Tag: Curriculum

Mr Gawain, NQT

Now the new year draws closer. Night passes. The day pushes out the dark – as the Lord bids.

Now neȝeȝ ƿe Nw Ȝere and ƿe nyȝt passeȝ
Ƿe day dryueȝ to ƿe derk, as Dryȝtyn biddeȝ…

The new year comes in for the young knight Gawain as he awaits his fate at the hands of the Green Knight: a cocky, good-looking, well-prepared young man, Gawain in the medieval poem had set out from Camelot to meet his nemesis the Green Knight with high hopes – but it was more ambiguous than he’d thought, and now it’s crunch time.

I won’t labour this analogy, but I am conscious that my corner of edutwitter has been pondering the Polonius-like advice for people starting the adventure of a PGCEs or work as NQTs for some weeks now. The time is upon us; that new year is here. Arthur, stirring in Camelot maybe, wonders how Gawain is getting on, just as I sit in my study and wonder how the students I met last year – the “graduands” from our PGCE whom I will meet again on Saturday – are facing what seem like crucial days of in-service training and meeting-and-greeting the team, and then the parents and children…

Does any[one] have any advice on what to do in first lesson…

What sort of lessons should my first lessons with a class be when school starts?

Any last minute advice ?

And the advice about not-smiling (or smiling) before Christmas piles in from

Teaching is 50% words and 50% numbers…but always 100% you

to

I understand the need for motivation yadayadayada but sometimes I read utter drivel that is solely tweeted for the purpose of likes/retweets and they mean nothing at all!

Right: so bearing that last outburst in mind, this isn’t advice as such, but self-reflection. My biggest changes in terms of work were probably: starting out as an undergraduate so long ago they would be findings for a History of Ed dissertation (as in fact they almost were a couple of years ago!), when I was caught in the headlights until Christmas; my first job in a Faculty library, where all of a sudden I was on the other side of the counter (and loved it); my first day on a PGCE teaching practice (and actually all of my final TP!); my first days in my first teaching job; my first day as Head Teacher – and then this summer, leaving my job in Higher Education to sit in the study here or in the Bodleian. They all have a theme running through them: that I had very little idea what I supposed to do. As a Head – on my own at the start of September – I sat at the desk and thought “Now you’ve done it.” That’s how it feels on my own again today, too. As a library assistant I had people telling me what to do until I got the hand of it; as an NQT, I tried to do the “fake it ’til you make it” thing. It didn’t work and I sat in my classroom wondering what I was there for…

I’m not going to be crass and suggest that training is useless or that only experience teaches – that’s all silly stuff from people with axes to grind. I will say, however, that when I came to education – or to education management, or to teaching in Higher Ed (not mentioned above) or out at other end, at 60-odd, into my eyrie here at home – the things I brought with me were insufficient. It was maybe an easier transition into working in Higher Education precisely because I knew what the initial tasks were, and I knew they would be fun and hard and complex. I would argue that that is the nature of things: the journey teaches, and while I would seriously urge the twin activities of scholarship and practice going hand-in-hand, there is an underlying attitude also needed: a willingness to learn.

Coming to a new classroom (as a teacher or a learner) with “I am all prepared” as your blazon is to lack a vital element. You are already well-liked on Twitter? It may be you have stuff to learn from actual colleagues. You are well-read and a critical reader? It may be you have stuff to learn from the children or your tutors and mentors. You have worked in schools for ages? It may be you have stuff to learn lurking in the library. Whatever it is, it may be you have stuff to learn. Bloody hell, as I exit to the other side and wonder what my new life looks like I can see I do: loads to learn, from how friendships look to how professional communication now works.

E7C55279-0993-4D7C-A0D1-C5D9609D5121So the advice has to be to recognise that starting out on one of the vital stages of professional formation (a BA, BEd, a PGCE, an NQT year) is just that: a starting out.

