The Play Observatory and Children’s Friendships
[00:00:00] [music playing] Hello, and welcome to Children’s Friendships Matter. A podcast about children’s friendships post-COVID 19. In this episode Dr Caron Carter talks to Professor John Potter who led the ESRC funded project ‘The Play Observatory’. Here they explore John’s research using media in education to chronicle children’s stories, and the links to children’s friendships.
They also reflect on children’s experiences at school, being online during COVID 19, playground play, and the Opie archive.
[00:00:51] So welcome, John Potter, to the Children’s Friendships Matter podcast. It’s really great to have you here today.
John Potter: [00:00:58] Well thanks for inviting me, Caron, thank you.
[00:01:02] I am really interested and looking forward to talking to you about your research. I just wanted to start off with getting a bit of a sense of your background and your journey, I suppose, in to academia.
So could we start by you introducing yourself and telling us a little bit about your background and your role as an academic?
John Potter: [00:01:26] Right, okay. I’m John Potter and I’m Professor of Media in Education, and the ‘in’ is important to me. So it’s not media education, or ‘and’, it’s ‘in’. So media in Education. That’s at UCL, and it’s at the IOE, which is The Faculty of Education and Society. In a previous life I was a primary school teacher and I taught for about 10 years, mostly in Tower Hamlets schools in East London, and a really brilliant place to work, which was extremely diverse. Lots of children of different backgrounds, different ethnicities. It was just a fabulous, vibrant community.
[00:02:01] Prior to that I had actually started out as a trainee teacher on a PGCE programme in about the middle of the 80s and I had gone back to London to do that, having been at university in Leeds, and I really enjoyed that course. And in those days, children were front and centre of what we were learning about and so on our reading list would be things like John Holt’s book on how children learn, and on how children fail.
[00:02:28] We had people like Michael Rosen working alongside us sometimes, coming in and doing talks for us. Margaret Meek Spencer. It was a very kind of child-centred education before going in to teaching and I think that I’m really un-reconstructed from those times. So I despair at some of the things that are going on in schools but we’ve got great colleagues who are researching it and find out more about how children actually learn.
[00:03:00] Yeah, so that’s me. And I got in to media in education really through an interest in literacy and in story-telling, and in recognising the many ways in which meaning making was changing at the time. I became very interested in first of all technology in education, but when that took a kind of, I guess learning analytics and learning games turn I was much more interested in using technology and media for children to express themselves to make short videos, to make animations – and increasingly things like podcasts, and ultimately to research their own lives through using digital media.
[00:03:40] So that is the kind of thing where the job title comes in, which is Media in Education, and I took up a post at The Institute of Education in 2007, beginning of 2007, and I’ve been there ever since, teaching on MA programmes, supervising students, and when I can get the funding, doing research that interests me.
[00:04:06] That’s great, thank you so much. Yeah, really interested in that idea about you were talking about children expressing themselves, almost like telling their own stories through those different mediums.
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[00:04:22] This leads me on to the next question, to ask specifically about your research. I won’t pre-empt anything. I’ve got a few questions to ask as we go along, but I will just leave that open to you, just to tell us a little bit more about your research.
John Potter: [00:04:37] When I joined, David Buckingham had a research centre called The Centre for the Study of Children, Youth, and Media. and there were a lot of people that had previously been teachers and were brilliant researchers, like Rebecca Willett, Liesbeth de Block, and I met Andrew Burn there as well.
And so Andrew and David became my supervisors, and my doctoral research, which I was doing alongside quite a lot of teaching on the MA programme in Media, Culture, and Education at the time, my research project was really about asking, or finding out what could be done with video in the way of storytelling about children’s lives. And it was very different in those days. So we weren’t using tape – things had moved on from then, but neither were we able to just give someone an iPad.
[00:05:31] We had these little Casio kind of hand-held camcorder things with a FireWire connection and micro DV tapes that you plugged in to the side and actually the performance of all of that was kind of interesting and it slowed things down a lot. There are some things about that way of making videos which I do miss. In particular the way that, although it was clumsy, when children had shot things they had to press ‘play’ to upload them on to the computer, but they were kind of getting to know the shots as they were coming in, rather than continually kind of instantly reviewing what’s available now immediately through a digital device, a more modern digital device.
