Posted, without comment, as quotations from Margaret McMillan‘s Education Through the Imagination (2nd ed, Allen and Unwin, 1923):

…”Just as we may meddle too much with a child’s play, we may meddle too much also with his day-dreaming… Doubtless, reverie is a part of the whole process of thinking.” p 18

It is only since the coming of the nursery school in the open that we have a really fair view of what has been done to many young children. Even some in the infant school suffer from various forms of repression. The big classroom, no more than the crowded home, lends itself to the need for motor expression. p34

Play gives comradeship, but also other things. It is, however, the great means towards clearance, or emergence, of clear mind images. Therefore even solitary play is sought. It is not a mere preparation for future tasks of the ordinary kind – fighting, buying, selling, housekeeping etc. Neither is it a mere outflow of exuberant energy. It is a forging on towards a goal beyond – a goal where new experiences as well as new memories will be possible. Its effect as a spiritualizing influence is almost certainly lost sight of. Yet this is its real goal. p179

To start with, some important quotations from EYFS:

From the Statutory Framework:

Key person: The named member of staff assigned to an individual child to support their development and act as the key point of contact with that child’s parents. (p 52)

Each child must be assigned a key person The key person should help the baby or child to become familiar with the provision and to feel confident and safe within it, developing a genuine bond with the child (and the child’s parents) and offering a settled, close relationship. The key person should meet the needs of each child in their care and respond sensitively to their feelings, ideas and behaviour, talking to parents to make sure that the child is being cared for appropriately for each family. (p37);

And, although it’s a rather noddy-ish approach, I’m going to pick out some key phrases:

Each child must be assigned a key person [whose job includes] developing a genuine bond with the child (and the child’s parents) and offering a settled, close relationship.

I have recently suggested that Peter Elfer‘s book Key Persons in the Nursery, while principally conerned with under-threes in day care, nonetheless has an important model for practitioners who are adopting the Key Person approach: that we should start not from the compulsions – that all-devouring “must” from the Statutory framework of the EYFS – but from the notion that this is “An approach, rather than a system” and should come from within the school’s existing, stated values. In other words, that phrases (culled from local school web sites fairly unscientifically) such as

[This school aims] To be a safe happy place, where everyone is known and valued, and where needs are accepted and met.

to help each child to be a happy and useful member of a school community thus learningto take their place in a wider society

Working in partnership with parents we enable our children to become happy, well-adjusted, confident and co-operative individuals, with the self-motivation to succeed.

 

can be the starting point for discussion of how this “new” idea is already in place or at any rate in germ in a school.

Card 2.4 – the card that deals with this in detail, and which, in e-format has links to further work by Elfer et al on this – is clear on practical details:

The crucial element is ensuring that the children are able to begin and end their day or session in a key group with their key person. This helps to develop a sense of belonging and connection not only with the key person but with the other children too.

And notice I’ve avoided wellbeing quite easily here. This person focuses the child and all the adults (note the working with parents element) on the tasks of adjusting long-term and short term to the job of being in a school and assists communication at a number of levels. S/he is an agent for partnership, not – at least in the later stages of the Foundation Stage – an institutional nanny. And of course not a substitite Mummy (or Daddy) either, execpt in the subtlest of ways; if, as Elfer (echoing Gunilla Dahlberg) suggests, “nursery… is a place to be different,” the relationships might very well also be different.

But what skills and attitudes does the role need? And what are the training implications?  Do they differ from the training and skills suggested by Elfer?

And I’m afraid the pun was intentional, given what she writes on.

I hope to write more about at least some of the ideas of Rachel Kaplan in the near future, but for now, these few thoughts:

Kaplan and Kaplan’s argument sees being outside as having key components in what they call the ‘ restorative experience’ (Kaplan and Kaplan 1989 p182): Being Away; Extent; Fascination; Compatibility.   These offer the mentally fatigued (Kaplan and Kaplan 1989 p178) – or more properly those whose directed attention to their tasks has caused them fatigue (p180) – a powerful opportunity for refreshment.

Being Away is often seen as a crucial element in Forest School. Simply being outdoors – especially in the context of Early Childhood education where best practice identifies outdoors as a vital but everyday experience – is not enough; being somewhere different is also important. Stephenson’s argument – that pedagogy and relationships are different outdoors, even in the nursery garden – would not seem enough: different, but not that different.

This is where Extent might play a part – and where the comparative issues of the Forest affordances of Ingunn Fjortoft and the small patches of fenced-off play areas in the UK are most crucial.   But if the Forest School site is small, perhaps, like the one hidden away in Little Wittenham, the overall feeling of extent is important?

And so to the last two: fascination and compatibility, that might be combined into something like Laevers’ notion of involvement…

 

Even so, the objections of Ecclestone and others cannot be ignored: what does the young learner need refreshment for? What needs restoring? Is there a sense in which the confined environment even in the best of schools is viewed as destructive?

