Episode 3: Colleagues Quiz with John Potter and Kate Cowan

• Here is the Play Observatory website on ‘A National Observatory of Children’s Play Experiences During Covid-19’
• You can also follow the Play Observerty on Twitter @PlayObservatory
• The first wave of playground archive by Iona and Peter Opie: The Opie Archive
• The second wave of playground play archive mentioned by John Children's Playground Games and Songs in the New Media Age
• The official website for Playing the Archive
• John spoke about Zygmunt Bauman's Culture in a Liquid Modern World  
• Haeny mentioned Catherine Kohler Riessman's narrative thread analysis
• Check out John's UK Japan VR project
• John's music project Red City Deep Blue Sky he mentioned during What's Poppin'
• Listen to the Lost and Found radio show John guest hosts; here is one of his episodes

Haeny: If you spend any time in a  playground you'll see all sorts of different games children play, some of which you may recognize from your own childhood, and others you can’t make sense of at all. The research of Kate Cowan and John Potter, this week’s guests, aim to describe the features, tools, and systems embedded in children’s play throughout the United Kingdom. So, what does children’s play look like today? What are the stories and myths that children generate and how does the telling and retelling of these stories shape the contours of young people’s sense of themselves and the natural world?

Nathan: In our conversation today with Kate and John, they recall the games and myths of their own childhood. They share with us the innovative methods that they use to document children’s play, and reflect on why we keep returning to the same debates about children’s play decade after decade. They've also accumulated an impressive archive of children’s play across both physical and digital spaces. We hope that you’ll check this work out. We've linked it to our website.

Haeny: Remember last week, we talked about multimodality? Well it’s becoming a theme. With multimodal methods, like capturing videos and other media, researchers can try to document and look at things other than just words, like movement, gestures and gaze. Kate and John share with us some examples of how they do just that as they try to take children’s play seriously in their work in the U.K.

[Music begins, then fades to background]

Haeny: Thank you, Kate, and John, for doing this. We're really excited that you're here and we get to talk to you.

John: Pleasure.

Kate: Pleasure, yeah. Thank you for the invitation.

Nathan: Of course, I, I think, Haeny do you want to? Do you want to start us out?

Haeny: Sure. So, I think we usually like to start off just by our guests just introducing themselves and talking about, you know, what they're doing, what they've been interested in lately. And maybe it'd be interesting to hear from you all where you are at, since you're at a different place than a lot of our other guests. So, John, do you want to start us off?

John: I don't mind. Yeah. Okay. I'm John. John Potter. I'm Professor of Media in Education at UCL Institute of Education. But if you want to know exactly where I'm about seven miles out of the centre of London, near a place called Greenwich, if any of you know London. I started life as a primary school teacher, and I worked as a primary school teacher in East London for about 10 years. Then I got interested in technology and education. And I went on to be an IT advisor for a East London Borough, just about the time that the internet was beginning to be quite big in schools here with something called the National Grid for Learning. But after that, about two years, I was dissatisfied with just putting equipment in, talking to people about classroom management, and I decided I wanted to do some research and teaching. So I got into teacher education, which led me ultimately to the Institute of Education. And I've worked in this unit called the knowledge lab since January 2007. And my research interests are at the intersection of popular culture, and media culture and children's agency and creative pedagogies. Let's hand it over to Kate.

Kate: Thanks. So I'm Kate Cowan. I'm a senior research fellow at UCL Institute of Education. I also used to be a teacher, I used to be a nursery school teacher for several years and then moved into research, mostly focusing on that age group. And mostly looking at play and communication from a multimodal perspective. So particularly interested in ways that children communicate and make meaning not just in language, but in all sorts of forms. I'm currently working with John on the Play Observatory project documenting children's play during Coronavirus, but previously have worked on Playing the Archive, which I think we'll talk about a bit more, which was looking at children's play cultures and comparing play today to play of the past. And also interested in how play is a part of young children's learning and how it becomes in, particularly in early years education, part of the curriculum and the pedagogy of practice.

Nathan: Haeny described you guys as the dynamic duo, perhaps the Avengers of play. [John laughs] And thank you for giving us that origin story. In that spirit, we always like to start the podcast with a game.

John: Alright.

Nathan: Or playing a game with our guests. And so we thought we might try some version of something like the Newlywed Game, though perhaps this is something more like a colleague's game. [laughs] And, you'll, you'll sort of think about or write down your answer to the question, and then I'll ask one of you to tell us what the other one has written. [

John: Oh, okay, yeah.

Kate: Ooh, interesting.

John: Right. Okay,  fire away.

