Rethinking Children’s Spaces and Places 9781472581488, 9781472581471, 9781474292085, 9781472581501

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Rethinking Children’s Spaces and Places

ALSO AVAILABLE IN THE NEW CHILDHOODS SERIES: Rethinking Childhood, Phil Jones Rethinking Children and Families, Nick Frost Rethinking Children and Inclusive Education, Sue Pearson Rethinking Children and Research, Mary Kellett Rethinking Children’s Play, Fraser Brown and Michael Patte Rethinking Children’s Rights, Phil Jones and Sue Welch Rethinking Children, Violence and Safeguarding, Lorraine Radford Rethinking Gender and Sexuality in Childhood, Emily W. Kane

Rethinking Children’s Spaces and Places David Blundell

New Childhoods series Series Editor: Phil Jones

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2016 © David Blundell, 2016 David Blundell has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: PB: ePDF: ePub:

978-1-4725-8148-8 978-1-4725-8147-1 978-1-4725-8150-1 978-1-4725-8149-5

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Series: New Childhoods Cover image © Enigma / Alamy Stock Photo Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN

For Margaret ‘Betty’ Maidment … who raised children untroubled by Modern Childhood 11 August 1924–11 May 2015

Contents

Introduction to the New Childhood Series  ix Preface and Acknowledgements  xi

Part I  Debates, Dilemmas and Challenges: Childhood and the Place of Children 1 Introduction  3 2 Modern Childhood as a Symbolic Space and Children as Social Actors  13

Part II  The Issues and Debates Defined: Space, Place and Spatiality 3 Spatiality and Understanding Children’s Lives  39

Part III  Implications for Children’s Lives 4 Scholarization and Institutional Spaces of Childhood  65 5 Playing Out: Range, Territories and Children’s Activity Space  99

viii Contents

6 Constructing Identities and Children in Relational Space  125 7 ‘Nature’ and Discursive Spaces of Childhood  151 8 Globalization and Future Spaces of Childhood  173 Bibliography  205 Index  217

Introduction to the New Childhoods Series

The amount of current attention given to children and to childhood is unprecedented. Recent years have seen the agreement of new international conventions, national bodies established, and waves of regional and local initiatives all concerning children. This rapid pace has been set by many things. From children themselves, from adults working with children, from governments and global bodies, injustice, dissatisfaction, new ideas and raw needs are fuelling change. Within, and often, leading the movement is research. From the work of multinational corporations designed to reach into the minds of children and the pockets of parents, through to charity-driven initiatives aiming to challenge the forces that situate children in extreme poverty, a massive amount of energy is expended in research relating to children and their lives. This attention is not all benign. Research can be seen as original investigation undertaken in order to gain knowledge and understanding through a systematic and rigorous process of critical enquiry examining ‘even the most commonplace assumption’ (Kellett, 2005, 9). However, as Kellett has pointed out, the findings can be used by the media to saturate and accost, rather than support, under-12s who are obese, for example, or to stigmatize young people by the use of statistics. However, research can also play a role in investigating, enquiring, communicating and understanding. Recent years have seen innovations in the focus of research, as political moves that challenge the ways in which children have been silenced and excluded result in previously unseen pictures of children’s experiences of poverty, family life, community. The attitudes, opinions and lived experiences of children are being given air, and one of the themes within this book concerns the opportunities and challenges this is creating. As this book will reveal, research is being used to set new agendas, to challenge ways of living and working that oppress, harm or limit children. It is also being used to test preconceptions and long-held beliefs about children’s lived experiences, the actual effects rather than the adult’s opinions of the way parents see and



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relate to their children, or the actual impact of services and their ways of working with children. In addition to the focus of research, innovations are being made in the way research is conceived and carried out. Its role in children’s lives is changing. In the past, much research treated children as objects, research was done on them, with the agenda and framework set purely by adults. New work is emerging where children create the way research is conceived and carried out. Children act as researchers, researchers work with questions formulated by children or work with children. This series aims to offer access to some of the challenges, discoveries and work-in-progress of contemporary research. The term child and childhood is used within the series in line with Article 1 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child which defines ‘children’ as persons up to the age of eighteen. The books offer opportunities to engage with emerging ideas, questions and practices. They will help those studying childhood, or living and working with children, to become familiar with challenging work, to engage with findings and to reflect on their own ideas, experiences and ways of working. Phil Jones UCL Institute of Education, University College London

Preface and Acknowledgements

In the late 1980s, Ruth Loshak, my tutor, mentor and friend, recommended I read two books: one was Richards and Light’s Children of Social Worlds, the other was Henriques, Hollway, Urwin, Venn, and Walkerdine’s Changing the Subject: Psychology, Social Regulation and Subjectivity – if only because the title was so brilliantly imaginative! If I recall correctly, she said that Richards and Light’s work was associated with a group of academics who met regularly down the road from where I was writing a thesis and they were actively challenging many of the received, developmentalist ways of seeing children and childhood. I didn’t meet or attend the group and I can only surmise who they were; but, I like to think that the conjunction of ideas and place was fortunate and locates me as an interested bystander at the birth of an endeavour that continues to fire my imagination and curiosity. I did, however, spend a long afternoon reading through Valerie Walkerdine’s brilliant deconstruction of Piagetian developmentalism and its method­ ological insertion into the everyday practice of the sort of primary school classrooms I then worked in; and it replenished resources of hope during a time when the pickings in the educational landscape were otherwise slim. Joining the institution that was to become London Metropolitan University some ten years later allowed these partially dormant seeds to germinate under the multidisciplinary imagination of Chris Richards and Simon PrattAdams whose stewardship of the Education Studies programme was always open to new lights and fresh ideas. Thus, finding effective ways to bringing the insights of the new social studies of childhood to students, many of whom were steeped in developmentalism and its presumptions, became central to my reading, thinking and teaching as I developed seminars for a module simply entitled ‘Childhood’ that became a regular twice-yearly fixture. A sustained diet of Burman, James, Jenks, Prout et al. was supplemented by a module entitled ‘A Cultural Geography of Childhood’ and between them they allowed the selection and refinement of material from which this book has its origins – it also brought me back to my own roots

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as an undergraduate geography student. However, it seems that in a parallel academic universe this fresher iconoclastic approach to understanding children’s lives has been matched by a recrudescence of developmentalism, attachment theory and the orthodoxies surrounding the psychological child as the Every Child Matters agenda and the Early Childhood Studies courses that support it have hit their stride. While so much has been achieved in the wake of this agenda – not least in the recognition given to those who work with and for children – the seemingly unbridgeable separation between Early Childhood Studies and the New Childhood Studies is at best unhelpful and cries out for dialogue and mutual understanding if not, actual resolution – perhaps this book’s attention to spatiality can contribute to this – with benefits for all. I am indeed very fortunate to be part of an excellent Education Studies team at London Met and despite difficult times it is unequivocally the case that teaching, learning and writing with them marks the high point of my career. My gratitude for their constant inspiration goes to Sandra Abegglen, Heather Allison, Adam Beck, Tom Burns, Jessie Bustillos, Peter Cunningham, Pam Dix, Nathan Fretwell, Aminul Hoque, Stuart Isaacs, Belinda John Baptiste, Naveed Kazmi, Paul McGilchrist, Monica Mottin, Professor Eileen O’Keeffe, Rossana Perez-del-Aguila, Christopher Ryan, Sandra Sinfield, Patrick Turner and Georgie Wemyss. They generate an intellectual culture at the UK’s most authentic university within which critical scholarly endeavour flourishes in spite of a straitening political climate; but, I hope they will forgive me when they see how I have shamelessly borrowed from them in the pages that follow! However, the period between completion of the manuscript for this book and publication saw the tragic and all too sudden death of our colleague and friend Dr Tözün Issa – aspects of whose work can be found in these pages. Tözün’s commitment to his students was unshakeable as was his scholarly tenacity in making multilingual learners and supplementary schooling visible in the UK and well beyond. Tözün was dedicated to achieving a fairer, kinder and more socially just world, we miss him sorely but his legacy remains to inspire us all. No book for students at large would be possible without the enthusiasm and inquisitiveness of my students in particular, and I am indebted to Imogen Bradley and Gemma Capper for taking time to read drafts and offer much valued comments; I wish them well as their careers unfold. My gratitude goes to Professor Phil Jones for his generous encouragement and honestly constructive editorial guidance that has seen the manuscript from early proposal to completion; similarly to Alison Baker, Jyoti Basuita,



Preface and Acknowledgements xiii

Rachel Shillington, the designers and all at Bloomsbury along with Kim Storry and Ronnie Hanna at Fakenham Prepress Solutions for keeping me on track and seeing things through so effectively. I want to say thank you to Terry Clark and Richard Cousins who kept step with me for much of the way and have been the best of companions. Finally, this book is completed just as our children embark on their lives beyond the family home and I am, as ever, grateful for the love, encouragement and intelligent insight shown by Mandy Maidment not only throughout its writing, but also because, like her own mother, she has raised Alex and Laurence untroubled by the vicissitudes of modern childhood and its anxious rationalities. I hope this book proves helpful in some way to them and to all who read it. David Blundell

Part I Debates, Dilemmas and Challenges: Childhood and the Place of Children

1 Introduction

Chapter outline This opening chapter establishes terms for a critical examination of children’s spaces and places and for the contribution that attention to spatiality can make to understanding their lives. Discussion of Dennis Potter’s Blue Remembered Hills serves to introduce key themes around the representation of childhood as a naturalized and separate space yet one that is always in an uneasy dualistic relation with adulthood and adult-world concerns. Questions surrounding a philosophical interest in the meaning of a good childhood – as a glimpse into raw human nature – and how children might actually feel about their lives are introduced along with the frequent tensions between these things. The condition of childhood is discussed in relation to recent evidence from UNICEF and other sources. The chapter is structured around the following key themes and questions: Setting the scene 4 How are children and childhood represented in space and place?5 Why should we be concerned about the quality of children’s lives?8 How does this book approach rethinking children’s spaces and places?10 Reflecting on keywords 12 Further reading 12



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Rethinking Children’s Spaces and Places

Setting the scene Curiosity about the world and our place within it seems to come readily to human beings and at the heart of this lies a complementary curiosity about what sort of creatures we are. Current upheavals and concerns across the globe, however, point to quite profound differences in how human cultures have addressed and continue to answer questions about where we stand in the world, whether there is a world beyond this one, how we should live with other humans and other forms of life and how it is that we become conscious, social human beings. This suggests that what we are cannot be disentangled from culturally and historically constructed beliefs about what we think we are; Trigg underlines this distinction as the importance of ideas about ourselves: ‘just as important as the kind of beings we are is the kind we think we are. The ideas we have of ourselves govern the way we live our lives … Ideas of human nature are the most potent ideas there are’ (Trigg, 1994, 169 in Mills, 2000, 28). Not the least amongst the questions we ask about ourselves is how we came to be as we are; for some religion offers answers, others turn to science and evolutionary theories and for many there is a fascinating combination of the two; however, in almost all cases understanding the period of biological immaturity that is widely identified as childhood and thereby the meanings attaching to children’s lives will be implicated. This book is concerned to explore the ways in which some these meanings are translated into the spaces and places that children are required to occupy in a world that increasingly seems to corral children into formal institutions. Furthermore, armed with powerful constructions (or ways of understanding children and childhood) these institutions serve as great engines designed to produce and reproduce certain sorts of human being through methods requiring a degree of subordination and passivity that would frequently be deemed unacceptable for most other people. The book is part of a series concerned to re-examine and rethink these powerful constructions in various ways and proposes that attention to space and place – that is the spatiality of human life – not only shines fresh light on many things that otherwise pass as normal in our social worlds, but also on how children as agentic social actors live within and respond to these worlds.

Introduction 5

How are children and childhood represented in space and place? Into my heart an air that kills From yon far country blows: What are those blue remembered hills, What spires, what farms are those? That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain, The happy highways where I went And cannot come again.
(A. E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad)

Woods, fields and a broken down barn provide a setting for seven children playing somewhere in the West of England. Four of the boys career through green woods, making imaginary parachute jumps from the low-hanging branches of trees or pretend to be Spitfire pilots in echoes of the distant Second World War. This is expansive playfulness wherein the boys’ persecution of an unfortunate squirrel, along with continuous bullying banter, complement the naivety of their free range imagination in this idyllic setting. Beyond the woods and down in the valley the girls play with their china doll named Dinah accompanied by an obviously unhappy, even abused, boy nicknamed – to his obvious fury – ‘Donald Duck’ although the others also refer to him as the more humiliating ‘Quack Quack’. Seemingly, Donald would rather play with them than his more rumbustious peers and he provides opportunity for the girls to season their reconstruction of everyday domestic activity with some everyday domestic conflict between mummies and daddies that has to be drawn from life. The girls go in search of the boys, leaving Donald in the straw-filled barn with a box of matches and an interest in setting fire to things that accompanies his growing distress over the fate of his soldier father who is ‘missing in action’, believed dead or captured by the Japanese. As the group rejoins (without Donald, who remains in the barn) an alarm sounds from a nearby prisoner of war camp and they are suddenly unified by fear as they construct fantasies about a desperate, bloodthirsty escapee, and the idyllic sunlit woodland is transformed into a place of dark shadows. Their elaborate imagination drives them from the woods and back to the barn with the collective intention to pretend to be the Italian prisoner of war and, creeping up on ‘Quack Quack’, decide that it would be fun to ‘frighten



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him to death’. Just as the children arrive at the barn door and hold it closed, Donald succeeds in setting fire to its heaped up mounds of straw. By the time the children realize that the straw is ablaze, it is too late; Donald is trapped by the flames and in instinctive fear and horror the others flee to hide in a field of long grass as the barn roof collapses on the frantic, trapped boy. The children’s immediate shock and distress about what has happened to ‘P-oor old Donald’ shifts rapidly from blameful recrimination to collective denial: Audrey: ’Twasn’t our fault! John: We’ll be sure to get the blame though. You can bank on it. Peter: I byunt going to get the blame for it. I never did anything. I wasn’t even holding the door. Angela: Yes you were! Peter: No I wasn’t! I was bloody miles away! Audrey: You was with me, Peter. Wasn’t you with me? Pause Willie: We was all together. Angela: Miles away! Pause Willie: What? Angela: Well, we were! Hiding in the trees, weren’t we? John: That’s right. We didn’t see nothing. Peter (eagerly) We don’t know nothing about it, do us?

These events summarize the plot for Dennis Potter’s Blue Remembered Hills, a television play first aired by BBC on 30 January 1979 that takes its title from Housman’s poem. The play, with its deeply seated cultural ambiguities about childhood, has become something of a favourite in the amateur dramatic society repertoire perhaps because it also offers possibilities to exercise nostalgic yearning for the ‘lost content’ that so many adults feel. However, in his introduction to the play, Potter is clear that his intention was ‘to ripple the surface of naturalism’, and so to unsettle ways of seeing children and childhood that rely on the cosy ‘softened retrospection’ of adult romance that he characterizes as a ‘stagnant pool where the spawn never turns into tadpoles, let alone frogs and princes’. The play is unsettling in several senses, but not dogmatic; Potter acknowledges that adult retrospection frequently represents a sublimation of ‘the opacities of the very anxieties and aggressions which we occasionally seek to evade by means of a misplaced nostalgia for those “blue remembered hills”’, but also that

Introduction 7

we ‘experience a countervailing grace when we actually look at children at play’. In pitting ‘anxieties and aggressions’ against ‘grace’, Potter echoes the sociologist Chris Jenks’ suggestion that the adult world is conflicted between seeing children as ‘chaotic, amoral and unruly’ on the one hand and as ‘sweetness, moral purity and light’ on the other – what he identifies respectively as the Dionysian and Apollonian discourses of the child (Jenks, 2005, 62–70). Potter deepens the critical interest in childhood through an unusual device that is immediately apparent on watching – his instructions require that all of the children are played by adult actors. Potter is, in part, pragmatic about this and expresses his aversion to ‘child actors’ or in actuality ‘to their greedy, ambitious and appallingly neglectful guardians’; furthermore, it is hard to imagine a realistic depiction of fights and bullying without risking accusations of abuse. However, this casting instruction is the rippling stone he flings across the stagnant pool of childhood and which disturbs its superficial cosy romance so effectively. The presence of adult actors playing children transgresses the idyllic insularity of the children’s separated world of play and intensifies their fears about imprisoned fathers, the rumoured sexual licence of parents and the brutally violent discipline of distressed home life, underlining that these things are no less part of these children’s social worlds than they are of their parents. In casting adult actors as children, Dennis Potter turns what social scientists refer to as the adult gaze into tangible form and thereby proposes that how children are represented is a product of the ways they are seen from the standpoint of those placed in dominant positions of power, whether this be particular adults – such as parents, teachers, doctors, social workers, police and probation officers, sport coaches – or more generally the adult world and its institutions. Are we watching children in all their assumed naturalness or childhood refracted through adult eyes? Thereby Potter’s casting of adults as children not only breaches the internal completeness of the idyllic childhood world, but the plot challenges the assumed distinctiveness of children as members of a separated pre-adult world on which this completeness and separation depends. Research evidence from anthropology, human geography and across the social sciences suggests that these powerful ways of thinking may have run their course and therefore their legitimacy in shaping children’s lives. These developments underline some of the pressing reasons for the rethinking that this book series advocates.



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Why should we be concerned about the quality of children’s lives? If childhood really is a land of content, you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise when looking at evidence for the condition of children’s lives across much of the world. It is rare to follow the news on television, radio, the internet or print media and not be presented with an item where anxieties about childhood or the quality of children’s lives surface at some point. Furthermore, regardless of hard empirical evidence or sober academic discussion that often paints a more complex picture (Alexander, 2012), the popular proposition that children are being denied something called their ‘childhood’ seems to guarantee best-seller status (see Postman, 1996; Palmer, 2006; Louv, 2010; Griffiths, 2014). It passes as a truism that children have always mattered for their parents, families and communities; but the quality of childhood – as an abstract condition – seems to have come to matter more in materially wealthy societies, such as the UK and North America, than at any other time in human history. Moreover, assessments of children’s well-being, growth and fulfilment have increasingly become indistinguishable from the normative terms underlying childhood and adulthood that Max Weber would identify as ‘ideal types’. Writing in 1901, the Swedish author Ellen Key proposed that ‘The Century of Childhood’ had begun and thereby pointed to a rising tide of interest that led the American economic sociologist Viviana Zelizer (1995) to suggest that while children have become economically ‘useless’ across Euro-America, they have in turn become emotionally ‘priceless’ – a trade-off that may not have served children, families or society as well as might immediately appear. This level of concern and interest might appear to work in children’s favour; however, the emphasis placed on the pursuit of a ‘good childhood’ – as seen by the adult world – may bear limited resemblance to what children want as conscious social actors embedded in the ebb and flow of their social worlds. Indeed, the evidence suggests that despite the symbolic value placed on childhood, many children in the UK and USA are far from happy or optimistic about their lives and that society combines a sense of preciousness with paradoxical ambivalence towards many children and young people. Successive reports by UNICEF present evidence gathered by the Innocenti Research agency indicating that children in the UK and US lack confidence about their future, are unhappy about the demands

Introduction 9

of schooling and have uneasy relations with their parents and carers (UNICEF, 2007, 2013; Blundell, 2012, 2014, 125–34). The Children’s Society, a UK-based charity, published the latest of a series of international surveys examining how children felt about their well-being in 2015 (The Good Childhood Report, 2015) and found that: … children in England ranked 14th out of 15 for satisfaction with life as a whole. England was in the bottom half of the table (i.e. ranking 9 or lower out of 15) for 24 out of 30 aspects of life, with especially low rankings for children’s satisfaction with their ‘self ’ and with their school lives.

The Innocenti evidence is disputed by other surveys – notably Alexander (2012) and the Cambridge Primary Review – but the findings that children in societies such as the Netherlands, with ostensibly similar political, economic and sociological characteristics to the UK and US, demonstrate significantly higher levels of confidence and contentment with their lives must give pause for thought. A broad coalition of concern about the condition of childhood is reflected in the range of explanations advanced for the UNICEF findings. These include: anxiety about the effects of technology on healthy growth; declining engagement with the natural world; obesity, poor diets and limited exercise; the loss of respect for authority; poor education; globalization and rapid social change; early sexualization; and ruthless commercialization. After surveying the list, Alexander (2012) in the Cambridge Primary Review expressed a degree of scepticism based on the patchy empirical evidence they found for the salience of these factors, preferring to stress the impact of structural factors including the growing gap between the wealthiest and poorest members of societies such as the UK and the very real effects of continuing child poverty that neo-liberal economic policies induce (see Wilkinson and Picket, 2010, for a detailed exposition of a similar argument about inequality and its deleterious effects across society; with the implication that whilst ‘child poverty’ may be the focus for policy interventions, poor children live in poor families). What does seem to be significant, at least on a educational front, is that the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) (an international agency with global reach and firmly wedded to the extension of a free-market capitalist economic order with close resemblances to the direction in which the US, UK and other European economies have been steered since the early 1980s) found that Finland topped the league table in their quadrennial Program for International Student Assessment (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, OECD 2014), in

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which a sample of fifteen-year-olds drawn from across the world’s wealthiest countries were tested in maths, reading and writing. Furthermore, the ascendancy of Finland was achieved through a state education system with very different assumptions about teaching, learning, children and schooling than the target and assessment-driven curricula and pedagogies currently dominating schooling in the United Kingdom, Germany, France and the USA (Martens and Niemann, 2013; Richards, 2013; Carvalho and Costa, 2014).

How does this book approach rethinking children’s spaces and places? This book explores these dominant ways of thinking about children and childhood as well as the impact they have on children’s lives; it argues that the idealized or symbolic separation of children from the adult world authorizes the construction of institutions that not only enframe but also constrain and constrict children’s lives (see, inter alia, Kjørholt, 2007, in Chapter 2). Moreover, this ‘way of doing’ childhood has a specific intellectual and historical provenance with roots in the scientific revolution ushered in by the European Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and so it is more appropriate to speak of ‘modern childhood’ as a quite specific historical, geographical and cultural way of understanding children’s lives, than of ‘childhood’ per se and the assumptions of universality and naturalness that this relies upon. However, to locate modern childhood in Europe does not render it as parochial or isolated, because wherever Europeans have gone, their ideas about human nature have accompanied them not only in the material form and spatial practices of childhood institutions, but also through the ideological assumptions of documents with global reach, such as the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. The book proposes that modern childhood effected a fundamental separation of childhood from adulthood that we find represented but also challenged in Dennis Potter’s Blue Remembered Hills. Moreover, the implicit spatiality of this macro-scale, symbolic separation is worked out through the more granular, everyday material spatiality of the schools, nurseries, youth clubs, after-school clubs, playgrounds, sports fields, settings for discipline and punishment, school dining halls and so on within which children are

Introduction 11

required to pass so much of their lives and in which many of this book’s readers will spend their working lives. The book draws upon research and scholarship to suggest that critical examination of institutional spaces frequently calls into question the integrity and appropriateness of modern childhood as a symbolic space within which biologically immature humans are required to live. Furthermore, modern childhood as an ideal was only ever partially concerned with actual children and so whilst rethinking certainly has important implications for children and their lives, it also has implications for how we think about human (and non-human) life as a whole. In Part I (Chapters 1 and 2), this book explores the origins and character of the symbolic separation of childhood from the adult world and the tensions this induces between ‘the child’ as an ideal type and children as social actors. Part II (Chapter 3) introduces thinking, drawn from human geography and what has been termed the spatial turn across social sciences, about key terms including, space, place and spatiality with a concern to focus on their meaning and use rather than a search for abiding essences. The book is predicated on the conviction that the incorporation of spatialized ways of seeing enhances our insight into the way that childhood as an ideal shapes and constrains the institutionalized realities that enframe children’s lives; but also that attention to spatiality can reveal the power plays found in relations between the adult world and children and offer pointers for rethinking and change. Part II therefore provides a linguistic and conceptual toolbox through which the key issues and current concerns identified in Part III (Chapters 4, 5, 6 and 7) can be thought through. The issues and concerns addressed in Part III are: the growing ‘scholarization’ and domination of large parts of children’s lives by pupilhood (Chapter 4); concerns about where children play and particularly engagement with outdoor spaces (Chapter 5); spatiality and the reproduction of social identities, including gender, sexuality, ethnicity, disability and social class (Chapter 6); and the periodic panics about children’s supposed alienation from the natural world and why the idea of Nature is so important in the discursive construction of childhood (Chapter 7). Part III concludes by drawing the preceding evidence and arguments together through an examination of globalisation and its challenges to many long- and firmlyheld assumptions. This chapter argues that the globalised and transnational experience of many children not only encourages us to rethink the meaning and currency of modern childhood with its Eurocentric provenance, but also whether rethinking children’s place can provide a light to guide our steps as we face uncertain global futures.

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Rethinking Children’s Spaces and Places

Reflecting on keywords The following keywords and terminology have been introduced in this chapter: MM

MM

MM

MM

MM

a good childhood human nature separate space spatiality UNICEF

Look back by scanning the chapter; in a short, summative sentence describe your understanding of each term and how it has been used.

Further reading Blundell, D. (2014), ‘Childhood and Education’, in S. Isaacs, D. Blundell, A. Foley, N. Ginsburg, B. McDonough, D. Silverstone and T. Young (2014), Social Problems in the UK: An Introduction, London: Routledge. A broad introduction to childhood as a social construction and discussed in relation to social problems; including the quality of childhood, child poverty and policy responses. Jones, P. (2009), Rethinking Childhood: Attitudes in Contemporary Society, London: Continuum. First publication in the New Childhoods series. Discusses the contemporary condition of childhood as well as new approaches to challenging problems associated with children’s competence, demonisation, participation and the construction of their social identities. Concludes with a discussion of children’s ‘voice’ and rights leading into an outline of an emerging agenda for research and action. Mills, R. (2000), ‘Perspectives of Childhood’, in J. Mills and R. Mills (2000), Childhood Studies, London: Routledge. Readable introduction to a number of discursive constructions of childhood drawn from literary and similar sources.

2 Modern Childhood as a Symbolic Space and Children as Social Actors Chapter outline This chapter develops themes outlined in Chapter 1 through the work of Anne Trine Kjørholt and other theorists. ‘Modern Childhood’ as an ideal form with roots in the European Enlightenment is discussed along with the proposition that it constitutes a separated symbolic space within which biologically-immature humans are prepared for the adult world. A social constructionist approach proposes that this symbolic space structures material and abstract institutional spaces within which children are expected to live, learn, play and socialize. However, following Stainton Rogers, it is proposed that ‘the child’ as an ideal expressed through discourses of needs and rights (e.g. those found in the UNCRC) may bear little relation to real children and their lives as social actors, not least in a culturally diverse, globalizing world. The chapter prepares the ground for a spatialiszed understanding of childhood and its realisation in institutional spaces and places along with children’s responses to them. The chapter is structured around the following key themes and questions: Setting the scene What might be meant by childhood as a ‘symbolic space’? Where else is childhood represented as a separated realm with its own ‘cultural geography’?

14 16 18

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Where did a conception of ‘modern childhood’ come from and how did it develop? How do discourses of rights figure in critiques of modern childhood and can they improve children’s lives? Conclusions and where do we go from here? Reflecting on keywords and terms Further reading

20 27 34 35 35

Setting the scene I’ve always worked since I was a kid on my Dad’s boat and had my own business lobstering by the time I was 13. Funniest thing was school and the teachers; I’d be half an hour late in the morning and they’d say ‘why are you late? This happens every morning, where have you been?’ And eventually I’d had enough and just said, ‘I’ve been up since half past four on the boat and I’ve earned more in that time than you will all day.’ They didn’t know what to say, but Mum knew a teacher and wasn’t pleased when she found out! (Tom, Swanage, UK – personal communication)

Tom, skipper of a fishing boat for holiday visitors and coxswain of the local lifeboat, was not the first to discover that the demands of school and good pupilhood conflicted with the opportunities and necessities of everyday life. Elsewhere a mother complains that the demands of homework leave too little time for her nine-year-old to play and have fun, so she has instructed the school that she is making a strict spatial demarcation between home and what should be confined to school: ‘School buildings and grounds are maintained for the purpose of education and teachers are trained accordingly, the home is for family life.’ An elderly grandparent is more explicitly sceptical about education, implying that the expectations of school bear no connection to what counts as preparation for life: ‘My children never had education. I reckon education destroys a lot, I do … The young people today, the moment they sit down they got to have a book in their hands. It’s all wrong. I don’t reckon that a lot of education is any good. If you’ve always got a book in your hands you aren’t got time to do anything else’ (Blundell, 2012, 2, 102). The opinions of these school sceptics were gathered over the first decade of the twenty-first century in the UK, a country that has offered universal public education to all its children for over 130 years; furthermore, they echo



Modern Childhood as a Symbolic Space and Children as Social Actors 15

the sentiments expressed by many among that first Victorian generation of scholars and their families. The 1870 Elementary Education (or ‘Forster’) Act of Parliament made it possible for all children between the ages of five and twelve to receive basic instruction but it was ten years later, with the passage of the 1880 ‘Mundella’ Elementary Education Act, that schooling became compulsory – this did not simply change many children’s day-today routines, but also installed the bond between childhood and schooling that has become the structural norm across industrialized societies. For the first time the expectation that all of the nation’s children would be in a single institutionalized place, doing broadly the same thing for large parts of their time, allowed the establishment of a mass public, national conception of childhood centred on schooling and the extension of ‘pupilhood’ as a near universal condition. Although many children had been schooled before the passage of this legislation, schooling and childhood had not been locked in so close a symbiotic union until then and the possibilities to improve the physical condition of the nation’s young people through a raft of centrallydirected legislative interventions in public health, moral instruction and preparation for adult life quickly became clear (Foley, 2001, 9–17; Blundell, 2012, 105–15). This new universal reach, and the statistical data that accrued from health interventions, created the idea of the standard ‘child’ as template for the construction of pupilhood and school life as the normal condition for children’s lives not only in Britain, but across the USA and continental Europe as well (Abegglen and Blundell, 2016). This is not to say that like the twenty-first-century complainants, universal schooling and the necessary assimilation of children’s lives to pupilhood were welcomed by all; Tomes (1985) reports contemporary complaints from parents in the industrialized eastern USA that their erstwhile working children were being forced into school and so turned ‘from useful to useless’ people as the acquisition of skills for life was sidelined and the flow of supplementary income dried up. This chapter will examine the institutionalization of children under the guiding discipline of childhood as both an idea and an ideal designed to regulate children’s lives; furthermore, it proposes that this institutionalization effects a spatial separation of children from the flow of everyday life for large parts of their time.

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What might be meant by childhood as a ‘symbolic space’? The institutionalized separation of children that modernity effects is illustrated by Anne Trine Kjørholt in a paper exploring programmes prompted by the UNCRC and designed to promote active citizenship and participation by children in Norway and Denmark. In particular, she examines the Norwegian programme entitled ‘Try Yourself ’ in which seven- to fourteenyear-olds were invited to apply for funding to set up projects of their choice. More than 1,700 children applied and engaged in a variety of activities including tinkering with cars, establishing cafes, selling eggs and making newspapers. Kjørholt suggests, however, that although Try Yourself was rooted in the UNCRC and its declaration of children’s universal entitlement to participation, the project relied heavily on culturally specific assumptions that were not, or could not be, applicable in many other places. Kjørholt suggests that Try Yourself ’s commitment to realizing children’s agency and encouraging autonomy reinforces an established Norwegian construction of childhood as having its own distinct and separate culture from that of the adult world. However, far from being liberatory, this produces a somewhat paradoxical outcome because Try Yourself is always prone to the perception that it is about playing at real life rather than doing something authentically real; so that whilst it seeks to emphasize children’s autonomy, it actually serves to restate and reinforce their subordination to adults. Citing Olwig and Gullov (2003), KjØrholt ‘suggest[s] that the description of children and adults as separate so often found in the research literature is not a universal characteristic but one anchored in western studies and notions of childhood’. Furthermore, this separation is not an ad hoc or arbitrary outcome but the construction of childhood as an ‘imagined community’ through which children experience ‘their own authentic culture’. This serves important goals as the children’s play is put to work in the reproduction of the liberal democratic ideals that children will be expected to demonstrate when they grow up. Try Yourself may be playing at participation and active citizenship, but Kjørholt proposes that it constructs ‘childhood as a symbolic space, representing and reproducing symbolic values related to democracy, national identity, autonomy and authenticity’; in short, it offers a simulacrum within which values associated with a certain reading of what Kjørholt identifies as ‘Norwegianness’ can be promoted and Norway’s children can be reproduced as authentic adult Norwegian citizens.



Modern Childhood as a Symbolic Space and Children as Social Actors 17

Furthermore, this idealized view of childhood as separated symbolic space, with its ‘emphasis on children as claimers to rights to participation, as set out in the UN Convention’, may be at odds with other ‘forms of participation relating to children as social actors in everyday life, as unfolded in families, kindergartens, schools, local communities and society per se’ – as the examples at the start of the chapter suggest.

Reflective activity If the institutional separation from everyday life that schooling demands is challenging for many children living in wealthy ‘minorityworld’ countries – not only in Scandinavia but also the UK and US – modern childhood and its expectations of an idealized separation can serve to compound challenges for many children across the globe whose circumstances are far harder. For many in the ‘majority world’ (i.e. that part of the world where the majority of the human population – and 90 per cent of its children – live) conflicts between the demands of day-to-day economic survival and the possibilities for future personal development that education offers are stark. Indeed, Kjørholt goes on to illustrate this through the impossible tensions that surface everyday in the life of Mary, a fourteen-year-old girl from the Philippines as she juggles formal rights to education with the pressing need to support the family income through back-breaking labour (Kjørholt, 2007). Mary attended an international conference to mark the 10th anniversary of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) in 1999. Taking centre stage, Mary endorsed the importance of the programmes sponsored by UNICEF seeking the abolition of child labour, but movingly told of the conflicting demands of needing to be a child worker as well as a pupil. With reference to her personal circumstances, Mary pointed out that for children like her, abolition of child labour would impoverish her family further and undermine any chance of participation in the education she so desired because she would no longer be able to pay for it – her only option for some years had been to curtail the time she spent sleeping and combine hours in exhausting work with study time as best she could. For Mary, the idealized imperatives of modern childhood found in the UNCRC are at best meaningless and could prove harmful if applied as universal absolutes and without reference to the economic and social realities within which the many children like her live.

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MM

MM

MM

MM

Is there anything that can be done to make the rights found in the UNCRC more meaningful for Mary and her well-being? To what extent might the institutionalized ‘symbolic separation’ that Kjørholt identifies for the Scandinavian children reinforce rather than remove adult-world imperatives? Can we assume that all children will feel happy with playing at participation rather than actually participating as social actors? Might all children, families or communities in minority-world settings be happy with the notion of ‘children as claimers to rights to participation’? What happens if they are not?

These are themes that will be picked up in subsequent sections and chapters.

Where else is childhood represented as a separated realm with its own ‘cultural geography’? The separation that Kjørholt identifies as a ‘symbolic space’ is not unique to Norway and is reinforced as a pervasive theme in children’s popular media across the globe – such as children’s literature along with cinema and television made for that audience. Surveying a wide range of literary sources, Richard Mills identifies a number of discursive constructions of childhood, many of which underline children’s vulnerability and distinctiveness from the rest of the social world and hence the necessity for separation (Mills, 2000). Classic children’s literature is frequently structured around a geography or location that separates events from the wider, everyday and (implicitly adult) world. The staging of stories on island locations allows an unfolding of events that are largely untroubled by external affairs and that enfold place and narrative as a unified whole; for example, the Katie Morag stories of Mhairi Hedderwick, Enid Blyton’s ‘Kirrin Island’ or Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons. Similar sequestered spaces do not require the islanded separation that water offers but are produced by high garden



Modern Childhood as a Symbolic Space and Children as Social Actors 19

walls imagined or not – In the Night Garden and ‘Telly-Tubby Land’ offer a protective haven from the perils that are presumed to lie beyond, and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden became emblematic for childhood itself as a separated, even sequestered, space where nature and childhood came together in ways that offered redemption and healing not only for Colin’s physical disability, but also Mary’s emotional and moral ‘maladjustment’. (We shall come back to some of these ideas, including the ‘islanding’ of children, in Chapter 5, the role of separated childhood spaces in producing socially normative outcomes in Chapter 6, and the assumed close association between nature and childhood in Chapter 7.) For certain theorists and researchers of childhood, this separation is not primarily underwritten by the establishment of separate institutions of childhood or by ideological constructions found in literature and children’s media, but by the idea that children are, in themselves, a distinguishable social group with their own cultural practices and norms. Guided by an anthropological approach that suggested children can be distinguished as a distinct human ‘tribe’, Iona and Peter Opie spent a lifetime collecting, cataloguing and mapping children’s language, games, rhymes and folklore in a series of seminal works that include The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren and Playground Rhymes (see also Steve Roud’s The Lore of the Playground [2011]). The Opies’ findings suggest that children’s culture is geographically widespread and of great age; furthermore, that it has its own means of reproduction that is independent of external interests and interference from the adult world. Whether what they observed is the product of a particular way of arranging childhood, based, for example, on the relatively recent arrival of universal schooling and the separation from the adult world of labour that it encouraged, is debateable. Phillipe Aries published his seminal history of childhood in 1963 and suggested that in the medieval era society had no use for the concept of childhood. Whether this meant that children played and behaved differently is disputed by archaeologists such as Carenza Lewis, who suggests that artefacts found in excavations as well as in paintings of everyday life present evidence for play as well as the work that was their lot. However, there are examples that children’s culture is malleable and is being recruited to meet the purposes of a commercialized age; one of which involves the toys that are given away with McDonald’s Happy Meals across Scandinavia. In a chapter entitled ‘Inscribing Nordic childhoods at McDonald’s’, Helene Brembeck outlines the popular appeal of McDonald’s for many Swedish children, but also seeks to identify ‘scripts’ that can be

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read into the fast food chain’s iconography including the toy gifts. Speaking of the toys included in Happy Meal boxes, Brembeck writes: During some weeks in the spring of 2003, the included toy was Pinocchio, targeting the Swedish release of the Disney film of the same name. In the McDonald’s version, Pinocchio is transformed into a soft toy with its bottom half in the shape of a coil spring. The idea was to compress the coil spring and then to release it in order to make it jump. One could say that the toy carried a script in terms of its design, or a blueprint inscribed on the object, its shape, and expected handling. Pinocchio was obviously designed to connect to the child in certain ways – the child should grab its upper parts and press the coil spring down to make it jump … Thus one might argue that Pinocchio facilitated a certain kind of child subjectivity – an activityseeking, pleasure-hunting type of child. Inscribed on Pinocchio is thus not only an idea of how to make an attractive toy but also a blueprint of a child supposed to be attracted by this jumping plaything – supposedly a child embracing activity, happenings, speed, and experience. (Bembreck, 2008)

Brembeck argues that not only are ideal Swedish childhood identities affirmed through the ‘script’ or blueprint for childhood inscribed in these toys, but also the fast-food chain forms a symbolic partnership with Swedish national consciousness (in Gutman and De Coninck-Smith, 2008, 269–81) that also relies implicitly on assumptions about childhood as a separated world. Prout (2005) explores similar themes in his discussion of the future of childhood by examining changes to the objects, such as children’s toys, that contribute to what Affrica Taylor calls ‘the bricolage’ (after the anthropologist Levy Strauss) or assemblages of mundane artefacts that not only populate and identify children’s worlds but also mark them out as separate from the realm of adulthood.

Where did a conception of ‘modern childhood’ come from and how did it develop? In their seminal ‘New Paradigm for the Sociology of Childhood’, Alan Prout and Allison James championed a social constructionist approach to understanding the meanings attaching to childhood and its place in the way society sees, thinks about and provides for the biologically-immature



Modern Childhood as a Symbolic Space and Children as Social Actors 21

human beings we call children. Their position on the social construction of childhood is set out, thus: The immaturity of children is a biological fact of life but the ways in which this immaturity is understood and made meaningful is a fact of culture … [i]t is these ‘facts of culture’ which may vary and which can be said to make of childhood a social institution. It is in this sense, therefore, that one can talk of the social construction of childhood and also … of its re- and deconstruction.’ (Prout and James, 1997, 7)

The implication of this is that social constructionists reject the essentialist belief in childhood as a natural and universal phenomenon and the assumption that the biological immaturity of children interprets itself for us; rather, social constructionists are interested in what childhood means within a particular social context. Therefore they propose that how we provide for children and young people’s lives, including the spaces and places designed and intended for them, is a matter of cultural, historical and linguistic interpretation and usage and, as such, draws upon religious, philosophical and practical traditions as well as being shaped by economic and social imperatives. Prout and James are anxious to clarify and underline the importance of this distinction between biological and cultural facts: ‘Childhood, as distinct from biological immaturity, is neither a natural nor universal feature of human groups but appears as a specific structural and cultural component of many societies’ (ibid., 8). Thereby they acknowledge social difference from the outset and open up the possibilities for a more anthropological and historical approach to understanding childhood and the position that children occupy within a society. This includes what may seem the challenging idea that the claims to universality and naturalness found in developmentalist theorization (such as found for example in Piaget’s stages), and by which so much provision for children and young people in institutions (such as nursery or school) is justified, are no less culturally and historically specific ways of thinking about children than any others. So although they would seem to oppose the social constructionist account, these essentialist accounts also represent ‘specific structural and cultural component[s]’ of the societies in which they are found. Social constructionism does not say Piagetian developmentalism, the assumptions about symbolic separation underpinning Try Yourself or other naturalized narratives for childhood, are wrong and need to be replaced by better or improved theories. Rather, it points out their provenance as social,

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historical and philosophical products and by questioning their claims to universality and truth encourages consideration of whether they could or should be different than they are. Going back to Prout and James, biology provides raw facts about immaturity but these facts do not interpret themselves for us; rather, human societies employ cultural assumptions and preferences to interpret their meanings and construct provision for children – indeed, social constructionists point to diversity in the interpretation of whether a person is a child or not and that this can lead to interesting ambiguities, for example is a fourteen-year-old a child or not, and do answers based on interpretations of legal, intellectual, economic, social, sexual and physical facts all lead to the same answer? Historical and cross-cultural evidence suggests that the answer is not simple. It is argued here that so much that underpins the assumptions about naturalness and universality found in documents like the UNCRC and minority-world child-rearing practice come out of the intellectual, social and economic convictions at the heart of the European Enlightenment and that what is passed off as ‘childhood’ per se is an historical and culturally specific phenomenon that many critical theorists increasingly describe as ‘modern childhood’. The Enlightenment marked a transformation in the intellectual, commercial and social affairs of Europe over the course of the eighteenth century. This followed on the heels of the Renaissance that brought the medieval period to a close along with the brutal shadow cast over much the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by the Reformation’s religious strife. The Enlightenment and the era of Modernity that it ushered in saw the birth of modern humanism founded on ideas of reason and progress that placed humans at the centre of the natural order and installed the conviction that nature could be improved to the great benefit of humankind. It is the era in which modern science, characterized by a technical-rational understanding of the universe, becomes a source of dominant and iconoclastic authority rivalling the religious convictions of earlier generations. Out of this comes the Industrial Revolution, free market economics and revolutionary politics that were accompanied by the shadow of racial and misogynistic theories claiming to set white northern European males over all others and justified the exploitative subjugation of non-Europeans and the natural world in pursuit of power and wealth (Porter, 2001). It is within this environment that children and childhood become focal objects for intellectual interest and philosophical attention: first, their youthfulness seemed to offer opportunities to glimpse untainted human



Modern Childhood as a Symbolic Space and Children as Social Actors 23

nature and thereby offer insights to fuel urgent debates about what sort of things people are; second, when combined with the potential held out by their incipient growth, these insights held out the chance that children and education would provide the key to human improvement physically, intellectually and morally. Philosophers, such as John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, together with their adherents and critics such as the Lovell Edgeworths, Johann Pestalozzi, Hannah More and Froebel, therefore engaged in debates across Europe about the proper education, care and discipline of children that were predicated on the construction of ‘modern childhood’ as a naturalized, universal and rational way of seeing and providing for children (Blundell, 2012). The word ‘modern’ has a complex usage and expresses ideas that are powerfully important for a society dazzled by the idea of reason, progress and improvement; in everyday speech it has a moral overtone and we frequently not only use it to describe things that are bang up to date, but also to diminish and reject that which is characterized as ‘old-fashioned’ – giving rise to the rhetorically powerful idea of modernization. The idea of ‘modern childhood’ embodies many of these meanings and refers to the way of seeing children and their childhood that are consistent with the Enlightenment’s project to improve human nature. This eighteenth-century philosophical interest in children becomes allied to nineteenth-century methods of scientific enquiry that treated children as objects of interest and raw material for detached observation, measurement and theorization (see Stainton Rogers, 2009). Thus through scientific processes and rational philosophical speculation modernity gets to work to produce an objectified ‘child’ that is the sum of these scientific knowledges. This idealized ‘child’ provides a template to guide the way that institutions such as hospitals, schools and nurseries ensure the health, education and care of children. Wendy Stainton Rogers (2009) asserts that the Enlightenment constructs this idealized child around a list of needs that must be fulfilled if children are to grow healthily and so become normal, balanced, intelligent adults able to take their place in the social world. These needs provide the fine detail for conceptions of normal growth underlying the developmental theories that have become so assimilated to the practices and working assumptions of institutions of childhood that their cultural and historical origins have largely become invisible. It should be said that just as the Enlightenment subordinated women and non-Europeans, this reduction of children to lists of needs to be fulfilled also subordinated them as human capital in the making, but not yet made.

