Dr. Chris Moffett

Visiting Assistant Professor, Art Education, College of Visual Arts and Design, University of North Texas

June 2015, October 2015, April 2017, June 2018

Interview conducted on February 5, 2019

Jesse Coffino: Do you ever ask people about their memories of play?

Chris Moffett: It comes up for me as a question very much in the context of trying to explain what Anji Play is. I think it’s a beautiful way to orient people to their own experience in a way that’s very hard to talk about otherwise. And those play memories are oftentimes so far away in our experience that it’s just important to go back, and use that as a way to understand what Anji Play is, but also just what is education in general. I have found myself evoking that experience more often when people ask what Anji Play is, just as an entry into it.

But also at a more formal level, since visiting Anji and hearing more about its origins, I’ve taken it on myself to ask my own art education students about their own early play memories, as an orientation to their coursework in general, without any particular connection to Anji Play, but just realizing that those play memories are, for educators, super important to be able to go back to and access as best we can. We’re never going to be children again, so that’s part of the challenge of the play memories: to tap into something in our own experience that brings us back closer to those moments, and understanding another perspective other than the one we’re living as adults and teachers in the moment.

And so I found, in my coursework with undergraduate students who are preparing to become teachers in the near future, that reminding them of those moments—not just, “Okay, here’s how you’re supposed to handle education,” but, “Here’s a moment in a student’s experience that’s profound, and you can also remember those and check in with those”—is a huge counter to the pressures that I think educators and future educators are feeling to manage a classroom, to impart knowledge, and all these expectations. And stepping back and realizing, “Oh, right, I handled that pretty well on my own as a child. It didn’t require a huge apparatus. It’s actually quite simple if you get out of the way of it,” is a huge relief to them, as people who are both caught up in the educational system and planning to take a role in future implementations of that for others. Play memories are an elegant way to tap into that.

Jesse Coffino: And when you bring that up with your students, or the people you’re working with, is it an invitation to think about it and sit with it, or is it an invitation to share? Do people want to talk about it? Do people not want to talk about it?

Chris Moffett: People love to talk about it. In fact, I started this semester two weeks ago, and with my elementary art education students I asked them to reflect, not on play memories per se, but on materials they engaged with at an early age. Because they had just gone through several years of studio practice, they’re immersed in charcoal and drawing materials and paints, sculpture, clay, all these very traditional student materials, and then on top of that, it gets layered with a whole slew of techniques, procedures, expectations. So I’ve just been asking them to reconsider what the scope of possible materials actually is. And I just launched into it by saying, “Well, what did you work with as a child?”

And they love to think back to what all those things were. We had probably a 20 minute discussion on Oreo cookies. Right? As this weird little construction material that you had this engagement with: it tastes a certain kind of way, there are different rituals and approaches to eating it, and all this kind of stuff. Or moss, for example, and what did you do with it? I think, for them, it was super engaging, and provided a really nice counterpoint to this sort of technical expectation around artistic materials.

Jesse Coffino: There’s this book called with a chapter called “The Psychopathology of Everyday Things,” and their affordances. And you’re thinking, as an educator working with materials, how these materials invite people, how the Oreo asks you to twist it, how that surface tension breaks in the twisting, right? Affordances. And that’s part of the experience, going back to that. But you mentioned, it was really interesting, what I picked up on is you talking about this distance between their current experience, where they are now, and that memory that they’re drawing on. And just this notion of memory being incredibly subjective, because you’re recalling and you’re adding experience and other things on top of what you’re recalling, and the experience itself is Rashomonian. Or just think about the unreliability of eyewitness accounts, or this larger question of subjectivity or objectivity.

But you have these deeply meaningful, highly subjective experiences. Then, in the Anji Play approach, the way we’re talking about it, these experiences make some claim to truth, right? So there’s a truth behind that experience, but its recall is filtered through all of this other experience. Is there any tension there in your mind? How do you feel about the use of words like “true”? 

Chris Moffett: As a trained philosopher, I’m supposed to have ideas about truth and these sorts of things, but practically speaking, I find it just an odd choice of words. I mean, for precisely those reasons. It’s an elusive thing, and we have very subjective notions of what truth is or why we should be oriented to it in general. And I think much of contemporary philosophy is about questioning our assumptions about what counts as truth, who says, and to what ends, and how can we situate to knowledge differently. So it’s a loaded term, and I think it’s a particularly loaded term within education, where it’s often deployed in very bureaucratic fashions. You’re often being assessed on whether you’re in the truth or out of the truth.