Haeny:  [laughs]

Nathan: So I'll ask John, this question. And then, Kate, you will try to guess what you think John will say to answer that question.

Nathan: So I guess we'll, the first question will be what is the spookiest childhood story? Alright Kate, what do you think? What do you think John's most frightful childhood story might be?

Kate: So the only hint I've got to go on is when we were talking about the, the Green Lady that came up in the fieldwork. And I think this is maybe a story of a ghost in a basement. That was really, really, terrifying. I don't know if that's the most terrifying.

John: Yeah. It's the ghost in the school. When I was at school. Yeah. [Haeny laughs] That is the, that is the thing. So it was yeah [John and Nathan laugh].

Kate: Yes-

Nathan: Ding ding ding!

John: My ghost story was simply a presence, and it was in the kind of, there was a basement area with coats and bags and what not. And going down there, and particularly, you know going down there when you weren't allowed to be in there. So the idea for my friends and I was always to sneak back into the school during playtime and run the risk of being caught, and then go downstairs and then try and see where it might be. [Nathan laughs] And I never saw it, and I think it would be, it was a sort of grey amorphous presence, and then just running straight back out into the playground again. Absolutely terrified. So yeah, that's absolutely right. Nathan: Excellent work. Great job

Kate: Phew.

Nathan: This is a, this is a solid start. [Haeny laughs] Okay, so this question will aim towards Kate then and John, you'll do your best to think about how she might answer. Alright Kate you are invited, to, all at the same time here, you're invited to Hogwarts, the Jedi Academy, Starfleet, to join the Witches of Discworld or to be a member of the Fellowship of the Rings; which do you choose to join?

Kate: Okay.

Nathan: She's got it. John, what do you think?

Kate: Tough. But

John: That's really hard because I would put Kate into all of those [Nathan laughs] organizations, and probably she'd succeed in all of them. [Haeny, John and Kate laugh] So I don't, I don't know. I'm gonna go with perhaps, almost certainly not Starfleet, ahh, I'm torn between Hogwarts and Jedi Academy. Umm, Jedi Academy I'll just go with that.

Kate: Correct. And I was torn-

John: Ah!

Kate: -between Hogwarts and Jedi Academy too. [Nathan and Haeny laugh]

John: Wow!

Kate: Very good. [Kate and Haeny laugh]

Nathan: Right off the bat. Excellent, so.

Kate: This is going well.

John: Yeah.

Haeny: I know.

Nathan: This is really impressive. Excellent work. Okay, so we're gonna pass this one back. This is another question for John, and Kate, you'll see if you can determine what he would answer. So it's recess time; the bell rings, and you rush out, John rushes out to go play? Where does he go? Does he head to the swings? Does he go and engage in some sort of a kind of clapping a rhyming game with his friends, play some variation of tag, football, or games are for children, and he's a sophisticated nine year old. [Kate, Haeny and John laugh]

Kate: Um, hmmm, Oh, that's really tough.

John: You wouldn't believe me age nine. Okay.

Kate: I know that he's a Crystal Palace fan. So I think maybe he would pick football. Tough though.

John: I had a joy. I mean, I, I find it inseparable. My, my number one is a mixture of football and tag because we were not allowed-

Kate: Oh.

John: -to play football every day. So if I'm allowed to have two answers.

Kate: Fair enough.

Haeny: You too, are so good at this. [laughs]

Nathan: Yeah. This is too easy. I'm a little worried about this.   

Haeny: I know [laughs].

Nathan: Okay, let's do one more question. Alright, and this, this will be for you, Kate. And John, see if you can figure out how she would answer. So, we're going to kind of continue with this theme of games. And you now are faced with challenging death to a game to save your soul. This is like, I don't know if you've seen the movie Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey, [Kate and Haeny laugh] but, but death has challenged you to a game and you have to win to save your soul. And so what game do you choose to challenge death? Do you choose checkers? chess? poker? Or Hungry Hungry Hippos?

Kate: [laughs]

John: I would say Hungry Hungry Hippos would be my answer.

Kate: Yeah, I always wanted Hungry Hungry Hippos growing up, and I never had it, [Haeny laughs] but I think that's probably the one I'd stand the best chance at. I don't know the rules of checkers or chess to my shame. Poker, m-, maybe. [lauhgs] But yeah, Hungry Hungry Hippos for sure would be the most fun way to cheat death.

Nathan: Well, that's amazing. You guys clearly know each other very well. [Haeny laughs] The, the, the, the tightness of the Avengers of play seems, seems safe. So thank you for playing that game with us.

