Tag: Childhood

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.

Nativity Plays…

…are always poignant, partly because Christmas brings its own nostalgias, regrets, hopes and fears. Julian Grenier in Inside the Secret Garden has posted a really lovely incident of a child who overcomes a sadness with a sense of wonder: “He had held onto something that was fascinating him, despite his upset, and he had wanted to share it with [his key person] once he felt calm enough.” Maybe that ‘wanting to share it’ is why I’m posting what I’m ending this blog post with now.

To explain: this post fulfills a promise to separate people I meet on Twitter: Bosco Peters (@Liturgy) and Zoe and Andy from Saying Goodbye (@SayingGoodbyeUK). Bosco, a priest in NZ, maintains this website, and Saying Goodbye can be found here. Their interests (hardly the right word) coincided recently when Bosco posted on mourning the deaths of infants. They coincide with mine too.

What follows is the contribution I wrote eight years ago:

Lully Lulla: For Theo, Four and Three Quarters at Christmas

A Christmas might-have-been

Whose eyes like tunnels let down into dark

Let me go to this place or that perhaps

To snowy possibilities where that hand

Is slipped in mine, and off we go:

Me unbegrudging, happy of the chance

To revel in the play, in cheap mulled wine,

Sit on the cramped school chairs, be proud

As one small tea-towel stumbles on his line.

Did I see him there? Perhaps

Some small Christmas ghost

That Dickens overlooked sits with me still

(or always); then yes I saw him there.

If not, I saw his absence only;

He was not here except

As a dim shape ahead of me

In this great blizzard of regret that for a moment

Blinds my steps to Christmas.

They can also, of course, be funny, charming, fraught, competitive… Boscos’s blog has a link to something I think is an exemplary use of video – and a real baby!


Every child is an artist?

What are we to make of the powerful assertions here in the HATCH blog? Is every child really an artist – or are we over-using the idea of Art? How practical are the ethos-based key words here of trust, choice and environment?

While wanting to raise the issues as questions, because I think these are fundamentally more about personal philosophy than a quick fix for success, I would hurriedly add  that this is a very good way for trainee teachers to view their artistic/creative curriculum, especially in the light of latest thunderings (also here and here) about the death of the creative curriculum in  UK after the new curriculum proposals were published amid criticisms that the proposals were “flawed” and “prescriptive.”

Grenier on Nutbrown

Julian Grenier is a thoughtful blogger, so it was interesting to read his reflections on the Nutbrown Review on his Inside the Secret Garden blog.  I share his disquiet about EYP status, I must admit: in 2002 I waved the flag for Senior Practitioner status and the Sector Endorsed Foundation Degree – and am still proud not only of our achievements in HE, but of the journey (yes I know it’s a cliche) of the thousands who have done the programme up and down the country. Then the goalposts changed, and I have since talked loud and long about Early Years Professionals, and we made a point of including EYP standards when the team here wrote the reflective reader (pause for a quick plug) . Now we move to maybe where I would have liked to be when I moved from being a headteacher ten years ago: an increasingly graduate group of professionals and certainly a well-motivated work force with access to Higher Education.  Places like Oxford Brookes will continue to work energetically with and for these people, as well as work training Early Years teachers in line with whatever is accepted from the Nutbrown recommendations and in accordance with the vision of the Government and the sector.

But until the sector bites the bullet and calls teachers teachers (and pays them accordingly), and recognises that expertise, we will continue to have this rather odd and too-casual upskilling of some of the most important people in our society.

Julian is right to be concerned.

Maurice Sendak

“Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake” as one poet-translator put it, after Callimachus. In the midst of saying goodbye to some really good students, and “doing” the marking, and sorting staffing and timetables and the other stuff, I am suddenly saddened by the news of your death.

I remember my parents being asked whether they would let me read Where the Wild Things Are (I was 10!); I recall my delight at sharing it, and Little Bear, and Chicken Soup with Rice with my children; news of your coming out at 80 reached me a day or so before I was to present a paper on Outside Over There, my first external academic paper! I feel I have had your books as part of the scenery of my intellectual life for so long.  I hope you wouldn’t have found that metaphor unwieldy; you were so much of a dramatist, both directly involved in theatre and in creating alarming and joyful explorations of dreams, both terrors and pleasures.

Ah enough. Better obituaries than mine have said more, and your own work is the best tribute to your genius. The best epitaph that I’ve seen was a quotation from you in the Guardian:

You cannot write for children. They’re much too complicated. You can only write books that are of interest to them.