© 2009 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
The Importance of Fantasy, Fairness,
and Friendship in Children’s Play
An Interview with Vivian Gussin Paley
Vivian Gussin Paley is a teacher, writer, lecturer, and advocate for the impor-
tance of play for young children. Author of a dozen books about children learn-
ing through play, she has received numerous honors and awards including an
Erickson Institute Award for Service to Children, a MacArthur Foundation Fel-
lows award, and a John Dewey Society’s Outstanding Achievement Award. Paley
taught early-childhood classes for thirty-seven years—chiey at the University
of Chicago Laboratory Schools—and in her books she describes and reects on
her own learning experiences shared with thousands of students. Her writings
focus primarily on three major areas of concern she sees in children: fantasy,
friendship, and fairness. Paley learned early the value of observing and listening
to children, recording and studying what they said and did in her classroom, and
using what she discovered to improve her teaching and children’s lives. In all of
this, Paley has been a gatherer and teller of stories, and she remains so in this
interview and in her continuing work as a sought-aer speaker and consultant.
Her latest book, forthcoming in 2010, is e Boy on the Beach: Building Com-
munity through Play.
American Journal of Play: In A Child’s Work: e Importance of Fantasy
Play, you wrote, “ere was a time when play was king and early childhood
was its domain.” Why is that no longer true? What has happened?
Vivian Gussin Paley: Once kindergartners could crawl under tables and be-
tween chairs meowing and woong in secret communication, and they
weren’t considered too babyish and told to stop. “Pretend you’re a lost kitty
and then you meet a puppy” could safely follow, and there would be time
to esh out character and plot. ose days are fast disappearing.
I walked into a kindergarten classroom this past winter and the meow-
meow, woof-woof part of the drama had just begun under the math table.
e teacher smiled apologetically, jumped up, and closed the door to her
room. “Now the children can play a little,” she said. “We’ve had to skip recess
for three weeks because no one will clear away the ice and broken bottles in
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122 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PLAY • Fall 2009
the playground. is sort of play and all superhero play are banned anyway,
so I protect the children’s rights by closing the door.”
“Is there no way to explain the puppy play to your principal?” I asked.
“Actually,” she said, “I did present very convincing evidence to her.
ere was a crisis recently when Erik accidently pushed Jenny against the
wall while coming back from watching a lm, which is the school’s sub-
stitute for recess. e children were all pent up, and a certain amount of
pushing was inevitable aer that much sitting. Jenny’s parents came to
school, and everyone was furious with Erik. e principal totally humili-
ated him. A few days later, Jenny decided to be a puppy, and she told Erik
he was the big brother puppy who was taking her for a walk. Suddenly they
were friends, and all the past hurts were gone in a moment of intimate
puppy play. is is what I tried to explain—play on its simplest terms. e
principal smiled but said, ‘Sorry, there’s no time for that.’”
Kindergarten teachers know the cost of cutting down free playtime,
but few people who set policy are listening. Kindergarten children have
been arbitrarily reclassied as pseudo–rst graders, and, in the preschools,
there is pressure to prepare children for kindergarten standards. No matter
how we look at it, young children are being deprived of at least two years
of spontaneous, imaginative play.
AJP: In A Child’s Work, you tell how, during your senior year in college, a
nursery-school teacher introduced you to the notion that “play is the work
of children.” What is it about children’s play that makes it work in your
view? And is adults’ inability to see that connection part of why play is no
longer king?
Paley: My original title for A Child’s Work was “e Endangered Occupation.”
Play is the serious and necessary occupation of children; it’s not just a pleas-
ant hobby or a frivolous means of spending nonworking hours. Freud con-
sidered our life-force as made up of work and love, in equal measure. For
a child, the formula would better be stated as “play and love equals life.”
In the not too distant past—in my own childhood, certainly—there was no
other serious occupation—no work—for the young but play.
Today’s picture is radically dierent. Adults impose phonics, math,
reading, writing, and other tasks into a primary position in the young child’s
life and set play aside as relatively unimportant. In many early-childhood
classrooms, the brief periods of free play that are permitted tend only to
create awkward and detached episodes. is lack of consistent practice
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of play skills leads to judgmental errors on the part of the adults: “ese
children do not know how to play,” they say, or even, “Play is a waste of
time in kindergarten.”
Play is, in fact, a complex occupation, requiring practice in dialogue, ex-
position, detailed imagery, social engineering, literary allusion, and abstract
thinking. Being both work and love for young children, play is absolutely
essential for their health and welfare.
