an especially good listener, from what I have read.) We need to really think of Paley not as showing us what things can be like in preschool, as they are rarely as she describes, in most preschools, but instead as showing us what skills must be developed for Christophers to be included. Not “How can we hold on to something from the early years?” but “What ways of working with people is Paley able to develop, and tell us about?” (We need a new technique. She tape recored and reflected in her writing, so what could work for a group of leaders or representatives of states? I have no idea but probably we have to be imaginative. For instance … perhaps we could have some group of people who live together and raise their children together, but are all from different countries, and whenever their country needs to make a decision these people must be consulted, but their expertise is listening, they will have spent their lives committing to listen to their fellow listeners, and studying how to listen, and then it is this group of people who will decide best steps to avoid wars? I am not suggesting this. I am just saying that I don’t see why we think that if we ask preschool teachers how to avoid wars, we’ll end up thinking of anything that looks even remotely like what we have in place today. If you exclude the wisdom of the caregivers for long enough, you’ll have developed systems that have to be reimagined entirely, if they are to be caring.) Sorry to be longwinded and not very practical but that’s my thinking about our last two sessions, Beth
At first glance, naming a book ” “Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees” made me think of the dementia patients in elder care. But you are referring to something like “deep seeing,percieving, coming to understand at a “new level.” Paul Baltes wrote a lot about wisdom as cognitive concomittant of healthy aging.
As to how to make your brand of developmental education go vital… We have neglected to discuss Ageliki’s paper that accompanied Mrs. V’s cognitive ethnographic notes. She and her co-author directly studied the issue of implementing her “Play Worlds” curriculum. I am pretty sure Gil knows a good deal about that topic as well having been teaching preschool teachers using those methods for the past 30+ years.
I wanted to just make clear for all the connection between the process and content questions, below. The question of how to include Christopher and what happens when we do is what’s driving CP to play around with different ways of posting. I know that trying these new systems and co-designing them is a little tedious and time consuming, but the more we play around on CP — and give feedback to our editorial collective (represented in this “project” or “page” by both Ivana and myself) — the more we can try to develop an inclusive community in discussion.
So far, the goal is to all introduce ourselves as whole people in our profiles when we log in, and then to try to use the “public” quality of these posts to bring in the hard questions from all.
Please see the video, log in, and add your voice!
I’ll write a thought on the elephant in a moment but was cheering as I read Gil’s post on Paley’s response to the labeling (which is a mania now, it was not like this when I taught preschool in the 1990’s in NYC).
Beth
Sticking with MS V and Christopher… our aversion to labelling and our struggle to talk OVER labels (“The question of how to include Christopher”…). It speaks to the power of labels “underserved” and to the difficulty of specifying how to reorganize the environment so that it creates a zoped for inclusion as an adult. I like to think of classrooms in terms of idiocultures, where culture is the “medium” for the actrivities that take place within them.Mollie is the person who creates the arrangement of the environment so that Christopher has a place in it.
Dear Colleagues- This is an effort to test the feasability of useful discussions in written form that help us interpret what we participated in orally/visually days and weeks ago.
Between Zoom sessions.
I picked up on one of the topics I thought went unspoken in our discussion and unspoken in the text. The elephant in the room.
Please read Gil’s note which tests my hypotheis that such discussion on CP is possible.Whether its as good as hitting “reply all” is another matter.
My voice has already gotten too loud. I’ll wait to hear others’ thoughts.
mike
Mike and friends,
Here’s a bit more on Vivian Paley and international political systems…
AS I think about imagination, I think of Vivian’s 3 Fs from “Wally’s stories”; fantasy, fairness and friendship. We can study imagination well enough with 3 year olds or adults and warring nations, but how do we build successively more complex systems of fairness and friendship as goals surrounding fantasy. Vivian could do it with 3, 4 and 5 year olds, but as she discovered in later books, the older children get, the less they think that rules of fairness can hold sway in the public sphere (“You Can’t Say You Can’t Play”). 5th graders recognize the benefit of a rule such as YCSYCP, but they argue that it just doesn’t work. Issues of power and control take over and dominate and subjugate imagination along the lines that those in control see fit. It is harder to get to adult systems of regulating a more open system of fairness and friendship. In this day and age, fools with billions are trying to wield their craziness to their personal whims.
