4 results
Foreword
-
- By Berry Mayall
- Edited by Wendy Russell, University of Gloucestershire, Stuart Lester, University of Gloucestershire, Hilary Smith, University of Gloucestershire
-
- Book:
- Practice-Based Research in Children's Play
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 05 April 2022
- Print publication:
- 08 March 2017, pp xiii-xvi
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
This important book breaks new ground, in bringing together a number of empirical research studies that focus on a wide range of settings in which children play, and address important theoretical issues in order to understand the findings. This contribution from me is slight, limited and angled towards what I myself have found through research and through reading.
My association with this great play project began, I think, because students on the University of Gloucestershire postgraduate programmes on play had been asked to read some of my written work; and subsequently I was invited to attend a conference (in January 2013), where the staff and students presented their work. This was a great experience for me, an eye-opener and the beginnings of insight into how thinking on play has moved on through the engagement of the staff and students on the course. In an age when the character of childhood is increasingly controlled by ‘education’ agendas affecting not only schooldays, but experiences outside school, I thought then – and now – that it was important to make the students’ work available to a wider audience. And now this book is seeing the light of day! So first I want to congratulate everyone concerned for the massive amount of work, including thought, study, emotional engagement, pioneering spirit, and openness to experience that is so evident in the chapters that follow. It is, in part, because the authors are, or have been, engaged practitioners, that they provide such creative insights into the material with which they engage.
The explorations in the following chapters point to a range of physical environments in which play takes place, including streets, clubs, adventure playgrounds and museums. However, a key enabling condition is the loosening of adult control over children's activities, so that children are freed up to develop their play. For as sociologists of childhood have pointed out childhood is a subordinate social group, in tension and in relations with adulthood (for example, Qvortrup, 2009). Children have to seek out environments relatively free from adult control. A dramatic example of a physical, but also emotionally laden environment hostile to play is provided by that acute observer of childhood, Charles Dickens in Great Expectations.
twenty-one - A long haul
-
- By Berry Mayall
- Edited by Katherine Twamley, University College London Institute of Education, Mark Doidge, University of Brighton, Andrea Scott, Northumbria University
-
- Book:
- Sociologists' Tales
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 11 March 2022
- Print publication:
- 15 April 2015, pp 181-186
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
My engagement with sociology is interlinked with my personal history, and so the two have to be described together. I graduated in English (literature) in 1958. No careers advice was offered, beyond directing ‘girls’ into secretarial or teaching work. I tried various avenues and had a memorable experience at the BBC. I applied for a job as trainee drama director and when I got to the interview, they said, ‘We thought we would ask you to come along, because we wondered why you applied: we don’t take women.’
The social and political climate for women, whether or not graduates, in the 1950s and 1960s was dire. Woman’s destiny was marriage and children, and when some of my cohort got married on the last day of the last term at university, we fellow graduates thought that was success. Commentators at the time, proclaimed that women must and would spend 15 to 20 years bringing up their two or three children, but that after that there was plenty of time for them to take up or resume their careers (for example, Titmuss, 1958). There were a few dissenting voices – women mostly, arguing that it was a waste of education (paid for by the state) not to use women’s education and skills (Banks and Banks, 1956 ) and in 1949 governmental concern about shortages of ‘manpower’ led to a Royal Commission on Population Report which argued that measures be introduced to allow women to combine motherhood with paid work (see Myrdal and Klein, 1956: 196). Later – in 1964 – the government relaxed its rules on not expanding nursery places, provided the new nursery place would release a woman to resume her job as a teacher.
After some false starts, however, I took the traditional course and from 1959 taught in girls’ grammar schools (this is just before comprehensivisation came in). Then after marriage and child, I taught very part-time for the Inner London Education Authority (ILEA) in a further education college. By the late 1960s, however, ILEA decided that all its teachers, however experienced, must do a training course, and word in the staff room was that it was excruciatingly boring. So I cast around. Maybe there was something else I could do.
eleven - Child–adult relations in social space
-
- By Berry Mayall
- Edited by E. Kay M. Tisdall, John M. Davis, Alan Prout, Malcolm Hill
-
- Book:
- Children, Young People and Social Inclusion
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 15 January 2022
- Print publication:
- 01 November 2006, pp 199-216
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Introduction
In a world where children have few civil rights, the family is the one setting where they can aspire to being treated as people in their own right. (Neale, 2002, p 468)
This chapter frames children's social relations with adults in the context of socio-political characteristics of child–adult relations in the UK. It argues that these characteristics help explain how children's social relations differ, according to setting. Broadly, children have more chance of respectful relations with adults in the ‘private domain’ of the home than they do with professionals in the ‘public domain’. However, this is a complicated and mixed picture, as the chapter suggests. And the picture is a shifting one, which intersects with changing representations of children.
Chapter One briefly reviewed the development of social exclusion/ inclusion policies in the UK. A long-standing aspect of social exclusion relates to behaviour that does not conform to societal norms, often but not exclusively associated with poverty. Policies to tackle social exclusion in this sense have included welfarist, targeted and individualised policies and initiatives, with heavy emphasis on the need to tackle deviants, especially young people. Underlying such policies and initiatives is concern for the appropriate balance between ‘the family’ and ‘the state’ as agents of socialisation. Of course, the concept of ‘family’ implies a norm, whereas families vary in composition and character; this variability underlies discussions in this chapter. Roche and Tucker (2003) note that social exclusion agendas tend to rely on families as the main socialisation arena and to identify as the main governmental role tackling deviance visible in public spheres (for instance, crime, drugs, truancy). Dealing with social exclusion as it affects children in private spheres is more problematic for governments, which hesitate to intervene in families.
Ways of thinking both reify and structure how social trends are perceived. For instance, sociologists reified social life into public and private domains; women, famously, have challenged the very notion of this division, but it has also proved a useful analytic tool for them to challenge male assignment of women to the home, and the complementary notion that what they do there is not work (for example, Stacey and Davies, 1983).
The Division of Labour in Early Child Care—Mothers and Others*
- Berry Mayall
-
- Journal:
- Journal of Social Policy / Volume 19 / Issue 3 / July 1990
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 20 January 2009, pp. 299-330
- Print publication:
- July 1990
-
- Article
- Export citation
-
This paper is concerned with the work of child care and with the division of work between mothers and others. Drawing on research data, it explores the idea that this work takes place in a domain located between the public and the private. The perspectives of mothers and health visitors on child care and health care are considered, with particular reference to their perspectives on their own and others' knowledge and responsibility.