[00:06:11] So it was fantastically interesting and the focus of the work was in two schools and in one of them the focus was on Y6 children, thinking back through their time in primary school and going around the spaces and places of the primary school, and recoding their impression so their memories of school and the things that they used to do, before they were leaving.
[00:06:31] Nice.
John Potter: [00:06:32] Because in this particular school there were 28 children in Y6 and they were going to go to 12 different destinations, so the videos actually became a record of friendship as well. And I was thinking about this in relation to your podcast. It was the one thing where there was a lot of friendship as a particular focus in that research.
[00:06:58] And out of that came the idea that in this school children were selecting assets and when they got to the point of editing they were moving them around in particular ways and they were curating an exhibition of themselves or their time. Mostly, according to the brief, although there was one that was 17 minutes long and had to be reduced substantially- Well I asked for between 2 and 5 minutes.
[00:07:24] Interestingly, in another school the comparison study was with children who were doing the same thing but they were mixed ages and they were children who, for one reason or another, had difficulty staying in the classroom so it was a kind of behavioural needs group on a Friday afternoon and so what they were doing was a similar spaces and places of the school and trying to find out about how they felt about it, and recording things that they were or were not allowed to do in school. And so successful were they at that that the films were banned by the headteacher for being displayed to the school because they featured them climbing a tree that they weren’t supposed to, and stuff like that. So I think I got in to some trouble myself for that. So we had to do a kind of more private screening in the community centre at the school, because having made them they had to be seen!
[00:08:17] But those were the sort of things that were early days of my research, and thinking about this theory of curation, which clearly needs revising substantially in the present moment, but at the time it was a very optimistic way of thinking about how children could be learning to manage digital assets and how to present themselves, their identities, their affiliations, their friendships, and their relationships to the spaces of the school in particular. Things that they did in the playground, things that they did in the classroom, in the hall, and in other kind of secret spaces that there are around.
[00:08:53] There is always little interstitial spaces in schools, little bits of garden here and there, or the back of a building – there was a kind of drainpipe where we used to go and talk here when we had private things to say. That kind of way of using the building and using the space of the building.
[00:09:10] Yeah, I think that’s really lovely actually. It reminds me, that idea of kind of looking back on your journey or your school, your primary school career or whatever you want to call it.
Alison Clark mentioned this on her podcast; this idea that we don’t always have that time to review or to look back. I think that there is something really nice about being able to sort of spend time with children talking about that journey and, like you say, it might be particular places or particular memories that are associated with particular places, and it made me think about the more recent research that you’ve done around The Play Observatory, and when you said about working with Y6 children in particular, it made me think about going through that process of reviewing your sort of journey through primary school and looking at the memories, and then looking forward perhaps, and how perhaps a lot of children during COVID, who were in Y6, might have been during the first lockdown or the second lockdown, didn’t get that opportunity for that sort of almost like closure on their primary school years and then like you say, a lot of Y6s, it is about friendship, isn’t it. And if you’ve got those friendships or you’ve even got just one or two friendships and then you transition with those friendships, you know, what a difference that can make.
[00:10:34] So I just wondered, and I know you didn’t look specifically with The Play Observatory around friendship but when you were saying that, it just made me think about the connections with what you did previously there on The Play Observatory and COVID.
John Potter: [00:10:48] The Play Observatory was set up to explore children’s play, primarily, and friendship impacts on play as we know, and play impacts on friendship, and we certainly found that in an earlier project which I can talk a bit more about a bit later, but The Play Observatory itself was really about what was happening to children’s loss of amenity, their loss of social contact, and we were trying to advocate against the idea that the only thing that was happening to children was learning loss, which was a kind of prevailing discourse of the time. And so we were interested in exploring the kinds of things that they were able to do, the kinds of things that they were not able to do, and the conditions of lockdown kept changing anyway, so that was highly variable through the project.
