Erin Davis on Playwork & The Land

Lukas: Where did you like to play as a child? I ask this question a lot because childhood memories shape us into the people we become. Welcome to Play It Forward, a worthy podcast. I'm your host, Lukas Ritzen. Thanks so much for joining me. I talk a lot about play. I'm a dad, I'm a husband, I'm an educator, and I'm a playground designer. So I want to gather some of my favorite people who are advocates of children and nature and create a space to have an honest conversation about getting more kids outside. The power of play is very often underestimated, and I think we all need a little more play in our lives.

Lukas: Today's guest considers herself a playwork evangelist. She's directed and produced an incredible short documentary about adventure playgrounds that has been affectionately coined as a horror film for hover parents, and it's called The Land. It's personally one of the biggest influences on my play journey back in the early days as I was going down the rabbit holes of play to try to understand it a bit more. Seeing the engagement in this film, the application, and the grace of those people working with the children, I thought: I've got to be a part of this, I've got to understand more. She also has a playwork podcast, she's a mum, and the worthy team thinks she's awesome. Today we're chatting about playwork, getting beyond the junkyard with adventure playgrounds, risky play, and a whole lot more. With a big warm welcome by Zoom all the way from stunning Vermont, thank you for joining us, Erin Davis.

Erin Davis: Thank you, this is very exciting. Glad to talk to you.

Lukas: Quite an intro, no pressure, but thank you so much for joining us. Like I mentioned in that intro, you've been a huge influence on me, so that's really awesome. I can't believe it.

Erin Davis: That's great. The film I've recommended the most in my life would be this one.

Lukas: Okay, wow. So as we do with all our guests, we start by taking a little stroll down memory lane. Where did you like to play as a child?

Erin Davis: Yeah, I grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio, in a city neighborhood where there were 10 to 12 kids who lived in the neighborhood. We had a street with houses, trees to climb, sidewalks, dogs to walk. I was thinking about this — our radius was probably no more than 100 yards and included three or four homes that we all kind of triangulated between. We occasionally would venture beyond that to go to the store for candy, but mostly we were in that little bubble, at least that's how I remember it. We watched a lot of TV, but we played outside a lot too. We had the sort of classic playful American childhood — suburbia, well, it wasn't suburban, but maybe in your imagination it sort of looked like that, but cooler, I would say. Anyway, you know, water fights, leaf piles, riding bikes, building ramps, slip and slides, snow days. A lot of us were latchkey kids, so we were home after school without our parents, and in the summer a lot of times without our parents, just kind of screwing around.

Lukas: What did you say — "latchkey kids"?

Erin Davis: Yeah, we came home with a house key around our neck, let ourselves in.

Lukas: I have not heard that phrase before. When I think of that American childhood, what stands out to me is actually enjoying the seasons. Being here on the Gold Coast, we don't really get proper seasons.

Erin Davis: I mean, it's a very specific American childhood, informed by the jobs that our parents had and the houses that we were lucky to be living in. But yes, we did have four seasons. Actually, I don't think it's in my office now, but a lot of times I have this photo of us all piled on top of each other on a snow day. When I talk about play a lot of times I reference snow days — those days, that feeling you get when all of a sudden your schedule is clear. Like you were supposed to be doing this one thing but it gets cancelled, school's cancelled, so what do you do with your time? What is it that you choose to do with your time? That's sort of how I start getting my college students thinking about it, when I'm working with them here.

Lukas: Yeah, because it's hard to access that feeling as an adult.

Erin Davis: Yeah, absolutely.

Lukas: Like, oh cool, I guess what do I actually want to do? What do I want to do first? And the environment has offered that arena because, despite snowing, you've got rid of the supervision. No parents going to go seagull you and stand over you and squawk out in the cold like, "No, it's freezing," or, "Do you think it's too cold?"

Erin Davis: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's true. Snow does offer some freedom there.

Lukas: Yeah, definitely, and it's a loose part.

Erin Davis: Totally, totally. And nobody cares about it, it's not precious, right? It's not like the lawn or the leaves that you're tossing out of a pile that someone raked. The snow is going to melt and it'll be all over soon.

Lukas: It paints a beautiful picture of this natural element that offers these same outcomes and benefits as loose parts.

Erin Davis: Oh yeah.