And at the start, we all need a friend, preferably a huggable, flesh-and-blood person we know, not just a smile on social media and a “U OK hun?” or people joining you in a moan who don’t know you or your school. Gawain (to return to my original image, with this picture of the Green Knight and Gawain reconciled) could have done with a mentor earlier in his quest to show him ways up the mountain, and Mr Gawain, the NQT (or the new starter on the PGCE, or new head or whoever)  could do with some genuine compassionate mentorship – and thinking of Up the Mountain (see the previous post) I might as well include this clip here of the marvellous picturebook about friendship and mentorship because – well, because picturebooks are always a good place to end.

Into compassion-focussed practice

I first met the work of Thich Nhat Hahn in his book Being Peace, which spoke powerfully to me in my first school, as a Reception Class teacher. It taught me that there were oceans of compassion beyond feeling sorry – sorry for myself or (to use the term differently) sorry for the children.  This was professional formation just like the day-to-day stuff from the school that still is with me some thirty years later. I certainly am informed by the difficult relationship I blundered into in that first job, and I continue to ponder somewhere what I feel about the children I worked with, for whom some kind of pity was a misguided (and ultimately pointless) way of looking at my job. I might have learned my craft there, but I also learned I was not there to rescue any more than I was there to squash and squeeze children into a preformed version of childhood or, worse still, some dire, conformist apprentice adulthood accompanied by claxons blaring “the children love it,” and (for those that don’t), “Develop your growth mindset!”

I met compassion in wholly other ways in my first Nursery Head, Lesley Grundy, where her immense concern for the children and families was at the same time empowering and for her team almost engulfing. Admittedly, she was less focussed on her staff – but that was because she believed, I think, that we all followed her vision  in minute detail, that her idea of an inclusive and imaginative curriculum extended beyond simply sunny

Old Grandpont Nursery School from a drawing by Jo Acty

days in the Grandpont  Nursery garden. The school, of course, has a slightly different feel now (several headteachers after her and also a new building), but for me, Lesley roams the Grandpont garden still. I look into the retirement homes that now occupy the site of the old Nursery and see the croci we planted and almost hear her reading in the garden.  A real inheritor of the MacMillan ideal, Lesley’s compassion was practical, focussed on the children and families, and still remained long-sighted and visionary. I felt when I was a Head that I was a long, long way behind her.

I meet compassion rather differently in my encounters with what I see as a new version of compassion – what for shorthand I might call revolutionary compassion – in the thinking of my colleague Jon Reid and others (such as Simon Knight and Tim O’Brien) he works with or meets. This is Jon’s area of expertise, both in research terms and in practice, and in this post I am simply reflecting on what he teaches me.  Here, inclusiveness is a more radical expedition into the unknown again, further into what I (yes, and others better qualified than I am) have described as the tangled roots of a definition of curriculum, into the realm of the ethical practitioner. We come to a recent discussion on Twitter in which one contributor light-heartedly suggested measuring compassion and I brought heavy wellies to the comment, like an eejit. I was worried about measuring compassion having opposed the notion of measuring spirituality – for example, however cute and useful this clip is, there is a touch of the catechism – and adult control – about the acts of kindness and gratitude the children outline.  “Child A has met their mindfulness target…” The idea however that there could or should be some regulation or measurement of compassion has stayed with me, and I am profoundly dubious.

The deeply attitudinal nature of compassion makes it possible to see it more than to measure it. Measuring is only ever going to work for behaviours, and there is the possibility of these atrophying into this or that set pattern: think about the difference between respect and some of the regimented behaviours in the more controversial free schools and academies – free schools with exceptionally limited freedoms, academies where there is no debate unless sanctioned by the adults. I am not a fan of such measurement: if child A gives what they can and it is poorer than child B, then the adults have, I think, a duty to value what the child is giving – not just in the end-of term chocs, but the attention they can maybe muster after an exhausting weekend.

