Category: Uncategorized

Gardeners

Isabel Colegate’s book A Pelican in the Wilderness has some interesting stories and she tells them well. I am particularly grateful for the information towards the end about Holly Hill, a place that I will always remember fondly and in some ways aspire to.
The narrative that I found especially useful, however, was the connections she made between the eremitical tradition, the Romantic Movement and garden design. And it made me think: is the mature garden envisioned by Capability Brown and Inigo Jones really the garden of the Romantic?

And is this idealized perfect landscape also the world in miniature, or the wild wood tamed – and hence is it Outside in children’s literature?

Early Years Training: Titus 2:7, 8

Another student comes today to talk about the job she’s got in Foundation Stage, despite her training being in the Primary phase. Why am I rattled by this? Is it the misunderstanding of the students that they will be OK, or the heads’ misunderstanding of what might be needed – or my fundamental misunderstanding of how un-precious EY pedagogy really is?

There is, of course, the embattled group syndrome, real Sherif intergroup stuff (this link is to a quick and easy overview) ,where EY people would somehow like to believe their work –our work, my work – is so specialised that no-ne dare set foot in the door without highly detailed understandings of child development and effective pedagogy . It’s true in one way. We do need –the research is at least clear on this – well-qualified people. I take this to mean people  with graduate attributes   ( for one table of attributes linked to employability see this fascinating article fromn BeJLT) who understand their job, who understand children; despite admiring his on-the-hoof work towards child-centred learning, we don’t want to replicate the experiences of Wilderspin.

EPPE is after all very clear:

High quality pre-schooling is related to better intellectual and social/behavioural development for
children.
Settings that have staff with higher qualifications have higher quality scores and their children make more progress.
Quality indicators include warm interactive relationships with children, having a trained teacher as manager and a goodproportion of trained teachers on the staff.
Where settings view educational and social development as complementary and equal in importance, children make better all round progress.
Effective pedagogy includes interaction traditionally associated with the term “teaching”, the provision of instructive
learning environments and ‘sustained shared thinking’ to extend children’s learning.

But there is another side to this: the idea of some school leaders and parents that “anyone” can teach in Early Years, the feeling that it is not a job that requires immense amounts of trust or expertise. It is bound to rankle.

The third point however, has to be where I point the finger at myself.

At what level does the teacher, or the teacher-trainer or (in my case the learning and development leader for a team of teacher-trainers [as in this epigram from A B Ramsay] need to recognise that the fine-tuning between the Foundation Stage and Key Stage 1 is just that? That’s not to say that there isn’t some poor practice “out there,” and Julie Fisher’s excellent new book, Moving on to Key Stage 1 (yes I did write an endorsement) is certainly written with a need in mind here, but when faced with the need to give guidance to teachers – or students – themselves faced with impossible demands, should we – I – be so quick to draw lines? Where do principles need to come in to play?
Perahps the answer lies not so much in the Pauline notion of “integrity, gravity and sound speech” as the idea of St Benedict; the teacher trainer may have principles but should also be aptus… ad lucrandas animas, skilled at winning souls, “qualified to win souls,” as this translation has it.

Qualified. I’m back to where I started.

Wolves and humans

There are plenty of organizations concerned with wolves in the UK. This link takes us to a site selling hybrids very close to wolves not so much as pets as companions (the site warns) and this organisation is working to reintroduce
I visited these people, the UK Wolf Conservation Trust last nght. They see themsleves as principally concerned with education about wolves; their wolves act “as ambassadors” fulfilling the trust’s founder’s ambition “to dispel the myths and misconceptions that surround them.” It might be said therefore that by looking at long-term conservation through education they hold a middle way between the re-introduction approach and (if I can say this without sounding too damning) the “tamer nature” approach of domesticated wolf hybrids. Of course, taming, living with and breeding from wolves can’t just be dismissed as a modern fad; it could be argued it is one of our oldest animal-human relationships. I like to imagine the symbiosis of human hunters and wolf packs listening for and watching one another’s hunting movements (and maybe a long period where ‘we’ scavenged off ‘them’ and maybe vice versa – and the even longer period [which we are still in] where we compete for space and food, and then at some point in one of those periods, that first time a wolf stood cautiously to one side and some human threw her or him a piece of offal… Pure mythology on my part.

But if that’s my aetiological myth, I felt close to it at Howl Night last night. Hearing wolves howl spontaneously as the twilight deepened was wonderful; managing to tune my voice into howling with a wolf – specifically this wolf – got me thinking about why our voices can be so alike. A sort of convergent evolution suggests itself – the need to communicate in similar terrains for similar tasks with similar groups – and this leads me to the big question I want to explore,one I’m always exploring really: what is this relationship founded on, and what are its characteristics?

It strikes me there are two elements that I can explore – two  interrelated issues I’ve already touched on in this post, but which I need to come back to: competition and symbiosis.

Do we fear and love the wolf because it competes – or competed at least – with us, especially when we moved to raising livestock which it took?   It might be argued that we developed, perhaps, a respect, an understanding of it – but at the same time a rivalry, even a fear that occasional confrontations will have done nothing to dispel.   Perhaps Steven Mithen’s fascinating book the Singing Neanderthals (an interesting critique is here)  might have some insight – I must have a look  back at this.   I also wonder whether we fear and love the wolf because we have lived close to it, tamed and shaped it, and the pure wolf seems somehow to remind of this process? Is the former what gives us the werewolf, the predatory danger, and the latter gives us the named and befriended ambassadors we met and howled with last night?