But the contributions we received, particularly from children who didn’t have siblings, they were really missing that social contact and that element of playing together. They tried to make up for it, as adults did as well, with screen games, with multiplayer online games, with sharing experience in Minecraft and Roblox and that kind of thing, but also playing Zoom games. So there was evidence that they were doing that kind of thing in The Play Observatory itself.
[00:12:13] but it wasn’t a primary focus. It just emerged as a kind of oblique findings. We were interested in other aspects of their play and how they were using their environment. But in terms of friendship, one thing that we did notice that happened was that siblings had to play together where they previously perhaps were ignoring one another, or were really not wanting to play with each other. There wasn’t anyone else around for some of the initial, harsher lockdowns so you had to play with your irritating little brother or sister or whatever and make fun. Usually build a dean together, crawl in to the den and play and that kind of thing, so that was going on for sure.
[00:12:56] But the connection back to the previous work that I did, or where I started out, which has always been a constant has been trying to bring out as far as possible the child’s voice in research. So that is what we were trying really hard to do in The Play Observatory, but it was by far the hardest aspect of the project because we were all working remote, remotely. So we were working remotely from one another and we were working remotely from the children that we were working with, so it was difficult to say the least.
[00:13:25] Yeah, that is really interesting, because I did some research during COVID around how children tried to maintain their friendships. Like you say, the different means they went about it. Like you say, we spoke to children between the ages of 7-11 and they did something before, you know, they produced some kind of artefact and then we talked to them about what they had produced as part of a zoom interview.
But there are those challenges, like you say, in terms of voice and sort of online research – and we found particularly how if you’re going to research with children you always had in that almost kind of lead in time to a project where you go in, you visit the school or the setting, you develop some kind of rapport with the children that you’re going to work with, whereas online we found that was much more of a challenge in how you go about that.
John Potter: [00:14:27] Well it really was. So we had a survey really, which was the main tool. Because we were building an archive as well, so The Play Observatory was not just finding out about what people were doing, but it was constructing an archive for future generations to look back at COVID and what children were playing in the pandemic. So the survey was really the main data gathering tool for the first half of the project and Julia Bishop, Cath Bannister and Yinka Olusoga did a great job of designing it in a very kind of child-friendly way with …. ? [name] [00:14:58] collecting archival information as well.
[00:15:05] And then Valerio Signorelli engineered it and produced a really brilliant website, which was easy to use and we got a lot of data through that. So we got videos that parents and children had submitted, images, bits of text, and lots of contextual information as well that was gathered so as to create it as a searchable database.
[00:15:28] Then the main emphasis fell on qualitative, even deeper qualitative work, which was interviewing with volunteer families, so we put a tick box in the survey to say if you would like to talk to us some more about your experience then please do – and then we made a selection of ten families that were representative of the data and the population of people that were coming in and/or had created really interesting content.
[00:15:56] And then we interviewed them, and we did ten interviews in-depth on Zoom. The Zoom experience was really interesting. We have written quite a lot about this. The reason why it was interesting was that we feared it would be really hierarchical and difficult to get answers and difficult to build rapport and of course it kind of was, but in terms of the democratisation of the screen space, it was really interesting because the children were the same size as the researchers coming across the screen, and as their parents, if there was multiple cameras in use and in a weird way the screen kind of flatted off some of the hierarchical business.
[00:16:40] Plus the children often had control of where the camera was going, or what the laptop lid was showing and there was one case in particular where a child with quite severe needs was really interested in being totally independent of what her mum was saying about her and during the course of the interview she would subtly shift the camera angle of the Zoom call. And we realised that there were ways in which children could actually take a little bit of control of the interview situation in Zoom that they might not have been able to do if we were sitting in the same room as them. So that was an interesting thing that had not occurred to us.
[00:17:21] You know that question that you often ask researchers what surprised you, well that really did surprise us, but it took us a while to get in to this, because we had spent such a lot of time, particularly Kate Cowan and I had spent such a lot of time in the previous project in the playground, building relationships, getting to know our child researchers, talking to them, seeing them play every day, morning and lunchtime breaks, over a period of six months.
[00:17:46] So to switch from that to being online was difficult, but we tried to maintain the same principles of as far as we possibly could, hearing the children’s views of what was going on, and that they had things worth knowing and they had things worth telling us.