Mike,
here’s my follow up to your comment about Christopher as elephant in Vivian’s classroom…
Mike, About one of the elephant’s in Vivian’s room – the suspicion that Christopher is a child who is “a little off,” not quite normal in some way, is what i think the story hinges on. Christopher is the counter-point to the more recognizable and lovable child that Mollie is portrayed as. Vivian says at some point in the first third of the book that she could seek labels for Christopher but labels would not help or explain him or illuminate his way of thinking. She does this repeatedly in her books – refuse to revert to labeling certain kinds of behaviors or children out of convenience and stereo-typing. She simply never did it. She prefers to rely on the discipline of observing and understanding what was going on in front of her. If she labeled Christopher, she would block her own eyesight from seeing how Mollie and Christopher engage each other. She would miss Christopher’s contribution to creating and engaging in a zpd with Mollie.
I think of the Psalm #118:22 that both Vvgotsky and Vivian quote in their work at different places: “The stone that the builders rejected has now become the cornerstone.” When we adults are too quick to pass off an unfamiliar and unusual starting point (like “Hello Birthday”), we would be dismissing and passing judgement on what others (and in this case, other 3 and 4 year olds) find as genius – the starting point for something new, the starting point for a new imaginative train of thought. Elephants in different possible scenes is a great building block for Mollie with Christopher. Vivian is more interested in following what Mollie knows and can teach her than what her own annoyance will deliver to the discussion. Vivian does not subscribe to the literal and strict meaning of “…adult or more capable peer…” in pinpointing zpds. Because of Mollie, Vivian sees Christopher, one that could easily be called the least likely kid to propel learning forward in the class, as a key inventor in the culture, in effect.
I think all of this hinges on cleaning our thinking of judgement which is a most difficult challenge when we come to extrapolating from Vivian’s classroom to our group’s discussion of international relations. I keep trying to imagine a powerful and respected international presence that does not get invested in judging right and wrong but puts its eggs in the basket of facilitating discourse, mediating, between and among those who disagree in the world. A pipe dream?
Hi Mike,
I received an email in my gmail that you posted this message. Let’s see if you get this in notification., G
Hi Gil-
This is a test message to see if you and I are notified that you got it. Anyone else who sees this, please respond. We are trying to create a discussion here but we need to know who is seeing what in order to proceed.
Mike, About one of the elephant’s in Vivian’s room – the suspicion that Christopher is a child who is “a little off,” not quite normal in some way, is what i think the story hinges on. Christopher is the counter-point to the more recognizable and lovable child that Mollie is portrayed as. Vivian says at some point in the first third of the book that she could seek labels for Christopher but labels would not help or explain him or illuminate his way of thinking. She does this repeatedly in her books – refuse to revert to labeling certain kinds of behaviors or children out of convenience and stereo-typing. She simply never did it. She prefers to rely on the discipline of observing and understanding what was going on in front of her. If she labeled Christopher, she would block her own eyesight from seeing how Mollie and Christopher engage each other. She would miss Christopher’s contribution to creating and engaging in a zpd with Mollie.
I think of the Psalm #118:22 that both Vvgotsky and Vivian quote in their work at different places: “The stone that the builders rejected has now become the cornerstone.” When we adults are too quick to pass off an unfamiliar and unusual starting point (like “Hello Birthday”), we would be dismissing and passing judgement on what others (and in this case, other 3 and 4 year olds) find as genius – the starting point for something new, the starting point for a new imaginative train of thought. Elephants in different possible scenes is a great building block for Mollie with Christopher. Vivian is more interested in following what Mollie knows and can teach her than what her own annoyance will deliver to the discussion. Vivian does not subscribe to the literal and strict meaning of “…adult or more capable peer…” in pinpointing zpds. Because of Mollie, Vivian sees Christopher, one that could easily be called the least likely kid to propel learning forward in the class, as a key inventor in the culture, in effect.