Revolutionary compassion however cannot be confused with letting children (or families) “off” in some way. I remember during my PGCE my tutor coaching me towards an understanding that “you may be the only stability that child has.” David, thank you: that stays with me and often helps me distinguish between genuine active help and simple woolly thinking. However, I don’t believe that confusion is what I see in the good-natured and sometimes hard-won generosity of people who act around me as proponents of compassion. Yes, there seem to me to be effective characteristics of such practitioners, such as an easy-going nature, lots of energy, and maybe a history that informs that compassion, but it is also quite steely; this compassion is deeper than being soft on kids (or students or colleagues). It is not straightforwardly measurable because it is not a set of behaviours that can be ticked off to get your compassion badge.

While I am not advocating a wholesale import of Buddhist ethics, it seems to me that this kind of action-compassion contains a sort of deep appreciation of the kind of interbeing that Thich Nhat Hahn teaches: a mutual interdependence, an understanding that the teacher (or the system) cannot really function without those around them, including the parent and the child. The system supports the learning – and really needs to support the professional adult (another story altogether) – but cannot be the true measure of a teacher. Some element of regulation is possible here, in the setting up of effective, well-funded systems of supervision and training that allows the new teacher to explore what it means to be on the edge of this difficult world where a desire to be empathetic meets real children: hungry for attention, good or bad, hungry for stability, sometimes simply hungry for breakfast… The mindful teacher is not necessarily someone with a candle s/he can bring out when stressed, but someone who appreciates the child, or the parent, or the colleague, in a way that attempts to understand the complexity of the life in their hands, and how we are, none of us, really that different. I think it goes further than that, but that will do for now.  I come full circle, back to Thich Nhat Hahn and his book The Sun My Heart: “We cannot take either side, because we exist in both.”

 

But while I’m ranting, I’m afraid I have to say that zero tolerance of genuinely disruptive behaviours is not the same as zero tolerance of the wrong shade of grey trousers.

 

Snow

I wasn’t going to say anything about how wonderful it was being out in the snow at a school on Tuesday. After all, schools and their communities should be able to go about their business without intrusion except in particular and boundaried circumstances.  So, while this post isn’t really about School A and certainly not about Child B or Teacher C, it starts from my sitting on the cold ground in the school’s outdoor area, talking to a small person. She has a small, flaky bit of snow and sand mixture in her palm, and her eagerness to share with me is coupled with amazing patience and delicacy. And I’m mentioning the school, the teachers and the child here as a thank you: thank you for letting me back into the world I love of young people learning.

Hardly a critical incident, but scroll through the zero days of this week to a tweet which alerts me to the practice of a “no touch” policy towards snow. It might have stones in it, it might be dirty, children might throw it… and therefore it stirs me to ask

what do children gain from touching snow?

We could play the Curriculum Game, which goes something like this: we predict or observe along the lines of the current official curriculum system and structure. “Touching snow is about the following three things…” It is like a magnificent game where the children are the callers, the practitioners trying to score against this box or that on a complex and shifting bingo card of language and ideas and physicality. We could play the short game, based on spotting characteristics of effective learning, or the individual long game, based on Child A and their grasp of this or that developmental aspect. Similarly, there’s the predictive game, which starts from snow and guesses where the bingo tokens will come out: what a child can do becomes what the practitioners guess the child might learn.

We could play (insofar as it’s a different game) a Spiritual Game. Not to reduce spirituality (as some writers have done) to another set of learning goals, but to talk about children’s awe, the delight at novelty and uncertainty. It is, maybe, the same “sense of joy and opportunity” that lead medieval writers to think about what Marion Glasscoe has called the “games of faith.” I think this is what writers from Margaret MacMillan on have tried to express when they describe childhood in terms of innocence and freedom: it is the engaged encounters with the unfamiliar that engender delight.