[00:18:04] Exactly, and I think that was really important during that period. Even though there were some challenges, I think it was really important to make sure that there was some element of voice. And we were aware that we couldn’t get to all children, or that some children, we were aware, wouldn’t have had access to the internet but we still needed to find some way of hearing voices of children.
John Potter: [00:18:25] That’s interesting what you say about access because we were aware, and we have been subsequently, and we’ve been challenged on this, quite rightly, which is the kinds of contributors that we had to The Play Observatory, are not representative of everyone and they were people who had access digital devices and knew how to use them, and had the time to upload and fill in quite substantial paperwork, visual paperwork on screen, about the detail of where the things were done, how many people, what time of day, what kind of mood were people in and that sort of thing. They had to do all of that.
So it’s a certain kind of person – I guess there’s a class issue here as well but it’s not actually evenly distributed across classes either, so it’s very complicated. Whereas with Playing the Archive, the previous project, we were in a primary school. Just about the most comprehensive range of people that you can have in front of you and we were aware that we were hearing from everyone, really everyone, apart from home school educated children and people who were not there. But we were hearing from a substantially wider group of children about their play in that project.
[00:19:40] So there have been efforts in Play Observatory as well to do outreach stuff, and I know that the Sheffield team did The Festival of the Human, and they incorporated some Play Observatory questions in what they did for that, but it wasn’t anywhere near the kind of range that we got in the Playing the Archive, we know that.
[00:20:09] What we will do is we will actually include any links to the Play Observatory research and the archive to this podcast, so if anybody wants to look at that or explore that further. And perhaps one or two of your articles that are related to this.
John Potter: [00:20:23] Yeah, I can definitely do that, and perhaps I should explain that the whole way of thinking about children in this way kind of matches what the Opies were trying to do, so it’s important to mention the Opies really, because their work has driven three projects and counting. The first of which was a Beyond Text project that Andrew Burn and Jackie Marsh did in 2008/10, that kind of time, which was digitising the audio archives of Iona Opie in particular and the Opies, for those that don’t know, were a couple. Peter and Iona Opie, immediately post-war, UK-based, who collected games. Initially by placing an advert in the paper saying what kinds of games do you play, and asking about them and receiving contributions.
And then by travelling and finding out, and after Peter’s death Iona was going around lots of- and before- was going around lots of schools with a tape recorder and recording things in playgrounds. Clapping games. Skipping games. Rhyming games. Imaginary games. Chasing games. All of these different ways in which children play and interestingly they were also challenging particular kinds of prevailing discourse at that point, which was they were challenging the idea that with the arrival of cinema and TVs in people’s houses, that children were not playing anymore and they wanted to show that the traditions of folklore of children’s games were still alive and well and so when it came time to do Playing the Archive, which was the second Opie project, again directed by Andrew and Jackie, I was a co-investigator on that alongside Kate in London, and there was a parallel team in Sheffield. We were interested in a couple of different things. One was what were children playing now and were the same kinds of ways of working with media to inflect their play-
[00:22:26] You know like building on the resource of a favourite TV show which they had found in the previous project, or more likely some social media influence on it and what was going on in the play that was interesting and again to challenge this idea that media drives play out. It doesn’t. It just changes play slightly somewhat, and the traditional rhyming and game forms are still there and you have to dig a little bit to find them, but they’re still there. And children are still doing clapping games and running around the playground and doing all the things that they’ve always done, but in the years of Play the Archive, Fortnite was popular, so we saw things like the floss, and take the L and other dances in the playground.
[00:23:10] And we realised of course that probably most of the children had never played Fortnite but they might know people that did or they had heard of it or they knew that there were dances in there so they we incorporating them in their play and so that connection between popular culture with its tremendous reach and affect, being then made in to something new by the children was a way of challenging the notion that children are just screen-based dupes that only consume. They don’t do that. They take the resource of what’s on offer through popular culture and media and they make something with it, and they actively author new games and they make something. So they are really people worth knowing about the ways that they express themselves using their resources and popular culture to make new meanings.