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An example of a needs-driven approach to understanding the meaning of a good childhood comes from recurring debates about the relationship between children and the natural world. There is an argument that children do not merely enjoy playing in wild places but that they need these experiences if they are to grow healthily and to reach fulfilled adulthood; thus meeting needs becomes associated with ideal children’s environments and thereby the spatiality of a fulfilled childhood. The origins and veracity of these arguments are explored in Chapter 7. However, this presumed special relationship between exposure to nature – green spaces, animals and outdoor education – and children’s well-being was recently discussed in a review of literature undertaken by Taylor and Kuo (2006); note the frequent references to ‘need’.

Example of research Taylor, A. F. and Kuo, F. E., ‘Is Contact with Nature Important for Healthy Child Development? State of the Evidence’, in Spencer, C. and Blades, M. (2006), Children and their Environments: Learning, Using and Designing Spaces, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taylor and Kuo begin their review thus: For many of us, intuition emphatically asserts that nature is good for children. We hold intuitions such as, ‘every kid needs a dog’, ‘children need a nice yard to play in’, and ‘children need “fresh air”’. Beyond these intuitions, there are also well-reasoned theoretical arguments as to why humans in general – and therefore children – might have an inborn need for contact with nature … But what do we really know about the value of nature in promoting child development? What systematic evidence is there for or against this possibility? Is children’s need for nature established fact, yet-to-be substantiated folk theory, or simply myth? The authors then set out to examine the evidence for the popular assertion that children need nature for their healthy development but are also mindful of the putative evidence suggesting that children spend less time in the natural world than is good for them. A fundamental opposition for the authors is between what they call ‘programmed activities’ and ‘exploring or free play outdoors’.



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Their review of ‘green space’ research broadly covers wilderness programmes, outdoor education, play and therapeutic interventions. The place of animals is largely discussed in terms of whether there are particular affective and therapeutic benefits that children derive from their relationships. We should note that although Taylor and Kuo’s review focuses particularly on children’s engagement with green space and animals, the authors (along with many others in this debate) risk conflating play in the natural world with the wider range of possibilities linked to playing outdoors – clearly, they may not be the same thing and it does not follow that a decline in one means an absence of the other. However, whilst their review of a number of studies seems inconclusive, Taylor and Kuo cling to their original convictions and maintain qualified support for the thesis: While we await more carefully controlled studies providing evidence of a causal relationship, current evidence suggests that the general hypothesis may be correct: contact with nature is supportive of healthy child development in several domains – cognitive, social and emotional. Until proven otherwise, we can continue to assume, just as they need good nutrition and adequate sleep, children may very well need contact with nature. (Taylor and Kuo, 2006, 136) A more recent study (Carrus et al., 2012) attempts to offer evidence for a causal relationship, and examined the performance of sixteen children in tests on positive social relations, stress reduction and performance in visual spatial tasks following opportunities to play in open green space. The researchers found generally positive correlations in the first two areas, but were less than certain about the second. Once again, despite the less than ringing endorsement of the proposition found in their research, they remain unmoved in their conviction that children need green space. Taken together, our preliminary results seem to confirm how the fruition of green external spaces in educational settings might have a positive effect on preschool children social behaviours and performances … [O]ur findings suggest how educational settings for younger children, such as day care centres, should be provided with an adequate amount of external green spaces (emphasis mine).

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Reflection Read through the evidence presented by Taylor and Kuo. How far do you feel statements of children’s needs are linked to moralizing shoulds – whether explicitly or not – and does this strengthen or weaken the arguments for you? The authors maintain their convictions about the importance of playing in green spaces even though the findings of the research are mixed. Under these circumstances, why do you feel they err on the side of acceptance rather than rejection?

For Stainton Rogers the appeals to need that underpin and justify developmental theories are neither natural nor universal, but derive from a particular culturally-laden and socially constructed way of seeing human beings driven by what she calls the discourse of needs. Furthermore, she makes an interesting comparison between children and the way that science treated plants and animals in natural history when she suggests that ‘the child’ is produced through a taxonomic approach (or one based on a classification) of needs. The upshot is that modern childhood and the discourse of needs constructs the ideal child as passive, incompetent and separated from the real world of everyday affairs – on the road to full status as a human rather than already being there (see Kjørholt, 2007, above). However, Stainton Rogers proposes that this is not so much how children are, but how the power mediated by institutions makes them, and social norms are reproduced: Critics of developmental theorizing – especially developmental psychology – argue that we need to counteract such enchantment by drawing on theories that look at issues of power. They therefore require us to acknowledge the extent to which children’s ‘incompetence’ may be a matter of powerlessness, which may be less a matter of their immaturity than of the way in which adults deny children power, all in the name of ‘doing what is in their best interests’. (Stainton Rogers, 2001, 212)

The extent to which the discourse of needs shapes decisions about children’s ‘best interests’ is underlined by Nikolas Rose in his seminal work Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self, where he observes that:



Modern Childhood as a Symbolic Space and Children as Social Actors 27

Childhood is the most intensively governed sector of personal existence … The modern child has become the focus of innumerable projects that purport to safeguard it from physical, sexual, or moral danger, to ensure its ‘normal’ development, to actively promote certain capacities of attributes such as intelligence, educability, and emotional stability. (Rose, 1999, 124)

Much of this intense governance of children’s lives is not only experienced and mediated through the rules, practices and social norms of childhood institutions, but also through their spatiality with evidence that it is growing. Children’s lives seem rarely to be their own and are the focus for competing claims by parents, educators, health workers, politicians and so on, not only about what is good for them, but also about how the health, wealth and economic survival of particular societies and (even) the world at large can be secured. Hence the intellectual history of the Enlightenment is not a mere sideshow to discussion of children’s spaces and places but provides the starting point for thinking how institutions seek to reproduce modern childhood and fulfil its taxonomies of needs in pursuit of the perfected adult. A purpose of this book is to examine how these processes of reproduction are achieved through the spatiality of institutions, but to encourage rethinking about how this might be different and how childhood institutions might be brought into closer alignment with the actuality of many children’s lives as social actors.

How do discourses of rights figure in critiques of modern childhood and can they improve children’s lives? The ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) in 1989 presented a concerted challenge to the assumptions about passivity and incompetence found in scientifically-driven developmentalism and the idealized Child that it was predicated upon. By contrast, the child found at the heart of the UNCRC was affirmed as a rights-bearing subject and presumed to be actively engaged in the construction of social worlds (Scholte, 2005, 343). This affirmation authorized children’s entitlement to active partici­ pation across a number of spheres, and appears in Articles 12, 13 and 14:

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Article 12 (respect for the views of the child): Every child has the right to say what they think in all matters affecting them, and to have their views taken seriously. Article 13 (freedom of expression): Every child must be free to say what they think and to seek and receive all kinds of information, as long as it is within the law. Article 14 (freedom of thought, belief and religion): Every child has the right to think and believe what they want and also to practise their religion, as long as they are not stopping other people from enjoying their rights. (summarized by UNICEF, 2012, CRCSummary_2012.indd)

The UNCRC is the most widely endorsed human rights instrument in history, so that following adoption in 2015 by Somalia and South Sudan, the USA is notable for its failure to sign up to it; however, the universal acceptance that this seems to imply has much in common with the assumptions about naturalness and universality that were located within the Enlightenment vision for children and childhood that we examined earlier. Indeed, as we have seen from Kjørholt’s work, tensions can arise around the implementation of universalized rights to participation when very different economic, cultural and social circumstances apply across minority and majority-world contexts. However, despite its universalism the ratification of the UNCRC was simultaneously accompanied by the emergence of a broadly-based critical coalition of academic interests that challenged key tenets of modern childhood, especially developmentalism and socialization theories that seemed to have sewn up the possibilities for understanding children and defined the terms by which a good childhood should be evaluated. This area has come to be known as the New Social Studies of Childhood and embraces sociological, anthropological, philosophical and critical psychological voices along with children’s geographies (as a sub-discipline of human geography). This coalition of interest began to form in the 1980s and was catalysed by the burgeoning body of theoretical insights from radical feminism and the purchase these offered for understanding and liberating subordinated groups. This developing body of critical theory shared a common commitment to the agency of children and the desire to recognize their rights and capacity to participate as social actors. In this, exponents of this emerging area frequently combine a commitment to rights with an endorsement of difference that can, self-evidently, prove problematic. Impetus and direction was lent to the work of the ‘new’ childhood studies



Modern Childhood as a Symbolic Space and Children as Social Actors 29

by the publication of Alan Prout and Allison James’ ‘New Paradigm for the Sociology of Childhood’ in 1990 and again in 1997. Although the ‘New Paradigm’ was explicitly social constructionist and stressed a view of childhood as a culturally and historically relative phenomenon, it also contained explicitly moralizing prescriptions for how children and childhood should be seen as social actors in its third proposition; and, for participation and agency in proposition 4: 3. Children’s social relationships and cultures are worthy of study in their own right, independent of the perspective and concerns of adults.

and … 4. Children are and must be seen as active in the construction and determination of their own social lives, the lives of those around them and of the societies in which they live. Children are not just the passive subjects of social structures and processes.

Furthermore, proposition 5 asserts that ethnographic research methods are desirable because they allow ‘children a more direct voice and participation in the production of social data’, thus fulfilling the rights to participation found in the UNCRC. The tensions between the cultural relativism found in social constructionism and what seem to be non-negotiable morally-founded commitments to children’s rights have presented difficulties. Like the UNCRC, problems of acceptance arise when the entitlements enshrined in both the Convention and ‘New Paradigm’ contradict or challenge long-established cultural norms and expectations. Indicative of this is that despite Ghana being the first country to ratify the UNCRC and enshrine it within its constitution, acceptance of certain aspects of the Convention have proved controversial at community and grassroots level. Research by a prominent Ghanaian anthropologist named Afua Twum-Danso, with a particular interest in children and childhood, points to the challenges that the right to participation can present. In particular, she found that ‘The idea of children having rights a priori was often met with rejection during the data collection process for this study’ and participants stressed the importance of reciprocity; that is, driven by a ‘belief that rights, or better still entitlements, come along with duties’ participants articulated a conviction that children’s entitlement to participation should be counterbalanced by a reciprocal obligation to show respect and act with a sense of responsibility to others. Twum-Danso (2009, 426–9; and see Montgomery and Cornock, 2013) found that the families and communities

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she conducted her research with saw the relationship more in terms of a contract between generations than unconditional entitlements that could only lead to conflict and social disruption. A particularly telling observation reported by Twum-Danso that also serves as a commentary on the UNCRC was that ‘several adults stated at various times during the research that, “we do not want Western children here in Ghana”. The implication behind this statement is that they believe that in Western countries children expect their entitlements, but do not give anything in return’ (see also Blundell, 2014, 119). However, the objection to raising ‘Western children’ expressed by Twum-Danso’s interlocutors reflects criticism not just of the UNCRC’s content, but more fundamental disagreements with the historical and cultural provenance of the broad set of values on which it is founded. Other critics suggest that the universality of its convictions and the authority of its assumed rationality and naturalness are, once again, closely linked to Europe and its Enlightenment and therefore that it represents an ethnocentric document and part of continuing attempts at colonial domination, albeit long after political independence had been gained. De Boeck and Honwara, writing from the standpoint of Sub-Saharan Africa, take up this theme and suggest that the emphasis on children as agents with entitlements but not enmeshed in reciprocating networks that require them to demonstrate responsibility renders them: … as pre-social and passive recipients of experience. They are portrayed as dependent, immature, and incapable of assuming responsibility, properly confined to the protection of home and school. (De Boeck and Honwara, 2005, 12)

The resulting confinement in home and school and thereby separation from the ebb and flow of the wider social world is an ironic outcome given the stated intention of the UNCRC to realize children’s agency; yet, this echoes Kjørholt where she points to the way that children are confined to separated environments where real life is approached through the simulated world of play. Like Kjørholt, De Boeck and Honwara locate the childhood that this represents historically, socially and (importantly) geographically by indicting its Eurocentrism; furthermore, they underline that modern childhood is a double-edged ideal and by pointing to the jeopardy risked by those children and young people who do not conform to it, it is far from benign in all its implications: This concept developed amongst the middle class in Europe and North America and has been universalized in such a way that youngsters who



Modern Childhood as a Symbolic Space and Children as Social Actors 31

do not follow this path are considered either to be at risk or to pose a risk to society. Children who are ‘out of place’ … who do not readily fit within Western cultural fantasies of children as innocent and vulnerable, are quickly perceived as demonic, discontented and disorderly and are often feared and punished as a consequence. (De Boeck and Honwara, 2005, 12)

De Boeck and Honwara’s work reveals the powerful binary dualism that stalks modern childhood and assigns either angelic or demonic status to children and young people – respectively informed in the popular imagination by what Chris Jenks called the discourses of the Apollonian and the Dionysian child (Jenks, 2005, 62–5). Furthermore, they suggest that the rights-based conception of children and childhood is not merely ethnocentric, but also has a social class dimension that generates difficulties where the ethos of an institution, such as a school, is not shared by the values and practices of those who attend it, whether this is in the majority or minority world. Just as institutionalized childhoods can alienate working-class children and families in minority-world settings – because of differences in parenting and familial arrangements – so a transnational global elite will feel comfortable in establishing Western-style nurseries and other institutions for middle-class children in majority world settings that may trample local values and traditions. The common issue here is about objections to a ‘one-size-fits-all’ template-childhood based on the values and practices of particular cultural elites and, returning to Stainton Rogers’ argument, the way that social power is exercised through it (these themes will be picked up in Chapters 4 and 6). Alongside these tensions around cultural values and social class, there can be conflicts arising from the exercise of the very agency by children and young people that is advocated by the UNCRC and by the New Social Studies of Childhood. Research by Lorenzo Bordonaro points to the tensions that can arise between children’s in principle entitlement to be active constructors of their worlds and the worlds they actually construct for themselves. Bordonaro (2012) looks at so-called ‘street-children’ in the Cape Verde islands and examines some of the tensions between agency as expressed in the UNCRC and their unwillingness to give up their life on the street. Bordonaro found that children were not simply pushed through poverty towards the street as their living environment, but also pulled by a combination of the economic possibilities they found there and an independence that allowed their ‘love of freedom’ to flourish and which they highly prized. Here were children displaying a form of agency that

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was problematically at odds with that championed by adult social workers because of its association with unchildlike risks and resistance to accepting adult patronage. However, Bordonaro found that these children felt the lives they lived offered a better option than the ‘redemption’ on offer from more familiar institutional arrangements; attempts by social workers to extract them from their life on the street and enrol them in institutions frequently concerned with ‘child-saving’ met with determined resistance because they believed that this would plunge them back into a childhood of dependency and assumed incompetence. Bordonaro stresses that we should be wary of romanticizing the decisions made by these young people, but see them as rational responses to chronic poverty in their extended families and communities. Further, although regarded as stereotypically ‘at risk’ they maintained varying degrees of association with their close and extended families and were neither isolated nor alone. The differing economic arrangements surrounding these children’s lives emphasize the complexity of the social networks within which they continue to be enmeshed; furthermore, their location in these networks also reveals the reductive connotations of ‘street children’ as an imposed label and its denial of their status as full social actors.

Reflection The UNCRC and the New Social Studies of Childhood place great emphasis on children’s agency, challenge assumptions of passivity required by many institutional arrangements for ‘modern childhood’ and promote the idea of children’s entitlement to participation as social actors. However, Kirsi Pauliina Kallio notes that ‘children’s counter-knowledges that do not endorse, follow or conform to the “UNCRC childhood” are typically disqualified as the children’s voice’ and, further on, that ‘ [l]istening to children’s voices … implies that children are heard in their daily environments in all situations and not merely through (semi-)official consultation procedures and participatory projects. Ideally, their experiences, understandings and views should inform all practices, decision-making and planning concerning childhood in general and children’s lived worlds in particular, including those linked to their protection and provision – on all spatial scales’ (Kallio, 2011). A social worker in Bordonaro’s study remarks, ‘The main trouble



Modern Childhood as a Symbolic Space and Children as Social Actors 33

with reintegrating street children is that once they experience life on the street, they start liking it and it is difficult then to get them out of the street. Some become drug addicts, making it even more difficult. Principally, unrestrained freedom is what makes life on the street appealing to children.’ MM

MM

MM

To what extent might social workers’ duty to listen found in the UNCRC be at odds with their responsibility to care? Is there a right or wrong sort of agency and what are the risks? Does this shed further light on the conflict between idealized childhoods as separated ‘symbolic space’ and children as social actors in everyday socially-networked spaces that Kjørholt refers to?

Wendy Stainton Rogers takes up the arguments surrounding the emphasis on rights and entitlements found in the UNCRC and elements of the New Social Studies of Childhood and how these might fail to connect with the actuality of children’s lives. This is because although these interventions challenge the discourse of needs that is associated with the scientific approaches found in developmentalism and that underwrite the claims to naturalization found in modern childhood, what Stainton Rogers calls the discourse of rights also relies on a taxonomic approach. In this case, children are understood and provided for through a list of rights and entitlements in place of needs. Indeed, although framed as rights, the articles of the UNCRC gain their authority from an implicit appeal to needs lurking behind them; furthermore, as in Kjørholt’s work, although these rights also construct childhood as a symbolic and separated space, real life all too often intrudes. Stainton Rogers (2009) proposes that in place of the discourses of needs and rights that reproduce this unhelpful dualism – objectifying and separating children in the process – we should turn our attention to what she calls the ‘quality of life’ discourse with its capacity not only to recognize the diversity of children’s lives, but also their embeddedness in social networks and the very obvious resilience that many are required to show in navigating everyday life and shaping their futures. This is what Stainton Rogers says: [P]roponents argue that the concept of quality of life – because it specifically acknowledges the variability of value systems – allows us to move beyond the

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ethnocentric concerns of the needs and rights discourses. It also acknowledges, in a way that the other discourses fail to address, that children’s welfare is always contextual. It cannot be fostered in isolation, but has to take into account the concerns, values, resources and limitations of the families and communities in which children are reared and cared for. (Stainton Rogers, 2009, 153)

This explicitly locates children as social actors and seeks to understand their lives as constituted by and constituting what social scientists might describe as synchronous social networks; that is, networks of here-and-now shared meaning.

Conclusions and where do we go from here? The end of this chapter also marks the end of Part I, and building on Chapter 1 has proposed that childhood is a socially constructed way of making sense of the biological facts of human immaturity; this means that it should always be understood in relation to historical, cultural and philosophical circumstances rather than assumed to be a natural and universal condition. The chapter introduces the idea that the European Enlightenment and its scientific revolution separated children from the rest of humankind to produce a condition that is increasingly identified as ‘modern childhood’. This condition is underpinned by an idealized object called ‘the child’ whose characteristics are understood through taxonomies of needs and rights that are yet to be fulfilled and are frequently at odds with understanding children as complete people. It is suggested that examining the spatiality of children’s lives invites greater attention to the quality of their relationships and well-being in the here-and-now, not least because crucial differences in the way that power is distributed become clearer. However, whilst the book addresses itself to important questions, it neither seeks nor offers clear-cut answers that can be translated formulaically into policy or practice; indeed, it offers no new theories about children in any conventional sense, but does attempt to encourage readers to consider how they think about theory and evaluate whether it helps, as Wittgenstein put it, ‘to show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle’. Consequently, the book contains few, if any, practical tips or recipes for transformation to be imposed on children – we have probably all experienced far too many of these – but rather offers research



Modern Childhood as a Symbolic Space and Children as Social Actors 35

evidence that provokes curiosity. It is, therefore, as concerned to endorse the legitimacy, agency and diversity of children’s lives as that of its readers, especially those working with children and young people.

Reflecting on keywords and terms The following keywords and terminology have been introduced in this chapter: MM

MM

MM

MM

MM

MM

MM

MM

Enlightenment institutional spaces modern childhood needs and rights social actors social constructionist symbolic space UNCRC

Look back by scanning the chapter; in a short, summative sentence, describe your understanding of each term and how it has been used.

Further reading Jones, P. and G. Welch (2011), Rethinking Children’s Rights: Attitudes in Contemporary Society, London: Continuum. This discusses the historical background to children’s rights as well as their contemporary condition in the UK and then tackles some of the tensions and debates surrounding them. It addresses questions concerning the ‘child’s voice’, rights and decision-making and family life as well the implications for those who work with children. The whole argument is closely informed by research. Kehily, M. J. (2009), An Introduction to Childhood Studies, Maidenhead: Open University Press. Strong introduction to the study of childhood with authoritative chapters from leading lights across this broad multidisciplinary field. Kehily, M. J. (2013), Understanding Childhood: A Cross-Disciplinary Approach, Bristol: Policy Press. A multidisciplinary introduction to the study of childhood with chapters on historical, anthropological and sociocultural approaches to understanding

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children’s lives as well as a discussion of the recurrent theme of ‘crisis’ and approaches to research with children. Pacini-Kethchabaw, V. and A. Taylor (eds) (2015), Unsettling the Colonial Places and Spaces of Early Childhood Education, New York: Routledge. A searching examination of modern childhood and its association with political and social projects to colonize spaces, places and cultural identities of indigenous populations across Australasia and North America by European settler societies. The essays are rooted in the concerns and practices of early childhood educators and open up ways to see children’s lives and education that are not dominated by imposed and restrictive Western developmentalist norms. These chapters have relevance not only to those working with children in indigenous communities or where cultural diversity is found, but have implications for all.

Part II The Issues and Debates Defined: Space, Place and Spatiality

3 Spatiality and Understanding Children’s Lives Chapter outline This chapter presents key themes, vocabulary and theoretical languages that will pressed into use through the rest of the book to make sense of children’s spaces and places and facilitate rethinking. The work of Soja, Lefebvre, Giddens and Foucault is drawn on to justify and explain what has been called ‘the spatial turn’ in the social sciences along with theorization concerning space and place from the geographers Teather and Massey. This provides a framework for a spatialized contribution to understanding children’s lives and childhood as social constructions. Concepts of ‘lived space’, ‘rites of passage’, embodiment, space/place, activity space, relational space and discursive spaces are explored and illustrated through research about school seclusion units as relatively new institutions of childhood and youth. The chapter concludes with the work of Matthews and Limb and their seminal contribution to understanding children’s geographies. The chapter is structured around the following key themes and questions: Setting the scene What do space, place and other key concepts mean and how can they be used as a language to discuss and rethink children’s lives? What can spatiality contribute to understanding children’s lives? Chapter summary Chapter activity Reflecting on keywords and terms Further reading

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41 54 60 60 61 62

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Setting the scene In Chapter 2 the idea of ‘modern childhood’ as a socially constructed way of seeing children’s lives with philosophical, social and economic roots in the European Enlightenment was introduced along with the suggestion that this supported a marked separation of children from many aspects of social and economic life. This separation is viewed with a degree of concern by those, like the sociologist Berry Mayall, who argue that modern childhood increasingly contains children in institutions, such as schools, that dominate their lives; so that we are witnessing what she calls an increasing ‘scholar­ ization’ of childhood. By this, she means a growing dominance of children’s time and space by school and associated institutions, whether this is through a lengthening of the school day, encroachments on holidays or through extensions to the age of entry and leaving compulsory schooling. Nikolas Rose amplifies Mayall’s point, suggesting that in the wealthy liberaldemocratic West, children’s lives are hedged about by multiple professional agencies, practices and practitioners whose territorial ambit reproduces the fundamental separation on which modern childhood is founded and renders up children’s lives as the property of numerous professional institutions: The environment of the growing child is regulated financially, through benefits and allowances to the family, and pedagogically through programmes of education directed at the parent-to-be. Legislative obligations are imposed upon parents … Health visitors exercise a surveillance … over the care of young children … Child protection legislation has imposed powers and duties upon local authorities … a child accused of crime now requires scrutiny and evaluation of family life … Doctors in general practice and in hospital have professional, if not legal obligations to scrutinize [children] for signs that they may be ‘at risk’ … And universal and compulsory schooling catches up the lives of all young citizens into a pedagogic machine that operates not only to impart knowledge but to instruct in conduct and to supervise, evaluate, and rectify childhood pathologies. (Rose, 1997, 123–4)

The institutionalization of childhood to which Rose points is a major focus for this book, along with the conviction that an examination of the spatiality of institutions offers important insights into the childhood worlds that are constructed for children to inhabit and how children respond to this compulsory corralling. This is because spatiality emphasizes what



Spatiality and Understanding Children’s Lives 41

social scientists refer to as the synchronous dimension to social life; that is, it is concerned with how social phenomena sit simultaneously alongside each other as if drawn on a map. This synchronous dimension reveals commonalities and differences between people as well as how power distributes itself across social settings and relations. These differences are not solely about the binary distinction between children and adults that modern childhood as a discourse relies on and authorizes, but also differences of social class, gender, sexuality, disability or ethnicity and how they intersect with age. By examining the spaces and places that children occupy we might better understand their experience of the childhoods they are required to inhabit as well as their responses and resistances to those childhoods as people for whom the above social variables intersect to a greater or lesser degree. Furthermore, embracing the spatiality of children’s social worlds contributes vital insights about the quality of children’s lives as social actors who are enmeshed in richly diverse social worlds rather than as separated out, disconnected individuals understood solely through developmental needs and discourses of rights (see Chapter 2 and Stainton Rogers, 2009).

What do space, place and other key concepts mean and how can they be used as a language to discuss and rethink children’s lives? If the fish is last thing to discover water then our relationship to space is similar; it is so pervasive in our experience that it is largely transparent to our gaze and therefore readily overlooked. What is clear is that space, place and spatiality increasingly attract the attention and interest of social scientists because they are vital to understanding the social realities within which people live. This extends to understanding not just how children are positioned in the world, but also how they seek to express their legitimacy and exert some measure of control over the quality of their lives. Jon Anderson and Katie Jones offer a commentary on the importance of understanding place and the contribution of spatiality to the construction of young people’s ‘lifescape’ through research they conducted at a secondary school in north Wales.

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Example of research Anderson, J. and Jones, K., ‘The Difference that Place makes to Methodology: Uncovering the ‘Lived Space’ of Young People’s Spatial Practices’, Children’s Geographies 7 (3) (August 2009): 291–303. The paper examines the importance of spatiality in research undertaken with children and young people and explores the links between where it is conducted and what it finds. In the process Anderson and Jones emphasize the reciprocal relationship between our embodied identity as emplaced humans and places as expressions of social meaning. The researchers express this in ambitiously broad terms when they say: ‘the human condition can be configured as thoroughly platial, with human identity both influencing and being influenced by its inhabited material spaces’. This claim is justified with reference to the work of Henri Lefebvre who asserted that whilst ‘[s]paces … are “empty abstractions” (1991, 12) … places are “drenched in cultural meaning” (Preston, 2003, 74)’ (from Anderson and Jones, 2009). Adopting a humanistic stance to the relation between space and place, they say, ‘Spaces are scientific, open and detached, whilst places are intimate, peopled, and emotive. Place then is the counterpoint of space: places are politicised and cultured; they are humanised versions of space.’ The intimacy in the connection between people and place is cemented in a concept identified in research literature as ‘“lifescape” [that] seeks to integrate the social, spatial and economic interactions that tie individuals to places … [so that] … [t]hrough repeated and iterated practices … mutually constitutive interrelationships between people and place are created’. Anderson and Jones illustrate these insights through a reflection on the importance of place in three research encounters with young people and the challenges that are associated with their embodied location. The first encounter is located in the pupils’ classroom where the researchers identified that inhibitions were imposed on interviewees due to the proximity of peers and teachers; this contrasted with the second encounter in an enclosed and ‘private’ cupboard, where the young people spoke more freely. However, Anderson and Jones found that although this location offered seclusion, it was still removed from the young people’s ‘lived space’ beyond the cupboard; in consequence they observed that this still adversely curtailed the content and form of the interviews. By contrast, the researchers



Spatiality and Understanding Children’s Lives 43

found that the young people expressed themselves more readily in ‘languages that recalled more detailed emotional and embodied experiences’ when the interviews were conducted in-situ and in step with the fluidity of young people’s movements in and across places. The researchers acknowledge that admitting ‘place’ as a variable to the research encounter opens up infinite possibilities for the meanings emanating from that research; however, their work recognizes that there is a need to embrace the complex and holistic lived-spaces inhabited by children and young people and that the relationship between place and social meaning is an important part of this.

Reflection Where would you feel most comfortable if interviewed by: a friend? a research professor? a child? Can you make any general observations about how ‘place’ figures in your preferences?

The work of human geographer Edward Soja offers much that is helpful in rethinking childhood and children’s lives by arguing, like Anderson and Jones, that our understanding of social phenomena is enhanced and expanded by the incorporation of spatialized ways of thinking. Soja (1999) sets out his ideas through a series of Theses that develop his argument. In his first Thesis, Soja acknowledges the unprecedented spatial turn witnessed across the social sciences in the late twentieth century and welcomes it as complement to more established historical and sociological ways of seeing human phenomena. He says: [S]cholars have begun to interpret space and the spatiality of human life with the same critical insight and interpretive power as have traditionally been given to time and history (the historicality of human life) on the one hand, and to social relations and society (the sociality of human life) on the other.

However, Soja is not suggesting that the explanatory power of either historicality or sociality should be eclipsed by spatiality in an attempt to understand human phenomena, but that it should join them on an equal footing. Moreover, whilst historicality, sociality and spatiality should remain as distinctive ways of seeing the phenomena of social reality, they not only offer a fuller and richer account of that reality when combined, but also one

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that is responsive to change and fluidity. Because there are three elements here, Soja suggests that they form a restless three-way conversation in what he calls a trialectics of being. Soja expresses this in the following quotation: The key to understanding the ‘trialectics of being’, and a major reason why the reassertion of critical spatial thinking is of transdisciplinary importance and not just confined in its impact to geographers, architects, urbanists, and others for whom spatial thinking is a primary professional preoccupation, lies in the absence of any a priori privileging of the three terms. Studying the historicality of a particular event, person, place or social group is not intrinsically any more insightful than studying its sociality or spatiality. The three terms and the complex interactions between them should be studied together as fundamental and intertwined knowledge sources, for this is what being-in-the-world is all about. Making theoretical and practical sense of the world is best accomplished by combining historical, social and spatial perspectives. (Soja, 1999, 262)

Extending Soja’s propositions, the incorporation of spatiality also invites an expansion of our thinking about social constructionism and can help us understand the meaning of phenomena such as childhood and how those meanings shape the social world. Attention to the spatiality of being reveals the synchronous relations between phenomena and means that the social differences, separations, boundaries and barriers encountered in everyday life become more clearly visible along with the inequalities in power, conflicts and injustices that may result from them. Dennis Potter’s Blue Remembered Hills as well as the work of Kjørholt and Bordonaro (discussed in Chapters 1 and 2) each suggested that the closed citadel constructed by modern childhood is far from congruent with the ways in which most children live their lives as social actors; thus, close attention to their ‘lived space’ can enable us to map the shifting boundaries and porous borderlands between these two, thereby providing valuable insights to inform the process of rethinking. Geography and geographers have long had an interest in space, place and spatiality; however, their specific interest has been complemented by a wider ‘spatial turn’ across the social sciences that draws upon a spatial analysis in order to explain social phenomena. The work of Henri Lefebvre (1961) and Michel Foucault was vital in this and particularly their demonstration of space as a dynamic socially constructed phenomenon within which social life is regulated, controlled and directed (see Foucault in During, 1993, 168). By contrast, most conventional accounts have relied



Spatiality and Understanding Children’s Lives 45

on the philosopher Immanuel Kant’s way of seeing space as a containerlike ‘category’ through which our intellectual apparatus made sense of experience – this might be characterized as a ‘doll’s house’ approach to understanding space where all the rooms come readily prepared and our task is simply to furnish them. However, Michel Foucault, with characteristic poetics, is at pains to challenge the Kantian container model and clarify what he means by space: The space in which we live, which draws us out of ourselves, in which the erosion of our lives, our time and our history occurs, the space that claws and gnaws at us, is also, in itself, a heterogeneous space. In other words, we do not live in a kind of void, inside of which we could place individuals and things. We do not live inside a void that could be colored with diverse shades of light, we live inside a set of relations that delineates sites that are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another. (Foucault, 1986, 23)

If for Foucault space is delineated by social relations and therefore as diverse, fluid and variable as they are, then Anthony Giddens extends this idea by endorsing the value of a spatialized imagination in social science and suggests that far from being passive and fixed (like a doll’s house), space is as dynamically volatile as those social relations: Space is not an empty dimension along which social groupings become structured, but has to be considered in terms of its involvement in the constitution of systems of interaction. The same point made in relation to history applies to (human) geography: there are no logical or methodological differences between human geography and sociology! (Giddens, 1986, 368)

Like Soja, Giddens seeks to bring the explanatory power found in the sociological, historical and geographical together. The theoretical revisions that Soja, Foucault and Giddens champion are more concerned with understanding how we see and use spatial ideas and how spatiality figures in the meaning of our ‘lifeworlds’ than in expressing eternal, universal and essential truths about space in the manner of Kant. In effect, their concepts offer us a language with which we can think and speak meaningfully about the spatiality of phenomena in the world; the value of this language lies in the way that it seems to fit the world as we increasingly find it in an era of virtual social media networks, globalization and diverse inter-cultural encounters.

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It has already been proposed that the interest in spatiality facilitates rethinking by enhancing understanding of the quality of children’s lives (following Stainton Rogers, 2009); however, whilst the apparent concreteness of space would seem to make its meaning straightforwardly unproblematic, a geographer named Elizabeth Kenworthy Teather proposes that when we scrutinize the ways we refer to, think about and use spatial concepts it is anything but. Teather suggests that although we use a single word – ‘space’ – we do not always use it the same way and even do not seem to be talking about the same thing. Teather challenges an essentialist understanding of space and spatiality by identifying different ways in which we use the word in everyday language and social interactions; thereby, she stresses the greater importance to be attached to grasping meanings when investigating social phenomena than searching for essential and timeless universal truths. Teather is a geographer interested in transitions across the life-course, including birth, childhood and adolescence and the ways in which these can be understood spatially. Her work offers a toolkit of concepts through which human life can be explored at all scales and for all ages through its spatiality. Her starting point is to acknowledge the importance of the human body as our fundamental spatial unit and from here she proceeds to suggest that growing up is marked by processes of transition, change and growth that are fundamentally spatial and have much in common with the theoretical concept of the ‘rite of passage’ found in anthropology. Teather distinguishes four senses in which we refer to space and use the idea in our understanding the social world; these are: space as place; activity space as the locus for our being in the world; positional space that gains its meaning from its relations to other spaces; and discursive spaces constructed through discourse. 1 Space as place is concerned with the everyday experience of material, bounded localities. This is captured and expressed through the human practice of naming places and their link to social, cultural or individual meaning. This frequently informs what people refer to as a sense of place but contrasts with the conventional geographical understanding of this as the genius loci (that is, where places possess a preordained spirit that is independent of human agency). Rather, spaces become places through associations with human meaning; this can operate at any level in a scale of social organization from the personal to the national and beyond. The concept of space as place is particularly explored in Chapter 4, but also informs the other chapters – whilst in



Spatiality and Understanding Children’s Lives 47

a formal institutional sense, the concept is prone to adult memory and adult-world identification of the sort of places children should and should not inhabit, attention to place can also reveal young people’s construction of the meanings attaching to their lives and how these shape their movements and geographies (see discussion of Anderson and Jones earlier and Bordonaro’s work on how ‘street children’ see ‘the street’ in Chapter 2). 2 Activity space is the space within which our lives are lived and responsibilities and relations are transacted. Activity space can embrace multiple places as nodes, but these nodes are embedded in a mesh of networks whose fluid, shifting connectivity challenges the meaning, integrity and durability of places. The concept of activity space acknowledges a fundamental condition of urbanized contemporary being, that we not only inhabit localized communities in shared geographical space, but also belong to ‘communities without propinquity’ based on transactional ties that do not rely on geographical proximity; these may be loose and ephemeral or strong and durable with technology playing an increasingly significant part in their construction. This means that activity space is constantly being made, remade and/or discarded; consequently its lifespan may be long, but often it is very short. Teather likens activity space to Manuel Castells’ concept of a networked ‘space of flows’ and its characteristic ‘subtle … form of social disintegration and reintegration’. The malleability of these activity spaces means that they may also serve as spaces of resistance to control and manipulation and even allow the adoption of multiple personae by actors operating within and through them. The usefulness of activity space as a concept to understand children and young people’s lives will be explored in Chapter 5 along with the challenges that this concept reveals. 3 Positional space builds on activity space by recognizing that places do not exist in isolation from one another, but their location and also their social value exists in relation to other places (therefore the spaces that positionality brings into being are sometimes referred to as relational spaces by some geographers). Positionality has a tangible material sense because we are all emplaced, but for Teather it also embraces the more metaphorical, social reality that is associated with ideas such as ‘knowing your place’ and the importance of childhood in learning this. Teather writes: ‘[P]ositionality implies that there are places where we are welcome and others from which we are excluded

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by convention or by law because of sex, age, class or colour, or other reasons. Because we all occupy different “positions”, there can be no single, objective account of social situations.’ Each position or standpoint has its own narrative or story to tell; however, this does not mean that social or material power are evenly distributed between these standpoints. The concepts of positional/relational space will support thinking about children’s identities, citizenship and trans­ national realities in Chapters 6 and 8. 4 Discursive space refers to public, cultural and institutional attitudes and conventions informed by discourse. Teather interprets ‘discursive space’ thus as a realm that can be constructed through ‘a set of mental attitudes and conventions held by members of the public, the media and even … by the judiciary’, whereby, drawing on ‘mental constructs that are the product of events and the reactions to them, of values and of the media debates and representations’ cultural and social meaning is assigned to spaces and places. Teather uses the concept of ‘rape space’ which although not always objectively located in material space, unequivocally exerts tangible effects on personal and social attitudes and behaviour. In Chapter 2 following Anne Trine Kjorholt’s work, Norwegian childhood was interpreted as a ‘symbolic space’ whose boundaries and content are informed by Eurocentric discourses that separate children from much of the social world; in this sense the symbolic space of childhood can also be understood as a discursive space. Teather continues by suggesting that somewhere like home might be understood by reference to all four spaces and thereby constitutes a fifth, complex, multiple and heterogeneous place. She illustrates her point by stating that home is: a material, bounded place [1], where our own activity spaces and those of people closest to us overlap [2]. It is, ideally, where we are most comfortable with our positionality and our relationships with others [3], a place where we are accepted and affirmed as who we want to be. Home is discursive space associated with values that overlap – [but] need not necessarily entirely coincide – with the values of those who share it with us [4]. (brackets and numbers added)

These four ways through which we think about space provide a vocabulary with which the meanings attaching to children’s spaces and places can be discussed and explored and critical rethinking might be approached.



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Teather’s multidimensional vocabulary also stresses that children’s spaces and places might not be reducible to a single thread of understanding – or an essence – but that those threads are interwoven into a complex of meanings– she illustrates this through her account of ‘home’ as a ‘complex, multiple and heterogeneous place’ where all four spaces can be recognized and experienced at various times. Teather‘s interest in spatiality at the scale of the body leads her to speak of embodied geographies; this is important in understanding the work of many children’s geographers and their approaches to understanding children’s lives and childhood worlds. She notes Henri Lefebvre’s (1991, 162) observation that ‘it is by means of the body that space is perceived, lived – and produced’; thereby recognizing that it is not just that the body occupies space, but it is also in itself a space in production; she explains: The body is our vehicle in traversing space and for responding to the world’s sensory stimuli; it is the location of our psyche, with its drives both creative and destructive; it is the tool we hone in order to communicate, to love and to hate; it offers a ‘surface’, inscribed by us and read by others; it is a sexed organism that matures, may well become diseased or maimed, and eventually dies; it is a social being on which institutions leave their imprint and by which they in their turn are modified; and which is variously endowed with attributes inherent and acquired (wealth, power and so on).

Teather uses the geographical metaphor of a map to illustrate ways that our bodies mediate our identities as we encounter the world: The sort of body that we can have prescribes the particular map that we use to navigate our life worlds. Body and self seem impossible to untwine: they are ‘pleated’ together. Individual identity is by no means fixed, but faces daily challenges to endurance and self-esteem in a world where there are no safe havens, not even in old age, nor in the overarching collective identities of the past. (Teather, 1999, 12)

This ‘pleating’ of body and self together applies across the changes of our life-course and Teather addresses this through the anthropological concept of the rite of passage drawn from the work of Arnold van Gennep (1909). Van Gennep proposed that key moments in the course of our lives (such as birthing, marriage and death as well as entry to adulthood or initiation into new social roles) frequently follow a common structural form with three identifiable stages: separation, transition and incorporation. Clearly, rites of passage are associated with change and can be represented in linear

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time; however, van Gennep also stressed the importance of embodiment, space and spatiality in the realization and completion of the rite of passage: a) Separation, whether metaphorical or material, implies a removal or partitioning that is spatial; b) Transition, suggests movement in space as well as time; c) Incorporation, literally means absorption into the body and therefore is an embodied process as Teather has already used the term.

