This book uses the playground as a reference point for a phenomenological examination of risk in children's lives and the development of a pedagogy of risk. Chapter 1 defines risk and discusses the use of anecdotes as a methodological device. Chapter 2 examines how considering risk as challenge and adventure leads to questions concerning adults' relationship to children and enabling children to take risks in relative safety. Chapter 3 examines adults' actions with children and the relationality of risk, while chapter 4 focuses on helping children to take risks in relative safety through adult encouragement. Chapter 5 considers direct and indirect social challenges to take risks, distinguishes positive and negative challenges, and examines how the visibility of risk allows the construction of a pedagogy. Chapter 6 maintains that a pedagogy of risk rests upon acknowledging one's own ability to take risks and focuses on how working through apprehensiveness leads to reconciling adults' need to lend security to children's explorations with children's need to test the security of their world. Chapter 7 maintains that a child-oriented language of risk gives a fuller sense of the meaning of young children's physical activity than does the language of skill development, and discusses the importance of attending to the riskiness of children's activity over the course of successive playground encounters. Chapter 8 focuses on implications of the practice of risk and their application to other situations. Chapter 9 makes recommendations for implementing a pedagogical relation sensitive to risk. (Contains approximately 275 references.) (KB)