Finally (for now) we might think about a Game of Life.  I have mentioned before, for example, the challenges of working with tactile-defensive undergraduates, whose world is (for me) limited by their ineluctable reticence around soil and mud and moss.  I also know that (quite apart from what the weather might do overnight) with a small amount of snow people talk about not being able to get to work, about a “snow day.” I do know people shouldn’t ignore real danger; I also know, however, that our divorce from nature leads to fear of it. Cold is cold; snow is snow. It is a sort of divorce: not just the split of a binary, but a loss of a whole lot of relationships. Two people break up and this friend  goes one way, that friend another; the music collection goes to one person, the dining chairs go to another. Who wants that vase?  Humanity (uppercase H) leaves Nature (uppercase N) and loses snow as well, and maybe slush and snowdrops. The disquiet I (and others) experience around loss of language and direct knowing of something as simple as snow is part of this schism.   Tragically we become first uncomfortable strangers then we grow unfamiliar, then mistrustful. What goes on when we reconnect is tentative but threshold-like: the snow becomes something we know, welcome or unwelcome as context dictates. This final aspect involves the other two: we learn the “snowness of snow” just as in early Maths we appreciate the “threeness of three,”and then we also see snow as wonder, as a source of fun, of poetry or science or expressive arts: we see it as snow.

What do we gain from touching snow? Maybe we gain some facility with active learning, or some more vocabulary, or skills with moving or handling. Maybe we gain a sense of wonderthat the bright crystal pile in our hands turns (back) to water. Maybe we learn something simple about who we are and how we live.

But very little of any of the three ways of looking at our learning comes from looking at snow through the window or via a video link, but comes from what the first epistle of John says of Christ, that “which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled.”

We’re (still) Not Scared

Politicians in the latest attacks on Higher Education have stated that we should be “accountable” for what we teach. I am not shrinking from the veiled threats here; this is not a bear I am frightened to meet. Indeed I don’t think I’ve ever taught about Brexit except to deplore the disjuncture between Fundamental British Values and recent reports of increasing xenophobia and homophobia.

However, in case we are to face a purge from those who see themselves as our Lords and Masters (sc. to include our Ladies and Mistresses) here is a list of possible offences (they are bit inconsistent, and I have deliberately mixed them up so no priority is visible) I may wish to have taken into account:

I am a traditionalist; I believe, with the founding mothers and fathers of Early Childhood Education, in the role of the imagination, in art, in play and being outdoors;
Funding is linked to taxation of society and intimately connected to society’s duty to work for the good of all;
Libraries are a good idea;
It’s not down to Reception;
Knowledge is a vital component in education;
Staff-student ratios are key to interactions, themselves key to quality;
There is no single action that makes children readers;
Children’s rights are human rights;
Schools as organisations are on the whole staffed by people with energy and vision;
Class and social capital matter;
Qualifications do not ensure quality;
School uniform is about control;
English spelling has evolved under a number of influences that are not always internally consistent;
Some children’s lives are deeply shit and even where that is not our fault as educators it is our responsibility;
You can learn more about children’s learning by going out for a walk with them than by quizzing them about how they match data projections;
Planning and data may inform but are not in se quality at any level of teaching;
Developmentally appropriate practice is an ethical position, not the whim of “middle class do-gooders;”
Skills and attitudes are vital components in education;
Children’s chances are not improved by debates that distract teachers: trad/prog is too often poisonous timewasting by the pedagogologues;
Reading high-quality children’s literature is enlightening for adults as well as children;
Politicians (of any persuasion) who seek to pontificate about education should be invited to spend considerable time in schools that have not been smartened up for their arrival.

Bite me.

Lists and Canons

As I write the title I am aware of the ways both “lists” and “canon” (or at any rate “cannon”) have military connections. There is also a certain sense of struggle or battle  when meeting the kind of lists that come my way. I am referring to the “Hundred Books to Read Before You Die” (HBTRBYD) variety. Here is one, the Fifteen Best Children’s Books of All Time.  Yes, Of All Time.