John: Yeah, I'm gonna do that to other people now I've decided. [all laugh]

Haeny: [laughs] Well, thank you, Nathan, for leading us in that fun activity. One thing that struck me as you both were doing your intro, and Kate, you talked about the Play Observatory, and how are you we're looking at play and COVID-19. And I think that is probably something that is intriguing everybody. And I think a question that we all get asked a lot is what does play look like, during the pandemic? And so, can you talk a little bit about that project for those in the audience that might not know about it, and what you're seeing as a result of it?

Kate: Yeah, sure. Yeah. So I guess, pandemic or no pandemic we know that play is a really important part of children's lives. And it's a way that they relax and form bonds and fight boredom and explore and express. And it's often dealt with themes of sort of danger and illness really. Our work on looking at archives of play has sort of shown that b-[indistinct], I guess we were interested in what was going to be going on during the pandemic. Like that you say, what is it going to be looking, looking like? So, we've just received funding from the Economic and Social Research Council to start a project that's called the National Observatory of Play, looking at children's play experiences during COVID-19. And what we're going to try and do is collect and share examples of children's play during and following the pandemic, to hopefully kind of provide insights into their experiences at this particular moment. And, I, I try to explain it sometimes like creating a time capsule of play fr-, for the future, and really listening to children's voices, because they've been often overlooked in a lot of the discussions of what's going on at the moment. So we're going to ask for children themselves and adults to, to submit examples of, of the ways that children have been playing both by themselves and with others, indoors and outdoors, on screen and off screen from the outset of the pandemic onwards, and I guess we're particularly interested in ways that play has emerged newly, different forms of play the ways it has adapted, and ways it's changed. So yeah, we're really looking forward to, to getting it up and running.

Haeny: Are there some premonitions or hunches that you might be having right now, as you're thinking about this?

Kate: Well, we've had sort of anecdotes, we've noticed them really all throughout. So right early on, we heard sort of stories of when, before schools were closed, children in school playgrounds, sort of talking about Coronavirus tag, so touching and pretending to infect each other. And then as sort of restrictions were brought in, so as children were encouraged to observe social distancing, we noticed things like shadow tag and helicopter tag and things like that, where the aim was not to touch. And so the kind of adaptation of those games to, to fit these rules. And I think that's always really interesting the way that games sort of get remade and, and remade again in, in these different contexts. And we've been kind of keeping alert as well to different anecdotes. We've had examples of Coronavirus kind of featuring as a theme in children's play. So children putting masks on their teddys, children washing dolls' hands, creating Lego hospitals and those sorts of things. And I think that's really interesting, sort of how does the virus feature in play, and possibly even, I guess, the role of play for keeping a sort of a, a safe distance between things that might be a bit troubling or upsetting or strange at the moment and ways that children are sort of working through that. And so the role of play in children's well-being, too.

John: I think, yeah, I, I, I agree with everything that Kate said, and I, I, I think it's interesting. It's, it feels like it's the third part of a trilogy in some ways, because Andrew Byrne and Jackie Marsh started with the Playground Games Project in a New Media Age with many other people including Rebecca Willett and Chris Richards and Julia Bishop. And that was like the first attempt to sort of get to the taped archives that the Opie's had made in playgrounds during, you know, from the immediate post war period on. Peter and Iona Opie were a couple who collected children's playground games all across the UK, from the end of the Second World War right up through the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s. Peter died and then Iona carried on. And they kind of touched on, they cut, they touch on difficult subjects as well. And there's still the shadow of the war over, over playgrounds. I mean, London was a bomb site, you know. So, children were playing in, in bomb sites and talking about wartime stuff during their, during their play. And as Kate says that that's one of the ways in which children develop resilience when there's a kind of emergency situation around them is that. And, and in playing the archive, we came up against difficult themes as well, sometimes as well. Playing the archive was a project over two years that investigated how the Opie's archive of children's games could be made in, into a kind of contemporary form using technology, but also allow us to get a window on contemporary childhoods as well. So playing the archive was like the second part where, where the idea was to go right to the written and drawn archive, and bring some of that out into the open. And also to think about how new technologies repres- could represent play. And then our part of the project was going in and finding out about contemporary play. So this feels like a natural progression onto that, because now this emergency has kind of descended over everything. It's what is the, what is the impact of that on how children play, and what aspects of play can be positively used to, you know, give- give life back to childhood. Wh-, there's this terrible narrative--Kate and I have been talking about this a lot--that children have lost so much, and, and have lost so much time in education. 'N what we'd like to do is to focus on what have they been doing? What have they been able to achieve? Because children and their families can be very resilient at times like this, and, and make the best of really difficult situations.

