Category: Uncategorized

Biking in today

If this doesn’t seem like an Early Childhood issue, well, read on.

Yesterday’s Observer seems to have moved into the anti-cycling camp, even if only to give some publicity to the people who want to ban bikes from disturbing the tranquillity of driving.  UKIP, for example – I know, an extreme example –  have some much-publicised things to say about how “cyclists” must not be allowed to “cause unacceptable delays to traffic.” It made this morning’s bike ride a little less pleasant, although the Anthriscus Arvensis and the smell of blossom from the trees (yes, I am sorry for the Hay Fever sufferers)  did much to alleviate my gloom.

But, because I was aware of how unwelcome I and other cyclists can be, what I did see were an awful lot of idiot cyclists and impatient drivers: the suited chap on his bike who went through the red lights and still only reached Oxford station at much the same time as I did; the Oxford bus driver who seemed to think his new, loud horn needed sharing with lots of people – and I have to contrast that with the cyclist who chatted with me at the traffic lights, and the bus driver who gave me a “thank you” flash of indicators when I let him pull out.

So what has this got to do with Early Years? It just made me think: what if as road users we based our thinking and behaviours on four themes similar to those underpinning the Early Years Foundation Stage?  We might end up with something like this:

Every road user  is a unique road user, who is constantly learning and can be resilient, capable, confident and self-assured;

Cyclists and drivers  learn to be respectful of each other’s needs  through positive relationships;

Road users  learn and develop well in enabling environments, in which their experiences respond to their individual needs and there is a strong partnership between legislation, signage, reasonable use of road space and understanding of one another’s needs;

Some road users are not always immediately aware of others’ needs. Just as children develop Theory of Mind in different ways and at different rates, we all need to take responsibility for how our road use teaches others .

Ah well, just a thought…

 

More on Liz Truss’ vision

Media reaction to Monday’s piece (which I commented on here) continued. The New Statesman, for example, pointed out discrepancies in a couple of statements and claimed she “appears to be making it up as she goes along” and there was an (unsubstantiated) claim on the ever-reliable (hem hem) Twitter which claimed that the only nurseries she had visited were all rated good by OfSTED  – but another side to this appears as we dig deeper.

It could be that, in an effort to sell the notion of graduates in Early Years settings to a resistant party, Liz Truss is putting a particular spin for the Mail and its readership on her vision of effective, thoughtful graduates working with children.  The speech on the Gov UK website gives a slightly different edge to this, and, while I still share reservations with a number of people who have joined the debate both on this blog and elsewhere, her speech to the Nursery World conference on Two Years Olds is much more thoughtful, and deserves a careful read.

Four short extracts are cited here. I know they stand in stark opposition to some of the other sections, but I’m putting them here just to allow some pause for thought.

Crucially, not only are trained teachers the most effective in their interactions with children, but their supervision of less well-qualified staff made those staff better as well.

Play and structured learning are not opposites and nor does one stop at age five and the other one start. Rather, they are complementary.

It would also be wrong for people in schools to take the view that life doesn’t begin before the age of 5. In fact, what we have learned about the brain shows that this is very far from the truth. I think we have a lot to gain from seeing early education and primary school as a continuum rather than as 2 completely separate things.

I want to see confident practitioners, availing themselves of the best available evidence to deliver the early years foundation stage (EYFS) in the way they see fit, so long as outcomes for children are good. I also want to see practitioners well-versed in the evidence.

Still, I’m sure, to be treated with care on some points, but also a worthwhile perusal at more leisure.

Return of the Werewolves?

Sarah’s ever-inventive LOLManuscripts and ITV’s magnificent Broadchurch on the telly tonight made me make explicit some connections that are latent in a lot of thinking about werewolves.

Sabine Baring-Gould’s Book of Werewolves is full of relished detail, picking out bits of folklore from all over the place with Baring-Gould tenacity. The werewolf as outsider, cannibal, predator: “the younger they were, esteemed them the mair tender and delicious…” Outside the bounds of the villlage, a monster, Long Lankin. I’ve written about these before, for example, here. Sensational stuff, sensationalised stuff, too.

