Max Porter claims that: Play is the most sophisticated, radical, powerful gift.
Sophisticated and Radical? They feel like opposites, Sophistication layers, it reads the room, adapts to complexity with adaptable complexity. Radical cuts all that nonsense away, revealing the root. Can play be both?
Sure. Play is the negotiation of terms, it is grandiose structures built on the fly, utterly serious but every layer is an invitation to its own destruction: knock it all down why don’t you? Play requires both sophistication and radicalism at full strength, at the same time, and shows no sign of contradiction.
That's where the power sits.
And it's a gift that moves generationally, exchanged in the act itself. By doing the thing that makes it exist, the child demands the adult return to a mode it is easy to forget remains an option. Playing together is the whole transaction.
& Play is always an option: Porter urges us to pledge allegiance to it, you have been given play (whether by nature or nurture), you are surrounded by players in the world that evolved play, you too can make up rules that you enjoy being broken.
Keep reading
The experience of practitioners who have worked with autistic children in Sensory Rooms. Part 6
TFH are advocates of the Sensory Room and the first five parts to this extended blog testify to their usefulness. But very little in this world, save love and perhaps the bicycle, is an unall
The experience of practitioners who have worked with autistic children in Sensory Rooms. Part 5
practitioners described the SR Room as an effective teaching and learning environment and some considered this its main purpose.
The experience of practitioners who have worked with autistic children in Sensory Rooms. Part 4
This is the fourth instalment of our discussion of the work of by Dr. Katy Unwin, Dr. Georgina Powell and Dr. Catherine...