Recess Battles: Playing Fighting and Storytelling

As children wrestle with culture through their games recess itself has become a battleground for the control of childrens time. Based on dozens of interviews and the observation of over a thousand children in a racially integrated working-class public school Recess Battles is a moving reflection of urban childhood at the turn of the millennium. The book debunks myths about recess violence and challenges the notion that schoolyard play is a waste of time. The author videotaped and recorded children of the Mill School in Philadelphia from 1991 to 2004 and asked them to offer comments as they watched themselves at play. These sessions in Recess Battles raise questions about adult power and the changing frames of class race ethnicity and gender. The grown-ups clear misunderstanding of the complexity of childrens play is contrasted with the richness of the childrens folk traditions.Recess Battles is an ethnographic study of lighthearted games a celebratory presentation of childrens folklore and its conflicts and a philosophical text concerning the ironies of everyday childhood. Rooted in video micro-ethnography and the traditions of theorists such as Bourdieu Willis and Bateson Recess Battles is written for a lay audience with extensive academic footnotes. International scholar Dr. Brian Sutton-Smith contributes a foreword and the children themselves illustrate the text with black and white paintings.