That said, I do think there’s something at the heart of it, if you think of it as an experiential practice. What feels true, what rings true, maybe might be a more interesting way to think about it. I’m sort of riffing on the language, but if you really think about truth as a kind of sensory practice, then that becomes interesting. All of a sudden it’s not just a question of are you in it or out of it, but what can you do with it? How does it speak to you? What does it afford? In the same kind of way that a material might.

Jesse Coffino: And, in parallel, we are talking about the period of childhood as the period where culture, language, the understanding of the self, of the environment, the world, reality, is taking place at this age, and you’re also determining, the child’s determining, what is and isn’t true, right? So, with Anji Play, you have a system which is about how you create the conditions for children to assess those things, but obviously there are all the inputs of culture and the environment and materials and the adult’s presence and the practices. But you have this larger question that comes up, which is something that comes up in the interviews, is that you do have what would seem to be common experiences or shared sensory and affective recalls, right? You have this very similar expressed emotional reaction or recall, and then even in the literal words that are used. When people say things, “freedom” or “alone” or “a tree.” If I have four people saying, “Oh yeah, I remember so clearly climbing into a tree and sitting in that tree,” I’m not saying that—and I guess this may be a separate linguistic or semantic question than what is the deployment of the word “truth”—but it seems to be, some things are shared. There is a shared experience or feeling that seems somewhat consistent across cultures in terms of the people we’ve spoken to. So maybe in the Anji Play or true play context, the claim to truth is the truth of it being something essential that it is possible for people to access.

Chris Moffett: There’s something about just being in a tree, for example. And whatever that is for somebody. I mean, maybe there’s an even deeper truth than any particular material, which is that we all share these common experiences of being in spaces and trying to find out, “What do we care about in those relationships?” And there’s going to be a kind of commonality, a certain biological imperative around both physical needs—like, I need air or I need sunlight, I need room to move so that I’m not trapped, those are all quite real—but then there’s also, I think, one of the things that I think about in my own play memories: How those sort of basic elements afford an experience. An experimental experience that I can craft for myself. Nobody told me to climb a tree, but I found myself there over and over again as a way to try to understand something about what my relationship to the space around me can be.

Jesse Coffino: If you’re willing to share, what are your memories of play? Are there any specific instances, is there a specific theme that emerges for you in the way you think about these things?

Chris Moffett: For me they’re very place based. So I think back to where I was. And I think we could probably find a kind of theme or a shared truth across those spaces, but the way they show up in memory is very specific to where they were. So until I was eight, I lived in rural Pennsylvania, in farm country, on 18 acres of church property. My dad was a minister. Which meant that, six days a week, that place was quiet and all mine, aside from random deer and hedgehogs and whatever. And I have early memories, who knows how reliable they are, of just sort of disappearing. Leaving the house, out into that space, into the woods, into the fields. There was a creek and climbing trees. I would just hop on my bike, and there was a perimeter to it, I had a sense of where the boundary of my world was, but I would push that, even as I was very young. It’s hard to imagine what that actually looks like today in our striated spatial world.

But for me, that was the most consistent feeling I had, of going out into a space and into whatever I chose to do in that space. Let’s say I wasn’t going out to play, I was going playing out. The very act of being out was already the play. I wasn’t going to go find someplace and then go play in that place, I was playing in place, I was exploring what my world was. And so things like climbing trees were a very natural extension of that, because that’s what was available, that was a way to understand my own physicality, a way to embed myself, I guess, in a place. To be in a tree is not just to be somewhere, like on the ground. It’s to be in the midst of something. So I have lots of early memories of just climbing and nestling into tree spaces. That’s one place.

When I was eight, we moved to the suburbs of New Haven, Connecticut, so the scope of my space was changed from 18 acres to a third of an acre, but then it became a much more social engagement, as you’re now, you’re playing in a neighborhood, you’re playing with other kids, the intersection of other people’s places, and it became much more of a social negotiation of place: riding bikes around the block, and finding a shortcut through somebody’s backyard.

Jesse Coffino: You talked about sort of pushing boundaries and space. I was thinking about your ambit of the property, and how the limits of the property bounded your space. But then you quickly went to sort of these boundaries of indoor and outdoor play and not-play. What is the discrete experience and what are these discrete spaces? And in Anji, you have this really liminal space or outdoor space that is this overlap in the Venn diagram of activities that happen on different scales, but with the same sort of philosophy behind them or the same ideals. So you have indoor or outdoor, and you’re talking about these boundaries, and then you’re talking about sort of this embeddedness. You’re talking about boundaries, but then you’re also talking about connectedness, the bounding or the lack of boundaries, and you push the defining of those boundaries, and then you have this connectedness.

