Ethnography and Education

ISSN: 1745-7823 (Print) 1745-7831 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/reae20

Mischief-making of one kind/and another:

unruliness and resistance in rural preschoolers'
free play

Sally Campbell Galman

To cite this article: Sally Campbell Galman (2015) Mischief-making of one kind/and another:
unruliness and resistance in rural preschoolers' free play, Ethnography and Education, 10:3,
310-324, DOI: 10.1080/17457823.2015.1050684

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17457823.2015.1050684

Published online: 27 Jul 2015.

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 Ethnography and Education, 2015
Vol. 10, No. 3, 310–324, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17457823.2015.1050684

Mischief-making of one kind/and another: unruliness and resistance in

rural preschoolers’ free play
Sally Campbell Galman*

College of Education, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Amherst, MA, USA

While many contemporary popular cultural discourses in the USA recognise and
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commodify children as distinct persons engaging in the middle-class project of

expressive individuation, much public and early educational policy has simultaneously
intensified the control and regulation of children, children’s culture and children’s
bodies and emotions in early education settings. Prout suggests that late modern
schooling might be characterised by ‘practices directed at greater surveillance, control
and regulation of children’ (304). This ethnographic study of a group of three-, four-
and five-year-old children in a rural New England community preschool setting
explores rural children’s lived experiences resisting control and navigating contradic-
tion through unruly, mischievous games and free play. This unruliness is situated in
the context of escalating academic demands in early childhood education and resistant
rural community culture(s).
Keywords: early childhood; preschool; children’s play; rural children; misbehaviour

As schools undergo radical centralisation and teachers experience workplace intensification

and other effects of the commodification of early childhood readiness, children are
conceptualised as containers for future economic productivity, and utilitarian, rather than
expressive, individuation. Meanwhile, the competing and contradictory discourses of the
child as a nostalgic or expressive project also do little to recognise children’s actual
participation in social life or full personhood. This study suggests that rural schooling
settings, where technological and spatial realities both ‘shrink space’ (Corbett 2009, 2) and
enlarge it as ‘phantasmagoric’ (Giddens 1990, 19), may muffle or deflect some aspects of
these contradictions, and with them some of the disorienting and seemingly rudderless
conditions of late modern schooling. The New Elizabethtown1 Preschool children created
and thrived in liminal spaces, where ‘leaky and viscous’ (Griffiths 2006, 398) political and
individual practices disrupted regimes of control, order and productivity. This was
particularly visible in children’s pretend play. These practices further created opportunities
for destructive as well as generative, resistant ‘unruliness’ (Khanna 2012) for children and
adults alike. While it is important for rural ethnographers to resist the lure of facile
romanticisation of rural schooling and rural spaces, the generative possibilities afforded in
this particular study context were largely borne out by findings.
As Prout (2000) observes that, ‘whilst the effect of [the centralization and intensifica-
tion of late modern schooling] on teachers and parents has been widely discussed, its impact
on children has remained relatively muted in public debate’ (307). Similarly, Stephens

*Email: sally@educ.umass.edu
© 2015 Taylor & Francis
 Ethnography and Education 311

(1995) admonished us to attend to the ‘crucial task [of] developing more powerful
understandings of the child in the structures of modernity’ (14). Further, I sought to
emphasise the child as an agent in claiming and managing bodies and spaces, drawing on
Markström and Halldén’s (2009) call to ‘study what space is given to children and, on the
other hand, how children assume power and make conquests’ (123) and shape the
institutions in which they participate. To that end, the study focused on the everyday
experiences of preschool children as understood through the lens of their games and the
powerful, resistant practices embedded in those games, asking:
(1) How does the classroom and peer culture produced by preschool children resist
control and regulation?
(2) What kinds of spaces, both physical and personal, do children create? What
purposes do these spaces serve?
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(3) What is the role of liminality in preschool? How is it manifested in the study
context?
I chose to work with preschoolers not only because of my interest in capturing the
immediacy of their ‘move outside the family circle into the more public world’ (Davies
2003, 28) but also in their coming together in free play activities which are prolonged and
more common in preschool. Finally, analyses of the preschoolers’ games are situated in
the discordant rural environment in which they, their teachers, parents, and school
function and which informs much of the structure of the spaces in which they do the
‘work of childhood’. This paper begins with a brief discussion of theoretical and other
background material, followed by an overview of ethnographic methods. Vignettes from,
and analyses of, field data conclude the paper.