Nathan: I wonder how you are, what you're expecting to see or how you're thinking about, you know, the differences of play whenever the circumstances, you know, require that not only children sometimes don't touch, but in some cases, maybe children, you know, are isolated from their friends entirely.

Kate: Yeah. Well, I think, yeah, one of the sort of threads through the other projects really has been, what does play look like in the new media age in the, you know, how are digital technologies, part of children's play, now. And that's something that I think we're gonna see really strongly in this next project. In the, in the play observatory project, because I think for many children, not all, but for many, digital technologies have been a way that they have sustained some of that social play while they're having to be physically distant from one another. So, we've had examples of, of children, you know, anecdotes about children meeting up in things like fortnight and Animal Crossing-

Nathan: Yeah.

Kate: Those sorts of online spaces just to hang out, just to kind of be together, sometimes using something like Zoom at the same time, so that they can sort of physically, so that they can see each other at the same time as being in those avatar-based sort of environments. And then also, I'm really looking forward to discovering ways that children have found to use things like Zoom playfully. So, one little example that I heard was playing with grandparents over Zoom and sort of asking an adult to go and hide the iPad, [Nathan laughs] then they'd have to go and find it; a sort of game of hide and seek. And another example, a friend whose little boy wants, likes to do yoga at the same time as his friend and sort of watch her in the screen in the corner. So I think that's one way that sort of this social play has been sustained at the moment. And I'm interested to sort of find out the extent of it really, and what children children can tell us, cuz I'm sure they've been doing really creative and inventive things to, to get around the restrictions.

John: But that kind of breaks down into sorts of, into all sorts of games with the, the camera and stuff. And I mean you, look at the explosion of interest there was the other day in the, the, the lawyer in Texas who appeared on screen as a cat and you know, [Nathan and Haeny laugh] that that particularly wonderful mournful thing 's, but I'm not a cat. [all laugh] And the judge goes, I know you're not a cat. [all laugh] It's just, there's something really beautiful about that. And there are many, I'm sure, there are many instances of this and all kinds of mistakes, and when things don't work, and children love that, and adults do too. You think about the number of memes that are shared across phones and tablets and you know, screens at the moment amongst adults about stupid things that have gone really wrong. Children are sharing similar stuff, you know, it's, it's playful and interesting.

Nathan: You mentioned the Opies' b- work, and I actually had just been spending a little time with The Lore and the Language of, of School Children. In part to kind of prepare to, to talk with you all. But I was thinking about how play in the 1950s and n' as you mentioned here, has, has really changed quite a lot. And, and one obvious way in which play has changed is that now, play kind of occurs in both these virtual spaces, as well as these physical spaces. And I'm wondering, in,  in your, in your ethnographic work that you've done, you know, prior to this pandemic, as well as maybe even some of the things that you're starting to notice now, how you see the way in which, kind of, play manifests in these different spaces or across these spaces.

John: One of the, the main tropes that I know Andrew Byrne was very keen to, to dispense with was that children don't play anymore. They just play on screens. Well, that's not really the case. But what happens is that their play becomes media inflected, because they draw on that as a rich resource to inform their rhyme-making and storytelling and an imagine, and imaginary play. It filters in, and they remake it much as fandoms do. You know fan, fan fiction writers do that, and they play later and they make up their own stuff. Children do that in the moment in, in an embodied way. I mean, Kate, I d- we had loads of examples didn't we Kate, of things-

Kate: Yeah.

John: -that people did.

Kate: And I think it's interesting that the Opies fa-, faced the same kind of arguments. They, you know, they were told that play was in decline because of radio and television and cinema. And you know, now we're just hearing it in relation to the technologies of today, but when they paid that close attention, and they really asked children themselves, what they were doing, listened, and that documented it kind of so meticulously, it was so rich and vibrant and, and full of life that, you know, I think it's all about how you get to what's going on, and when, w-, how you do that looking and that listening. So yeah, we've, we tried to use I guess, we tried to build on the Opies' legacy in a way, and use some of the tools that are available to us today as researchers to do some of that looking. So, video clips, using audio recorders that the children could use with each other, asking the children to draw and make maps of their space. And, as John says, it was, it was interesting to sort of sometimes see these different influences on their play. Sometimes building on older traditions and the sort of folklore of the playground, but then you would get a reference to the iPhone in there, or SpongeBob Squarepants, or something else, and it would just sort of be this wonderful, like tapestry of their different influences and meanings made into, into one play text, if you want to call it that.

