Dr Ludmila Elkoninova - International Council for Children's Play

FULL CYCLE OF DEVELOPMENT
OF SOCIO-DRAMATIC PLAY
L.Elkoninova
Instutute of psychological problems of childhood
Moscow,Russia
milaelk@gmail.com

Introduction
The issue of how a socio-dramatic play originates,
“flourishes” and then “wraps up” into a resource of further
development of a child requires fundamental theoretical
research. At the same time, a competent answer to this
question may help to informally tie the theory and the
practice, and to solve practical tasks in a meaningful way.
This question will be answered here in the
frameworks of the L.S.Vygotsky’s Cultural-historical theory
and Activity theory. In accordance with them, internal mental
processes can be “read out” by the qualitative changes of
the mode of action. Mental development is a transition from
natural (impulsive) action towards the action built on the
new cultural form thanks to which the action becomes
intended and conscious. Description of this qualitative
transformation is the fixation of development.
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The definition of a play in general: a free activity, during
which ideal subjects are being tested (examined) – meanings
of activities, internal states and modes of acting. The aim of
such testing activity is to get oriented in the object matter and
within yourself, discovering your own possibilities, uncovering
of yourself. Self-revelation in a play is performed due to the
fact that the person is indeed open to the world of the
potential, the world of the possible. That’s exactly why a play
is unfolded in the form of performance (enactment,
expressive representation) of certain situations, meanings,
states, actions, or in a form of a competition. The situation of
a play is safe, since the person acts within it conventionally
(“as if”, in the trial regime), however the achieved experience
is real and unconditional, because it has been felt and lived
through during the play. A play trial, in distinction from a
practice exercise, should have cultural form.
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1.Setting Stage of Socio-Dramatic Play at Early
Age (approximately from 1 to 3 years old)
1.1.Meanings, relationships are ideal objects (love, courage) and that’s why
dealing with them differs drastically from the way of dealing with real
objects – tools (a spoon, a hummer). Before a child can discover, feel
and hold in a play the sense of action (relationships of people), he
should to act intentionally on conditional level, i.e. keep in mind
simultaneously the real and the imaginary meanings. At the early age he
is learning to act ‘as if’ – first in relation to objects (a little stick – as a
substitution for a spoon), and then in relation to a role play (I am cooking
dinner like my mummy). A socio-dramatic play cannot achieve its apex
without such preparatory skills. I believe this is exactly what
L.S.Vygotsky meant when he wrote about the Imaginary Situation
(divergence of the perceptible and semantic fields) as a basis to the preschool
children’s plays.
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1.2.The difficulty is that for a child, a word
(image, perception) is merged with the actual
object it defines. That’s why the child’s play is an
Ernstspiel until he/she separates his/her
perceptions from reality, until he/she feels and
identifies them as images, fiction. The child’s
main achievements at the early age – such as
walking, talking and object-related actions –
help him/her to separate a real action from a
“make-belief” action, and spontaneously build
an imaginary action.
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1.3.Any new experience, including appearance of an image, is always
connected with a bodily sensation. When a child starts to walk, not just a
broad visual space opens up in front of him, but he feels it tonic-kinetically,
he feels the “there” and the “here” with his body. Image at this age is an
action in the visual-body field which is felt by a body. Grown-ups set up
external boundaries of the child’s activity through prohibitions (can go here
– cannot go there). With the appearance of external boundaries, there also
appears a ‘reaction’ to a prohibition – an intended breach of the prohibition
by the child. This is not a whim, but the only possibility to establish, feel the
internal boundaries of an act. It doesn’t come easy with a child: he is
attracted by anything that his eye can catch, however he gradually learns to
separate himself from the outer world. The perception of his own action first
happens in motion. The ‘own/alien’ boundary (external/internal) is felt by a
child on bodily level – well known is the struggle over own space in a
sandpit, children’s “proprietary” mood (this is mine; I’m not giving it back). At
the age of approximately 2,5 years a child starts to realize that it is exactly
he, who is acting: words ‘I myself’ start to appear in his speech.