Little White Horses, Hobbits, Boys in Dresses  and Velveteen Rabbits are all in place, along with Pippi Longstocking and the Philosopher’s Stone (I may be wrong about this one). I looked in vain for Michael Rosen hunting bears. I really like Francis Spufford’s The Boy that Books Built, although I wasn’t at all sure why that was there. Perhaps the writer’s lists got muddled, and that was the reference tome. I would have preferred the new Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature as a guide, but maybe I am misreading the Spufford and it really is “for children” rather than “about childhood” (for a lengthy argument on targets and destinations for older young readers, I’m sure the eloquent and energetic Patrick Ness will give anyone a run for their money, but my mind changed on this – or at least any certainty I had blown up –  when I read The Case of Peter Pan, or, The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction).  It’s interesting to note how age-skewed these are, although there is some material published in this millennium. I rather suspect there has been a quota system applied, about date of publication, translated or not, maybe even something about “target gender” or some other such idea.

The Bestness has to apply in all sorts of areas.

The Best of All Time has a canonical feel to it.

HBTRBYD is like that. Maybe it’s the intimation of mortality does it.

And here is another, the Top Ten Books About Trees. Because I feel a lot of sympathy for this thoughtful list – and indeed for the project of literature and landscape, I felt I could use this one to explore the idea of a list and a canon. Ignore the fact that the writer is in part writing a plug for her own book, The Long, Long Life of Trees: her motive is subsumed into the choices she makes, and in any case her book does look good. Here is Fiona Stafford’s list, shorn (pleached? pruned?) of her evaluative comments.

Howards End by EM Forster
Meetings With Remarkable Trees by Thomas Pakenham
The Dead by James Joyce
Outline by Paul Nash
Dante’s Inferno
Sylva by John Evelyn
Whispers in the Graveyard by Theresa Breslin
Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery by John Clare
The Woodlanders by Thomas Hardy
Apple Acre by Adrian Bell

And of course my removing her comments really removes the point of the article: the list is nothing without the critical commentary. What is Dante doing there? What does Apple Acre have that Wild Life in a Southern Country doesn’t have? Where are the books that are on my desk (somewhere) even now as I type: the rich Arboreal, or the enlightening poetry collection Into the Forest or the quirky Gossip from the Forest?  The chapters from Landscape and Memory? Robert Macfarlane? Rob Cowen? The point of the articles, from Telegraph to Guardian is not that they are canonical, but that they stimulate debate.  You, dear writer, can dress it how you like, but I may not agree that Emile and the Detectives is one of the best children’s books of all time, although I remember it fondly. You might equally howl at my suggestion that we replace it with The Owl Service (a commentary website here) or More Than This or a graphic work such as Nimona.  These are your choices, I have mine (and I would probably include We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, but what might I get rid of?). Trying to make it into something with should and must (and death) is sensationalist.

The debate is what this is about. The danger comes, I think, when it is couched in terms of what you must read. HBTRBYD works on the premise there is an implicit failure in your not having read The Great Gatsby (“The BAE across the Bay” as my daughter described it on the bus to me this morning)  or The Glass Bead Game. Tick, I win: I have read more than you.  There might be arguments, of course, for literary works that are the building blocks of one’s cultural capital, although endless quizzes on the computer don’t seem to be able to come up with a decent answer, and shifting cultural experiences make this a Protean task to say the least (“What book of the Odyssey does Proteus come from, Swarbrick?”) . These arguments seem to me to be ones in which we do see a piece of literature as a building block: no Milton without the King James Bible, no Lord of the Rings without Beowulf, no Matilda without Oliver Twist &c., &c., and I have said enough about Alan Garner whose breadcrumbs of harking-back to other myths and landscapes through all his writings are almost a pedagogic approach in themselves. No Thursbitch without Gilgamesh?