AJP: So, then, does referring to play as children’s work cause adults to take
play more seriously?
Paley: Yes, I believe so. When we see play as representing work and friend-
ship—or love, if you will—we are likely to reward the activity with more
time and attention in the early-childhood curriculum. For example, “What
are you working on?” one might ask children in the block area. “We’re
trying to gure out how to keep Jason from pushing over the spaceship,”
could be the underlying message in the exclamation, “Jason’s spoiling ev-
erything! Take him away!” e potential of this “workplace altercation” for
emotional, intellectual, social, and logistical impact on learning is enor-
mous. It is not frivolous and easily dismissed. It is the important work of
the classroom community.
AJP: Is there any downside to describing children’s play as work?
Paley: ere is no downside to a serious consideration of play as the central
motivating and learning tool of young children. When teachers say to young
children, “Finish your work and then you can play,” they diminish respect
for the signature characteristic of their students. When teachers pretend
that a phonics game is a fair substitute for free, imaginative play, it further
dims the dierences between “original research” and “applied technology.”
In play, children begin with their own set of premises and learn to follow
through, step-by-step, scene by scene in the complex process of creating
a logical and literary dramatic project of their own. In each episode, one
can intuit a child’s individual approach to the principles underlying fair-
ness, friendship, fear, storytelling, and personal history. In each episode
one can study the development of a community of learners in a hands-on,
face-to-face, authentic manner.
AJP: You write most about fantasy play. Why is fantasy play important? What
does it do for children, or what do they accomplish through it?
Paley: It has been suggested more than once that I concentrate too much on
fantasy play. Going back to Wally’s Stories, my editors expressed concern
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124 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PLAY • Fall 2009
that my readers would think that nothing else happened in my kindergarten
but the children’s make-believe. Pretend this and pretend that? Is that the
entire curriculum?
I had assumed, of course, that readers would take for granted that every-
thing else is, indeed, taking place in my classroom: books are read several
times a day to individuals and the group, and math, science, music, art, and
dance are interspersed throughout the day, to our enjoyment and benet.
But the glue that binds everything together is the children’s imaginative play;
the best conversations arise out of the children’s own play and storytelling;
we learn to know what we are thinking about by the ways in which we play;
we learn to support one another’s private and public plans (including the
teacher’s) through our developing skills in play.
Sometimes I’m asked, “Aren’t there other kinds of play? What about
just plain running around?” Certainly an important component of free
play is its physical expression. ese are skills we have in common with
all mammals; children crawl, run, climb, jump, push and pull, pounce
and pummel, and hug and squeeze. Only human children, however, add
narration. e most characteristically human skill of all is imaginative
role playing in the context of storytelling and the dramatization of ideas
and imagery.
AJP: When in your career did you rst recognize that fantasy play is important,
and how did you come to that conclusion?
Paley: Early in my career as teacher and writer, I began to realize that any dis-
cussion with young children based on the substance of their fantasy play
went very well, whereas discussion evolving from my own agenda frequently
got stalled in rote responses and restlessness. Group or individual conver-
sations that referred to events, pretend characters, story lines, and social
issues encountered during play merged into lively considerations of such
urgent matters as friendship, fairness, and fear, in which every child voiced
an opinion and oen expressed deeply felt emotion.
e fairy princess in the doll corner must nd out if the baby unicorn
she is playing with needs feathers in order to y. So, she says, “When I get
my power back, I’ll glue you on some feathers!” And, in the blocks, Super-
man claims he is the one who identies all bad guys, so his companion asks,
“Why is he always the one who says who the enemy is?” It is a matter of
some urgency and perhaps even some delicacy to determine the acceptable
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characteristics of unicorns, princess fairies, and superheroes, and these deci-
sions are likely to change every time a scene is repeated, as new characters
enter the story.
A teacher’s (or writer’s) impressions of the importance of fantasy play
can be inuenced by a single brief scene, such as the following, nal episode
in White Teacher, my rst book. On a class walk to a nearby pond, Sylvia,
the black child whose behavior most concerns the adult world, is suddenly
at my side crying. “Nobody likes me any more,” she sobs. “ose girls is
saying four is too many.” She buries her head in my lap.
“Why is Sylvia crying?” asks Philip.
“She feels sad,” I tell him.
Philip studies Sylvia’s face through his thick blond lashes. She is some-
one he has rarely played with, and he seems curious about her tear-stained
face.
“Hey, Sylvia, you wanna be Batgirl?”
