Playborhood Berkeley - The Freedom and Fun of Forts

Berkeley General

The Freedom and Fun of Forts

Posted: 04/15/08 01:58 PM

For some children recess provides the most important reason to come to school. With its promise of games of chase and tag, clique-bound conversations, solitary wandering and exploration, pretend and war play, recess provides reliable access to a scarce resource of immense value in the lives of children: spontaneous self-direction.

But at one school in Massachusetts, recess meant just one thing for many children: time to work and play on their forts.

I was a lower elementary teacher at Lexington Montessori School from 1994 through 2002, and for 8 years I witnessed first-hand the development of an extraordinary child-centered and spontaneous world of recess play. As children entered the elementary program at the school, they were initiated into a culture of fort building by their peers. The forts, built entirely from sticks, leaves and found objects from the surrounding woods, were the site of considerable experimentation with different forms and rules of social organization and various styles of construction.

They were also the vehicle for much of the conflict which occurred at the school. Children negotiated and clashed over ownership of land and resources, and argued about the rules and roles of fort play and about whether the rights of those already identified with a structure outweighed the rights of outsiders to be included. In doing so, they developed and influenced each other’s reasoning about such moral principles as benevolence, justice and reciprocity.

Fort play was unpredictable, immediate, exciting and fun, a brief window of opportunity among hours of mostly adult-inspired activities and expectations in which these children were free to manage their own lives and interact with each other on their own terms.

As Lorena, 15, a student at LMS from 1991 to 1996 put it:

“I liked being in a fort because it gave me a sense of belonging to a small family, and it also gave me a purpose; namely, expanding and taking care of the fort.… Fort play was a way for me to be comfortable expressing opinions and leading other children at a time when I was very hesitant to do either in front of adults. I think this made me a stronger person today.”

The building of forts at LMS was made possible by its location adjoining a three-acre, undulating woodland property. But for many adults it was the open field created by the school was seen as the optimal play area for children at recess because it offered the opportunity for cooperative and competitive sports and games, and for easy supervision of large numbers of children.

From the moment the field was available to the children, however, many of them were drawn away from its large open spaces and the organized games and into the woods still surrounding it on all sides. By all accounts, fort play began almost immediately with sticks piled up from the clearing process—despite the best intentions of those who had sought to plan the children’s free play activities.

The forts were constructed either as open spaces with boundaries marked out with stones or sticks or as enclosed structures that were generally limited by the lack of binding materials to “teepee,” lean-to,” and “pile fort” designs. The open forts tended to be used more intensively after construction as a locus for social gatherings or for the practice of domestic skills like sweeping or making “food” .

For enclosed huts—usually, though not always, constructed by boys—the act of building itself was often the important thing. Once these structures were complete, there was often little room and few sticks for further expansion, which meant that the only way to keep the excitement of construction alive was to demolish and rebuild either in the same place or in a new location.

All the students I spoke to were clear about the benefits of fort play. Some reported being drawn to fort play for the excitement of building and maintaining a structure they felt was their own. Carlotta and Zeke* began their first fort as a structure to serve as the Warner Tower in a game based on the television cartoon Animaniacs, but soon discovered that they were having more fun building the fort than imitating the characters. Alfie said that he and his friends also found the woods “more interesting than the barren field”. He recounted how they used the fallen branches and other found forest detritus to construct their fort…

...“because it just seemed like the right thing to do… It was as if we built the structure itself because we had nothing better to do, but the reality is that we did: We had a whole field at our disposal with balls and Frisbees and cones, but for some reason building a fort seemed like a more productive use of our time.”

Our generation of young people will inherent many of our most chronic and intractable social problems, as well as some precipitous environmental crises. Avoiding catastrophe will require flexible, inclusive and highly imaginative thinking on their part. But the opportunities available to today’s young to experiment with their own decision-making powers in free play with one another, and to interact positively with the natural environment, are rapidly shrinking. For many students at LMS recess provided not only some of their most cherished memories of life at the school—it may also have provided some of their most valuable lessons.

This post is an edited extract from Mark Powell’s thesis “The Hidden Curriculum of Recess” in which he writes in detail about the fort play phenomenon he studied while at LMS. He will return to this subject in future posts looking at, among other things, the ambivalence of some teachers to fort play, the rules devised by the children around fort play, and the many reasons given by those children for why they loved creating and playing in forts. *All names used are pseudonyms.

by Mark Powell

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2 comments
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This is an excellent and fascinating article. The desire that kids have to build and construct is amazing, whatever their circumstances.

For another perspective on the social dynamics and community formation that surround these kinds of construction activities, I would also recommend the article “Why We Banned Legos” from Rethinking Schools Online (http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/21_02/lego212.shtml) which discusses the response of educators at an after-school childcare program to the conflicts that developed as a result of this sort of unstructured construction play, and the ways that they integrated it into their structured educational activities.

@alex

by Alex Dupuy on 05/07/08 12:22 PM

Mark-

Thanks for the article. I’ve catalyzed the building of structures like this as part of my group art-making in nature events.

I have a few questions for you:

1) Do you know the origin of the word “fort” to describe these structures? In the UK, they are called “dens”. See this interesting link:
http://www.forestry.gov.uk/forestry/infd-6p8kvw

2) You mention that they were built mainly by boys. Can you say why you think that is the case? In my events, I have seen structures built by pretty equal numbers of boys and girls. In this photo gallery from one event, you can see several structures - with boys and girls participating.

http://picasaweb.google.com/ZachPine/ArtAndSoul2007

3) In your opinion, what spots in Berkeley would be the best place to establish structure building in nature? My interest stems from my desire to help establish a “Wild Zone” here (see http://www.wild-zone.net/)

Looking forward to reading more from you.

-Zach Pine
naturesculpture.com

by Zach Pine on 05/15/08 08:17 AM

Berkeley General

The Freedom and Fun of Forts

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