Session Information
13 SES 03 A, Toying with education: play, tools, and LEGO
Paper Session
Contribution
In the paper presentation I will present some of the early findings from the research project The Children of Textiles. The purpose of the research projectis to investigate the relationship between children's work, education and play within the history of textile work as recorded in the textile archives and testimonies. Child labor is a widespread reality in the textile industry and child labor was a major contributing factor of the early industrialization in the 18th and 19th centuries. (Humphries, 2013) My focus is not on whether or to what extent the children participated in the work, but rather in what way these children appear in the archive, also in relation to each other, to the mothers and fathers and the industries.
An interesting finding from my early archive work states that children took part in work, but they were also involved in other activities. One example of this is the sign post at Rydal’s Spinnery in Sweden (which today is a museum) that urge the children not to play or fight: "Don't play, don't fight – rule out play and fighting at work". (Rydals museum n.d.) Play is a central concept and phenomenon for childhood. It is a phenomenon that is philosophically interesting in order to understand different aspects in life and childhood, as well as in relation to education, politics, society and democracy (Koubová et al., 2021)
The call not to engage with play, in this specific Rydal’s Spinnery, tells us that it occurred, but it also tells us something about the place, the view of children and childhood within this industry and spinnery, and what it could mean to be a child in the textile industry. Drawing on this example of “Don't play, don't fight” I will explore and develop the relationship philosophically between children's work, education and play within the history of textile work and its archive. The question that I will focus on in the paper presentation is: How can the relationship between work, play and educational process related to the children be understood?
In the presentation I will philosophically develop these children’s life through the lens of play. In Agamben’s work, play has a function in the act of profaning things, in order to understand politics, capitalism and consumption. Profanation means to treat something (or someone) as worldly and as something “that can be played with”. It is an act that separates the thing from its context (from the sacred) and makes it free. (Agamben, 2007; Removed for peer review) Agamben write:
“Children, who play with whatever old thing falls into their hands, make toys out of things that also belong to the spheres of economics, war, law, and other activities that we are used to thinking of as serious. All of a sudden, a car, a firearm, or a legal contract becomes a toy.” (Agamben, 2007, p. 76)
Children’s use of things – sticks, cars, pots, chairs – shall neither be understood as sloppy nor negligent. Rather, the children have the capacity to make something new of the old thing. “It should be understood as a new usage that children give to humanity.” (Sundal and Øksnes, in Koubová et al., 2021, p. 215)Drawing on Agamben, one can regard play as freeing things from its normal use. Play is characterized by its changing and transforming of both actions and things into something new. It is not about restoring an original state. (Sundal and Øksnes, in: Koubová et al., 2021, p. 216)This thing or action can also be related to time (cf. Masschelein & Simons, 2013; Lewis, 2013), a free time that is not productive.
Method
The project is educational-philosophical. Earlier prognosis of archive studies show that children were present and conducted textile work, but the children’s voices are not well attested in the archive. They are pictured and listed as workers. Sometimes with names, sometimes just an nameless faces. They are not “speaking out loud”, which is not a dead end for doing research on these voices and testimonies. (Removed for peer review) It is here the philosophical formulation becomes a way to approach these testimonies in the material, as “history from below”, where voices from the past with reminiscences of child labor can come into a new light. (cf. Humphries, 2013) Aspects that thus interest me in my material are the various individual testimonies; narrated or not narrated (cf. Removed for peer review). Through the individual stories that appear in the archive, there is the opportunity to develop the children's perspective and testimonies, and in this way approach the children's voices and thereby examine history, subjectivity, qualification, socialization, work and play through different testimonies. In the paper presentation at ECER I will draw on a few of these example from the archive, and seeing them through the light of the phenomenon of play.
Expected Outcomes
In the Swedish curriculum for preschool, play is considered to be a goal for something, as something that have an end, such as learning (Läroplan för förskolan, 2018). Sundal and Øksnes (In: Koubová et al., 2021, p 2016) draw on Agamben and argue that, even though there is a strong connection between these two concepts, “play and learning are two different phenomena, both important in their own right. Just as teaching and learning are two interrelated, strongly connected phenomena, they are not the same.” Following, firstly this understanding of play as something different from learning and as a specific activty where mystery and imagination can take place. And secondly, following Agamben (2007) and his understanding of play as freeing things and time, I will go back to the children of textile and reread them through this light of non-productive and free time. In this paper presentation I will argue that the (unwanted) play in the textile factory, Rydal’s Spinnery, could be regarded as a space of a non-productive time, a form of liberation and resistance even, which also gives me openings of reading these working class children through a new light. This does not mean to deny or neglect the difficult situation these children was in, but rather giving them a possibility to come into light through another language than that of hard work, productive time, poverty, slavery and misery.
References
Printed Sources: Hartman, S. V. (2019). Wayward lives, beautiful experiments: Intimate histories of social upheaval. W. W. Norton & Company. Agamben, G. (2007). Profanations. Zone Books. Removed for peer review. Removed for peer review. Humphries, J. (2013). Childhood and child labour in the British industrial revolution. Economic History Review. Jan Masschelein & Maarten Simons. (2013). In defence of the school. A public Issue. E-ducation, Culture & Society Publisher. Koubová, A., Urban, P., Russell, W., & MacLean, M. (Eds.). (2021). Play and Democracy, Philosopical Perspectives. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003122289 Läroplan för förskolan. (2018). [Text]. Retrieved 31 January 2023, from https://www.skolverket.se/undervisning/forskolan/laroplan-for-forskolan Lewis, T. E. (2013). On Study: Giorgio Agamben and educational potentiality. Routledge. Unprinted sources: Lek ej, bråka ej – avstyr lek och bråk i arbetet, Sign post, Rydals Museum.
Search the ECER Programme
- Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
- Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
- Search for authors and in the respective field.
- For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
- If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.