Sylvia sits up and smiles. “Sure. I’ll be Batgirl!”
As the comforting sounds of the Batmobile zoom around the pond, we
all know the world is a happier place. And I know that I must listen more
closely to the fantasy play surrounding me in kindergarten.
AJP: What are the most important ways in which fantasy play facilitates learn-
ing?
Paley: Fantasy play allows the child to step back and watch the ways in which
thoughts play themselves out in action and then continue on into new think-
ing and actions. Dramatization is an essential piece of the process. If a little
girl is asked, for example, “How do you like your new baby brother?” it is
hard for her to imagine what the question means and what answer she ought
to give in response.
However, if she transposes the question into “How does Goldilocks feel
about Baby Bear?” she can imagine an entire scenario and even involve her
playmates in a consideration of various aspects of the issues concerning big
sisters and little siblings. Fantasy play provides easy entree into abstract
thinking and sets up patterns of “what if” and “in other words” that become
a model for discussions on all subjects.
is means, then, that we must ask ourselves: Do our children play
enough to accomplish these loy goals? Children in earlier generations
could depend on ve or more years of continued practice in imaginative
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126 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PLAY • Fall 2009
play, unhampered by school or technology. Today’s young child oen is
short changed in hours available for free play and leisurely conversation. Is
there time to invent pretend worlds and to build real communities?
AJP: You wrote in A Child’s Work that fantasy play helps children achieve an
open mind. How does it do that?
Paley: In fantasy play, children learn to envision new roles for themselves and for
other people. ey learn to change and redirect the outcome of an imaginary
plot and to include the ideas of others in their plans. When the common
story becomes more important than one’s habitual stance, the individual
mind expands in the search for more common ground. Experience teaches us
that we and our narratives become more interesting when we add maximum
variety in people and ideas. It is a tall order, but the more we play out the
problem involved, the more likely we are to nd the right balance between
the individual and the group.
I have found that my own core curriculum, consisting of the dictated
story acted out on a pretend stage, gives us the opportunity to step aside and
see the larger picture. Just as play itself opens the landscape, the additional
structure of storytelling and story acting enables children to reenvision
some of the spontaneous scenes remembered from play and to reshape
them in further detail or design, thereby creating an open-ended dialogue
with oneself and the community.
AJP: Do you have a favorite example of fantasy play helping a child to achieve
an open mind or helping a group of children to do so?
Paley: I’ll give you an example, from Mollie Is ree, of two three-year-olds
learning to view their classroom roles in a more objective, open-minded
way, thanks to the imaginative intervention of a four-year-old.
Frederick, new to the ways of school, seems locked into the notion that
when he sees something he wants, he can take it even if another child has
it rst. e toy he wants is a cash register, and Mollie is denitely playing
with it. When Frederick pulls it away, the usual scenario takes place: Molly
cries, the teacher intervenes, and Frederick retreats, sullen and resentful.
However, when the aggressive act is repeated a few moments later,
Libby steps in. “Don’t let him come to your birthday, Mollie. He’s just a
robber.”
Molly stops crying, and Frederick pauses to consider. “Yeah, I am a
robber,” he says.
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“Well, too bad for you,” Libby continues, “because robbers can’t come
into the doll corner!”
e children have begun a robber-in-the-doll-corner plot, and there
are well-established rules to cover its exigencies. “She’s right, Frederick,”
the teacher says. “If you want to play in the doll corner, you’ll have to be
something else, not a robber.”
“He can be the father,” Samantha says. “Put on this vest, Father. And
Mollie is the baby. Get in the crib, sweet child.”
Suddenly, Mollie and Frederick are part of a drama that has its own
conventions and evolving set of rules. ere is nothing in my curriculum
that can match the doll corner in its potential for examining behavior and
ideas in an open-ended process. e moment Frederick, the bad boy, be-
comes Frederick, the robber, the problem of the purloined cash register
can be addressed according to the rules of the stage, where characters can
easily change their personas on demand to suit the ongoing story.
AJP: What happens to children when they are deprived of fantasy play in class-
rooms?
Paley: e absence of imaginative play in a classroom greatly limits a child’s
options. For some children, the opportunity to spend part of the school day
as a kitty, for example, can alleviate such problems as loneliness, transition
from home, awkwardness with others, pathways to a friend, and the neces-
sity of belonging to a group.
