Who is Vivian Gussin Paley?
A lifelong observer of children, Vivian Gussin Paley has, through her books and lectures, presented to generations of early years educators an unparalleled insight into the play, needs and motivations of the young child. Through her work as a teacher she has developed storytelling and storyacting techniques to foster children's creative play.
'The power of her books is that she connected observation with skills of reflection,' says child psychologist and early years consultant Jennie Lindon. 'In Bad Guys Don't Have Birthdays, she describes how it dawned on her that children's spontaneous contributions were "the sounds of the children thinking" and must not be seen as distractions away from the teacher-led exchange.'
Paley was born and brought up in Chicago. After marrying, she lived for 12 years in New Orleans, where she trained and worked as a kindergarten teacher, and 12 years in New York, where she again worked as a teacher. But it was only after returning to her home town and taking up a position at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools that she started writing about her observations. Her first book was published when she was 50.
Since then Paley has gained a worldwide audience through her now 12 books, which draw on her early years in teaching, her 24 years at the Laboratory Schools, and since her retirement, her visits to early years settings around the world.
What are the main messages from her work?
As a teacher, Paley's classroom became for her 'an all-consuming laboratory', in which she sought to answer two main questions: What is supposed to be going on in this classroom? How do we create the kindest and fairest environment in which children can grow and learn together?
'My primary finding, which took me ever so long to really understand, is that young children come to school with a remarkable agenda. It is called play and it is the foundation of all the activity and inventiveness that follow.'
Children's learning through play about their world and their place in it begins in the comfort of their own home and must continue in the classroom, which they enter 'as a stranger' at a very young age.
Here, says Paley, children will learn about themselves, about people's roles and motivations, about the purpose of language, about humour, sorrow and loneliness.
For that learning to be successful, children must be 'bound together as a community of players' and that intimacy is reached most easily through fantasy play and storytelling, which, she believes, is an innate human need.
Only fantasy play, she says, with its processes of creating roles, developing stories and organising their enactment, can so stimulate the imagination and provide children with the opportunities to explore their experiences and emotions, make friends and develop the mechanisms that will help them deal with people and new ideas as they progress through life.
In her work, Paley observed what helped and hindered children as they tried to make sense of their world and create the mechanisms that would bring them closer to people.
She concludes, 'I began to realise that much of what I was doing stood in the way of young children being able to continue their early education by means of play, mutual storytelling and role play. I was missing the children's point of view in favour of my own.'
Thereafter, Paley viewed the classroom as a stage and began to see herself in the role of observer, scribe, stage director and what she describes as 'connection builder', using techniques to help the children develop, discuss and act out their stories.
'The classroom is a stage and everyone who walks into the classroom, myself included, is a character in the drama,' she says. 'Year by year, book by book, I behaved more like an actor, and I saw the children doing the same thing. A child playing a baby or bad guy was trying to explore concepts such as big and little, strong and weak, good and bad, and thinking about what these roles tell us about ourselves and others. In a sense, children were learning to read people before they read books.'
Drama became a key feature of her classroom, for she believes that stories, whether first played out in the play areas or dictated to someone, become all the more potent when we watch the words acted out.
'It is the abstract form of play, and produces an endless conversation about the roles we play and the words we deliberately choose,' she says.
Through drama, playwright, player and audience can explore, or re-explore, their emotions, develop empathy and learn from the experiences, or reactions, of others. 'The work of the group is to enlarge and enrich each classroom member's story,' she says.
Her observations of children's play, its themes and importance led her to consider children's behaviour and the role of superhero play in their learning. Here, she advises young teachers: 'Never confuse the fantasy role a child takes and the personality of the child.'
In her own classroom, she would refer to the children as 'actors' and set stage rules - such as, pretend fighting only - as a means of allowing the children to engage in superhero play in freedom and safety. 'Instead of stopping their cops and robbers play, I decided that I ought to improve their style!' she says. 'Just as we improve the style of all other manner of social interactions.'
Why is her work important today?
Her most recent book, A Child's Work, touches on the extent to which policy-makers in the US have sidelined fantasy play in recent years, ignoring the analytical thinking and personal, social, emotional and language development that can flow from it in their haste to teach children literacy and numeracy at an ever earlier age. Yet her work is a record, and reminder, of what matters to children and should matter in early years education.
While she feels there is a climate for change in England, in the US she believes 'a diminishment of faith in children' and policy-makers' 'lack of grounding in child development' remain major problems.
'Learning starts with a child's dramatic imagination. Play is the stuff of life. The logical narratives that develop in the doll corner and the block area, in the sandbox and playground, open the door for all future narratives about friendship and work, about family and community.
'In the first five or six years, children can't believe in themselves unless other children want to play with them, unless they learn how to play with others and have something to say about the way the narrative goes.
This establishes a child as an important, knowledgeable person in ways that early reading lessons do not.'
Paley continues to travel the world lecturing and demonstrating her storytelling and storyacting techniques.
Further information
Vivian Gussin Paley's books include A Child's Work: The Importance of Fantasy Play. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); The Kindness of Children (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); The Girl with the Brown Crayon: How Children Use Stories to Shape Their Lives (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); The Boy Who Would Be A Helicopter: The Uses of Storytelling in the Classroom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990); Bad Guys Don't Have Birthdays: Fantasy Play at Four (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988)
