“My” PGCE students are out on their first day of what we term their first school experience, and the rain has tipped down, and the winds are high. It reminds me of my very first play time that I had to supervise and it was announced (perhaps somewhat gleefully by an older teacher) as Wet Play Time.
It was a bear garden, if by that term we can conjure up a hundred bears and probably about 75 crayons and the longest piece of paper – from one end of the hall to the other – and twenty minutes of frenzied drawing.
Did I mind it? Well, it was an eye-opener as to how much these rather daunting and serious-minded children could throw themselves into a rather ad hoc activity. No, it was fine, except perhaps for gathering them all together at the end. What gave me pause for thought was what counts as unsuitable weather. Rain is out, for starters, apparently.
Then, after a stretch of some four years, I found myself in the pouring rain with a bunch of four year olds, watching water pour down the leaky gutter onto the pumpkin they had grown. We all got wet and cold, and took about an hour to invent ways of collecting water, harvest pumpkins, and so on. I thought I was very brave, smugly. I can see now I was learning.
Move forward to this morning, and my thoughts turning to the baptism by fire that might, in some schools, be Wet Play Time for the PGCE students. I find, with a bit of help, two starkly contrasting visions of outdoor play: this from Norway and this from the UK . The emphasis on risk and protection from the v enthusiastic advocates in UK is entirely valid, but the conversations (and in some ways the actitivities) are dominated by the notion of staying safe.
Both sets of practitioners would claim that “Being happy, being outside and getting fresh air is clearly important for today’s children” as Heidi, the Norwegian school leader states. This is close to the four dimensions of outdoors mentioned by the Kaplans that I have discussed before: Being Away; Extent; Fascination; Compatibility. What is most striking is the degree to which they do this, the degree of Extent to use Kaplan’s phrase – one setting being next to a (doubtless quite cold) lake, where the staff meeting (in a tepee) discusses (at 12 mins 50 in the clip) being able to see the children after the winter sun disappears, and the other in a UK garden where an island is manufactured with a tarpaulin sheet (6 mins 20) and you have to pretend it’s deep water. Look at the Norway clip around 10 mins in, and see the match incident, to see real instruction, real involvement. It’s there in the UK, of course – as in the box play (4 mins 50) – but contrast that to the mountain walk in Norway (16 mins 20).
There are huge issues of confidence here – adults’ trust in the resilience of children, parents’ trust in the staff (and we can note the difference in the videos between advocating the outdoors to parents in the UK, and the parents’ voices in Norway) the staff’s trust in their understanding of the children: a mutual upbuilding of a project, arising from respect and common ideals. Is that what we’re lacking in the UK context?
nicktomjoe 