Background: on mischief and unruliness

In Maurice Sendak’s (1963) picture book, Where the wild things are, a small boy named
Max misbehaves: ‘That night, Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind …
and other. His mother called him ‘WILD THING’ and he said ‘I’LL EAT YOU UP’! at
which point Max is punished by being sent to bed without eating anything at all. As
Sendak draws Max and his world, we see Max become the animal his costume affords
and throw himself headlong into mischief of all kinds, including but not limited to
threatening his mother and the family dog with a fork. It is common a discursive habit to
make animals out of children to explain their naughtiness away and preserve the myth(s)
of childhood innocence and the primacy of as a nostalgic project (Jenkins 1998).
However, just as Max later takes off his wolf suit and resumes good behaviour (and
supper), we are also reassured that children can return from being wild, unruly animals to
being people again, brought to heel or at least taught proper behaviour via adult
regulation. This regulation is often incorrectly assumed to be an absolute good, and that
one cannot have too much of it.
The relationship between childhood, adulthood and mischief is complex and
interrelated. Jones et al. (2010) suggest that children’s ‘naughty’ behaviour is a function
of adult experiences of ‘ontological insecurity’ (177). To wit: ‘certain behaviours on the
part of young people become untenable to [teachers and other adults]’ by making
insecure, even momentarily:
those ways in which ‘the child’ is conceptualized … creating cognitive dissonance and
leaving a severe sense of helplessness where everything that is of comfort in terms of what it
 312 S.C. Galman

means to be a teacher [or other adult], disintegrates … and the ‘clean and proper’ becomes
soiled, and is manifested in/as ‘improper’ children. (p. 177)
To Jones and colleagues, it is in this way that children are produced as ‘improper’ in the
very early grades, constituting a reputation that then follows them in school. It seems fair
to say, then, that the improper child could be an adult construction, adult experience and
adult problem tied to mythologies of childhood innocence and idealised passivity
(Jenkins 1998).
So, it is possible that mischievous behaviours are merely inconvenient for adults, but
very useful for children. While I am very cautious of romanticising or over-interpreting
children’s activity, it is possible that children might employ the practice of mischief in
emergently resistive ways, much like Max put on his wolf suit with intentionality. These
can be small, as Jones and colleagues observed children transforming locations of
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punishment (such as being sent to the ‘naughty seat’) into locations of amusement and
even power: ‘Children found other material items, such as the nearby Velcro name stickers,
with which to distract themselves, and thus changed the discursive status of the act of
“standing by the door” [being punished]’ (181). The child transforms space as a resistance
to mechanisms of ever-tightening adult control, and so also they step outside the place of
the child by ‘having gone against what is customarily sanctioned within early years
education of who the child can “be” … their utterances jar against those boundaries or
framing mechanisms in which we situate children so as to “know” them’ (183). By making
themselves strange in this way, they become terribly powerful, disrupting the mechanisms
by which they are produced as utilitarian containers for economic future productivity, and
demanding that adults engage with them as immediate persons doing the work of being
rather than future persons being produced as becoming (Qvortrup 1994).
Davies’ (2003) work on preschoolers and gender described a similar process at work.
She noted that children were expected to be practicing the work of ‘behaving oneself’, and
that this constant expectation ‘seemed to rob them in some sense of their personhood’ (4).
Many teachers and other adults who are asked why children need to sit still, listen, take
turns or walk quietly in a line often answer that these skills are necessary so that children
can function in society, get good jobs, do well in school and other aphorisms that all point
towards future economic productivity at the cost of current personhood. Children’s
disruption of such futures might be interpreted as an assertion of the value of the current
self, and a question about the regulation of said futures. As Heckert (2013) suggests, the
practice of doing nothing, of play, of meditation or of simply existing constitutes
‘disobedience to the cult of productivity’, economic and otherwise. This resistance,
whether it be in the form of pulling apart the Velcro edges of the ‘naughty chair’ or refusing
to practice behaving oneself for the sake of an externally determined future is a specific kind
of mischief that renders the subject unruly, unpredictable and difficult to regulate.
Such an ‘unruliness’, as per Khanna’s (2012) work on unruly politics, constitutes:
actions which escape, exceed or transgress ‘civil’ forms of civic and democratic engagement
[taking] forms that are juridically illegible, extra-legal, disruptive of the social order, strident
or rude, whether this be in the form of riots or revolts, or through the use of humor,
disruptive aesthetics or eroticism in engagements with power. (Institute for Development
Studies n.d.)
While children may not be actively rioting in the preschool, they are using many of the
tools of unruliness: humour, disruptive aesthetics and all manner of extra-legal subversion
of the unquestioned and deeply entrenched rules and regulation of late modern schooling
(and the obvious contradictions therein). In the contemporary US context, young
 Ethnography and Education 313

children’s bodies, emotions and spaces are subject to ever-more rigid control via
standardisation, accountability measures and the implementation of higher and higher
academic performance expectations for younger children than ever before (Curwood
2007; Graue, Kroger, and Brown 2003; Hatch 2002).
Preschools and Kindergartens of today more and more resemble what adults recall of
their own middle elementary grades. Such academic ‘push down’ is often mandated at the
expense of playtime, teacher recommendation, developmentally appropriate practice and
school and community culture (Shepherd and Smith 1988; Shepard, Graue, and Catto
1989). Escalating academic demands and rapid shifts in control across the grades
promotes a destructive brinkmanship of redshirting,2 retention, standardisation, vouchers,
charter schools, testing regimes, parent triggers, achievement rhetoric and privatisation
propaganda (Cavanagh 2012; McNeil 2013; Taylor 2012). In preschool, such destructive
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jockeying manifests as dissonance: teachers must nurture and advocate for the same
children they must sort, regulate and control, while children must simultaneously engage
in the expressive project of ‘finding themselves’ and asserting identity while also
achieving a utilitarian form of ‘readiness’ for all things and all possible futures. They
must be able to realise the individual project of total freedom from tradition and
convention while also adhering to the structure of school. In short, children have an
ample fodder for disorientation and rebellion.

