Trauma, Imagination, and Child-Governed Rules at Play

Vygotsky makes it clear that imagination and play are inextricably intertwined.  “…elements of imaginary situations will involuntarily be included in the affective nature of

play itself.” (p.5). This made me think of my earlier explorations and questions about the ways in which experiences of trauma affect the imagination, as imagination is an extension of previous experiences. 

I find it interesting to think about how trauma’s impact on the imagination manifests itself in young children at play.  Vygotsky alluded to this very briefly early on in the article when he mentioned the child suffering from acute inferiority complex, but I think there is much more to explore in this vein of play and the imagination. 

I have been doing a literature review of play, as it relates to my general interests (I’m in the early stages), and have found that Vygotsky’s supposition that “it seems…that one can go even further and propose that there is no such thing as play without rules and the child’s particular attitude toward them” is now unanimously agreed upon by scholars of play.  Across the literature you find a general agreement that within play, there is a dynamic set of rules that are typically child-governed.  Vygotsky goes on later in the article to point out “a child learns to behave according to certain rules from the first few months of life.”  If we accept this claim and those we’ve read earlier in the semester regarding a child’s cognitive development being a product of their previous experiences, then it seems to me that the anti-social behaviors that manifest in classrooms are simply a product of the child’s past experiences and their understanding of the rules of interpersonal behavior.  And, that in preschool and early school settings, the children who struggle with healthy forms of play, socialization, collaboration, and self-regulation, struggle due in some part to either learning an established set of rules outside of school that don’t align with the expectations or school settings, some sort of trauma that affects how their imagination functions in context with others, or both. Their behavior in play, when they are free (aside from the rules they themselves collaboratively establish) in context with the imagined situation or scenario, is simply a manifestation of their earlier life experiences. For as Vygotsky points out, “play is more nearly recollection than imagination – that is, it is more memory in action than a novel imaginary situation.”  It is interesting to think about how and why certain behaviors manifest in play.  For not only do I think past experiences would affect the way children collaborate and inter-socially engage with others and behave individually (this part seems kind of obvious), but they would also manifest in the rules of play that the child themselves establish.

            It is interesting then to consider the interchange that happens between children at play, and how that modifies both their pre-existing understanding of appropriate behavior (whatever that is) and the second aspect of their moral development that Piaget contends develops through collaboration with others.  I wonder also if collaboration with their peers or with adults would be a more effective modifier.  I wonder still if there are certain domains of the second aspect of their moral development that are more impacted by collaboration with their peers while others are more impacted by collaboration or the general influence of adults.

           

P.S. I think if Vygotsky had spent more time in preschool classrooms he would retract his claim that children under 3 are incapable of “play with an imaginary situation.”