Nathan: I love that I, I, I often have noticed my son who, who not terribly surprisingly, got very into video games, because his dad was always playing a lot of video games. And, and, you know, he used to play this game, LittleBigPlanet. And he would often, when he wasn't allowed to play the game, he would often use his blocks or, or various kind of toys in the house to build levels that he was imagining in LittleBigPlanet. And then, when he wasn't playing with the blocks, maybe he'd sort of be walking through the house and like jumping on things and trying to dodge things kind of in his mind. And, it was always striking to me to see the way in which these kind of virtual worlds and these, and the, and the physical world was so porous, and the ways in which ideas easily crossed between the two. And, and even, you know, in, in a game like LittleBigPlanet, where you can make levels in the game itself, you know, he would take ideas from his, his life outside of the game world and try to bring 'em into the game space. And I think that's a really, you know, under, under appreciated thing about the way in which children play with, with digital media as well.

Kate: Yeah, and I think in children's lives, they're not separate. Maybe we're a bit too quick as adults to say that's online; that's offline; that's on screen; that's off screen. And maybe now, especially with the kinds of technologies that they're engaging with, and that sort of, yeah, the blended-ness of it, that actually, maybe that for them in their life worlds, they are more, more closely intertwined.

Haeny: You know, I like the idea, Kate, how you framed that as, it's not necessarily these separate spaces, you know, not even just online, offline. But these three separate storylines that we think are three different things that just kind of merge together and blend for young children really seamlessly, I think is such a fascinating thing. And I, I don't know if it was, John, if you brought it up at the beginning, but, I think we just forget what it's like to play that creatively, because we're adults, and we lose that. [laughs] And you almost have to retrain yourself to find that sophistication sometimes.

John: Yeah, I think one of the thing that character, one of the things that we, we should mention that characterizes our work is using children to inform us directly. So we've, we've been very, very interested in that aspect of our, of our research and more so in Playing the Archive really, in a way, because we created teams of children who would be interested in helping us to find out more, because children talk to children differently. You know, Haeny, some of our things are not directly observed by us, but by children and then relayed to us.

Haeny: Umhmm. Yeah.

John: Because you can't, it's really hard moment to moment to unlock everything that's going on. And sometimes it's nice to invite, like a kind of director's commentary, on, on, on what's happened if you've managed to record it, sit down with the children, watch it back and have a kind of director's commentary on what they think is going on. They might not know either, of course, but they might be able to tell you, and then you get a different, a totally different perspective. And so we've had lots of things from them, interviewing them, interviewing each other, interviewing them after they've interviewed each other, collecting drawings, [Haeny: mmhmm] talking about the drawings that they've made, and really trying to make it a participant co-production of the research.

Kate: Something we're trying to do in the Play Observatory project, too, is to actually invite children's own examples, you know, from them as much as is possible when it's in a, an online upload system. And not always rema- relying on the, the accounts of adults. We're interested in those too, but it, we're sort of thinking about how we can get to children's voices at this time, through entirely online methods.

Haeny: Yeah, it's kind of like Catherine Riesman talks about these narrative threads, and how you have to pick up all these narrative threads that go from here to there and everywhere. [laughs] And unless you're looking forward and piecing them together, it's almost like our job to do that, right? It's not their job to teach us what they're doing or to tell us, but it's kind of our job to pick up those narrative threads.

John: True and, and, and you, you tend to have a model, don't you? You have a model in your head of what it might be like, and sometimes that's based on what you played, or, or your children played. And so you approach the setting in a, in a particular way. So it is, it is good to try to other it slightly by getting children to find out for you, as well, so that you don't make assumptions about why somebody is going to a partic-, particular corner of the playground and looking at a particular mark on the ground, what are they doing? Oh, I think they're looking at this, or ask the friend who's with them. So tell me about that play, and then listen to how they've constructed what it is that- that's a treasure, it's a place where some treasure's buried or something. You know, you, you unlock it that way.

Haeny: One thing that I've been thinking about lately, and this is with a grad student that I have, where we're talking about the relationship between play and our own cultural memories, especially those of us who have, you know, who are in the United States who haven't always been there, right, who have a different kind of cultural background and ways of playing and knowing that might be very different, right, from what our peers might have experienced. And so one of the things that we've been thinking about is just our own memories, not necessarily because they're accurate, [laughs] because they, like you said, inform and shape the lens in which we look at play. And so I just kind of wanted to take one step backwards a little bit and just have you talk about, you know, since we're talking a lot about archives, if you had to construct an archive of objects, like, I don't know how I phrased it, I think it's from one of your colleagues right, the box of delights, right? What would have been, what would be in this box of delights, when you think about your own childhood, like, what would be the artifacts that are in there?