In Broadchurch we are confronted with a very rare sight: a man lost, confused, unable to deal with his own feelings, one minute a stupid, failure of a man, the next a killer trying hard to conceal his crime, and in a few moments reduced to a penitent, frightened prisoner. There is no werewolf here, no monster. A real life example, whereas fable demands a diametric opposite, some binary to be defeated.  If anything, the wholly believable fury of the murderer’s wife and the rage of the victim’s father made them for a moment less human – or at least, less covered by a veneer of politeness.   It is a tribute to the writers and cast of Broadchurch that they sustained that ambiguity, maintained such sympathy for all those flawed and suffering characters.

But what of the Fairy Tale? What of sympathy for the Big Bad Wolf? We don’t want to reduce the wolf to a nothing. The numerous rewrites of Red Riding Hood attempt some sort of reconciliation, whereby the wolf comes back to life and reforms, and retellings such as The True Story of the Three Little Pigs or The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig turn the wolf in turns into someone misunderstood, or victim of his own mauvaise foi, or victim of another (better, funnier) monster.

Only once have I seen something approaching genuine understanding. As part of a writing project in a school, the teacher (writing as the wolf from prison) sent a letter a day to the children and the children responded. They asked all sorts of questions, such as “Are you real?” and “Did you mean to eat the Granny?” One little girl, however, wrote in some detail, asking what life was like “inside,” asking if he was “on remand” – and ending “And have you met my dad?”

Sense of Purpose

Liz Truss has made some comments which, if accurately reported in this morning’s Guardian, suggest that she and I sit at opposite ends of a spectrum of views of how children learn best.  “Free-flow play is not compulsory,” she states in the Mail. I will be addressing this as a key theme in my class tomorrow morning  – a gift ( as is Toby Young’s rather sideways defence in the Telegraph) for my summative class on Play and Pedagogy of the semester!

But we do need to look behind the rhetoric and the snarling with which the Guardian message boards are filling up. The bile is extraordinary, a tap turned on to release a slurry pit of anger. Maybe that was her intention; it certainly doesn’t help a reasoned voice to be heard in response. Giving children a sense of purpose is important, and I worry that this sort of statement is liable to drown out a lot of good work that thoughtful people do with their own children and as paid professionals or volunteers.  Few parents (or grandparents) want a bear pit at home, any more than a nursery worker wants a block play corner wrecked or Lord of The Flies in the garden – but that’s not what actually happens; by building on children’s interests that grow from adult stimuli (a book, a song, some colour in the water tray) children are encouraged to develop a sense of purpose. This is autonomous learning: satnav politeness isn’t the aim, and in any case politeness is best modelled rather than instructed, which requires, for one thing, warm, genuine interest from the adults around the child.

And here is part of my chapter from our book Themes and Debates, blogged last summer. I note an increase recently in people finding my longer extract on Academia.edu by searching for “Formal and informal curricula,” too.

Gambia – Rewarding?

“So, how was Gambia?” The Gambia was what it always is when I go: an opportunity to learn, hot, a bit stressy, and that oddly fuzzy phrase rewarding. What does that really mean? I’m writing from the perspective that I come back, of course, happy to be back, relieved that the organisational difficulties (more or less) resolved themselves, and that the Health and Safety issues were (more or less) OK. Using Gambia-Extra certainly made the organisation go more smoothly. Alan and Tony were brilliant. Relief at how well it went is certainly part of it – and the enjoyment I took while there is in no little measure due to their thoughtful, hard work.

Crocs 2013

So it went OK.

What did I learn? Is the “reward” about what I now know about myself, about the Gambia?

Brikama 2013

Well, the inservice course teaches me a lot every time:  enthusiastic and committed Gambian professionals make this a wonderful opportunity for me, and I’ve mentioned this before. The challenge of teaching without as much tech support hones my skills no end, makes me think differently about my pedagogy, and the debate this time around how to organise for play and for observation with a ratio of one adult to 40+ children told me a lot about how deep my own assumptions about early learning go. I really like the photo I’m including here because it shows me really enjoying what I’m doing – not easy sessions, but teaching, listening, interacting.

Interacting. Hmmm. There’s an interesting idea. A lot of other assumptions go out of the window too: how students relate to tutors; how language changes; how the immediate challenge of relating session by session to students becomes a different thing when it runs from before breakfast to after-dinner drinks.

Bakau dawn 2013

But are these what make this trip rewarding? I know more about the students that come, more about myself, more about the Gambia.  This time I also got a bit of a sun tan, saw the dawn rising, and the grey stretch of the Atlantic, and travelled more independently than on any of my previous trips. Is this what made it rewarding? What does rewarding mean?