 

 

A shame one of the Lehrer videos was removed. This (sort of) makes up for it, not in its depiction of elements, but in the images of scientists: mad, middle-aged white men, working in some hinterland that is at once chemistry and physics. Now that’s worth thinking about!!!

I found these on Youtube and couldn’t resist posting them here: the first tries to illustrate every element in the Lehrer song, the second illuminates the elements on the periodic table as he sings. The third is a snappier, live recording which marries ideas from both. Enjoy. And ponder the educational context, if you’re reading this blog for that kind of reason.

You have a document like the old Curriculum Guidance for the Foundation Stage and, even in e-format it was just a pdf, in effect an electronic copy that matched the hard copy cm² for cm² – nothing to it, really. You’d treat it like a book, so that in the text it would look like this:

mytext mytext mytext mytext mytext(QCA 2000) mytext mytext &c.

and in the references list it would look very straightforward, too:

QCA (2000), Curriculum Guidance for the Foundation Stage, Nottingham, DfES Publications

So, no worries.

But the new Early Years Foundation Stage presents a number of problems:

• The hard copy is really a collection of documents – a library of resources rather than one single publication, which will make straightforward Harvard referencing harder to follow;
• There are two e-format versions: the true electronic format version and the pdf version;
• The two versions differ, not in intent but in structure;
• The URL does not always change between pages, making a simple reference very much harder;
• The change between DfES and DCSF has made the author harder to refer to with any certainty.

Let’s look at the “true” electronic resource: http://www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/eyfs/ I’m going to call this the gateway page.

This URL takes you to not very much. If you go to About the Themes and Principles (the grey tab above Learning and Development), you get to a very useful and quotable but of text about themes and principles: http://www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/eyfs/site/principles/index.htm I think that we’d all like to cite this as a URL (a complete URL, of course, with “Accessed on” + the date following). But what does it look like in the references list?

If instead we were to go from the gateway page to Enabling Environments and go to 3.3, there are some things here to look at, maybe to cite, and the URL looks a bit different: http://www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/eyfs/site/3/3.htm However, whichever of the  links in the grey box to the left we click on, the URL stays the same.

So, how are we going to deal with this when referencing?

There are the problems.

———————————————————–

Here are my suggested solutions.

The Author is DCSF. Live with it.

Where the hard copy is being used, it is referred to by individual publication, and the whole pack treated as a set of documents rather than a single one.

Where there are subpages that do not change the URL, as in Creativity and Critical Thinking: Making Connections and Sustained Shared Thinking, the writer should expect the reader to be intelligent enough to find the right bit without having a tizzy. This would not, however, apply to the resources in the right-hand links which do lead, of necessity, to new URLs, and frequently lead the intrepid site explorer outside the DCSF entirely. On the same page, http://www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/eyfs/site/4/3.htm for example, the link “Research Report: Researching Effective Pedagogy in the Early Years” leads straight to the REPEY report of Iram Siraj-Blatchford, which would need a seprarte refernce, and the “Messy Play” takes us to a pdf from Bernadette Duffy, again with a new URL. Resources links may take the reader to sites as diverse as a Community Playthings Guide to Room Layout and the Childhood Bereavement Network.

The title is whatever the main title on the page is, but I would suggest that it’s preceded by Early Years Foundation Stage: this means that the individual publications occur out of actual published pack sequence and marked a, b, c, in alphabetical order by title. Something like this: mytext mytext mytext mytext mytext (DCSFa) mytext mytext &c.

Creativity and Critical Thinking (“Card” 4.3) could look like this: DCSF (2007a or b, or c)

And in the references list would appear as

DCFS (2007a) Early Years Foundation Stage, Creativity and Critical Thinking (4.3), http://www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/eyfs/site/4/3.htm accessed on 21st April 2008.

 

Let’s see if this works. Thoughts, anyone?

A minor addition to the arguments below: if (as often happens) we call the people undergoing Initial Teacher Training Trainees (since, if they are taking up training, they are being trained), we put them into the passive. We describe their process  as something done to them rather than something they do; the verb is linked to trainer in French, trahere in Latin. A train, a convoy of things being pulled along.

They are being trained.

If we call these people students, they are active – it’s derived from a present participle, and to add to all this, it’s the present particple of the Latin verb studire, which can mean “to be zealous, to be absorbed [by].”

Of course, we could take this further, and suggest that someone described in the passive of “to train” has somewhere in their etymological baggage the image of someone “being dragged,” whereas the student is someone who is enthusiastic for something, someone with a desire for active participation – perhaps someone so enthused – by their own teachers, perhaps, but also by the business of education – as to seek creative solutions for themselves: a risk-taker?

This is straying into Furedi territory again, and probably far-fetched, but does it suggest two very different images, and comes close to McGregor’s theory of X and Y models of employees – see this link or this. Are we in danger of assuming that trainees are feckless people who need dragging along? I would hope not; but we do need to be aware of the nuances of our language about the work we do.