[00:24:02] Yes, and that reminds me of the sort of William Corsaro, The Interpretive Reproduction. Yeah, that is really interesting. Thank you for that. I went to that wonderful event that Julia Bishop and Yinka did around the Opie celebration event, which was really, really interesting to hear about those projects.
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[00:24:24] We have talked a little bit about children’s friendships and obviously we know that’s not the main focus, but I just wondered, you know, when I did my research I found that in terms of COVID 19 in children’s friendships, some children still had some quite positive experiences from COVID. Some children really found the online thing was great; particularly children who liked gaming. So they would wear their headsets and they would talk to one another and they really seemed to enjoy it. Also, we had quite a bit in our research where children talked about doing art with others.
[00:25:09] So the younger children talked about making comics or drawing on WhatsApp and doing like video calls and sharing their drawings. Or they would have like a little WhatsApp group that they would start, with a drawing focus or some kind of art based focus. And then the older children talked about they had been given art tasks as part of school, and then they often paired up with people or went online and talked about the art that they were doing, and that kind of thing.
[00:25:46] So it felt like there were aspects for some children where they found, a bit like you were saying, they are very creative and they find ways to sort of engage. For some it was very positive and obviously the other side, for some it was very negative. And there were scenarios from the other side really where we could see where children really found it challenging and felt really fed up because they couldn’t be with their friends and struggled to find- You know. They tried the online things, but for some children they just said it was really awkward on Zoom, I don’t know what to say. It’s not like real life. And when you’re in the programme the talk flows freely, but online it was really awkward.
[00:26:28] So I just wondered in your experience of COVID, did you get that sort of positive/negative? Did you get a real mix of things?
John Potter: [00:26:39] Absolutely, absolutely. So from a positive point of view: different ways of using media, different ways of using play, masses of construction of imaginary things. Constructions of imaginary dens and spaces to play, art workshops as you’ve said, families sitting down together and leaving the camera on and painting at a distance. We found all of those things as well. And one of the papers that we’ve written subsequently, and I’ve realised actually that we’ve written loads of papers and so I can give you lots of links.
[00:27:08] That’s great.
John Potter: [00:27:09] It’s interesting when you stop and count them up, but we wrote one called Lessons from the Play Observatory, which was about the amount of time that children had to make things and that they don’t have in the current congested primary school timetable. It’s not a teacher-blaming thing at all by the way. This is just saying that these are the constraints that come from all sorts of performative structures around the classroom. So it’s not a way of saying anything disparaging about teachers who I admire more, and more, and more over time. But what it is saying is that the people that drive education, that assess it in such a performative way, might want to consider the ways in which the school day could become a little bit more open to allow children to have more time to do certain things.
[00:28:03] That was the big factor really, was that there was lots of time to fill and they still managed a real intensity of activity. Media producers, for example, the kids that make films that they wanted to share with us; the amount of time that they’d invested in them and what they were learning in that, it’s just incalculable really. It wasn’t an ephemeral or trivial activity. It was really culturally important, but in terms of learning as well, and so we wrote some of this in that paper called Lessons from the Play Observatory, and that is one that I did with Michelle Cannon and Yinka and Kate Khan. But there have been others where we’ve tried to make that kind of case.
The negative stuff, it came out obliquely in play in concerns about the virus, in concerns about how people were feeling about each other. So we’ve got a really famous video that has been widely shared now, called COVID Gone, made by a 10 year old boy, in which he describes his feelings about the virus, and about wanting to be back at school but kind of realising that that’s dangerous. A lot of all of the things that he’s missing. He made another video actually about his football club that he was really missing and seeing all his mates and all that kind of thing. So we saw some of that. And one of the girls that we interviewed in the ethnographic interview very, very clearly had not had a good lockdown at all, and she had no one to play with and had not enjoyed being online. Just as you found, Caron. So there was a real mix of positive and negative. But the creative stuff, and the engagement with popular media culture was very positive.
[00:29:50] And it was interesting actually that some of the prevalent discourse at the time, even from the government, was you should be playing more video games so you stay in with with your friends, and then the minute that lockdown was over, you shouldn’t be playing video games because they’re bad for you. Well, you know, make up your mind!