In summary, Teather observes that: 1. ‘Rites of passage being transitional stages in life are connected with changes to where those involved are placed’; 2. ‘learning about place is matched by learning about self ’ and, in turn, learning about self is emplaced. Teather presents a quotation from van Gennep where the relevance of the rite of passage as a frame for understanding the experience of growing up and growing older is clear: ‘there are always new thresholds to cross: the thresholds of summer and winter, of a season or a year, of a month or a night; the thresholds of birth, adolescence, maturity, and old age; the threshold of death and that of the afterlife’. Children’s lives are replete with such rites of passage, especially as they encounter the institutionalized realities of schooling, nurseries, playgroups or junior sports’ clubs; so much of their experience is understood by the passage of time and its manifestation in growth, transfer and movement whether over the course of a lesson, a day or longer periods that can be understood in terms of the threefold process.

Reflection 1. Think about your own upbringing – or that of children you know. Are there practices that could be described through the threefold schema of ‘separation, transition and incorporation’ that van Gennep proposed and, again, what does spatiality add to their meaning? 2. When you became a student, were there any ‘rites of passage’ attached to the process – special events, trips, residential involved? How about taking exams or graduating?



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Teather offers ideas of embodiment, rites of passage and space as place along with activity, positional/relational and discursive space as a vocabulary for understanding and then rethinking children’s lives. Recent research concerning children and young people’s punishment in school carried out by a team of researchers at Brunel University in London will help to test the utility of the language. The researchers were interested in the seclusion units that are proliferating in UK schools as one response to young people’s challenging behaviour and they highlight ways in which the spatiality of these units is a vital element recruited to ensure that they achieve their disciplinary goals. In a paper whose title asks whether these are spaces for pupils or prisoners, John Barker, Pam Alldred, Mike Watts and Hilary Dodman (2010) explore how seclusion units bring social discipline, spatial separation and embodiment together to construct not just a place of punishment, but also affirm the unit as a discursively constructed disciplinary space, whose influence extends beyond the walls that mark its physical limits and into the classrooms.

Example of research Barker, J., Alldred, P., Watts, M. and Dodman, H., ‘Pupils or Prisoners? Institutional Geographies and Internal Exclusion in UK Secondary Schools’, Area 42 (3) (2010): 378–86. The authors’ research examines the seclusion unit as a relatively new institutional space within secondary schools. These units have arisen as a response to concerns about excluded pupils’ attainment and problems associated with short-term exclusions. Pupils are consigned to seclusion units following serious infractions of school rules. These are environments where ‘students cannot socialise with friends and [are] taught intensely (on a staff-student ratio approaching 1:1) and therefore should be more, not less, focused on learning whilst excluded from the classroom’. This development has not been without controversy and it has been suggested that the units violate children’s rights. The embodied separation of this disciplinary tactic is underlined by the researchers: Operating the entire length of the school day, Seclusion is longer lasting than other spatial practices of segregation that young people are routinely subjected to in schools. Whilst visible demarcation of those punished is a routine spatial

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strategy within schools … [s]eclusion is not a highly visible spatial strategy of punishment, but one based on absence, physical isolation and separation from the rest of the school. However, the disciplinary effect of pupils’ absence, isolation and separation is not confined to the unit, but the knowledge of its presence ripples through the rest of the school (the authors cite Foucault, who saw the public gallows on the hill as both place of punishment and warning to the rest). Students’ embodied separation through isolation is compounded by the visual-spatial form of the unit; whereas classrooms are bright and attractively furnished, the seclusion unit is small, quiet and almost windowless. The experience of isolation from the rest of the school is reinforced by ensuring that pupils face blank walls and by seating arrangements that curtail social interaction. Teaching staff are positioned so that pupils are aware of what, in Foucauldian terms, would be termed a ‘panoptic gaze’ and they have to bid for attention by raising their hand, rather than gaining a teacher’s attention by more informal means. Despite the unit’s aim to achieve docility in the pupils, their spatiality opened opportunities for small acts of resistance that posed challenges for teachers. In one case a pupil’s persistent tapping provoked a dilemma for one teacher about how to respond because the standard classroom response employing verbal force seemed unacceptable in the environment of the unit, and a quieter, polite request to stop seemed more appropriate. For the authors this suggested that the spatialized disciplinary expectations of the seclusion unit not only reformed pupil behaviour, but also that of staff – a finding that leads them to challenge the legitimacy of the strict adulthood–childhood binary with all the assumptions about adult power that accompany and authorize the units. Whilst the disciplinary gaze within Seclusion Units is highly powerful, the examples of students’ transgressive acts suggest domination is not complete. However, that the transgressive acts are minor and often inconsequential indicate the limits of children’s agency and the power and surveillance that is routinely enacted upon them. Whether seclusion led to reformed behaviour is not clear and several teachers remarked that once back in the classroom there was little discernible change to patterns of disruptive behaviour. Further,



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while pupils’ behaviour frequently became passive and compliant in the unit, this could be interpreted as a rationally-conceived coping strategy to get through the punishment and so represented an agentic response that was calculating and paradoxical.

Activity 1 Looking back at Teather’s categories of ‘space as place’, ‘activity space’, ‘positional space’ and ‘discursive space’, can you use each category to interpret the operation of the seclusion unit and its contribution to the school as a social world? What might it mean for: pupils under punishment; pupils not under punishment; teachers? Use the table below to help structure your thoughts: SU and ‘space as place’

SU and ‘activity space’

SU and ‘positional space’

SU and ‘discursive space’

Pupils under punishment Pupils not under punishment Teachers

2 Does van Gennep’s schema for rites of passage help us understand the seclusion unit and how it seeks to achieve punishment and reform through spatiality and the pupils’ embodiment? Use the table below to structure your thinking. Separation and space Embodiment and the seclusion unit

Transition and space

Incorporation and space

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Reflective activity Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) designed a prison called the Panopticon, in which warders could watch prisoners but the prisoners could not see the warders. He argued that the thought that they might be watched was enough to limit and control the prisoners’ behaviour. Foucault uses this as a trope for the way that modern societies design institutions (prisons, but also hospitals, schools, law courts, highway control, etc.) to discipline their populations and replace violent coercion with self-regulation and that we are all subject to the ‘panoptic gaze’. MM

Are there ways in which the seclusion units and their approach to instilling discipline across the school can be understood through the idea of the panoptic gaze?

What can spatiality contribute to understanding children’s lives? We are developing a view of space as an active contributor to the construction of social life. What this means is illustrated by Joanna McGregor in a passage that stresses an interactive and co-constitutive relation between physical and social space in a school: The difference between the enclosed space of ‘egg-crate’ schools (as one ex-teacher said ‘nothing so private as a classroom’) and the open-plan schools which thought they were embodying the more child-centred pedagogy of the 1970s is not simply a physical one relating to walls and doorways … [rather, space is] more than either physical or social space, but … an interaction between the two. (McGregor, 2004, 2)

McGregor suggests that this interactive relation between material/physical and social practices leads us to an understanding of spatiality as a fluid and volatile social construction that, to use Henri Lefebvre’s phrase, is ‘drenched in cultural meaning’. In this view, space is not merely a passive container or medium for social life, but in an echo of Soja, is ingredient in the construction of human meaning. McGregor illustrates this distinction between a conception of space as a neutral container and spatiality as actively ingredient in the social world thus:



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[T]he spatiality of a year eight modern languages class in a mobile classroom at 3.00pm on a Thursday will be different to a year ten maths class in the same room at 9.00am on Monday … If we look more closely we can see that the way space is organised in schools produces particular social relations. Rather than being an arena within which social relations take place, space is made through the social – it is enacted and so continually created and recreated. (Ibid.)

Thus, these authors offer a view of space as continuously created and destroyed along with the fluidity of social life and its networked worlds of meaning. Again this takes us beyond the idea of space as an empty container within which life is played out; but as Soja has it, this presents space as an ‘actually lived, and socially created spatiality, concrete and abstract at the same time, the habitus of social practices.’ However, Soja suggests that we are blinded to this socially-dynamic view of space by the dominance of a more conventional way of seeing, so that this ‘is a space rarely seen because it has been obscured by a bifocal vision that traditionally views space as either a mental construct or a physical form’ (Soja, 1989, 18). Once again, Soja proposes that this ‘actually lived … spatiality’ serves as a third possibility that disrupts the dominant and dualistic way of understanding that either sees ‘space as a mental construct’ (conceived space) on the one hand or ‘space as physical form’ (perceived space) on the other. For him, conventional scientific enquiry has not only been dominated by the belief that the world can be understood through external observation of facts found in perceived space from which theories to describe it are constructed in conceived space. Both processes stand outside the lifeworld being observed and although they seek understanding, the meaning of that life-world for its inhabitants will almost certainly prove elusive. A more radical strain of social science challenges this model and rejects its capacity to yield authentic knowledge and understanding of the social world, arguing that standing outside and peering into people’s lives rarely reveals what the observed ‘facts’ mean to the people who live them. In response, Soja does not propose that either perceived and conceived space or rational approaches to acquiring knowledge are jettisoned, but that they are complemented, enhanced and challenged by what he calls ‘lived space’. This is congruent with a core goal of the New Social Studies of Childhood and its commitment to incorporating what children have to say about their world; that is, listening to the sense they make of their ‘lived spaces’ (see Beazley et al. 2009).

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Much of the scholarship and research associated with the spatiality of childhood and of children’s lives has been undertaken by human geographers with particular interests in social and cultural geography. Hugh Matthews and Melanie Limb gave particular impetus to this work in 1999 with the publication of a paper entitled ‘Defining an agenda for the geography of children: review and prospect’. This followed on the heels of Prout and James’s work (1997) and was instrumental in giving shape and direction to an emerging research agenda for children’s geographies.

Example of research Matthews, H. and Limb, M., ‘Defining an Agenda for the Geography of Children: Review and Prospect’, Progress in Human Geography 23 (1) (1999): 61–90. This paper represented a systematic attempt to extend insights and approaches from cultural geography and its interest in other subordinated groups to children. It drew on existing work by feminist and critical geographers, such as Gill Valentine, Stuart Aitken and Tracey Skelton, and theorists such as Alan Prout and Allison James, Berry Mayall and Chris Jenks, with their anthropological, sociological and cultural studies perspectives, and sought to point the way for productive research initiatives that explored the spatiality of children’s lives. Matthews and Limb proceed from a proposition that like other groups children occupied a marginalized position in many social landscapes, moreover that this social marginality became written into material spaces and places – this echoes the argument advanced earlier that assumptions about children’s separate moral, intellectual and emotional status are realized in the separated material conditions of institutions of childhood. Matthews and Limb cite the ratification of the UNCRC – ‘rooted in concerns that children have not been recognized as fully human and have therefore not been afforded the same rights as adults’ – and what they saw as a ‘growing moral panic about children [who] are depicted as innocents, at risk from corrupting society, or as monsters, capable of undermining the moral fabric of places’ as two contextual factors driving this radical new agenda forward along with what at the time was a substantial commitment of government funding for academic research in this area. Matthews and Limb were keen to move the geographical study of children on from the passive structural functionalist and



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psychologically-driven examination of distributions and patterns of behaviour that had hitherto dominated research to explore the experiences of children as agentic subjects and their relationship to the landscapes of power in which they are located. This inevitably opens up questions about research and a fresh ethically-driven imperative to get beyond adult accounts for children’s lives (that frequently resemble Soja’s perceived–conceived space dualism) whilst also acknowledging children’s interdependence with adult care-givers. Furthermore, Matthews and Limb were at pains to distance themselves from an essentialized view of children based on an ideal object called ‘the child’; rather, they saw in this a danger of ‘conceptual homogenization’ that bears ‘little resemblance to the experiences and engagement of children with their lifeworlds’. Thus they go on to stress that: Children come in all shapes and sizes and may be distinguished along various axes of gender, race, ethnicity, ability, health and age … We emphasize the need to recognize the importance of ‘multiple childhoods’ and the sterility of the concept of the ‘universal child’. ‘Who’ the child is (as with class, gender and even personality) and ‘where’ the child comes from (both in place and time) define important situations (or positions) from which to understand the complex and multiple realities of children’s lives. (Matthews and Limb, 1999) The authors went on to offer seven propositions as a spur and guide to further research in children’s geographies that had understanding of the spatiality of their lives at its heart: 1 Children and childhood are social constructions. Assumptions are made by adults about what it means to be a child and therefore what environments they need. In so doing they fail to recognize that children differ from adults in terms of their ‘ways of seeing’. What goes on during the day of an average young person is different in rhythm, scale and content from that of adults. Understanding of these differences needs to be rooted in the lifeworlds of children. 2 The land uses and facilities which involve children are frequently different from those of adults and, even when shared, are largely used for different purposes. Collisions resulting from different patterns of usage are almost inevitable.

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3 The free-range of children and the types of environmental setting which they enter are often more restricted than that of adults. In some respects, young people have much in common with other ‘outsider’ groups in society, such as the disabled and the elderly, in that their behaviour is often constrained by caretaking conventions, physical ineptitude, limited access to transportation, lack of money and roles which separate them from a larger and more diverse daily round. A complex negotiated geography is also apparent through varying parental caretaking practices. 4 In the course of their environmental transactions, children commonly encounter threats which often go unnoticed by adults. Many childhood hazards are not dangers in later life. 5 Even when the same environment affects children and adults, their interpretation and evaluation of these places are not likely to be the same. Young people and adults often differ in how they see, feel about and react to a landscape and their views on environmental planning are unlikely to coincide. 6 Children are unable to influence decision-making and management which typically determine the structure of environments in general and land uses in particular. Thus the environments which have the greatest significance for young people are decided for them by adults and reflect values which pay scant regard to their needs, aspirations and behaviour. 7 Democratic responsibility is acquired only through practice and involvement. It does not arise suddenly in adulthood through maturation. Involving children in the design and management of their environments is a valued end in itself, as well as an important step to developing competent, participating citizens.



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Reflection 1 Are you able to offer any tangible examples for each of Matthews and Limb’s propositions? 2 Earlier in Chapter 2 it was suggested that a rigid and categorical separation of children from the adult world is not always found when we examine history or when we look at other cultures and their social practices. Looking at what you have come up with, do each of Matthews and Limb’s seven propositions weaken or strengthen a peculiarly Western and ‘modern’ construction of childhood that separates children from the rest of social life? Use the table below to clarify your thoughts. Proposition

Strengthens children’s Weakens children’s separation? separation?

1. Social construction 2. Different land-uses 3. Free range and restriction 4. Hazards and threats 5. Environmental interpretation and evaluation 6. Children and decision-making 7. Learning democratic responsibility

3 Are there particular aspects of their ‘agenda for the geography of children’ that convince you about the importance of adopting a spatialized way of seeing children’s lives?

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Chapter summary This chapter has proposed that space and place are vital contributors to the construction of social realities. Further, it has also explored new and emerging ways in which social scientists are thinking about spatiality and the challenges these present to a conventional understanding of space as a neutral and inert container within which life is played out. It is argued that this view of space complemented an understanding of childhood as a separate domain (see Chapter 2) in which children are expected to live their lives (James and Prout, 1997) and tread the pathway towards becoming ‘normal’ adults. It is suggested that just as Teather’s work presents us with a view of space as a social phenomenon bound together in dynamically fluid networks of activity, and of place as volatile, relational and constructed through human meaning, Soja’s interest in ‘lived space’ encourages us to challenge institutional rigidities through the subjective meanings of children as social actors. Both avoid simple overarching definitions of space, place and spatiality and encourage us to live with pluralistic ways of seeing that do not reduce to one-dimensionally neat, formulaic and potentially oppressive patterns – in this they echo and complement Matthews and Limb’s assertion that ‘[c]hildren come in all shapes and sizes’. These emerging ways of seeing space, place and spatiality will be used in Part III to understand children’s lives as well as how they are changing. This understanding provides a springboard for approaches to rethinking and reconfiguring found in Chapter 8.

Chapter activity Leading geographer Doreen Massey presents three propositions that summarize much of the preceding discussion about space and seek to establish an understanding of space; her propositions read as follows: First, that we recognise space as the product of interrelations; as constituted through interactions, from the immensity of the global to the intimately tiny … Second, that we understand space as the sphere of the possibility of the existence of multiplicity in the sense of contemporaneous plurality; as the sphere in which distinct trajectories coexist; as the sphere therefore of coexisting heterogeneity …



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Third, that we recognise space as always under construction. Precisely because space on this reading is a product of relations-between, relations which are necessarily embedded in material practices, it is always in the process of being made. It is never finished; never closed. Perhaps we could imagine space as a simultaneity of stories-so-far. (Massey, 2005, 9)

If we tease out three themes from this and replace the word ‘space’ with ‘children’s spaces and places’: MM

MM

MM

children’s spaces and places are interactively produced across the range of human scales; children’s spaces and places are as diverse in their plurality as human cultures are diverse but distinctive; children’s spaces and places are produced by relations and so constantly under construction, reconstruction and destruction.

Looking back at Chapter 2: MM

MM

Do you think Massey’s propositions encourage us to view childhood as a singular space or as a plurality of spaces? Do you think the propositions lend support to an understanding of children as social actors?

Reflecting on keywords and terms The following keywords and terminology have been introduced in this chapter: MM

MM

MM

MM

MM

children’s geographies embodiment lived space rites of passage spatial

Look back by scanning the chapter; in a short, summative sentence, describe your understanding of each term and how it has been used.

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Further reading Holloway, S. and G. Valentine (2000), Children’s Geographies: Growing, Playing and Learning, London: Routledge. A seminal contribution to the geographical study of children’s lives that retains theoretical and methodological value and interest. Kraftl, P., J. Horton and F. Tucker (2012), Critical Geographies of Childhood and Youth: Contemporary Policy and Practice, London: Policy Press. A very useful collection of papers offering critical approaches to understanding children’s geographies that was consciously published after the financial crash of 2008–9 and takes stock of policy in the UK and beyond during the era of austerity. McGregor, J., ‘Editorial – Special Edition on Space and Schools’, Forum 46 (1) (2004). Joanna McGregor’s editorial frames a rich set of papers drawn from across a number of spatial disciplines that offer differing, yet complementary, insights into spatiality and the construction of institutional worlds of childhood. Soja, E., ‘Thirdspace: Expanding the Scope of the Geographical Imagination’, in D. Massey, J. Allen and P. Sarre (1999), Human Geography Today, Cambridge: Polity Press, 260–78. A vital contribution to discussions around the contribution of spatiality to understanding social worlds – not specifically about children, but a very important philosophical contribution to social science in general.

Part III Implications for Children’s Lives

4 Scholarization and Institutional Spaces of Childhood Chapter outline The starting point for this chapter is commonly expressed concerns about the domination of children’s lives by the institutionalized imperatives of schooling and pupilhood. Using Teather’s concept of ‘space as place’, it offers a critical examination of what sorts of places schools are and how this contributes to what has been described as an increasing scholarization of childhood. The chapter briefly examines evidence for the ways that school architecture is shaped by ways of seeing childhood and goes on to examine how educational and social policies are implemented in and through the spatiality of classrooms, dining halls and playspaces. Attention to spatiality reveals that schools teach not just formal academic lessons, but also seek to achieve the condition Foucault describes as governmentality through covert lessons concerning the self, including proper morals, emotions and healthy growth. Research examining children’s responses and resistances to these attempts to impose goal-directed rationalities is also presented. Finally, readers are asked to consider the extent to which Goffman’s concept of the ‘total institution’ might be useful in understanding schools and how space is recruited to achieve their goals. The chapter is structured around the following key themes and questions: Setting the scene

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How far does schooling dominate children’s lives and is there evidence for growing scholarization? 67 Are school buildings ‘a kind of teacher’ and what might children learn from them? 70 Does the spatiality of school teach children what it means to be a good pupil and so achieve governmentality?77 Are children passively moulded by the spatiality of childhood institutions or do they find ways actively to challenge and transform them? 88 Chapter summary 94 Chapter activity 95 Reflecting on keywords and terms 96 Further reading 97

Setting the scene The passage into law of the 1870 Elementary Education Act in England and Wales and in 1872 in Scotland completely changed children’s lives by paving the way for all to attend school and receive a basic education. As a result, being in school became the shared childhood norm that we largely take for granted and, despite some misgivings, the principle that it should become disciplined to the interests of the state was reinforced. This position was also adopted in Germany through the influence of the much admired Prussian system, as well as France, where highly centralized education systems emerged to govern and direct children’s education and lives (Martin, 2004, 40). Hahn (1998, 30) describes the role expected of education by the newly unified Germany under the direction of the Prussians: ‘The classroom became once more an instrument for the education of subjects, not citizens, and religious instruction, loyalty to the crown, and secular Protestant virtues such as diligence, industriousness and discipline were judged of paramount importance.’ The dominant influence of school and linked institutions not only on how, but also where, children spend their time has not diminished over the past century and a half; indeed, the influence of schooling seems to be growing and this is giving some observers cause for concern about what has been termed the creeping ‘scholarization’ of childhood. This seems to reinforce the argument advanced in Chapter 2 that the idea of modern childhood



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authorizes a separation of children from the rest of social world into a range of institutions designed, arranged and equipped to achieve the goals of a childhood – broadly seen as a preparatory stage for adult life. This chapter argues that examination of space reveals how schools and schooling are constructed as goal-driven, bounded places where a normatively conceived good childhood can flourish through the regulation of children’s growth; so that spatiality contributes, in Peter Moss and Pat Petrie’s words, to a repertoire of ‘effective technologies which, applied to children at early enough ages, can ensure a “head start” or “sure start”’ (Moss and Petrie, 2002, 60). If, indeed, schools and associated institutions are exerting a growing dominance over children’s time and spatial range, it seems important to investigate these childhood worlds and ask how children experience them as ‘lived spaces’. This builds on Edward Soja’s propositions advanced in Chapter 3 that a spatial analysis highlights lived relations, so that examining schools spatially enables us to ask not only how space contributes to the lessons it seeks to teach, but also what children learn about their place in relation to others through it. This does not mean that children are passive in their acceptance of the authority and spatial dominance exerted by the adult world through schooling; indeed research suggests that they find imaginative ways to assert their agency within the constraints imposed upon them.

How far does schooling dominate children’s lives and is there evidence for growing scholarization? Early in 2014 the UK government announced its intention to see more two-year-olds joining school nursery classes. This was in the belief that the emphasis on informal play rather than targeted skill development found in many playgroups and less formal childcare settings was compounding social disadvantage for those children whose best hope to achieve social mobility lay with education (Office for Standards in Education, 2014). The move would mean attendance at school or nursery a year earlier than had previously been the norm for many children. Although the announcement occasioned some debate in national news media it surprised few observers,

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since the previous two decades had seen the incorporation of ever younger children into the state institutions of education and care – so that children born today can expect to be in school or full-time education for a minimum of fifteen or sixteen years. Critics challenge the presumption that more time in school equates to improved performance and point to the contrasting experience from other countries, notably Finland, where despite deferring the commencement of formal education until a child’s seventh year, high levels of educational achievement and performance are evident (Whitebread, 2014). This latest policy development was prefigured by legislation passed by the New Labour governments (1997–2010) designed to standardize early care, offer a common platform for healthy growth and facilitate the movement of many child-carers into employment; notably, the 2004 Children Act (DfE, 2004) under the headline title ‘Every Child Matters’ and the 2005 Childcare Act prefigured this latest announcement by embedding the Early Years Foundation Stage in the landscape of young children’s education, care and well-being. For many, this entails fundamental challenges to the ethos and purpose of Early Childhood Education and Care: ‘[S]choolification’ where ECEC [Early Childhood Education and Care] is increasingly conceptualised as preparation for compulsory schooling and the didactics of compulsory schooling therefore tend to determine ECEC programmes. Children are expected to acquire (pre-)literacy, (pre-) numeracy and (pre-)scientific skills from a young age … To ensure this, more formalised approaches have been adopted, goals and standards being distinctly formulated and indicators used to measure children’s achievements. (Van Laere, Peeters and Vandenbroeck, 2012)

Furthermore, once at school, there has been a progressive lengthening of the school day for many UK children through the rapid growth of extension classes as well as after-school and early-morning ‘breakfast’ clubs as along with a proliferation of school holiday sport and play projects. Overall this has meant an extension of the time many children spend under direct adult guidance and supervision. Clearly, this represents a rapid expansion of schooling (and associated goal-directed activity) as a dominant institution of childhood beyond the home and what may even be seen as a drift towards ‘total institutionalisation’ (this is a term introduced by Goffman in his classic work The Asylum, published in 1960). Indeed, the educationist Berry Mayall has coined the word ‘scholarization’ for this growing assimilation of children’s lives to pupilhood and the temporal and spatial dominance by school that it entails.



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These developments have not gone unnoticed by critics, including the children concerned, and although we do not know whether children see their position in Goffman’s terms, there is evidence that the extended time spent in school is not always welcomed by them. When in 2003 the Guardian newspaper commissioned a survey inviting children to describe ‘The School That I’d Like’ (as follow-up to a much earlier survey of the same name by Edward Blishen conducted in 1969), the increasing domination of children’s time by schooling figured strongly. Remarking on children’s comments in the survey about extensions to school hours, Daniel and Gustafsson (2010) note: … the most striking feature of the responses is the perception among children that it dominates their lives at the expense of personal and family time. This awareness of, and annoyance at, the extensiveness of the time spent at school and on school-related activities such as homework, after school and breakfast clubs etc. is much greater than in an earlier version of the same survey … [and] … may reflect what Mayall (2002) has termed the increasing ‘scholarisation’ of childhood.

In a more recent international survey of children’s well-being, the Children’s Society (2015) reported that ‘Children in England were unhappier with their school experience than those in thirteen other countries. Almost twice as many children in Year 6 (34 per cent) totally agreed that they liked going to school compared to Year 8 (18 per cent).’ Amongst the highlighted concerns was a widespread fear of bullying and poor relationships with teachers. However, concerns about the creeping scholarization of childhood are not new. Whereas current anxieties in wealthy countries, such as the UK and US, usually stress the denial of children’s time for fun, relaxation and free play, by contrast, the introduction of mass public education in the nineteenth century was more likely to be resisted because it denied children opportunities to work and contribute to family budgets – thus, concerns expressed by families were more likely to be about the way that schooling separated children from the wider sphere of economic life and devalued their community and ‘street’ knowledge than that a carefree separated childhood should be protected. Tomes (1985) shows how the passage of compulsory elementary schooling was resisted by many parents in the United States because it prevented children from contributing to the economic well-being of their already impoverished families and turned them, in a memorable quotation, from ‘useful to useless’ people. Drawing on the work of Harry Hendrick (1997), Erica Burman argues that this was

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far from an unfortunate but unavoidable outcome from growing scholarization; rather, it was an intrinsic part of processes that sought the moral reconstruction and regulation of working-class populations. She suggests that these changes wrought seismic effects on the lives of children and families because for the first time: [a] national childhood was constructed through schooling, which, although it was officially classless, rendered the child (and therefore the family) always available for reformation of their working-class morals. The process of schooling demanded a state of ignorance in return for advancement of opportunities for a limited few. In terms of impact on children at the time, Hendrick (1990) suggests that the main effect of the introduction of compulsory schooling was to diminish children’s sense of their own value and take them out of the sphere of ‘socially significant activity’. (Burman, 1994, 54)

Thereby, mass-schooling and the challenges of school work served not merely to remove children from the vicissitudes of harsh economic labour but, inspired by the middle-class norms of modern childhood, sought their moral redemption through separation from everyday life. Arguably, reconstruction under the guise of redemption continues to shape many child-saving initiatives targeted at children in the majority world by minority world agencies. The contradictions and difficulties associated with these views and their imposition on children and families in the majority world are discussed by Kjørholt (2007 and in Chapter 2) and by Karen Wells (2009).

Are school buildings ‘a kind of teacher’ and what might children learn from them? If educational methods, ideas and systems from Germany were influential in shaping state schooling in the countries of the United Kingdom, then Germanic philosophical idealism continues to make its presence felt, especially in progressive or child-centred education. Geographer Peter Kraftl is interested in these forms of education (Kraftl, 2014) and was concerned to explore how ideals of childhood are translated into the material form of a school. His research focused on a small school in west



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Wales, built and equipped by a group of parents in conformity to the ideas and ideals of the Austrian educationist Rudolf Steiner.

Example of research Kraftl, P., ‘Building an Idea: The Material Construction of an Ideal Childhood’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers NS 31 (2006b): 488–504. Kraftl is concerned to explore ways in which ideas about children and ideals of childhood are translated into material forms. He does this through an examination of the design, construction and day-today maintenance of Nant-y-Cwm School in west Wales consciously built by a group of parents following the educational and philosophical ideas advanced by Rudolf Steiner. Although the focus is on the realization of a Steinerian ideal, Kraftl is concerned in general with how ideas and ideals about childhood are realized in spaces and lend them meaning and moral value as places of childhood. He does this for three reasons: MM

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first, because ‘many seminal accounts of childhood do not provide a vigorous, detailed sense of how constructions of childhood are achieved’ – this takes social construction on from what to where and how childhood is constructed; second, Kraftl argues that ‘there is a need to focus on more detailed studies of particular practices … Very little research has focused on just one practice, institution or building, to really explore what is going on there’, the implication being that although generalizations may have limited validity they can point the way for a more general understanding of the spatial construction of childhood; and third, he suggests that hitherto ‘there is very little sense of how materials, spaces and material spaces come to matter in the construction of childhood’.

Kraftl is interested in answering the question ‘why and how does childhood really come to matter, in practice, in and as place?’ The italics are his and encourage us to reflect on the relationship between ideals, their translation into material form and thus the construction of what is taken to be real. Kraftl is keen to avoid a one-way determinism, suggesting that the material practices and

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spaces of the school are not merely shaped by ideals of childhood as a one-way relationship but that the world they construct reflexively serves not only to promote those ideals and the ethical imperatives that they embody but also affirm their correctness. However, whilst this entails engagement with Steiner’s ideas at the philosophical level, Kraftl is keen to examine their realization in and through what he describes as ‘banal’ everyday forms, such as the shape of ‘windows, door-handles, paintbrushes, blackboards and chairs’ but also everyday practices such as ‘creating nature tables, cooking and reading and toilet-cleaning’. Therefore he is keen to see how ideas and ideals, heavily freighted with the ethical purposes that surround childhood, are translated into banalities that are the warp and weft of everyday life and, as such, are frequently overlooked in favour of the grand vision. Rudolf Steiner was born in 1861 and as a student developed a lifelong interest in the work of Johann Wolfgang Goethe and the German Romantic idealism that also influenced progressive educators such as Pestalozzi and Froebel (Blundell, 2012). Steiner’s work seeks a holistic blend of idealist philosophy, mystical spirituality, paganism, psychology and Christian theology that is addressed to the practicalities of farming, medicine and children’s education. Like other progressive theorists (including Rousseau, Froebel and Piaget), Steiner espoused a stage theory of childhood: the first stage of ‘imitation’ – wherein children are conceived as largely ‘sense organs’ imbibing the array of experiences that the world brings – is succeeded by a second of ‘authority’ and a third of ‘discipline’. These stages translate into a system of schooling comprising kindergarten, middle school and upper school, where curricular practices and prohibitions at each stage are guided by what are seen as children’s changing nature and needs. Prohibitive measures, such as the delayed introduction to reading and writing until age 7 and restrictions surrounding children’s exposure to electronic devices for play and learning, have brought Steiner schooling into conflict with the expectations of centralized measures such as the Early Years’ Foundation Stage (EYFS) (Blundell, 2012, 174–5). Kraftl reports how Christopher Day, the school’s architect, relates the work of Rudolf Steiner and the childhood ideals found within it to the construction of the school as an organic whole: ‘A building needs forms and shapes … which relate to the surroundings. These create appropriate gestures: of welcome, of privacy, of activity, of repose’ (Day, 1990, 109); moreover, these gestures should be in



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harmony with the being and needs of young children so as to create ‘a harmonious, gentle, magic grove, described by Day (1998) as a “Haven for Childhood”’. The construction therefore proceeds upon a set of presumptions about children’s essential needs. Built largely by parents, the design and construction of the kindergarten exemplifies an attempt to realize Steinerian principles and childhood ideals in material form: ‘The building has wavy, orange-pink walls, made from local stone with natural plaster, and conical grass roofs. The interior is designed to be warm, enclosing and “womb-like”, as well as “homely”, to nurture and protect young children conceived at the imitative, “sense organ”’ stage. The two classrooms are entered from a labyrinthine corridor, are circular in shape, with no straight lines, painted a deep pink, with cubby holes and bulbous hide-aways, a little kitchen, and cupboards behind solid doors of local hardwood.’ The kindergarten therefore attempts to provide a suitable space (ethically and materially) in harmony with children’s bodies and those Steinerian ideals of childhood through which their embodiment is understood. Parents and teachers seek to complement the material spaces of Nant-y-Cwm with practices that express their ethical commitment to communal life and childhood ideals; these include banal and, apparently less appealing, practices, such as taking shared responsibility for cleaning the toilets. Kraftl concludes this is because ‘as I have demonstrated, these activities and objects – such as plastering, toiletcleaning, nature tables, learning letters of the alphabet, door-handles – are enrolled in, and constitutive of, more pervasive, more-or-less coherent notions of childhood at Nant-y-Cwm’.

Reflection on research Kraftl points out three underlying reasons prompting his research and the questions he asks. These can be summarized as: MM

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First – how are constructions of childhood achieved through spatiality? Second – how far do we really explore the details of the construction of childhood in a particular place? Third – how do materials and spaces become imbued with meanings about childhood?

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Use the table below to tease out examples for each of the above drawn from Pater Kraftl’s paper; then relate these questions to a setting you know and try to think through what seem to be good examples from that setting. Following Kraftl, how important are the otherwise banal aspects of institutional reality in consolidating and substantiating the realities you identify – what is the smallest ‘atom’ of meaning that you can identify? Nant-y-Cwm Steiner School

Your selected setting

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Kraftl’s paper offers an approach to recognizing and understanding connections between ideals and ideas of childhood and the material form of institutions designed to actualize them. Another example of an attempt to align built-form with specific childhood ideals comes from the work of George Baines (1927–2009), a zealous progressive educator who was head teacher at Eynsham County Primary School in Oxfordshire, UK. The curricular freedoms that the 1944 Education Act permitted (see Ross, 1999, 25, 29–31) encouraged a spirit of experimentation and enabled Baines to realize his belief that curriculum and pedagogy were to be conceived as a whole package and indivisible from the spaces/places that the built-form of his school should afford children as active learners. In an essay advocating a progressive educational approach to Social and Environmental Studies, Baines exemplified a number of outdoor learning topics undertaken by children in his school, but also expressed his convictions about the school buildings and environment: For me, learning can only be based on interest; and children are interested in their environment, especially and effectively their immediate one – the one to hand. School is part of the environment and through its building and organization, by its very nature it is a for-better-or-worse ‘teaching instrument’ … I sometimes tell my colleagues … that our job is to ‘prescribe the environment of school, to release the children permissively into it, to observe and diagnose needs from their activities, and to draw upon all our professional resources to meet those needs’ (Baines in Rogers, 1970, 202–3)



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Working with the progressive educator Edith Moorhouse, Baines turned his convictions into tangible form at Eynsham, Oxfordshire. This is how Catherine Burke, an educationist with a special interest in school buildings, summed up the way he translated his convictions about learning environments into the spatiality of his school: George wanted the building itself to be a kind of teacher, with a ‘geography’ that the children could understand, and with as wide a variety of spaces as possible supporting different kinds of activity … the design of the school became a model for others to follow with its vertical groupings of children – groups of mixed ages within the whole primary range of 5–11 – domesticated ‘home bays’ with cooking areas, ‘book corners’ for quiet study, and separate bays for art, craft and nature study. (George Baines, obituary, The Guardian, 28 October, 2009)

However, an interest in spatiality and the lessons taught by school buildings is not confined to so-called ‘progressive educators’ and we see a very different vision for children’s place, as well as their relation to school, knowledge and authority, articulated by the architect of a private, preparatory school in West London. Again, the architect champions the idea that schools should facilitate children’s agency and their entitlement to a school environment that serves as ‘a kind of teacher’, but his design appears to be enfolded within a very different set of values.

Critical reflection on research Reference: Bayley, S., ‘Go straight to the top of the class, Mr Henley: an architect frustrated by government thinking on school design has brought to fruition a remarkable riposte’, The Observer, Sunday, 15 February 2009, http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2009/ feb/ (accessed 1 July 2014). In 2009 the Observer newspaper published in its architectural section a review of a new school extension at Ealing Abbey School in west London. In it he praises the new ‘exemplary building’ that has added a ‘dignified, severe and intelligent cloisters’ to an existing church school run by monks along with ‘two new assembly halls, chapel, music rooms, language lab and new public entrances’. All is ‘of high finish, but unapologetically naked, glass-reinforced concrete which reflects monastic modules’. The reviewer reports the architect

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and his criticism of the school building policies pursued by the then New Labour government for an obsession ‘with superficial glitz and infantile shape-making’, asserting that this is only fit for a generation of ‘glazed morons with no more discipline than you need to change channels’. Henley is quoted as stating, ‘The government wants schools to look like shops with big graphics and bright colours. They are frightened by tradition, frightened of the idea that children should even be a little intimidated by school. I’m not afraid of ethics and tradition. I like institutions, institutions are good.’

Reflection 1 Reflect on the moral discourses of childhood that might lend meaning to the conviction that children should feel ‘a little intimidated by school’. MM

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Does this suggest that the attitudes, abilities and predispositions children bring with them into school are to be encouraged or that they need to be disciplined and re-directed? Earlier we saw that George Baines felt that school buildings can ‘be a kind of teacher’ – if so, what kind of teacher are these buildings? What sort of outcomes might this be intended to produce from children – both immediately and as adults?

Reflection 2 The English empiricist philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) was amongst the first to turn his attention to children and made a massive contribution to the construction of modern childhood. He believed that children were born with a mind that was tabula rasa (or a blank slate) and that knowledge of the world was acquired as experience imprinted itself on children’s minds. This meant that whilst on the one hand they were intrinsically neither good nor evil (unlike theological positions based on the Christian Doctrine of Original Sin – see Blundell, 2012), on the other, children had no innate sense of moral direction and needed to be taught how to become good and proper adults. Therefore, providing the right experiences early on was vital. Stephen Bayley, the author of the review, begins by asserting that, ‘We shape our environments and then they shape us. This is specially true of schools; the influence the architecture of school buildings has on developing minds is surely incalculable.’ MM MM

Are there any echoes of Locke in what Bayley writes? Can you identify who ‘we’ (those that shape) might be both in



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MM

west London and at Nant-y-Cwm and who ‘us’ (those that are shaped) are assumed to be? In modern industrialized societies school buildings are commonplace. Can you identify any that do not serve as ‘a kind of teacher’?

Does the spatiality of school teach children what it means to be a good pupil and so achieve governmentality? If, as Burke suggests, school buildings can ‘be a kind of teacher’, what do children learn from them and are the things they learn always what the formal curriculum spells out? Educationists use the concept of the ‘hidden curriculum’ to suggest that pupils learn in and through school many things that are never explicitly stated in formal curricula but are as important as explicit and formal outcomes, such as being able to read, write, calculate, know historical facts and so on, when it comes to becoming what society sees as a well-tempered adult (much has been written on the hidden curriculum, but see Kelly, 2009, 10–11). An ethnographic study conducted in Scottish schools with six- and seven-year-olds by Jeni Harden explores aspects of the hidden curriculum and particularly the links between children’s emotional lives and the material places, spaces and practices of the classroom. What she found revealed much about assumptions surrounding what children must do in order to become well-tempered adults. Harden was concerned to examine children’s emotional lives and saw the classroom as a suitable space within which to conduct her research. At first, what she found puzzled her but then she realized that the classroom is far from a passive container for learning; rather, its built form, layout and the practices associated with the place reveal much about dominant constructions of childhood and the normative characteristics we expect children to develop and internalize. Harden sees the classroom as a space of regulation both for children’s bodies and their emotions and demonstrates how a spatialized analysis can bring fresh light

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to our understanding of classroom life and the processes of scholarization that are facilitated through it.

Example of research Harden, J., ‘Good Sitting, Looking and Listening: The Regulation of Young Children’s Emotions in the Classroom’, Children’s Geographies 10 (1) (February 2012): 83–93. Harden’s paper begins with a discussion of the unhelpfully dualistic way in which emotions have been understood as, either ‘organismic theories, positioning emotions as instinctive, biologically driven expressions’ or via social constructionist accounts that ‘locate emotions entirely within the social domain’. Harden is concerned to resolve this dualism by suggesting that ‘[e]motions are multifaceted, residing neither entirely within the biological nor the social realm but rather at the intersection of complex biological and social processes’. This means that she sees them as embodied and thereby ‘as a bridge between the social order and the body’. Like Kraftl, Harden is also interested in the banalities of classroom life, because ‘it is through the everyday routines, expectations and interactions, which form children’s days, that emotions are constructed and experienced. Within the classroom, where the research was carried out, children’s emotions were regulated and controlled by the restrictions placed on their bodily movement and by their interaction with the teacher and other children and as a result, normalised forms of emotional behaviour were constructed.’ As an ethnographer interested in emotions, Harden’s curiosity was aroused by her apparent failure to observe emotional content in the day-to-day routines that the children followed. After initial perplexity, she realized that far from being a researcher error, this absence of emotion was actually the point and that ‘there was an absence of much emotional expression in the classroom as a result of the close regulation of children’s bodies and emotions within that space. The classroom was a very controlled emotional space and it was only in subtle ways that emotions and emotional interactions were expressed.’ The construction of the classroom as a particular moralizing environment with a heightened demand for emotional control was



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confirmed by posters on the classroom walls showing ‘good sitting’, ‘good listening’ and ‘good looking’. Harden saw these messages reinforced by an instructional video story shown to the children, wherein a boy decides to hide his sister’s asthma inhaler in an act of spite, but then changes his mind due to the sudden, intellectual insight that this could harm her. Harden sees this as emblematic for a total approach to emotions in the classroom ‘as something to be controlled by the brain … The emphasis was on the brain as the rational counter to impulsive bodily emotions.’ This offered an example of how children are taught that the rational, calculating mind is to be preferred over the more intuitive impulses of undisciplined bodies. When interviewed, the children confirmed that suppressing emotions in the classroom had its reward, because it meant that they could avoid people being ‘angry’, ‘cross’ or ‘sad’ with them; thus these messages seem to have been internalized as part of becoming a good pupil. However, Harden noted that there were times and places where children were given opportunities to express emotions through their friendships: children could be with their friends when seated together in front of the teacher – a location that also offered scope for social activity, such as cuddling, laughing, braiding of hair and so on. However, when working at tables the classroom seating plan was designed to restrict diversions from the task. Harden’s findings suggest that whereas children spontaneously demonstrated emotions through bodily actions – ‘jumping around at times of excitement or impatience, slumping down when bored or falling out with friends’ – the classroom was deliberately designed to regulate and control these spontaneous physical demonstrations and even eliminate them. Harden concludes, ‘This article described the emotional relations, structured by the institutional expectations of the school which focused on controlling children’s bodies and emotions. The specific form this regulation took is reflective of the developmental goal of the school to teach children how to act in a “civilised” way, which in effect means hiding the display of emotions.’

