You Can’t Say You Can’t Play

Is it possible to have just one rule for the playground? Could that rule reflect and reinforce the culture of the school?

In 2007, a group of South Carolina educators designed an outdoor learning environment for a new elementary school. It was where we lunched most days, given our temperate Southern setting. Serious science happened in the garden and pond. We sang and celebrated graduations, birthdays and holidays under the Oak trees. And it was where we enacted our strongly held beliefs about learning, community, and belonging.

To encourage imaginative play, the outdoor space was largely unstructured. Students constructed spas for pumpkins in the fall and fairy villages in the spring; buckets operated as transportation vehicles and a large boulder alternated between being “home base”, a canoe, or a rocket.

Thanks to the groundbreaking, heart-centered writing of educator Vivian Paley, we knew that her “You can’t say you can’t play” would be our first rule. This rule grew out of Paley’s understanding that even very young children could exclude one another. At times that exclusion fell along the lines of characteristics outside of the child’s control. Paley wrote extensively about the role of race and relationships in the classroom. In our experience, we knew children could also be excluded for more transient reasons, including hair styles, the smell of their clothes, or the brand of their shoes. In each circumstance, exclusion diminished connection and community among all students, not just the student being ostracized.

“You can’t say you can’t play” does two important things- it puts universal belonging into action AND it challenges students’ cognitive and creative abilities as they rapidly develop new rules to govern play. For example, a game of tag may need new rules to accommodate the addition of a player to a team. Or a game where each player has a bucket would need to consider reallocation of the valued bucket-resource when one or more players is added. In our experience, students displayed enormous flexibility and creativity in this dynamic play setting.

Despite the power of Paley’s rule, we quickly understood the need for a second rule. The desire to exclude someone from play revealed itself in a less obvious, perhaps more insidious manner: the assignment of roles. Yes, students would allow anyone to join their game, but they might insist the newcomer take an undesirable role. For example, in a game of “Stable”, the newcomer could be relegated to being “cat” or another role that had limited opportunities for participation. In one version of Stable, the cat was sequestered in the corner and not allowed to speak. We recognized the assigned role could exclude a student as powerfully as “You can’t play.” Here on the playground, we learned the lesson playing out in our society at large, inclusion was not the same as belonging.

Our observations gave rise to a less catchy, but equally important rule: You can’t choose someone else’s role. Once we had this second rule in place we saw students’ ability to self-advocate, negotiate, and compromise flourish. Accommodating each other led to co-construction, a power structure that is very different from gatekeeping. That change shifted the goal from simply inclusion toward belonging.

As I consider the current politics of language and labels, I wonder if these playground lessons offer us a path forward: You can’t say you can’t play and you can’t limit someone’s participation by assigning their role. These could be guideposts for how schools foster creativity, flexibility, and kindness and put belonging into action.