[00:30:13] Yeah, that is really interesting around the sort of – you know, really, like to just highlight that sort of positivity and when you were saying about, it’s almost that time to be absorbed, isn’t it, to be really engaged with what you’re doing and not have to be worrying. I think Alison Clark talked about this because of her work around time and slow pedagogy and, you know, that idea that she was talking about- I think some of her take home messages in episode 1, she is really interested in exploring what affordances we can have from having more time, or putting more time to certain things, and what you actually get back from that and what affordances can come from that.
[00:31:03] So I think that’s really interesting that I can see those links from what you’re saying about. And it’s probably unusual, isn’t it, because in life, probably at school, but also at home I am always aware of this, that it almost feels like you’re getting up, you’re getting everybody’s breakfast, out the door, you know, ‘hurry up, hurry up’ and there is not this time to take time and reflect on things. So it does feel very busy these days, doesn’t it.
John Potter: [00:31:26] It does. I really like the slow pedagogy movement. I went through that period where my time in the classroom was coming to an end, just as the literacy strategy and numeracy strategies were coming in and I had a decision to make about whether to carry on in to management. Actually one interview was for a deputy headship I could have gone for. Or there was another one for advisory work on media and tech and ed, and that’s the route that I took and that led me in to university. But one of the things that used to concern me about the literacy and nummary strategies, as good as they were, and they had some good content in there, was this idea of pace, pace, pace, pace, pace, which has only increased. To the idea that instantly recalling something means that you’ve learned it.
[00:32:16] And I’m not a psychologist, but I know that that’s not really how things are learned, by instantly being told something and then parroting it back. That’s not learning. That’s parroting things back.
[00:32:30] So there are lessons to be learned from the time that that they had to spend with each other in lockdown, where they went for walks, families went for walks and got to know their local area in a different way. Hung a sign in the window. Spent all day on a drawing to send to someone. Set up a very complicated activity in Minecraft to have a birthday party in Minecraft. All of those things were incredibly powerful and required a sort of self-directed slow pedagogy, and I’m really interested in Alison Clark’s concept of that and I think that we need to slow down. Yeah, it’s just people who don’t really know teaching and learning have been in charge of teaching and learning in our country for such a long time.
[00:33:16] I think that we have one of the most politicised systems in the developed world. Thinking about Gove and his pronouncement that we’ve had enough of experts – I don’t think that we have had enough of experts. I don’t think that we’ve heard enough from experts in recent years, so it’s really nice that some experts are breaking cover and saying ‘You know what’s there’s more to reading than phonics’, and stuff like that. And the evidence shows it. And the evidence doesn’t back up phonics as the sole means of teaching and learning reading. So yeah, those are encouraging signs I think. Let’s bring the experts back. Let’s be a bit more like Finland, as everyone always says.
[00:33:59] When you were just saying then about the literacy strategy; I had only been teaching a few years when the literacy strategy came in and I still have in my head 15, 15, 20, 10, which was the time thing. So 15 minute start, 15 minutes with this, 20 minutes getting busy, 10 minutes cleaning away. And I still have that 15, 15, 20, 10.
John Potter: [00:34:21] And I was going to say, there was a lot of pace, pace, pace in that. But I suppose one of the good things about the literacy strategy was that searchlights idea. So when a child is reading and comes across an unfamiliar word, yes, you can use sounds, but you could also use ‘Have you seen a word shape like this before?’ or you could also use ‘What is the picture telling you?’ and you can also use ‘What is the position of that word in the sentence? Does it make sense when you make an attempt on it?’. It’s not just about sounding out the sounds. So there were some good things about it.
[00:34:51] Just another thing that really sticks in my mind, and I used to play it to students when I was doing teacher ed at Goldsmiths and UEL. There was a clip in a numeracy strategy where there was a numeracy hour, and a reception teacher was talking to a class of absolutely bored- and it wasn’t his fault, he was just delivering content, as they say- and they were completely, absolutely uninterested and doing the Velcro on their shoes and starting out the window and stuff like that.