Ethnographic context and method

New Elizabethtown Community School (NECS) is located in a small, single-round,
PreK-6 school in a rural setting in the Northeastern USA. The preschool serves a
socioeconomically diverse group of children who live in rambling nineteenth-century
farmhouses, trailer homes and a few expensive, modern eco-friendly dwellings clustered
together on steep, winding, narrow dirt roads, most of which are named for either that
road’s ultimate destination (e.g., North Village Road) or the name of the family that once
lived there (e.g., Smith Road). It is not uncommon for the road names to change halfway
to indicate either a new historical family residence or a destination reached. The village
library and municipal building do not have running water or flush toilets, power outages
are common, and there are no retail shops, no streetlights and few stop signs. Without
either zoning or oversight most people raise a surprising array of farm animals on their
properties, and still others hunt the local fauna such that they begin winter with a freezer
full of venison and wild turkey. Whenever a major snowstorm looms, the village police
chief phones every resident to suggest they take steps to ready themselves, often driving
to the homes of the elderly or others who may need extra help. Snow brings the
expectation of a long period of isolation. The village library is located in a converted shed
and when residents forget to return books, fees are usually waived by the understanding
and flexible librarian, who knows where everyone lives, anyway.
Twenty minutes down a steep mountain road lays the comparatively bustling college
town of Oldfield, known to New Elizabethtown residents simply as ‘Town’. New
Elizabethtown is an environment characterised by informality and familiarity by flexible
boundaries and a deep belief in the village’s separateness from ‘town’ and town residents’
byzantine and unfriendly, litigious and stringent practices. If town is characterised as
effete and over-regulated, then village sees itself as hardy and plucky. Residents of
Oldfield, in turn, describe village residents as largely ungoverned, with a penchant for
small-town guerilla politics. One Oldfield resident somewhat jokingly compared New
Elizabethtown residents to the witch-burning mob of early Salem, Massachusetts who
 314 S.C. Galman

isolated and in crisis, rapidly disintegrated into lawlessness, hysteria and murder. While
New Elizabethtown residents are neither irrational nor murderous, they are facing
legitimate crises in the form of unemployment and poverty, dwindling local resources and
threatened municipal consolidation. They are not isolated as much as under-resourced and
pragmatic; as Hessler (2009) and other ethnographers of the rural USA have found, rural
communities tend to look inward for support. Many rely on an intricate community
network that is organic and familial in structure instead of seeking unreliable help from
outside.
This is especially true when it comes to the village school. Residents, parents,
teachers and students alike react poorly to the external regulations imposed by high stakes
testing (many residents pull their children out of school for those weeks) and are fatigued
by the constant threat of their self-sufficient school being forced to merge with the larger
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Oldfield district. Nonetheless, the community does not see itself as small or powerless in
the face of state mandates or the comparatively powerful external legislative machines;
the fluid political tactics practiced in the village have proven highly effective, if not ugly.
For example, during the data collection period, a beloved administrator frustrated
by increasing accountability measures even in his rural area took early retirement.
A competent but uninformed administrator from Oldfield replaced him. This new
administrator began the opening school assembly with a grim lecture on behavioural rules
for the children in attendance. This rural community does not approve of condescending
shows of either judgement or power over its children, especially from an outsider. One
parent said, after the assembly, ‘When [the principal] brought out his rules for sitting
there and not moving I thought, here we go – he thinks our little country kids don’t know
how to act in public’. In contrast, the previous administrator began each assembly with a
community sing. Events like these recurred and the new administrator faced a long period
of ostracism and civil disobedience before finally, frustrated and thoroughly bested by
New Elizabethtown guerilla politics, he resigned. Such moments, as Jorge Larrosa
observed, ‘are the best ways to know the [rules of] a structure … and its “deep grammar”’
(1998, 213; cited in Fischman 2001, 28). In this case, the deep grammar of the New
Elizabethtown community emphasises the distrust of outsiders and structures of
surveillance and control and power in the margins.
At the time of data collection NECS enrolled 126 students in grades PreK-6. The school
cafeteria served locally grown food for breakfast and lunch, many teachers live in the
community they serve, and residents see the school as ‘theirs’ – meaning, it is a place where
children are educated, but it is also a community centre, bad weather shelter and meeting
place. The preschool curriculum can best be described as a child-centred, project approach
with close to two hours of free play exclusive of recess or other outdoor time. Despite the
head teacher’s philosophical preference to the contrary, she was required to use one pre-
packaged character education curriculum purchased and mandated for the entire school.
According to its promotional materials, this ‘Emotional Learning’3 programme provides
social–emotional skills, emotional management, problem-solving, self-regulation, execut-
ive function skills and a boost to early learning. It typically involves a series of moderately
scripted lessons on topics like ‘Paying Attention’, ‘Staying on Task’, ‘Following
Directions’, ‘Identifying Angry Feelings’, ‘Calming Down When I Have Strong Feelings’
and others. The lessons are facilitated with plush hand-puppet role-plays and modelling
self-talk.
The NECS preschool enrolled 13 children between the ages of three and five, nine of
whom were white, two African-American, one Latino and one identified as multi-racial.
Four of the 12 children received free and reduced price lunch, and 1 child was diagnosed
 Ethnography and Education 315

with a significant cognitive disability. Five children identified as male and eight as
female. Most children attended full time, Monday–Friday from 8:30 until 3:30 in the
afternoon. Considering that most rural families opt for family or home-based care for
their preschool aged children (Smith 2006), the fact that nearly all village preschoolers
attended NECS was testament to community ownership and support, as well as its very
low, subsidised fees. The school was open to New Elizabethtown residents only, and the
friendships and familiarities that developed between the children, and between children
and school personnel, are long lasting. It is not uncommon, given the stable nature of the
village population, for children to graduate from sixth grade having known every child in
his or her class since they were three years old. Joya, the head preschool teacher and
Patty, the assistant teacher are both white females and had been working in this
community for the past decade. Joya has been an early childhood practitioner for over
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20 years.

Methods
The analyses presented in this paper are from the first year (2012–2013) of an ongoing
ethnographic project in the New Elizabethtown Community School. The data were
collected primarily though modified participant observation during each morning’s free
play period, approximately four hours per week for an overall total of approximately 130
hours of observation at the site. In addition to free play observation, I also interviewed
teachers, parents and other community members as available, attended class presentations
and community events and engaged in artefact collection and document analyses.
In keeping with recommendations from Davies (2003) I did not use audio or video
recording to capture children’s games. Rather, I had a small notebook in which I recorded
observation notes for immediate transcription. Despite my similarity to a teacher (to the
average young child any adult female in the building could easily be a teacher) I was
cautious to never be involved in mediating children’s disputes or enforcing classroom
rules. While children in the midst of some act of mischief might look at me guiltily, they
came to expect that I would not interfere. This was difficult at times when children would
injure one another or were particularly cruel in excluding other children from games.
As I collected data and transcribed my field notes and catalogued them along with
other artefacts, interview data and my ongoing researcher journal, data analysis was an
ongoing, iterative analytic process. Analysis incorporated some of the qualities of a
grounded theory technique (Strauss and Corbin 1998) and a pre-constructed codebook,
the low-inference codes in which were informed by the study’s conceptual framework
and research questions. While it can be said that most ethnographic researchers combine
both ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ forms of data analysis in their hands-on process, it was
the interplay between these two forms of analysis that I found most useful (LeCompte
and Schensul 1999). Triangulation of findings, keeping a reflexive field journal and
member-checking contributed to maintaining study quality.

Researcher role and representation concerns

I locate my approach to exploring this work in the interpretive tradition of the
ethnography of childhood (D’Amato 1988; Leavitt 1994) that positions children’s culture
and childhood as ‘an independent place with its own folklore, rituals, rules and normative
constraints … within a system that is unfamiliar to [adults] and therefore to be revealed
 316 S.C. Galman

through research’ (James, Jenks, and Prout [1998] 2012, 29). As James and colleagues
describe, this orientation towards children and their culture(s) can affirm children’s
agency, intentionality and ‘provide the tribes of childhood … with the status of social
worlds’ ensuring ‘that such a form of child life can begin to receive detailed annotation’
(29–30). However, it also risks the facile and cute, ‘generating whimsical tales’ rather
than descriptive, meaningful accounts and further [disadvantaging] children with the
researcher’s own adultist, nostalgic projects. James and colleagues further caution the
ethnographer of childhood to avoid allowing one’s understanding of children’s culture to
be used as a mechanism for enhanced control: ‘The ever-looming panopticon’, they write,
‘may explode into fruition once the interior and the ontological become readily
available’ (30).
I attempted to tread cautiously throughout this project, keeping in mind these caveats,
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as well as those presented by my own location as a former classroom teacher, early

educator and parent of three young children. Thorne’s (1993) ‘tugs of memory’ strategy
was particularly useful here, as I used my own, gently ‘tugging’ memories of being a
child to help me both bracket my own interpretation as well as consider multiple
viewpoints, especially those of the children. I was able to gain access to the site because
of previous connections with Joya and my familiarity with her classroom practice, and
that relationship, as well as my experience and stance as an ethnographer may have been
helpful in avoiding a fate similar to that of the Oldfield administrator.
As noted above, I was careful to avoid being classified as a teacher, but in my
interactions with the children I knew I would never be (nor would want to be) a peer. To
attempt to enact the role of a child, even a very large grown-up one, would create obvious
problems of trust and feasibility (Corsaro 2003). As such, observations were not true
‘participant observations’ but were modified by my position. I adopted the strange role of
the ‘researcher’ as a special kind of adult (Graue and Walsh 1998). My notebook was a
site of interest: children frequently asked me what I was writing, and were interested in
also writing things down on small pieces of paper, pretending to be ‘Sally doing
research’. Some older children had questions about what I was doing, and I would answer
that I was interested in children and wanted to learn about the games they play because
children’s games are very important.

