Overheard on the bus, a four-year-old explaining patiently to his mum:
Only dogs are allowed to catch a cat.
And cat is allowed to catch a mouse.
The “play” here is at a number of levels. I really appreciated the repetition, but most of all the slightly ponderous cadences and pulses. I could have looked at David Crystal’s eye-opening book Language Play, which makes a plea for language enrichment precisely through valuing children’s (and adults’) play with their language. I could have looked more seriously at Bruner, whose book on Child Language I explored for myself this semester as part of the Brookes module on Practice and Pedagogy. I was drawn instead to a book that suggested to me ages ago (wrongly) that this was what Education research had to look like: the detailed transcripts in Martin et al’s 1976 Understanding Children Talking, and I was reminded of Jason and his life-story poem “I wish I was a raindrop.” I am struck by what he plays with here in terms of rhythm and structure:
I wish I was a raindrop, a raindrop, a raindrop
I wish I was a raindrop and lived in a cloud
And it would be all warm, all warm, all warm,
And it would be all warm and we’d have a nice cup of tea.
(NB: there are four more verses to this).
I am struck by the rhetorical rhythm the boy on the bus gave to his Dogs and Cats pronouncement, which gave it authority. Martin et al call this “bardic,” which I wouldn’t want to lose as a concept.
The ideas expressed are influenced by the hidden demands of the mode.
and it’s this hiddenness that requires play. We could not teach Jason how to make a poem like this (very like “I’m walking like a Robot” and “Poor Jenny sits a weeping”) but we can allow him room to try out the various structures. As adults we introduce, repeat, maybe reinforce – but it is the child’s playful exploration that makes the creative leap.
Martin et al ask big questions of language, but I’ll end with the challenge of literature:
Are our novelists, poets and dramatists reaching back into their earlier days and, with the added skills of literacy, exploring and extending those same frameworks through which as children they talked out their fantasies?
nicktomjoe 