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Why the playground gives more room to the boys

2020-07-10T13:04:26.019Z


Several projects aim to revegetate educational establishments in order to promote diversity in play areas. And make more p


Supposed kings of the playground, the boys could see their territory transformed… into meadow! Several projects in France aim to revegetate educational establishments in order to promote diversity at school. Because the place of hopscotch and frenzied football games is sometimes accused of maintaining a form of domination by small schoolchildren over their female comrades.

Thursday, the mayor of Grenoble, Eric Piolle (EELV), praised one of these transformations on Twitter, photo of a bulldozer in support. Schoolyards are "too reserved for boys' practices," he said. Before giving his "solution": "de-spray, degenerate, vegetate and vegetable".

🧑‍🤝‍🧑The schoolyards of our children are like bitumen car parks, hot in summer and too reserved for boys' practices. The solution: de-vaporize, degenerate, vegetate and vegetable! And in addition our children help to make the plans. Yes, we also grow during recess pic.twitter.com/VxEsNJhGcC

- Éric Piolle (@EricPiolle) July 8, 2020

This list with Newspeak accents may have disconcerted some Internet users. But the councilor assumes, in particular comforted by the observation made for several years by specialists.

A geographer of the genre, Édith Maruejouls is regularly associated with reorganization of playgrounds, particularly in Gironde, as a specialist in equality issues in public space.

Reinforcement of green spaces and vegetable gardens

"The schoolyard is above all a question of uses," she recalls. Certain spaces will freeze uses reserved for boys or adults, such as a football field directly marked on the ground. Conversely, green spaces have no predefined use and can be mixed. "

In Trappes (Yvelines), this process was initiated in 2018, at the instigation of the town hall. Concretely, in the schools of the city, the sports fields left the center of the court. “The courses are very tarmac and sad, explained to us Thomas Urdy, assistant to town planning. We are therefore developing green spaces, sometimes vegetable gardens, and we are gradually installing games, hopscotches and synthetic pitches. "

In a 2018 report, UNICEF looked at the way children experience the tacit distribution in force in schoolyards. "The exchanges with the elementary classes show that the girls express a feeling of injustice shared collectively by the group of girls," noted the UN agency.

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A few years earlier, the director Eléonor Gilbert had already highlighted this child malaise by interrogating her eight-year-old daughter, facing the camera, for a short documentary entitled "Space". The little schoolgirl draws the distribution of her classmates in the schoolyard. "When you want to play something big, like the boys, with their football it takes all that," she complains, pointing to the largest part of her sheet.

Space / trailer from Les films-cabanes on Vimeo.

"They say that girls have little games ," says Edith Maruejouls. But that's because we don't leave them room! If they have room, their games are as big as those of boys. To think about a more balanced sharing of places, the geographer also always asks the children to take part in the same exercise and to draw their playground. Each time, the girls find themselves on the outskirts.

Sometimes misunderstood by adults, the question is not anecdotal. "Unmixedness fuels stereotypes, sexism and harassment," says Édith Maruejouls. According to the specialist, one in two children would say that they do not have a friend of the opposite sex. "It is this lack of relationship that will maintain biased and aggressive relationships between girls and boys," she deduces.

Mixed activities

Green spaces, in addition to making it possible to draw spaces with variable geometry, would give rise to mixed activities in essence. "These are so-called sensitive spaces," emphasizes the geographer. Children come to look, hear, feel things. These activities have no gender from a societal point of view. "

This revegetation carries its share of constraints, however. An area of ​​grass can turn straw yellow in summer, or muddy in fall. “Greening is a land problem, agrees the specialist. But not greening is other problems. Which don't all go away when they get home.

Source: leparis

All life articles on 2020-07-10

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