Important games
The preschoolers spent roughly two hours of each morning in free play in the designated
play spaces of the classroom: dress-up/dramatic play, the kitchen/home area, block area,
book area, dollhouse area and painting and writing centres. This arrangement would be
highly unusual in ‘academic’ preschools with escalated demands on student performance,
but in an early education environment that emphasises play, this arrangement would be
more standard. Joya and Patty also set up other activities, such as the sand table and
stacking cubes or magnetic tiles. Teachers spent the free play period working on
classroom projects and covertly listening to and watching the children, but never
engaging in play themselves. Intervention was minimal: Joya only became involved in
children’s disputes or sought to quell raucousness if the effects were extremely loud or
disruptive, or if a child said s/he needed help with conflict resolution.
The children organised the free play period as a series of ‘games’ that involved
multiple material sets and multiple spaces, usually repurposed to fit the evolution of the
‘game’. Games were developed, named (e.g., the Kitty Game, Ninja Game, Pirate Game,
Castle Game, Baby Game) and repeated. While there were some activities during free
 Ethnography and Education 317

play that were isolated events, Games were recognisable and followed consistent patterns
and scripts. In the paragraphs that follow I will describe two very common games: the
‘Sleeping Family Game’ and the ‘Gymnastics Game’. In the discussion that follows I
describe how these games are locations for mischief and unruliness.

The Sleeping Family Game

The Sleeping Family Game was among the most frequently played games in preschool.
While anyone could participate in the game, it was primarily attractive to the younger
children (3 and 4 year olds). It had three stages: (1) constructing a hidden place where the
game can occur, (2) furnishing that space with bedding and food and (3) inhabiting that
space.
Just before 9 am, Isaac buoyantly announced, ‘Let’s make a tent’! Interested parties
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gathered around him quickly. Isaac and Martina pulled several large sheets and blankets
from the dramatic play area, where the blankets were intended as tablecloths, and with
help from Isaac, draped them over an upended, similarly repurposed wooden structure
(originally intended to be a rough storefront in the dramatic play area). The tent was
constructed in the place, where the storefront stands – the centre of the classroom – and
was easily visible by teachers and others, so covering it completely was very important.
The space inside the tent was large enough that four or five children could gather within,
but it was difficult for teachers, who are obviously physically larger, to either participate
by entering or by watching the children from the outside. Bonnie and Tucker pulled
pillows and seat cushions from the window seats in the book area and pushed them into
the tent to make ‘beds’ while Josefa gathered ‘blankets’ (repurposed long scarves and
other dress up clothes from dress-up area) so that all the children could all rest
comfortably in their ‘beds’ inside. The construction and furnishing of the tent happened
very fast – probably five minutes or less, after which Bonnie, Tucker, Martina, Isaac and
Josefa crawled inside and snuggled up together, making contented, snoring noises and
cuddling:
Isaac says quietly: ‘I’m the dad, and also I’m the brother’.
Josefa: ‘You can be the brother’.
Martina: ‘I am the mom’.
Josefa: ‘I am the big sister’.
Bonnie: ‘You can also be the uncle. Or the mom’.
The children assumed fluid, familial roles to populate their new shared space and explain
their relationships. Having decided who plays the mom, dad, siblings, aunts, grand-
mothers, babies and so on, the Sleeping Family left their cosy beds to seek sustenance.
Tucker took a pushcart from the block play area and, along with Josefa and Bonnie, filled
it with the entire contents of the dramatic play kitchen and home area. They collected
every dish, plastic food item and scrap of play money, and all the dress-up shoes, beaded
necklaces, hats, clothes and plastic baby dolls that the pushcart and their arms could carry
and dumped it all into the tent, often on top of some members of the Sleeping Family.
‘Now we have food’! the children exclaimed. They crawled back into the tent and noisily
pretended to eat. A few of the preschoolers removed items of their clothing and their
shoes, and squealed and howled with delight. Their ‘eating’ is ravenous and animalistic,
with loud gnashings and growlings as they and throw the plastic food hither and yon,
gathering large amounts of these small plastic toys in their arms and throwing them in the
air inside the tent. As the loud chewing sounds diminished, Bonnie and Tucker began
growling, meowing and barking whilst rolling about on the floor. Isaac noticed and said,
 318 S.C. Galman

‘You are our kitty and puppy’! He produced a leash from the mass of toys and attached it
to the collar of Bonnie’s dress.
It is not long before the great ruckus commanded Joya’s attention. She approached the
wildly escalating game and, kneeling, pulled back the tent flaps, saying, ‘Making a home
is perfectly fine, but trashing is not’. ‘Trashing’ is her word for indiscriminately filling a
play space with small toys:
If you want to play that you are eating, you can set a table – you can put the food on the
plates and organise these things, but you cannot just throw them around. That makes a big
mess and you end up stepping on things and breaking them.
Joya waked away and watched from a distance. The children continued their thrashings.
She then announced that it was time to clean up, and the formerly energetic children
trudged slowly and wearily and complained that they did not know how to put things
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away, and that they were hungry or needed to use the toilet. The game was over.