In children’s play, meow-meow is not babyish; nor is it a waste of time,
as I have heard it described. On the contrary, meow-meow and woof-woof
can create deeper connections to a classroom community than a teacher-
initiated phonics lesson can possibly achieve. And without the sense of
intimacy aorded by meow-meow, some children cannot listen well to
other voices or perform other tasks—such as a phonics lesson.
e would-be kitten, puppy, wolf, or baby bunny—or superhero or
monster—who cannot reach out in the roles of their choice and be guided
by the dramatic moment at hand, may become silent, or restless, or aggres-
sive and sad. For healthy children, fantasy play is a necessity.
AJP: You continue to write, to travel, to lecture, and to talk with teachers about
why fantasy play is important, as well as about other aspects of play and
of teaching. What else needs to happen to ensure that young students are
not deprived of fantasy play and other forms of play? What should society
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128 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PLAY • Fall 2009
be doing? What should policy makers be doing? What about schools of
education?
Paley: For an appreciation of play to ourish and remake our early-childhood
classrooms, we must become anecdotists and storytellers ourselves. Our
sensibilities will not be awakened to play by means of theories and meth-
odologies. Play cannot be listed on charts; it comes in the form of little
episodes and scenes, and these are best described in stories about boys and
girls at play, with dialogue and stage business accurately recorded.
Listening to children play, we become reporters and anecdotists, passing
along our accounts and searching for meaning in what we see and hear. e
search itself, which includes the children in our pool of curious researchers,
becomes the academic tool of the children’s intuitive activity. Play gives
us the opportunity to seek its own meaning in a way that no other subject
can, because in play the subjects are always seeking to know what they are
inventing (though of course they are unaware of their design). Fantasy play
is a curriculum lled with the potential for rich language and social experi-
ences bound together by the structure of story.
Where do educators begin our practice of becoming anecdotists and
storytellers? e opportunities are many: in our schools of education, in
our faculty rooms, at our parent-teacher conferences, and above all, in the
classroom with our children and fellow teachers.
Play is entirely local; each classroom resembles a novel in which increas-
ingly well-dened characters act out their roles. If we begin to think of the
early-childhood classroom as theater, we are on the right track. “What story
are you playing in the doll corner?” we ask the children who rush in and
put on new disguises each day. “Who is in the spaceship? Where are the
enemies you are banging at? Tell me the story and later we’ll act it out.”
What should policy makers do? Come watch a preschool and kinder-
garten in which dramatic play, storytelling, and acting are the core cur-
riculum and see for themselves how the search for meaning is established.
One visit is not enough, of course, and, for this reason, teachers must be
prepared with good stories to add to the experience.
AJP: You meet a lot of preservice teachers in your travels. What are their most
common concerns about teaching as it relates to play?
Paley: Teachers worry about boys’ play. e themes our young boys are deter-
mined to examine in play—good guys versus bad guys, superheroes and
antiheroes, good against evil, safety and danger—present images that teach-
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ers resist and, in many instances, outlaw. e boys act out their familiar
scenes with a sense of heroics only to discover that they will be punished
if they follow their dramatic instincts.
Teachers oen express feelings of guilt about this, for they all remember
similar play by brothers, cousins, and their own sons at home. However,
the school establishment conspires to permanently alter boys’ play—zero
tolerance is the label—and to drive it underground. My goal when I speak
to teachers is to try to put boys’ play into a familiar perspective, as “theater,”
not random mayhem. If children’s play is theater, then we can develop
“stage rules” for its various components. Since everything is pretend, the
rules governing characters and plots can be easily arrived at, as in, “Robbers
can’t come into the doll corner if babies are present.” As in all classroom
activities, no one can threaten another child; no one can touch another
child except in friendship; and no one can exclude another child from a
scene being played, whether at the math table or in a spaceship. Boys’ play
yields itself to rational behavior when the characters are identied and the
plot is claried, mainly because there is a great desire to be able to continue
the play. Violent imagery in the monster’s cave is not dierent from rude
behavior at the clay table: it can be analyzed and adapted to the needs of a
safe and respectful community.
AJP: In the latter part of your classroom teaching career, you devoted an entire
book, You Can’t Say You Can’t Play, to how some children limit the social
experiences of others by saying, “You can’t play.” Why did you select that
as a topic at that particular time, and what key classroom approaches did
you use to help children learn not to say that or to respond to it?
Paley: Perhaps all of my books could have been titled “You Can’t Say You Can’t
Play,” and, in a sense, the name would be valid, for I have been searching
continually for the meaning of play and the reasons why no child may be
excluded from a turn at center stage. However, in writing e Boy Who
Would Be a Helicopter, I saw even more clearly that every child, no matter
how strange his or her behavior may seem, must be given full inclusion
rights. Furthermore, I realized that the children themselves wanted to bring
in the “stranger” and achieve a balance between his or her ways and the
culture of the larger group.