Back again

… from the Gambia (see a previous and all-too-brief entry),  no thanks to the titanic rumblings of Eyjafjallajökull.  The University’s article on the subject in Onstream shows us in a very good light – although I could have wished Geoff had been decribed as leader, since he did much, much more than I did.

Our thanks have to go to Alhajie, Brendan, Jenny, Jo and Butch – not to mention Josh and Fatou and Mustapha and all the others – at the Gunjur Project who took us in and looked after us and kept us busy while airlines and politicians panicked around us. We, of course, did not panic at all.

It was interesting to meet new people on this trip. Interesting, for example, to meet the wonderful Fatou who runs Mariamma Mae nursery, a little gem of pre-school provision tucked in behind Gunjur Lower Basic school. More later, perhaps, on this. Life in Gambia College was also good – the hospitality of the staff was, as ever, very welcome. It was also very good to meet some of the other people in College, from more senior University officers through to (I couldn’t say “down to”) VSO workers such as Rachel, whose blog is linked here.

Late night thoughts on Tom Tit Tot

“Now, my dear, here you’ll be shut in to-morrow with some victuals and some flax, and if you haven’t spun five skeins by the night, your head’ll go off.”

The story of Tom Tit Tot is an interesting one partly because it has such a close cognate in Grimm – the now better-known Rumplestitskin –  but also because (as I’ve noted before) the motif of the pagan wood. Tom Tit Tot is ‘the black thing,’ ‘the old thing,’ a tail-twirling ‘impet,’ a night-visitor and the girl’s defeat of him allows her security, safe from the murderous intent of the court and the wood.

Is his occupation – and her dilemma – part of the conundrum as to what Tom Tit Tot is? Or is this demonic night-creature always going to be her way out – why else does he do her so many good turns, give her so many chances to redeem her pledge?  Defeat of the stressful worry of a task too big for you is possible with patience, cunning and a bit of luck.

And maybe now I’ve finished my marking, I can see Tom Tit Tot in this light. I certainly have some sympathy for the girl.

“Deep understanding is more important than superficial coverage.”

In one short sentence, the authors of this report on EYFS sum up so much.   Here I am, in a cold study with the snow pelting down and the light fading,  struggling with what to say about Early Years and Health, and they give me the answer.

Let them say it themselves, then – although the emphases and editing are entirely mine.

Enhancing children’s development is skilful work, and practitioners need training and professional support to do it well, including making decisions about children’s individual needs and the ways to ‘personalise’ their learning.

Talking about feelings has beneficial effects. Although this has been a self-evident truth for decades, new research on ‘Social and emotional aspects of learning’ for children shows how it benefits learners of all ages, even children under four.

Formative assessment will lie at the heart of providing a supporting and stimulating environment for every child. This may require professional development for practitioners and liaison with individuals and agencies outside the setting.

The art of early years practice is getting the balance right between guided and self initiated learning, either in homes or in settings.

Skillful work. Art. Balance.

The excitement of helping a child melt a handprint into frost.

Knowing when to swap the sand for cooked spaghetti, or to put a plastic penguin in a tub of water in the freezer for tomorrow.

And from the point of view of ‘health promotiong activities?’

Is the In Depth section for EYFS Health and Well Being really sufficient?

The landscape of traditional tales

I am writing this when any sensible, diurnal person would be long in bed – where, as a penitential exercise, the monks of La Grande Chartreuse are about to perform the ‘reclaim the night’ they have done since their inception.  But with a conference bid to complete tomorrow, and with Mark Rowlands’ enjoyable The Philosopher and the Wolf just finished, it’s time, I feel,  to move into a more reasoned look at a question I’ve been mulling over for years, the question of where, exactly, is the landscape of traditional tales?

The most immediate answer is that I know where it used to be; it used to be on the doorstep of the storyteller.  But of course it doesn’t stay where we left it, not least because we, the audience, have moved off. We moved off from clearings to common land to enclosed fields, and then to the towns, with our stories as cultural baggage in the handcart. We moved into a wolf-free country, then into a country where there is less darkness. We might argue that the stories we brought with us retained their currency because we brought the darkness with us too – but maybe this is a little fanciful, and while it might take us some way to an answer to a spiritual question, it doesn’t help me answer my research question much.

More on this when I can, in the research pages.

Correction and addition

I am no longer sure that the wolves were what was A l’envers in my previous post.  What often moves around I this story is not, of course, the wolf, who remains the familiar predatory, possibly sexual bzou (this link has a lot of detail but I’m unsure about all the content!), but the girl. Is she little? Is she dressed in red, or grey, or what?

Why this should have struck me in the bath while reading Mark Rowlands‘ book on living with his wolf, I don’t really know, but perhaps I need to think more about the figures of the wild if I’m going to write about the outdoors, than about the children who go into the woods. More weasels, fewer moles.

Or at least, it’s a separate section – what one meets in the (fictional) outdoors.

Like this Cynocephalus.