Activity In an editorial introduction to a special edition of the journal Emotion, Space and Society, Jane Kenway and Deborah Youdell (2011) write: Education is almost always positioned as rational – as

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a social and epistemological endeavour, as an abstract process, as a set of reasoned and logical practices, and as a series of formal spaces the production and use of which is as ‘uncontaminated’ by emotion as possible. Emotion is not formally part of education, its philosophical underpinnings, its policy and curriculum imperatives or, often, even its day-to-day enactments. In the latter case, when emotion is allowed in, it is understood through the filter of educational psychology. This occurs, for instance, in the form of psychologically underpinned discourses of proper, or more often improper, student development. Here we find diagnoses and designations of the maladjusted student, the out of control student, the aberrant student, the student with ‘social, emotional or behavioural difficulties or disturbances’ … These diagnoses and designations serve to identify, sort and sift the ‘abnormal’, emotional student from the ‘normal’, rational student … This sorting and sifting in turn underpins the separating off of these abject, feeling bodies into separate spaces in which they might be contained and their ‘contamination’ of the normal student and normal educational spaces be avoided.

Reflection 1 Harden identifies ways in which the emotions of the children in her research are regulated in the classroom space as well as by the timetable. Can you identify specific instances where space is used within and beyond the classroom to sort, sift and separate pupils demonstrating ‘abnormal’ emotions from those who comply with expected developmental norms whether for punishment or therapeutic reform or both?

Reflection 2 In Chapter 3 the idea of the ‘rite of passage’ from the work of Arnold van Gennep was introduced. This proposes that there is a common form to rites of passage comprising a threefold process of ‘separation–transition–incorporation’. Looking at your examples above, are there aspects of the regulation of ‘abnormal’ emotionality that can be described in terms of van Gennep’s rite of passage?



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‘Good sitting’, ‘good listening’ and ‘good looking’ clearly represent slogans for an environment where intellect and rational control are favoured over the emotions and contribute to a school’s project to (re)construct children as well-tempered pupils who, in turn, are apprenticed to becoming well-tempered adults. In his important book Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self, Nikolas Rose writes: Our personalities, subjectivities, and ‘relationships’ are not private matters … On the contrary, they are intensively governed … Conduct, speech and emotion have been examined and evaluated in terms of the inner states that they manifest, and attempts have been made to alter the visible person by acting upon this invisible inner world. Thoughts, feelings and actions may appear to be the very fabric and constitution of the intimate self, but they are socially organized and managed in minute particulars. (Rose, 1999, 1)

The very idea of good sitting and so on is part of this regime through which supposed inner states are organized and managed; further, extra impetus comes from the implied moral dimension to this behaviour with the underlying presumption that ‘good pupils’ will allow the head to rule the heart and reason to curb emotion in the classroom. Harden’s findings echo the moral dimension to school life recognized by Shaun Fielding, who as a young geography teacher quickly learned that there are right and wrong ways to arrange and occupy school space (Fielding, 2000). He relates two striking instances where he was made aware that there was a clear sense of correct spatial ordering underlying the pedagogic practices in the school. First: I had organised my classroom so that the tables made a large rectangle in the middle of the room, with the material resources laid out around the classroom’s perimeter. This was designed to facilitate better cooperation and collaboration among the children, and to foster this, I was going to allow them to sit in friendship groupings. On my first day, the head of department came in and told me to rearrange the classroom into rows and seat the children in alphabetical order.

… and then: [A] few days later, myself and a Year Seven class (11–12 year-olds) walked around the school to familiarise ourselves with its geography. During this, we met the headteacher who ‘told us off ’ because we were walking on both sides of the corridor and not down the left-hand side, and because we were walking in groups and not in pairs.

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The idea of being ‘told off ’ confirms that debates over spatialized orderings and rules frequently go beyond mere organizational efficiency and become moral matters of right and wrong; Fielding concludes ‘that the school, its beliefs and practices was a “hot-bed” of moral geographies – of moral codes about how and where children ought to learn and behave’ (Fielding, 2000, 230–44). Both Fielding and Harden remind us of Teather’s concern (Chapter 2) with embodiment, because in each case these moral geographies are directed at the disciplining of children’s bodies as the primary spatial organism through which they will encounter and navigate the social world, so that this disciplining becomes a major focus of school and the way that it seeks to achieve its goals. Being a good pupil is therefore not merely about conforming to the academic imperatives of the classroom, but also internalizing the social expectations of the place and its values so that children’s bodies become disciplined to ‘pupilhood’ as part of their scholarization. The contribution of spaces and places to school discipline requiring the regulation and control of children is taken beyond the classroom and into the school dining hall by Daniel and Gustafsson (2010). These authors are interested to explore lunchtime as a vital structural component of school life and the extent to which it serves as an opportunity for children to take time out from lessons in the company of friends. The authors draw on Moss and Petrie’s (2002) distinction between ‘children’s services’ and ‘children’s spaces’ as a central feature of their analysis; in this, children’s services are understood ‘as instruments or technologies for producing outputs which are essentially adult driven – in the case of education this would be productive future workers and responsible citizens … The aims of children’s services are primarily future oriented’. Moss and Petrie challenge the idea that children’s lives should necessarily be driven by a sense of futurity, or what is to come, and propose that although they may be enframed by the physical boundaries of material institutions, we should seek to promote children’s spaces that are actively produced in collaboration with them. For them, children’s spaces ‘foreground the present, rather than the future; they are part of life, not just a preparation for it. They are spaces for children’s own agendas, where children are understood as fellow citizens with rights.’ These spaces affirm children as ‘agents of their own lives but also interdependent with others’ (Moss and Petrie, 2002, 107). Daniel and Gustafsson (2010) examine school dining halls and use Moss and Petrie’s distinction to ask whether they qualify as children’s spaces or children’s services.



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Example of research Daniel, P. and Gustafsson, U., ‘School Lunches: Children’s Services or Children’s Spaces?’, Children’s Geographies 8 (3) (August 2010): 265–74. The authors’ research explored children’s experience of lunch times in UK primary schools following the introduction of initiatives aimed at offering healthier meals. They assert that while children are highly regulated through much of the school day, and especially in the classroom, mealtimes would appear to offer one opportunity for them to enjoy informal time with their friends and thereby could be considered to be children’s space. A total of sixty-eight children in three London primary schools took part in semi-structured, informal interviews focusing on ‘how satisfied they were with school meals, their wider relationship to food at home and elsewhere, what they thought about the changes to the menu and their views on the eating environment and the social experience of dining’. Using the language of Moss and Petrie, the authors identify the overriding finding of the research as a palpable conflict between school meals as a children’s service and lunchtime as a children’s space. These conflicts are materialized by a regulation of space and time as a central feature in the transaction of mealtimes – for example, spatial regulation of seating arrangements (frequently denying opportunities to eat with friends) as part of the curtailment of what the children see as their own social time. In summary, Daniel and Gustafsson assert that these conflicts mean that these dining halls fail to qualify as children’s spaces but have much in common with children’s services(as Moss and Petrie conceive them). The authors conclude that although there is consultation with children about meals and mealtimes at an abstract, high level of national policy formation, more granular, local-scale research with children about dining halls as lived spaces reveals very different priorities, hopes and emotional investment.

Activity 1 Many adults working in children’s services will sincerely defend their provision as ‘being in children’s best interests’; further, many adults will concur with Articles 12 to 14 of the UNCRC and its insistence that children must be consulted on matters that concern them. How do you think children’s services should respond to what children have to say? (See Jones, 2009, 49–75.)

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Activity 2 Daniel and Gustafsson use the idea of ‘children’s spaces’ as a yardstick against which their research findings can be measured and evaluated, however they suggest that ‘of all provision for children in the UK, schools are the most at odds with the “children’s space” ethos’. Think back and identify an adult who in your experience really cared for and supported you during your time at school. What do you think motivated them and how did they go about securing children’s best interests? Can you suggest reasons why, when so many adults are unstintingly committed to securing what they believe to be children’s best interests, Daniel and Gustafsson find that the institutions they observed failed to reach the aspirations implicit in the idea of ‘children’s spaces’?

Questions concerning the didactic character of the school environment are taken up in research with a focus on school meals by Jo Pike (2008). Pike’s work turns our attention to the spatiality of the dining hall and introduces Michel Foucault’s critical concept of governmentality to help understand schools and their wider disciplinary goals, suggesting that these include the normalization of social power and authority through spatiality.

Example of research Pike, J., ‘Foucault, Space and Primary School Dining Rooms’, Children’s Geographies 6 (4) (November 2008): 413–22. Pike examined four school dining rooms and how they responded to Hull City Council’s ‘Eat Well Do Well’ initiative. Her research uncovered competing ‘rationalities’ (or arguments, reasons and values that justify practices) informing the initiative, but in this paper Pike concentrates on those policies surrounding healthy eating and explores whether their rationalities always sit comfortably with goals focused on other aspects of children’s social well-being. Children’s eating habits became a focus for popular concern in the early part of this century, in part through a high-profile media campaign featuring celebrity chef Jamie Oliver (2000) that linked to concerns about obesity, public service outsourcing and a putative decline of the family meal to debates about the condition of childhood.



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Pike sets out to examine ways in which healthy eating rationalities are realized in the layout and everyday practices of the dining room. Using Michel Foucault’s concept of ‘governmentality’, Pike was concerned to delve beyond superficial appearances and expose: … some of the ways in which spatial practices in school dining rooms can be understood as techniques of government that seek to shape the conduct of actors within the setting by limiting their field of action … [P]ractices which appear ‘normal’, or as the only reasonable way of doing things, are regarded as discursively generated. In this instance it is the discourse of nutrition which legitimises spatial practices within the dining room so that it becomes impossible to think about school dining without thinking of ways in which children might be encouraged to eat more healthily. For Foucault, ‘governmentality’ explains how modern liberal societies control and regulate their population without seeming to compromise their liberal ideals or denying the individual’s sense of their own agency. Governmentality suggests ways that institutions (including schools, prisons, asylums, hospitals, factories, the family and so on) not only organize and administer individuals and groups but also confirm that these ways to govern them are normal and proper. Thereby, Foucault argues, institutions are able to exercise power over pupils, inmates, patients or workers without resorting to physical punishment or violent coercion principally because the ‘right ways to behave’ become assimilated as part of their subjectivity or selfhood and so they govern themselves. Achieving governmentality suggests that spatial organization and material arrangements are far from random or arbitrary, but are component parts of technologies that are applied to achieve the regulation and discipline of children – in this case as healthy eaters on course to become well-tempered, physically fit subjects and citizens. To illustrate, Pike describes the experience of entering the dining space and highlights the strategic positioning of the salad bar, not just for its obvious utility, but also as iconic reinforcement of the values underpinning choices available to children in this space. First there are the messages found in a series of posters: On entering the room there is 5 A DAY poster illustrating a variety of fruits and vegetables displayed on the glass door.

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To the left there is another poster also showing vegetables. Above the counter there are attractive pictures of healthy food with the names of the items written underneath and decorating the walls throughout the space are children’s posters illustrating ‘healthy food’. But then the layout of the dining hall and children’s bodily movements are synchronized as ‘the salad bar is positioned on the left hand side of the room close to the entrance … all children must walk past the salad bar in order to queue for their main meal’ so that ‘through the aesthetics and organisation of the space, children are encouraged to adopt eating behaviours which conform to specific nutritional rationalities underpinning school meals and discouraged from pursuing social interactions with peers. Thus the dominance of nutritional discourse over the social discourse is maintained through spatial practice.’ Pike’s observations suggest that the spatiality of the dining hall is recruited by (not so subtle) imperatives to keep children learning the right lessons, thereby inculcating approved attitudes and achieve governmentality.

Activity 1 A geographer named Elizabeth A. Gagen (2015) links governmentality to the curriculum of citizenship education and suggests that this is an essential part of the role played by schooling and education in reproducing a governable population with a sense of national identification and belonging. She writes: In the context of nation-building, citizenship education denotes not only the knowledge and power invested in political philosophies and ideologies, but equally, the requirements of physical health and well-being. Indeed, physical health education has played a central role in the complicity of schools in nation building. How do you feel about this? Is everything so tightly sewn up or is there any scope for divergence from this complicity? What is your experience?

Activity 2 In Governing the Soul, Nikolas Rose quotes Foucault, thus: ‘Governmentality is “the ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, the calculations and tactics,



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that allow the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form of power, which has as its target the population”’ (Rose, 1999, 5). Foucault frequently presents his ideas in language that deliberately challenges common-sense understanding and encourages us to see things with fresh eyes in pursuit of insight. Can you identify specific ways in which the institution of the school dining room is underlain by ‘procedures’, ‘analyses and reflections’ and ‘calculations and tactics’ that seek to discipline the children to the requirements of the healthy eating agenda? Use the table below to help analyse Jo Pike’s work and then reflect on how your own experience of eating at school worked. The dining hall from Pike(2008)

An institution of childhood from your own experience

‘procedures’ through which power is exercised ‘analyses and reflections’ that justify the exercise of power ‘calculations and tactics’ designed to secure the effective exercise of power

Activity 3 Daniel and Gustafsson suggested (see above) that children resented the dining space as more ‘children’s service’ than ‘children’s space’? Does your examination using Foucault’s concept of governmentality (with its procedures, analyses and reflections, calculations and tactics) help us to understand the forces that shape the dining hall as a socially constructed space and its goals in terms of what Moss and Petrie call a ‘children’s service’?

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Are children passively moulded by the spatiality of childhood institutions or do they find ways actively to challenge and transform them? Thus far our discussion might be seen as suggesting that children’s worlds and institutional spaces are dominated and controlled by a one-dimensional imposition of adult power on to children. But are children’s lives and identities moulded in this way? Indeed, are all children rendered entirely passive by the limitations on their social power and all adults totally powerful? Taylor and Richardson (2005) challenge environmental determinism (i.e. the suggestion that children are passively shaped by their environment) through evidence from research undertaken with children playing in a nursery home corner. The authors argue that their evidence challenges the Lockean view of young children as blank slates waiting to be moulded by their environment; rather, they portray children who express their agency through play scenarios that bring social roles, artefacts and spaces together in syncretic and dynamically shifting hybrid configurations. Taylor and Richardson challenge what they describe as the ‘hegemonic discourses of childhood innocence and “compulsory heterosexuality”’ found in conventional child development theories and that not only inform Developmentally Appropriate Practice (or DAP) but also the spatially mediated expectations of the home corner. The authors’ work was prompted by an event that revived discussions surrounding children and television and, particularly, the extent to which what they see imprints itself in deterministic fashion on passively impressionable minds.



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Example of research Taylor, A. and Richardson, C., ‘Queering the Home Corner’, Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood 6 (2) (2005). Taylor and Richardson’s research was prompted by the controversy stirred by the depiction of children taken to the park by their two mothers in Play School, an Australian series for young children in which viewers are invited to peer ‘Through The Window’ every day at some aspect of everyday Australian life. The popular Australian national press expressed indignation about the implied link between same-sex family relationships and childhood and objected to what they saw as a challenge to their assumed heterosexual norms. For Taylor and Richardson this moral outrage was a salutary indicator of social attitudes rooted in popular constructions of families, children and childhood, because the depiction of a happy family with two mums ‘pushes the conceptual boundaries of “normal childhood” that are so rigorously upheld by the discourses of childhood innocence and hegemonic heterosexual family life’. Their paper examines ways that children actively challenge assumptions about the normal order of the home corner – a familiar feature of any early childhood setting – through three vignettes drawn from an ongoing ethnographic study of children’s play. Their vignettes demonstrate that the normative ‘premises of childhood innocence, domestic natural order and developmental appropriateness … embedded in the architecture of home corner’ seem not to be shared by the children who readily transgress its assumptions about social norms as their play invents and reinvents the home corner as a space of multiple possibilities. The authors suggest that in the process they challenge inbuilt presumptions about the naturalness and stability of links between biological sex, ’gender and heterosexuality’. In the three vignettes the children’s play successively transforms the home corner into: the site for a family camping trip; a police station; and, a royal stable. The researchers note not only the transformation of the normative form of the home corner as a domestic environment, but also the children’s fluid approach to gender identities revealed through their readiness to embody differences. One such crucial incident revolves around Reg and his need, along with other boys, to reinvent the feminized and domesticated home corner space as what he calls a ‘real-man’ police station. However,

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while Reg duly dresses up with a policeman’s cap, he also selects his favourite blue frock. Moreover, Reg’s police station departs from standard expectations as, clipboard in hand, he alternates barking out orders with tender asides to baby dolls sleeping in a row of cots. His concern for the babies is confirmed when another boy drops a baby and refuses to pick it up; Reg takes the crying baby to the care of a teacher, yelling out, ‘I’m a policeman … and a mother … my name is Thelma and this is my baby. Can you look after her for me?’ In summary, Taylor and Richardson make the following suggestion: Traditional lines of power and desire are crossed when deepvoiced policemen choose skirts and high heels and then teeter between expressions of domination and tenderness. Along a continuum of difference, these non-normative roles blur the boundaries of identity categories and ‘dramatise the incoherencies in the allegedly stable relations between chromosomal sex, gender and desire’ (Jagose, 2005, 1). The radically otherwise visions of these children exist in sharp contrast to the prescribed and conforming order of the more appropriate world created for children by adults.

Reflection 1 For over a quarter of a century, Prout and James’s seminal New Paradigm for the Sociology of Childhood has done much to catalyse research and challenge working assumptions about children and childhood on many fronts. Among these is their first proposition that childhood is a social construction and so it is important to distinguish between the biological facts of immaturity on the one hand and how these facts are made sense of through cultural institutions on the other. Taylor and Richardson’s findings suggest ways that the children construct play scenarios combining social roles based on sex, gender, parenting, care responsibilities and working lives with toys, dressing-up clothes and other artefacts in ways that also incorporate the spatial possibilities of the home corner. Does their work on the home corner lend support to the social constructionist distinction that Prout and James made between given biological facts and what cultural meanings make of them?

Reflection 2 Prout and James’s third proposition champions the idea that children are active in the construction of their social lives and the lives of



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those around them. Are there socially normative assumptions designed into the home corner as a play space and how far do you think Taylor and Richardson’s research goes in challenging environmental determinist arguments?

Taylor and Richardson propose that their findings challenge normative assumptions about children, play, gender and sexuality based upon biologically-driven developmentalist and normative assumptions that, they argue, are written into the spatiality of the home corner and provide a script for children’s play. However, they also demonstrate the active engagement of the children in transforming this space into a place or locale whose meaning supports their play rather than the intended normative expectations. Taylor and Richardson found the children drawing on a full repertoire comprising language, voice, dressing-up clothes, toys and various other props to reinvent the home corner space as a multiplicity of places within which open-ended worlds of possibility can be explored. It is not always clear that the space found in institutions of childhood is as malleable as the home corner in the particular setting where Taylor and Richardson conducted their research. All too often the deterministic presumptions, ideological assumptions about childhood and the drive to achieve governmentality that seem to be built into institutional spaces – that we encounter, for example, in Harden, Daniel and Gustafsson and Pike’s work – stymie and curtail children’s attempts at reshaping and reinvention. This can mean that children are provoked into conflictual encounters that pit their ideas about suitable spaces to play and be against the spaces and places the adult world believes they need. This can lead to conflicts, resistance and transgression, so that in Somerville et al.’s (2012) terms, ‘deep place learning occurs in a contact zone of contestation’. According to ethnographic research by geographers Fiona Smith and John Barker, after school care and play provision can resemble such a zone of contestation. The emergence of the ‘out of school club’ as a relatively new institution of childhood in the early years of the Blair New Labour governments again opens up questions surrounding the distinction between children’s services and children’s spaces identified by Moss and Petrie (2002). Smith and Barker conducted extensive research exploring the impact of these new and emerging institutions of childhood through groundbreaking research

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into children’s experience of them as lived spaces; this entailed the use of what were then novel research methodologies based on the sort of visual elicitation techniques that have now become rather more methodologically orthodox.

Example of research Smith, F. and Barker, J., (2000), ‘Contested Spaces: Children’s Experiences of out of School Care in England and Wales’, Childhood: A Global Journal of Child Research 7 (3) (February 2000). The after-school club has become, along with the children’s centre, a commonplace component of childhood in the UK, but this is a relatively recent development and neither had a consistent institutional form before the late 1990s. However, Smith and Barker’s work was significant because it caught these nascent institutions at a point of rapid growth following the appearance of the National Childcare Strategy in 1998 – the authors report that there were just 350 after-school clubs in 1990 but over 5,000 by 2000 when they reported – and their work was prompted by a realization that ‘we know little about children’s experiences of and feelings towards these specific types of geographic setting’, therefore they set out to explore ‘how children experience and attribute meaning to the space and place of the out of school club. In doing so we discuss what … has [been] described as the “space of place” – the ways in which children experience out of school clubs as “material, bounded localities” (Teather, 1999)’ (Smith and Barker, 2000; but see also 1998, 1999a, 1999b, 1999c, 1999d, 2000a, 2000b, 2001, 2002). The intention to explore how children experience and attribute meaning to the spaces of this relatively new institution of childhood led Smith and Barker to develop a number of research methodologies that asked children to record and then narrate their experience using cameras, video and drawing as well as interviews with one another. These methods sought to allow the children to offer interpretations of the out of school club as their ‘lived space’ (see Soja, 1999, and Chapter 3). However, the researchers found that their concern to encourage participation and consultation was rarely replicated in the operation of the clubs as ‘environments created for children rather than by children’; rather, their evidence suggests that children did not passively accept the arrangements



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made for them but found ways to demonstrate their transgressive resistance. In interviews, the playworkers stressed the importance of the clubs as places of care where boundedness and visibility were central to their strategies for the management of the children; typically they spoke of setting boundaries and managing or curtailing spatial access in order to achieve this. However, the research revealed that this concern with spatial control and management could lead to conflicts over children’s range and the degree to which they were subject to adult surveillance. So, in contrast to the playworkers, many children saw the clubs as sites for play and fun that should not only extend beyond the safety of the indoor environment, but also offer private space that was beyond the adult gaze: In a number of clubs one of the favourite activities was to make dens out of furniture, boxes, cardboard or material. Children strictly controlled this micro-environment within the club by prohibiting adults from entering and by sometimes making them too small for adults to inhabit … Children were clear that one of the key attractions of den-making was the privacy it afforded them outside the watchful gaze of adult playworkers. In many of the clubs, dens provided the only opportunity for children to create a private space within the public realm of the club. Clearly the children take steps to construct private environments beyond the adult gaze, but also take advantage of the differing embodiments of the adults and their peers to help them control physical access to them. That said, the potential for malleability and openness found earlier in Taylor and Richardson’s (2005) work on the home corner seems reduced in these environments; however, despite this, the researchers found children asserting their constrained agency as and where they were able to. Where the clubs occupied school buildings after school hours, the children’s desire to exert control over what they saw as their space and time and deflect the regulatory gaze of the adults led to conflicts and contestations. The researchers reported the children’s indignation when teachers, who were not playworkers, challenged them over their behaviour at the out of school club; they found this unacceptable because it crossed the important territorial boundary between school-time and the after-school club that they believed should have been respected.

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Conflicts not only revolved around relations with teachers and other adults, but also emerged when Smith and Barker examined the spatiality of the clubs in relation to the sociological categories of gender, ethnicity and age and the way that these are played out through relations of power between different groups of children.

Reflection Smith and Barker’s finding about how children felt when teachers challenged their behaviour out of hours echoes proposition 2 in Matthews and Limb’s (1999) agenda for the geography of children, where they state that, ‘The land uses and facilities which involve children are frequently different from those of adults and, even when shared, are largely used for different purposes. Collisions resulting from different patterns of usage are almost inevitable’ (see Chapter 2 for fuller discussion). Are you also able to interpret what Smith and Barker found using the concept of heterogeneous space that comes from Foucault’s work as well as Taylor and Richardson’s (2005)?

Chapter summary In his paper on the Nant-y-Cwm Steiner School, Peter Kraftl expresses an interesting ambiguity when he asks, ‘why and how does childhood really come to matter, in practice, in and as place?’ The ambiguity, of course, lies in the use of the term ‘matter’. In one obvious sense this refers to the materiality – bricks, mortar, joinery, chairs, tables and other pedagogic props found in schools and that make schooling possible. However, there is also the sense of mattering; that is, being important and a worthy subject for our attention. The designs, orderings and arrangements of schools as dominant and increasingly domineering institutions of childhood bring the material and the mattering sense together to construct places as ‘material, bounded localities’ (Teather, 1999, and see Chapter 2), where a certain vision for childhood can be realized. Yet the research suggests that engineered or not, these places are not infrequently sites of conflict where children as beings



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in their own right encounter the expectations of modern childhood and its construction of them as unfulfilled and incomplete human becomings requiring constant regulation, supervision and separation.

Chapter activity How complete is the scholarization of children’s lives? In order to evaluate this it may be helpful to look at the work of a celebrated sociologist named Erving Goffman. Goffman worked in the 1950s and 1960s and took a particular interest in institutions and the sort of social realities found in them. He spent some years in the mid-1950s working in a number of asylums built to treat people with mental illnesses; following his fieldwork he developed the theoretical concept of the ‘total institution’ that has been highly influential in shaping social science. This is how he begins with a working definition: A total institution may be defined as a place of residence and work where a large number of like-situated individuals, cut off from the wider society for an appreciable period of time, together lead an enclosed, formally administered round of life. (Goffman, 1962, 11)

He continues: [E]very institution has encompassing tendencies … Their encompassing or total character is symbolized by the barrier to social intercourse with the outside and to departure that is often built right into the physical plant, such as locked doors, high walls, barbed wire, cliffs, water, forests, or moors. These establishments I am calling total institutions. (Goffman, 1962, 15–16)

Goffman identifies five types or categories of ‘total institution’ in relation to the people they accommodate. These are for: 1. people who are helpless and harmless (e.g. those with disabilities); 2. helpless people who unintentionally are considered a threat to society (e.g. those with contagious or mental illnesses); 3. those who intentionally threaten the community (e.g. violent prisoners); 4. those people whose work is facilitated by these arrangements (e.g. soldiers in barracks, pupils in boarding schools, members of work camps); 5. those who intentionally retreat from the world (e.g. monks and nuns).

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Goffman goes on to offer two caveats: First, ‘This classification of total institutions is not neat [or] exhaustive.’ Second, ‘[N]one of the elements I will describe seems peculiar to total institutions, and none seems to be shared by every one of them; what is distinctive about total institutions is that each exhibits to an intense degree many of the items in this family of attributes.’

Looking back at the examples of research in this chapter – Kraftl, Harden, Daniel and Gustaffson, Pike, Smith and Barker as well as the report on Ealing Abbey – can these institutions be understood in part or completely in terms of the ‘family of attributes’ Goffman associates with ‘total institutions’? Reflecting on Kjørholt in Chapter 2 and the idea of childhood as a symbolic space, although more abstract than a school, barracks, prison or mental hospital, might modern childhood also have the characteristics of a total institution?

Reflecting on keywords and terms The following keywords and terminology have been introduced in this chapter: MM

MM

MM

MM

MM

MM

MM

emotions governmentality healthy pupilhood scholarization space as place total institution

Look back by scanning the chapter; in a short, summative sentence, describe your understanding of each term and how it has been used.



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Further reading Blundell, D. (2012), Education and Constructions of Childhood, London: Continuum. An historical survey of education, schooling and the construction of modern childhood. Burke, C. and I. Grosvenor (2008), School, London: Reaktion Books. Comprehensive historical and contemporary examination of mass schooling and its architecture in relation to education and its aims. The Children’s Society (2015), The Good Childhood Report 2015, http://www. childrenssociety.org.uk/sites/default/files/TheGoodChildhoodReport2015. pdf (accessed 5 April 2016). Latest of successive reports from the Society examining the condition of childhood in the UK and in relation to international research evidence – a campaigning statement on the state of play in 2015 with particular interest in schools and schooling. Kraftl, P., ‘Ecological Architecture as Performed Art: Nant-y-Cwm Steiner School, Pembrokeshire’, Social and Cultural Geography 7 (6) (December 2006). Further research by Kraftl on Nant-y-Cwm Steiner School. Kraftl, P. (2014), Geographies of Alternative Education: Diverse Learning Spaces for Children and Young People, London: Policy Press. Continues and deepens examination of the themes and priorities explored in the Nant-y-Cwm work by examining the relationship between material and social spaces in places where alternatives to mainstream education are conducted and found. This includes Montessori nurseries and Steiner schools, but also care farms, home schooling, forest schools and others.

5 Playing Out: Range, Territories and Children’s Activity Space Chapter outline There is a widespread belief that children no longer play freely outdoors and that where this does happen it is almost always under the supervision of adults in appointed play parks and spaces. This chapter assesses the evidence for a curtailment of children’s outdoor play and draws on Teather’s category of ‘activity space’ as theoretical support for the task of thinking and rethinking. The chapter draws on research from the UK and international contexts; the impacts of road traffic, fears about strangers and abduction, the demonization of some children and young people and the phenomenon of islanding are discussed in relation to parental constructions of risk, rural–urban divides and their responses to sectarian memories and experiences. The chapter goes on to examine research concerning institutional attempts to regulate and delimit children’s activity space through the concept of territoriality as well as their responses as social actors to attempts at curtailing their activity space – this includes challenges to assumptions that children’s always find protective interventions by parents and adult carers unwelcome. Finally, global approaches to facilitating children’s outdoor play are presented and discussed. The chapter is structured around the following key themes and questions: Setting the scene Do children play outside anymore?

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What shapes children’s mobility and spatial range? What is the evidence for the ‘islanding of children’, and what does this mean? How do some children and young people respond to the limitation of their activity space? Is children’s agency always opposed to adult will? Chapter summary Chapter activity Reflecting on keywords and terms Further reading

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Setting the scene In her 1961 classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs presented a powerful indictment of professionalized urban planning and what she saw as its destruction of the spontaneous vibrancy and dynamic sociality of city life. At the heart of her arguments stood children and the way that urban planning had turned its attention to redeeming and transforming their lives. Here she characterizes the arguments of the planners about the evils of unregulated street-play: Among the superstitions of planning and housing is a fantasy about the transformation of children. It goes like this: A population of children is condemned to play on the city streets. These pale and rickety children, in their sinister moral environment, are telling each other canards about sex, sniggering evilly and learning new forms of corruption as efficiently as if they were in reform school … If only these deprived children can be gotten off the streets into parks and playgrounds with equipment on which to exercise, space in which to run, grass to lift their souls! Clean and happy places, filled with the laughter of children responding to a wholesome environment. (Jacobs, 1993, 97)

By contrast, Jacobs presents evidence that the somewhat sanitized ideal play environments found in parks and playgrounds were anything but safe for city children and that the modernizing projects of the planners had created greater moral hazards than would ever be encountered on many meaner streets:



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[A]s I passed the relatively genteel playground where I live, I noted that its only inhabitants in the late afternoon, with the mothers and the custodian gone, were two small boys threatening to bash a little girl with their skates, and an alcoholic who had roused himself to shake his head and mumble that they shouldn’t do that. Farther down the street, on a block with many Puerto Rican immigrants, was another scene of contrast. Twenty-eight children of all ages were playing on the sidewalk without mayhem, arson, or any event more serious than a squabble over a bag of candy. They were under the casual surveillance of adults primarily visiting in public with each other. (Jacobs, 1993, 102)

Jacobs’ work draws attention to the modernizing ethos of the planners and their attempts to engineer and transform children’s lives in ways that appear congruent with the goals of modern childhood that were discussed in Chapter 2. Similar arguments are taken up in 1974 by Joe Benjamin, doyen of the adventure play movement through the 1960s and 1970s. Benjamin made a plea for a reappraisal of idealized assumptions about suitable environments for free-play and the exercise of imagination, arguing that for children growing up in urban environments the city’s streets and buildings supported their own ‘natural history’ of play: We must stop regarding the streets and similar favourite haunts in the negative way we do. These places can and do provide much more than opportunities for free play; they stimulate the child’s need to learn about motor cars, engines, transport, shops and ships; about the lives of bus conductors, factory workers, builders, painters, telephone engineers, shop assistants, policemen and nurses. Children do not, as is commonly believed, go into a strange world when they leave school. But they would be far better equipped for that world if, instead of being continually hounded from it, they were encouraged to learn more about its opportunities within a framework of play and participation by people who themselves are active in its many spheres. (Benjamin, 1974, 88)

We might reflect on whether the deterministic connections he makes between people, place and what children should be ‘encouraged to learn’ are quite so clear in the economic conditions of the early twenty-first century as they seem to have been in 1974. However, writing more than thirty years later, John R. Gillis suggests that the very environments championed by Benjamin because of their immediate proximity to home have become inaccessible to children:

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Children have been systematically excluded from the former mainlands of urban and suburban existence, especially the streets and other public spaces … even as terrifying images of ‘street children’ proliferate; and more and more children are under surveillance or locked up … For many children, their most immediate environment is a blur seen from car or bus. The full range of sensual and social experiences afforded to earlier generations is denied to those who no longer walk or ride bikes in their immediate environments. (Gillis, 2008, 317)

Thus, concern about how and what children play is matched by anxious questions of where, when and with whom – resolving into a generalized and grumbling fear that their free-play has become circumscribed by adult-world agendas whether at home, in school or other organized recreational settings. In particular, discussions and research have centred on the extent to which children now play outdoors at all and whether the spaces and places afforded them have become curtailed in ways that may not be desirable for their health and well-being. Skår and Krogh’s conviction about childhoods in Norway speaks for many in Western minority world societies when they suggest that ‘children are spending increasing amounts of time in institutions such as kindergartens, schools, and before- and after-school care. Much of their free time is now occupied by organised, planned and adult-controlled activities’ (Skår and Krogh, 2009). Elizabeth Kenworthy Teather’s dynamic understanding of ‘activity space’ offers useful conceptual support in an appraisal of children’s spatial range and limits both because it enables an examination of where these lie, but also because it allows us to ask whether these have changed. Further, as Teather also points out, our bodies and selves are pleated together to form the primary spatialized unit through which activity spaces are navigated. Therefore, in an echo of Prout and James (1997, 8), children’s activity space must also be understood in terms of social variables including ethnicity, class, gender, disability and sexuality as well as particular constructions of childhood itself; so that an intersectional approach to understanding children’s spatial range and experience is required and we rightly ask which children are or are not playing out as well as where and why this is.



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Do children play outside anymore? In 2007 the Playday organization published a review of research entitled ‘Our Streets Too!’ (Lacey, 2007), prompted by the conviction that children were playing out less frequently and that many rarely left the house except under adult supervision. Their argument was supported by research findings suggesting that in 2005 just 15 per cent of children played in the streets near their home as compared with 75 per cent in 1973. In seeking reasons for this decline in street-based play, Playday cite a survey conducted by Hugh Matthews and Melanie Limb in 2000 highlighting fears about the dangers of road traffic as ‘far outweighing fears of bullies, gangs, strangers and fear of attack’. It is intriguing to note that although this is how children and young people perceived the dangers of outdoor play, child pedestrian casualties declined dramatically over the same period (although, of course, this may in itself be an indicator of the decline in outdoor play). The children’s expressed fear of traffic seemed to correspond to a more general anxiety amongst parents that may have been internalized by children, so that children come to share their parents’ anxieties and feel uneasy about venturing beyond home and familiar territory. However, not all children felt the same degree of anxiety and Matthews and Limb’s research found evidence for differentiation on the basis of social and economic deprivation, with children from the most deprived neighbourhoods feeling twice as fearful about walking around alone than those living in more affluent areas (see also Reay and Lucey’s [2000] paper looking at the experience of children from minority ethnic groups growing up on inner London estates). If this is how children and young people felt about being outside in the streets around their homes, the attitudes of the adult public towards them was far from straightforward or positive. Whilst on the one hand, Matthews and Limb (cited in Lacey, 2007) found that there was general agreement that children were less safe outdoors and faced genuine threats to their safety, adult respondents also confirmed that they saw children and young people’s presence as undesirable. This seemed to be confirmed by broad endorsement in the media for the legislation from the New Labour government to introduce what were known as Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs) as a measure to curtail what was popularly seen as an epidemic of low-level crime, disobedience and general disorder amongst

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young people (Crime and Disorder Act, 1998; Anti-Social Behaviour Act, 2003). The legislation was broadly welcomed and there was widespread public endorsement of the idea that ASBOs would serve to regulate young people’s behaviour and access to space. Playday cite work by Squires and Stephen (2005) in which the authors ‘argue that the street was once an ideal setting for children’s play and recreation and that anti-social behaviour orders are a symptom of increasingly negative attitudes in society towards children and young people’s place in the public realm’ (Lacey, 2007, 19); this point was echoed by the finding of a MORI survey in 2003 where 75 per cent of the UK’s adult population backed a legal curfew on teenage young people (Thomas and Hocking, 2003, in Lacey, 2007, 18). The presence of children in the public realm is not only a source of contention in the UK; in Germany, anguished debate accompanied moves to change planning laws that regarded schools, nurseries and playgrounds as presenting an environmental nuisance equivalent to garages and factories because of the noise made by children at play (The Guardian, 2010). It is helpful at this point to refer to Chris Jenks’s work, where he examines these ambiguities and suggests that our constructions of children and young people are deeply conflicted and informed by dualistically opposed discourses that he identifies through the respective ideal forms of ‘the apollonian’ and ‘the Dionysian’ child – whereas the former is characterized by sweetness and light, the latter is an agent of chaos and disorder (Jenks, 2005, 62–70). Moreover, when intersected with ‘race’, gender and class concerns frequently focus more specifically on which children and young people are found in public space, for example the intersection with social class that clusters around those children and young people identified as ‘hoodies’, or the negative constructions of girls and young women who as members of so-called ‘girl gangs’ figure as neighbourhood menaces. Criminologist Tara Young writes: Much has been written in the press about girl gangsters … a considerable proportion of this has, until recently, focused on the violent and destructive aspects of female involvement in male groups and criminality … Gang-involved girls have been constructed as violent ‘She Male gangsters’ capable of robbery, rape, murder and ‘deadlier than the males’ … Branded as ‘the feral sex’ and ‘natural born killers’ this new breed of gangster is deemed to include some of the most aggressive, violent and menacing young people in the world. (Young, 2014, 182)



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Playday conducted a follow-up survey in 2013 with 3,000 children, parents and other adults and found that a combination of fears about strangers, parental anxiety and intolerant attitudes towards the young were among the factors explaining inhibitions on children’s outdoor play, but, once again, the overriding factor was a sense of the dangers posed by road traffic. However, it is also important to note that in this more recent survey parental anxiety about these familiar factors was supplemented by respondents’ misgivings about whether they could trust their neighbours – even when they felt they knew them well. This is certainly worthy of further research and may well be due to a climate of uncertainty that has grown up in the UK in the wake of a tragic series of headline cases that includes the abduction and brutal murder of Sarah Payne in 2000, Madeleine McCann’s disappearance in 2007 and the more recent murder of April Jones in the summer of 2012. Although these fears are frequently and somewhat casually filed under the ‘stranger-danger’ cliché, the ambivalence of respondents towards neighbours may reflect the discussion around the Soham case of 2002, where the fact that the perpetrator, Ian Huntley, was well known to Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman because he was a school caretaker received particular emphasis. Concerns about children’s freedom to be outdoors are not unique to the UK; in a report on children’s independent mobility published in 2015, the Policy Studies Institute found that, with the striking exception of Finland, independent mobility in sixteen countries (mostly European, but also Israel, South Africa, Australia, Brazil, Japan and Sri Lanka) was low across the age-range studied (seven to fifteen-year-olds), with road traffic featuring as a familiar cause for concern. Only in Finland, Sweden, Japan and Denmark are a majority of children allowed to venture out after it is dark and in South Africa most eleven-year-olds are not allowed to cross main roads alone – see Benwell’s research later in this chapter. Finland’s position is markedly at odds with restrictions found elsewhere: At age 7, a majority of Finnish children can already travel to places within walking distance or cycle to places alone; by age 8 a majority can cross main roads, travel home from school and go out after dark alone, by age 9 a majority can cycle on main roads alone, and by age 10 a majority can travel on local buses alone. Overall, Finland is the top-performing country across almost every independent mobility indicator in this study, coming second only to Germany for children’s self-reported freedom to travel on local buses alone. (Policy Studies Institute, 2015)

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The next section presents research looking in finer detail at the factors that might contribute to shaping children’s independent mobility.

What shapes children’s mobility and spatial range? The factors shaping parental anxiety and in consequence the decisions concerning mobility and activity space they make on behalf of their children are explored in research by Alparone and Pacilli from Italy. This research examined parental assessments of relative risks in children’s immediate environments, whether these were urban or rural settings.

Example of research Alparone, F. R. and Pacilli, M. G., ‘On Children’s Independent Mobility: The Interplay of Demographic, Environmental, and Psychosocial Factors’, Children’s Geographies 10 (1) (February 2012): 109–22. Alparone and Pacilli (2012) examined children’s independent mobility in urban environments starting from the conviction that ‘adults often perceive the city as a dangerous place and have thus significantly increased their protective behaviour towards their children, sometimes even going so far as to overprotect them. These fearful attitudes have led parents to strongly limit how much they let their children go and play freely outdoors … as well as how much they consider the home as the safest and comfortable [sic] place for children’. The parents’ beliefs that ‘ill-intentioned adults’, including encounters with criminal activity or drugs, inhibit children’s free movement in urban rather than rural areas is emphasized later where the authors assert that ‘compared to cities, rural towns offer contexts and characteristics which children benefit from during socialization and creative play (water, hiding places, things to climb)’. However, the authors also found that the urban environment was not universally damned as a site of depravity and danger; rather, they found that parents expressed an ambivalence, seeing the city as offering the benefits of a civilizing, diverse social world on the one hand, whilst endorsing the sociable affordances of the rural small town on the other. Their research found that ‘[p]arents often



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acknowledge that the urban environment provides their children with opportunities for cognitive, social, and physical development’ and in consequence ‘try to overcome their fears in order to enable and support the mobility of their children’. It seems that ‘a positive parental judgment regarding the potentiality of the environment can counterbalance a negative perception of the neighbourhood, helping parents to see their children’s autonomy as a positive growth agent’. Although recognizing that a number of factors impact on children’s mobility, Alparone and Pacilli are keen to stress the importance of parental evaluations and fears about children’s safety; this is because they suggest that whilst these fears are vitally important, they are not immutable. Furthermore, it is clear that multiple and at times contradictory factors can be at play in shaping perceptions that consequently appear inconsistent. Therefore, the authors assert that ‘any measure aimed at improving children’s independent mobility can be truly effective only if parents are encouraged to improve their environmental quality perception, reflect on the legitimacy of their own social fears and have confidence in the benefits that the free use of the public space provides for children’s development’ (Alparone and Pacilli, 2012).