So is there a difference between a list and a canon? At a basic level, no: a canon is just a list. However, the idea of a canon as somehow a required list, a hallowed thing in itself, makes me worried, especially when we come to thinking about children in school. “I think Y6 will love this” is a good day’s trek for Michelle Paver‘s young shaman/hunter Torak away from “They must have read this before Y7 or before University.” Several contributors to the Oxford Reading Spree gave us lists of books that had inspired them, but what was noticeable was that no-one (unless I saw the whole thing through rose-tinted specs) told us what children must read. These were lists, not a canon: an invitation, not a rule.

So what purpose do these lists really serve? They can do one of three things: one, the HBTRBYD method, is to score points like first year undergraduates did to me, to my near-compete despair, in 1976/77; the next is to stimulate debate about what might be on this list or that; the last is to stimulate the reader to move into a new area, pick up a new book. Whispers in the Graveyard sounds worth a look; what’s A Boy and a Bear in a Boat like? I can then make up my own mind about what quality looks like – and the more I read, the better my guess about that might be.

Partnership, Obedience and Trust

I think the Oxford Reading Spree went well. There were notable stars, of course, and followed some way behind by a man looking like a grizzled version of Basil Brush, rabble-rousing rather than really presenting a case on parents and partnerships and how that might sometimes involve a loss of power for the professional. Me voila, along with many – but alas, not all – the speakers.  It has been immensely gratifying to read praise from serving teachers such as Kiran, here.  Yes, it really does mean a lot.

What I want to return to is the notion of parents as school agents. I know I was pressing my case too hard in my talk on Saturday – but equally I now see there were people in the audience who do, in fact, keep children in at playtime if the child’s reading record has not been filled in. All I think I could do is point out the ambiguities in both doing this and not doing it – something I had been planning to do until I read Sue Cowley’s reflections on school absence. She has moved the argument on from my moans about whether this action or that in the teaching of reading is in the best interests of the child, in the light of the news that Jon Platt, who in effect queried the use of the word “regular” in “regular attendance,” and whether a school has a right to determine what “regular” means.

I find myself caught. Head teachers sometimes seem like dreadful killjoys – “You know it’s a trend, the Head’s thinking of banning it” – and maybe sometimes they are, seeking an even sailing rather than any choppiness, conformity and compliance rather than real partnership. However, does the perceived need for a big holiday somehow overrule the professional judgement as to what why a child might be in school – still less the organisational complexity of a curriculum in which children may or may not be there for this or that piece of learning? The tensions are – or seem – very either/or in the matter of term-time holidays. As Sue acerbically sums it up, ” your personal circumstances have ceased to matter.” Holidays, healthy packed lunches, uniform, whether you have the time to fill in a reading record, whether your shared reading with a child is about Charlie and Lola, or Smash Hits, or Biff and Chip, whether… Oh, enough.  It comes down to the idea that somehow the parents (“the most important job in the world, and it’s left to amateurs”) can have a right to disagree with a professional. Sometimes they do. Sometimes the school makes a mess of the message the team is trying to convey. Been there, on both “sides,” and am always struck, as I look back at the highs and lows of parent-teacher relationships by the dilemma: Does a school demand obedience, or does it inspire (or work to inspire) trust?

In this case, tonight, I think Sue is right: this parent and teacher playground bundle is the wrong battle. Fighting about school term holidays or absenteeism during SATs seems a bit of a distract-and-redirect, if the stories are to be believed (I’m not doubting them) about teacher recruitment, low morale, chronic funding. There are worse ogres to fight than a (perhaps) over zealous head or (perhaps) a belligerent parent. These everyday squabbles need to be seen for what they are, or at least could be: the school-by-school, sometimes family-by-family storming and forming of relationships. We have other dragons hatching, and we will need all the strength we can muster, all the friends we can get.

 

Come and Join the Dance

This weekend I will be doing something – I am so nervous I can’t really talk it up, although the event itself will be marvellous – at the Oxford Reading Spree about reading in the EYFS. I could

  • fulminate about phonics
  • chide people on child-initiated learning
  • do other things on how to share books in group time that could have an alliterative title, but I can’t be bothered.

but in fact what I’m going to talk about is parental partnership and particularly about books.