Lukas: And also you've just got that novelty, wonderment, adventure, and it comes down to you're getting that affordance of time, freedom, possibilities, and surprise. You know, you wake up in the morning and you look out the window and everything's different.

Erin Davis: So yeah, there's like an excitement to explore.

Lukas: And how did that experience contribute to what you do today? What did that journey look like? How did you get there? How did you get to playwork? How did you get to The Land? I'm intrigued.

Erin Davis: Yeah, I mean, okay, so how does that playful childhood affect me today? I really — I've been thinking about this and I just don't know. I think it's just in me now. I don't know if there's a straight line to anything necessarily, but it's baked into me now, those experiences. And I think that, if anything, maybe that sensation deep in my brain is like a touchstone that I carry around, so that when I'm doing something else in my adult life — that's good — if I'm doing the right thing in my life, it resonates with those playful experiences. Does that make sense? I was trying to think about it like — because of that playful freedom that I had in my childhood, I've experienced and can recognize what feels right for me and what feels good in my adult life. Maybe.

Lukas: Yeah, and what I hear there is every time you're thinking about it and reflecting on it, you're bringing that positivity and emotion and the physiological state into the present, and you're making it now as well.

Erin Davis: I think that is what it feels like carries through — the physiological, whatever the physiological state is, that's what's still alive in my adult version of me.

Lukas: That's a perfect playwork response, by the way — I don't know, what's the possibilities, let's see, let's explore.

Erin Davis: Yeah, yeah, exactly, don't try and name it, just be in the moment. So, I mean, how did I end up at The Land? Okay, so basically it was 2010 and I was living in New York City, working as a nanny among other things, keeping my head above water. I read an article in The New Yorker — I was just living my life, reading this and that — and I picked up a New Yorker magazine and read an article called "State of Play" by Rebecca Mead. This is in 2010, and she was writing about the Imagination Playground that had just been installed on the south side of Manhattan. The article is very interesting if you haven't read it, it's really cool — it sort of tells the story of the evolution of playgrounds in New York City, why they were developed, and so on. I was nannying at the time, so I was like, great, let's go to this new playground. The big special thing about the Imagination Playground is these loose parts — do you know the Imagination Playground blocks, those big foam blue blocks?

Lukas: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Erin Davis: So that was the first time I had heard of those blocks. They're designed by a really amazing designer named Cas Holman. The Imagination Playground had water, sand, loose parts, and these people who worked there called play workers. In the footnotes of this article was the fact that this was informed by something called an adventure playground that came around in the UK, started by a woman named Lady Allen of Hurtwood. I was like, well, what's that? And I just fell down the rabbit hole — you Google image search "adventure playground" once and you find so much cool stuff. There was just really no turning back after that. I was intrigued by the name "playwork" — who are these people who have to learn, who have to be trained to be playful? What does that mean? I just started meeting people and emailing people. I don't know, I just cared all of a sudden. I don't know why, I just cared and was really, truly interested.

Lukas: I relate, because by watching The Land and then going down these Google rabbit holes of adventure, it's like, oh yeah, this is where it started — no, that's not where it started, it goes back further. Oh my gosh, the influence of that and where it is now, and the perception. And the crazy thing was learning about how you can actually go and study play.

Lukas: That would work for me.

Erin Davis: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And also it'd be acknowledged in the UK as well. I'm not familiar with if it's recognized in the States, but it's not recognized in Australia unfortunately.

Lukas: Yeah, I mean, only in a very small way — meaningful but small.

Erin Davis: So I actually didn't find the land at first. At first I just got really interested in the imagination playground. In my obsession with this, I saw an announcement that the architects who designed the imagination playground were giving a talk in New York at some architecture center. It was free, so I was like, okay cool, I'll go. There's an architecture center in New York, everyone's super cool and everything, and I sit there and listen to the talk, and at the end ask a question. They say, you know, you talk about all these benefits that the kids are getting — they're learning physics, they're doing conflict resolution stuff like that — and I was sort of... I can't remember exactly what I said, but basically I was like, how do you know that that's happening, and why is that so important to you? What's so important about that to you?

At the end of the talk everyone's milling about and I'm getting ready to leave as quickly as possible because I'm basically embarrassed, and this person comes up to me and says, "Hi, my name is Morgan Leichter-Saxby, I think we would like each other." Basically, and she is Morgan Leichter-Saxby, who's a co-founder of Pop-Up Adventure Play. And we're now very good friends, and she invited me to a pop-up event that they were doing and sort of gently held my hand into the play work world and introduced me to other people.

