Category: Uncategorized

How to ask a question

Last Friday and this Tuesday I taught very small classes – ten in each. Something of a luxury, not because the showman is put away in a class that size but really because the academic can come out.

The first class was a sort of guest spot on the outdoors in an international perspective in a module called (surprise!) “Cross-National Perspectives in Education,” and raised questions (I hope) around the validity of evidence from sources grabbed (purposefully) from YouTube, and set in the context of harder (but less immediately illuminating) data such as stats on life span.

The second was my “Becoming a Reader” class, where the ungarded students were lively and argumentative while presenting to one another on issues around reading and memory, reading schemes, motivation…

So far, so good.  What struck me was that the smaller classes gave us all time to listen, to question, to discuss. They gave me time to listen, and to raise questions – and to listen to my own questioning.

But what sort of questions do I raise? How do I challenge students? I think – I hope – I do so with some reference to the kind of progression in thinking skills I’m looking for. I’m looking less for an answer about “How many children attend the pre school in Norway that we saw?” than I am for some response to “What do you see as the drawbacks to the kind of provision we saw?” or “Why might a family education project in Kenya be presented as a women’s empowerment project?”

But do I – do we – model effectively enough the deeper questioning we seek from our students? I ask a student to “be more critical” – but can I, hand on heart, say I have shown the students the kind of questioning I want them to do?

This comes to a head with the students I’m meeting tomorrow, and to the stream of Masters students who have come to me this week to check their essay titles are “on the right lines.” What makes a good question, a good area for a short essay, a fruitful line of discussion?

I think we’re back, to a greater or lesser extent explicitly,  at Gibbs’ reflective cycle and Bloom’s taxonomy.  Watch out for that threadbare carpet, please, as I suggest

  • To what extent do you think you can rely on…
  • How valid do you think the argument is…
  • Can you use this argument in a different context/Can we explain this another way…

…are  good ways [for me] to go, rather than nervously saying “Do you understand this?” “Are you with me?” or (in some ways the most cowardly of all) “I’m assuming you’ve all read this.”

This would/could/might lead to better questions at least at M-level or L6. Armed with this – or having armed my students with it? – I can genuinely expect essay proposals that are not “How can a practitioner support role play effectively?” but “To what extent might practitioner support improve children’s experience of role play?” or “What theoretical background might a practitioner employ to understand role play in a setting?” Tentative. Exploratory.

Fruitful.

The Guardian Letter, Fri 21st Feb 2014

Local politicians must take action to protect provision of quality for young children. We are profoundly concerned about the widespread loss of local early years provision of quality and the resulting harm to children and their families. We understand that the resources available to local government are being reduced, and therefore difficult decisions must be taken. But we urge local politicians to protect early years provision, which can have a lifelong, positive impact on young children and their families. Otherwise, we will all pay in the long-term for cuts being made in the short-term.

Since 2010, the number of children’s centres in England has reduced from 3,631 to 3,116; and some of these centres are information hubs open in name only – “half a person and a bunch of leaflets” as Naomi Eisenstadt, the first national director of the Sure Start Unit, has summarised the situation. The House of Commons select committee also reports that “many maintained nursery schools have closed in the last decade” (over a hundred in England) despite robust evidence to show that they offer the best outcomes to disadvantaged young children. The benefits of attending a maintained nursery school last right the way through the school system: their closure represents the worst sort of short-term thinking. The youngest and most vulnerable children are being harmed by these irresponsible actions.

Where is the quality for two-year-olds? Local government has a vital role to play in the successful delivery of the national programme to provide free nursery places for disadvantaged two-year-olds. We know children will only benefit if they attend a good-quality early years setting with appropriately qualified staff. So we are dismayed that some councils fund settings without a good Ofsted rating, and further dismayed by the cutbacks to training courses and to teams of early years advisers. Without training and ongoing support, how will quality be sustained and the poorest settings improve?

A recent report on summer-born children has highlighted the pressure being put on children and parents by local authorities and schools to enter reception class before the age of five.

All these short-term actions which damage children in their early years will have an upward impact as they go through their schooling. This in turn damages communities. Local authorities must do more than blame national government and the economic recession. We therefore call on candidates in the forthcoming local elections in England and Northern Ireland to stop cutting early years provision and pledge their support for the high-quality provision that will benefit young children and their families now, and for years to come.