And so there’s a sense of, in my mind, connectedness to something larger, there’s a sense of spirituality, maybe, or the safety of feeling connected to something that’s bigger that’s there, because you’re talking about getting lost, disappearing, of embedding, of being “out” in space. And you’re also talking about being on the property, which is almost definitionally spiritually oriented. 

Chris Moffett: That’s a whole can of worms, because as a preacher’s kid and growing up in church property, it’s a very specific environment that many people have an experience with, but having experience on the sort of backside of it becomes very different. And so in some sense you could say church was—I wouldn’t say a spiritual thing—it was a playground. I even remember, up until perhaps high school, thinking of the church structure as like a climbing gym. I was pretty good at shimmying up the walls. And I would wait through a service in order to finally have the space made available for its properties, right? Which led, you can say, to a deeply ambivalent relationship to spiritual practices. On the one hand, I was very embedded in them, but on the other hand I had a very odd relationship to them, in which they were a context but also a kind of weird proceduralism laid on top of it. I mean, you could draw interesting parallels between that and education.

Jesse Coffino: Like praxis, right? Orthopraxy versus orthodoxy.

Chris Moffett: Yes, in a lot of the same forms. A commitment to the verbal, a commitment to forms of leading and following, and the distribution of information or ideas. 

Jesse Coffino: And I guess part of that question for me is that you’ve got people like Steiner, or even Montessori, where there’s this view of this moment as spiritual, this connectedness, this sense of the discovery of our embedment in the natural world, and then there’s the values that come from these spiritual framings of experience. In some instances, you can see it create a sort of romanticized notion of a child, and maybe it’s filtered through these positive memories, who knows. Maybe it’s this joyous discovery, it’s kind of this thing, so there’s this spiritual unknown quality to it, what is known to the child in some sense. I think sometimes of prehistory. When a flower flowering in a reflection was magic, because you didn’t have a better explanation. The mystery of the unknown and the child encountering the unknown.

Chris Moffett: I’ll just speak to my own particular experience. I have very distinct memories of being a child, and then as I moved through the world and through the educational system, one of the weird side effects of how we think about education is, we bracket out people by age. We just take it so for granted, but it’s the strangest thing. If you’re this age you go there, if you’re this age you go here, and don’t interact, or only in very proscribed ways. And so I think we also see a real shift, in the US, around the public and the private, and where children are expected to be and how they’re expected to be in different places. And so the larger result of that, just in my own experience, is that after I left behind my childhood, I didn’t know any kids. I didn’t know people who had kids, and if they did I wouldn’t see them with their kids. I was studying education, and yet would rarely see a kid.

We would do philosophy of education, which presumably has something to say about early childhood experience, but we would talk about it in theoretical terms, or within the context of a particular book or particular image of a child, rather than with children or in the vicinity of children. So the closest I got was really working with undergrads, who became sort of de facto children for me. But that’s also very weird: why is that as close as I could get?

And so I was fortunate, in my private practice in movement education, to mentor with somebody who worked with kids. But honestly, I wanted to work with her because I thought she was brilliant, and it just so happened she worked with kids specifically. And so here I found myself observing and working with infants and children through movement, but one on one, in a private setting, a therapeutic setting. And I found that to be hugely rewarding, but also very strange. I spent a lot of time just trying to figure out, how do you be with kids, what does this mean? But I was fortunate to have that experience, and then I think, as a result, I slowly began to gain more confidence. But without that experience, I could easily still be in a similar circumstance of thinking about education without a direct experience of children’s lives.

And that’s weird. It’s weird that you can go through this world for so many years, and, without a very specific professional or familial exposure, not have any access to children. Now I have nieces and I see them now and then, so I have those kinds of encounters, but even today, as a professor of education, I have to seek out those experiences, I have to go find a school and ask to come visit and see them within those parameters. So I guess all that is to say, the cultural notion of what a child is is largely formed at a distance, and it takes something to actually shake that off, to find ways to get under all those impositions that keep it from actually being an encounter, and keep that encounter from being one that’s already proscribed by very clear social norms. Either you’re a therapist, you’re working with a child for XYZ reasons, or you’re a teacher and now your job is to work with and manage these children who are in this age range, this one- or two-year gap of age that now is your bandwidth for exposure to children.