It was logical for me, at this point, to wonder if a rule, a generic sort
of golden rule, would be accepted as a natural part of classroom life. Since
I happened to be returning to kindergarten and it was housed in a large
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130 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PLAY • Fall 2009
school, this became a good opportunity to try out the injunction, “You can’t
say you can’t play,” and test the idea throughout the lower grades.
In You Can’t Say You Can’t Play, I wrote, “Equal participation . . . is
the cornerstone of most classrooms. . . . is notion usually involves every-
thing except free play. Yet, in truth, free acceptance in play, partnership,
and teams is what matters most to any child.”
Preschool and kindergarten are exactly the right time in which to put
across the notion that every person owns a place in the sun and a role in
the ongoing story. When make-believe is the dominant mode of social in-
tercourse, and friendship means having a role in the drama, the picture of
fairness is sharp and clear. e children learn that when they play together
they are friends; it is easy to visualize three princesses becoming four prin-
cesses, and four Ninja turtles becoming ve. We can see ourselves becoming
friends in terms of a story before we accept the habits of separation imposed
upon us by the outside world.
AJP: You have written a lot about the importance of children’s storytelling in
learning. How does children’s own storytelling help them learn?
Paley: When children dictate stories in order to act them out, the subject matter
of their stories usually includes the same characters and plots as found in
their dramatic play. Storytelling of this sort is one step away from play, sug-
gesting a scene-by-scene review of their thoughts at the time. Lev Vygotsky,
the Russian psychologist, describes the beginning of fantasy play in the lives
of two children in this manner: two little sisters walk along hand in hand
and the older one says, “Pretend we’re sisters and pretend we’re walking
together holding hands.” e two girls have climbed the rst rung on the
ladder of abstract thinking. Now, let’s take them to the next rung. One of
the girls dictates a story, “ere was a girl and a big sister. And they went
for a walk. And they held hands. And they see a dog. So they play with the
dog.” Once they begin to see their ideas in terms of a story, they expand and
build in new directions. As the personal narrative develops into a communal
eort, the connection making that we call learning becomes more visible
and therefore more accessible to group analysis and debate.
AJP: Is the fantasy play and storytelling we have been discussing important
just for preschool children, or is it also important for older elementary-
school children?
Paley: Storytelling is the academic precursor at every level of instruction. e
imagination begs to be used at every age and stage of life; it frees the mind
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of rigid patterns and allows us to visualize new approaches to old questions,
moving us on to new possibilities. “What if” and “pretend that” are the
motivational devices we require to move beyond self-imposed limitations
as well as those levied on us by convention and convenience. In the older
grades, as in kindergarten, social problems and issues concerning the in-
dividual and society become claried when viewed in dramatic form on a
stage. Students can step back and examine their prejudices in the light of
new exposures and experiences.
e fact is, when we are eager to convince an audience—to persuade and
explain—stories are a necessity. If we are to make authentic connections to
ideas and ideals, we must bring in people’s dreams, fantasies, and personal
narratives. Our political leaders know this, and our teachers should learn
the skills required in storytelling and theater and practice them along with
their students. e power of story trumps the power of authority.
AJP: What is the relationship between storytelling and free play in the class-
room? We hear more and more about free play disappearing from Ameri-
can classrooms. Can storytelling as a way of learning be eective without
free play?
Paley: e relationship between storytelling and free play has occupied much of
my thinking for many years, and I am still searching for answers. Teachers
ask me, if there isn’t time for free play, or if we can’t justify time spent in
free play in the classroom, will story dictation and story acting be enough?
Can we substitute organized storytelling for spontaneous play? In other
words, can the imagination bypass the free association of play and go di-
rectly into a dictated story?
Since play itself is the original source of sensitivity, sensibility, and
knowledge about the human experience, it is impossible for me to imagine
children being able to create the abstract version of images that have not
been practiced rst in real time. If storytelling is the literature of play, then
play is essential to supply new themes, characters, and plots.
Nonetheless, I tell teachers: Even if the children’s play is cut short, yes,
by all means, do the storytelling and story acting; it will show you the many
paths by which to return to play.
AJP: Making up your own stories became an important aspect of your teaching.
How did your get started doing that?