Helen Moylett President of the British Association for Early Childhood Education, Prof Tina Bruce Marion Dowling, Retired Her Majesty’s Inspector, Bernadette Duffy Head of Thomas Coram Centre for Children and Families, Prof Aline-Wendy Dunlop, Jean Ensing Retired HMI, Professor Chris Pascal, Rosemary Peacocke Retired HMI Prof Iram Siraj, Lesley Staggs Retired national strategies director of early years, Prof Kathy Sylva, Prof Colwyn Trevarthen, Denise Hevey Emeritus professor in education, University of Northampton, Anne Nelson National Association for Primary Education, Wendy Ellyat Save Childhood Movement, Jo White Headteacher/head of centre, Portman Early Childhood Centre, Dr Margy Whalley Director, Pen Green Centre for Children and Families and Pen Green Research Base, Ben Hasan Chair, National Campaign for Real Nursery Education, Jane Payler Chair, Association for the Professional Development of Early Years Educators, Pamela Calder On behalf of The Early Childhood Studies Degrees Network, Melian Mansfield On behalf of Early Childhood Forum, Nancy Stewart Early Learning Consultancy Emeritus professor Tricia David, Nick Swarbrick Oxford Brookes University, Dr David Whitebread University of Cambridge, Beverley Nightingale University Campus Suffolk, Rosalind Godson Unite/Community Practitioners’ and Health Visitors’ Association, Penny Webb Proprietor of Penny’s Place Childminding, Kathryn Solly, Edwina Mitchell On behalf of OMEP, Michelle Melson, Chris Palmer Chair of trustees of Centre for Research in Early Childhood, Birmingham (CREC), Maureen Saunders Trustee of CREC, Sheila Thorpe Trustee of CREC, Professor emeritus Philip Gammage Trustee of CREC, Professor emerita Janet Moyles

Resistance or debate?

A selection from Saturday’s conversation on BBC Radio 4’s Week in Westminster (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03tqx9x) between David Blunkett and Nick Gibb:

NG: …He [Michael Gove] doesn’t set out to be non-consensual, but what can happen is that if you’re determined to ensure that the reforms are implemented which he is they will ruffle the feathers of those people who are resistant to that reform.

DB: Well I’m not sure about calling the teaching profession The Blob is actually all that consensual…

NG: No, well, the Blob isn’t the teaching profession, the Blob is not the teaching profession…

DB: Well, who the devil is it then?

NG: The Blob, I’ll tell you who the Blob is, the Blob are the academics in the education faculties of the Universities and the Local Authority advisers and they have a particular orthodoxy that they impose on the teaching profession….

[A discussion on who has power continues]

NG: …. Now, well, now they have less power because automony has been given to the professionals and at the expense of the education faculties and at the expense of the local authorities and that is why there is this anger by those people about what Michael Gove is doing

DB: Nick, Nick, you’re fighting a past battle, you’re fighting a past battle begun twenty-five years ago in 1988 by Ken Baker and you’re still fighting it now [….] That battle’s over; the battle for the highest standards in every school, the life chance of every child whatever their background, that battle will continue…

NG: There is still an intellectual battle to be won about child initiated learning, about mixed ability teaching, about how you teach arithmetic…

I can’t spare the time to challenge the logic in the first section about consensuality and resistance (or to hark back in any detail to David Blunkett’s phrase about people being “cynical”), so here are just a couple of thoughts from the Blob, if that is who I am (quite apart from the insult, I’m not sure I’m comfortable with the pigeonhole; I am in no way knee-jerk resistant, for example): if there is an intellectual battle to be fought over child-initiated learning, then perhaps the research done by the Universities might be useful evidence – or is an intellectual engagement really not about weighing evidence, but about who can shout the loudest, be the rudest (and I know some HE and school colleagues who have not held back here)? And on the side-swipe on child-initiated learning, do we discern how The Foundation Stage might be further dismantled, with insights from psychology and sociology – not to mention the everyday pedagogy of the nursery I brought with me into teacher education – swept aside in the kind of rhetoric I have commented on before?

Open Air Schools

A now lost phenomenon, largely built on how people understood tuberculosis – but does the Open Air School movement have something to teach 21st Century Britain?
Check this out: http://municipaldreams.wordpress.com/2014/01/21/aspen-house-open-air-school-lambeth-doing-the-world-of-good/

As the blog post states:

This was an education rooted squarely – though without the rhetoric – in the principles of the Swiss pedagogue, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi: a focus on the equilibrium between head, hands and heart, a belief in the free development of each child’s potential through observation and discovery of nature and the material world.

The Inimical Outdoors

“There’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing.”