I think all of this hinges on cleaning our thinking of judgement which is a most difficult challenge when we come to extrapolating from Vivian’s classroom to our group’s discussion of international relations. I keep trying to imagine a powerful and respected international presence that does not get invested in judging right and wrong but puts its eggs in the basket of facilitating discourse, mediating, between and among those who disagree in the world. A pipe dream?
Colleagues- Here are a couple of messages sent right after the discussion on the 15th. I may have lost one or two. It would be great if the papers mentioned could be linked here so that people can follow up.
Ageliki Nov. 15
Thanks, Gillian, for your wonderful presentation today. It was thought-provoking & made me better understand how we speak about the structuring role of imagination.
Here is another quotation from Vivian Paley’s The boy who would be a helicopter that brings out the power of her approach to the flourishing of the imagination.
“The play and the stories and the talk nourish one another and translate into ever more logical thought and social effectiveness. It is all there–this original intellectual and emotional energy–a garden waiting to burst into a flower.” (p.21)
Also in this section of the book, she presents the three roles she takes during the storytelling and brings out her role of connection-maker.
Toward the end of p. 21, she writes:
“First, I enable others to hear the storyteller by repeating each sentence as I write it down.”
“I question any aspect of the story I might misinterpret–any word, phrase, sound effect, character or action that does not make sense to me without further explanation. […] The story must make sense to everyone: actors, audience, and narrator.” (p. 22)
“[…] my third role as a connection-maker. Throughout the day I may refer to similarities between a child’s story and other stories. books, or events […]
Gil Nov 16
Hi Beth,
Here is the paper I recently published capturing Vivian’s explanation of the 4 words she thought most important in her interactions with children: “That reminds me of…” Ageliki has already found references in Vivian’s book, “The Boy Who Would Be a Helicopter” where she starts to discuss her role as connection maker.
Mike said we need to keep our eye on Vygotsky’s phrase, “sea of meaning,” when we discuss the group nature of social interactions in pretend play, and perhaps hypothetical discussions among political leaders over power and control.
The tile of my paper builds off the title of a paper Mike wrote with colleagues years ago about a boy trying to have a good day in school. My paper explores how a teacher aims to have a good day in school.
Thank you all for the chance to discuss my favorite kind of data – children talking about anything! Gil
On Tue, Nov 15, 2022 at 8:34 PM Beth Ferholt <bferholt@gmail.com> wrote:
Oh yes, I do know this paper, I didn’t catch the date in the meeting — super relevant — thank you!
I am also very interested in Gillian’s just-published paper, the one she mentioned in which Paley explains what she left out of her books.
Thank you all,
Beth
Gil- Isn’t one of the elephants in the room is Vivian’s (and our) suspicion that Christopher is “on the spectrum” as the phrase currently goes? Vivian won’t name the beast, Mollie is not phased by Christopher or his elephants, but always seens to find a way to include Christopher …. and after a year, the elephant appears as floppy-eared and friendly as Dumbo.
I am looking forward to the video so I can recapture your discussion of “whose the more capable peer.”
mike
Thank You Gillian, for enriching our seminar with Vivian Paley’s charming examples of
preschoolers’ story telling/story acting. The next day I discussed Christopher’s Eli-Lion
creature in a YouTube interview. Here is the link https://youtu.be/vKwm5CGI5NQ
Once I have a chance to watch the video from your session, I will post some of the
highlights here. We continue to explore the important role pretend play has in the development of adult skills at the International Relations level. Story telling is directly related to formulating and sharing narratives. In our next session on Tuesday Dec 6th,
we will explore how this relates to Gregory Bateson’s concept of ‘framing’ pretend play
and how ‘framing’ operates in Social Movement Theory in International Relations.
Where for art everybody?