Paley: When I le my own childhood, I was no longer a storyteller. But aer
years of listening to children at play, the shape and substance of story began
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132 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PLAY • Fall 2009
to reignite for me. Just as the children improve their stories with practice,
I too became conscious of myself as a practitioner of this art form.
“Pretend we’re going into a deep forest” might be the way I began an
activity, even classroom clean up. “Once there was a very sad little princess”
could just as easily begin a discussion of social issues or a math problem.
How did my storytelling connect to the problems at hand? is is the special
province of storytelling, as the children have discovered. Stories connect to
other stories; nothing is a non sequitur once the storytelling habit is estab-
lished. Bridges are waiting to be crossed, and our expectations help carry
our ideas into hospitable places. “What happened next?” is irresistible.
AJP: You encourage beginning teachers to keep journals and write down what
they observe in their classrooms, just as you did for many years. If those
teachers ask you why they should do that or how they can best use what
they have written, what do you tell them? How did doing that aect you
and your teaching?
Paley: I have found that the best way to listen to my own thoughts and hear
my own questions has been to write them down every day in a journal. e
classroom is a busy place, with two dozen or more people clamoring for
one’s attention. Conversations are seldom remembered accurately without
the habit of writing them down. Furthermore it is dicult to examine our
own behaviors or the children’s within the active social discourse if we do
not transpose what we say and do onto a readable format. e very act of
putting contrary lines of thinking into writing helps explain where the
predicament lies and suggests new approaches for the following day.
My daily writing habit began when I brought a tape recorder into my
room and, for the rst time, created a reliable witness to classroom events.
Not having been an intuitive writer, the taped segments of conversation,
group discussions, play episodes, and story dictation gave me material to
write about, in much the same way that play helps children organize an open-
ended dialogue. I found in what I wrote the subject matter for classroom
discussions, references, and literary allusions. My journals came alive with
new themes and curiosities, thereby enlivening the classroom. I strongly
recommend the regular use of a tape recorder as a tool for learning about
the classroom—its actual language and emotional urgencies—and the at-
tempts made in it to connect all the voices of its community.
AJP: Did you transcribe all of your recordings? If not, how did you choose
which parts to transcribe?
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Paley: e logistics of using a tape recorder developed for me with daily experi-
ence. I found that if I limited myself to one sixty-minute cassette each day, I
could nd the time to transcribe the material and add my own commentary.
No one else ever listened to my tapes or helped me transcribe the words.
e art of transcribing is in itself an important means of internalizing the
sounds and rhythms of speech, the children’s and my own. Furthermore,
as one transcribes even the briefest dialogue, the entire context of the sur-
rounding action comes to mind.
I never le the tape recorder running or operating without my being
present. To have le it running would have been more like eavesdropping
than research. When children asked why the tape recorder was there, I told
them, truthfully, that I liked to hear our conversations again, in the quiet
of my home, so I could make sure I’d fully understood everyone. en,
if I had a question, I could ask it the next day. is always satised the
children, and they never referred to the tape recorder again. ey became
quite used to hearing me say, for example, “John, I heard you tell Larry
not to ‘roam’ on your paper and I’m not sure what this means. Can you
explain it again please?”
John’s answer, by the way, was, “Oh, you know how the cows roam all
over in that song? Larry was roaming all over my paper. I told him not to.”
“He was coloring on your paper?” I asked him.
“He was markering on my paper,” he responded.
As you see, the journals became even more important as I used them,
for now they contained all the transcribed material plus its aermath in
the classroom. As I myself became more focused, I became more selective
in deciding what to transcribe.
AJP: You have written a dozen books based on what you saw and heard in your
classroom. What propelled you to publish your thoughts and observations
instead of keeping journals for your own personal use?
Paley: It was Philip W. Jackson, then chairman of the Graduate School of Edu-
cation and director of the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, who
urged me to write for publication. I was forty at the time and felt myself at
a crossroads: should I continue teaching young children or should I enter
the PhD program and seek another sort of occupation? Professor Jackson
suggested that I audit his Analysis of Teaching seminar and see how well I
liked researching academic problems. e rst paper assigned concerned
teacher attitudes, and, clearly misunderstanding the goals of a research in-
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134 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PLAY • Fall 2009
stitution, I researched myself, telling stories that revealed my own feelings
in a classroom. Phil kindly pointed out that, though I had failed to produce
the required study based on library research, what I had done interested
him even more. He asked me to turn my teacher story into a journal piece
for School Review, of which he was editor. I titled my article “Adventures in
Color Blindness,” and, ve years and much work later, it emerged as White
Teacher. Needless to say, I remained in the early-childhood classroom. Hav-
ing discovered that I was a writer, I knew what subject I wanted to study.
