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P L AYauthors make recommendations that provide play opportunities leading intentionally to the development of various literacy
skills. These are outlined to show teachers
how to embed new practices into theirscripted curricula. Chapter 2 links bookplay with narrative comprehension andvocabulary development by following aread aloud with a ten-minute play session
using related materials. Closely related ischapter 7, where Meachum and Han offer
insight into how teachers and adults canuse their language (i.e., responsiveness) toimpact receptive and expressive vocabulary development. In addition, chapter
4 provides a list of children’s literaturefeaturing play that educators can use toinspire playful learning in their classrooms
and other learning environments such asmuseums. The suggestions are practical,meaningful, and innovative.
The book’s final two chapters coversecond-language learning, a vital topic
given the growing diversity of the UnitedStates. The authors of these chapters ask
us to consider play with adults learning
new languages. In particular, dramabased instruction (DBI) offers an alternative to direct translation activities andallows learners to become playful in theirattempts to communicate in a new language. Communicative language teaching (CLT) is also used to create a playfulenvironment in which adult learners workin pairs to interact and negotiate. The key
is authenticity that can be applied to any
learning context.
Although joy, happiness, and fun are
not usually considered essential components of literacy learning environments,
this volume offers hope and inspiration forbuilding play into everyday literacy prac-tices. Play is an avenue into academic rigor
that can have a positive impact on literacy
development in first and second languages.
Building literate identities and building
upon personal interests are possible whenplay is at the forefront. Schools and educators would be remiss in educating all
students if they did not employ play-based
pedagogies and set up playful environments
in which everyone can engage in literacy
practices. This edited volume will inspire
readers to rethink existing practices andrevalue play.
—Sally Brown, Georgia Southern University, Statesboro, GA
What the Children Said: Child
Lore of South Louisiana
Jeanne Pitre Soileau
Jackson: University Press of Mississippi,
2021. Preface, introduction, notes, works
cited, appendix, general index, index offirst lines and titles. 331 pp. $99.00 cloth,$30.00 paperback, ISBN: 9781496835741
Expositions of children’s folklore since thelate nineteenth century have taken primarily the form of the annotated collection.
Compilers transcribe material that draws
attention to itself because of the context ofplay and imagination as poetry and narrative from orally performed rhymes, songs,
jokes, legends, and tales; socially enacted
games, pranks, and routines; and spokenslang and sayings. The emphasis typicallylies in the produced creative texts of ananonymous individual rather than in thatof children playing in groups. Less often,
mention is made of the craft and architecture of childhood and the integration

Book Reviewsof gesture, song, speech, and social activity. The rendering of children’s folklore
as literature in this manner has allowed
scholars to undertake comparative studies
on a regional and global scale and draw
generalizations about the continuities aswell as varieties of tradition across timeand space. With growing ethnologicalattention to race, ethnicity, and genderduring the twentieth century, children
emerged as a social group especiallymarked as oriented to folklore because of
its semiliterate status. The trouble camewhen the developmental differences thatemerged in stages of the years before
maturity gave way to a vague, generalized
notion of childhood, especially in North
America where there was not a public,
agreed-upon transition across stages ofaging. Folklorists theorized that, indeed,folklore provided the cultural passage forchildren from infancy to early adulthood.
Even as folklorists called for more nuanced
contextual, ethnographically driven, andpsychologically informed studies of small
diverse groups of children’s lives, generations of consumers kept up demand forthe textual collections to be reminded of
their own childhood and to be relievedthat children were still capable of play infamiliar forms despite rapid social andtechnological changes.
Jeanne Pitre Soileau’s What the Children Said has the look and tone of a textualcollection. Soileau identifies as a teacher
who wants to show that children still playas they did previously. She says that theperception of adults that children do notplay and that current folklore is anachronistic grows from the fact children are
secretive and adults, immersed in theirmodern grind, wrongly assume children

follow the lead of adults. This interpretation echoes the case made in 1976 byeducator-collectors Mary and Herbert
Knapp in One Potato, Two Potato: The
Secret Education of American Children.
Indeed, Soileau traces her collecting to
1979, when an adult colleague warned
her that the fifth and sixth graders she
wanted to record were not likely to produce any lore. Taking her recording forays
into the twenty-first century, she is able
to declare that children adapt old forms
to current events and conditions, but thatreaders will recognize many texts frommany generations back. Rather than treat
children’s expression as rudimentary, shevalues their voice and creativity and wants
readers to appreciate their artistry as wellas their social statements concerning lore.
So what is different about this collection? Soileau claims it is special because “itconcentrates on a small triangle centeredin south Louisiana, and it continued fornearly fifty years” (p. 20). Soileau proceeds
in commentaries after texts to provide historical and geographic contexts for local
references while also underscoring continuity with national precedents. Yet thebook is not marked by long annotations in
the manner of Peter and Iona Opie’s various tomes on nursery rhymes and singing
games, which took the form of dictionaries. Neither is it ethnographic in the styleof Anna Beresin’s studies of recess activities or Jay Mechling’s work on boy scouts
at camp. To be sure, Soileau provides
information about performers and eventranscripts of interviews that is certainly
useful for cultural interpretation. Perhaps
the best sections are those that consider
same-race and mixed-race play in the section of Louisiana she observed with a large

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African American population. Folklorists
and ethnologists will read with interest,
and probably a yearning for more detail,descriptions of the “clear-cut difference thestyle of play and delivery” between whites
and blacks despite their sharing similar
texts (p. 161). In the collection by Soileau
there is less differentiation into developmental stages and the sociopsychologicalanalysis that usually accompanies suchlife-course approaches.
What the Children Said is a goodreminder that folklore is a contemporary form of play that performs various
important social and expressive functions for children. One might assume
that it has been displaced by technology,
but she shows that at least in various oral
and social genres, folklore is active in children’s lives, even if kept secret. It deservesattention and the material in this book—although its presentational format andfunctional interpretation appear dated,or even lacking—can best serve to raisequestions for deeper dives into the complex, diverse societies of the early stages ofhuman development and the situations inwhich children express themselves.
—Simon J. Bronner, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee, WI
Growing Sideways in TwentyFirst Century British Culture:
Challenging Boundaries
between Childhood andAdulthood
Anne Malewski
Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing
Company, 2021. List of figures, listof abbreviations, acknowledgments,introduction, references, index.
229 pp. $143.00, hardcover. ISBN:
9789027210081
Growing Sideways in Twenty-first Century British Culture is a comprehensive,
thoroughly researched monograph into
identifying, contextualizing, and investigating alternative ideas of growth. The
author investigates flux in the boundaries
between human childhood and adulthood,in a contemporary society that perpetuates the idea of human growth as a grandnarrative that privileges adulthood. It is
not only a grand narrative that devalues
youth and misses other ways of being, italso devalues and misses other ways ofgrowing. The author concludes that thegrand narrative of growth privileges adulthood by picturing contemporary societythat embraces the ideal of childhood as astate that can (and must) be discarded inorder to attain the state of adulthood. Thevery wide range of sources used to support
the discussions about growing sideways
are well considered and explored meticulously, offering engaging critical analysisof the ideas that pluralize constructionsof childhood and adulthood. The author
states that her study is interested in aparticular, contemporary socio-cultural
moment and in a variety of cultural forms.
The book then goes on to delve deeply andintelligently into these ideas by examining practices around appearance, play,and space the provide alternatives toconventional ideas of growing up and by
establishing that growing sideways is an
emerging alternative structure of feeling.
At the heart of this monograph lies thediscourse of adulthood intruding on childhood that emerges alongside a discourse of