In Memoriam
Vivian Gussin Paley

Vivian Gussin Paley, the teacher, author, and advocate for the importanceof play for young children, died on July 26, 2019. She was a charter member ofthe editorial advisory board of the American Journal of Play, and The Strong’s
Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play cares for a collection of her
personal papers. Her pioneering technique of storytelling and story acting in
the early-childhood classroom earned her a MacArthur “genius” grant in 1989
and influenced a generation of researchers and teachers who studied and usedfantasy, storytelling, and dramatic play to teach, and learn from, young children.
Born in Chicago, Illinois, on January 25, 1929, Paley earned a bachelor’sof philosophy degree from the University of Chicago in 1947 and a bachelor’s
degree in psychology from Newcomb College (the women’s college of Tulane
University) in New Orleans in 1950. She began her teaching career in New
Orleans before moving to New York, where she would earn a master’s of science
degree in education from Hofstra University in 1965 and teach nearby in theGreat Neck public schools until 1971. That year she returned to her hometownof Chicago and spent the rest of her thirty-seven-year teaching career in theUniversity of Chicago Laboratory Schools.
Founded by philosopher and progressive educator John Dewey, theLaboratory Schools proved to be just the place for Paley to develop andexperiment with her innovative storytelling and story-acting teaching methods.
She asked children to tell stories from their imaginations or based on their life
experiences, which she then turned into a malleable script that the class could
act out together. InWally’s Stories: Conversations in the Kindergarten (1981),
Paley described how she discovered the importance of children acting out theirown stories. After five-year-old Wally had sat on the time-out chair twice in oneday, Paley tried to cheer him up by having the class act out his story about a89

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dinosaur sent to jail after smashing a city. In the past, the students had only everdramatized the fairy tales, songs, and poems that others wrote. But in acting out
Wally’s story, Paley found a playful approach that transformed the classroom
into a theater where children grew by inventing characters, rules, and roles that
helped them reveal inner thoughts and make sense of their own worlds.
As Paley explained in Bad Guys Don’t Have Birthdays: Fantasy Play atFour (1986), the classroom dramas about “bad guys, birthdays, and babies”
are symbols for, among other things, preschooler Frederick dealing with thebirth of a new baby brother. “I record their fantasy play because it is the main
repository for secret messages, the intuitive language with which the children
express their imagery and logic, their pleasure and curiosity, their ominousfeelings and fears,” she wrote.
Paley documented her storytelling and story-acting approach in a dozensuch books, including Boys & Girls: Superheroes in the Doll Corner (1984), Mollie
Is Three: Growing Up in School (1986), The Boy Who Would Be a Helicopter: The
Uses of Storytelling in the Classroom (1991), You Can’t Say You Can’t Play (1992),
and The Girl With the Brown Crayon: How Children Use Stories to Shape TheirLives (1997). In these she often eschewed more conventional research methods,documentation, and existing literature and theory. Instead, she painted vividethnographic portraits—self-conscious vignettes—of the classroom and thechildren who played and learned in it. Along the way, she explored topics suchas child development, fantasy, gender roles, race, socialization, isolation, andexclusion.
But play—and the study of children’s play in particular—was at the heartof Paley’s work. Set against the backdrop of educational policies increasingly
focused on high-stakes testing and narrow definitions of academic achievement,
her work inspired decades of research that has demonstrated the value ofimaginative play in the classroom and beyond. As she explained in a 2009
American Journal of Play interview, “It is in play where we learn best to be kindto others. In play we learn to recognize another person’s pain, for we can identify
with all the feelings and issues presented by our make-believe characters.”—Jeremy K. Saucier