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1.4. At this age adults already ask the child, what
he/she wants, give him/her an opportunity to take
own decision what he/she will or will not do. Thus,
he/she learns to refer as his/her not only things, but
also wishes; to feel and to show personal initiative,
which in the future, in development of sociodramatic
play, will become a special subject of the
child’s attention.
Children are read literary books, and they receive
experience of participating in imaginary, fictional life,
although the fairy-tale events are being lived though
by the child as real.
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1.5. Separation of a word from a real object also happens
through object-related actions comprehensible for a child of
this age: a child quickly realizes that a ‘cake’ which he/she
has made out of sand is in fact inedible – and this difference
is once again felt bodily by tasting the cake. The child can
already make jokes, and thus loosens the merge of the word
and the object.
Eventually, at the early age there appears a toy per
se: a child is given to know that one doesn’t play with a bed
pan like with a doll or a toy car. At the end of this age range
a child is able to perform a story with a sequence of
consecutive actions, but this is still not the type of a play,
where he/she intentionally explores and discovers human
relation. This type of a play is the next stage of
development.
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2. “Ideal” Socio-Dramatic Play
2.1 What is the criterion that an outside observer can use to
responsibly define a moment when a child is developing in a
play? In fact, actions in a play are conditional and abridged,
they are not always accompanied by the word, the meaning of
gestures is clear only from the ‘inside’ of the play, children are
all the time distracted from the initial plot and change the
assumed roles many times. At the same time, for the child
involved in the play, the meaning of the play action is
unconditional and real (in a play, everything is conditional but
the meaning). How and with which “sensor” does he/she feel
the meaning (purpose) and by which means an outside
observer watching the child’s play can “point a finger” at that
meaning?
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2.2. According to L.S.Vygotsky, patterns of behavior
are prescribed in culture, and therefore there is a
prototype of an “ideal” playing plot, within which the
meaningful side of the action has been prescribed in
a comprehensive for the preschoolers form. This
cultural plot is the ‘bearer’ of a certain general mode
of building a socio-dramatic play, by which a child is
testing and experiencing the meaning of the action.
Studies have shown that it’s a fairy-tale, in which
patterns of taking initiative are specified, or, in other
words, active decision taking. It is exactly initiative
taking that is being tested by a child in a sociodramatic
play.
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2.3. The form (structure) of an ideal playing plot,
where the meaning of an action is highlighted,
consists of two parts, or steps. The first step of a
play plot consists of a sequence of playing
actions with which a child creates the situation
of expectation of some sort of a role action,
creates circumstances containing a question
towards characters in the play. This sequence of
actions has a symbolic meaning of triggering
role action. The second step is a sequence of
role actions, symbolic meaning of which is the
response to this challenge.
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2.4. Therefore, the question by which sensors and
how a child feels human relations we can answer as
follows: if in a playing plot he/she is trying to create
two steps – the one of a challenge and the one of
the reaction to the challenge, then his/her focus of
attention is the meaning of action. This is exactly the
trial of relationships, i.e. the moment of the child’s
development within play. Besides the two steps, the
full form of play has the following characteristics:
1. every step has its own time and space
characteristics;
2. the child connects the two steps at his/her will,
constructs a 'bridge' between them;
3. finally, there is a conflict, a collision in the play.
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2.5. The concept of a two-steps form of a play
helps dividing children’s plays into three groups:
plays with a full two-steps form; plays with a
reduced form (children play out just one part/step,
and the other one they only keep in mind); and
poorly structured plays. Development is
associated only with two-step play, in the other
plays the two-step structure is reduced, and these
plays are associated not with development, but
with functional pleasure. The unit of a play is not
one role, but the relationship of two roles: the
challenging one and the answering one.