Reflections on research Alparone and Pacilli’s work tends to place its emphasis on psychological factors – parental fears, attitudes, beliefs and perceptions – in order to understand and explain the curtailment of children’s mobility. Re-read the summary of Alparone and Pacilli’s research and note their specific findings; use what you find to reflect on the following questions: 1 While we might accept that understanding parents’ mental state may be necessary in tackling the problem, is this sufficient to understand what shapes children’s mobility? Without consideration of what children think in relation to these perceptions, do we risk reinforcement of an ‘adult versus child’ dualism? 2 Teather identifies what she calls ‘discursive space’ as ‘a set of mental attitudes and conventions held by members of the public, the media and even … by the judiciary‘, whereby, drawing on ‘mental constructs that are the product of events and the reactions to them, of values and of the media debates and representations‘ cultural and social meaning is assigned to spaces and places (Teather, 1999 and Chapter 3).

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3 How are urban and rural spaces thought about in Alparone and Pacilli’s work and how are they positioned in relation to one another? Do you think Teather’s idea of ‘discursive space’ help us to understand popular meanings attaching to, say, ‘country childhoods’ and ‘urban kids’?

Research by Maguire and Shirlow (2004) conducted in Northern Ireland also takes up the theme of children’s mobility in rural contexts; but an evaluation of personal, psychologically-located perceptions is complemented by historical, sociological and political factors that draw on more collective contemporary sectarian experience. This suggests that the invisibility of many socially constructed barriers makes them nonetheless real, so that, despite their material absence as fences, walls and gates, sectarian boundaries and adult memories chart out an invisible, yet experientially real, social geography that curtails and delimits children’s lived space. Such barriers are commonly encountered where ethnic and communal strife is or has been prevalent, and these less tangible, yet powerful social barriers are examined by Maguire and Shirlow in relation to the violent ‘Troubles’ that blighted lives and communities in Northern Ireland over the last 40 years of the twentieth century. These conflicts are broadly linked to broad distinctions between nationalist/Catholic and loyalist/Protestant identities and, although greatly reduced following the 1998 Good Friday agreement, they have profoundly shaped social relations and geographies in that part of Ireland and to varying degrees continue to do so. The effects of these conflicts on the children of Northern Ireland have been the subject of considerable research interest; however, whilst the weight of attention has been focused on harmful psychological impacts and their relation to children’s identity, Maguire and Shirlow make a case for understanding how children narrate the spatiality of risk in their lives as a complement to parental assessments.



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Example of research Maguire, S. and Shirlow, P., ‘Shaping Childhood Risk in Post-conflict Northern Ireland’, Children’s Geographies 2 (1) (February 2004): 69–82. The authors start from the principle ‘that in order to understand the multiple and complex geographies of childhood we must learn to explore children’s experiences through their own explanations and voices in addition to our own memories of being a child’. The research is concerned with the spatiality of risk and the barriers and boundaries that delimit children’s activity space. The researchers conducted their research with children from four primary schools (two Catholic and two Protestant) aged between eight and ten as well as five women’s groups, all within the predominantly rural area of mid-Ulster. The authors were particularly keen to examine children’s lives within rural towns and villages because so much of previous research had been conducted in urban settings and they are aware that this bias may have been shaped by discursively constructed beliefs about rural areas being less susceptible to the evils of the urban world. However, Maguire and Shirlow point to a number of research studies indicating a more complex social geography than these discourses admit and ‘that within rural children’s experiences there are multiple and complex geographies emerging dependent on their location and socio-economic status’. However, the depth of these beliefs about the relative safety of rural areas appeared to have been endorsed when 97 per cent of the children in the authors’ research confirmed that they thought their area was safer than NI’s main urban centres and that while familiar concerns about traffic in urban areas surfaced, fear of strangers was more closely associated with others from across sectarian divides than with an urban–rural split – in contrast to the less specific ‘stranger-danger’ found in other parts of the UK. Sectarian divisions and memories of the Troubles appeared to haunt particular areas in which children claimed they were forbidden by parents to play. Maguire and Shirlow infer that while ‘[t]hese barriers to play appear to have been established to prevent children from encountering risky people who might pose a threat or cause them to get into trouble’, there was also evidence that some of these spatial restrictions were the product of ‘the (re)construction of parents’ lived experiences into their children’s geographies of play’.

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Sometimes, as in the case of the nine-year-old boy who avoided the local play-park, references to current experiences or fears – such as: ‘there are people down there who are very bad … they drink [and] Catholics always play up there … and they shout at you. The Catholics will take you away’ – are intercut with reference to his mother’s own childhood memory of events from the 1970s: ‘She thinks there’s people who used to throw stones there.’ The impact of sectarian differences was, unsurprisingly perhaps, greater where different communities lived in closer proximity to one another and, by contrast, featured much less in remote or more homogenous communities. While some areas were directly identified in sectarian territorial terms, others, such as open land, were less specifically earmarked, although still identified as dangerous and unsuitable for play because of dumped weapons or encounters with soldiers. The study confirmed other research by suggesting that identifying children’s experience on the basis of universalist assumptions about childhood or ‘the child’ was unfounded and that other social factors greatly influenced children’s experiences and lived spaces. In particular, family structure, class and parenting practices shaped decisions and rulings not merely about how far children could go, but also when they could venture beyond the home. The authors found ‘single-parent families relying more and earlier on children to undertake tasks such as going to the shops or looking after younger siblings resulting in more autonomy in their spatial movements’. Indeed, in contrast to other studies ‘the majority of the children in this study were allowed some personal freedom by the age of seven to eight years old. Children of this age reported playing out away from the adult gaze, going to the local shops for sweets, negotiating roads and visiting friends and relatives … with boys being allowed to go slightly further at slightly younger ages.’ There was no evidence for difference in these freedoms between religious communities; however, for children from Catholic families their activity space was augmented around the age of eight or nine when they became altar servers at Mass and were expected to attend church several times during the week throughout the year. Joining the local GAA sport clubs also offered similar early rites of passage for these and other children from Catholic/nationalist backgrounds. In summary, the authors found that despite the common fear of traffic and child-abusers, in post-conflict Northern Ireland there were ‘localised spatial and context related variations in risk perception particularly in relation to ethno-sectarian conflict’ and that ‘some



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parents reproduce a mistrust of an ethno-sectarian “other” through instilling spatial behaviours upon their children that they learnt whilst they were children themselves’. These perceived risks and parental memories serve to construct and curtail how children see their activity space.

Reflection: 1 Look back at Edward Soja’s proposition in Chapter 3 that a fuller understanding of social being is possible both when the spatiality of social phenomena complements examination of their historicality and sociality, and when we seek an ethnographic understanding of people’s ‘lived space’. Do you think Maguire and Shirlow’s research could be conducted without attention to spatiality and to the children’s lived space and would it be richer or poorer without this? 2 Point 4 of Matthews and Limb’s framework for the geography of children asserts that ‘In the course of their environmental transactions, children commonly encounter threats which often go unnoticed by adults. Many childhood hazards are not dangers in later life.’ Maguire and Shirlow suggest that boundaries and barriers do not have to be materially tangible or visible to exert existential effects. Can you think of any barriers in your childhood and adulthood and whether they have changed or remained the same? Can you suggest why they may have changed or remained the same?

What is the evidence for the ‘islanding of children’, and what does this mean? The growing regulation and curtailment of children’s ‘activity space’ leads to a metaphorical ‘islanding’ of childhood according to Helga Zeiher (in du Bois-Reymond et al., 2001, 139–56) and John Gillis (in Gutman and de Coninck-Smith, 2008). In an echo of Jane Jacobs, Zeiher argues that post-war structural-functionalist planning regimes across Europe have reinforced the segregation of children from the mainstream of social life by regulating their free-association and confining play to pre-constructed

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spaces. The role of parents as transport providers is key to the navigation of space ‘between these islands: to the homes of friends and relatives, playgrounds, kindergartens, sports grounds, shops in the town center, and weekend and holiday destinations. The area throughout which the insularized life space of these young children may be spread as far as the daily mobility of their parents’ (Zeiher, 2001). Zeiher goes on to suggest that these individualized arrangements shape children’s childhood experiences around temporary or shallow friendships that are parent dependent and may break as quickly as they form; furthermore, and perhaps crucially, any difficult interactions will tend to be resolved by moving-on rather than negotiation. Zeiher suggests that under these conditions it is not until middle childhood that young people may begin to define a more localized and geographically continuous activity space that opens up as walking or cycling extends their reach. But even then, the embeddedness of children in growing specific social movements (youth organizations, sport, cultural activity, etc.) or in identity communities may well maintain this islanding into young adulthood and work not only against geographically immediate social interactions but also less selective ones. Although children do inhabit materially bounded communities of propinquity – such as neighbourhoods or institutions, like school, that rely on being cheek-by-jowl with fellow community members – many children’s social worlds are rarely restricted to them and also take place in communities of interest that are not tied to one place. In a perceptive chapter, John R. Gillis expands the islanding metaphor by speaking of separated archipelagos and the loss of a ‘mainland’ childhood. His metaphorical synopsis is bleak: Each child now has his or her own schedule as well as his or her own geography. There is no longer a shared time or territory of childhood, no mainland of childhood, only infinite archipelagos of stranded children, ever more dependent on adults to transport them from island to island and to keep them on schedule in their increasingly hurried lives (Gillis, 2008, 316)

Research illustrating this institutionalized ‘islanding’ and its relation to parental concern comes from the work of Elcin Tezel and her examination of children and families living in Istanbul’s gated communities, where the boundaries between home space and outside are materially tangible.



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Example of research Tezel, E., ‘Exploring Parental Concerns about Children’s Interactions in Gated Communities: A Case Study in Istanbul’, Children’s Geographies 9 (3–4) (August–November 2011): 425–37. Tezel situates her research with reference to Istanbul’s rapid expansion between 1950 and 2000, when the city grew at an average annual rate of 4.5 per cent to reach around 12 million inhabitants by the first decade of this century. This rapid growth led to many pressing urban problems, including unregulated residential development, so that squatter settlements lie adjacent to luxury developments and occasion fears about crime and disorder amongst more prosperous inhabitants, many of whom now live in gated communities defined as ‘habitat units that include at least two houses or apartments, secured by a fence or a wall and proper security infrastructure like guards, video cameras, and automatic barriers’. Tezel continues, ‘The gated communities that have developed in Istanbul in the last ten years are trendy forms of residential settlements widely preferred by people from upper-middle and upper class socio-economic status. Gated communities are preferred by residents for a range of factors, including privacy, the urban community, security, identity, and citizenship.’ These developments represent a highly significant intervention in the overall social geography of the city and not less for children than other groups: ‘[C]hildren’s outdoor experiences and spatial perceptions have dramatically changed. These changes are characterized by the loss of action spaces due to problems of safety and security.’ This loss of what Tezel terms ‘action space’ also means that ‘they are also more escorted and supervised by their parents in their everyday mobilities than previously’ and as a result ‘spaces for children are scattered like islands in the city where children are unable to reach them on their own’. This is a situation with obvious similarities to what Zeiher (2004) and Gillis (2008) describe as ‘islanding’ and that illustrates how children’s activity space may be shaped and curtailed by powerful discourses constructing children as vulnerable and in need of protection (Mills, 2000). Tezel suggests that this has important implications for how children come to see the world and experience it in tangible ways: ‘Being taken and dropped by school service bus and driven by car to reach the places of outside world beyond the gates may limit spatial knowledge, such

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as distance identification and the relative orientation of landmarks,.’ But beyond this topographical knowledge she also points to other matters associated with their actuality as embodied subjects in social spaces: ‘[C]hildren’s perceptions of hazards, security and their ability to cope with conditions of urban life are severely restricted by the realm of gated communities. Though the perceived and actualized outdoor experiences of children are changing geographically … children are still permitted to experience independent urban mobility in other types of residential settings.’ This has predictable implications for children’s emerging social relations: From the interviews … it was found that living in a gated community promotes the formation of attachments and friendships between children and siblings through the available social networks and feelings of belonging. Nevertheless, the identity of the community also provokes the polarization and fragmentation of social classes which is assumed to be the source of threat in the views of community members. Thus, Tezel’s findings suggest that children’s activity space comprises an internalized realm (the gated community) supplemented by tentacle-like forays to exterior islands of social and institutional familiarity. However, it should not be assumed that parents felt unequivocally secure within the gated community – especially when they had young children. Identical concerns about unfamiliar adults entering the gated area and the fears about traffic and the curtailment of children’s cycling in communal spaces surfaced in interviews. Interestingly, an unpredicted spatial conflict cited by parents concerned the competing rights of a disabled resident to use his car within the confines of the gated space and the children’s perceived entitlement to free-play. As a result, the proximity of play spaces to young children’s houses was important to parents because ‘parents of younger children still retain their anxiety and fear about children’s safety in a gated community and they need to supervise their children’, and by implication ‘[t]his study mostly indicates that the conditions of gated community do not decrease parental anxiety about children’s safety in a community protected from strangers and traffic’. In summary, Tezel returns to the social and economic processes and conditions that have shaped the material development of Istanbul since the 1950s. Through this she seeks to locate the actuality of children’s lives in relation to the effects of globalization that have enveloped the city and that, in part, explain how they experience their childhood.



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Activity Much of the work about children’s access to outdoor spaces and their autonomy has focused on fears and anxieties which may stress the personal and perceptual. How do you evaluate the influence of structural social and economic conditions and material or geographical constraints in relation to these more personalized psychological factors? Use the table below to examine Tezel’s paper – tease out the two strands, but do not be surprised if they are difficult to disentangle. Personal perceptual factors curtailing children’s activity space

Structural and material factors curtailing children’s activity space

Activity A number of organizations have arisen in UK cities over the past few years to address concerns about children’s free-play in the streets around their homes. Among these is an initiative supported by the London Borough of Hackney entitled ‘Play Streets’. Their webpage describes their work: ‘Hackney Council’s Play Streets policy enables people living in residential streets to apply for weekly or monthly temporary road closures (also known as playing out sessions) so that children can play out in their neighbourhood regularly’ (Gill, 2015). 1 Are there similar initiatives where you live? 2 Playing out sessions rely on a zoning of time and space and voluntary community activity in order to regulate traffic and allow children opportunities to play. Are there other measures that you think will be necessary to facilitate children’s free play and ensure its long-term sustainability?

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How do some children and young people respond to the limitation of their activity space? Matthews and Limb’s ‘agenda for the geography of children’ (1999 and see Chapter 3) proposes that the values children and young people hold for spaces and places may be very different from those intended by the adult world. In a study of school playground space, Sarah Thomson found that the highly constrained ‘islanded’ space of school playgrounds became a site both of conflict between the adult world and children and of confusion about how spatialized rules governing play were to be interpreted. Thomson’s research relied on Robert Sack’s theoretical concept of ‘territorialization’.

Example of research Thomson, S., ’”Territorialising the Primary School Playground”: Deconstructing the Geography of Playtime’, Children’s Geographies 3 (1) (April 2005): 63–78. The paper is an empirical study seeking to understand how adults and children ‘territorialize and “re-territorialize” the playground space in order to control, dominate and resist the “other’s” spatial area, range and rule’. The paper highlights the conflicts that these processes generate as each group seeks, in Robert Sack’s terms, to consolidate power through the segmentation of space, explaining that ‘territorialization is about possession of area; having the power to say, this is “ours not yours”.The three main components of territorialisation are “classification by area”, “communication by boundary” and “enforcement of control” over access to the area and the things within it’ (Sack, 1986, p. 21, in Thomson, 2005). Thomson suggests that while each of the playgrounds she observed had differing material form and configuration, the walls and fences were merely the visible manifestation of complex moral geographies that were rendered meaningful as territory by ‘a framework of rules, regulations and surveillance which, resulted in “the constraint of freedom and flow” (Bale, 1994, p. 98) of children’s movement’. Furthermore, operating with ‘the fixed architecture and pre-set design of the space, teachers and others made clear attempts to redefine the territory further. Teachers interviewed talked about “setting out



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boundaries” and “overstepping boundaries” in the playground. They argued that “zoning” alleviated the lack of space and poor design, that it expanded the space and increased its range of uses.’ This implies that while speaking about ‘overstepping boundaries’ and so on makes sense metaphorically, such language frequently correlates with tangible impacts and organizational demarcations in material space. However, although real in their effects, these boundaries were not always so clearly demarcated and the children did not always agree with adult perceptions of the utility and good sense to be found in zoning that sought to curtail their activity space; in certain cases, this was because it was not clear where the zones were. In each of the schools researched, areas were identified as ‘off-limits’ or ‘out of bounds’, but these proscribed zones might be classified by rules alone and not by visible signs or material markers that ‘communicated the boundaries’ (viz. Sack). One school attempted to create territories intended to keep younger and older children apart. Although well intentioned, the boundary of this partition was not clear to the children; in consequence, they found the enforcement of controls unfair, leading to such animosity that oppositional groups formed and then squared up to each other in defence of ‘their territory’ – thereby communicating what they saw as the boundary and seeking an embodied enforcement of control over it. Thomson found that adults used space as a reward for good behaviour through regulated permissive access to territory that was ‘out of bounds’. However, this did not prevent children from taking matters into their own hands by resisting and transgressing territorial rules. For example, the rules about keeping off the sports field invited frequent challenges to supervisors’ authority through ‘one foot on, one foot off’ challenges and transgressive games of football, wherein the ball would ‘accidentally’ be kicked over the crucial line of demarcation as one small, but significant, attempt to challenge limitations placed upon their activity space. Other children adopted forms of ‘passive resistance’ to spatialized regulation worthy of any civil disobedience campaign and Thomson suggests that these children’s ‘anxiety … sometimes expresses itself like that of animals caged in a zoo. One Year 4 teacher remarked on the fact that she had a child who “perimeter walked”. At one school, several children would spend all of their playtime continually walking around the perimeter of the playground that bordered the outside space of the school premises.’ In these ways children seemed to regard the spatial rules as a sort of evolving ‘case law’, subject to continuous challenge in order to maintain pressure on the imposed borders and force adults to justify the territorial limits imposed on their activity space.

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Reflection on research Robert Sack writes, ‘Territoriality … means the assertion by an organisation, or an individual in the name of an organisation, that an area of geographic space is under its influence or control’ (Sack, 1980, 167). Sarah Thomson uses Sack‘s concept of territoriality to understand not only how the schools sought to manage and regulate the children’s play but also to point out weaknesses in their plans. Use the table below to explore the following aspects of Thomson’s findings: 1 How might the concept of ‘territoriality’ help us understand the school’s approach to managing children’s activity space in the playground? 2 Did children’s activity space comply with the schools’ territorial plans? 3 Can we interpret the actions of the ‘perimeter-walkers’ using Sack’s concepts of ‘territoriality’ and ‘activity space’? The elements of The schools’ territoriality plans

Children’s activity space

The meaning of ‘perimeterwalking’?

‘classification by area’ ‘communication by boundary’ ‘enforcement of control’

Is children’s agency always opposed to adult will? In the discussion above we have sought to distinguish personal factors shaping children’s mobility, autonomy and spatial range – such as the perceptions and fears of parents – from what we have termed structural factors, for example material or physical limits as well as socially, culturally



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and politically defined spaces and boundaries. However, the tendency to interpret the imposition of limits on children as if this is solely to be understood in terms of adults versus children where children are seen as heroic figures, constantly challenging and resisting the structural demands of adult power, may be unhelpful as well as inaccurate. Research findings presented in a paper by Matthew Benwell require us to reconsider what he sees as a tendency to reinforce an ‘oppressive adult–heroic child’ dualism, arguing for a more nuanced understanding both of adult–child relations and how children evaluate and respond to political and social conditions found in their environments.

Research report Benwell, M. C., ‘Rethinking Conceptualisations of Adult-imposed Restriction and Children’s Experiences of Autonomy in Outdoor Space’, Children’s Geographies 11 (1) (2013): 28–43. Benwell’s research is motivated by a concern that commonplace presumptions of adult dominance pitted against children’s resistant agency can be simplistic misrepresentations of what is a more complex and nuanced relationship between adults and children. He argues that this is: … salient when considering debates about children’s mobility in outdoor space, where the influence of adults has often been negatively perceived. Adults tend to be critiqued for their role in restricting children by creating ‘child unfriendly’ outdoor environments, for being overly anxious about ‘stranger danger’ or for placing children under increasing levels of surveillance … There are, of course, benefits to children engaging independently with their surroundings … but Sharpe and Tranter (2010) argue that children may not be able, or indeed want, to encounter these environments alone. The authors call for ‘a rethink of the much-vaunted concept of independence, since … it might not be as high as other values on the list of children’s priorities’. Whilst challenging simplistic understandings of children’s agency found in certain strands of the new Childhood Studies, Benwell endorses the commitment to listening to children and including their perspectives when trying to understand their lives; this he

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sees as the basis for a more interactive understanding of adult– child relations. Accordingly, he recognizes the importance of the ‘increased attention being paid to the family and interactions which take place between adults and children when negotiating the extent of their spatial freedom’. Therefore, whilst he is at pains not to deny the actuality of territorial control and marginalization of children that characterizes many adult–child encounters, Benwell also acknowledges that protection can be welcomed by children and that examining how children view adult control is at least as important a topic as that control per se. This acknowledges that these decisions about freedom and control are situated within diverse family settings with multiple conceptions of how childhood should be. Benwell’s research was conducted with children growing up in post-apartheid suburban South Africa, where it is important to acknowledge ‘the wider societal constraints generated by concerns with crime in post-apartheid urban and suburban spaces’, and in light of these conditions he stresses the dangers in making generalizations and unhelpful comparisons. Accordingly, the particular children in Benwell’s research ‘spoke positively about the presence of adults and about feeling more secure in spaces where they were placed under the surveillance of adults’. Benwell’s research was conducted in two schools and an afterschool centre in the suburban town of Fish Hoek, Cape Town. In all, thirty-nine girls and twenty-six boys between the ages six and twelve took part along with 20 parents, five teachers and four carers; 9 per cent of the participants were black, 12 per cent ‘coloured’, with the majority (79 per cent) white, a proportion that broadly reflected the ethnicity of the schools’ population. Under the apartheid regime, Fish Hoek had been a ‘whites-only’ area, a status that was reproduced both in the continuing ethnic imbalance and that the majority of all children were from ‘middle- and upper-class backgrounds’. Research was conducted using a range of mixed-visual methods, and home and field visits, including neighbourhood walkabouts. Benwell found that fears about public space led to several parents installing play facilities in their gardens that resembled park-space and the use of enclosed and defended private play spaces in gated compounds. When researching children’s mobility beyond these home or private spaces ‘a common theme discussed in research sessions was the necessity of having adult accompaniment when outdoors. This accompanied mobility was reassuring for children and was perceived to provide protection against potential dangers.’



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Although Benwell identifies features of children’s experience that are specific to South Africa and its particular socio-political circumstances, he found more general patterns of response to anxiety that have the characteristics of the childhood ‘islanding’ that we have encountered earlier, with ‘common … instances of children being transported to friends’ homes or local attractions to play in private, enclosed outdoor environments. Parents in more remote parts of the Cape Peninsula, in particular, tended to “ferry” their children to outdoor play spaces (e.g. the children’s playground at Fish Hoek beach) in the car because of the lack of safe and “suitable” play areas in the immediate vicinity.’ In conclusion, Benwell suggests that although the children were not always completely comfortable with the almost ubiquitous adult gaze, they shared their parents’ anxieties and welcomed adult presence when encountering outdoor space. In his view, these findings challenge theorization that ‘routinely reinforce[es] the “adult versus child” narrative that has so often prevailed in the social studies of childhood literature’ and remind us that ‘[t]he behaviour of adults does not always and everywhere impinge upon the lives of children in negative ways’, and moreover, that it may not always be for adults to have the last word on whether it does or not.

Reflection on research Benwell’s work suggests that although research into relations between adults and children may be necessary, it is not sufficient to explain what shapes children’s lives and, in particular, questions about children’s engagement with the outdoor world. He points to the interplay between local and global factors: There were clearly exceptional levels of sensitivity to perceived insecurity in this part of the Cape peninsula (when compared to children’s geographies in the UK, Australia, New Zealand and so on), yet some of the observations reflect wider societal changes which are shaping childhoods elsewhere. For example, environments increasingly dominated by the car and the privatisation/commodification of play space have been influential in promoting an individualistic ethos in parts of the minority world, with its concomitant effects on childhood and children’s mobility … This individualism is reflected in strategies used by adults when taking their children outdoors in the Cape Peninsula … [with] a heavy reliance on the car to transport children to other places.

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1 Does the ‘islanding’ metaphor coined by Zeiher and by John Gillis help to understand the spatial effects of what Benwell sees as an ‘individualistic ethos’? 2 As we have suggested, the Enlightenment constructed childhood as a separate realm from the rest of the social world (Chapter 2). How far does Benwell’s research challenge the idea that children are separated from the social, economic and political factors that we readily accept shape the adult world? To what extent might we say that they inhabit the same world as adults and should this be the case?

Chapter summary Do children play outdoors more or less than they used to? The evidence seems to suggest that free play in the streets around their home neighbourhoods has declined markedly and that road traffic along with high-profile incidents reinforcing stranger-danger fears have combined to construct perceptions of risk by adults and children. In its place has come a raft of developments, in part associated with increased material wealth for many in the minority world that have seen the proliferation of virtual play environments in the home and professionally designed environments in earmarked public space outside it. Increased personal mobility facilitates access to this islanded world for some, but its absence curtails opportunities for others because not only far-flung friends but also the social worlds of play parks are less accessible without private transport. Furthermore, because evidence suggests that (some) children are increasingly demonized, unwelcome and excluded from their home streets, we are cautioned against all too readily thinking of children as a uniform, distinct and separable social group independent from the social networks in which they live and through which their identity is expressed. The intersection with a range of other social variables found in the research suggests that we might usefully ask, which children are playing outside less than they used to and is biological immaturity the main factor explaining the constraints that shape the spatiality of their social worlds? In addition, the need to hear what children have to say is borne out by Benwell’s finding that their attitudes may not be as predictable as policymakers with an adult-world standpoint imagine.



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Chapter activity Teather proposes that ‘activity space is primarily a conceptual, but partly a material, space, as our interactions often literally “take place”’; thereby, she suggests that it is not only a way of embracing ideal or imagined spaces, but also the lived space of everyday encounters. In Chapter 2 we looked at Anne Trine Kjørholt’s work and her distinction between modern childhood as a separated ‘symbolic space’ and the actuality of children’s lives as social actors. Look back at the research evidence from Lacey (2007), Alparone and Pacilli (2012), Maguire and Shirlow (2004), Tezel (2011), Thomson (2005) and Benwell (2013); do we learn anything about children’s activity space: 1 in relation to childhood as a symbolic space? 2 In relation to their agency as social actors? Do you think children’s agency as social actors will always be at odds with modern childhood as a symbolic space?

Reflecting on keywords and terms The following keywords and terminology have been introduced in this chapter: MM

MM

MM

MM

MM

MM

MM

MM

activity space islanding outdoor play risk sectarian childhood strangers territoriality traffic

Look back by scanning the chapter; in a short, summative sentence, describe your understanding of each term and how it has been used.

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Further reading Chawla, L. (2002), ‘Cities for Human Development’, in L. Chawla (ed.), Growing Up in an Urbanising World, Paris and London: UNESCO and Earthscan. The introductory chapter in an informative and stimulating collection of international chapters focusing on children’s experience in urban settings. Gill, T. (2015), Hackney Play Streets: Evaluation Report, http://wp.hackneyplay. org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Final-full-evaluation-report.pdf (accessed 5 May 2015). An informative piece of evaluation research with evidence derived from this outdoor play project in inner London. Lacey, L. (2007), Street Play: A Literature Review (Playday – Our Streets Too!), London: National Children’s Bureau, www.playday.org.uk (accessed 1 July 2014). A campaigning research review. Gives a sense of how spatialized research is used by pressure groups to promote policy goals. Shaw, B., M. Bicket, B. Elliott, B. Fagan-Watson, E. Mocca and M. Hillman (2015), Children’s Independent Mobility: An International Comparison and Recommendations for Action, London: Policy Studies Institute. An informed survey examining children’s freedom of movement in 16 countries, with useful suggestions for action and policy development, including examples of child-friendly city initiatives from the Netherlands. Ward, C. (1990), The Child in the City, London: Bedford Square Press. A classic text written by anarchist academic and leading light in children’s play – still a challenging and stimulating read.

6 Constructing Identities and Children in Relational Space

Chapter outline This chapter examines the contribution of space, place and spatiality to the construction of children’s identities by drawing on research from across the social sciences and human geography. Teather’s concept of positionality is used to explore some of the ways that socially constructed differences concerning gender, sexuality, social class, ethnicity and disability are normalized and reproduced through relational spaces of institutions of childhood and youth. The chapter also introduces research concerned with the concept of biopower and its exercise through the regulation of play and attempts to promote acceptable forms of pupilhood. Research illustrating children and young people’s responses and resistances to these institutional realities through attempts to carve out relational spaces of their own is introduced and discussed. The chapter is structured around the following key themes and questions: Setting the scene 126 Pupilhood and playtime in relational space: How does the spatiality of institutions contribute to disciplining children? 127 Femininities and dominant masculinity in relational space: How are gendered identities reproduced in the playground? 130 Masculinities in the ‘borderlands’: Safe haven or exile? 134 Social class, perimeter fences and relational spaces of schooling137

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Ethnicity in relational space: Should schools consider their wider spatiality when promoting citizenship values in the classroom? 140 Where’s the problem?: Disability and ableism in relational space143 Chapter summary 147 Final activities 147 Reflections on keywords and terms 148 Further reading 148

Setting the scene In 1991 the UK public service television broadcaster Channel 4 aired a series entitled The Century of the Child. In one programme an elderly man named Cyril Hayward-Jones (b. 1903) was taken back to his school for children who were blind or deaf: Cyril: They forced me to come to a boarding school … the only possibility for blind children in my time … and it was a very big shock indeed, and it was a very, very rough, tough sort of a place altogether. Tough life … Interviewer: There’s a long corridor here with a lot of glass windows. Cyril: Ah, we always called it the ‘glass passage’. It led from the dining room into our part of the building. You see, there was the blind part and the deaf part. But I know very little about the deaf part; I mean, the only time we went to the deaf part was as a punishment. If you were naughty in any way they sent you to live on what they called ‘the deaf side’. The joke was, of course, that the deaf couldn’t hear and you couldn’t lip read, so it was a really pretty desperate situation there …

Some ‘joke’! Cyril’s experience illustrates how his school aligned its spatiality with his disability to discipline and punish and, thereby, achieve acceptable sorts of pupilhood. This not only exploited his embodiment as a blind person, but also located him within a social setting (‘the deaf side’) where it assumed an acutely disabling salience that did not exist on ‘the blind side’. Teather’s assertion that our bodies are positioned in spaces that are lent meanings through their relations to others might help us here: [E]ach of us is positioned or located relative to others. Our positionality depends on who we are – our identity. One aspect of positionality concerns



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power relationships. We talk about ‘knowing your place’, which has many possible interpretations. But on the simplest level, positionality implies that there are places where we are welcome and others from which we are excluded by convention or by law because of sex, age, class or colour, or other reasons.

Cyril’s ‘place’ was made only too clear from this experience and manifestly as a memory it remained with him more than half a century later. This chapter will examine research evidence for the contribution that spatiality makes to the construction of children’s identities and uses Teather’s concept of positionality (and the ‘relational’ spaces that it creates and is implicated in) to aid our understanding. It suggests that institutions of childhood seek to reproduce and normalize sociological dimensions of children’s identities – not only social class, ethnicity, gender and sexuality, but also the meaning of being a child/pupil – through their spatiality and disciplinary use of space and place.

Pupilhood and playtime in relational space: How does the spatiality of institutions contribute to disciplining children? Cyril Hayward-Jones’s experience at his school over a century ago points clearly to the disciplinary and moral possibilities that have been found in the embodied positionality of children. However, the meaning of discipline and the means to achieve it have been a focus for conflict in the construction of modern childhood; a commonplace association on the one hand with physical, emotional or material punishment is pitted against, on the other hand, the sense of becoming a disciple or follower who, like all good pupils, willingly subjects himself/herself to the leadership and guidance of others. Put this way, discipline is conceived dualistically as either an imposition by external forces or a matter of internal, psychological compliance. The work of critical thinkers, including Michel Foucault, challenged this individualized and psychologically-oriented approach, suggesting that institutions, such as school, achieve self-discipline (or what Pike refers to as governmentality – see Chapter 4) through processes and practices designed to achieve self-regulation and the internalization of compliant dispositions.

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Recent research demonstrates how institutions promote discipline and fulfil their goals through strategically-designed processes of reward and the identification of what could be described as reward spaces. Moreover, these reward spaces do not stand in isolation but derive their meaning (and therefore effectiveness) relationally, that is, how they are positioned in relation to other spaces and their respective (and often different) disciplinary requirements. Research conducted in primary schools by Peter Hemming (2007) illustrates how play and work are set against each other as complementary opposites in order to achieve disciplinary goals. For example, promises of time spent in the playground are made to reward ‘hard work’ and disciplined behaviour in the classroom, so that the meaning of the playground is relationally coupled to the expectations of the classroom. However, Hemming’s work suggests that this effort/classroom – reward/playground relationship is complicated (even compromised) by attempts to redefine and recruit children’s playtime for didactic ends and impose a healthy activity agenda upon it. This replaces play as an informal activity with a strategically-directed and resourced technocratic phenomenon called ‘active play’.

Example of research Hemming, P. J., ‘Renegotiating the Primary School: Children’s Emotional Geographies of Sport, Exercise and Play’, Children’s Geographies 5 (4) (November 2007): 353–71 Hemming’s research examined how children interpreted a raft of UK government policies and initiatives concerning their health and fitness (e.g. the National Healthy Schools Programme, 1999; Food in Schools Programme, 2001; National PE, School Sport and Club Links Strategy, 2003; Choosing Health: Making Healthy Choices Easier, 2004; and the 2004 Children Act). The research found that children’s emphasis on play as ‘enjoyment’ and ‘fun’ did not always match dominant adult-world constructions stressing sport skills and healthy exercise that are central to the formal idea of ‘active play’ found in many of these policies. The latter were substantially driven by concerns to tackle obesity and emphasized goal-directed health and fitness along with regular access to equipment designed to facilitate this. In Hemming’s view, this is important because the meanings attaching to ‘active play’ are not confined to playtime, but appear as



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‘socio-spatial practices [that] ricochet back onto the structure of the institution itself, thereby manipulating and transforming space and place’. Hemming argues that ‘active play’ becomes not just a means to discipline children to acceptable regimes of health and fitness but also embeds this form of play as a legitimate educational goal and, thereby, transforms the spatiality of the playground and meaning of playtime. However, this reinvention of play as a goal-directed and disciplined activity not only redefines the spatiality of the playground but also exerts influence on children’s activity in the classroom space – hence the ‘ricochet’ metaphor. Here Hemming draws on the Foucauldian idea of ‘biopower’ to understand schooling as a project to discipline children’s bodies through ‘subtle routines and discourses used to exert power over bodies’: These processes represent yet another form of ‘biopower’ designed to construct children’s bodies as ‘disciplined’ and docile through discursive corporeal regimes … In the classroom, children were required to sit quietly in their seats while listening to the teacher or carrying out independent tasks at their desks. On the playground, adults set rules for where children were permitted to go and what activities they could take part in This suggests that playground and classroom do not exist as isolated spaces where functionally separate goals are pursued, but as relational spaces/places whose complementary meanings are invoked and renewed through the daily transaction of school life. Illustrative of this, Hemming noted that teachers recognized the value placed on fun and enjoyment by the children and drew on this in order to achieve disciplinary ends; for example, teachers encouraged appropriate behaviour in the classroom space by offering access to ‘active play’ as a reward for working hard. So the playground came to be identified as a ‘space of reward’ (even though PE was a mandatory part of the curriculum in England and Wales and therefore demanded time in its own right). However, this is not to suggest that children always accede to the attempted imposition of ‘biopower’ by passive submission to these moral geographies; Hemming found that when possible several children took what steps they could to realign ‘active play’ with their interest in enjoyment and fun. For example, ‘Tennis rackets were sometimes used to knock against a fence, skipping ropes were used to tie up other children, and tennis balls were used as footballs.’

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Reflection Hemming uses Foucault’s concept of bio-power to understand how school seeks to impose regulation on children’s bodies. Looking back to Chapter 4, might the concept also be helpful in interpreting what Jeni Harden found in her paper ‘Good sitting, looking and listening: the regulation of young children’s emotions in the classroom’ as well as John Barker et al.’s work on seclusion units and Jo Pike’s research on governmentality in the dining hall?

Hemming’s research reveals ways in which the school he investigated used the opposition between play and work to promote appropriate disciplinary behaviour, so that although separate and distinct spaces, the meanings attaching to the playground and classroom were co-constructed and were to be understood in relation to one another. Therefore, echoing George Baines’ view that ‘buildings are always a kind of teacher’ (see Chapter 4), lessons are learned through the spatiality of school and some of the most significant lessons taught are about who we are or, in Teather’s terms, how we are positioned and placed.

Femininities and dominant masculinity in relational space: How are gendered identities reproduced in the playground? Paechter and Clark (2007) also examined school playgrounds as part of a research project concerned with how children understood non-conventional feminine identities. They found that playgrounds were not only spaces whose meaning was shaped by gendered practices, but also (like Hemming) that those practices ricocheted back to affirm normative gender identities in other spaces across the institution.



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Example of research Paechter, C. and Clark, S., ‘Learning Gender in Primary School Playgrounds: Findings from the Tomboy Identities Study’, Pedagogy, Culture and Society 15 (3) (October 2007): 317–31 The authors present findings from a research project prompted by concerns about an apparent decline in physical activity among school-age girls. The project looked at what they refer to as ‘tomboy identities’ and how these ‘are taken up, enacted and maintained within peer-group and family settings’ – ‘tomboy’ refers in common parlance to a girl who partakes in activities widely regarded as masculine and who eschews some dominant or conventional trappings associated with femininity. However, the project was keen not to rely uncritically on normative definitions for this commonsense expression, but to elicit children’s thoughts on its meaning. The researchers’ analysis was spatial and as a generality found that ‘space use in school playgrounds is highly salient for the construction of masculine and feminine identities’. The researchers conducted their work in two very different primary schools: Benjamin Laurence, an inner London traditional ‘Board School’ with 260 pupils; and Holly Bank, in a suburban setting with 670 children on roll. Both schools were co-educational and recruited an ethnically diverse population – although this was more obvious and explicitly acknowledged in the curriculum, meals and uniform found at Benjamin Laurence. At the heart of the research is an understanding of identity as an embodied phenomenon performed through the spaces and places found in the school. That is, identity is not an abstract entity or essence that is intrinsic to a person, but rather it is continuously realized through our embodied presence in space and the fluid social relations and encounters that accompany this presence. The authors express it thus: We see individual masculinities and femininities as constructed through local communities of practice in which children and adults collaboratively develop relational understandings of what it is to be male or female in a particular context. In some settings, such as the school, spatial relations are particularly salient to the forms of masculinity and femininity that are enabled or inhibited.

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As exemplar for this, the authors report that a common feature of school playgrounds at both schools was the spatial dominance given over to informal games of football and their association with certain forms of masculinity. At Holly Bank the criterion for entry to these games was being able to ‘hold your own’ so that both boys and girls could play; however, in practice this meant that traditional ‘masculinity and football were inextricably linked’ and so very few girls played. More girls did play at Benjamin Laurence; however, the engagement of the girls was commonly inhibited by rules constructed around spatial arrangements that reinforced conventional masculinities and femininities. For example, although many girls relished participation in football, school rules excluded them from the pitch-space earmarked for the oldest pupils. This meant that boys’ dominance was confirmed not only in this space, but also by the rule that designated it thus; so that girls ‘had to construct themselves either as belonging to Pitch Two with the younger children, or as relatively inactive’. For the authors this is an example of how: Masculinities and, especially, femininities were not only constructed by children through their use of space, they were also constructed for them as a result of restrictions on their spatial use and range. For many of the girls … differences between their access to the playground … and that which was allowed to the boys meant that it became increasingly difficult to develop femininities that were not associated with restricted mobility. This is not to say that the girls Paechter and Clark observed were passive or compliant; indeed they actively expressed their frustration about the inhibitions placed upon them through embodied acts of resistance and protest: At Holly Bank, where the ‘cool girls’ resented the amount of space given over to the game despite their own relative immobility, this group occasionally deliberately disrupted games by walking, arm in arm, into the middle of the pitch and just standing there, or by stealing the ball. Similarly, at Benjamin Laurence, from time to time the footballing girls would get so annoyed by the failure of the boys to pass the ball to them that they simply stopped playing and stood in the middle of the pitch chatting.



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Paradoxically, these embodied acts of resistance merely reinforced prejudices about the dominance of certain masculinities with the ironic outcome that they were used to legitimize subordinating constructions of femininity, because ‘Both these strategies reinforced the boys’ and the male teachers’ views of the girls as not taking sports seriously and not “really” wanting to play, thus making it less likely that they would be supported when they did.’ The authors conclude with a vital observation and a plea: Playgrounds are, as Karsten (2003, 471) notes, ‘the first arenas in which girls and boys learn to negotiate their behaviour in public’. It is there that they start to construct and establish their identities, including their gender identities, in relation to their peers and to the spaces they inhabit. If we want children, both boys and girls, to have a wide range of possibilities concerning how they think about themselves and who they can be, we need to provide playgrounds that enable a wide variety of play activities, and which do not allow particular forms of masculinity to dominate the available space.

Activity The authors consider some solutions to the problems posed and say: ‘It would be an enormously symbolic gesture for primary schools to limit football to one, relatively small, section of the playground, maybe restricting access to one year group at a time with some girls-only sessions … While it is unlikely to be possible to challenge the significance of football in relation to the construction of dominant masculinities, this would offer children a wider variety of alternatives. Looking back at Peter Hemming’s work, he found that ‘socio-spatial practices [on the playground] ricochet back onto the structure of the institution itself’. Reflecting on Teather’s assertion that identity is an embodied phenomenon, does this suggest that changes to practices on the playground might have a greater impact on dominant masculinities than Paechter and Clark imagine? What do you think and why do you think it?

