So you believe that the rules are more important than the content?

Violent content can make children anxious; it can make them uncomfortable. So we tried to limit it. And that involves listening to each other and understanding that people have different tolerance levels.

For example, it often comes up in a classroom that some children like to be touched and other children like a lot of privacy around physical issues. A child will reach out and spontaneously touch a friend, and the other child will like it or not, depending upon how they feel about their own body. A child who doesn't like it might feel that the touch was aggressive, even if it was meant in a friendly way.

Understanding those differences helps children connect with each other more positively. The same thing is true of how they feel about violence. A child can enjoy a pretend shooting game or can feel attacked by it. If they feel attacked by it, you can't play it with them.

Let's talk a bit about the way democratic principles work in your classroom. In one case, you raised issues in a classroom meeting about the way violent play was being handled on the playground, and the children more or less vetoed some of your ideas in favor of their own. How, as a teacher, do you negotiate democratic rules without letting go of your authority?

I make all the rules that have to do with physical or emotional safety. The children know that I am responsible for that, and they accept that. The rules that we negotiate are those in which they really can't make a bad choice. I might not agree with them, I might think that another decision would have been better or I might not have thought of their ideas. Most of the time, the latter was true. I never would have imagined their solutions. But we'd try them, and if they worked we would keep those rules, and if they didn't we'd come back and negotiate them again.

My rules included things like: "You can't touch when you pretend to fight" -- they could do things like pretend to shoot each other with a finger, but they couldn't come close enough to do physical harm. And you can't say, "You can't play," which is a rule that protects children from being excluded.

Why do you think it's important to allow children to have some say in creating rules for themselves?

First of all, I think the rules are very effective when the children make them. Second of all, it gives children the message that listening to each other is important -- that's good both for the children who are speaking and for those who are listening.

We didn't usually vote about our rules; we usually used the consensus model, which is much harder. It means that you really have to listen to everyone and figure out how best to accommodate their needs.

In the beginning, it takes a lot of time. We would come back to some issues two or three times before we would resolve them. But as time went on, they were doing it themselves: They'd come in from recess and report to me about issues that they'd solved at recess. And then it got to the point where they didn't even bother telling me, because they were just so used to doing it. Parents told me that they would hear the children negotiating at home with their siblings or their friends.

We adults are not always there to help children negotiate these things. It's more valuable to give them the tools -- so that they know how to negotiate issues themselves -- than the rules, which they won't necessarily be using when they are not with us.

When you began your research on children's play, you tried to focus exclusively on issues of violence. But when you reviewed the tapes of the children speaking, you found that they were continually talking about issues of exclusion. At first, you cut out those parts of the tape. What made you decide that violence and exclusion were closely linked?

It seemed as though the exclusion led to violence -- in two different ways. First, the excluded child felt entitled to get revenge. Second, the children doing the excluding felt entitled to be violent toward the excluded child because that child had been labeled as being different. One boy remembered being called a girl and then hit. Another boy said he was called a baby and then pushed down. So it seemed that just the fact of being excluded, of being considered different from the others, was enough to make them feel entitled to be hurtful.

What were some of the gender differences you saw in children's play?

The boys were much more attracted to the violence than the girls. There was only one girl who really enjoyed the games that had violent fantasies in them. And when she played, she always wanted to make sure that everyone in the game was OK. She was quick to make compromises and to look out for other people. It also seemed to me as though the girls were more curious about everybody's feelings. A girl watching boys play a battleship game would say, "Why do they like violence so much?" I didn't hear boys asking those kinds of questions.

But girls could be very mean to each other -- and very exclusionary. Their meanness was more quiet. I had to look very carefully to even see it. A girl would say to everyone in the group how much she liked a thing that they were wearing, but leave one girl out. And everyone knew that she would always leave the same girl out.

Recent Stories