AJP: Once you decided to publish your thoughts and observations, was it easy
or dicult to interest a publisher?
Paley: It was not easy to nd a publisher for my rst book, White Teacher, mainly
because I looked in the wrong places. At rst I sent the manuscript to many
commercial publishers and received respectful and kind rejections. en
someone suggested that perhaps my sort of writing would do better with an
academic press, and this proved to be good advice. Both Harvard University
Press and the University of Chicago Press liked my teacher voice—so they
said—and I found a home for all thirteen of my books.
AJP: How did your commercial success as a writer aect your classroom journal
keeping? Once you began to write for publication, did you keep more or
fewer journals?
Paley: Do you mean, would I have continued to ll journals with a record of
my experiences and thoughts without the incentive of book writing? Prob-
ably not to the degree I have over the years, and probably not in so focused
a manner. However, since the journals proved to be so important to my
teaching and to my enjoyment of teaching, I think I would have kept up
some form of journaling for its own rewards.
Writing is the means of having visible conversations with ourselves.
is would be valuable in any profession, but the teacher is in the best po-
sition to follow through in hour-by-hour, day-by-day interactions. It can
be a euphoric experience. One gains the ability to focus on specic issues
and to collect anecdotes and commentary to support one’s interpretations,
questions, and doubts. Writing about one’s own classroom is an ongoing
process that provides continuity, purpose, and context. If this comes close
to identifying the meaning of play, it is probably no accident. Writing about
play and story can become a teacher’s form of play.
AJP: You write with great clarity. Does writing come easily for you? Have you
always been a writer?
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Paley: My advice to classroom teachers who want to write about their experi-
ences and nd their own special voices, is to keep writing. It is essential,
in writing as in teaching, to learn to self-edit and rewrite sentences until
they say what you want them to say. Also important is to nd a good editor
to respond to your work, line by line. A family member or friend whose
language skills are excellent can serve that necessary function. In my case,
my husband lled the role. Your editor need not be an educator, but it
should be someone who knows and values good writing and can spot an
empty phrase and superuous comment. ere are no short cuts: as with
play, the more you practice, the better the writer you become. I was not a
writer in my youth. Quite the contrary, I was in my forties when I began
to write. It was, indeed, hard work, but a pleasant surprise awaited me. I
discovered that I enjoyed the rewriting and rethinking and reshaping of a
page fully as much as the rst eorts. I was teaching myself to think about
what I was doing in the classroom—and then to rethink every detail that
interested me the most.
AJP: Among all your books, do you have a favorite?
Paley: Each of my books represents a dierent phase of my teaching and writing,
evoking memories that still have the power to move me in new directions. I
nd it no easier to identify a favorite book than a favorite period of teach-
ing. I sometimes think, however, that e Boy Who Would Be a Helicopter
may have inuenced my teaching the most, giving me the sharpest picture
of the mutual and reciprocal growth possible between the “outsider” indi-
vidual and the “insider” group when the stated goal is to learn to play in
each other’s stories. In Helicopter I learned to talk about and think about
the moral dimensions of children’s play and classroom conventions. It
was inevitable that You Can’t Say You Can’t Play came next, for I could
see more clearly that the community must reach out to children who are
dierent and even oppositional and nd authentic ways to include them in
every aspect of classroom life. I saw that the school community benets as
much as the stranger when there are no outsiders or insiders. It is the way
our two-year-olds begin, and it makes sense as children grow older.
AJP: Which have you enjoyed most, writing or teaching?
Paley: Whenever I’ve been asked, “Do you consider yourself primarily a teacher
or a writer?” I have always answered, “First, a teacher.” As I developed in
both areas, however, they grew closer together in purpose and sometimes
even in style. It felt almost as if I had created a classroom in order to write
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136 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PLAY • Fall 2009
about it, but also as if I wrote scenes in my journal in order to reenact them
the next day in the classroom.
In e Girl with the Brown Crayon, I asked what will I call myself when
I give up the name of teacher? at book coincided with my last year in the
classroom. It has been ten years now, and I have never relinquished the title.
My travels take me into classrooms to demonstrate storytelling and acting
and to collect children’s invented narratives, those dictated to teachers and
those spontaneously played out in the classroom. So I am still teaching
and writing, most oen now about children in other teachers’ classrooms.