Gillian Morrow and Nigel Malin, in the heady days of reasonably funded Early Years, proposed a model of parents and professionals working together. They suggested that partnership “which is often depicted in terms of a hierarchy of levels, for example from non-participation to partnership and control” can sometimes be seen by professionals “as a matter of ‘giving’” – and I wonder whether this means a giving but with the right to take back. Power really remains with the setting, and the role of the educator is to make up for parental deficiencies.  In Morrow and Malin’s more dynamic model, we see this undergoing changes. Most teachers will, I think, recognise that  changes in relationship between parent and professional are not necessarily easy, but their research is primarily into parents’ decision-making through committees, and one of the workers’ responses to the increased empowerment is telling:

…one of the good things has been becoming a lot less precious about your professional status. People on the Parents’ Committee respect you not because of your job role but because of their relationship with you

I return to this as I think about reading.

How well do we act as advocates for reading? How easy is it to fall back on institutional lines of power?

I have recently heard (but now cannot trace) the story of the school that threatened a child with detention if the parents didn’t read with the child three times in a week; I remember a parent’s anger at reading in the child’s reading record a telling-off for not keeping the reading record up-to-date…  These are indicative of a power relationship in which a home-school agreement is for the parents to agree to comply. They/we comply with what the school deems fitting. This is, I think assumed in the legislation, which states that a home-school agreement must contain “the responsibilities which the parents of such pupils are expected to discharge in connection with the education of their children” – assumed, I think, that it is the school that sets those expectations. This seems to me a far cry from the EYFS statement that

[c]hildren learn and develop well in enabling environments, in which their experiences respond to their individual needs and there is a strong partnership between practitioners and parents and/or carers…

So what is this strong partnership – and especially when we are talking about fostering literacy in EYFS – what does the professional have to do? Assume or require compliance? Or become the dancer, inviting parent and child to join? And if the latter, how much does the professional need to understand that long story from the first, cuddly book-sharing to the child making their own choices in a library?

This is what I will be exploring, all in 20 mins, on Saturday. No pressure, then.

 

 

Gillian Morrow  & Nigel Malin, (2004) Parents and professionals working together: turning the rhetoric into reality  Early Years Volume 24, 2004 – Issue 2, Pages 163-177  http://dx.doi.org.oxfordbrookes.idm.oclc.org/10.1080/0957514032000733019)

 

 

 

 

 

My Outdoor Learning

Last weekend (the final weekend in Oct 2016) I went outside.

Not to the allotment, and not to the Kalahari: a sort-of-adventurous outside for a 59-year-old academic who was a great hiker in his early teens but since then…

Well,  this is where we went.

thursbitch

And the “we” is Mat Tobin and I.

The notes of the work leading up to the trip and then the weekend’s notes are here:

It’s very obvious what we did well, and equally obvious what I didn’t prepare for properly.  Ah well, it was a first go. Others have also attempted it – cf Emily Morrison. There are even YouTube clips. As Garner and Langland say we “blostrede forth as bestes ouer baches and hulles,” and saw, and learned and came back.

What I want to think about here is how children’s experiences of “going out of their comfort zone” might parallel mine. I am struck by an impressive autoethnographic study by another colleague, Jon Reid, whose imaginative leaps have compared the metaphorical journey into doctoral study with physical travel.  It would be too cheeky – not to say intrusive –  to use his ideas verbatim, but let me just pull up one idea: that learning is very easily translated into journey imagery, and that the relationship is so intimate that “outdoor learning” might even seem a tautology.

It isn’t, of course: I’m not saying that no-one learns indoors, or that learning outside is automatic, or something so process-led that merely travelling is to arrive.  I simply can’t (yet?) get my head round the learning we did, since it was bound up in three elements:

  • