Recess Battles: Playing, Fighting, and Storytelling By Anna R. Beresin
Article Sidebar
Main Article Content
Abstract
A spate of books lately have signaled a dire warning about the threat to free play with the elimination of recess by school administrations and the regimentation of children at camps and after-school programs. Folklorists have much to contribute to this discourse in the “war on recess” because of the association of recess play with spontaneous, evolving traditional practices controlled by children rather than administrated by adults or influenced by corporations (in the form of video games and other gadgets directing play). Some advocates such as Joe L. Frost have even referred to a movement to counter the detrimental effects on child development with the redesign of playgrounds and the war on recess with the urgency of a “child-saving movement” (see his A History of Children’s Play and Play Environments: Toward a Contemporary Child-Saving Movement, 2009). To date, much of the folkloristic attention to the issue of the decline of free play seems to have been centered in Great Britain with the publication of Steve Roud’s sweeping tome, The Lore of the Playground (2010), and Julia C. Bishop and Mavis Curtis’s editing of nine insightful essays in Play Today in the Primary School Playground (2001). To this bookshelf can now be added an incisive ethnography by Anna R. Beresin of recess at one American urban school between 1991 and 2004.
Downloads
Article Details
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Materials published in the Children's Folklore Review (CFR) remain the property of their authors. CFR encourages authors to honor the journal with exclusive rights to their work for the period of one year following its initial publication; however, authors may offer their work for reprint as they see fit. Submissions may be withdrawn at any point during the review process. Once the material has been published in CFR, however, it becomes part of the CFR record and cannot be removed.Likewise, CFR may emend the appearance of materials to maintain a consistency of design, but will make only make changes to the text when requested by the author. At the author’s request, and with the agreement of the editor, additions and amendments may be added as separate files to the table of contents.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Derivative License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgment of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgment of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work.
- While CFR adopts the above strategies in line with best practices common to the open access journal community, it urges authors to promote use of this journal (in lieu of subsequent duplicate publication of unaltered papers) and to acknowledge the unpaid investments made during the publication process by peer-reviewers, editors, copy editors, programmers, layout editors and others involved in supporting the work of the journal.