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Fraser Brown, Professor in playwork and Lecturer at Leeds Metropolitan University in the United Kingdom, has become best known in North America over the last decade for helping expose the plight of abandoned and abused Romanian orphans. Brown advocates for environmental design strategies that enrich children's play environments, and he is the author, editor, or coauthor of a number of works, including two that are forthcoming: Playwork: Theory and Practice; Foundations of Playwork; The Venture: A Case Study of an Adventure Playground; Rethinking Children's Play and Play and Playwork: Reflections on Practice. In the interview that follows, Brown discusses the development of playwork as a discipline, a child's inherent right to play (and the consequences of denying that right), the challenges of the noninterventionist approach, and the inventive, exuberant games he observed among Roma children in small villages in Transylvania. Key words: play among Roma children; play deprivation; playwork; Romanian orphans
American Journal of Play: Dr. Brown, what is playwork?
Fraser Brown: The essence of playwork is this: Children learn and develop while they play. The benefits of play are both immediate and for the future. In many modern Western societies, children are no longer free to play in the way that their parents' generation used to. This is potentially dangerous both for the individual child and for society in general. The role of the playworker is to create the conditions that make it possible for children to play freely.
AJP: How did you become interested in playwork?
Brown: During my final student vacation from college, I was sitting in a park in a seriously disadvantaged area of London watching some people in track suits trying to engage a small group of children in some informal games. The children clearly were not interested. I started chatting to a friend about how badly organized it all was, and then we rather arrogantly discussed how we could do much better. Within a week we were running our own play scheme in the same park with more than two hundred children and a lot of scrounged materials, including giant puppets, cardboard boxes, and an enormous inflatable cube. I remember that on the first afternoon I became completely convinced this was something worth doing with my life....