Enjoyment is part of it, in immediate pleasure (a cold Julbrew by the pool at the end of a journey on several bush taxis) and also in some longer-term contentment. Feeling good because I know I was learning is also part of it. Feeling good that a project has gone well enough, that people are already thinking about Gambia 2014, that there are writing and research opportunities that have grown from the discussions in the evenings…

So, this is even woollier. Feeling good.  Perhaps the best approach is simply to look at where I see this nebulous “reward” coming from: I think it comes from the change I see – in me, and in the students. More confidence, change in perspective, change in skills.

And maybe that’s some of what the other course participants felt too. I hope so.

Children, Spirituality and Death

Not an easy topic for me in March, not an easy topic for anyone. With an added poignancy that this was a class on spirituality on Maundy Thursday, I ploughed on.

We looked at SeeSaw and at Cruse, and watched the moving Saying Goodbye charity video. We looked at the questions raised in children’s literature about how death is represented, from the goblins in Outside Over There to the skeletons in Funnybones, revisiting stuff I’d done on visual methodologies for the Hallowe’en seminar in 2011. A smaller class meant that the time I set aside for discussion was ample.  I gave a warning at the start.

The purpose was to look at the less comfortable sides of spirituality, to explore beyond trees and sunshine and quiet. If, as Andew Wright says

“Our spiritual lives are marked by a need to wrestle with questions of the meaning and purpose of life, of our origin and destiny, and of the ultimate nature and truth of reality”

then some of this is about where was I before I was born? and where am I after I die?

Can I evaluate the success of the class? Hmmm. If I’d placed it earlier, I was worried it would have unduly affected the students’ choices for their essays – and last week, Theo’s anniversary, I simply couldn’t have managed. Later would not have given it due weight, maybe, or would have made this look like a Finale.

What always strikes me about this module is the amount of personal disclosure the students do. Often we – I too, I mean – talk about our faith communities. Sometimes we discuss practice. Very frequently we discuss memories (a good topic for further research?).  This leads me back to my musings on anecdote: how personal should a class get?  Would that class be better or worse if it stuck to the research of others?

 

Social World of Childhood?

Yes I know this is a module title from the Ed Studies programme here, but I wanted to give some account of my being on the school bus, the 4a from Headington up to the top of the Raleigh Park estate in Oxford, with an increasing pile of kids from Matthew Arnold School.  They were legion and noisy at the start of the day, and sort of objecting to my curmudgeonly refusing to move so they could sit together. What was most interesting was their concerns: “Would I be allowed to have my ‘phone in behaviour support?”  “Did you know that [A] isn’t speaking to [B] since [B] said she didn’t like [C]???””Miss [to the luckless TA also on the bus], I have an exam tomorrow does that mean I miss behaviour support?” The conversations were all about behaviour and relationships, a descant to the tap of mobile ‘phones, multifaceted conversations.

Why I am surprised?

I’m not, well, not really – but what I want to underline is how little any of this seemed to chime with the grand high project of education I was going to lecture on.  On the bus I felt surrounded by an alien world, a world of children and young people: concerns around rules and rule-breaking; alliances and gossip; what can be got away with and what will have to be endured.

Light, dark, and points in between

How do we use figurative language with children when discussing issues of spirituality?

This (first attempt at a) Prezi on spirituality gives three images, which I’ll discuss here, and a couple of quotations to ponder.

The first thing is to point out that the bells-and-whistles approach doesn’t really help. I have seen Powerpoint destroy an argument in much the same way: so many ways to change from image to image, different sounds from slide to slide. Here the seasickness pills are required from when we lurch through the window to going round the sun (although I’m sneakily proud of that) to the seven-league boots leap to the Zen circle at the end.

The second is this idea of dark and light, common, as far as I can see, to all religious language. “Lead me from dark to light, from death to immortality” say the Uphanishads, and the Hebrew Bible tells us that “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light.”  A basic figure of speech in discussing spirituality – even when faced with the iconoclasm of St John of the Cross and his much-misquoted “dark night.”

But why the figurative language? What are the limits of language or experience that it seems inappropriate to discuss spirituality without reference to light, or wind, or bread (and wine)? And (for the point of view of my module on children and spirituality) what is the impact of this on children?