Kate: So I put my mom under strict, strict instructions not to throw anything away from my childhoood [laughs], so her, her attic at home is, is pretty much a box of my childhood delights. It's full of all the, the toys and things that I love. But, I guess one of the most meaningful ones is, is some little dolls that were made for me by my grandmother. So we, when I was growing up, she lived at the other end of the country. And I didn't s-, get to see her that often. But when I did get to see her, she would tell these amazing stories about a little boy and fairies and witches and all that sort of thing. And then when we weren't together, she would send post letters with these stories in and, and she, she was a great maker as well. She made little dolls that were sort of about like, I guess child's hand size. And they were out of pipe cleaners and beads and bits of fabric and stuff. And I just, I loved them, and I still love them. And when I look at them now, you know, they, they brought me closer to her then, when I was young and far away and now over the time as well it sort of is a, is a nice connection across, across the years back to her. So that was, that's probably one of the more meaningful ones alongside all of the Polly Pockets and Sylvanian Families [laughs] and things like that.

John: A, a very, very strong childhood memory for me is, is a box rather than anything in a box. And I can explain it this way. Our house was the end house on a row on a terrace in London. And over the fence were cardboard boxes and various detritus from old TVs and radios and so on, because there was a TV repair shop just behind our house on the main road. And so what my friends and I, and my, some, later my sister did, was we used to climb over the fen-, up the tree over the fence and jump down and throw these boxes back into the back garden. And we'd build like entire streets worth of houses out of these boxes. And we'd take the polystyrene packaging from 'round TVs and stuff and make, literally make bookshelves inside the houses. And we'd cut out windows and put the cellophane up in the win-; we'd make like just hou-, and they were quite ephemeral, because we'd smash them down later on and make another one the next day. But we had them up for ages. I mean my parents were just, what are you doing? It's just rubbish. But to us it was like houses that we lived next door to each other in these houses. So we'd run out to play, and then go and climb into these boxes, and they'd be like our houses, and we'd have door numbers on them and everything. So I think those, those boxes are really strong memories to me.

Nathan: We did the same thing. We didn't have boxes but I remember distinctly there being kind of a, some sort of a dumping ground. It wasn't a full on junkyard, but, you know, people who were dumping old, old wooden pallets and things like that and old, you know cars and things in this area behind my house. And when we found it, it was similar; it was just like, oh my god, this is a whole world for us. We can start creating our own little houses, our own shelters. And you know, I'm surprised none of us got tetanus from it but, [Haeny and Kate laugh] it sure was a good time. [Nathan laughs]

John: There's a movement called the Loose Parts Play Movement where kind of often rubbish, safe rubbish, not dirty stuff. But like old boxes and things are left for children to play at playtime in, and we watched a, a cardboard box be kind of a train, and then,  then a car, and then a robot, and then pulled apart and be a picnic table all within the space of about 10 minutes. And but different children playing with this box and turning it into different things over a period of about 10 minutes. And it was fascinating.

Haeny: Yeah. I mean, yeah, I think the thing about cardboard boxes is it will always be in fashion. Throughout of time. [Nathan laughs]  And so that's, I mean, that's a really interesting thing to hold on to. To kind of go off the archives, is there something- Is there something that you've collected over the past few years that has resonated with you still or that you're still kind of thinking about? I mean, I think back to my own research and how there are definitely moments in the last 10 years where I've been still stuck on something that I've collected, right, whether it's a drawing, whether it's a piece of writing, whether it's a little transcript. So, is there something that has remained with you that you're still kind of thinking about? And, or something that has surprised you as you've collected children's play in these archives?

Kate: Yeah, I mean, we collected so such a lot of data. So it's one of, one thing is that, I just love to go back and look again, and look closely and listen to the different voices in there, maybe. And one thing that we did that, I still sort of think there's potential there, was we work with a colleague called Valerio Signorelli at the Center for Advanced Spatial Analysis. And he helped us to work with fixed position video cameras looking down onto a playground, and then wrote a script that helped to develop int- into a kind of heat map. So you could see over time, sort of like the intensity of action in particular places, and I think that's a, I don't know I think there's loads of potential there for sort of seeing a playground differently, and taking a step back and seeing, you know, using that to just pay attention and, and look in a slightly different way. But we didn't really sort of incorporate that into our analysis. I think we would also have to maybe use kind of on the ground field work, to kind of, to give us a close up lens, and then to come to [indistinct] put it together with that. So that's something that I think maybe there's a bit more scope for exploring in a different project or another lifetime. [laughs]