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Masculinities in the ‘borderlands’: Safe haven or exile? If Paechter and Clark (2007) are concerned to examine the embodied construction of femininities (including those that are ‘non-conventional’), other research addresses school playtime and the experience of boys who adopt what are described as non-hegemonic masculinities – that is, masculine identities that do not conform to the sort of dominant forms that Paechter and Clark find so emblematically expressed through football. One study that set out to give children an opportunity to ‘tell a story of their choosing, based on one small slice of their experience of school’, and thereby offer a voice to non-dominant identity discourses, is reported in a paper by Newman, Woodcock and Dunham (2006). Their work reveals an otherwise largely hidden reality within which certain children live, and, echoing Soja, underlines the value of a spatialized way of seeing and the enhancement it brings to our understanding of social being.

Example of research Newman, M., Woodcock, A. and Dunham, P., ‘“Playtime in the Borderlands”: Children’s Representations of School, Gender and Bullying through Photographs and Interviews’, Children’s Geographies 4 (3) (December 2006): 289–302. The paper is based on action research undertaken by Newman while she was a teacher in a Midlands primary school teaching a curricular project on photography. Following introductory sessions exploring the nature and prevalence of photographic imagery in the personal and media realms, Newman’s class of ten- and elevenyear-old children were presented with digital cameras and asked first to photograph a place with significance for them and then to supply a caption and a short piece of writing of their choice – this writing provided a focus for interviews based on the photos. Echoing Paechter and Clark’s theme about embodied constructions of gender through football, there is a fascinating contrast between Anne and Rebecca; both girls love football, but only Rebecca is able to play with the boys. Rebecca says this is because: … she was like the boys … she was tall, and wore trousers.



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She did not ‘act all girly, you know giggling and crying if the ball hits you and that’ … she chose to be photographed with a mixed group of girls and boys, finding acceptance amongst both sexes … Her acceptance came about by being like the boys. Rebecca’s experience was in stark contrast to that of Michael. The caption accompanying Michael’s picture of him sitting alone in a secluded part of the playground was ‘misery’. By way of explanation he said that: … he did not want to be identified with a lot of the boys in his class and found playtime very difficult. He hated football and similar games played by the boys … Recently some of the boys had noticed the way he identified with some of the girls and had begun a campaign of name-calling. He spent his time off the main playground hiding from the view of the other boys to avoid being bullied. Michael’s most vociferous tormentors were the very boys who accepted Rebecca, but the boys were not alone in characterizing his non-dominant form of masculinity; several teachers openly described him as not ‘a proper boy’ and therefore a ripe target for the attention of bullies – significant in an environment where being described as ‘gay’ was a common insult traded between pupils that usually went unchallenged by teachers. Indeed, one teacher explicitly opined that Michael’s ‘different masculinity must automatically mean homosexuality, and that it was a problem’ (see also Mac an Ghaill, 1996). Discussions with Michael’s mother revealed that serial bullying, name-calling and offensive text messages had not been dealt with or taken seriously throughout his time at the school, suggesting that this was not isolated, but emblematic of this school’s pervasive culture of hetero-normativity. For Newman et al., Michael’s photograph is expressive of his status as an outsider occupying the ‘borderlands’; through the name-calling, threats and physical acts of bullying, Michael’s non-dominant masculinity became grounds for a social marginality that found embodied expression in his self-imposed spatial exile from the heartland of the playground, thereby consigning him to ‘a “borderland”, real and metaphorical, inhabited by less dominant boys’. Much as this was enforced upon him, occupation of this borderland territory represented a defensive move, because here ‘“borderlanders” may keep their identities as

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quiet, sensitive boys without posing a threat to, or attracting the bullying of, the boys who dominate the playground.’ Interestingly, Newman’s role as researcher and teacher meant that she felt compelled to take up the matter of bullying and the position of boys like Michael who exhibited non-hegemonic masculinities. She concludes by noting that this did not go down well with more traditional male or female colleagues, so that she and other staff who objected to the highly gendered and sexualized culture of bullying found themselves sitting ‘on the edges of the staff room with like-minded members of staff’, opting ‘to stay in one of the classrooms or to go out of the school at lunchtime to avoid the atmosphere in the staff room’. She closes with the ironic reflection that through this ‘I experienced, on a lesser level, what it feels like to be a “borderlander”’.

Reflective activity Newman et al.’s paper directs our attention to the contribution made by places and spaces in schools to the construction of diverse children’s identities around gender and sexuality. So that, while the landscape of the playground may seem to reproduce the dominant values and ethos of the school, it can also be a site for heterotopic moral, emotional and embodied geographies where acts of agency on the part of children challenge that normative order. Michael seeks out what Newman calls ‘the borderlands’ as a heterotopic or ‘other space/place’ that is drenched in meaning and yet we can assume that this is not because school architects or educators have deliberately designed it that way. 1 To what extent does Michael’s case suggest that school is constituted as a socio-space by all its actors and not just those with formal jurisdiction or authority, such as teachers? 2 Although forced on him, to what extent might Michael’s occupation of the borderlands become part and parcel of how he performs his masculinity and, therefore, be seen as an expression of his agency as a social actor?



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Social class, perimeter fences and relational spaces of schooling In Chapter 4 we looked at Jo Pike’s research on governmentality and school dining halls and reflected on ways that schools seek to reinforce lessons on healthy eating through the spatiality of these familiar school spaces. Pike develops her work about the healthy eating initiatives with an examination of the dining halls as social spaces constructed through a complex series of reflexive social relationships between the people who work and eat in them. Pike demonstrates that a simple adult–child dualism is insufficient to explain the conflicts and power differences found within the dining rooms; rather she suggests they are manifestations of a more complex network of social relationships that extend beyond the school gates and into their surrounding communities to construct a relational social geography that may cut across and even be at odds with a school’s attempts to exercise and maintain dominance over children’s lives and their home communities.

Research report Pike, J., ‘“I don’t have to listen to you! You’re just a dinner lady!”: Power and Resistance at Lunchtimes in Primary Schools’, Children’s geographies 8 (3) (August 2010): 275–87. In this second paper Pike develops her examination of ‘the increasingly politicised space of English primary school dining rooms’ and their role in the production of suitable personhood (or subjectivities) through a discussion of power relationships between teachers, lunchtime supervisory staff and children. Pike found distinct differences in the relationships children forge between their teachers and lunchtime supervisors – as reflected in the quotation that makes the title of her paper – along with a generally critical assessment of supervisors by teachers as lacking their professionality and associated competences. She observed that teachers’ and children’s constructions of supervisors drew upon highly gendered and classed discourses that associated the supervisors more closely with motherhood and childrearing and therefore with non-professional socio-spaces beyond the school gates. This meant that children’s behaviour towards lunchtime staff could be

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markedly different from that presented to teachers. In the most lurid examples, supervisors reported ‘being hit, kicked, having fingers bent back, being called names, being spat at and sworn at by children’; also children felt more empowered to resist control and sought to evade supervisors’ surveillance by exploiting the complex multi-use spaces within dining halls. However, Pike also found that whilst this construction of supervisors ‘frequently leads to confrontations as rules are negotiated and contested’, it also commonly ‘results in closer and more personal relationships between lunchtime staff and pupils’. Although frequently welcomed by the children, Pike suggests that these more maternal relations were not always deemed appropriate by teaching staff, not just because of fears about potential claims of abuse, but also because of moralizing assumptions about the class identities of the lunchtime staff and the challenges to normal social ordering of the school that their less-formal relationships represented. These assumptions included an assessment of them as bad parents, and Pike quotes a head teacher who described her supervisors as ‘just mums off the estate with poor academic backgrounds, escalating behaviour issues by shouting, with poor attitude to discipline’. This clearly positioned the lunchtime supervisors and the estates where they live in relational spaces that are ‘other’ to the school.

Reflective activity The geographer Doreen Massey proposes that space is not a priori present that is, already given to us, but ‘constituted through interactions, from the immensity of the global to the intimately tiny’. Moreover, as these interactions change, new spaces are created and old spaces disappear, so ‘that we recognise space as always under construction’ (Massey, 2005, 9). Does Pike offer examples illustrating how schools comprise networked spatialities that are made and remade through the positionality and social relations between children, teachers, lunchtime assistants, parents and whoever else joins the networks? This interactive and networked view of socio-spaces suggests that although schools and their staff have responsibility within the material footprint on the school estate, their socio-spatial range also extends well beyond this immediate jurisdiction; that said, it also suggests that the social world outside impacts on relations within the footprint. Can you identify particular instances from Pike’s work that illustrate this and how should schools respond?



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Pike’s findings suggest that relationships between children and adults are not structured by a simple and deterministic adult–child binary but rely on a complex set of social positionings that not only extend beyond the curtilage of the school, but also challenge what is within. Pike’s championing of the contribution that a spatial analysis can make to our understanding of policy, schooling and children’s lives is also evident in a paper she published with Derek Colquhoun entitled ‘Lunchtime lock-in: territorialisation and UK school meals policies’ (Pike and Colquhoun, 2012). In this paper the usefulness of a spatialized analysis and the language of positional or relational space are again underlined as the authors discuss what were headline-grabbing actions by the self-styled ‘junk-food mums’ and ‘sinner-ladies’ of Rawmarsh, south Yorkshire in the UK. With some notoriety, a group of women sought to find a way around the imposition of healthy-eating rules at their children’s comprehensive school by passing food from local fast-food outlets through the school fence. As a flagrant breach of adopted policy, this was not well received by the authorities and despite the very public pillorying at the hands of the national press – much of it framed prejudicially around caricatures of working-class identity – the women were unrepentant. In response, the authorities not only tightened rules on access to the school boundaries, but also reinforced existing controls on fast-food outlets via an exclusion-zone surrounding the school. For Pike and Colquhoun this demonstrated the ways in which schools claim territorial jurisdiction beyond their immediate curtilage: … school spaces and the spaces surrounding schools are policed and regulated through processes of territorialisation in an effort to advance the school meals agenda and increase the uptake of ‘healthy’ school meals. (Pike and Colquhoun, 2009, 144)

The research by both Pike and Hemming suggests that children are far from passive in their acceptance of attempts to govern them through the spatiality of institutions so that internal dining-halls and playgrounds as well as external spaces become sites of confrontation, conflict and contest where processes and practices designed to achieve governmentality may have to be more negotiated than first appears. Furthermore, this suggests that interpreting these regulatory regimes simply through the lens of an adult– child binary (i.e. that there is a one-way imposition of self-interested adult values on children) seems to oversimplify the complexity of school and its environs as a socio-space created in and through multilateral, relational power-plays. Pike reveals how power courses through more complex social

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networks that include relations between adult and adult, adult and child, and child and child, but are also structured by social class and gender hierarchies. However, the resistances and conflicts are also illustrative of Foucault’s insight that while power certainly shapes relations in the social world, the seat of that power is unstable, decentred and far from reducible to a simple powerful-versus-powerless binary. Pike demonstrates how Foucault’s work brings ‘new light to bear on children’s agency and the ways in which children are able to accept, modify and resist specific subjective positions. This allows us [to] conceptualise children as social actors who are able to define and constitute social space while simultaneously recognising that structural elements often limit their field of action and place them in subordinate positions to adults’ (Pike, 2008). Further, Pike and Colquhoun’s research suggests that these relations in social space exist in a field of action not limited by the school’s walls, gates and fences, so that, as in the case of the women at Rawmarsh, ‘social relationships between children, between adults and between children and adults should be assessed within a wider set of social relations operating within and beyond school boundaries which are framed by classed and gendered discourses’ (Pike, 2010).

Ethnicity in relational space: Should schools consider their wider spatiality when promoting citizenship values in the classroom? Some of the challenges to the promotion of collective and meaningful values of citizenship in schools with multi-ethnic student populations are examined in a Canadian study undertaken by Tupper, Carson, Johnson and Mangat (2008). Drawing on the idea of the hidden (or informal) curriculum and its implications, the researchers were curious to understand how the spatiality of a Canadian high school building reinforces and teaches lessons (deliberately or not) about the extent to which students from ethnicallydiverse backgrounds belonged to the school as an imagined community. They were interested in whether implicit lessons from the building’s hidden curriculum matched the school’s explicitly designed programmes of study in citizenship by examining the actions, attitudes and relationships of the pupils. Like Pike (2008) and Pike and Colquhoun (2012), the researchers



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found that the school was enmeshed in networked socio-spaces that extended beyond its material boundaries.

Research report Tupper, J., Carson, T., Johnson, I. and Mangat, J., ‘Building Place: Students’ Negotiation of Spaces and Citizenship in Schools’, Canadian Journal of Education 31 (4) (2008): 1065–92. This work proceeds from O’Donoghue’s observation that ‘people are place makers and that places are a primary artefact of human culture’, and further that understanding the spatiality of school and young people’s lives in school ‘offers rich potential to consider how public schools contribute to young people’s negotiation of identities in “spaces and places outside the classroom” (O’Donoghue, 2007, 62)’. The researchers sought to understand the informal curriculum as a spatial practice and propose two lines of enquiry: First – ‘By examining how students inhabit, move through and interpret the geography of a large school, researchers can achieve some understanding [of] … how adult identities are formed from the experience of going to school.’ Second – ‘[F]rom the perspective of future citizenship in an evolving Canadian nation … that is paying greater attention to diversity, it is helpful to reflect critically on the nature of the identities being formed in ethno-culturally diverse urban schools through spatial practices and to consider the implications of this identity formation for a pluralist, democratic society.’ The research was conducted in a large high school occupying a sprawling set of buildings erected during the 1960s, where due to climatic factors and the need to conserve heat the architecture was overwhelmingly functionalist. This meant that there were no external windows and few sources of natural light. The research project comprised four elements: 1 A survey of students regarding their perceptions of out-ofclass school spaces; 2 Student production of photographs of school spaces; 3 Individual interviews with students; 4 Interviews with school staff.

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With similarities to Smith and Barker (see Chapter 4) and their research with children in after-school clubs, a ‘visual hermeneutic approach to data analysis’ was employed so as ‘to draw connections between spaces, student identities, and experiences of citizenship’ and their findings are reported under the five headings of ‘Constructing spaces’, ‘Occupying spaces’, ‘Congregating spaces’, ‘The visual landscape of the school’ and ‘Surveillance’. The researchers found that, overall, the functionalism of the building seemed to work against the students’ sense of agency and they were resigned to the idea that they ‘must learn to live with the physical environment of the school, even if it is uncomfortable or uninviting’ – certainly a conclusion that worked against the possibilities for active, participatory citizenship. As ‘place-makers’, it was clear that students’ identities were expressed relationally through material spaces identified as zones and areas with group, often ethnic, affiliations, so that ‘hallways then became unofficially designated as the “Mormon,” “Chinese,” or “Brown group’s” hallway’. Furthermore, the students expressed a dualistic and conflicted relationship to the ubiquitous CCTV installed in the wake of 9/11 and the Columbine massacre and representative of the all-seeing eye of authority. Although the researchers found evidence that many young people recognized the need for security, some felt that cameras were threatening and forced modifications to behaviour. These modifications included the redirection of certain activities to spaces that were beyond the cameras’ panoptic gaze and thereby seen relationally as safe zones. Overall the researchers reflect that the sense of disengagement, self-segregation and resignation to surveillance was not a singular phenomenon of schooling, but ‘reflects many of the currents that exist in the public space of Canadian political and social culture’. Thus, the school and its spatiality had become a simulacrum for wider society and its debates about citizenship, state power and belonging.



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Reflection on research Tupper et al.’s findings seem to suggest that although there were few if any outward-facing windows, the school could not be separated from the outside world and the character of wider Canadian society. 1 Can you identify examples from Tupper et al.’s work to justify this view? 2 To what extent might Tupper et al.’s work endorse Pike and Colquhoun’s findings, that despite their aspirations to inculcate their own particular ethos, schools are positioned relationally in social spaces comprising a plurality of networks for pupils, teachers and all who work within them that transcend and transgress their physical boundaries and material spatial footprint?

Where’s the problem?: Disability and ableism in relational space This chapter has examined intersections between children’s identities, their status as subordinated pupils and the relational spaces that flow from and underline how they are positioned in institutional settings of childhood. The approach has been a step-by-step examination of pupilhood in relation to gender, class and ethnicity. This approach may be instructive, but it risks failure to capture the complexity of children’s lives and the multiple bases upon which they perform their identities; in short, the intersections are almost always far more complex and diverse than the separate chapter sections suggests. Furthermore, despite opening with the experience of Cyril Hayward-Jones and the way that his embodiment as a blind pupil intersected with the spatiality of his school for blind and deaf pupils, the chapter has not addressed itself to the experience of children and young people broadly identified as having ‘disabilities’. Michelle Pyer, John Horton, Sara Ryan and Peter Kraftl (2010) suggest that this reflects a wider absence: ‘the experiences of children and young people affected by disability have been underrepresented in the new social studies of childhood’, a position that the authors seek to rectify through a special edition of the journal

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Children’s Geographies that ‘begins to address this question in relation to the place(lessness) of disabled children in geographies with, for and of, children and childhood’. Nick Hodge and Katherine Runswick-Cole echo this, arguing that this marginal positioning is reinforced by the pervasive currency of ‘mainstream’ as the metaphor of choice in the parlance of most services and in policy documents: By definition the term mainstream places some children outside these services with the presumption that their requirements can only be met within some minority, specialist provision. Therefore, ‘mainstream’ facilities might be more accurately termed ‘normate’ (Garland Thomson 1997) services to reflect that they are constructed and constituted for those who ‘can represent themselves as definitive human beings’ (Garland Thomson 1997, 8): those who can walk rather than roll, speak rather than sign, read print rather than use Braille and who are interested in people rather than objects (Hehir 2002). (Hodge and Runswick-Cole, 2013)

Hodge and Runswick-Cole seek to render what they call ‘ableism’ more visible through an examination of leisure activity designed for and undertaken by children with disabilities. For them, ableism is ideological and not only informs notions of what normal bodies are like, but implicitly constructs bodies with disabilities as ‘different, lesser, undesirable, in need of repair or modification and de-humanised. The project of ableism creates a different “kind of people” (Hacking, 2007), a sub-human species that is the “Inferior Other”.’ The work by Peter Hemming on achieving bio-power through children’s playtime activities that we examined earlier in this chapter demonstrates how play can be recruited to pursue goal-driven agendas. For Hodge and Runswick-Cole, these processes increase in intensity and urgency for children with disabilities: Play and leisure become key sites for rehabilitation, development and cure (Goodley and Runswick-Cole 2010). Some even see the primary value of disabled children’s participation in leisure activities as the opportunity for ‘development’, a chance to encourage the ‘generalisation of skills’ and ‘adaptive behaviours across a variety of settings’ (Buttimer and Tierney 2005, 25). (Hodge and Runswick-Cole, 2013)

However, the authors suggest that in most cases this participation is constructed around and reinforces what they describe as ableist norms, so



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that, as one mother pointed out, her daughter was left feeling that she could not help her team and that they, in turn, did not include her by passing the ball. For this child the experience served to confirm powerful narratives about her limitations and ‘oddness’ rather than facilitating the rewards that leisure might be expected to bring. These ‘barriers within’ leisure activities are complemented by ‘barriers without’ that consistently include limited funding and poorly equipped staffing. Hodge and Runswick-Cole’s work proposes that for too long research, policy and practice has proceeded from a way of thinking that is structured around the mainstream–special/able–disabled/normal–Other dualisms that create central and marginal spaces not only in the thinking of policymakers, but also material spaces children are required to inhabit (we saw something akin to this in Michael’s experience as a borderlander based on his perceived different masculinity). For them, this leads to an recurrent focus on disability and what they call ‘disablism’ when the problem lies with ‘ableism’; this is problematic because ‘a focus on disablism only works to include the “Other”: it does not disrupt the very concept itself ’. To illustrate this, Hodge and Runswick-Cole present research by Buttimer and Tierney (2005) that looked at the leisure experiences of disabled young people, revealing that these included not having friends, not feeling welcome and not knowing how to join in; but then suggest that if its approach had been concerned with ableism, it might have offered important insights into what made them feel this way, such as ‘non-disabled people viewing disabled people as either not worthy of friendship or not worth the effort for non-disabled people to learn new methods of communication; regulatory ableist norms that position children with impairments as not belonging in leisure spaces and that it is only necessary to inform normates how to access these leisure opportunities’. In short, for Hodge and Runswick-Cole ‘the problem is not the disabled person but the way that “normalcy is constructed to create the ‘problem’ of the disabled person” (Davis, 1997, 3)’. By failing to recognize that the problem lies with an ableist agenda and its implicit marginalization of disabled people as the ‘Other’, segregated leisure activities are all too often the outcome where participants are sorted and given authorized access by virtue of a disability designation or label. The authors distinguish segregation, however, from separation and point to the positive comments from parents in their research about the value in children attending classes, groups and activities that are separated from ‘ableist’ environments and their overwhelmingly normalizing gaze. That said, they are mindful of the difficulties that could ensue from this and the potential for it to become a

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form of self-segregation that, paradoxically, reinforces the ableist agenda. However, they draw on spatial concepts to chart the boundaries between segregation and separation and offer concepts that facilitate challenges to ableist dominance: Holt (2007) emphasises the complexity of spaces being constituted as both segregate and separate. And acknowledges that while being separate does little to turn the gaze or to expose pathologies of ableism, it has value in allowing time for healing and recovery and offers an oasis of calm in an ableist world. It is also an act of resistance: the taking of ownership of the exclusionary, segregated and enforced provision and reconstituting it as a separate and ‘safe’ … choice, a site of sanctuary, healing and support … in so doing separate spaces can, through the facilitation of ‘bonding ties’, sometimes then empower members to work, individually or collectively, to challenge and disrupt the practices of ableism by forming ‘bridging ties’ with mainstream leisure organisations (Holt 2010).

The authors conclude by calling for a shift in focus and a fundamental recognition that ableism exists and exerts powerful influence on the children’s lives because ‘the problem of exclusion continues to be located within the child and not the leisure environment or its practices’. For them, challenging ableism has the potential to increase the breadth and range of differences and their acknowledgement, but also highlights what is shared by being human. Furthermore, the mode of analysis adopted by Hodge and Runswick-Cole (2013) underlines the value of a spatialized analysis and its capacity to identify materially and ideologically powerful features of the social world as well as approaches to rethinking them.

Reflection Hodge and Runswick-Cole make a distinction between segregation and separation; although we might find the same people occupying the same material spaces in each case, do the concepts of agency and relational space help to understand why they might have different meanings in a world where an ableist agenda is dominant?



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Chapter summary This chapter has proposed that the spatiality of institutions reinforces expectations of children through the positions they are required to occupy in relational space and can penalize them if they fail to comply. As Teather suggests, ‘knowing your place’ can refer to a literal position in material space but also to any number of relational positionings in more abstract social space – Michael’s experience as both literal and metaphorical borderlander confirms this. However, the extent to which Michael’s position is forced upon him suggests that there can be tensions between where we place ourselves and where others put us, so that whereas Teather is right to observe that ‘ [b]ecause we all occupy different “positions”, there can be no single, objective account of social situations’, this does not mean that all accounts are accorded equal social value and we may all at some time feel that we are subject to objectifying accounts that deny us the right to say who we feel we are and where we should be allowed to position ourselves. Through the chapter a spatialized approach reveals tensions between institutions of childhood as a sort of container within which children are expected to live their lives and what children actually say and feel as social actors, but it also offers pointers towards an agenda for reconstruction and reimagination.

Final activities Like Hodge and Runswick-Cole (2013), Pyer et al. (2010) propose that far from being a marginal phenomenon, attention to the spatiality of disabilities has the potential profoundly to disrupt what appears to be unproblematic, ableist normalcy: [G]eographical studies of disability should challenge us to become radically aware of the multifarious mind–body–emotional differences which pattern, intersect in, all geographies of childhoods, disabilities and everything else… Likewise, they should sensitise us to the ways in which notions which can feel stable and ubiquitous (‘childhood’, ‘disability’) are actually diversely patterned, complexly interconnected, processually constituted and extended at multiple scales, and experienced differently in different time/space contexts.

1 How might this claim about disabilities enrich our understanding of the examples of gender, sexuality, ethnicity and social class presented

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earlier in the chapter and the mainstream–special/able–disabled/ normal–Other dualisms that the researchers encountered in the relational spaces of schools etc? 2 Does this have implications for a progressive agenda to rethink and redesign the spatiality of institutions of childhood, such as schools? 3 Doreen Massey presents three propositions about space; in her second proposition she suggests ‘that we understand space as the sphere of the possibility of the existence of multiplicity in the sense of contemporaneous plurality … as the sphere therefore of coexisting heterogeneity’. Does the research offered in this chapter lend particular meanings to what Massey proposes?

Reflections on keywords and terms The following keywords and terminology have been introduced in this chapter: MM

MM

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‘biopower’ ‘borderlanders’ ethnicity gender identities positionality relational spaces sexuality social class

Look back by scanning the chapter; in a short, summative sentence, describe your understanding of each term and how it has been used.

Further reading Cannella, G. S. and L. Diaz Soto (2010), Childhoods: A Handbook, New York: Peter Lang. A pluralist, cross-cultural and political appraisal of childhoods in relation to the universalizing and naturalizing discourses of modern (Western) childhood. Valuable critical source for cross-cultural and anti-essentialist analysis. James, A., C. Jenks and A. Prout (1999), Theorizing Childhood, Cambridge: Polity Press.



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A very important and accessible contribution to the theorization of the new critical Childhood Studies, including discussion of social space, embodiment, controversial themes and approaches to research. Jenks, C. (2005), Childhood, London: Routledge. A definitive second edition that established the grounds for students’ study of the sociology of childhood and has become a classic. Rönnlund, M., ‘Schoolyard Stories: Processes of Gender Identity in a “Children’s Place”’, Childhood 22 (1) (2015): 85–100. Research paper from Scandinavia examining the construction and reproduction of gendered identities in school playgrounds.

7 ‘Nature’ and Discursive Spaces of Childhood Chapter outline The idea that children need nature but that modern life alienates them from the natural world is a recurrent theme. Drawing on Teather’s concept of discursive space, the chapter grounds these concerns in the intellectual circumstances of the European Enlightenment and Rousseau’s romantic construction of children and nature as other to civilization and the cultural world. The centrality of nature to understanding modern childhood is not only explored through the putative need for contact with external nature but also through complementary arguments about the internal nature of ‘the child’. Both are examined critically in relation to research about the adventure play movement, social class and the achievement of governmentality. Links to Stainton Rogers’ critical examination of Eurocentrism and children’s needs (presented in Chapter 2) are made. Research examining children’s responses to green spaces and the meanings they hold for nature is discussed. The chapter is structured around the following key themes and questions: Setting the scene Do children need contact with nature? Do children spend less time in the natural world than they used to and why might this matter? Where do ideas about a special relationship between children and nature come from? How do children respond to outdoor or natural environments and their affordances?

152 152 156 164 166

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Chapter summary Final activity Reflecting on keywords and terms Further reading

169 170 171 171

Setting the scene A popular focus for recent discussions about the quality of children’s lives has been the extent to which children now engage with the natural world. Free play in open green spaces has long been emblematic for a healthy childhood but has become held up as acutely oppositional to any number of contemporary influences on children that are, rightly or wrongly, believed to stymie their proper growth and development. These frequently relate not just to perceived threats to children’s safety in open spaces, but also anxieties about whether new media and virtual realities attenuate their exposure to the challenges that more tangible physical experiences in the natural world present. A putative decline in opportunities freely to run, climb, play and learn in wild places has recently been linked to arguments that children do not simply miss out, but are actually damaged by the absence of engagement with these things. This chapter will examine why the proposition that children are pathologically at risk when denied access to nature appears to exert such a tenacious grip on our imagination. It will suggest that this direct association between children and nature is rooted in modernity and the European Enlightenment and has been central to the way that human nature has been understood. Building on Teather’s work, the chapter will suggest that childhood and the natural world can be seen as discursive spaces that frequently overlap and find material form in the institutional spaces constructed for children to inhabit.

Do children need contact with nature? In 2012 the National Trust published a report entitled Natural Childhood (Moss, 2012), lending fresh impetus to popular debates about the quality of children’s lives and whether the modern world denies them a proper



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childhood. The National Trust’s report leans heavily on the work of a North American environmentalist writer named Richard Louv and his book entitled Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-DeficitDisorder. The sense of crisis implicit in Louv’s title was intensified and focused through his appeal to a particular pathology – which he identifies as ‘Nature Deficit Disorder’ – with causal roots in what he argues is the alienation of many children from the natural world. Indeed, when the National Trust’s report hit the headlines it was ‘Nature Deficit Disorder’ that caught the attention of journalists, and in particular its arresting suggestion that the modern world presents an epidemic-scale risk to children from this controversial quasi-clinical condition. Louv proposes that Nature-Deficit-Disorder results from the tendency of modern life to curtail children’s access to the natural world. He argues that this not only has harmful effects on children’s general development and well-being, but may also explain rises in obesity, attention deficits and depression among the young. Specific targets for this discourse of alienation include the rise of the ‘wired generation’ and increasingly digital-mediacentred childhoods. As a result: For a new generation, nature is more abstraction than reality. Increasingly, nature is something to watch, to consume, to wear – to ignore.

and … Nature-Deficit-Disorder describes the human costs of alienation from nature, among them: diminished use of the senses, attention difficulties, and higher rates of physical and emotional illnesses. (Louv, 2005, 6)

These arguments have much in common with a general level of concern about the condition of contemporary childhood and the rise of the online generation that has been with us through the past thirty or so years (Postman, 1996; Palmer, 2006; Griffiths, 2014). There has also been a spate of international reports based on research with children and young people suggesting that children in some of the wealthiest countries of the world (including the UK and USA) are far from contented with their lives, secure in their relationships and optimistic about their futures (see Chapter 1 as well as UNICEF, 2007 and 2013 – focusing on the OECD members; the Children’s Society, 2010, 2015; Alexander, 2010; Blundell, 2012, 2, 2014). On one level we might see Louv and the National Trust’s work as an argument that children really should be encouraged and enabled to get out,

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run around and test their physical limits more. However, by appealing to something called Nature-Deficit-Disorder the argument is taken somewhat beyond good (but take-it-or-leave-it) advice and given a quasi-clinical status whose force derives from an implicit appeal to what is ordained as natural and thus a series of needs that must be met if children are not only to grow up healthily but also as normal adults (see Chapter 2 and Stainton Rogers’ discussion about the discourse of needs). Whilst an argument such as this invites questions about what is meant by normal, the argument roots itself in ideas about nature that are oppositional to matters of cultural difference and so places biological necessity at its heart – by asserting what children need, the argument also claims to know what they must become when these needs are fulfilled. It is proposed in this chapter that these arguments are not new, but derive from the specific philosophical, intellectual and historical circumstances of the European Enlightenment and its attempts to establish a foundational understanding of human nature – that is, what it means to be a human being and not only a child. However, while the proposition that exposure to the natural world is important for children’s healthy growth may appear to be something that can be settled by the certainties of quantitative research, diverse and variable meanings for key terms (including ‘nature’, ‘healthy’ and what ‘growth’ leads to) ensure that outcomes will probably always be uncertain. For example, what counts as ‘contact with nature’ will, in turn, also depend on what is meant by ‘nature’ itself – is this a wilderness experience, playing in a public park or growing mustard and cress on a kitchen window-shelf? Second, and linked to the first, is the research clear about whether the key ingredient is the natural world or being outdoors or even simply being more physically active? As we saw with Taylor and Kuo’s review (and certainly what Carrus et al. found – see Chapter 2 for discussion on children and the discourse of needs), research seeking a quantifiable correlation is hardly conclusive, consequently questions must remain about the hypothesis. But what if, rather than continuing to test for correlation, we step outside the terms of the hypothesis and ask why, despite equivocal support from research, it continues to hold our attention and imagination? Answering this goes beyond whether or not the research itself was well designed and executed and suggests that there might be some deeply held convictions about children, childhood and nature structuring the debate. Developmental psychology holds centre-stage both in the research presented and discussed in Taylor and Kuo’s review as well as Carrus et al.’s work (see Chapter 2). However, despite (and because of) its dominance



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in shaping so much provision for children, critics such as Erica Burman (1994), Valerie Walkerdine (1984, 2009), Wendy Stainton Rogers (2001, 2009), Sadaf Shallwani (2010) and Affrica Taylor (2011, 2013) take issue with developmental psychology and its construction around a universalized and normatively conceived object known as the child that may not be shared by non-Western societies and, they contend, is not only highly gendered in its implicit masculinity but also validated by being seen as natural. Developmental psychology relegates (and frequently ignores) sociological questions of gender, class and ethnic and cultural difference in favour of understanding children predominantly in the naturalized terms of their biological im/maturity and growth – hence the importance of age for so much institutional life (see also James, Jenks and Prout, 1999, 17–19). Based on empirical research, critics propose that this idealized and objectified child bears little resemblance to the millions of young humans inhabiting diverse social spaces and community networks across the globe. This emphasis tends not only to bracket-out and essentialize healthy development as settled and unproblematically about the fulfilment of naturally-given needs (see Stainton Rogers, 2009 and Chapter 2), but also places the ideas of nature and the child on which these needs are based beyond critical discussion. However, critical psychologists along with critics of psychology’s essentializing tendencies (Walkerdine, 1994; Burman, 1994; Burr, 2004) as well as exponents of the ‘new’ Childhood Studies (Prout and James, 1997; Jenks, 2004; Stainton Rogers, 2009) challenge the legitimacy of the idea that there is a universal natural child and so might well ask: but who are the children represented and mediated through the statistics and aggregated research findings? And what is the more granular, subjective ‘lived-space’ that is the locus for their lives? In short, how far is the naturalized child found at the heart of developmentalist thinking useful or meaningful in a world that must become more sensitive to cultural diversity? To assert that many people enjoy and gain a sense of well-being from eating, camping, walking, cycling, climbing trees, lying on a beach or being outside does not authorize a claim that they have a basic biological need for these things or that their lives will be incomplete without them. In a critical study of the Fresh Air Fund, Robert Vanderbeek (2008) examines a project to offer ‘inner city’ black and minority ethnic children opportunities to lodge with families in the predominantly white state of Vermont. He suggests that underlying its altruistic removal of children from harsh home environments is not only a good/bad discursive construction of rural/urban environments,

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but also assumptions about the redemptive possibilities found through closer contact to nature and, implicitly, white society. Telling the story of ‘whiteness’ as normal, natural and healthy through the lives of the children involved is, Vanderbeek suggests, ‘one of the primary means through which racialised difference is narrated and reproduced in the contemporary US’. So that: … the Fresh Air narrative (re)scripts whiteness such that it becomes a solution to – rather than a manifestation and source of – social inequalities. The narrative erases or obscures whiteness as a system that contributes to the production of inequalities while posing the individualized efforts of white families as a corrective to inequality.

Vanderbeek is at pains not to impugn the motivation of those families that involve themselves in the project, but his work points to the power of discourses of nature and whiteness in the construction of the natural world as a discursive space of childhood.

Do children spend less time in the natural world than they used to and why might this matter? Critics of the Nature-Deficit-Disorder arguments point to a tendency to conflate ‘being outdoors’ with ‘being in nature’ and suggest that this is unhelpful and confuses the argument and yet, research on children’s play outdoors does suggest that children are spending less time playing outside their homes (Lacey, 2007; Shaw et al., 2015; and Chapter 5). However, whilst there is evidence to support the belief that children play outside less than they used to, it still begs the question arising from the exponents of Nature-Deficit-Disorder, whether they also play less in natural spaces and places. One study seeks to tackle these questions by exploring whether the years since the Second World War have seen significant changes in children’s experience of spontaneous play in natural surroundings near to their homes; recognizing that the research will rely on matters of memory, judgment and value, the researchers foreground these via a methodology based on phenomenology.



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Example of research Skår, M. and Krogh, E., ‘Changes in Children’s Nature-based Experiences near Home: From Spontaneous Play to Adult-controlled, Planned and Organised Activities’, Children’s Geographies 7 (3) (August 2009): 339–54. Skår and Krogh’s paper suggests that play in the natural environment is particularly significant for Norwegian children and their acculturation to a collective national identity in a country ‘where 40 per cent of the country is wooded and where there are traditionally strong cultural connections and associations with nature’. The study is based on interviews with twenty inhabitants of Brumunddal, a small town adjacent to Norway’s largest lake, forests and the mouth of the River Brumunda. The respondents were adults aged between eighteen and seventy-two and the interviews were conducted quite literally ad hoc while walking in natural surroundings; topics covered respondents’ recollection of their own childhoods and their interpretation of their own children’s lives. The authors claim that the study was shaped by the application of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological approach to understanding children’s lives and play, contending that children’s identity and their identification with particular environments ‘is shaped through their dialogue with their surroundings and in accordance with the distinctive and individual character of each child’. For Skår and Krogh, play opens up what they call a ‘”space” of possibilities’ in which this dialogue with their surroundings can be transacted and elaborated (see Taylor and Richardson, 2005, in Chapter 4). Asking adults to reflect on how their childhoods were, inevitably relies on partial or imperfect recall. The authors see this as part and parcel of how we construct narratives about our lives and must be accepted as such; so that their emphasis on dialogue and interpretation means that imperfect recall is acknowledged as an unavoidable contributor to the phenomenological encounter. The authors claim that what they found supports other studies, so that, when comparing how respondents spoke about their childhoods and those of their children, they reached the following conclusion: Adults interviewed in the study talked about their own childhood, and parents’ descriptions of their children’s everyday lives indicated that children today have fewer

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nature-based experiences, and that these have changed from being spontaneous and self-initiated activities set in natural surroundings to being organised and adult-controlled, often taking place in purpose-built facilities. An important aspect of this trend is that children’s nature experiences have become dependent upon adults’ own varying interests, priorities and willingness to contribute to supporting outdoor activities, and moreover, the suitability for nature-based play of the nature areas near by the institutions. (Skår and Krogh, 2009) In the following quotation we glimpse the authors’ thinly veiled presumption in favour of children’s ‘spontaneous’ (as opposed to adult-mediated) engagement with nature and ‘natural’ places when they imply that whilst negative effects are already known, benefits are yet to be revealed: What kind of effects do organised and adult-supervised nature experiences have on children compared to more spontaneous and play-like nature activities? Further research involving participant observation and conversations with children are necessary to develop and refine our understanding of the negative effects – as well as potential benefits – of these newer forms of nature experiences amongst children. (op. cit.) An interesting set of assumed priorities appears to underlie this statement. For example, in the dualism set up between ‘spontaneous and play-like nature activities’ and ‘adult supervised nature experiences’ it is clear that the former is to be preferred over the latter. This may or may not be so, but it does seem to presuppose what adults are like and what children want. Furthermore, there is a distinctly deterministic (and therefore one-way) reading of the effects that natural environments have on children (whether natural or adult-organized) that seems at odds, once again, with the phenomenological construction of meaning based on dialogue between people and their environments that they claim to champion. This appears to proceed on the commonplace assumption that while childhood and children’s experience may change, nature is not susceptible to changes in human meaning and is therefore stable from one generation to another and across social groups, such as class, gender, ethnicity or disability.



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Reflections on research 1 Skår and Krogh examine the question of whether children spend more or less time in the natural world through research data relying on adult memory. Whilst their acknowledgement of the inevitability of imperfect recall is interesting and valuable in certain contexts, do you think it undermines what the researchers are trying to achieve here? 2 Can you identify other sources of evidence that might be drawn upon to address this question? 3 How important are assumptions around what the researchers mean by nature in designing this research?

Whilst Skår and Krogh’s discussion appears to be shaped by an underlying assumption that engagement with nature in the external world is vital for healthy development and well-being, other contributors to the debate about children’s lives and the quality of their childhoods have seen things differently; namely, that children express their nature through play and the external environment for play is less important than opportunities to play. In The Child in the City (1978, 1st edn) the late anarchist writer Colin Ward explores the position of working-class, urban children and the influences these social and geographical parameters have on their access both to nature and to opportunities for play. Given that the wild spaces of the natural world, even the countryside, is frequently beyond the reach of these children, he makes the case for the importance of places, spaces and opportunities for play in what may appear to be the most unprepossessing environments. Ward asserts that the enduring imagination and resourcefulness of children means that the outdoor spaces of the city are far from inimical to children’s play: Every generation assumes that the street games of its youth have been destroyed by the modern city. Yet they survive, changing their form in innumerable adaptations to exploit environmental changes.

Indeed, while not arguing that green and rural spaces do not offer attractive affordances, Ward suggests that urban children appear not to require access to them to inspire their imagination and readily adapt the world for the purposes of play. In consequence, he argues that these environments are as much a part of the natural history of childhood as any forest, hilltop or river:

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The lifts of the tower block, the trolleys from the supermarket, are incorporated into the repertoire of playthings, often to the great discomfort of the adult world.

However, for Ward this capacity to adapt the world goes beyond arguments about the individual child’s healthy psychological and physical development and is a social and political assertion by children of their right to play: The very outrageousness of some of the forms these adaptations take, surely suggests that children are demanding their share of the city and knocking for admission into this adult world which monopolises the city’s toys and forgets, as Iona and Peter Opie keep reminding us, ‘that the most precious gift we can give the young is social space: the necessary space – or privacy – in which to become human beings’. (Ward, 1978 and 1990, 77)

Ward was affirming what Joe Benjamin, doyen of the adventure play movement in London, said by suggesting that the problem lies not with children or with the spaces they seek to transform but with wider society: ‘Our problem is not to design streets, housing, a petrol station or shops that can lend themselves to play, but to educate society to accept children on a participating basis’ (Benjamin, 1974, 3). The writings of Ward and Benjamin together propose that opportunities for imaginative, freely chosen play are more important than access to wild or ‘natural’ spaces. For them, the key ingredient is children’s spontaneous and instinctive capacity to exercise their imagination; further, that just as a capacity to exercise imagination is a vital sign of children’s ‘nature’, so its expression through play is at the heart of what might be called the ‘natural history’ of childhood. Thus the counterpart to Richard Louv et al.’s arguments about the importance of engagement with the natural world is found in the assertion that children have an inner nature that must be allowed to flourish. Both positions draw heavily on Enlightenment discourses that align the external natural world with the internal naturalness of ‘the child’. This conjunction found expression in the adventure playground movement that flourished amidst the ruins of European cities following the Second World War and sought to create spaces where children’s imagination could flourish, healthy growth would occur and a discursively constructed natural history of childhood could be realized through free play. Adventure play has its roots in the work of Danish landscape architect Carl Theodor Sørensen and his enthusiasm for the naturalistic Froebelian vision for the child at play. In 1931, after observing children at informally-arranged play



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around junkyards and construction sites, he published a proposal for ‘waste material playgrounds in suitable large areas where children would be able to play with old cars, boxes and timber’. Wartime Nazi occupation brought his ideas to fruition, when Jonus Bertelsen, a member of the Danish resistance, saw an opportunity to keep children safe and inculcate enduring moral values. As English visitor and childhood activist Lady Marjory Allen of Hurtwood (Allen and Nicholson, 1975) put it: In the moral confusion of German occupation the difference between sabotage and delinquency was not obvious, and many of the children had become unruly and antisocial.

