Recess Battles by Beresin Anna R.;Sutton-Smith Brian;

Author:Beresin, Anna R.;Sutton-Smith, Brian;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Published: 2010-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Students inevitably requested permission to show me one more game, to sing one more song into the microphone. One shy girl looked up at me after doing her last hand clap and sighed, “There’s so much stuff I want to say.” When I told her to go ahead and say it, she sighed again: “My name [sighing, with a whoosh of rushed air]—my name’s Aisha.” Cheeks flushed with the excitement of speaking about things that matter, the students proceed down the hallway with me. Gina, a gymnast, does a cartwheel. Two others imitate her; they are bursting with energy, doing flips, cartwheels, not making a sound. The building’s manager stops them in the middle of the hallway and says, “Are you nuts or something? What’s the matter with you?”

Social theorist and historian Michel Foucault has written of the body and its ultimate control in the prison, a metaphor often heard when children describe school—the bars on the windows, the rules, the extreme time limitations, the barking directives.11 He describes the “micro-physics of power” among French prisoners in 1837: “There is recreation until twenty minutes to eleven. … At twenty minutes to one, [they] leave the school, and return to their courtyards for recreation. At five minutes to one, at the drum-roll, they form into work teams.” Even prisoners had recess twice a day. Presaging Pierre Bourdieu and Foucault, Charles Dickens noted that the institutions of power—jails, hospitals, schools—were practically indistinguishable in working-class communities, where the movement of the body was proscribed.12 Then and now, the playful social body offers escape, but now the words are increasingly scripted. What can we learn about human adaptation and creativity as children’s movement is restricted in a scripted world? At what point does research evolve into advocacy?

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