John: I think one thing that sticks in my mind is that when I went back to the school, you mentioned, Haeny, earlier about different cultures and having different backgrounds. And when I taught there, there was something like 28 different languages in the school, proper inner city, urban school, and many cultures in the classroom. One of the dominant cultures was probably about 30, 40% of the school came from families of Bangladeshi origin, and specifically Sylhet in, in the center of Bangladesh, where they had a ser-, you know, all kinds of different games going on. And they were filtered through a kind of London-Sylhet, that's a, a definite phenomenon, I'm sure you have this in New York City as well, where immigrant communities that have been in the S-, in the States for a long time, have developed a kind of language and, and a way of being that is, is a hybrid culture, like a, that Bauman thing of having a liquid identity, where you have really important things from, from a different culture, meeting another culture, and they make something beautiful and new, which is really genuinely just different. And the London Sylheti language is very much like that. And some of the games that they brought into the playground, they would play, and they would have echoes of kind of older, Anglicised games. But there was one in particular that the ch-, the girls used to play a lot when I was at the school. And it was called something like (fulgurti), which was a catch game involving stones, and they throw the stone up and catch it and then do some do some fantastic movement with your hand. And I was really, I came across that piece of data again the other night, Kate, where I was looking back. And it was just so interesting to see how she was talking about I can't do this, but my mom could do this really well. And she was kind of frustrated that she had forgotten how to do it. And she was describing it, but it was a really interesting moment. And it is something that the Opies did not particularly capture, because of the times, I guess, but it is something that we're acutely aware of which needs to, we keep needing to go back to, to look at kind of intercultural, transcultural games and play and the influences of, of one thing or another, because children from kind of more indigenous groups in the school would look at these games in wonder and learn them as well. And they'd play them all together. But they definitely came from a, a different direction of culture, and then inflected it in the same way that media does. It's like another laminate. But I'd l-, I'd love to look more closely at that, at that stuff. That would be so interesting, and I think children would love to be able to talk about it, and maybe talk to their parents about it. Kate isn't something that we wished that we'd had a bit more of in Playing the Archive.

Kate: Yeah, we sort of, we wondered about the idea of sending home like voice recorders, so that the children could interview their parents about their play.

John: So I think if we'd had a longer time frame, we'd be able to do sort of a really nice longitudinal ethnography of, of the whole thing over a year or two; would be fantastic to do that.

Haeny: I mean, I think that's such a great point. Cuz I think about how even children's pop culture is sometimes undecipherable to me, and how I don't understand something that's happening until many, maybe even years later, when I actually investigate it and do sort of like a deep dive to that. And I think about all those moments when we are studying, not just children's culture, but children's culture intersected with their other ethnic racial, gendered identities and things that we don't understand about that in the moment that we might come to understand later.

Nathan: On that note about pop culture, thank you both for hanging out with us to talk a little bit about your research and about the really exciting things that you're, you're doing around play and trying to understand the different ways in which kids play not only in this particular unique time that we're in, but also, you know, kind of throughout time. It's been really fun and really interesting. We do like to find out more about how you play, though, as part of this podcast. And, you know, as Haeny noted, I think pop culture is one, one tool, one sort of venue for us to kind of, even as adults to kind of, to experiment and, and play with different i-, different ideas and different things. So we like to ask at the end of our podcasts, what's poppin? [Kate laughs] For, for you, in your life, we know what's poppin for you? Kate, would you like to, to start out, [Kate laughs] what's something that you, maybe it's a, a TV show or a game or a book or a movie or a magazine? What, what are you, what are you into these days? What's interesting?

Kate: Well, like, like a lot of people I, I tried downloading TikTok at the start of lockdown [Nathan laughs] and definitely lost a [laughing] few hours to that I haven't yet made any videos, th- probably for the best. But, yeah, I've been really kind of interested in that as a medium, I suppose. It's a little bit of a research interest in, just because it is so like fun and absorbing. Yeah, but I've, I've been sort of interested in what's going on there, particularly like the clapping challenges and things like that, that were, that were around a while ago, the dance challenges, things, things like that. And, I like a good meme as well. Enjoying the, lately in the UK, there's been a, a Zoom parish council meeting that, s-, surprisingly, went, went viral. I don't know if it's made over to the States or not, but a sort of very petty local politics, Zoom meeting has been just pastiched in so many different ways. And I think it's, it's really great to see the kind of creativity in the, the, yeah, the way that those sort of just as a sign of the times is getting sent around.

Nathan: [laughs] So, so you have not yet made TikTok videos. Is that, is that what you said?

Kate: I have not, no. And I think that's probably the best, although actually, I think it also, it's probably beyond me. I think the, the skill that you need to edit, to do the soundtrack, to do the, you know, the filters and the everything, I think it, you know, there's, they're not a mean feat, they l-, they make them look easy, but I think they're a really clever little form of, of text and super multimodal, obviously.