Allen was so impressed by what she saw in Denmark just after the war that she brought the idea of the ‘Junk playground’ back to England and replaced ‘junk’ with ‘adventure’. In Lady Allen’s and her follower’s hands the adventure playground became a site where children’s mental scars could heal and blitzed streets and bombsites be redeemed and restored with children’s play as the transformative cathartic principle. The movement has been researched by US academic Roy Kozlovsky who suggests that beneath its appeal to a spontaneous natural history of childhood, lurk a series of social and political agendas.

Example of research Kozlovsky, R., ‘Adventure Playgrounds in Post-war Reconstruction’, in Gutman, M. and de Coninck-Smith, N. (2007), Designing Modern Childhoods: History, Space, and the Material Culture of Children, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press Kozlovsky’s discussion of literature concerned with the adventure play movement begins with the statement of a paradox that goes back to the 1959 UN Declaration of the Rights of the Child and what it asserts about children’s right to play: The child shall have full opportunity for play and recreation, which should be directed to the same purpose as education; society and the public authorities shall endeavour to promote the enjoyment of this right. For Kozlovsky, this sounds uncomfortably like an adult injunction placed upon children to ‘play on command’; however, as a

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movement, adventure play sought to liberate itself from this paradox by asserting that authentic play springs from within the child as instinctively as birds build nests, elephants protect their young and spiders spin webs – again, the rationale is driven by nature and its imperatives. However, the paradox may not really be resolved; suppose the children do not spontaneously choose the freedom of play? Should they be encouraged or even coerced to play this or that way because, whether they know it or not, they need to? Kozlovsky draws on American critics such as Galen Cranz (1982) who asserts the regulatory aspect of adventure play, arguing that it imposes social control on children coming from politically weaker groups because of its middle-class construction of childhood as a universal condition where age, not sociology (that is, access to social power), is the only significant difference. David Cohen (1987) criticized the adventure playground movement for its tendency to instrumentalize play so as to meet ‘social and educational goals … [he] argued that play ought to be promoted because it is pleasurable, not because it is useful’ (cited in Kozlovsky, 2004). Extending Cranz and Cohen’s criticisms, Kozlovsky draws on Foucault’s work to propose that any social practice can support relations of power and so we should not be misled by the apparent beneficence of the playground movement – in the case of the adventure playground, children are being disciplined to choose a particular sort of individualized freedom. This may seem paradoxical, since we usually associate disciplinary activities with the denial of existing freedoms rather than the imposition of an obligation to choose freedom. However, for Kozlovsky the operation of modern neo-liberal societies, characterized by free markets in the economic sphere and by liberal democracy in the political realm, is predicated on a social reality wherein people are required to identify themselves as free, rational and agentic individuals. Drawing on Nikolas Rose’s seminal Governing the Soul (1990), Kozlovsky proposes that adventure play offered a medium within which children could be socialized to choose freedom and agency as not only a desirable and socially redemptive outcome, but also come to believe in its legitimacy as a natural state.



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Reflection Advocates of free play frequently champion the idea of childhood as a state of being in its own right (see Mills, 2000 – ‘Children as Persons in their own Right’) and challenge the emphasis that institutions, such as school, place on childhood as a means to becoming an adult (and again, Mills, 2000 – ‘Children as Apprentices’). This either/or relationship between being and becoming is an example of what social scientists often refer to as a dualism and can prove problematic when trying to decide the best course of action. 1 Might Kozlovsky’s work suggest that the debate around whether childhood should be about being a child or about becoming an adult may not be as straightforward as either ‘persons in their own right’ or ‘apprentices’ to adulthood might suggest? 2 Is it likely that adult policymakers will see this either being or becoming dualism in the same way as children? Why might this sort of either (being)/or (becoming) dualism prove troublesome when making practical decisions, arrangements and policies? That the straightforward liberatory instincts of adventure play might be compromised by this paradoxical (and for many exponents, disturbingly underhand) dualism – freedom and self-realization on the one hand and social control on the other – is a critique familiar to many engaged with humanistic initiatives that seek social transformation. Indeed, similar themes are taken up by Wake (2008) in relation to the children’s gardens movement that continues to enjoy popularity, especially in the United States. Wake’s paper ‘”In the Best Interests of the Child”: Juggling the Geography of Children’s Gardens (between Adult Agendas and Children’s Needs)’ – whose title borrows with a sense of irony from the UNCRC – surveys literature across this area, and identifies: … a continuation of the historical tendency for programmes to do with children, nature and gardening to be an attempt to inculcate children in some other way than is openly touted. Therefore children’s garden practitioners should ensure these gardens do not become an overbearing educational vehicle for righteous adult agendas. For example shifting from the nineteenth-century viewpoint of regarding children’s gardens

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and gardening as a physical, moral, social and economic savior; to the twenty-first-century issues, which could see them being regarded as an antidote for recklessly treated bodies and a tired and spoiled planet. (Wake, 2008)

Reflection Looking back at Vanderbeek’s work as well as Kozlovsky and Wake, do you think nature and the natural world have to be seen as redemptive?

Where do ideas about a special relationship between children and nature come from? The Enlightenment thinker who most explicitly links children with nature is Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In 1762, Rousseau published a hugely influential work called The Social Contract that went on to inspire revolutionary political movements across Europe and the Americas with its concern to address human freedom. In the same year he also published a book entitled Emile: or on Education. This addressed many of the same themes through an exploration of the education and growth of a child named Emile.

Key point: Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) At the heart of Rousseau’s work was a conviction that society and nature were opposed and that children are instinctually closer to nature. However, Rousseau argued that a child’s growing entanglement with the demands and expectations of society alienated it from the healthy and natural form of self-love that he calls ‘amour de soi-meme’ and encouraged the growth of a self-conscious and unhealthily comparative form of self-love that he refers to as ‘amour propre’. However, through the natural education of the uncorrupted child Emile, Rousseau seeks to demonstrate how the development



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of amour propre can be deferred and diminished to the eventual benefit of society and humankind in general. For Rousseau, ‘the educator … was to treat the child as a “little human animal destined for the spiritual and moral life” who developed “according to certain laws whose natural progression must be respected above all”’ (Hendrick, 1997, 36; Rousseau, 1762; 2005).

Emile inspired poets and painters – including Wordsworth, Blake, Coleridge, Thomas Gainsborough and Philip-Otto Runge – to champion the child as romantic icon and rallying point for their protest against the depredations of industrialization and its corruption of truth, beauty and innocence. This idealized child symbolized the hope for salvation through his innocent opposition to the corrupted world. Rousseau’s assertion of children’s original virtue proved controversial because it contradicted the Church’s Augustinian doctrine of original sinfulness so that the Archbishop of Paris ordered the book to be burned in public. Despite (or because of) this, Emile proved so popular that within a decade booksellers found that more money could be earned by hiring copies to readers than selling them. Among Rousseau’s readership was the great philosopher Immanuel Kant, who it is said missed his daily constitutional walk through Königsburg for two weeks as he read and re-read the book (Russell, 1984, 678). Besides being a philosophical icon, Emile also generated an interest in children’s welfare and education among idealist thinkers, including the Swiss Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and Johann Friedrich Froebel, inventor of the kindergarten system as a literal ‘children’s garden’ where plants and children grow harmoniously. The educational benefits derived from an alignment between children’s intrinsic naturalness and the external natural world expressed by Froebel runs as a golden thread through Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy, via the open-air nursery schools surrounded by vegetable gardens founded by Rachel and Margaret MacMillan amidst the slums of Deptford, on through Lady Bridget Plowden’s articulation of progressive education. Indeed, it continues to inspire passionate followers in organizations such as the Forest Schools’ movement (Knight, 2011). Rousseau’s influence on romantic strands of thinking was not only felt in Europe, but inspired North American thinkers, writers and environmental activists, such as Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson and John Muir – a prime mover in the National Parks movement. The polemical legacy of

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these thinkers undoubtedly shines through the arguments of Richard Louv and his Last Child in the Woods. Science was not immune from romanticism when it came to children. Drawing heavily on Darwinian evolutionary theory, thermodynamics and the science of ethology, Jean Piaget gave the more intuitive work of Pestalozzi, Froebel and Montessori a scientific rationale that was meet to the intellectual requirements of the early twentieth century. Piaget brings cognitive and physical growth into alignment by establishing childhood as a biological condition whose stages are driven by a natural process called ‘development’; his work sets a scientific seal on the relation between children and ordered growth that is driven by nature. Piaget was much influenced by the work of the evolutionary psychologist Claud Levy-Bruhl, who claimed that the progressive development of the individual human followed the same sequence as that of the species as a whole – captured in the aphorism ‘ontogenesis recapitulates phylogenesis’. Thus a ‘natural history of childhood’ emerges, where ‘the child’ is conceived as a more primitive human than the rational adult, driven by deterministic developmental needs and closer to less intellectually and culturally evolved ‘primitive’ humans (see also Donna Haraway [1991], whose seminal book Simians, Cyborgs and Women deconstructs the Enlightenment’s construction of the adult white male as the pinnacle of evolutionary development and suggests parallels between meanings associated with conventional constructions of femininity and modern childhood). The Eurocentrism, even racism, underpinning Levy-Bruhl’s propositions about the Primitive Mind, is not explicitly articulated in Piaget; however, the naturalness and rationality of the universal adult that is the end point for Piagetian development remains as a legacy of the European Enlightenment (see Shallwani, 2010; Abegglen and Blundell, 2016).

How do children respond to outdoor or natural environments and their affordances? Earlier we looked at Skår and Krogh’s (2009) work that speaks of children’s spontaneous play in nature and suggested that their examination of changes to children’s play in the natural world via adult memory and parental attitude might be complemented by children’s own ways of seeing. But what



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do children think about play and environments for play and will this be different to adult responses and values because they are children? Tapsell et al. (2001) sought to answer this through research designed to elicit London children’s attitudes to flood plain spaces and rivers in urban spaces and the opportunities that these afforded for play. What they found was not entirely congruent with the more romantic expectations that so frequently inform and offer a rationale for these encounters.

Example of research Tapsell, S.,Tunstall, S., House, M.,Wholmsley, J. and Macnaughten, P., ‘Growing up with Rivers? Rivers in London Children’s Worlds’, Area 33 (2) (2001): 177–89. Tapsell et al. (2001) claimed that flood plain and urban river environments are important because they offer access to significant open ‘green’ spaces in what are densely settled areas such as Greater London and other major industrialized and/or post-industrial conurbations. Significantly, the researchers proceed from an assumption that these areas are selected on the basis of the social meaning they hold as green spaces – that is, as recreational and sports’ fields – rather than a more absolute value as natural wilderness-like spaces. Until their research, little was known about children’s ways of seeing greenspace and the value they placed on these particular environments. The authors worked with children aged nine to eleven from two London primary schools and designed a multi-method, largely qualitative project based on two small rivers within walking distance of these schools. The sections of river were chosen because of their ready accessibility, open/non-canalized banks and absence of significant health or safety hazard. The initial research suggested that children did not exhibit a spontaneous identification with the rivers as natural places to play; rather they found ‘the dense riverside vegetation and long grass of the natural river environment alien and unsuitable for their games’. Furthermore, ‘pollution, litter, untidiness, and perceived neglect’ confirmed children’s initial beliefs that the rivers were sites of social and physical danger and so to be avoided. However, over successive visits the children’s attitudes changed as they identified particular affordances offered by the rivers through these encounters. Signally, the children’s attitudes seemed to

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turn from repulsion and fear to a more citizenly concern about the pollution of London’s rivers and streams over the course of the visits; furthermore, what also became clear were the particular preferences for playing in and around the rivers that the children expressed: [T]he activities enjoyed most by many children were those that involved direct contact with the rivers: getting wet, paddling and splashing in the river. … Part of the attraction of the rivers to the children was that they offered different, challenging and modifiable environments, and the opportunities to transgress the land-based norms of behaviour of keeping clean and dry. Tapsell et al.’s research suggests that children’s mode of engagement with nature is not determined by the spontaneous, empathetic, spiritual recognition that is presumed by more romantic exponents but that their valorization of these environments as ‘lived spaces’ was learned and compiled through the children’s embodied encounters over an extended period. The children’s apparent preferences for splashing about may be deemed by some to be antithetical to certain conceptions of environmental education and to authentic communion with the spirit of Nature; however, this playfulness illustrates the process of embodied encounter very well and its open-ended variousness. Tapsell et al.’s approach perhaps seems closer to Merleau-Ponty and phenomenological method than Skår and Krogh; indeed, Tapsell et al.’s findings about the affordances of natural phenomena for the children seem entirely consistent with this passage from Skår and Krogh (2009): [C]hildren, as phenomena, have to be seen as embodied subjects in their encounters with their surroundings. Children’s connections with nature, according to MerleauPonty, are relational, dynamic and characterised by their experiences in an everyday life-world … According to this approach, human nature is associated with being open to what is happening during, for instance, children’s play. Play, according to this approach, is thus characterised by the exploration of that which happens, and can be termed a ‘space’ of possibilities. Amongst these possibilities is clearly the idea that the rivers offered possibilities for deliberate transgression of the institutionalized



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expectations to which the children were subject, suggesting that play is not some pure essence, but always embedded in lived spaces that combine shifting relations between affordance and restriction for those who play.

Reflection Activity 1: Tapsell et al.’s findings explore what children think and feel about rivers and their affordances for play. Does listening to the children add anything fresh to understanding the debate about children and the natural world? Activity 2: Do Tapsell et al.’s findings lend support to Edward Soja’s proposal that if we want to understand the meanings that people hold for places and spaces we have to look beyond conventional scientific approaches to embrace what he calls ‘lived space’ (see Chapter 3)?

Chapter summary Ideas about Nature and the needs it authorizes stalk modern childhood and represent a highly influential contributor to the discourses that shape the institutions in which children live, learn, play and work. These ideas are readily translated into conceptions of growth, cognition, morality and need that underpin most educational decisions and identify what does and does not count both as a good childhood and normal adult outcome. The chapter has explored the assumed special relationship between children and the natural world and some of the reasons for the hold these ideas maintain over adult-world thinking and provision for children. It has examined research evidence for the proposition that children need contact with nature and the natural environment if they are to grow and prosper as well as the premises on which this research is founded. These include largely unquestioned assumptions not only about the validity of ‘the child’ as an ideal type, but also the meaning of ‘nature’. The chapter argues that these ideas are not culturally neutral, but are rooted in the

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intellectual assumptions of the Enlightenment and its employment of ‘the child’ as a philosophical trope through which progressive improvements to human nature could be explored and realized. Thus, the claim that children need nature is matched by modernity’s need to align children’s growth with the pursuit of human wealth and progress and the construction of the natural world as a discursive ‘laboratory’ space in which the child can flourish and appropriately fulfilled adults can be delivered. The chapter also presents research suggesting that children may have very different priorities and understandings of what the natural world affords. These themes are explored further in Chapter 8.

Final activity The close discursive connection between nature and childhood authorizes the taxonomic approach to understanding children through discourses of needs and rights that Wendy Stainton Rogers criticizes. She suggests that this is neither helpful nor tenable because this approach fails to recognize real children’s active resilience and agency and renders them passive in the face of what are presented as natural developmental forces. An adventure play initiative seeking to embrace young people’s interests and acknowledge their resilience whilst not denying the values of project workers is described in Fraser Brown’s account of ‘The Venture’ playground (Brown et al. in Jones et al., 2008, 245–55; Staempfli, 2009). Many of the children and young people who attend The Venture will have been told regularly, elsewhere, how unsatisfactory they are in many different ways. They will overhear people talking about them in derogatory ways. They will feel all the negative subliminal messages that are fed to them by society as a whole. At The Venture it is the staff ’s job to observe constantly and find the tiniest thing for praise. Sometimes children spend all their non-Venture time being made to feel bad about themselves. So it is The Venture’s job to provide as many hours as possible of unadulterated positive reinforcement, to try to find for that child some quality time to feel good about themselves. (Brown et al., 2008)



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Reflection Kozlovsky’s examination of the adventure play movement earlier in the chapter leads us to ask whether it is possible ever to accommodate children’s lives within discursively constructed spaces of childhood without imposing adult-world purposes. Does Soja’s notion of ‘lived space’, wherein both children and adults are acknowledged as social actors, offer any insights into how The Venture operates, and might this offer a way out of the deterministic difficulties described by Kozlovsky?

Reflecting on keywords and terms The following keywords and terminology have been introduced in this chapter: MM

MM

MM

MM

MM

MM

MM

MM

adventure play ‘the child’ discursive space Enlightenment  Eurocentrism nature romantic Rousseau

Look back by scanning the chapter; in a short, summative sentence, describe your understanding of each term and how it has been used.

Further reading Aitken, S. (2001), Geographies of Young People: The Morally Contested Spaces of Identity, London: Routledge. A classic contribution to the geographical study of children and young people including a formative discussion around children and nature. Hendrick, H., ‘Constructions and Reconstructions of British Childhood: An Interpretive Survey, 1800 to the Present’, in A. James and A. Prout (1990, 1997), Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood, London: Routledge.

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A chapter drawn from James and Prout’s seminal work examining the genealogy of discourses that have contributed to the construction of modern childhood. Hendrick, H. (1997), Children, Childhood and English Society 1880–1990, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. A scholarly historical account of childhood in England from the late Victorian to the 1990s exploring themes found in this chapter. Taylor, A. (2013), Reconfiguring the Natures of Childhood, London: Routledge. A very important contribution to debates around nature and childhood that pulls together much of Taylor’s earlier work and sets a course for reimagining and living in common worlds.

8 Globalization and Future Spaces of Childhood Chapter outline This final chapter draws together several of the themes already addressed and relates them to the condition identified as globalization. Global economic, social and technological changes impact on children’s lives and relations at various scales, underlining the emergence of what are frequently described as transnational identities. These challenge the legitimacy and integrity of modern childhood as a universal condition existing in separated symbolic space from the rest of the social world. Conflicts facing young people around citizenship, belonging and dissent are discussed along with what we might learn from the experience of unaccompanied refugee children about globalized childhoods and the condition described as ‘identities on the move’ by which this might be understood. The chapter concludes by presenting debates questioning the utility and limitations of the social constructionist critique found in the New Social Studies of Childhood and the work of critics who argue that it may fail effectively to challenge links between modern childhood and nature and may even reinforce the stubborn nature–culture dualism that arises from it. Finally, it argues that rethinking childhood can be beneficial for our whole species as we face the challenges of climate change and threats to the future of life on Earth in the era of the Anthropocene. The chapter is structured around the following key themes and questions: Setting the scene How is globalization shaping children’s identities and sense of places to which they belong?

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Are conventional understandings of children’s relations to near and faraway places helpful in understanding their lives? 185 Can we learn anything about new childhoods from the experience of children who are refugees? 187 Why might rethinking the future of childhood be important in times of globalization and climate change? 195 Chapter summary and conclusions 201 Final chapter reflection 202 Reflecting on keywords and terms 202 Further reading 203 Postscript204

Setting the scene Tözün Issa leads the Centre for Multilingualism in Education at London Metropolitan University and researches children’s identities through their experience of both mainstream and community-based complementary schools across the UK. In the following passage he interviews an elevenyear-old boy about his experience as a mainstream state school learner during the weekdays and at his north London Turkish-medium community school at the weekend: Q1. What do you like most about your school? I learn Turkish, which helps me to speak to my parents and grandparents and the community. I also use it when I go on holiday in Turkey. We do some work which is the same as in my other [mainstream] school except it is in Turkish. It helps me to understand it better and my Turkish gets better. It’s fun! Q2. What do you like least about your school? Wish it wasn’t on Saturdays. I get tired sometimes. Q3. Do you think what you learn here helps you with your learning in your English school? Definitely. For example we were doing some science work on metals and their properties last week. We had the same lesson in my English school last month. We did this in Turkish and English here. That means it was a good revision for me. It was also fun to learn that names of some metals were almost identical in Turkish and English.



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Q4. Is there anything you want to say about your Saturday school? This school teaches me how to be proud of being Turkish as well as British. I have the best of both worlds. It can’t be bad. (Issa and Williams, 2008, 10–11)

What Issa and Williams describe is a condition within which not only this boy, but many of us increasingly live: this is that whilst we live much of our lives through what could be described as relationships of propinquity – with those that are immediately to hand – we also experience relationships of connectivity that bring the near and far into immediate relation with one another. Whether fleetingly ephemeral or lifelong, the fabric of our social worlds seems to comprise overlapping networked activity spaces. Conventional concepts about the fixity of the space in which we live our lives, including the idea of near and far as existing in a constant relationship to one another that is measured solely by geographical distance, are certainly challenged by this. Just as social meaning makes things that are ‘faraway’ closer to the eleven-year-old (above) than much that is geographically close to hand, so what is to hand may best be understood through references to people, events, places or shared stories that are located far away.

Key information point: The concept of the ‘glocal’ The entanglement of propinquity (what is near to hand) with connectivity has led theorists of globalization to coin the concept ‘glocal’ to help understand where the local and global mesh together (Howard, 2011, 71), quoting Jan Aart Scholte: ‘Through so-called “glocalization”, global news reports, global products, global social movements and the like take different forms and make different impacts depending on local particularities’ (2005, 26).

Changes in communication technologies frequently reinforce this by ensuring that we become increasingly aware of how our local experience of global phenomena or events can elicit very different reactions in other locales. This may not only challenge the integrity of the modern nation state as a basis for affiliation and identity, but also the legitimacy and currency of ideas about childhood. For example, despite widespread enthusiasm for

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Montessori education amongst the emerging middle classes in China, there is evidence of a desire to reinterpret the Italian childhood pioneer to meet local cultural norms. Technological change, enforced migration and intercultural encounter shape children’s lives as much as they do adults; in the process they may catalyze a need to rethink the meaning of childhood in relation to adulthood, its binary other.

How is globalization shaping children’s identities and sense of places to which they belong? In 1989 the General Assembly of the United Nations passed the seminal Convention on the Rights of the Child and called on the nations of the world to ratify its articles and embrace its implications for the lives of children and young people. The UNCRC was predicated on the idea that there are universal realities to the status of being a child that should underwrite an entitlement to have needs met and rights ensured. This document therefore represented a globalized view of children and aspirational ‘road map’ for childhood. Although prominently debated since the end of the Second World War, globalization processes are not new and human history is marked by a growing sense that human life is played out on an expanding geographical, political, economic, cultural and social stage. At intergovernmental level, much of the recent discussion of globalization surrounds questions of economic and political integration of trade and markets facilitated by rapidly changing communication and transport technologies that have shrunk the world. These changes to global trade and exchange inevitably also bring about interpersonal and cultural encounters as well as social movements that can be enriching, but, as current crises confirm, also lead to destabilizing conflicts on a vast scale. Alongside the economic, political and cultural effects has been a growing global consciousness and with it a recognition that the Earth is a very small, rather fragile living planet in a vast universe, whose survival might be in jeopardy from the very processes of economic globalization. This global consciousness frequently finds expression in global events and organizations – such as the Live Aid events that appeared in the 1980s or in the work of Greenpeace, Oxfam or Save the Children (Steger, 2013; Scholte, 2005, 73–5) – that seek to operate across



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national and regional borders, and a globalized representation of children and their lives is frequently central to their work (Wells, 2009, 33–44). However, the very globalization of childhood effected by the UNCRC and these other bodies encourages a reappraisal of their own normative assumptions precisely because at the point of application striking differences in particular childhood experiences across the globe become clear (see Beazley et al., 2009). Research suggests that, like the Turkish boy in Issa’s research, this changing global consciousness increasingly informs the activity and relational spaces inhabited by children and young people and therefore where they locate their identities. This has implications not simply for the school curriculum (Bale, 1987, 90–104; Wiegand, 1998, 70–2), but also for a reimagination of young people’s political intelligence and how they engage with world affairs under conditions where so many express growing indifference, alienation and disillusionment in relation to traditional, more parochial political institutions. Kathrin Hörschelman and Elisabeth El Refaie examined young people’s transnational and political affiliations using a spatialized analysis and found evidence that whilst sceptical about these traditional forms of political engagement, the children and young people they worked with knitted the local and global together to construct politically meaningful identities that also acknowledged and embraced immediate personal and global conflicts.

Example of research Hörschelmann, K. and El Refaie, E., ‘Transnational Citizenship, Dissent and the Political Geographies of Youth’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 39 (2014): 444–56. This study was concerned to examine young people’s sense of their cosmopolitan citizenship in relation to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and argues that far from being uninterested in global issues and events there is a need for ‘greater recognition of the complex entanglements of young people’s lives with international politics and for more nuanced analyses of the specific, contextual relations and identities that inform their senses of citizenship’. Cosmopolitan citizenship is linked to a gathering experience of interconnectedness and ‘a sense of global responsibility and shared humanity’. The research was conducted with eighteen female and

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nineteen male young people living in Bradford, UK, in full-time study and mostly on courses leading to university entrance. All but seven of the subjects were too young to vote at the time the interviews and focus groups were undertaken. Around half of the group identified themselves as Muslim with family connections to Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh, and of the others, nine ‘self-identified as white British, Christian or Atheist (9), Hindu (4), Caribbean (3), Sikh (2), British-African (1) and British Indian (1)’. The authors’ findings challenge limiting assumptions about the scale at which young people are interested in the world, that is, primarily local and immediate and ethnocentric; rather, ‘[t]he relational perspective we advocate … recognises that citizenship is already practised by young people across different spheres of their lives, not a future achievement’. In other words, young people do not acquire an international outlook on citizenship as a result of their developmentally-driven staged cognitive growth or the school curriculum, but it is embedded in the reality of their lives and networked relational spaces produced by them as social actors. These spatial and relational aspects are of central importance for the authors because they help us to begin to understand how a politics of propinquity (or what is nearby and ‘to hand’) is not isolationist or concerned only with what is local to us, but in a rapidly globalizing world is implicitly linked to a politics of connectivity that embraces the wider world. This was most obviously true for those young people with international family links, but also for those who had experience of international travel even though they did not have family connections in the places they visited. This connectivity to the global not only influenced the young people’s responses to international events – for example, their empathy with strangers suffering the effects of the geographically distant wars in Afghanistan and Iraq – but also their understanding of what is close at hand as a more-than-local expression of global circumstances. For example, they interpreted the 7/7 London bombings as global events that also had immediate and local impacts – not only through obvious increases in security on the streets but also personal experience of racism and Islamophobia. This suggested the need for a reappraisal of the conventional view of children’s identification with the world based on an image of expanding ripples from a centralized, local self in favour of a more complex and intersected scalar relationship wherein the global transgressed the local and vice



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versa – that is, their lives were lived with a glocal consciousness. The authors suggest that politics and citizenship were often not formal or institutionalized, but the young people drew on their ‘embodied, affective relations in the exercise of political agency’, suggesting that understanding how they constructed themselves as citizens required ‘greater recognition of spatially and temporally flexible, multiple allegiances through which citizenship identities are formed’. So their sense of who they are was as likely to be formed by their relation to events, people and phenomena in geographically distant places as to what was tangibly near at hand. In conclusion, the authors identify some implications for policymakers on the wider political stage as well as for educators. At the global scale they argue for a deliberate ‘restructuring of international political decision making processes to enable not just debate alongside, but active participation by young people in such processes’ in ways that avoid a charge of tokenism. However, while the researchers found that many young people dissent from the actions of the political class, they are wary about where this places them vis-a-vis a perceived status quo – particularly where they had ties to minority ethnic communities. The authors are clear that ‘if “democracy” is to have any meaning and (young) people are to feel that their participation matters, then belonging through, not despite dissent, is essential for exercising citizenship’. This challenges the education system and civil society to create ‘political spaces that enable the articulation of dissent with “the state” as well as between young people without entrenching antagonism’ if they are to become ‘sites for developing “habits of co-existence” and for engaging “with diversity, conflict, and structural inequalities that know no national borders”’ (quoting El Haj, 2007, 312).

Researcher interview When interviewed about his work, Dr Tözün Issa, Director of the Centre for Multilingualism in Education, was asked about children’s identities, supplementary schooling and the constructions of an inclusive British society. This is some of what he said: Young people are constantly trying to make sense of their cultural and linguistic spaces. Their identities are largely

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shaped by internal and external responses. The former is about how one feels inside. This develops as a natural process in any individual asking questions about oneself. The latter is more complex and is the way such internal ‘vision’ is affected by external factors, including how one’s perception of linguistic and cultural self is seen by others? In my own research, I have witnessed many instances where students from linguistic communities are hesitant in declaring openly, their cultural or linguistic identities in mainstream school settings … We need an appropriately trained and professionalized management and teaching force to change this. But it cannot be done without a political will. The schools following government rhetoric on ‘singleness’ under ‘We are multicultural BUT...’ need to seriously rethink their position if they really want to implement a democratic inclusive British society. This is a moral as well as educational issue. If the government does not have the will to do it community organisations have ample expertise and willpower to implement it. Are there ways that the vocabulary of ‘space as place’, ‘activity space’, ‘relational space’, ‘discursive space’ and ‘globalization’ might help to add extra sense to what Issa says about how children, communities, society and political institutions are positioned and serve to inform policy responses around schooling and education? How does what Issa says sit with Horschelmann and El Refaie’s findings about tensions between belonging and dissent?

Liberal democratic societies would seek in principle to uphold a right of citizens to show dissent without exclusion from belonging or rights and entitlements – the ideal of democracy implicitly recognizes difference. However, as Horschelmann and El Refaie point out, the conflicts felt by young people can be acutely challenging and may be far more significant in explaining young people’s patchy commitment to voting and conventional politics than the frequent and, frankly, slip-shod accusations of apathy. Horschelmann and El Refaie’s work suggests that young people have a well-developed grasp of geopolitical realities that transcends the nation state and the institutionalized political understandings that the adult world expects them to slot into; however, they may experience conflicts and the



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challenges to authentic expressions of non-dominant identities. Research by Thea Renda Abu El Haj (2007), looking at some young people’s responses to institutionalized citizenship in US schools, illustrates this acutely.

Example of research El Haj, T. R. A., ‘”I was born here, but my home, it’s not here”: Educating for Democratic Citizenship in an Era of Transnational Migration and Global Conflict’, Harvard Educational Review 77 (2007): 285–316. El Haj found that in the charged atmosphere following 9/11, citizen­ ship education for young people with Palestinian heritage was experienced more in terms of a requirement to demonstrate allegiance to norms of national identity than in the more classical and abstract conception stressing rights and entitlements that enshrined the right to political dissent as a matter of principle. Thus, citizenship increasingly served as a constraining container imposing normative expectations rather than facilitating the sort of ‘belonging through, not despite dissent’ that Horschelmann and El Refaie refer to. The standard requirement to pledge allegiance to the US flag every day became a point of acutely felt conflict as did the acceptability of conventional identity descriptors. Here is how Khalida – born in the USA, lived seven years in the occupied West Bank and returned to America in her teens – describes her relation to what has become a standardized form for descriptors: I only think of myself as Arab – a Palestinian, actually. Most people ask me, ‘You’re a Palestinian American?’ I told them, ‘No, just Palestinian.’ Then they start getting stupid about it: ‘And then how do you know English?’ I’m like, ‘No, I’m American Palestinian. I just want to be a Palestinian.’ (El Haj, 2007)

Reflection: 1 ‘Arab’, ‘Palestinian’, ‘American Palestinian’, ‘American and Palestinian’, ‘Palestinian American’ – do they all mean the same or are they vital to understanding complexities around how we are located in the contemporary world? 2 Does Khalida’s experience suggest anything about the place of citizenship in the curriculum of US schools as well as assumptions about what is expected of children and young people and where institutions position them in relation to the nation state?

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Researcher interview with Dr Aminul Hoque MBE, community youth worker and academic researcher at Goldsmiths’ University, London DB. You recently published a very well received book about what you see as an emerging identity amongst young people entitled British-Islamic Identity: Third Generation Bangladeshis from East London (Hoque, 2015). It is based on your own extensive ethnographic research and examines ways that children and young people are grappling with challenges around identities and belonging. What are some of these challenges for children and young people in the community you worked with and are these unique to them? AH. The British-born third and fourth generation Bangladeshis that I spoke to as part of my in-depth ethnographic research were overwhelmingly embroiled in the migrant story of non-belonging – the eternal search for a place they can call ‘home’. This feeling of non-belonging and displacement is not unique to this community. Indeed, it affects many other migrant diasporas across the globe. Many white working-class indigenous communities from across the UK are also searching for a sense of belonging and acceptance. The dynamism of identity presents itself as a riddle. This is especially pertinent for the British-born generations. Who are they? Bangladeshi? British? Muslim? Londoners? East Londoners? None of these? Or a fusion of them all? How do they negotiate the tension between the internal sense of who they are against the external construction – the ‘critical gaze’? Where do they get a sense of belonging and acceptance? Crucially, they were born here. They think, eat, live and breathe British (whatever that means?). They are British. The issue of non-belonging is crucial. Marginalized by some sections of mainstream British society due to ethno-cultural and religious differences, many are also excluded from the Bangladeshi community because they’ve adopted a seemingly Western lifestyle. And they are dismissed as British or ‘Londonis’ by fellow kin when they visit Bangladesh. So the question is: where do they go? Where is home? One fifteen-year-old girl from my study echoes this feeling – it’s like being an eternal tourist, not fully belonging anywhere: ‘[T] hey keep on telling me to go back to where I came from. I was born



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here. I am 100 per cent British. Where is it exactly that I am supposed to go back to?’ This is the identity conundrum that weighs them down and is so intensely complex to negotiate. The vast majority also negotiate their multifaceted identities within a social backdrop of intense poverty, Islamophobia, deprivation and marginalization. DB. Other researchers have pointed to tensions between citizenship as an ideal, wherein the right to be different and to express dissent is part and parcel of belonging, and the actual experience of many young people. Is there evidence for this tension and does the BritishIslamic identity you write about address this in significant ways? AH. Britishness and citizenship, as layers of identities, were not fixed and were contested by the participants of my study. In recent years, British Muslims, in general, have dissented to their marginality, invisibility and powerlessness, i.e. the demand for government-funded faith schooling; the choice to wear Muslim clothing, especially the hijab, in public spaces; the availability of ‘halal’ food in public places and so on. They have entered the public space through their demand for recognition and institutional representation. However, this logic of ‘claims-making’ and assertiveness is particularly European in context. As a political condition of egalitarian multiculturalism, Muslims, like other faiths, cultures and immigrant communities in the UK, have just claims to difference, recognition and citizenship rights in public spaces. Young British Muslims find themselves entangled in this tension between citizenship as an ‘ideal’ and the right to be different. The challenge for Britain is this: how to govern a world religion such as Islam, which is very public in its expression, and to accept Muslims as equal social partners despite some cultural and ideological differences. Just because Muslims have a beard, eat different food, wear the hijab, and so on – it does not negate their right to be British or to be a citizen. This tension is echoed by two of my participants. Azad, aged eighteen, argues ‘just because I am a Muslim, it doesn’t mean that I cannot be British as well’, and Taiba, aged seventeen, contests that ‘as Bangladeshi Muslims, we are different to most British white people. But we can be different and also be British at the same time.’ DB. This book is about children and young people’s spaces and places; you suggest that the emergence of British-Islamic identity holds out the prospect of vibrant new ways of being and doing British national identities. Are there any significant spatial aspects

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to this emerging social reality in your view? And how important are these? AH. According to the Census of 2011, the London Borough of Tower Hamlets has over 81,000 Bangladeshis, making it the largest Bangladeshi diaspora in the world. Therefore, a unique sense of community, space, place, culture and a shared brother/sisterhood has been constructed in Tower Hamlets. And the key proponents behind this push for a British–Bangladeshi–Islamic syncretic space have been the British-born third and fourth generation Bangladeshis. Above, I pose the question – if they are neither nationally British or culturally Bangladeshi, where do they go? Where do they find a sense of acceptance and belonging? I argue that the peaceful religion of Islam helps fill this identity void. Islam offers a sense of peace, humanity, belonging, family and spirituality. And it also offers some of them a platform for a political search for identity revolving around equality, voice, recognition and a commitment to social justice. Importantly, it helps manage the ‘who am I?’ riddle. A whole new infrastructure has emerged to cater for this emerging British-Islamic identity within east London – with its emphasis on banking, education, entertainment, smaller families, ‘chic-hipster’ fashion culture, individualism, women’s rights, and so on, this localized east London British-Islamic culture resembles a familiar British/Western capitalistic lifestyle. British Islam, therefore, is more than just a social or religious movement; it denotes a whole new ‘modern’ British way of life. This fusion of tradition, modernity, culture, language, nation and religion is not limited to east London. For example, the tension of non-belonging is mirrored by many French-born Algerians in the suburbs of Paris as well as many German-born Turks. This is a global story.

Reflections 1 Look back at the research from Horschelmann and El Refaie (2014) as well as El Haj (2007). Does what Hoque found in his research confirm and add to their findings – particularly about the question of conflicts between belonging and difference? 2 Hoque points to the position of Islam as a world religion and attempts by the nation-state to achieve governmentality. How far might the experience of the young people be understood in terms of Foucault’s assertion that ‘we live inside a set of relations that delineates sites that are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another’ and does this condition inevitably lead to conflicts (Foucault, 1986, 23, and see Chapter 3)?



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Are conventional understandings of children’s relations to near and faraway places helpful in understanding their lives? Horschelmann and El Refaie as well as El Haj’s papers encourage us to consider questions around the scales at which children and young people live their lives because they challenge the primacy of geographical distance in explaining many young people’s identities and the strength of their affiliation to what is local and what is global. It is a commonplace assumption derived from developmental psychology that the global scale makes little sense to children because it is too abstract (i.e. removed from their direct experience), whereas the local scale is more immediately available to sensory experience and therefore offers a more tangible or concrete basis for acquiring knowledge of the world. This distinction between the concrete and the abstract and that the former must precede the latter are important articles of faith in developmentalist practice that have shaped the content of curricula in school geography for many years. However, the geographer Nicola Ansell challenges the assumptions, and, drawing on the work of Herod and Wright (2002), suggests that while this is a dominant and influential way of thinking about the world, it may not relate very closely to how children and young people actually do see and understand their worlds: [S]cales are certainly used epistemologically, as ‘mental devices for ordering the world’ (Herod and Wright, 2002: 5). This ordering may take place through metaphors, perhaps the most common being a set of Russian Matryoshka dolls wherein ‘each constituent doll and each constituent scale is separate and distinct and can be considered on its own, but the piece as a whole is only complete with each doll/scale nesting together, such that the dolls and scales fit together in one and only one way’ (Herod and Wright, 2002: 7). Although this model is adopted in many formal organizational diagrams, and affects the enactment of political and social relations, its implication that scales correspond to fixed, clearly defined, bounded areal units fails to describe or explain how scales are constructed and experienced. (Ansell, 2009)

Furthermore, Ansell’s challenge to conventional assumptions about scale goes hand in hand with fundamental revision of how other social scientists, geographers and philosophers think about ‘space’. Scholte remarks that:

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[a] number of social researchers across a range of academic disciplines have discerned this reconfiguration of space … Half a century ago, for example, the philosopher Martin Heidegger proclaimed the advent of ‘distancelessness’ and an ‘abolition of every possibility of remoteness’ (1950: 165–6) … The anthropologist Marc Auge has described an instantaneity that puts ‘any person into relations with the entire world’ (1994: 95).

Clearly Horschelmann and El Refaie’s research was undertaken with young people coming to the end of their formal schooling and suggests that young people not only hold local and global relationally, but that local and global are intersected through their lived experience so that we might, once again, speak meaningfully about their glocal consciousness. However, much younger children’s geographical imagination seems similarly unconstrained by narrow propinquity and the need for concrete experience than developmental theory presumes and that their positioning as social actors is central to understanding this. Speaking with young children playing in a London nursery class, researcher Alison Hatt (AH) found that Malcine, a nursery child, draws upon her family’s global connectivity to incorporate a sense of geographically distant places into her immediate play with blocks: AH: Malcine: AH: Malcine: AH: Malcine:

Where are you going? We’re going to Barbados. What will you do there? Play with the sand (pointing to sand pits) and the water. Where will you stay? In the restaurant, in the hotel have to go on the aeroplane, train to the airport, mum and dad lived in Barbados when I was born. (Malcine was actually of Eritrean background but was going to Barbados for a family wedding.) (Issa and Hatt, 2013, 87)

For Malcine the absence of first-hand, sensory experience of Barbados did not mean that her references to the Caribbean island in her play stood for nothing. Further, it was not necessary to be sure that her understanding was based on any objective truths; the point is that she was discussing Barbados in terms that could be interpreted meaningfully by others. This exchange points to the importance of the imagination not merely as an individualized capacity to be developed in children, but as part of their rootedness as social actors in the collective or shared imagination of the social worlds to which they belong. Malcine produces and reproduces intelligible meanings for places in her language and through her play, thereby underlining the



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proposition that place is a socially-constructed phenomenon made and sustained through shared communities of practice, language and meaning. Like Ansell, these examples suggest a more complex and intersecting view of scale that leads us to question the sort of Matryoshka-like, hierarchical understanding of local and faraway spaces that developmental theorists propose constrains children’s thinking. At root there are fundamental assumptions made here about children’s incompleteness and that various degrees of ‘lack’ are at the heart of their being rather than competence (Jones, 2009; Jenks, 2005; James et al., 1999). By implication this would suggest that in contrast to children, adult ways of knowing are marked by a rational completeness and consistency – which is manifestly not the case. But what does it mean to have a complete knowledge of something or, indeed, is such a thing possible not only for children, but for any of us? This suggests that a place holds a single or essential meaning that can be known as an intellectual phenomenon; moreover, that we need to acquire these enhanced knowledges of places before we can speak meaningfully about them. What Hörschelmann and El Refaie (along with Issa and Hatt) found challenges the idea that knowledge of place is merely a matter of intellectual competence, but is an embodied understanding related to their position as social actors. Indeed, it is possible to go further and infer that their insights are not only about affirming the legitimacy of children’s global understanding, but also a social view of knowledge that challenges the individualized, predominately intellectual and technocratic approach to the world forged in the Enlightenment and that proves inappropriate to many contemporary globalized encounters.

Can we learn anything about new childhoods from the experience of children who are refugees? The transnational character of children’s experience and how this impacts on their social relations and identities is explored by Deborah Sporton, Gill Valentine and Katrine Bang Nielsen through the concept of intersectionality. The authors explain this concept, thus: Everyone has multiple positions reflecting for example age, gender, ‘race’, religion, class and sexuality and these in turn are shaped by relations of

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power … These positions are not fixed, they intersect in complex ways at different times and in different places … Intersectionality therefore provides a way of conceptualising age, gender, race, etc., not as given or socially and culturally constructed categories, but rather as emergent properties that are not reducible to biological essences or role expectations … (Sporton et al., 2006)

Their research looks at separated refugee children seeking asylum in the UK, and although these children’s lives may appear to represent a minority or marginal position, not only might their experience become more common in a globalizing world, but also their marginality challenges the currency of those norms. The research was prompted by the furore surrounding the failed London bombings of 21 July 2005, when an angry debate raged around the fact that two of the would-be bombers had entered the UK from Somali as children seeking asylum some years earlier. Sporton et al. drew a number of inferences from this case about normative assumptions and differences surrounding the meaning of being a child that surface in the experiences of many ‘unaccompanied’ children who seek asylum. As geographers they suggest that attention to spatiality and the construction of childhood in relation to concepts of place offers particular insights through which the lives and motives of the would-be suicide bombers might be understood. Furthermore, they suggest that their experience points to the complex, multidimensional identities many children – asylum seekers or not – are required to perform in transnational global societies.