Remarkably, the power of children’s play and storytelling continues to oer
me substance and inspiration, and I continue to write books. e habit of
play and the habit of book writing have much in common.
AJP: How did you come to choose teaching as a career, where did you study,
and what led you to the Laboratory Schools at the University of Chicago?
Paley: I was not one of those who always planned to become a teacher. In truth,
I chose this career because I wanted a job, and teaching jobs were among
those most easily available in New Orleans where I lived immediately aer
college. It took me many years to realize that I had picked the right path
for myself. In fact, it was when I began to write about myself as a teacher,
struggling to understand my own intentions and behaviors, that I began
to feel the wisdom of my choice.
Aer New Orleans, I continued my career in Great Neck, New York,
and then, in 1971, I returned to Chicago, my hometown, to complete my
nal years of teaching at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. I
had come full circle, for I had been a student at the university in the 1940s,
and, between Socrates and Dewey, I had begun to wonder about the aims
of education. I was very young and inexperienced, and it would be many
years before I could connect myself to some of the issues raised by the great
thinkers. Needless to say, I am still trying.
AJP: Are there any particular teachers or writers who have had an especially
important impact on your career, your approach to teaching and learning,
or your beliefs about the importance of play?
Paley: My belief in the importance of play—and especially of fantasy play—grew
out of my increasingly careful observations of children playing, in my own
classrooms, year aer year. As I listened to what children said and watched
them in their spontaneous interactions, I was drawn ever more deeply into
the narrative beginnings of childhood. Sylvia Ashton-Warner was closest to
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my thinking in her admiration of the mythology of childhood and its roots
in the mythology of all early peoples. She understood, better than anyone
else, the passion in children’s fantasy play and its profound connection to
the process of becoming educated and becoming human.
AJP: What is the most important thing that you have learned from your stu-
dents?
Paley: Children have focused my attention on the three major areas of their
passionate concern: fantasy, friendship, and fairness. As I have watched
and recorded their spontaneous activities and listened to their words and
dramatized scenes, I have come to understand that children enter school
seeking the warmth and the admiration of an intimate community. Nothing
is of greater importance or urgency to them. We may consider ourselves
good teachers only to the extent that we keep examining our environments
to see if they provide this inclusive home for every child.
AJP: How did you play as a child, and what are your favorite ways to play to-
day?
Paley: I think I played no dierently as a young child than children do today
when they are given ample time without TV, video, or standards. My early
childhood was spent at home playing on porches, under tables, and on the
courtyard of my apartment building. It has been a goal of mine as a teacher
to provide the level of free play my playmates and I had as we listened in the
alley behind our building for the voices of vendors on their horse-drawn
wagons calling out: “Veg-ta-bles! Veg-veg-veg-ta-bles!” and “Ice today!” We
pretended they were pirates about to attack our castles. We spent our days
in make-believe, and we were expected to spend our time this way. School
began for most of us in rst grade, and the only preparation for school we
knew about was receiving a much-prized pencil box. We were taught our
ABCs in rst grade, but until then, we played.
AJP: Are you working on another book, or do you have another one coming
out soon, and if so, can you give our readers a preview?
Paley: I have just nished my thirteenth book, to be published February 2010
by the University of Chicago Press. It is called e Boy on the Beach: Build-
ing Community through Play. I begin with a description of “pure” play, an
uninterrupted day at the shore by a four-year-old boy, and then I follow
him and his classmates during the kindergarten year. ere are various
narrative detours, including letters to and from a teacher pen pal in Taiwan
who joins me in a search for the meaning of play.
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138 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PLAY • Fall 2009
AJP: Is there any last observation about play or teaching you would like to
leave with our readers?
Paley: ere is a well-known cliche that tells us to “use it or lose it.” is warning
goes too far, perhaps, if applied to the limitations placed upon the free, imagi-
native play of young children, because such a distinguishing characteristic as
play in molding the human personality can’t be so easily shut down.
We must take care, however, that the current academic expectations
arbitrarily imposed on our children do not produce less-creative and less-
happy students in our culture. It is not too late to reexamine our curriculum
in the early-childhood classroom and reset the clock to an earlier time,
“when play was king and early childhood was its domain.”
Let me end with what for me may be the most important aspect of play
we learn from the children: it is in play where we learn best to be kind to oth-
ers. In play we learn to recognize another person’s pain, for we can identify
with all the feelings and issues presented by our make-believe characters.
“Pretend there is a lonely puppy, and then a friendly kitten comes along”
begins a scenario that is adaptable grade by grade as we attempt to create
a just society.
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