John: But for me, it's playing musical instruments quite badly passes the time. I play that like someone that learned the piano. That is not a piano, but I play it like someone that [indistinct], you know, for those that can't see it, it's a guitar.

Nathan: That's a guitar. Yeah. [laughing]

John: And so I, I just play, [Kate laughs] and I just make things up. And I sit here sometimes and switch work off, and then switch the keyboard on and just play. And that for me is fun.

Haeny: Have you been engaging in any YouTube videos or digital lessons?

John: Yeah, I released a charity single at Christmas. I'll send you the link you can donate to the Trussell Trust for food banks in the UK. And it's just a kind of, it's got some nice pedal steel played by an actual musician friend of mine, and co-produced by a, a proper film composer, but I, I wrote it and did it. Yeah. And that, that, that to me is fun. But it's longer than a TikTok video, so you might fall asleep before the end, but that's okay. I do a radio show about every five weeks, every fifth week. For a friend of mine in Australia. It's a small- [laughs] Sorry, this is a long story. [Nathan laughs] It's a small town radio show. And it's called the Lost and Found. So it's, it's for music that passed under the radar. But should be heard. And so he started it and he is a complete, you know, he really knows his stuff. And has got thousands of records and anecdotes and stories. When he needs some time off, I do a show. So I really, really enjoy doing that, putting that together. That is, that's my kind of play. So just sitting out here thinking of links between the pieces of music, and putting together a two hour radio show, and then having it played on Australia and heard by about 10 people. [Nathan laughs]  To me, that's-.

Haeny: You definitely have to put a link to that for us.

John: That's fun. That is fun.

Haeny: What about for you Nathan? What’s poppin’?

Nathan: What’s poppin’ for me. Um, you know for me, you know, I, like, like a lot of people I’ve started watching the show Wanda Vision. If you're like me and you didn’t follow these things when you were younger, you spend a lot of time, you know Googling up all the different possible links and connections to, to, you know, decades of [laughs] stories and comics. And so for me it’s poppin' because, you know, it’s not just watching you know, 20, 30, 40 minutes of a TV show. It’s also the next, you know, two hours that you spend trying to draw all the connections. I'm not quite to the point where I have like a, a board of like, yarn and, you know, pins that I’m trying to, to make connections with [Haeny laughs] between everything yet. But I'm pretty close to that [laughing] and I might be there soon. What about you Haeny what’s poppin’?

Haeny: Yeah we started, well we started watching that too. And then we realized that we don’t know that much about Avengers. Um, this is exactly reminiscent of my Star Wars adventures, too, where I started in the middle and I was like I don’t know what's going on. And then we started over and started watching the Avengers in the s-, in the timeline suggested by the Disney channel. [laughs] And so now we’re getting really into that. Um, so I will use that because the thing that I was going to say was that I also binge-watched Bling Empire. [laughs] Which is the reality version of Crazy Rich Asians. [laughs]

Nathan: [laughing] Okay.

Haeny: And so, it’s just like a mix between the Kardashians and this thing I used to watch called Laguna Beach. [laughing] Which is basically following these friends who live in Orange County. But, it’s basically like all these rich Asian people doing their thing in LA. [laughs] I thought I was going to hate it, and two episodes in I was like, stop watching this, [Nathan and Kate laugh] and then before I knew it the thing was over. [Nathan, Kate and Haeny laugh]

Nathan: Well thank you, thank you both for joining us this week. This has been really, really fun to, to talk to you about your work and, and about your childhood, and about the many different sorts of stories and experiences that you’ve had over the years. This has been a lot of fun. Thank you.

John: Thank you very much.

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Kate: Well thank you, it has been fun.

John: It’s been great. Thank you.

Haeny: Thank you.

Haeny: Thanks to Kate and John for joining us for this week’s episode! And thank you for listening. Before you leave we have a huge announcement! We’re recording a special Pop and Play live episode on April 26th at 11:30am Eastern. Yes, you’ve heard it right. A live episode of Pop and Play. If you’d like to ask us questions about play, want to find out about our current obsessions, including what video game(s) continue to make Nathan cry and “get in his feelings” or just want to hang out and laugh with us, go to tc.edu/popandplay for more information. This episode was edited by Lucius Von Joo and Joe Riina-Ferrie. 

Nathan: Pop and Play is produced by Haeny Yoon, Lalitha Vasudevan, Joe Riina-Ferrie and myself, Nathan Holbert, at Teachers College, Columbia University with the Digital Futures Institute. For a transcript and to learn more, visit tc.edu/popandplay. Our music is selections from Leafeaters by Podington Bear, used here under a creative commons attribution non-commercial license. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next time!   

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