[00:35:26] And then at one moment he mentions something about Tinky Winky, right, and you can see – there’s a girl that just goes ‘bang’ and switches on, and starts listening to him. It’s kind of obvious, but an important point to make, that just a connection to children’s culture, just a connection to children’s lives, it just opens up across that school/home divide or culture/learning divide. Just knowing about some of this stuff and showing children that you know about some of this stuff opens it up in ways that are really interesting. You don’t have to follow the script. It worries me to think about schools where they have scripts.
[00:36:08] Yes, and that links in to sort of Liz Chesworth’s work around children’s interests. Yeah, that reminds me of that, which is so interesting.
John Potter: [00:36:19] Yeah, it works great.
[00:36:18] Yeah, and I was thinking what you were saying about taking the path. Do you go down the advisory role of the deputy head role. I went down the deputy head role for a few years. I had that path to take. But then yeah, or takes full circle and then back in to academia.
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[00:36:37] I’ve just got one more question before our final take home messages. So you know now we’re post-COVID, we’re in this period of time where there are things out there, aren’t there, like the cost of living crisis, children being displaced by trauma. So what do you feel at the moment that children particularly need in terms of their friendships, or support with their friendships in these new times?
John Potter: [00:37:06] I think space to have friendships, places to go. I think that at school it’s still incredibly important, and I don’t like the idea of there being organised playtimes. I think that the playtimes that we observed in Playing the Archive are really special moments of friendship, and that did come out in that project. So the ways in which certain people would always go to play with each other and to learn new games from each other, and then people would come in to that group and go out of that group again. So don’t colonise the playground and playtime and take it over and reduce it to a mechanistic form of play. Leave it to the children to use that time freely to form friendships. So space and time to do it. I think that it’s great that some children get to go to after school clubs and either school based or woodcraft folk, or scouts, cubs, that kind of thing. I think that they’re all really good, but I was in Stockholm recently and I got shown around a place called the Kulturhuset in the middle of the city, and I know they have a similar thing in Finland.
[00:38:18] It’s a place where particularly children who are at the end of primary and 11-16 year olds, which have got a really difficult time in this country where loads of youth clubs are shut down, and if you don’t have the cultural capital to get yourself in to an organised group what do you do?
So in these Scandinavian countries they have spaces where people can go after school and hang out with each other and make things, or not, or just read or watch something or learn a musical instrument together. And the space was absolutely full of people in between those groups, those groups in between, from the end of 11 to when you can go out independently age 16, 17. So they had somewhere to go.
[00:39:08] I think that in this country, if we want to do something we should reinvent that kind of space, or borrow from Scandinavia more likely, and create some of these spaces for people to go. Because I feel for children in that period particularly now, because they get told to just be at home and be in their home space, but don’t go on your phone either. So you can’t use the phone, and you can’t go out, you can’t go to a youth club. What do you do? So if there was some sort of space for people to maintain friendships in that kind of post-primary and into early-secondary period, I think that would be great.
[00:39:47] I’m sure that there are such places in the UK, I’m just unaware of them being organised to that degree that I saw when I was in Scandinavia.
[00:39:52] Yeah, I interviewed a deputy head for one of the podcasts, and we were talking about playtimes and how some schools have reduced playtimes and that space and also I think sometimes there can be this, like you said, that structuring the playtime where there is particular games there, but sometimes it comes from a really good place, because children fall out, don’t they, and they have arguments with their friends and what have you, but almost a sort of- They almost need that space to fall out with their friends, to be able to learn those skills of negotiation. So I think if we can hold on to those spaces for play, and free play, where children have agency and I think that is really, really great.
[00:40:46] And when you were talking then about the older children in that 11-16 space, again I was thinking how difficult it is, like you say, you know, there are places that they can go, but like the park and the shops, and then that’s when you get people saying they shouldn’t be hanging around there and they’re up to no good.
So, like you say, it would be really good if there were these spaces where young people could go that felt reasonably safe for them as well, to be and socialise with others. And to make connections with others. When we spoke to Chris Pascal and Tony Bertram, they were talking about you don’t have to be friends with everybody, but you do need to know how to connect with people, and I think that’s really important, isn’t it. Yeah.
