Content area
Full text
The Art of Play: Recess and the Practice of Invention. By Anna R. Beresin. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2014. Pp. ix + 191, acknowledgements, introduction, photographs, illustrations, notes, references, index. $25.95 paper.)
Children's folklore has been the beneficiary of many prolific advocates in the discipline. The tradition of advocacy begins with William Wells Newell in the late part of the nineteenth century and continues through more recent scholars and collectors such as Iona and Peter Opie, Brian Sutton-Smith, and Simon J. Bronner. With her recent work on children's play, folklorist Anna R. Beresin adds her name to that list. In her 2011 book, Recess Battles: Fighting, Playing, and Storytelling, she examined violence in the schoolyard and the benefits of play. In 2014's The Art of Play, Beresin follows up with an ethnographic description of her service-learning efforts and those of the organization Recess Access with whom she works to provide Philadelphia schoolchildren with materials that encourage creativity and activity at school. She gives the children art materials and then observes and responds to their artistic creations, displaying the paintings of more than one hundred children in this book.
Beresin describes The Art of Play as "a pairing of narratives-the telling of the tales of Recess Access schools from 2010...