The Gymnastics Game

While the Sleeping Family Game happens in the high-visibility centre of the classroom
and is loud enough to warrant adult attention (and therefore is usually short-lived), the
Gymnastics Game avoids these pitfalls and subsequently lasts much longer. Also, while
all the children at one time or another play the Sleeping Family Game, only its creator,
five-year-old Delia, and a highly selective sub-group of female friends usually play the
Gymnastics Game. The Gymnastics Game occurs in three stages: (1) setting up the
gymnastics space in a hidden part of the classroom, (2) Delia selecting a friend to partner
with her in the space and a friend or friends to systematically exclude from it and (3)
constructing a play narrative to be acted out both inside and outside the space, while
Delia continues to inhabit it.
Most of the children had arrived for the day and were engaged in activities around the
room. Delia quietly removed couch cushions and pillows from the window seats in book
area. The Sleeping Family Game was in full swing and many of the best cushions were
already taken, so Delia slipped her hand under the edge of the tent and removed one of those
cushions without anyone noticing. Sarah, also five, also took a few pillows from that Game.
Both girls headed to the far corner of the classroom where the brooms, dustpans, sleeping
mats and outdoor equipment are kept against a blocked off external door. This corner is not
visible from Joya’s desk or from common activity areas. Delia and Sarah pushed some
cushions underneath the storage tables in this area and use the rest to cover the tile floor.
Delia stretched out on the cushions and studied the arrangement, with Sarah laying down
next to her and pretending to sleep. The girls cuddled together their bodies touching,
whispering. After some time, Delia noticed Lizzie, also five, nearby. Delia caught Lizzie’s
attention and announced that she and Sarah are doing gymnastics. Lizzie rushed over to the
corner and asked to join in. Delia was aware that one hard and fast rule of preschool is that
‘You can’t say you can’t play’. However, an important part of the Gymnastics Game is
creating an exclusive space and requires that a child play the role of an authentically
Excluded Person. So, Delia said, ‘I’m so sorry, Lizzie, but only two are allowed in
Gymnastics. The space is not big enough for three’. Delia said this with a sympathetic look
on her face, as if she were an official delivering sad, but necessary, regulation. Variations on
this might include allowing Lizzie or another child into the game and ejecting Sarah using a
similar reasoning such as: ‘Sarah, you have to sign up for Gymnastics. You haven’t signed
up, so I’m so sorry you can’t do this activity today’. The Excluded Person is disappointed,
 Ethnography and Education 319

but she typically nods in agreement and goes to play somewhere else. Typically, any
attempts at exclusion in preschool are cause for alarm, with children running to the teacher
to report a violation of ‘You Can’t Say You Can’t Play’ and waiting excitedly for justice to
be meted out. But Delia’s purposeful exclusion game raises no alarm.
Delia and Sarah returned to doing headstands and talking quietly while Delia began to
craft a play narrative. ‘Pretend I am the coolest girl in town’, Delia says with a flourish,
and a headstand:
And we are going to have our own kingdom, with our own castle made of colors in the sky,
and lava and dinosaurs, okay? And you’re my friend, who can never be as cool as me … but
you have to go out into the lava and get a throne for me to sit on.
She directed Sarah to venture out from the game space and commit an act of brazen
mischief: to make off with Joya’s small black wicker Teacher Chair. The Teacher Chair is
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a forbidden object, located in the corner of the block play area, where Joya sits to
facilitate morning circle. It is a rule of the classroom that children do not sit in the
teacher’s chair, and until this point I believed it was beyond their scope to actually pick it
up and move it elsewhere. Sarah did not hesitate: she poked her head out of the game
space and peered around the corner, quickly zipped out, snatched the chair and carried it
back to Delia, who immediately secreted it under the storage table and nervously glanced
around to see if anyone was watching. Then, she and Sarah went back to lounging on the
pillows and doing headstands.
Joya had been watching Delia and Sarah, for some time, listening carefully to their
exclusionary tactics and waiting to see what would transpire. After another child was
turned away, she did intervene (and retrieve the chair) without chastising Delia, but rather
by instituting new rules. These rules included: (1) moving the game out of the unseen
corner of the classroom to a central, visible location, (2) allowing other children to play
through the instigation of turn-taking with an hourglass timer and (3) making the actual
gymnastics part of the game much more central. In its new iteration, the game no longer
held any appeal for Delia.

