Again the thoughtful and thought-provoking Ken Robinson talking about the nature of learning. http://embed.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_how_to_escape_education_s_death_valley.html
Learning or compliance? Teaching or testing? I won’t comment much more, but it does tie in to some extent with last night’s post about my position as an HE lecturer; what he says about teaching children also applies, mutatis mutandis to many University classes, too.
Maybe that Latin tag is ill-advised?
…instead of Moves like Jagger?
This is again to provide links to some ideas people may find useful.
The upsurge in interest – and the rising intake – in undergraduate education programmes here at Brookes naturally gives me a bit to think about, not least about staff deployment. I was, therefore, interested – maybe dismayed – to find this model of the academic as a unit in the workforce described here by Pat Thomson.
I hate newspaper reports that talk about “research shows,” and “today’s research”, so I apologise for this link to the Telegraph on reading for pleasure, but I need some time to find the original report.
And at its worst (or maybe as its norm?) this blog – along with so many other blogs – is just opinions blurted onto the Internet. The debates about the Big Questions are also being enacted elsewhere. The Great Education Debate is one place. Go and have a look.
Preparing for the Summer School at which we discussed Alice in 2010, I find my thinking about children’s literature has changed. I will put the powerpoint here at some point after the class, and I don’t think it will be much changed; Alice’s dates, &c are unrevised, and I haven’t much else to say about Victorian education and childhood – but what I am thinking over is the notion of the sly joke, the remark way over the heads of the child audience, flattering or distracting the adult teller and/or the adult reader.
So the first (new – well, to this blog) question is:
How many audiences are there in Alice?
Crudely outlined, I can discern a basic five: children past; children present; adults past; adults present; scholars. In fact this will fragment and kaleidoscope into all sorts of divisions: children in the past who were original audience (the Liddells – see below); the first children to read the first published editions; children before this present generation; the informal adult audience for the first stories; the adult readers of the first editions (Queen Victoria being one), subsequent adult readers – and this is where it gets even more complicated by a subdivision of adults who had and had not been child readers, and adults reading with and without children…. How to begin to think of ‘reader response’ with such a diverse audience? Perhaps the excellent Rob Pope English Studies Book is a place to start?
He asks, as I do here, about readers (“The Reader… Which Readers?” Pope 1998:247), and rightly raises issues around how we theorise these readers, but behind all the readers we can come up with (and maybe many others I haven’t begun to name) are three girls and one male adult: Revd Duckworth, and Lorina, Alice and Edith Liddell, the original hearers of the stories of Alice, the fellow-travellers in the rowing boat to Godstow, on 4th July 1862). Whatever we make of any subsequent readers, these four – and one in particular – are always with us.
This is well worth pondering without my rabbiting on.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-23239800
Here’s to the Sylvias in Tanzania and elsewhere, and here’s to BBC for telling us about them.
Michael Gove, “the most important person in education,” (according to Nevile Gwynne), likes and promulgates Gwynne’s grammar, and for a while the grammarian himself is available in a brief conversation on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. This is the link that works for now. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01c98k1.
In a very short piece on R4 it isn’t possible to explore Gwynne’s arguments very easily, any more than it was when he appeared on Saturday Live; sweeping statements go unchallenged, and this four or so minutes certainly isn’t a scholarly defence of grammar, still less the teaching of grammar in schools, but as a test of current government thinking has some interesting points to ponder. Was an understanding of grammar acquired “effortlessly” before the age of nine? I wonder whether Gwynne’s defence of corporal punishment on his website suggests otherwise. Here, as part of a class he is running, he suggests looking at the arguments around the subject:
The days of “six of the best” are now over, almost everywhere in every country in the Western world. But… will someone please, after reading the following (a) extract from a newspaper article and (b) letter responding to it, be so kind as to let me know what possible alternative there is to corporal punishment that is sufficient to do the essential job – both for the indicidual and society — that “the cane” had done everywhere throughout the whole of recorded history up to the 1960s and after?
Given the accuracy of my typing, it would be churlish to mock the typo, and in any case the pedant in me likes the fact that there is no apostrophe in 1960s.
Here, Neville Gwynne simply raises the question for others to respond to.
