Realising the ‘right to play’ in the special school playground

ABSTRACT

In this paper I mobilise a multimodal ethnographic data fragment depicting a moment of play in a UK ‘special school' playground to unpack the challenges of realising the ‘right to play' (Article 31, UN Convention on the Rights of the Child) in a non-inclusive play space. I show that play (im)possibilities were delineated by the physical boundaries of the playground, the absence of non-disabled peers and a lack of symbol-based resources to support playful meaning-making. Nevertheless, the children execute a short play event through multimodal embodied communication encompassing pleasure, frustration, invitations, rejections, acceptances, and negotiations over resources. I argue that this brief play event instantiates broader debates around the ‘right to play': specifically, to what extent this right can be realised in a non-inclusive playground, whether autistic children require play ‘training’, and how diverse forms of play can be scaffolded by staff in the absence of non-disabled children.

KEYWORDS:

• Play
• autism
• disability
• inclusion
• segregation

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Professor Carrie Paechter and Dr Andrew Clapham (both of Nottingham Trent University) for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Dr Lauran Doak is a Lecturer in Special & Inclusive Education at Nottingham Institute of Education, Nottingham Trent University, UK. Her research centres on children with learning disabilities and/or autism, specifically the multimodal communication of minimally verbal children.