Leakiness, viscosity and ambiguity

The rural community and rural preschool culture(s) exhibited some of what Griffiths (2006)
describes ‘leaky and viscous’ practices. These reflect individuals’ embodiments of practice
rather than rigid rules and hierarchies. Whereas the efficiency models driving many of the
conditions of late modern schooling emphasise individualism and competition within a
rigid hierarchy, Griffiths’ model may represent the inverse: embodiment, diversity and a
non-hierarchical, more democratic distributions of and relationship with power. Its
boundaries are fluid, and in Preschool, practices associated with families may ‘leak’ into
practices associated with schools; so also the practices of teachers may ‘leak’ into the
domain(s) of children, and children’s into teachers’ while communities and spaces may
similarly ‘leak’ into and across boundaries, rendering them much less rigid, more plastic
and perhaps less inflexible in daily practice. Similarly, practices may exhibit ‘viscosity’: the
slow, sticky and highly situational flow of practice as it responds ‘to internal and external
changes’ (396). This serves to create communities in classrooms that are ‘more like the
Himalayas and less like the single peak of Kilimanjaro’ (396), and may in fact be sites of
resistance to surveillance, control and regulation. It is through leaky and viscous practice
that rural communities in general, and rural teachers and children specifically, may navigate
and resist the intractable contradictions of school. Furthermore, the leaky and viscous, like
 320 S.C. Galman

the mischievous and unruly, are liminal and ambiguous, emphasising connection rather
than hierarchies. For example, the successful administrator understood the importance of
such ambiguity and connection. The administrator from Oldfield began by demonstrating
his role as enforcer, effectively deflating the cushion of ambiguity that allows for fluid
practice in a small community where the village librarian might also your neighbour, the
school principal your cousin and the parent of one of your students your landlord.
The community and its relationships must be as multi-purpose as the school building itself;
The noisy assembly, like the disordered roadmap and preschool free play are all leaky,
viscous structures that create, as poet Leonard Cohen writes, ‘[the] crack[s] in everything/
That’s how the light gets in’ (Cohen 2011, 190).
That said, rural schools are not exempted from surveillance and control; like most
places where young children spend a great deal of time, they are institutional in an
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increasingly total sense:

The nature of children’s lives [in such institutional spaces] is such that they are constantly
under the watchful eye of adults. Children rarely are given private places to work and play.
Teachers and caregivers are told that they must be able to see all the children all the time.
The boundaries of children’s experiences are patrolled by adults. (Graue and Walsh 1998, 12)
However, as Graue and Walsh go on to observe, children are not without power in these
settings. For example, they write, ‘kids often do stuff to keep adults at a distance – stay
away from the climbing structure unless you want to hear fart jokes’ (1998, 61). Their
tactics may be unruly. As I reflect on a year spent observing Delia’s Gymnastics Game
and the many participants of the Sleeping Family Game, I recall the many times I had to
stop myself from intervening in the midst of the mean and the disruptive, the cruel and
wild and unsafe behaviour I saw as part of those games. I would look beseechingly at
Joya to stop them and alleviate my discomfort. In effect, the games represented the
children at their most unruly, and myself at my most squeamish. The cruel exclusion and
exploitation I saw in Delia’s game was a disruptive aesthetic, as were the activities of the
Sleeping Family. As an observing adult, I felt both the ‘horror of abjection’ and
ontological insecurity (Jones et al. 2010, 177) such unruliness promoted.
This discomfort was certainly located in a cultural investment in the nostalgic project
of the innocent, well-mannered, idealised child and my impossible struggle to reconcile
that with the spectacle of the Games in preschool. A rigid hierarchy of control is difficult
to enforce in such an unruly environment (and it would be undesirable), but one informed
by leaky, viscous practices may afford a teacher (and students) the cushion of ambiguity
helpful for navigating contradiction. Joya did eventually intervene, breaking up the
games, but before doing they continued for quite some time; I hesitate to say that Joya
‘allowed’ the Games to continue – the Games filled the space in such a way that she
could both actively resist intervening as well as be compelled by the Game itself.
Rules themselves are applied in both directions: the prohibition against ‘trashing’ in
the Sleeping Family Game had been (and will continue to be) easily broken, and the new
rules for the Gymnastics Game served only to break up that particular game but did not
take power from or shame particular children. While Joya was charged with safety and
surveillance in her role as teacher, the rules were ‘leaky’ – letting the games go on, and
giving the children time to develop their mischief before finally breaking up the
escalating unruliness, knowing that it would only begin again. While Joya could have
instituted a much more inflexible regime of disciplinary control in the classroom, with
children at desks, moving about by bells, assessed for ‘time on task’ or other measures,
she chose to continue her leaky, viscous, orientation to control.
 Ethnography and Education 321