So I started calling around, calling people, and spoke with Penny Wilson at one point who said, "Maybe — I think you might actually like this new place called the Land. You should go check it out, or give Claire a call at the Land." And the rest is history, I guess. There you are.

Lukas: What was the difference you saw in the children you nannied at the imagination playground compared to where you were taking them previously?

Erin Davis: I think what's interesting about my experience with that family is that those kids were so smart and bright and silly and curious and fun, and I was under the impression — based on the media that I had seen about children at the time — that children were lazy, bored, incapable, terrible, their childhood was being wasted away on screens. You know, I was like, that's not true. These kids are great, these kids are smart, cool, whatever — they read, they fight, they watch TV, whatever. So I was very intrigued by the dissonance between the way the public was talking about children and these actual children in front of me. So that was one thing.

And also, I was living in New York City, and they were a middle class, upper middle class family, I guess, and I was very aware of the lack of privacy that the kids had. They're never out of eyesight of an adult. They just aren't, and they live in a two-bedroom apartment, you know — they're never out of earshot of an adult. And I was always just kind of aware of that, like, how can kids have privacy, or a semblance of privacy? And that's something that I feel like the Land offers children. It's sort of, in its weird way, even though there are adults there, they're not there in the same way that "normal" adults are there — they offer the children a sense of privacy.

Lukas: You're honoring the humanity of childhood and the right to that. For our listeners that aren't familiar with the Land — and I'm not going to try to describe it when I've got you right here, who've delved so deeply into it — can you give our listeners an overview of the Land?

Erin Davis: I mean, the Land is a junk playground embedded in a neighborhood in northern Wales. If you've never seen it, it's a plot of land, about an acre, maybe less — it's not huge, but there's a lot going on there. It's full of stuff, just a bunch of crap everywhere. This is sort of what it looks like when you walk in — you're like, there's just crap everywhere. There's old toys, buckets, keys, trees, balls, blankets, brooms, saws, a bike with no chain. There's a stream that kind of runs through it, so it goes up and down, there's water, there's a fire pit, wigs, paint, dress-ups. It's like everything's so spontaneous. There are things that are very, very small, like a marble, and then there are things that are very, very large, like a tree that you can climb. So it's a very spontaneous, wild, chaotic-looking environment initially when you first arrive. And while you're there, kids can do anything they want with anything they find — I guess that's important to know.

Lukas: And how did you — like, you went there, you saw it, and then what were the next steps in that journey to be able to go, okay, I'm going to do something with this?

Erin Davis: It's life-changing. Like I say, people who see it in a 20-minute video, it really affects their parenting and their work permanently. I really just think of the film as an attempt to elevate what they do, to broadcast it, to just make it accessible to people who can't go there. You see it, and it speaks for itself, I think.

Lukas: Yeah, it's just so counterintuitive, so crazy — something that doesn't make sense, that really challenges your perception of what a playground is, or what children should, in inverted commas, be doing. But then you see it in action and you go, that makes sense. And it kind of ignites — for so many people that I've had conversations with, it ignites this truth they already know but didn't realize.

Erin Davis: Oh, totally. I think it gives people permission. I mean, it gives the children permission — when they walk onto the Land they're like, "Oh cool, I can make a mess. Oh cool, I can make this space my own. Oh cool, I can tidy this up if I want to." It's permissive. And I think when people see the film, it's like the spectrum of what is possible just widens — the scope widens. Like, oh, maybe I don't need to clean up at the end of the day, or whatever it is. I mean, everybody's different.

Lukas: And the perception of it is that it's this unsafe free-for-all, and it's kind of like an act of not caring from the adults' standpoint — like, "yeah, you just do your thing" type. But it's very, very intentional, but in a passive way. In the arena of input, what my takeaway was is that we try to give children resources constantly, and they don't need more resources, they don't need more things. We need to just create the environment which gives them permission, because the first step's permission. We create the environment for them to flourish within it, and not have to go do the movement for them, or do the learning or the prescribing for them — take that step back.

How did you move into that community as play workers, as an outsider, as a novice?

Erin Davis: We just got involved — it was just participatory.

Lukas: You mean at the Land specifically?