So I don’t know that I really have a fully formed appreciation of what childhood even means, even after all the work I’ve been doing. Becoming aware that that was odd, and is a problem, took a long time. I didn’t even notice it as a gap until I started thinking about education, until I started thinking, “Oh, I do need to work with this child, and I don’t have a sense of what children are in general.” And so, once I became aware of it as a challenge, that was one of the things that really spoke to me about my experience in Anji. To have an experience with children that is much larger in scale, and also much freer in its expression, freer in how it plays out in space, how the children are free to be children in that space, rather than playing the role of children within an educational sort of paradigm. So that was a profound encounter.

Jesse Coffino: You’re talking about sort of this hypothetical child or abstract child or theoretical child, or the lineage of the child from this thinker to that thinker to this thinker, that practice, right? So the Vygotskian child to an American Vygotskian looks different than he does to a Russian Vygotskian, which probably looks very different than he or she did to Vygotsky. You have these views of the child or these ideas of the child, and then you have the systems where knowledge is in some ways transmitted from an expert to a learner or to a knowledgeable person to a learner, and then in Anji you kind of see this reversal, where the child is really teaching in some ways, or is the subject. That the location of authority around knowledge, or the value of knowledge, or the meaning, the authority around the meaning, or the importance of knowledge, is more centered in the child’s experience. There’s a lot of subtle distinctions there. We can talk more subtly about how the teacher may or may not be scaffolding learning, what are the routines they’re putting into place, how they’re framing questions, what materials they’re providing, what their culture is as teachers and professionals.

But to a certain extent, there is more deference given to the direction of the child’s knowledge or what it means for the child to explain. You’re talking about this position where the child is present in your professional experience, or even in your personal life, because that’s where society often organizes the presence of children in our lives.. And then you encounter in Anji something that maybe changes, a little bit, that view, that directionality. You’re saying there’s this linear view of where children should be, so there’s this band of this year for the kids where they should be, which is informed by developmental psychology. And there’s truth to that. There are things that do happen developmentally, chronologically, but that’s a narrow view of capacity or a narrow view of what a child or an educator should be doing in that moment. 

Chris Moffett: Speaking of play memories, there’s a little gap in my memory around how I first heard about Anji, how it actually kicked off. I can only say that it was really just at the invitation of Chelsea, who I had met the year or two before, quite by chance, quite by art, you could say. We were both invited to be part of an art project of a mutual acquaintance of ours who would stage dinner à vingt, dinner of 20, in which he would invite people who he thought would have interesting conversations together, and would never invite the same people twice. So it was a sort of chance encounter, sort of an artistic blind date of sorts between people who might be of interest to each other, either artistically or as just human beings. And so Chelsea and I were both at one of these dinners, and of course got talking about education, and quickly discovered we had common unorthodox ideas about education.

And then I guess it sort of got left at that, sort of kind of like a “to be continued,” and I was finishing up my doctorate at the time. And then I think, during that period, she went to China, encountered Anji Play, and in my dim recollection, as far as I can tell, it was either an email or a call or something, along the lines of, “You’ve got to check this out.” And so I perked up, and again, I was not particularly focused on early childhood, but when somebody who I think is doing interesting things is interested in something, I want to understand that. And so I took it very seriously, and very quickly found myself on a plane to China to check it out.

I think I had some ideas about why this might be interesting, partly coming out of my own interest in working with children in a movement context and trying to understand how that relates to educational spaces, so I had a series of my own questions that I thought might be spoken to in this context. But again, it was very abstract still. I didn’t have a sense of the space or the possibilities, in any but the dimmest ways. And so, when I arrived in Anji, that first sort of visceral experience was quite profound. And I don’t know what to say about that. It was familiar, in the sense that you can recognize a school setting, you can recognize children in a space together in those contexts, and I think it probably evoked some of my own memories.

But I think there was also a critical difference as well, and that had to do with a kind of . . . there’s not good words for this. I’m going to say it wrong, but a kind of wild exuberant joy in the physicality of a space that really spoke to me in a way that I had never brought those two worlds together before. I had my own play experiences and I had my own school experiences, and the Venn-diagram overlap of those was quite sliver thin. And so there was something very familiar about it—I recognized play, I recognized school, but there was something about the combination of those that was staggering.