I’ve met the saying in all sorts of places, from reminiscences of Swedish preschools to being traced to Alfred Wainright. It gets very bad press (in a comic way) from expat blogger David Nikel in his post “Sh*t Norwegians Say.”

But what does the EY practitioner in England make of weather that we’re seeing at the moment? There are things to move us to a sense of awe and wonder like this from October (the Telegraph seems to lead the way on these (here’s another, more recent one!); the Mail has doom and gloom disaster pics, like these, of impending snow, to judge by a quick Google trawl, but perhaps this is unfair). There are, however, images and experiences closer to home that are not awe-inspiring, not conventionally beautiful, but inconvenient at best, destructive and potentially fatal at their worst.

Is it about context? Are we willing to see the dramatic surge in pictures of fierce waves  on the web, but lament the long rides into work, the slow, smelly seep of floods and the even smellier aftermath? Do we actually not think “There’s no such thing as bad weather”? There is inconvenient weather, destructive weather, enjoyable weather, whether (!) we are referring to blazing summers, windy springs and autumns or the varying styles of forms of winter precipitation. Some of it is welcome; some of it, let’s be honest, is not.

Thirteenth Night

Richard Greene is a scholar (his University page from Toronto is here), a wit and a friend. He is most widely known, I would guess, for his excellent work on literary biography. However, he also a poet of no little distinction (his latest, Dante’s House is both monumental and accessible) and for the night after Epiphany I should like to offer his short, early poem, Thirteenth Night, on tonight’s dies non.

I hoover up the rubble of Christmas,

Bright shreds of wrapping, carpeted biscuit crumbs,

Ornamental shards of a fallen angel,

Satsuma stems, red and green ends of string.

Now, the night after twelfth night, old Christmas

Growing older, the tree standing one last hour,

The house must turn to the simpler regime

Of school-going, work, library delving,

Lives which will prosper through unfestive months

Of England’s wet winter. Waybread in season:

The last dark fruit-cake one wise elf hid.

Calleva Atrebatum and all that

It hardly seems worth putting links to the claims and counter-claims that have followed Michael Gove’s irascible statements about Blackadder views of World War I.   Perhaps the best (and genuinely critical) précis of the [can I call it?] debate, is to be found here, in a blog post on the Imperial and Global Forum from Marc-William Palen at Exeter. In any case, it’s not the argument I’m really interested in, and Dave Aldridge’s work on remembrance (see his blog for a taste) already goes way beyond what I could say.

What prompts a blog post tonight is a quotation in Charlotte Higgins’ book Under Another Sky, which I was given at Christmas and which I am really enjoying.  In exploring Roman Britain she has moved from messy Londinium to the quieter and more ordered Silchester – Calleva Atrebatum – only to reveal it, too, is a site where tangles of Romano-British religious practices, loyalties and rivalries do not make for a straightforward narrative.   She contrasts this with Rosemary Sutcliff’s vision of Calleva in “The Eagle of the Ninth,” and quotes Sutcliff saying that she is “happiest…in Roman Britain:”

“If I could do a time flip and land back in Roman Britain, I would take a deep breath, take perhaps a fortnight to get used to things, then be all right… I have a special “Ah, here I am again, I know exactly what they are going to have for breakfast” feeling…”

 One way of looking at this is to say that it is part of our own spiritual and cultural identity that we construct a world we feel we would like to be at home in; Rosemary Sutcliff had a great gift for portraying that home, and giving flesh to long-dead bones, stories to long-forgotten artefacts. I could feel the same about some parts of the Middle Ages – but I know (as I suspect Sutcliff knew) that this is fantasy, really. Sources help us do history better than stories do – although stories have a part to play.

I am less sure that some of the voices raised are clear about this themselves, when we/they discuss World War I.  I suppose I can claim to have had a Grandpa in the Boer War and in the trenches – I still have the touching and eye-opening letters he sent the young woman who was to become my Grandmother; I have met people who were there, listened to the way they avoided talking about the enemy as a group of people, only as a single, dehumanised Enemy. I guess there are quite a few people who have similar experiences. I guess most of them, like me, will not claim, on the strength of that, to pontificate about what it was “really like” in the trenches.

My worry is when politicians, rather than historians, start telling us what must be taught in schools about how things were. Myth-makers with the power to wreck history?

Tim Whitmarsh’s review of Charlotte Higgins’ book in the Guardian makes an important point:

The temptation to retool our Roman heritage so that it looks the way we want it to can be overpowering.