Erin Davis: At the Land specifically, yeah. Oh my god, I was just like a ball of manic enthusiasm, you know what I mean? I think a lot of times — and I see people do this now, and I'm just like, oh my god, I do this too — where you get so excited and you're like, "I know about this, this is familiar, this feels right, I am like this, I can do this." You know, and it's very life-affirming and exciting, and I was very affirmed and excited to be there. And I think I sort of became humbled the longer that I was there — the more I worked with the material afterwards, the more I've studied and learned about play work afterwards, I've been very humbled by what happens there. In retrospect, I feel like I was so amazed, I just wanted to soak it all up. And in the process of making the film, I hope it kind of sank in a little bit.

Lukas: You achieved that for me, that's for sure. And I know that familiarity of the awkward stages of — it's like, oh, fire — yeah, kids should totally be allowed to have fire. Oh yeah, swearing — yeah, let them swear. Like, be free, man, you know.

Erin Davis: Yeah, that was sort of very exciting — it was very exciting about that space. And I've come — I mean it's still something very exciting about that space, but it's also specific. It's just so specific and special about that place. It's not like a checklist of things that one needs to have an adventure playground. You don't need to allow swearing, you don't need a fire pit, you don't need a saw — that's not what it's about, you know what I mean? So I think I was — and a lot of people, including me — very dazzled by those things initially, and they are dazzling, and they are the culmination of almost, at the time, almost a decade of relationship building and work that they were already doing. They were in deep at that point, and I just dove in.

Lukas: How long was it going when you came in?

Erin Davis: So the playground itself—

Erin Davis: As I recall, they would talk about it as "the fence went up" — there's a six-foot-high privacy fence around the whole thing so no one has to look at it, basically. The fence had been up for about a year when I got there, but they had been doing pop-up events, community events, and other community projects for at least seven years before that. So the neighborhood, the parents, the kids — they knew them, they knew the kids' older siblings. They were really in deep there for sure.

Lukas: So when it came to the relationships, the sores, the swearing, the fire pits — they're all things that would challenge the normal perception of what children should be doing. In what you're saying, yes, the families locally had accepted it and even embraced it, but you had to narrate a story or a message to people who are so far removed from it. So what was your approach in trying to deliver this challenging message? I think our listeners and educators out there who are trying to sell these loose parts to parents would learn through your wisdom for sure.

Erin Davis: Yeah, I mean, we started small. The film is short, and I don't think it's for beginners necessarily — anyway, beginners see it and have their own experience with it. But even regardless, we start small. We start with a risk that an adult thinks is cute. You see early in the film a child taking a risk — she's swinging over a mud pit on a rope swing, a little girl trying to get from one side to the other. She almost makes it, and doesn't. She almost makes it again, and spoiler — she makes it in the end. The audience inevitably is like, "Yay!" They're happy for her, it's adorable, completely charming and sweet, and really cool — she's super proud of herself. Then things kick up a notch in terms of risk-taking: a child climbs a tree. That's a risk a lot of adults remember taking but haven't done in a while, you know? So they're not as familiar with it. Then there's a scene where kids are playing with a mannequin, and that triggers more of an emotional risk — emotional issues that adults take issue with. My point is that we up the ante throughout the twenty minutes. If you're trying to adopt a playwork practice in your environment, the lesson of the film, and of playwork itself, is to start very small with time, space, and play. You don't need a fire, you don't need to hand out matches — you can have bubbles, plenty of bubbles, so that if they spill it's not a problem. You can let the kids blow as many bubbles as they want, let them get sticky, whatever it is for that place. It doesn't have to be high gear right off the bat.

Lukas: Nor was the film incremental — the overall structure is incremental steps?

Erin Davis: Yeah, totally, yeah, absolutely.

Lukas: I like that point you made — we look at the land and think of all the physical risk, but we have to acknowledge the emotional risk as well, especially in high-risk communities, and how to work through that within your relationships, within the environment. And also dealing with that emotion as a parent who's trying to implement it or expose their children to these situations — like, "I feel uncomfortable, I feel—" and I'm like, that's okay. I'd much prefer you feel uncomfortable about your child maybe getting hurt than not.

