Playful introduction 11.2

Abstract

We begin with an ovation, a tribute to DavidWhitebread’s research career as collected by Marisol Basilio, Deborah Pino-Pasternak, and Dave Neale. Professor Whitebread was the inaugural director of PEDAL, The Play in Education, Development, and Learning Centre at the University of Cambridge. The editors hope we honor Professor Whitebread’s memory here. Pat Rumbaugh, co-founder of Let’s Play America, writes of her own playful memories and the thrill of riding bikes in our regular Playful Memories & Reflections column. If we ride forward, we move to Lee Martin and Ciara Thomas Murphy’s study of tinkering through distance learning during COVID, and then to Jane Cooper, Mong-lin Yu, Ted Brown and Linda MacKay on school based filial therapy. These two subjects are very much on many peoples’minds: How do we help children globally heal from the isolation of COVID directly through therapeutic programs? How do we help indirectly through advocacy for tinkering and free play? Or is it that therapeutic programs are the indirect forms of assistance and free play the direct one? Riding backwards, turning to developmental time we have two articles on play and early childhood. Daniela Aldoney, Soledad Coo, Andrea Mira, and Josefina Valdivia write of parents’ perceptions of Chilean preschools. Pavla Boulton and Amanda Thomas examine outdoor play and schema development among young children in the United Kingdom. The International Journal of Play is committed to studying play as microcosm and macrocosm and we turn from descriptive study to policy. Edward B. Olsen, Emi Tsuda, James D. Wyant, Zach Gerken, Ian Capp, Gabriella Smith and Nestor Conforti combine efforts to bring us ‘Senate bill 847: The implementation of New Jersey’s recess law in public elementary schools.’ In our field, to do play research is a political act on behalf of all children. Ashli Venokur offers an additional pirate themed play memory. Perhaps memory itself is an act of piracy, and play is part of our human effort to create interesting memories. With all that is going on in the world, Ashli Venokur reminds us we are all in the same boat. Elizabeth Tucker brings us a book worth rereading, Marjatta Kalliala’s Play Culture in a Changing World. New books editor Sylwyn Guilbaud shares Rick Worch’s review of Reflective Playwork: For All Who Work with Children by Jacky Kilvington and Ali Wood, and Tim Gill reviews Rae Bridgman’s and Lauren Sheedy’s Urban Playground: How Child-friendly Planning and Design Can Save Cities. It doesn’t get more hopeful than that.