Perhaps the “Great Times in WWI” story is a rewrite that seeks to up the patriotic flag in history; I think it has badly backfired.  I think at the heart of Whitmarsh’s caveat is something that historiography always seeks to explore; the temptation to which he refers is something that  perhaps the Secretary of State and some of his opponents have succumbed to. A group of people want World War I to be glorious sacrifice, or the noble and legitimate struggle for freedom; another group want it to be mindless, a massive slaughter of young, uncomprehending men rising from lousy, mud-swilling trenches to their deaths.

In some ways, now-quiet Calleva stands as a very good warning to people seeking to make history fit their view of what it should have been. It is not only ancient history that makes myths. Higgin’s chapter ends with an example from a schoolboyish copy of a scene from the Aeneid (itself, of course, a reworking of an imagined history – but let that pass) where the guests at a feast are hushed:

But for me the clamour of the people of Calleva Atrebatum is forever stilled.  I will not – I cannot – hear them. The silence is not the hush of expectation, but the chill of secrets.

Wolves, dogs, werewolves and stories

In a  break from marking I was intrigued to find this image come up for me on Twitter (from Kathleen McCallum on Twitter but it’s on @nickswarb if you follow me). I am unsure – party because I don’t read Arabic – whether they are werewolves (predatory shape-shifters) or Dogsheads, Cynocephali, whose everyday shape ( and, according to this picture at least, behaviour) are a bit, well, dog-like. Are they from travellers’ tales or horror stories?

I think it’s time to look at wolves again – partly for a session I hope to be doing in Solihull (that birthplace of the Warg, at least, in my mind) on the BA in Early Childhood Studies and for my MA (Childhood Studies) module on Children’s Imaginative Worlds.

I’ll start from BBC’s Atlantis, the latest (as I write) dog/werewolf transformation (Hunger Pangs, Ser 1, Ep 11/13; this link is current, but iPlayer won’t last, of course).  It’s a children’s programme, prime time Saturday evening Doctor Who/Merlin fare, with the requisite hair growth, (partial) nudity, crouching and of course the scary eyes followed by lycanthropic shadows. We are in TV Trope land; werewolf as humanoid dog-beast, more or less acceptable stuff for families- as is the now famous American Werewolf in London transformation or the Being Human transformation that is its more horrific descendant. This (partially successful) filming from a Manchester student, Katie Blagden, neatly illustrates the modern elements of transformation.

Peter Stubbe, to whom I have referred before, is perhaps less so, and certainly the animation on LOL Manuscripts is quite creepy. Similarly, there are some werewolf stories that are either Bowdlerised into family form (see Red Riding Hood, passim) or are just not really OK (perhaps) for young modern audiences – too scary, too bloody. This blog is interesting. Sabine Baring-Gould also has some that may well have been repeated in families, or maybe in other meetings in the past, although I find them quite disturbing; the Book of Werewolves is linked in my blog side-bar. Look at Ch VI:

Gilles Gamier had attacked a little maiden of ten or twelve years old, and had slain her with his teeth and claws; he had then drawn her into the wood, stripped her, gnawed the flesh from her legs and arms, and had enjoyed his meal so much, that, inspired with conjugal affection, he had brought some of the flesh home for his wife Apolline.

Enough. Modern audiences at least would not consider this appropriate for children.

The only point so far to think about is who is the audience for the tales of Peter Stubbe and Gilles Gamier? Surely not really the children; I suspect they will have gone to bed before granny gets these out.  But is this a 21st-Century judgement? Two other sources should be looked at here, however, one more recent and theoreical, the other somewhat oblique.

The first (and recommended to “my” MA students [I hate the possessive here; “my dog, my boots,” as C S Lewis puts it] this next semester) is from Zohar Shavit’s essay in Maria Tatar’s thoughtful collection The Classic Fairy Tales.  And yes, both “classic” and “fairy” can be debated.

Up to the seventeenth century children were an integral part of adult society, sharing clothing, lodging, games and work. Unity prevailed between children and adults in regard to all physical and psychic needs…

Shavit goes on to suggest that the growing concept of childhood distinguishes in practice between child and adult in a great many spheres. I would contend that one of these is in storytelling. Both Shavit and Zipes explore how stories such as Red Riding Hood (we’ve met her before, of course!) are altered for new or differently defined audiences, but we have, in M R James, a fictionalised account of the storytelling context from someone who continued that tradition with his own material. In An Evening’s Entertainment, James records past occasions of storytelling as part of his framing for a story – but in doing so also salutes, wistfully, its passing. The story begins:

Nothing is more common form in old-fashioned books than the description of the winter fireside, where the aged grandam narrates to the circle of children that hangs on her lips story after story of ghosts and fairies, and inspires her audience with a pleasing terror. But we are never allowed to know what the stories were. We hear, indeed, of sheeted spectres with saucer eyes, and — still more intriguing — of ‘Rawhead and Bloody Bones’ (an expression which the Oxford Dictionary traces back to 1550), but the context of these striking images eludes us.

and a parody of the enlightened household follows, with the worthy, pushy parent explaining levers to his child, before we move to the old Squire and his parlour and the even older granny:

How different the scene in a household to which the beams of Science have not yet penetrated! The Squire, exhausted by a long day after the partridges, and replete with food and drink, is snoring on one side of the fireplace. His old mother sits opposite to him knitting, and the children (Charles and Fanny, not Harry and Lucy: they would never have stood it) are gathered about her knee.

Grandmother: Now, my dears, you must be very good and quiet, or you’ll wake your father, and you know what’ll happen then.

And we are into James’ horrific story of human sacrifice, which concludes:

There! Off to bed you go this minute. What’s that, Fanny? A light in your room? The idea of such a thing! You get yourself undressed at once and say your prayers, and perhaps if your father doesn’t want me when he wakes up, I’ll come and say good-night to you. And you, Charles, if I hear anything of you frightening your little sister on the way up to your bed, I shall tell your father that very moment, and you know what happened to you the last time.

The door closes, and granny, after listening intently for a minute or two, resumes her knitting. The Squire still slumbers.

We have here a context that is to James’ audience both as part of their own mythologised past and the recogniseable context of James’ own delivery – the oral story.  But if we are to go back into Shavit’s reconstructed past, I think we have to ask:

When these stories were first told, were children present? And if so, were they the intended audience? 

I do not think we can be sure about the first question (hence all my “perhaps”), but we can be a tad clearer about the second: folk tales were for adults, too.

 

Cheap Tricks

When Gombrich talked about woods, fields, hills and a Church spire in the distance as the “cheap tricks” of English landscape painting, he might have had S R Badmin’s painting in mind – such as this Christmas card , which I discussed in my last internal paper, the reading for which is at the end of this post.

Certainly, Badmin does have a particular view of the English Countryside: this link and this (scroll through Gentleman and Hilder to Badmin’s West Yorkshire)  will illustrate it sufficiently – although he is able to depict quite explicit human activity like this picture and this show. [Logging, is, in some ways, anti-totemic; woodland is to be “preserved,” and perhaps unconsciously this implies “kept inviolate.” Portraying woodland as resource runs counter to the idea of the innocent landscape. Echoes of Manley Hopkins and Clare: much more to think about here – for example, George Monbiot on Clare as “poet of the environment” and Blake Morrison on nation and landscape.]

Of course, what I failed to recognise was the mutual dependence of (traditional) landscape art and the preservation or creation of (traditional) landscape.  I’m not sure what “traditional” really implies, but let’s leave that for now. Badmin paints the scene of skaters on a winter’s evening and we appreciate it as “beautiful,” see the landscape in a particular way – but the landscape is formed that way because the landscape artists of the past (and maybe of the present: see this blog from Cornwall, for example)have taught us to look for it.

We look for snow at Christmas (the gale and the rain outside as I type are more like the weather that must precede the flood at the start of The Children of Green Knowe (this is a quick blog post), and as the Grandmother remarks in Green Knowe, “Whoever heard of thunder at Christmas?”), and we look for the Church spire, the trees in the middle distance, a brightly lit sky. The landed creators of estates and agrarian revolution farms looked for (and paid for) landscapes they knew were beautiful. We are into Richard Mabey’s views on the planting of the Chiltern beechwoods.

Our “outdoors” is partly formulated by an interplay of economics and art appreciation. Cosgrove and co have already told us this, I know; my reiterating it is maybe my own “cheap trick” about landscape.

——-

Appleton, J (1996) The experience of landscape. Chichester : Wiley 1996

Bonnett, A (2009) The Dilemmas of Radical Nostalgia in British Psychogeography Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 26(1): 45–70

Coverley, M (2006) Psychogeography. Harpenden: Pocket Essentials

Donovan, V (1982) Christianity rediscovered: an epistle from the Masai. London : aSCM 1982

Kaplan, R and Kaplan, S (1989) The experience of nature: a psychological perspective. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press

Salisbury, M and Styles, M (2012) Children’s Picturebooks. London: Laurence King