Playground Essay...Work in Progress

My previously shared weekend update was about playgrounds. While discussing this with my students, I realized I had a lot more I wanted to say on the topic. I told them I would go home, write more, and bring it back.

Here’s what I shared on the LCD projector the next day:
http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AW0d22CwYgP0ZGhwa3hzYzhfMTkzY2tycXZkZDg&hl=en

As I read through this with my class, I shared some of the thoughts I’d had while writing it. What surprised me most was the revelation that I had discovered a Burning Question. I’d actually written right past it, and then in re-reading, found the question written on the page. I edited a bit to point this out to my students.

Here’s that section of the writing…

“The real question to me isn’t, “What happened to the good old days?” aka “What happened to splinters?”, but “Why were playgrounds so UNsafe before?”

Hey, wait a minute. My writing just turned into an intro to a BURNING QUESTION!

(Honest, I didn’t plan that.)”

The point of all this was to share myself as a writer with my students. In the process I shared myself as a learner, a thinker, and a researcher.

I wanted to find some pictures of the lethal animal swings, and started a google image search. Nothing satisfactory came up, but somewhere along the line, I came across a short video of ‘traditional playgrounds’ in New York City. An amateur videographer had put this together from archival photos and footage of Coney Island. I emailed her, and shared my burning question. Her video focused on a man named Robert Moses, a politico-engineer-planner of NYC in the 50’s I think.

Here’s her response…

ethel malley just sent you a message on Vimeo:

Hi Eric!

"sorry i can't help you re: documentation, but for thoughts on safety, i'd guess there actually weren't thoughts on safety to begin with in NYC. Robert Moses was something of an off-shoot of city reformers influenced by Jacob Riis and his documentation of the frankly horrifying tenement conditions. i'd argue that just the very thought of creating a public space not only where people of lower incomes could congregate but their children could actually be children and play (relatively) safely was fairly unique. i'd think at the time of Robert Moses, just creating the space was the goal and that it would be incredibly safer than having children play in the streets and among the trash.

your project/paper sounds fascinating: i wish you the best of luck with it!"

If you want to reply:
http://vimeo.com/messages/#inbox/ethelmalley

ethel malley's profile on Vimeo:
http://vimeo.com/ethelmalley

Ms. Maley helped me a lot. One reason she suggests that playgrounds were so unsafe in the early early years of public spaces is that people were just glad to get kids off the streets and out of the trash, and to have opportunities for clean and relatively safer play.

I poked around more and found lots of information about the developmental considerations of childrens’ play structures. I’m thinking of making a timeline to help sort it all out. And I’m still not sure whether my original question has been answered. More later, when I share with my students what I’ve got so far.