Erin Davis: It's definitely — I mean, I think the topic of parenting and playwork is also very interesting to me. They're two totally different things. I'd like to talk to more people about whether you can playwork your own child, and if you ask me right now, I'd say basically no, you can't. It's just not the job of the parent. My job as a parent, yes, of course, is to allow them to take risks and flourish, but you're still their parent. So it's better to have a playworker in your life who can support your child through their playful choices without that reptile brain jumping in and screwing everything up.

Lukas: The react brain, yeah. I found that with my daughter — she's seven, and my son is four — being proactive in the play, being an active or inactive participant depending on whether they're dragging me in. One observation I made was my daughter started to have a default of me being the vessel to activate — not so much activate the play, but to be that security for her to feel safe and secure to explore within a new environment with other children. And it got to the stage where, at a family gathering or a catch-up at a park, a birthday party, she'd come hold my hand and say, "You're the children's adult. It's not your job to be with the adults, your job's with the children — you're the children's adult."

Erin Davis: Oh, interesting.

Lukas: So I had to be like, whoa, I don't want to be the driver of it — and that relationship and structure had to change.

Erin Davis: So that you were less involved, you didn't want to be?

Lukas: Yeah, absolutely, because I'm not going to always be there, and I didn't want that to become the standard. Well, if I'm not there to offer the cues for her to run with — that was hard, because she'd keep coming to me saying, "But you're the children's adult, let's go," and I'd have to say, "Oh my god, well, I'll be over soon," and try to create that bridge. Yeah, it's absolutely hard.

Erin Davis: Yeah, parenting is this whole other bag of worms.

Lukas: It's definitely been interesting — learning about playwork as a non-parent, and now being a parent.

Erin Davis: Yeah, I don't know. I can't tell if they overlap a lot or not at all.

Lukas: It's almost not at all.

Erin Davis: Yeah, not sure. Once again, I think for me it just goes back to — let's offer an environment where that opportunity can happen, and that's my responsibility as a parent: just to expose the children to an environment where it can happen, not be the driver of the environment.

Lukas: In the film, Claire says it so beautifully — she says, "We watch the children that we work with, and we see what interests them, and then we provide."

Erin Davis: Yeah, that's all it is.

Lukas: Yep, watch and provide. And I love another quote in there: "It's not your feeling of being uncomfortable which should inform your next move — it's the child that should inform the move." I use that one all the time, especially with risk-averse people, leveraging that act of love, act of kindness, this emotion we have for the children in our lives. Let's work with that. But it means working through that emotional challenge. My daughter recently was up a tree, like seven meters high, sketchy thin branches, and I'm just like, "Yep, okay, that's cool" — I still had sweaty hands. I wasn't going to tell her to get down, wasn't going to tell her to be safe, wasn't going to interject in any way. But I was still nervous about that.

Erin Davis: Yeah, totally. Yeah, and I think there's a scene of tree climbing in the film too, and it's fair to say that Dave, who's a playworker at the land, was nervous about a situation where a child was up a tree — the kid was high up, and it had been snowing, so the branches were soft with water. He says to Ethan, the kid, "A thicker branch than that snapped on me the other day" — a line of information.

Lukas: Yeah, absolutely, yeah. It's a beautiful way of communicating his concern without being like, "Get the hell down from there."

Erin Davis: Yeah, with that line of information.

Lukas: It's so valuable. Time and time again I witness an educator reframe and move away from "be careful" or the authoritarian approach, and just give them the information they need to make an informed decision for themselves. I look for the double-take from the child — like, "You're supporting me, you're not just being this authority, not just being the general." The rapport that's built in a short amount of time through interaction within that play arena with children is phenomenal. I've been involved with this for four years and it still blows me away.

Erin Davis: Well, that's what I love about playwork — it can be immediately useful. You can turn off this podcast, and the next time you're with a child, count to three before you say anything when you start to feel the tingles of nerves. You're already letting the playwork seep into your body. Or you can spend ten years studying it, writing about it, traveling the world, meeting people — it's just such an ocean. You can enjoy it for a day and dip your toes in, or you can—

Erin Davis: ...and sort of be out there in the deep.

Lukas: Yeah, one of my favorite attributes of it is that it's accessible.

Erin Davis: Yeah, it is.

Lukas: I just want to mention the Playwork Primer by Penny Wilson, which is a free sort of PDF booklet that she wrote — Penny Wilson wrote it. It's just such a beautiful resource that you can print off at the office and take it out, drink it over coffee, and it's just really useful. I'll put a link for it into the show notes. And this is a great opportunity to talk about your podcast, so we can put that in the show notes as well.