I’ve been to China three times now. All of my reason for being there is Anji, so there may be other ways to make the long journey possible, but in each case it’s always been a case of, how do I get to Anji and spend more time there, because I feel like that’s a kind of spatial imperative, a need to be immersed back into that experience and understand it better.

And now, having gone back several times to some of the same schools and seeing some of the same contexts, it’s all sort of layered now in memory, so it’s hard to extract the first encounter. But I think there are things that have stood out to me as consistent across each visit. And each visit seems like a chance to deepen and expand on those sort of basic elements. I think one of the first things that really stood out to me was the sense of space and movement: a kind of almost oversaturation of that, seeing things that I could imagine sort of in isolation, climbing a tree or stomping across a creek, all those things from my own memories, but just seeing them en masse, a whole group of children engaging in this activity together collectively . . . the physicality of it, the sense of how pervasive the movement and physical engagements were in the space, is something that’s hard to explain.

Because we’ve all seen movement, we have sports, have all kinds of ways of understanding these things, but seeing it in such a condensed form, there’s something that just seems quite right about it. For whatever reason, we don’t do that as a common physical experience in the world. It is unfortunate. And you only really get to feel that once you see it being enacted on such a pervasive scale. A whole group of children within a school, within so many schools, and schools typically being the places where those movements are very carefully proscribed, very carefully regulated and excluded.

You could imagine recesses being a particular moment in school where you’re allowed to physically engage, but even then, those spaces tend to be fairly proscribed and the range of behaviors fairly proscribed, and there tends to be a kind of franticness that comes with the release that’s afforded by those moments. And I think that’s quite different when you see something at that scale. It feels like a kind of inevitability. Of course it should be this way, right? It doesn’t feel like an exception and doesn’t feel urgent, it feels natural and timeless, and there is something true or right about it.

So I think that stood out. There is something about just the full expression of children’s movement in relationship to large-scale material and environments. It was so clearly elaborating on itself, rather than on some kind of other external regulation.

Environments for children are typically fairly constrained, privatized, or commercialized as marketable experiences, with all the branding and colored plastic that goes with those kinds of things. So aside from my own memories of childhood, which were very different, or aside from seeing children’s faces from a distance in Central Park or seeing the kinds of materials that children are afforded as they’re moving down a city street in a stroller, there isn’t a lot to actually compare to.

And I think the expectation when you go into a school is already formed by a history of what kinds of materials are likely to be for children, and, certainly in an outside sort of play area, tend to fall into typical categories. Seesaws and increasingly bizarre plastic tree house–like slide structure things. And in contrast to that, what I recognized in Anji was a very direct relationship to the thing-ness of things, rather than a kind of semblance of things. Things don’t need to be toys in order for children to play with them. They don’t have to already fit into a particular aesthetic category or a particular educational category for them to be available for people to work. Trees are trees, and they can be climbed on or they can be looked at or they can have things attached to them. And there’s a very direct relationship to the physicality of things that I recognized there, that spoke to my early childhood memories.

I think one of the things that particularly resonated with me is just the sense of scale of materials. There’s a way in which we tend to reduce things both for children and for education. Things are made smaller and of less responsive materials, less functional, they’re scaled down in any number of ways to be a very different experience for a lot of different reasons. So, in terms of materials, one of the things that really stood out to me was how appropriate the size of them was, and yet how odd that appropriateness seemed, how sort of extraordinary it was. For example, real ladders. Ladders that you could climb up, and boards that you could string between ladders, and barrels that could be used to hold things or to get up on top of and try to roll on. Shovels that actually are designed for shoveling, in large enough areas that you could actually irrigate something or uncover something, or bury something, not just as a token sort of representation of burying or irrigating, but for real.

There was a sense of just the very directness of scale, of material, of experience, that didn’t seem particularly mediated or didn’t require mediation through any idea in order for it to be real and expressed. So that was striking.

Coming from a movement perspective, the quality of the movement expressed in relationship to those materials was quite extraordinary. Just a full range of human possibility of movement that didn’t seem particularly constrained. And, again, it’s hard to recognize those constraints until you have something to compare it to. But if you’ve been moved from place to place in a bundled-up fashion and are told, “Here are the things you can move around and here are the ways you can move around them,” then it seems very normal, but it’s also very constraining. So when you see that unleashed, when you see the full possibility of human expression and movement and relationship to environment and materials, in which you’re not just moving in an environment but you can actually change your environment and create challenges in your environment that will even elicit more movements, in this really interesting sort of feedback loop, then that’s striking.

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