However, I feel torn when reading some of his articles. I seriously disagree with some of his ideas, and might well question some of his sources or approaches, but I must admit that when I mark the work of some of my students, from the generation that grammar forgot, I want to say with him that “A very great deal of our knowledge comes from argument, which is our most important means of checking and making sure that what we believe is true.” Similarly, when he states with obvious passion that “Real philosophy is simply the overall science of “getting it right” in all our activities, from deciding what time to get up in the morning to choosing the right religious or anti-religious position. We are all philosophers whether we like it or not,” I find myself nodding in (at least partial) agreement.
My daughter Rosa is all but through the last school assessments she will ever have to do, the last of our children to have to do this. A levels done, one last BTEC assessment point to go. Whatever she chooses next, exams in sixth form will not return. There will, I guess, be no more attentive sixth-form teachers to coax her from a panic, but equally no school worrying about grades and profiles either. For a brief time (maybe), she has no academic ties. She has “made it.” She is sitting in the garden in the sunshine this evening. I am glad, proud to look out at her, and it prompts this reflection.
Today, by a sort of coincidentia oppositorum I sat in three meetings today considering at University level the marks for semester 2. So many stories passed by, some as numbers only to most of us, a brief window into someone’s difficulties and then on. I raise a couple of questions, and we move on; the meeting is attentive but businesslike. Brookes will have processed about 3000 graduates today, maybe 10,000 undergraduate marks in all, according to John Raftery, the pro-VC. No mean feat. And in some other rooms in a few week’s time, Rosa will appear – a name no-one knows, or maybe “just” a number? – and be processed and then disappear. The computers will reassert themselves, the stuff will go to schools, et voila c’est fini pour la petite Antigone. She becomes a “past pupil.”
It never is impersonal, not really; tutors know the names they are dealing with, understand the cases, in some cases have handed tissues to distraught students, or answered worried emails, or made a judiciously timed cuppa for someone. Tonight, though, I feel the weight of it. I just wouldn’t want anyone – least of all the students who will get their results and be happy or sad or relieved or irritated on Monday, or the students at the end of sixth-form crowding round school doors and opening envelopes in mid-August who may see new possibilities arising and sometimes big plans slip out the picture – to think that these complex and somewhat paper-heavy processes are undertaken by heartless bureaucrats. We do know. We are acutely aware of what our decisions will do, or might do. A mark here, a grade there. We know what they mean.
I look at Rosa in the garden and wonder, just sometimes, how we dare.
This time, to post a link to Michael Rosen’s analysis of Michael Gove’s article in today’s Times.
“Some people… find it so difficult or painful to admit that they’re wrong that it is much more comfortable for them to keep repeating that everyone else is wrong instead.”
Criticism has continued in TES, too, or at least been documented there.
The Secretary of State was in no mood to back down, however, after the battling at the NAHT conference (here is his speech and here and here is some reporting of the occasion) – but I am reminded of the way that John Patten’s rhetoric also faltered, with parents headteachers and teachers all described as historical bygones – Neanderthals, Dinosaurs – and how David Blunkett likewise overused the idea of educationalists as “cynical” when they (we) opposed what he suggested. This, on Patten, from the Indie in the depths of the nineties, makes for interesting comparisons, for example.
Are we (as we like to see ourselves) principled, educated, analytical – or maybe being SoS for Education is like being a cat-herder?
The best-argued riposte to Liz Truss so far has come, I think, from Julian Grenier in a post on Inside the Secret Garden. I even get a mention! – but that’s not why it’s impressive. Well thought-out and impassioned stuff, Julian.
Of course, the situation is changing daily, with most media attention going to Nick Clegg’s newly-voiced opposition to and the PM’s possibly wavering support for Liz Truss’ model around ratios. They are, of course being watched carefully on all sides at a politically difficult time for both leaders. Just for info, here is their joint thinking from March.
Caught in the middle of more marking than I care to think of, I would merely point out that ratios only make up part of this tussle (can we call it a Trussle?). She is also talking about the ways in which the graduate workforce can be afforded, and has either (depending on your interpretation) tried to sell this by talking about an adult-dominated pedagogy, or she has sought to introduce a sort of Key Stage 2 pedagogy to get away from the ‘chaos’ of free-flow play. Ratios are an important part of this; how we afford well-paid graduates (they need to be well paid to pay off their University fees, of course) is another; whether play is at the heart of children’s learning strikes me as the most important point – and one I really don’t want us to forget.
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…
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.
nicktomjoe 