Chapter III School Power, Children's Play, and the Timing of Recess Violence

Anna Richman Beresin

There is a growing literature that examines the controlling aspects of schooling as a framework for studying children inside the classroom in a Foucauldian sense (Ball 1990; Bourdieu and Passerson 1990; Devine 1996).

Violent episodes were indeed visible, and almost predictable, but rarely at the time of play. The playtime was instead filled with peer-led activities such as jump rope, hop­scotch, handball, and basketball. Actual violence could be found in the transition back to the classroom when the bell rang indicating the end of recess. This can be contrasted to the mock-violent play, also known in the literature as “rough-and-tumble,” exhibiting a very different dynamic than actual violence. If one can demonstrate that the adult- constructed transition back to the classroom brought on actual violent interaction, and not the play period itself, then it raises some important questions about policies that limit or eliminate play.

Daily fieldwork was carried out during the fifteen-minute break known as morning recess, which lasted from 10:30 AM to 10:45 AM. Extensive observation was also done in classrooms, in the lunchroom, in the gymnasium, in the hallways, at school wide events, and in the neighborhood at large. Of the 300 students at play on the playground, 104 third, fourth, and fifth grade boys and girls were the focus. Forty-seven served as na­tive experts, and gave their own commentary as they watched themselves at play on videotape. Video footage allowed for repeatable analysis, and was encoded with a run­ning clock so as to render comparable visually recorded information with audiotaped sound and field notes. In order to examine the interact ional patterns of both play and vio­lence over time, two video cameras were set up, one from the second floor window fac­ing the school yard, and another eventually set up on a roving tripod with the author on the playground itself.

The children knew the author was studying recess and were eager to offer their in­sights and considerable expertise on the subject. No footage of actual violence was shown directly to either children or staff in order to make clear that the ethnography was not intended to get any person in trouble. Footage of general interaction, play, and games were shown to children in single-gender, small groups, and separately to staff. Recess was described by one fourth-grade boy leader as a time for “playin’ and fightin’.” The question was, how were they distinguishable, and in what contexts did playing, fighting, and play-fighting emerge.

The timing of actual fighting was clear to the children. The fourth grade girls talked of the difficulty of ending their play, and of the frequency of fights while lining up to go back to class. That was their time to “slap someone upside the head” or to try to run away (a practice officially prohibited by the staff during lining-up time).

Not unlike transitions in rites of passage, the procession back to the building was filled with tension (Turner 1982).

—Some people run, and then most people just hang out and keep doing what they’re doing.

—Yup.

—No.

ARB: Is it hard to come in, or are you glad to come in?

—I don’t want to come in (pause).

—I think going in is the worst part of school. —Yes it is.

Mock-violent play has been studied most extensively and most usefully by animal ethologists such as Karl Groos (1976/1901), Robert Fagen (1975) and Owen Aldis (1975) and by scholars of face-to-face communication such as Erving Goffman (1963) and Adam Kendon (1990). The primary distinction in mock-violent play, among both al- lo-animals and humans is in the presentation of the face and the small meta- communicative messages that tell the players that this action is jest, and not to be taken seriously. The clearest distinction between mock-violent and real violent interaction is said to be that when mammals play mock-violently, they tend to stay together after the bout is over, and that their faces are in part visible to each other. In real violent interac­tions, the actors separate, if they are permitted to do so (Boulton and Smith 1989; Pelle­grini 1994). At the end of recess, this is especially difficult to do, as the adults are direct­ing the students to stop playing and get in line. Conner (1989) has cautioned that the labeling of interactions as violent may be subjective and calls for a less rhetorical and more exacting definition of the phenomenon.

Following the children’s cues and the distinctions described by the ethological and human communication literature, the video footage from both the roving camera and the wide angle camera were analyzed for incidents of actual versus mock-violence.

The following is a summary of the roving, up-close camera coding. Attention was paid to whether the actors separated, and to facial cues.

The time of the bell is also recorded below, as it is significant in its relation to the timing of the activity and the violence. The actual time of the bell and the clock on the video camera may not have been synchronous; one of the two clocks might have been fast or slow. The important thing here is the timing of the bell in relation to the activity to

In more than half of the footage with the roving camera, which was focused on the game interaction, images of real fighting appear. And in all of these, with one exception, the fighting occurs within a minute and a half of the ringing of the bell.

The wide-angled footage recorded general traffic patterns, and was coded for blatant violence in the larger play period and the lining-up process as well. Note that some times are recorded with hour, minute, seconds, i.e., 10:44:21, and some are noted with minutes and seconds by a counter, i.e., 25:34, depending upon which wide-angled camera was in use. Again it is the relation of the timing of the action to the bell, and not the absolute time that is significant here.

Here eight out of nine examples showed distinct violence in the lining up procedure, with six out of eight occurring in less than two minutes from the bell.

Several factors are contributing to the escalation of tension and palpable violence at the end of recess. During the games themselves, the children were in charge of their own peer groups, but the ringing of the bell signaled that the peer period was over, and that the teachers and teachers' aides were now in charge. Yet during the five- to ten-minute tran­sition period at the end of recess, teachers were often not yet outside, leaving, quite liter­ally, no one in charge. Secondly, the lining-up formation itself, in this time of leaderless transition, placed students head-behind-head in close proximity, not permitting the usual reading of facial clues to regulate messages of mock and real violence. It is at this point that the teachers emerged and saw chaos, substantiating their claim that when they “see” recess, they “see” violence. But to confuse the part with the whole is to deny children the opportunity to play, an interference likened to the denial of free speech. The violence is then displaced; the punishment is upon the children, who are blamed for the transitional structure of “the worst part of school.” In this light, children's strategies to “keep on play­ing” and to “keep doing what they're doing” reflect a stance not of defiance, but self­imposed structure.

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