Erin Davis: Sure, I mean, the Playwork Podcast is a podcast for people who love play, and anyone who listens to your podcast either knows everything that we talk about already or would love it. My co-host is Morgan Leichter-Saxby, the co-founder of Pop-Up Adventure Play, and we get the same questions all the time — how do I do this, what is playwork, how do I start an adventure playground — and so we really talk through those questions and put it on the internet so that whenever people fall down the rabbit hole, it's there waiting for them.

Lukas: Excellent. Going to that accessibility — there's a school in Brisbane, which is just close by to us, and it's a challenging community. Great community, they have their challenges. During COVID the schools got shut down, but there were some high-risk... activities, so the children were still coming to school in that community. So the principal — I thought it was a great opportunity — implemented loose parts, so he converted his tennis courts into a loose parts area for children to explore. What a gift. And the results he's had are phenomenal — in one year, for the high-risk children that were involved with this initial program, there was a 70% drop in violent incidents, just due to the collaboration, and a 30% increase in attendance.

Erin Davis: It's useful to have that quantifiable impact.

Lukas: Yeah, it's equally as important to hear that child's voice and be like, look at you, when they're building something — "I can't believe you're letting us do this." I'm like, "what are you talking about, no, let us have fun." It's heavy. I do — it's a win-win.

Erin Davis: Yes, absolutely.

Lukas: And we recently — we've got an Imagination, which is a 20-foot container filled full of... we ship that around, like, to a fire-affected town in Victoria. We sent it down there for the recovery from the bushfires.

Erin Davis: Amazing impact.

Lukas: Next week we've got — over two days we've got the Imagination going to a park in Logan, and it's set up with a fence and a bunch of volunteers, and it just got put online, advertised — who wants to come and play this thing — and they put up photos. Two days, a thousand children have registered.

Erin Davis: Yikes, that's alarming.

Lukas: Yeah, but how amazing is that?

Erin Davis: Yeah, yeah, to be like, yes, we're in — you've got buy-in.

Lukas: Yeah, let's start fundraising.

Erin Davis: I'm scared, I'm scared right now about it.

Lukas: That's a lot of kids, there's no sauce there, maybe — sorry, I think we need another container right now.

Erin Davis: Right, yeah.

Lukas: I have a few questions for you from our community here in Australia. We have four adventure playgrounds in the whole of Australia. This is a question from Hayano from the Australian Institute of Play — he's like, we have four adventure playgrounds in the whole of Australia. So what are your tips for people wanting to start or get involved with one?

Erin Davis: I mean, we talked about starting small. I would echo that. Jill Wood, who's the founder of an adventure playground in Houston, Texas, at a school, defined adventure playground in a way that makes a lot of sense to me that might be useful to your questioner. She calls an adventure playground time, space, and playwork. An adventure playground is a place where playwork is happening. It does not need to be anything more than that. A great place to start basically is reading that Playwork Primer and looking around for time and space that no one else has claimed and no one expects anything out of it. Jill Wood, when she founded the adventure playground at the Paris school — you should totally google and look at their beautiful images, they're a very inspiring space — she's at a school, and there's a lot that needs to get done at school that's important, but after school people are less concerned about. So she's like, okay, after school, let's see what we can do, where can we do it. We can't use the playground at school because kids aren't allowed to paint or draw or destroy it basically, but they do have a field out back that floods twice a year, that they can't build on and nobody cares about. So they're like, well, we'll take that. So I would say look for the time and the space that is low stakes and start small.

Lukas: I mean, if you're asking me, no, absolutely — making what's at your fingertips already, what's accessible, do that.

Erin Davis: Yeah, exactly, don't overcomplicate it.

Lukas: Yeah, no paralysis of analysis here. From our friends at Camp Hill OSH — a bunch of them are trained in playwork, and OSH in Australia is after-school-hours care.

Erin Davis: Ah, okay.

Lukas: So it's children of school age that go before and after school, and they've got this — at Camp Hill they've got a complete junkyard playground.

Erin Davis: Cool.

Lukas: Which is very abnormal, and it's within the premises of the school but it's their own area. They've also started a little training advocacy group called The Outsiders, and a bunch of them are trained through Pop-Up Play, and a bunch of them are studying through Pop-Up as well.

