Education, Childhood and Anarchism by Catherine Burke & Ken Jones

Author:Catherine Burke & Ken Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge

Part III

Reflections on practice

Chapter 9

Playwork

The anarchy wing of sociology

Marc Armitage

Play Wales, one of the four national organisations for play in the United Kingdom, say on their website, “Playwork is a profession. Playworkers train to do their job”.1 Play Wales, and the other national organisations,2 represent a small but distinct professional group of workers who share a common identity, and operate within an agreed ethical and theoretical framework, through national, regional and local structures.3 Since first establishing its roots in the United Kingdom, playwork has also become firmly established in many other countries around the world – particularly Japan, Germany and Denmark, for example – and is gaining interest in others such as Australia and the United States. There is also an international network in the form of the International Play Association.4

In the United Kingdom, the profession has developed a progressive route of training and education that provides opportunities for development ranging from practical training through to an academic route with undergraduate and masters degree programmes in place at a number of universities. More recently, playwork has been able to boast a number of doctoral level professionals and, as of 2011, the first academic chair at Leeds Metropolitan University.

All this is a far cry from the early days and even from the time I joined the profession as a field playworker in the early 1980s. At that time, playwork was a disparate grouping of individuals and networks striving to define a separate identity from the urban and community development sector in which many play-workers had their roots. As a colleague of mine once remarked there was also ‘nothing to read’ at that time, by which he meant no published material had been written by and/or specifically about playwork.5

A number of key texts produced by authors from a broad field of disciplines have since contributed to a developing framework which finds the profession today with a much stronger theoretical grounding. Here, within an unapologetically personal account, I chart the development of my own practice and understanding through the influential work of two key individuals in particular.

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