The children transformed teacher-created children’s play spaces, like the block area,
into hidden worlds populated with fluid relationships. They constructed a tent as an
impenetrable location, too small for adults and too dark to watch the goings-on within.
Delia and her friends stealthily took control of a space that was neither official play space
nor teacher space and located their resistant mischief in the margins of the classroom, out of
sight. They also took control of the teachers’ space by brazenly kidnapping her chair. When
the teacher broke up her game and transformed it into something much more controllable,
Delia took up a new, covert game in the coat and boot closet. Delia found new ways to
control and occupy a range of illegal and legal spaces, and the Sleeping Family players
rebuilt their tent nearly every day, fully anticipating its destruction, but revelling in their
transitory resistant experience of relationships, sensation and unruly love.
While Emotional Learning was considered to be among the better character education
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curricula by most NECS teachers, it still constitutes a form of social control aimed at
limiting ambiguity and ‘taming the labile student’ (Boler 1999, 79). With its stiff plastic
laminate lesson plans and scripting, it seemed terribly out of place, yet one must still resist
the temptation to cast the curriculum as malevolent and the children as its innocent victims.
These children are powerful: they put the curriculum to work like any other tool, using the
discourse of the programme to further their own unruliness and mischief. For example,
when Tucker approached Delia’s game and asked to play, Delia mimicked the firm, but
caring tone and the specific words the teachers modelled in the programme lessons. ‘I’m
sorry’, she said, ‘but only two are allowed in this game right now. I can tell you are feeling
sad. Try again later’. This is not recognisable as a reportable exclusionary offence, and thus
it is not contestable, like so much of the Emotional Literacy programme, which legitimises
savage feelings with official words. When I later asked three-year-old Elsie what was going
on after she had been rebuffed from the art table by Josefa (who said, ‘I’m so sorry, but you
need to sign up for this activity’) she told me that it was okay because ‘Josefa is using her
words’.
The preschool children repurposed not only the language and intention of the Emotional
Language curriculum but also the intentional activities and materials provided by the
teachers. The carefully constructed dramatic play area was repurposed for the riotous
Sleeping Family Game. Sofa cushions and pillows furnished the anti-social Gymnastics
Game in the re-imagined broom corner. Players in the Sleeping Family Game took off their
clothes and became joyous animals, growling and spitting. It took considerable time to get
everyone dressed again. However, repurposing and confounding these structures was not
possible all the time; in one particularly poignant instance, Joya and Patty were doing the
yearly assessments. This required them to sit with one child at a time and ask that child to
perform a series of tasks. The children did not understand why their friends could not help
them with the items they did not know. Eventually, assessment was moved to another room.

Conclusion
On one particular rainy morning, the preschoolers were in lined up in front of the
classroom sink, preparing to wash their hands and line up before beginning a structured art
activity. As each child finished washing hands, she or he was instructed to follow a series
of multi-step directions: find their name card at the art table, choose markers, choose paste
and select coloured paper, then sit down and wait for the others to join them. This was
overwhelming for many of the children who had to be reminded multiple times about the
order of operations. David, age three, sat down on the floor, refusing to move through the
 322 S.C. Galman

prescribed steps. ‘NO’! he shouted. ‘I can’t do this. I am still SMALL’! He then threw
himself on the ground, sobbing. He simply would not participate in a task that affirmed a
different, more ordered, version of himself than he was ready to embrace that day. David’s
unruly actions forced the adults around him to acknowledge, if only momentarily and with
frustration, some of the contradictions between expressive individualism and utilitarian
control; to wit: he compelled the adults around him to recognise his immediate being rather
that the current located more in his future becoming (Qvortrup 1994).
In this analysis, I am not arguing that rural schools are the civic equivalent of naughty
children, acting out in tears and tantrums against what they cannot change. They are,
however, presented with difficult contradictions and few straightforward official avenues
for recourse. They are left to their wits, leaky and viscous practices and the cushion of
ambiguity they afford, and unruliness. The NECS preschoolers, teachers and school are
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subject to technological conditions that ‘shrink space’ (Corbett 2009, 2), making the
realities of external compliance and control much more immediate than they really are: the
tentacles of No Child Left Behind, for example, are both distant in Washington, DC and
also immediately at their door via the ever-expanding reach of information technologies,
social media and accountability mechanisms, as well as the reshaped rural consciousness of
that penetrative immediacy. Furthermore, the immediacy of rural experiences serves to
create these intrusions as unseen, and penetrative ‘phantasmagoric’ realities that confound
support systems and rural culture (Giddens 1990, 19). Preschoolers and their teachers
experienced episodes of resistance and negotiation as pendular movement between the
immediate/visible realities and the invisible, ‘phantasmagoric’ ones: they found themselves
hamstrung between the overarching realities of modern schooling and the immediate
everyday rural experience. This means that teachers, like children, must exist at what
Giddens (1990) calls ‘the intersection of estrangement and familiarity’ (21). The rural
school and community must function amidst the ‘ghostly presences’ (Bryant and Jary 1997,
119) of distant social processes that bifurcate their daily practice and seek to tame their
labile possibilities. This is true even as, like David, they work to affirm their contradictory,
ambiguous identities in the face of distant, more rigidly controlled futures.

Acknowledgement
The author wishes to thank Dr M. Beth Graue, Dr Kate Reynolds and Dr Travis Wright for their
helpful and insightful comments on early drafts of this paper.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes
1. All names are pseudonyms.
2. This is a US term for the common practice of parents’ delaying the start of formal schooling for
their age-eligible children for the purpose of giving the child the advantage of being older, larger
and ‘ahead of’ their peers. The term is borrowed from competitive athletics.
3. Pseudonym.

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