John Potter: [00:41:36] It is. I think so. And like these places were sort of like libraries a bit, so they were definitely what we would call third spaces where there was a kind of flattening of hierarchies but an admission of children’s culture in to them as well. Some of the background music that was playing was self-chosen, that kind of thing.
It’s unfortunate that so many libraries have gone to the wall, but I’m thinking about there are boroughs and local authorities that have preserved that notion of the library as a space where people can go and do stuff and be together, and I would love to see that return and be expanded in to maker spaces and stuff like that, where children could just drop in and make something after school. It would be great.
[00:42:25] Yes, nice idea.
John Potter: [00:42:27] I can dream.
[00:42:30] So, it has been really, really interesting to talk to you John. I was just wondering now as a final sort of point, is there any sort of take home messages, or things you would like listeners to reflect on, or any questions you would like to put to the listener. Anything you would like them to take away from this podcast?
John Potter: [00:42:48] I think an awareness that there are things worth knowing from children, and it’s worth trying to understand a little bit about their affiliations and popular culture and so on. And talking to them about what they’re doing – not in a prying way, but in a way to actually learn from them. I don’t want to romanticise childhood, but I do want to see it as a state of being and not to think, to quote Alison James in A New Sociology of Childhood where as a child the day is 100 years long and you are in that day. You are not thinking about ‘Oh, I’m not something yet’ and ‘I’m not a grown-up yet, so therefore I can’t have opinions, I can’t have feelings’. So being open to finding out the things that are worth knowing about children and then building on them because obviously the things that they say, yes, there is such a thing as learning and education, but if you don’t know where a child is coming from you can’t take them somewhere else. The whole idea that you can impose a set of atomised facts and then get them parroted back is a sort of masquerade for what real learning and deep learning is. So that would be a take home thing.
And welcoming the ideas of slow pedagogy, and also valuing play, as something that it can be ephemeral and nothing, but it can be everything. So it’s having that openness to understanding what play is. It can be actually yes, I am wasting time with this spinner because I need to be thinking about something else. And then another time I might be making a cathedral out of matchsticks or something. But play can be all of those things. So understanding this spectrum that play has of activity, and valuing it really, and allowing children to just be in that space I think is an important take home.
[00:44:47] Yes, that is really interesting. And I think all of those things that you’ve mentioned there are so pertinent to friendship. So like you said before, in terms of the play being very integral to friendship. Sometimes the slow pedagogy, or that space and time for friendship.
John Potter: [00:45:03] Yeah, groupwork. That thing about children talking in class that is quite scary that some schools don’t allow any at all. And obviously when I was a teacher there were times when no one is going to be talking now because everyone is going to be writing, but there are other times where that talking to each other forms part of the landscape of learning. We know this from social constructivists. It’s not something that is currently in vogue, by people like obviously Vygotsky and so on, but by explaining something to someone else, or working on a task together you both benefit. You both learn something. Even if you know something and then you’re telling somebody that, in rehearsing the knowledge you are also learning about it and constructing it differently.
So I would say that there is a lot to be learned from friendship about this, and thinking about what I’ve been talking about throughout, about play, children’s culture and media cultures – that is the kind of landscape against which the friendship figures form, isn’t it. So though we haven’t in the projects that I’ve been talking about directly research friendship. Friendship is a very important part of it. The figures take shape in there, against those backdrops.
[00:46:15] Yeah, and I always feel that. A bit like when you were saying about the being and the becoming and that kind of idea of – and with friendship, I think that friendship does provide lots of other affordances for children in terms of learning and development. But I also always feel like it’s so important to focus on it, because I just know that it means so much to children, therefore it’s important.
John Potter: [00:46:37] Yeah, I completely agree with that. You can’t argue with that.
[00:46:41] You can’t can you. Yeah. That’s great. Well thank you very much. It’s been a real privilege to talk to you John and to hear about your work. Thank you for your time.
John Potter: [00:46:51] Thank you for inviting me. Thanks for all your help. Thank you.
[00:46:54] Thank you for listening. For more information on Caron’s research and other related podcasts, please visit https://research.shu.ac.uk/friends This podcast was made possible through funding from Sheffield Hallam University. [music playing]
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