You Can't Say You Can't Play

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Critical Review of You Can’t Say You Can’t Play “You can’t say you can’t play” recounts a teacher’s attempts to undo the habit of exclusion in her kindergarten classroom. In this case, the exclusion that has come to concern her is that which arises when certain children are consistently rejected from entering the other children’s play. A Macarthur Fellow, Paley teaches kindergarten in a racially and socio-economically diverse classroom at the University of Chicago Lab School, but the problems she writes about could arise in any classroom group anywhere. The exclusionary behavior arouses memories in Vivian Paley of her own childhood. She watched but did not feel powerful enough to go against her classmates making outcasts of some children, such as an overweight girl with only one dress while everyone, teachers included deferred to the leading confident children. At the age of sixty, Paley can no longer resist those early memories of her past painful empathy with the outsiders. She undertakes to go beyond the usual practice of making the outsiders more acceptable to the insiders, to find a way to break the chain of exclusion without violating the other children’s sense of justice or ruining the atmosphere of her classroom. Several surprising things about Paley’s approach to problem solving with the children make the story engrossing and full of suspense. For one thing, she is genuinely ambivalent and does not know how imposing a new rule (“You can’t say you can’t play”) will work out. She decides to proceed slowly with a long period of talking and thinking aloud with the children before starting the rule. During the consideration period, she does two more surprising and fascinating things. To add more perspectives and richness of reasoning to the thinking of her group, she goes one by one to the older grades in the school and asks each group

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