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2.6. The sensual material of the play is an initial,
spontaneous emotional state caused by some event,
something that caught the child's attention, impressed
him/her, provoked his/her reaction. The experienced
event affects the child existentially, necessarily
touches upon the consciousness of his life. The child
takes such an event more or less emotionally, more or
less distinctively, but the significant thing is that the
child does not understand its meaning. It can be, for
instance, the feeling of solitude when the child is sent
to nursery school, fear, envy, and grievance. The word
combination “assignment of meaning” pushes towards
understanding of a play as a process of finding out the
ready-made, but not exactly clears where lying
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meaning. This is not so.

2.7. By giving the sensual material a two-steps form, a child
generates the meaning, he/she creates it. The meaning as an
object exists only when it is being lived through. By playing, a
child objectifies his/her inner world, makes it representable –
he/she shapes it as a plot, turns it into a story with events.
He/she constructs a situation, in which a natural experience has
occurred – since if one cannot feel it, then there is nothing to
shape, there is nothing to overcome. He/she creates a space
where the collision has happened, evokes the conflict anew,
acts with it upon him/herself (challenge), and tries to respond to
his/her feeling with an action, to find release to his/her feeling
(catharsis). This doesn’t happen easy with a child. The child
tries ‘successfulness’ of a conflict-resolving action through
repetitions, with the help of which successfulness of an action is
being felt again and again, and it is tested. Two-step form of a
play is a functional organ, with the help of which the
meaning is being lived through and generated.
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2.8. This is difficult because of two reasons.
First, a child needs to find him/herself an action
suited for the first and/or second step; to create the
plot, fulfill gaps in it. This moment explains
unpredictability and creativity of a play. The
connection between the challenge and the response
is culturally defined in the structure of the ‘text of a
play’ – the semantic fields.
Secondly, it’s because the emotional material itself
maintains resistance. This is the main internal
reason why it is not easy for children to create a plot
for two-step plays.
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2.9.
A child him/herself builds his/her playing space, which has
external geography: he/she generates two (or more) fields
opposite by meaning within it (semantic spaces, the own
and the alien) and the borderline between them, and as
well role action, which crosses and binds these spaces (i.e.
this action has its own chronotope).
By building a challenge and the response, a child
correlates intention and implementation: he/she corrects
the intention, if implementation on the challenge doesn’t
work out, or he/she changes playing actions of the
response to the challenge. One can observe separation of
the intention from action implementation when children
about 5 years old select a topic for the play before it is
started (“let’s play hospital”) and their roles (“I am a
doctor”).
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3. Socio-Dramatic Play as a Resource
3.1.Study of the impact of socio-dramatic play on
the mental development is difficult since it is built
into the whole life of a child, and an artificial
scientific experiment could distort the real picture.
This is the reason why the developmental function
of play has not been explored sufficiently.
We find it important to highlight not the didactical
possibilities of play but what happens to child’s
action thanks to socio-dramatic play.
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3.2. Only in socio-dramatic play, child’s attention is
for the first time centered on intention (purpose),
desire; it is marked by the child as a separate
reality. This qualitative change of action is
connected with the form of action – it is for the
child him/herself divided into two components:
intention and implementation. The child
spontaneously and according to his/her owns will
learn how to coordinate these components,
moving back-and-forth between them. Plays with a
long sequence of consecutive events encourage
appearance of a program of implementation of
action.
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3.3. Coordination of intention and implementation in a
play encourages appearance of positional
(decentered) action which may appear already in
late pre-school age, for instance, in a puppet theater
performed by the children themselves. Transition from
playing action towards scenic action may occur in it.
The essence of positional nature of scenic action is
retention by the child of two things simultaneously:
not only the mode of unfolding the performance, but
also the reaction of the spectator.
The experience of referring the intention and the
action implementation program serves as a foundation
for the task-oriented form of the child’s work at
school, for example, at solving math problems, writing
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compositions or at creative activity (drawing etc).

Conclusions
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THANK YOU
FOR ATTENTION!
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