Playing at Violence: Code Red Drills, "Bad Guys," and the Construction of "Acceptable" Play in Early Childhood

• In Event: Roundtable Session 8
  In Roundtable Session: Children as Active Agents: Game Players, Curriculum Designers, Actors of Violence, and Digital Curators

Abstract

This paper uses the critical lenses of Foucault’s (1979) power theory and comic subjectivity theory to examine the ways in which Code Red/Active Shooter drills (playing real violence) and children’s bad-guy/violent play (playing pretend violence) are construct understandings of play and ‘appropriate’ to school behaviors. To do this, I examine how these versions of ‘playing at violence’ positioned one classroom of four-year-old children and their teacher as subjects of violence, and how the children resisted this positioning through the use of hidden and subversive violent play. This paper draws attention to how conflicting constructs of school sanctioned ‘playing at violence’ may undermine the needs of children to make sense of violence in the world around them.

Author

• Katherine Kresin Delaney, University of Toledo