Erin Davis: Wow, their practices are awesome.

Lukas: Yeah, there's a wait list, very long. And even the stories of the buy-in from the teachers over time, the buy-in from the parents over time — the Outdoor Classroom Day, the International Outdoor Classroom Day — the school actually allocates time to send all children over to the OSH area to engage and play on Outdoor Classroom Day.

Erin Davis: How long has that been growing?

Lukas: I mean, it's been around probably — oh, Angus is going to shoot me — but I'd say it would have been like six, seven years maybe.

Erin Davis: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, yeah, that's great. Yeah, cool, you're doing great stuff.

Lukas: So, questions from his team as they delve into it — they had a staff meeting about it — so were there boundaries around tools that you observed at The Land, or in playwork in general? I'll say, I want to try to get away from just "The Land" because you're an expert in playwork, so...

Erin Davis: Hardly, but yeah, I hear what you're saying.

Lukas: Modesty.

Erin Davis: I mean, every place is different, you know — some place it's what makes sense for your location, I think, is what a playworker would say. I can say at The Land, there are saws and hammers laying around anywhere, at the bottom of a stream, somewhere that you would expect camera to be. But lighters, for example, the playworkers kept in their pockets so there weren't lighters everywhere. I don't know why, but that was just what worked for them. So boundaries around tool use — it's like, what works for you? Start small, like, you can use a hammer in this area, and then a year later maybe you don't care about the area anymore, and I don't know what happens between A and B, but what are the boundaries that will make it possible to say yes? Put those boundaries in place so that you can say yes.

Lukas: That's a beautiful framing, I really like that — like, create the opportunity to

Lukas: Adventure playground in Berkeley?

Erin Davis: Oh cool, yeah, that was awesome.

Lukas: That's an interesting one, that's interesting because it's such a destination, they have different kids every day, you know, it's not a neighborhood, and so they have their own sort of way of dealing with that. You probably noticed they have, like, if you bring them a nail they'll give you something — what is it, I can't remember anymore — but if they work...

Erin Davis: Oh, you have to recycle. You have to be able to recycle some nails to be able to get new ones.

Lukas: Yes, right, right, right. So it incentivizes the kids to do some hazard clearing. Did the filming cause any adulteration to the play during it?

Erin Davis: Yeah, totally, of course it did. Definitely.

Lukas: For sure. Can you unpack adulteration for the people listening?

Erin Davis: I'm not sure if I can really define that well, but I think the spirit of the question is: did the kids perform for the camera, and in doing so, did I take them out of what they might have been doing otherwise? Certainly the cameras are cool — we were there for three weeks, I'll say that. So there were times it got a little old. That said, Luke, who's a play worker there, shared with me that Ethan had never climbed the tree before we came, and he climbed it while we were there. There's definitely some jokes that were told that might not have been told if I wasn't there filming — maybe trying to impress or amuse me, I don't know, it's hard for me to say. I think the play workers would probably have more to say about that because they know the kids so well. But yes, absolutely. And I think it means that whatever I make with this material better be worth it, because I totally went into their world and siphoned out these images, and so the images had better honor what's going on in there.

Lukas: Now your main role is as a parent. So how does play factor into how you operate as a parent?

Erin Davis: It certainly tests my comfort with risk-taking, for sure.

Lukas: So having a child has changed that lens, giving you a bit more of a risk-reflex lens?

Erin Davis: Oh, wildly so. Oh yeah, big time, big time. I just want to protect him, my little chick, you know. So I always appreciate when people push back on me — "he'll be fine, he can do it." I don't know, I'm not like a total freak or anything, but sometimes I'm surprised when I'm like, "just shut up, Erin, stop talking, be quiet, step back."

Lukas: Apart from practice — I mean, play work is a practice.

Erin Davis: Play work is a practice, and yeah, it's a skill, it's a muscle.

Lukas: So do you have any techniques to get over your fear reflex, for parents listening?

Erin Davis: The thing is, when I went to the land, it changed me, and when I came back I talked so much less — 90% less. I am way more silent now when I'm around kids than I ever was. I think it's baked in now, being aware of how little they really need me in their playful moments. I'm constantly defaulting to the idea that they don't need me unless they're asking for me — if they're looking me in the eye, if they're extending their hand in my direction, then there's a sign that they need me. Otherwise, I don't assume that they need me. It's a heartbreaking thing, really — what's hard about play work is it's so humbling. It's not about me, it's not about what I want to do, it's not about what I think is cool, interesting, or should come next. It's not about how I feel, it's not about my hurt feelings, what I think is right or wrong.