Example of research Sporton, D., Valentine, G. and Nielsen, K. B., ‘Post-conflict Identities: Affiliations and Practices of Somali Asylum Seeker Children’, Children’s Geographies 4 (2) (August 2006): 203–17. The authors’ starting point is a highly vocal media complaint at the time of the failed 21 July bombings that two of the bombers had been granted asylum in the UK as children and that besides their criminality they were guilty of gross ingratitude. The authors use the case to explore what they see as socially constructed, cultural differences in the meaning of childhood and their impact on the experience of being a child through an intersectional approach to identity. By examining differences in the construction of childhood the paper addresses challenges facing those children who simultaneously



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inhabit very different socio-cultural worlds; the immediacy of these challenges becomes clearer through a spatial approach emphasizing the conflictual personal geographies that comprise their lived space. The empirical work for this paper was conducted online with eleven to eighteen-year-old children in the UK and Denmark. The authors underline the powerful influence of Western ideologies that, quoting Allison James, predominantly see ‘childhood as a time of happiness and innocence’, arguing that while this may seem a laudable expectation it has an obverse side and serves to exclude (James, 1993, 28) and even pathologize those whose lives do not conform to this culturally-laden norm (see DeBoeck and Honwara, 2005, 12; Blundell, 2012, 158–60). Sporton et al. suggest that in coming to the UK as a child, one of the bombers – Muktar Said Ibrahim – had probably experienced a very adult mix ‘of conflict, persecution and personal hardship that positioned himself against the dominant narratives that have come to be associated with childhood and that may have alienated him from the society that gave him asylum’. Sporton et al. suggest that: Young Somalis growing up in the UK therefore find themselves caught between very different ‘childhoods’ – the childhood they never had or which was lost in Somalia; the idealised western childhood that they/their parents are expected to achieve; the demonised childhood loaded with racialised and Islamophobic overtones that is thrust upon them; and the childhood denied them as refugees and asylum seekers. The authors propose that the complex and conflictual demands faced by these children, when attempting to position themselves in relation to strikingly different expectations and norms for childhood, can be unsettling and lead to a condition they describe as ‘identity on the move’, so that ‘[f]or young refugees and asylum seekers this ‘unsettling’ experience of forced mobility that can influence forms of identification is compounded by disempowerment across different spheres (material possessions, cultural and social capital) and by the provisional and uncertain nature of this mobility … [and] may result in different narratives of dislocation and attachments to place’. Access to schooling and other childhood services is predicated on an assumption that people tend to stay in one place that is rendered difficult through asylum seekers’ frequent experience of being dispersed and re-placed while their cases are considered.

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The authors speculate that the certainties of radical Islamism may serve as a decisive counterweight to this fluidized and unstable experience of identities on the move. The authors suggest that, along with hegemonic narratives of underachievement and experience of racism, the high numbers of school exclusions for Somali pupils may be explained by this, because ‘[f]or many young Somali people school is therefore experienced as a place where they do not fit in’. Evidence suggests that the challenge of navigating their position in school is compounded by profound differences in expectations between home and school that may be explained not only in terms of culture and language, but also by the difficulties of knowing how to perform in relation to the norms of these different socio-spaces. Sporton et al. found that identity conflicts are not confined to the relational spatiality of home and school life, but also concerned the young people’s stated uncertainties about how their identity was positioned in relation to peers, including the meaning of being ‘black’: ‘While some young Somalis, for example, may identify with black African Caribbean street style and music others have experienced tensions with other black African and Caribbean young people.’ In response to these challenges, Sporton et al. note that the Somali community has set up homework clubs running after school every weekday; this is a common, but under-researched phenomenon (although see Issa and Williams, 2009, for detailed treatment) that plays a vital role in the activity space of the children and the concern of parents to locate their children in spaces that maintain contact with cultural norms, practices and values not found in the mainstream education system: While Somali parents have little contact with or involvement in the formal education system they enforce their children’s attendance at the homework club because they know, can communicate with, and trust the Somali volunteers who run it. While offering support in core school subjects, such as English, Maths and Science, the homework clubs also provide Quaranic education. In this way, these community spaces both support Somali children’s education in UK schools while also (re)producing a particular understanding of what it means to be Somali which is predicated on the Muslim faith. The authors speculate that the stability offered by Muslim identity is ‘particularly significant given Somali young people’s experiences



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… of: missing their homeland or being rootless with no particular attachment to place, encountering disconnections between their identities at home (treated in an “adult-like” way, speaking Somali) and at school (treated as a “child” and communicating in English) and needing to negotiate a “black” identity within their peer group context’.

Reflection on research 1 In Chapters 3 and 6, Teather’s concept of positionality was explored; she writes: ‘[P]ositionality implies that there are places where we are welcome and others from which we are excluded by convention or by law because of sex, age, class or colour, or other reasons.’  Does positionality suggest any insights into points of identification/ dis-identification and where conflicting norms may have appeared in the life of Muktar Said Ibrahim and his associates? Does this lend meaning to what the authors call the experience of ‘identities on the move’?   Do you think that the experience of ‘identities on the move’ is limited to children seeking asylum or is there evidence that it is a more general phenomenon to which we are all subject as we navigate the institutional spaces of modern industrial societies? 2 Look back at the interview with Aminul Hoque. Does the concept of ‘identities on the move’ help to understand the experience of the young Bangladeshi Londoners that he encountered in his research?

At least two things become clear from Sporton et al.’s work: first, that we know all too little about unaccompanied or separated children who seek asylum and how they come to be so; second, it is not entirely clear what the implications of identities on the move might be for the quality of social relationships formed by these children and young people. Karen Wells looks at the finer grain of asylum seeking and refugee children’s experience of travel to London and life once arrived in the UK. She finds that the prevalent tendency when thinking of refugee and asylum-seeking children ‘of treating “the child” as an individual radically severed from social networks and effectively alone and in need of rescue’ is not borne out by evidence drawn from the experience of the children she worked with. Wells

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suggests that her analysis of the social networks to which these children belong challenges simple notions of them as vulnerable or at risk; rather, her findings encourage us to rethink their relationship with formal services and support agencies by acknowledging their agency as social actors – this globalized experience adds a new dimension to the discussion advanced in Chapter 2.

Research report Wells, K., ‘The Strength of Weak Ties: The Social Networks of Young Separated Asylum Seekers and Refugees in London’, Children’s Geographies 9 (3–4) (August–November 2011): 319–29. Wells conducted a small scale study with boys and girls identified as ‘unaccompanied’ asylum seekers or refugees in London. It should be said that Wells points out that ‘unaccompanied’ may not be a helpful label, in that many children are accompanied by smugglers or traffickers and so refugee support agencies prefer to speak of ‘separated children’. The study used a photo-elicitation method whereby children were given mobile phones with built-in cameras and £10 credit per week and ‘[t]he participants were asked to take photographs of places they went to in the course of an ordinary week’. These photos then provided a basis for detailed discussions about their lives. Wells remarks that ‘[o]ften their account of the image and the place would be very brief but three or four images would prompt a more elaborated account in which the participants might talk about their feelings about school, friendships, foster care, social workers, and their neighbourhood in London and their home in their country of origin’. From these discussions Wells was able to explore the participants’ social ties and encounters using a method called Social Network Analysis that ‘maps the ties between people at a personal and institutional level in order to trace how networks influence or correlate with individual behaviour and action’. For Wells this is vital not only because it provides a theoretical language within which to make sense of these young people’s lives, but also because it acknowledges that they live in social networks and are embedded in the activity spaces that these define. Traditional views of networks and the communities they constitute will tend to stress the importance of offering strong social ties that endure over time – such



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as attachment to family – and thereby see ties in more transient social networks as implicitly weaker. Wells is sceptical about the assumption that weak ties lack strength and fail to confer benefits under the particular circumstances in which separated young people find themselves; she cites the work of Mark Granovetter (1973) who suggested that there may be ‘strength in weak ties’. Moreover, her research suggests that in the course of their long, tortuous and difficult journeys from their home country to London, UK ‘young refugees might have a proliferation of weak ties that can be distinguished more by whether they are informal or formal than by strength or weakness’ and the degree to which the networked ties meet immediate challenges. Wells’s emphasis on social networks reveals findings that challenge conventional or stereotypical views of separated children and shows how, for example, ‘ties between people at the transit points in sharing information’ are vital to the accomplishment of the migration journey. She continues: ‘The image of the lone young asylum seeker is often precisely that, a boy on his own without help, support or comfort, and the details of how he manages the journey are at best hazy.’ Later, Wells suggests that this sort of image plays to powerful discursively constructed convictions that are ‘marked in any case in child-saving institutions of treating “the child” as an individual radically severed from social networks and effectively alone and in need of rescue’ – as in Sporton, Valentine and Bang Nielsen’s paper, the dominant discourse of the child as ‘vulnerable and in need of protection’ shapes not only what we see, but also how agencies with a predominantly Western gaze regard children and young people and interpret their needs, thereby failing to recognize their agency as social actors (Mills, 2000; Stainton Rogers, 2009; also, Wells, 2009, 28).

Reflective activity Karin Heissler from UNICEF (2013) identifies the importance of social networks and the significance of gendered relational space to understanding the experience of Bangladeshi children involved in labour migration. She suggests that her empirical findings encourage us to rethink the meanings we frequently attach to child trafficking and that an appraisal of children’s lived experiences presents us with a more complex picture than global headline concepts seem to allow: Growing empirical research from many parts of the developing world on the reasons why children migrate

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helps dispel the notion of child labour migrants as passive victims trafficked or forced to migrate due to their naiveté, poverty or a breakdown in family relations (Whitehead, Hashim, and Iversen 2007) ...The usefulness of the concept of child trafficking is queried when one examines children’s experiences of migration more broadly [because] … these findings show the importance of testing prevailing assumptions about childhood through empirical research, including the involvement of girls and boys themselves, but also they draw attention to the need to move beyond homogenous views of children’s vulnerability that, as illustrated earlier, prevail in some approaches to migration. 1 Can you identify ways that both Wells and Heissler challenge stock assumptions about children’s passivity and dependency? 2 Can you link Sporton et al.’s concept of ‘identities on the move’ to what Wells says about the importance of weak ties and how might these children’s actions challenge many assumptions found in modern Western childhood? 3 Wells writes that ‘[f]ormal social ties are … able to provide young people with the “bridges” to new life spheres and to people’ and that her research ‘points specifically to the importance of formal ties in connecting young separated refugees to material and cultural resources’. What part might concepts of location, positionality and relational space play in understanding whether these children and young people can access formal social ties and cross these bridges? 4 Wells found that whilst these children’s geographical knowledge is extensive in comparison with typical geographies of working-class youth in London, once settled, apart from journeys to school and to refugee groups, the spatial range of the children was fairly limited – especially for girls who might only rarely venture beyond their house. Does this suggest anything about intersections between these children’s identities as refugees and their gender, ethnicity or social class in relation to both community and society?



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Why might rethinking the future of childhood be important in times of globalization and climate change? The New Social Studies of Childhood proposes that modern childhood as a way of thinking about children is problematic because it diminishes their status as social actors and effects a wide-scale institutional enclosure of their lives. In trying to understand this position, Kjørholt’s work suggests that it is instructive to distinguish between childhood conceived as an idealized symbolic space and the diverse lived spaces inhabited by children as social actors – that is, with lives embedded and enmeshed in social worlds (see Chapter 2). Whereas the former conceives of childhood as a fixed container – that then shapes institutions designed to hold and develop children – the latter recognizes the more fluid, dynamic and open networked social realities within which children and young people actually live. Wells’s exploration of weak ties and Sporton et al.’s exposition of ‘identities on the move’ challenge assumptions and convictions about children that lie at the heart of modern Eurocentric constructions of childhood and ‘the child’ by providing evidence for these more fluid, dynamic and open networked realities. However, despite this evidence, there are signs that modern childhood and its developmentalist approach to understanding children is not about to give way; rather, it retains a strong appeal whether for a growing transnational elite captivated by the spell of Western approaches to rearing young children (such as Montessori – a widespread global brand of choice for middle-class elites) or through policy interventions, such as Sure Start in the UK and ‘No Child Left Behind’ in the US. Furthermore, the increasing prominence of global comparative testing of academic achievement found in the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is predicated on assumptions about the universality of abilities based on a natural rationality found in children irrespective of their cultural circumstances. For Stuart Aitken, Ragnhild Lund and Anne Trine Kjørholt, this resistance to embracing long-established cultural differences and emergent social realities is entirely explicable because they argue that the develop­mentalism found in modern childhood has much in common with neo-liberal,

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free-market approaches to economic development. They argue that modern childhood is ideologically wedded to the imperatives of economic globalization through a shared interest in recruiting the reproductive power of nature in pursuit of wealth and that assumptions about rationality, naturalness and universality that structure the staged theories of child development also structure staged theories of economic development: The notion of development as a series of stages through which children progress to a predetermined, normal adulthood resonates with the notion of a nation’s development in a global market economy. Like time, space becomes an expanse to cross, the promise of development, of new markets elsewhere, of the global south awaiting the arrival of global capital (from over here), awaiting an understanding of what it is to grow up. This smacks of imperialism and sounds a lot like the creation of new lands to conquer and colonize. The creation of times of childhood (for normal development) and spaces for children (for free play and schooling) are similar kinds of enframements. (Aitken et al., 2007)

For Aitken et al. (2007), just as globalization sets countries (whether characterized as ‘under-developed’ or ‘developing’) in the majority world on the path to become like fully-developed minority world nations, so schooling, play-spaces and settings for care enframe children’s lives in order to set them on the path towards fully rational adulthood. In both cases, the authors argue, the logic of developmentalism seeks to nullify the uncertainties and challenges found in open, untamed space (whether found in countries or in children) and thereby align societies and individual humans under a common economic discipline. Aitken et al. not only object to this as a matter of political, economic and moral principle, but also to the stifling of children’s voices that has accompanied it: It is clear that despite young people’s dominance as a demographic category in the majority world – including their influence globally as a market niche and their importance as a focus of care and responsibility – they, and their voices, are still largely missing from larger academic debates on globalization. (Aitken et al., 2007)

The authors go on to propose ‘that the frameworks of progress and development, for both young people and nations, must be replaced with something more fluid and politically open’. For critics, achieving this transition to something more fluid and open requires a fundamental challenge to the ideas that underpin and authorize developmentalism



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whether found in modern childhood or theories of the economically developed state. As we saw in Chapters 2 and 7, the force of developmentalist arguments derives from their appeal to being natural and therefore beyond challenge. The New Social Studies of Childhood, spurred on by interventions such as Allison James and Alan Prout’s social constructionist New Paradigm, set itself the task of seeking this more fluid and open conception of childhood and children’s lives in place of developmentalism and committed itself to listening to children’s voices. However, a number of thinkers (including Alan Prout himself) have begun to express doubts about whether the New Social Studies of Childhood is able to achieve what Aitken et al. are asking for (Lee, 2001; Prout, 2005). Prout argues that by setting itself against the naturalizing tendencies of modern childhood and its developmentalism, social constructionism has become identified with a childhood as culture discourse, so that far from obviating arguments about the naturalness of childhood, it has perversely revived the stubborn ‘biology–culture’ dualism (frequently expressed in oppositional terms as ‘nature or nurture’). Indeed, it is surely significant that over the same period that the New Social Studies has flourished across the social sciences, the developmentally-driven discipline of Early Childhood Studies with its naturalized childhood has also gone from strength to strength – with an unhelpful failure to understand and communicate across this widening disciplinary gulf as a frequent outcome! For Prout and others, neither pole of this dualism seems helpful because each reproduces a fundamental intellectual separation between biological and scientific facts on the one hand and social and cultural values on the other (see also Latour, 2004). Indeed, as Prout argues: … rather than questioning the opposition between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, the claim that childhood is a social construction reproduces it. It can be interpreted as a reverse discourse. (Prout, 2005, 84)

The sense of frustration over this lack of resolution and the detrimental effects it has on research, policy and practice in relation to children’s lives and their well-being is expressed by an Australian geographer named Affrica Taylor: Ontological accounts of childhood keep ‘zig-zagging between the poles of culture and nature’ (Wyness, 2009, 22). This zig-zagging is most clearly illustrated in the popular nature/nurture debate, which is concerned not with questioning the categories of nature and nurture themselves, but

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in commentating upon their interactions and/or ascertaining the relative proportions of culture’s influence upon childhood and nature’s determination of it. (Taylor, 2011)

Taylor goes on to cite Prout’s work who, having identified the shortcomings of social constructionism, offers ways to side-step unresolved differences between nature and culture: My intervention within the field of childhood studies is inspired by the work of those human geographers who step outside the nature/culture dualism … In The Future of Childhood, Prout (2005) forcefully argues that it is time for childhood studies to fully engage in an interdisciplinary conversation that will allow it to reconceptualize the ontology of childhood as: ‘neither “nature” nor “culture” but as a multiplicity of “nature-cultures” … a variety of complex hybrids constituted from heterogeneous materials and emergent through time’. (Prout, 2005, 144; Taylor, 2011)

Alan Prout’s work (to which Taylor refers) illustrates the meaning of these hybrid ‘nature-cultures’ through examination of a series of technologically driven changes and their impacts on children’s lives and bodies. He looks at: MM

MM

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Children and mundane artefacts (including digital robot toys); Information and Communication Technologies; Reproductive technology – genetic testing, choice and children; Reproductive technology – engineering the child; Children and psychopharmaceuticals.

In each case, Prout points to the ways in which these technological interventions catalyze and reconfigure any number of hybrid combinations involving children’s embodiment (including their biological inheritance) on the one hand, and cultural value (their social environment) on the other. For example, in his discussion of children and psychopharmaceuticals, Prout points to the use of drugs designed to treat conditions like ADHD by those wishing to enhance concentration and who do not have a diagnosis of that condition. The drug serves to enhance mental capacities when tackling socially-defined goals (such as passing exams in French) by altering the biological condition of the exam taker. As a relatively new and unfamiliar technology, the use of these drugs is controversial and seems at odds with what we understand as natural abilities. However, as Prout suggests, ‘natural abilities are already the product of multiple, but normalized and accepted supplements (like parental help with doing homework or differential access



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to information on the internet)’ (Prout, 2005, 140). In making the case for the argument that being human has always entailed living within hybrid assemblages comprising natural biological facts, cultural values and shifting possibilities for enhancement afforded by technology, Prout draws on the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari for whom:
 The world, including its human and social parts, is seen as a set of assemblages constituted from heterogeneous elements … The Enlightenment belief in the uniqueness and separateness of humans is no longer regarded as tenable and human life has to be seen in terms of its emergence from, connections with and dependence on the heterogeneous materials that make up the world. Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion pays a great deal of attention to characteristics of the human species such as technology and language … they see the emergence of the human species as involving the modification of the function of the hand and the mouth in a way that makes possible the use of tools and language … Human history is the process of borrowing from the non-human world, creating new combinations and new extensions of the body (and … the mind). (Prout, 2005, 114–15; see also Nick Lee’s earlier arguments – Lee, 2001)

Affrica Taylor (2011) believes that Alan Prout’s work opens up important opportunities to ‘denaturalize’ children without ‘zig-zagging’ in the direction of culture or nature and so reproducing the dualism. For her this work is vital in understanding the lived-spaces of children and especially those whose circumstances are very different to Western cultural norms (including indigenous communities of central Australia with whom she has worked for many years). However, Taylor goes further and suggests that reimagining modern childhood has implications for rethinking how humans as a whole species relate to the non-human world and might achieve sustainable futures: For my purposes, the claim that ‘There is no natural or evolutionary child’ is significant because it explicitly challenges the assumption that there is an a priori ‘special relationship’ between childhood and nature. My contribution to the body of work that sets out to denaturalize childhood is to interrogate the often essentialized and valorized ‘special relationship’ between children and nature. This involves not only interrogating the essentialized nature of childhood but also the essentialized nature of nature.

For Taylor, understanding how and why we think about nature in the way that we do is vital to addressing this problem, and the ideal type of ‘the child’ has a counterpart in the idea of wilderness as the purest,

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most essentialized representative form for nature. She argues that just as modern childhood is a product of the European Enlightenment, so is how we construct the meaning of nature and our relationship to it. Crucially, many Enlightenment thinkers proposed that humans were morally and intellectually distinct from nature and that wilderness is the purest form of a natural world without humans. However, Taylor quotes a geographer named Cronon (1998): Far from being the one place on earth that stands apart from humanity [wilderness] is quite profoundly a human creation – indeed the creation of very particular human cultures at very particular moments in human history.

This may sound strange given the very premise upon which the idea of nature is based, namely that it is what is given rather than made by humans and beyond our power to change; however, Taylor draws on the work of scholars looking beyond the presuppositions of the Enlightenment to propose a different way of seeing wilderness than that propounded by European colonists. For her, this has profound implications for rethinking human relations with the natural world on a grand scale: Indigenous and postcolonial scholars have pointed to the erasure of indigenous people from these places … Indigenous Australian scholar Marcia Langton, for example, has forcefully argued that the land has never been un-peopled. This idea, she suggests, is nothing more than a neo-colonialist fantasy of terra nullius, the legal fiction of an empty land that justified British colonization of her people’s country. According to Langton, this same country that white environmentalists now refer to as un-peopled pristine wilderness, has an ancient cultural history. It is not possible to separate the mutually constitutive relationship between indigenous people and country.

Like Prout, Taylor argues that children inhabit diverse nature-culturetechnological assemblages that rarely, if ever, approximate to the separated and individualized ideal type of ‘the child’ that has been generated by the essentialized, Western world-view. Similarly, she argues that wilderness as an ideal representation for nature obscures the role of humans in shaping and defining the natural world. Taylor argues that if the wilderness ideal has ever existed since the emergence of Homo sapiens 200,000 years ago, it certainly becomes untenable as humankind asserts its ubiquitous dominance across the planet. Indeed, this dominance has led environmentalists from many disciplines to suggest that we are now living in the Anthropocene: a distinct geological era where humans shape the Earth and



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its systems in ways that may have serious implications for the survival of planetary life. Taylor suggests that the idea of the natural and universal child is as unhelpful in understanding actual children’s lives as a conception of nature as wilderness untouched by human agency is in tackling the environmental challenges we face. So that just as we should find ways to make peace with the planet, we should also acknowledge and understand childhood (or more properly biological immaturity) in ways that accommodate diversities and differences. Taylor encourages us to embrace a plurality of possible childhoods comprising multiple hybrid ‘socio-natures’ that embody shifting combinations of cultural, biological and technological elements. She believes that this not only benefits children, but also relations between humans and the natural world as we face what may be humankind’s greatest challenge.

Chapter summary and conclusions In this chapter we have examined specific impacts of globalization on some children and young people’s lives but suggested that the processes directly and intensely affecting children who are displaced by war, disease and poverty have features that, to a lesser or greater extent, may apply to many other children. Research suggests that children and young people embody complex, multilateral and trans-national identities that challenge the institutional separation which modern childhood authorizes. In part this is because globalization draws us all into networked spatialities that are neither shaped by Matryoshka-like scalar nesting of places nor seem to fit rigid container-like institutions, whether these are schools or the nation state. The resourcefulness of unaccompanied refugee children in maintaining ‘identities on the move’, and in getting-by on weak social ties, offers compelling evidence that recognition of children as social actors makes their corralling into separated institutions increasingly unsustainable and unacceptable. Moreover, it is proposed that in rethinking the spatiality of children’s lives we not only rethink many of the naturalizing assumptions that justify this separation, but also our relationship to nature and our common worlds.

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Final chapter reflection The socio-natures proposed by Prout and by Taylor – whether applied to children or to life on Earth in general – embody the qualities found in Doreen Massey’s propositions about space, including her assertion ‘that we understand space as the sphere of the possibility of the existence of multiplicity in the sense of contemporaneous plurality; as the sphere in which distinct trajectories coexist’ (Massey, 2007, 9 and Ch. 3). What might acknowledging coexistent distinct trajectories for children’s lives mean for institutions of education and childhood and what part might technology play in facilitating these distinct trajectories? Do you think that modern childhood will survive as a way of seeing children’s lives?

Reflecting on keywords and terms The following keywords and terminology have been introduced in this chapter: MM

MM

MM

MM

MM

MM

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Anthropocene belonging and dissent globalization ‘glocal’ ‘identities on the move’ nature-culture hybridities scale symbolic space transnational

Look back by scanning the chapter; in a short, summative sentence, describe your understanding of each term and how it has been used.



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Further reading Aitken, S., R. Lund and A. T. Kjørholt, ‘Why Children? Why Now?’ Children’s Geographies 5 (1–2) (2007). A very important editorial introduction to a special edition of this journal that is devoted to looking at ideological links between child and economic development and challenges many assumptions of Western modernity. Ansell, N. (2008), Children, Youth and Development, London: Routledge. Ansell addresses a globalized understanding of children and young people in the knowledge that nearly half of the world’s population falls into this grouping. The book explores children’s lives in relation to poverty, cultural change, health, education, work and a raft of areas for concern about their well-being. There is also a discussion of rights and discrimination in the context of globalization and development. Ansell, N. (2009), ‘Childhood and the Politics of Scale: Descaling Children’s Geographies?’, Progress in Human Geography 33 (2) (April 2009): 190–209. A rich philosophical discussion of the geographical concept of scale and its relation to understanding children’s lives and geographies in a globalizing world. Braidotti, R. (2013), The Posthuman, Cambridge: Polity Press. Follows through on critical arguments about Enlightenment humanism drawing on feminist theory (with a nod to the construction of childhood) to approach a reimagining of nature, culture and technology that embraces sustainability. Taylor, A. (2009), Re-theorising the ‘Nature’ of Childhood, AARE Conference Paper, University of Canberra, http://www.aare.edu.au/data/publications/ 2009/tay09993.pdf (accessed 5 May 2015). Helpful conference paper from this original and challenging contributor to rethinking and reimagining childhood, children and nature. Vince, G. (2014), Adventures in the Anthropocene: A Journey to the Heart of the Planet we Made, London: Chatto and Windus. A comprehensive survey of the concept of the Anthropocene and its implications and impacts across a range of global environments. Not explicitly about children or childhood, but a readable and informative source for a new and emerging idea that is influencing thinking about children, human natures and the impact of climate change.

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Wells, K. (2009), Childhood in Global Perspective, Cambridge: Polity Press. A comprehensive survey and discussion of children’s lives in a globalizing world that challenges received Eurocentric and essentialist notions about childhood and addresses a number of controversial and challenging transnational themes including schooling and work, war and the impact of political factors on social relations. It challenges the dominance of minority-world constructions of childhood and their legitimacy across diverse majority world settings.

Postscript This book has set itself the task of rethinking children’s spaces and places. It has attempted to do this through a critical examination of how we think about children and use the concepts and assumptions found in something we have called modern childhood. The argument has hinged on a conviction that modern childhood is just one way, albeit a powerful and influential one-size-fits-all way, of thinking about and making provision for the period of biological immaturity that humans pass through. However, it has argued that this is not the only and may not be the most suitable way to make provision for young humans; furthermore, that it frequently overlooks how children see their own lives and how they are enmeshed in social networks. The book certainly has implications for a reimagination of the spaces and places that children inhabit, but also suggests that a spatialized way of seeing reveals much about how children are positioned that may otherwise go unnoticed. In a globalizing world, differences and conflicts become increasingly acute across many spheres, including how we imagine childhood and make provision for children – and these are frequently evident in spatialized encounters; but there are also opportunities to see these encounters as opportunities to listen and learn from each other. As corollary, rethinking children’s spaces and places may play its part in reimagining and realizing better futures for all in our common world – we have seen how modern childhood drew children into grand narratives of transformation, progress and redemption that separate and diminish their lives as social actors, consequently the core purpose in rethinking childhood must be to facilitate change with and for children; global transformations can follow that.

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Index

ableism 143–6 adult gaze 7, 121 adult-child relations 120 adulthood 8 adventure play 151, 160, 163, 170, 171 adventure playgrounds 160, 162 Afghanistan war 177 Aitken, Stuart 56, 195, 196, 197 alienation 11, 153 Alldred, Pam 51–3 Allen, Marjory 161 Alparone, Francesca Romana 106–8 America, United States of (USA) 17, 28 Anderson, Jon 41–3 Ansell, Nicola 185 Anthropocene 200 anthropology 7 anthroposophy 165 Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs) 103–4 Apollonian child 31, 104 archaeologists 19 architecture 141–2 ASBOs see Anti-Social Behaviour Orders asylum seekers 188, 189, 192, 193 asylum seeking 191 Australia 105, 199 Baines, George 74, 75, 130 Barker, John 51–3, 91–4 Bayley, Stephen 76 Bengali diaspora 182, 184 Benjamin, Joe 101, 160 Bentham, Jeremy 54

Benwell, Matthew 119–22 Bertelsen, Jonus 161 biology 22 biopower 125, 129, 130 Blake, William 165 Blue Remembered Hills 3, 5–6, 10, 44 Blyton, Enid 18 body 46, 49, 73, 77, 79, 82, 102, 126, 130 borderlands 134–6, 145 Bordonaro, Lorenzo 31–2, 44 boundaries 117 Brazil 105 Brown, Fraser 170 bullying 135–6 Burke, Catherine 75, 77 Burman, Erica 69, 155 Burnett, Frances Hodgson 19 Cambridge Primary Review 9 Carson, Terry 140–3 Castells, Manuel 47 CCTV see closed-circuit television Census of 2011 184 Centre for Multilingualism in Education at London Metropolitan University 174 Century of Childhood 8 Century of the Child, The 126 Channel 4 126 Chapman, Jessica 105 child development theories 88 Child in the City, The 159 child labour 17 childcare 67 Childcare Act, 2005 68

218 Index Childhood Studies 119, 155 Children Act, 2004 68 children’s services 82, 83 Children’s Society 9, 69 China 176 cinema 18 citizenship 86, 173, 178, 183 citizenship values 140–3 Clark, Sheryl 130–3, 134 class 31, 137–40, 151 climate change 195–201 closed-circuit television (CCTV) 142 Cohen, David 162 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 165 Colquhoun, Derek 139 communication technologies 175, 176 communities of interest 112 communities of propinquity 112 community schools 174–5 connectivity 175 politics of 178 consciousness global 177, 179 glocal 186 Cranz, Galen 162 Cronon, William 200 cultural geography 18–20 cultural relativism 29 curriculum 74, 77, 86, 129, 177, 178 hidden/informal 77, 140, 141 Daniel, Paul 69, 82–4, 87, 91 DAP see Developmentally Appropriate Practice Darwin, Charles 166 Day, Christopher 72 Deleuze, Gilles 199 demonization 99 Denmark 16, 105, 161 deprivation 103 developmental psychology 154, 155, 185 developmental theories 23 developmental theorists 187

developmentalism 21, 27, 33, 195–7 developmentalist theorization 21 Developmentally Appropriate Practice (DAP) 88 digital media 153 dining halls 82–7, 137, 139 Dionysian child 31, 104 disability 126, 143–6, 147 discipline 127 discourse of needs 26, 154 discursive spaces 48, 151–71 Dodman, Hilary 51–3 drug addicts 33 drugs 198 Dunham, Philip 134–6 Early Childhood Education and Care 68 Early Childhood Studies 197 Early Years Foundation Stage 68, 72 eating behaviours 86 Edgeworth, Maria 23 Edgeworth, Richard Lovell 23 Education Act, 1944 74 educational psychology 80 El Haj, Thea Renda Abu 181, 185 El Refaie, Elisabeth 177–9, 180, 185, 186, 187 Elementary Education Act, 1870 15, 66 Elementary Education Act, 1880 15 embodiment 82 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 165 emotions 77, 78, 80 Enlightenment 10, 13, 22, 23, 27, 28, 30, 34, 40, 122, 151, 152, 154, 160, 164, 166, 170, 187, 200 entitlements 33 environmental determinism 88 ethnicity 140–3 Eurocentrism 30 Europe 30 Every Child Matters 68 evolutionary theories 4, 166 exclusion 190

Index 219 exercise 9 family 89, 120, 193 femininities 130–3, 134 feminism, radical 28 fences 137–40 Fielding, Shaun 81, 82 Finland 9–10, 68, 105 fitness 128–9 football 132, 134 Forest Schools 165 Foucault, Michel 44–5, 52, 54, 65, 84, 85, 86, 87, 127, 130, 140 France 66 free play 101, 102, 122, 152 Fresh Air Fund 155 Froebel, Friedrich 23, 72, 160, 165, 166 Gagen, Elizabeth 86 Gainsborough, Thomas 165 gardens, children’s 163 gender 91, 134, 136, 137, 140, 155 gender identities 89 Gennep, Arnold van 49–50, 53, 80 geographical distance 185 geopolitics 180 Germany 66, 104 Ghana 29 Giddens, Anthony 45 Gillis, John 101–2, 111, 112, 113, 122 girl gangs 104 girls 5, 132–3 global consciousness 177, 179 globalization 9, 11, 45, 114, 173–202, 204 economic 196 glocal 175 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 72 Goffman, Erving 68, 69, 95–6 Good Friday agreement 108 governmentality 65, 77–87, 91, 137, 139, 151 Granovetter, Mark 193 green space 25

Greenpeace 176 Guattari, Felix 199 Gustafsson, Ulla 69, 82–4, 87, 91 Hackney, Play Streets 115 Haraway, Donna 166 Harden, Jeni 77–80, 82, 91 Hatt, Alison 186 health 15, 128–9 healthy eating 84–5, 137, 139 Hedderwick, Mhairi 18 Heissler, Karin 193–4 Hemming, Peter 128–30, 133, 139, 144 Hendrick, Harry 69 hetero-normativity 135 hijab 183 Hodge, Nick 144, 145, 146 home 48, 49 home corner 88–91, 93 homework 14 homework clubs 190 hoodies 104 Hoque, Aminul 182–4 Hörschelman, Kathrin 177–9, 180, 185, 186, 187 Horton, John 143, 147 House, Margaret 167–9 Housman, A. E. 6 human geographers 56 human geography 7, 11, 125 human nature 3, 4, 10 humanism 22 Huntley, Ian 105 identity 125–48, 157, 174, 176–84, 190, 191, 195 identity communities 112 transnational 173 working class 139 imagination 5, 101, 159, 160, 186 immaturity 4 In the Night Garden 19 incorporation 49, 50

220 Index Industrial Revolution 22 Innocenti Research agency 8, 9 institutionalization 15, 16, 31, 40, 50, 65 institutions 27 Iraq war 177 Islam 183–4 Islamism, radical 190 islanding 111–15, 116, 121, 122 Issa, Tözün 174, 175, 179–80 Istanbul 112–14 gated communities 113–14 Jacobs, Jane 100–1, 111 James, Allison 20–2, 29, 56, 90, 102, 189, 197 Japan 105 Jenks, Chris 7, 56, 104 Johnson, Ingrid 140–3 Jones, April 105 Jones, Katie 41–3 Kant, Immanuel 45, 165 Katie Morag stories 18 Kenway, Jane 79–80 Key, Ellen 8 kindergarten 165 Kjørholt, Anne Trine 16, 17, 18, 30, 33, 44, 48, 96, 123, 195, 196, 197 Kozlovsky, Roy 161–2, 171 Kraftl, Peter 70–4, 78, 94, 143, 147 Krogh, E. 102, 157–9, 166, 168 Kuo, Frances E. 24–5, 154 labour migration 193 Last Child in the Woods 153, 166 Lefebvre, Henri 42, 44, 49, 54 leisure activities 145 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 20 Levy-Bruhl, Claud 166 Lewis, Carenza 19 lifescape 41, 42 lifeworlds 45 Limb, Melanie 56–9, 103, 111, 116

literature 18 Live Aid 176 Locke, John 23, 76, 88 London bombings of 2005 178 Louv, Richard 153, 166 lunchtime supervisors 137–8 Lund, Ragnhild 195, 196, 197 McCann, Madeleine 105 McDonald’s 19 McGregor, Joanna 54 MacMillan, Margaret 165 MacMillan, Rachel 165 Macnaughten, Philip 167–9 Maguire, Sarah 108–11 Mangat, Jyoti 140–3 marginality 188 masculinities 130–6, 155 Massey, Doreen 60, 138, 148, 202 Matthews, Hugh 56–9, 103, 111, 116 Mayall, Berry 40, 56, 68 media 152 digital 153 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 157, 168 mobility 106–11 modern childhood 10 modernization 23 Montessori, Maria 166, 195 Montessori education 176 Moorhouse, Edith 75 moral geographies 82 More, Hannah 23 Moss, Peter 67, 82, 83, 87 Muir, John 165 multiculturalism 183 Nant-y-Cwm School 71 National Childcare Strategy 92 National Parks 165 National Trust 152–3 Natural Childhood 152 Natural Deficit Disorder 153–4, 156 natural world 24

Index 221 nature 24, 151–71 nature-cultures 197–8 needs 33
 New Paradigm 197 New Social Studies of Childhood 28, 31, 32, 33, 55, 173, 195, 197 Newman, Michelle 134–6 Nielsen, Katrine Bang 187–91, 193, 194, 195 No Child Left Behind 195 Northern Ireland 108–11 Norway 16, 102, 157 nurseries 67 obesity 9, 128 OECD see Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development Oliver, Jamie 84 Opie, Iona 19 Opie, Peter 19 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) 9 Our Streets Too! 103 out of school clubs 91–4 Oxfam 176 Pacilli, Maria 106–8 Paechter, Carrie 130–3, 134 parental anxiety 105 passive resistance 117 Payne, Sarah 105 pedagogy 74 Pestalozzi, Johann Heinrich 23, 72, 165, 166 Petrie, Pat 67, 82, 83, 87 phenomenology 156, 157 Piaget, Jean 21, 72, 166 Pike, Jo 84–7, 91, 137–40 PISA see Program for International Student Assessment place 42 planning laws 104 play 91, 128–9, 157, 159–60, 163, 167, 186

adventure play 151, 160, 163, 170, 171 facilities 120 free play 152 outdoor play 99–123, 156 Play School 89 Play Streets 115 Playday 103 playfulness 5, 168 playgrounds 116, 128–9, 130–3, 139, 162 adventure 160, 162 playtime 127–30, 144 playworkers 93 Plowden, Bridget 165 positionality 125, 127, 191, 194 Potter, Dennis 3, 5–6, 7, 10, 44 poverty 9 Primitive Mind 166 privacy 93 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) 9 propinquity 175 politics of 178 Prout, Alan 20–2, 29, 56, 90, 102, 197, 198, 199, 200, 202 psychologists 155 psychopharmaceuticals 198 punishment 51, 53 pupilhood 14, 15, 65 Pyer, Michelle 143, 147 racism 166, 190 radical feminism 28 Ransome, Arthur 18 refugees 173, 187–94, 201 religion 4 retrospection, adult 6 reward 128 Richardson, C. 88–91, 93 rights 27–32, 33, 51 risk 110 rites of passage 46, 50, 53, 80

222 Index rivers 167–8 Rose, Nikolas 26, 40, 81, 86, 162 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 23, 72, 151, 164–5 Runge, Philip-Otto 165 Runswick-Cole, Katherine 144, 145, 146 Ryan, Sara 143, 147 Sack, Robert 116, 118 safety 100, 107, 114, 152 Save the Children 176 Scandinavia 17 scholarization 11, 65, 66, 67–70, 95 school buildings 70–7 school meals 84 schooling 9, 15, 17, 19, 65, 67–70 science 4, 22 seating plans 79 seclusion units 51, 52, 53 Secret Garden, The 19 segregation 145–6 self 49, 50 self-love 164 selfhood 85 separation 49, 50, 145–6, 201 sexuality 91, 136 sexualization 9 Shallwani, Sadaf 155 Shirlow, Peter 108–11 Skår, Margrete 102, 157–9, 166, 168 Skelton, Tracey 56 Smith, F. 91–4 social constructionism 13, 20–1, 29, 44, 54, 78, 90, 197, 198 Social Contract, The 164 social geography 108, 109, 113 social identities 11 social media 45 social mobility 67 Social Network Analysis 192 social networks 32, 33, 122, 139–40, 193 social reality 43 social sciences 7, 11, 43, 55, 125

social scientists 41, 60 social workers 32 Soja, Edward 43–4, 54–5, 57, 60, 67, 111, 134, 169, 171 Somalia 28 Sørensen, Carl Theodor 160 South Africa 105, 120–1 South Sudan 28 space 46 activity 47, 51, 102 as place 46, 51, 53, 65 discursive 48, 151–71 positional/relational 47–8 symbolic 11, 13–36, 48, 96, 123, 173, 195 spatial turn 39, 44 spatiality 54 Sporton, Deborah 187–91, 193, 194, 195 Sri Lanka 105 Stainton Rogers, Wendy 26, 31, 33, 155, 170 Steiner, Rudolf 71, 72, 73, 165 stranger-danger 109, 122 street children 31–3 subjectivity 85 Sure Start 195 Swallows and Amazons 18 Sweden 105 Tapsell, Susan 167–9 Taylor, Affrica 88–91, 93, 155, 197–8, 199, 200, 201, 202 Taylor, Andrea Faber 24–5, 154 Teather, Elizabeth Kenworthy 46–51, 53, 60, 82, 102, 107, 123, 125, 126, 127, 130, 147, 151, 152, 191 technology 9 television 18 Telly-Tubby Land 19 territoriality 99, 118 territorialization 116, 139 testing 10

Index 223 Tezel, Elcin 112–14, 115 Thomson, Sarah 116–17, 118 Thoreau, Henry David 165 tokenism 179 tomboy identities 131 total institution 95–6 Tower Hamlets 184 toys 19–20 traffic 99, 103, 105, 109 transition 49, 50 transport technologies 176 trialectics of being 44 Try Yourself 16, 21 Tunstall, Sylvia 167–9 Tupper, Jennifer 140–3 Twum-Danso, Afua 29–30 UNCRC see United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child underachievement 190 UNICEF see United Nations Children’s Emergency Fund United Nations Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) 3, 8, 9, 17 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) 10, 13, 16, 17, 18, 22, 27–30, 31, 32, 33, 163, 176, 177 ratification 28, 29

United Nations Declaration of the Rights of the Child 161 urban planning 100 USA see America, United States of Valentine, Gill 56, 187–91, 193, 194, 195 Vanderbeek, Robert 155–6 virtual realities 152 Walkerdine, Valerie 155 Ward, Colin 159–60 Watts, Mike 51–3 Weber, Max 8 well-being 9, 159 Wells, Holly 105 Wells, Karen 191–4, 195 Western gaze 193 whiteness 156 Wholmsley, John 167–9 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 34 Woodcock, Andree 134–6 Wordsworth, William 165 work 128 Youdell, Deborah 79–80 Young, Tara 104 Zeiher, Helga 111–12, 113, 122 Zelizer, Viviana 8