Lukas: So that teaches you about your active agenda, or even passive agenda — you don't have a conscious thought, but then you catch yourself and realize you've completely hijacked everything, turned it into a teaching moment in the middle of their whatever.

Erin Davis: I turned that into a teaching moment, I wasted it, I ruined it. It's not about that, and those teaching moments are for some other time.

Lukas: And that's the contrast, isn't it — between thinking that everything has to be a teaching moment, when really, what's our role as a parent? We're there to teach them, show them, do the growing for them — on our timeline too.

Erin Davis: Yeah, I think it's a disservice to your child if you create a world where there's no value in risk and independence. Because you want them to fall when they can fall, and then extend a hand to you — or when they're a teen, when their fall is witnessed by a peer going through something similar. It definitely gets harder as the kids get older — not just my own child, but children in general. Play-based preschool was awesome, kindergarten, cool, first grade, okay, second grade, seventh grade — as the kids grow it's valued less in their playful lives. And that's what's interesting to me too as a parent, to be so invested in these kids — not just my own, but all of them, you love them all — and now he's going into kindergarten, and I'm thinking, does that mean his playful life is over, or reduced by half? That's sort of where I'm at in my life right now.

Lukas: Yeah, that's interesting — Matt Robinson from Learning Through Landscapes in the UK, their main focus at the moment is play for teens, because they've had nice traction with early years, but nothing's happening there. Within surveys he's done, the response has been, "No, they don't play, so you don't need to come here."

Erin Davis: Ah, which is sad.

Lukas: Yeah, not probably... What type of play does your child engage with? Where, how, what?

Erin Davis: Well, he's in preschool — he's very lucky to go to a wonderful preschool — and at home we have a sandbox, big grassy fields. He has a very playful life. He likes vehicles, sand, transformers — I don't know, it's all the combination, little-kid stuff. One thing about when I was growing up is I was one of the older kids, so I was twelve or thirteen playing with six, seven, eight, ten-year-olds, and I always felt kind of unusual in my own peer group in that I had a sort of playful outlet. Because our gang of kids — I was seven and they were babies or whatever — we all kind of grew up together, and I just hung on a little longer than some of the other kids did, or were able to.

Lukas: Yeah, you just got a bit more before you became a boring adult into agendas. What advice do you have for educators and parents about letting children engage not only in loose parts and adventure-style play, but risk?

Erin Davis: I think — let's reframe — find your people.

Lukas: Okay, go ahead, make it more emotive for you.

Erin Davis: Yeah. One thing that I think is important about play work is that it's working directly with the kids, but it's also navigating the boring, stupid adult world on behalf of children — filing the permits, advocating at the boring council meetings, getting petition signatures, applying for grants, cutting off grown-ups at the pass who are coming in to interview — it's all of that other work that's so important. I think the best play workers are awesome with the kids, but they're also awesome with the adults — awesome at engaging them, bringing them in, talking them down, and doing the advocacy. It's community organizing. A society that's safe and healthy for children is safe and healthy for everyone, and I think that's one of the really special, important things happening in play work. So it's not exactly your question, but that's it — it's not about parenting, you know what I mean? I think it easily gets pushed into a conversation about parenting, mooshes into a conversation about schools, but play work is its own thing. It's community work, it's advocacy work for a disempowered, underrepresented community of citizens — children — and it's also very rewarding, intellectually stimulating, and rich.

Lukas: And what excites you most about being involved in the world of play work, and being that play-work evangelist?

Erin Davis: Yeah, this is when I just sound like a religious nut, but it's just so true. I think there's so much truth in it. It's not hypocritical — it stands up, it's solid, it's a really deep and loving field. It's wonderful. It is an act of love and kindness to advocate for our children.

Lukas: And thank you, on behalf of everyone that's been inspired by watching The Land — the amazing message that you were able to get out to the world. Thank you for inspiring me and opening my eyes to that whole world as well. So thank you so much for making the film, I appreciate that.

Erin Davis: Not at all.

Lukas: Thanks for joining us today.

Erin Davis: Wonderful. Thanks.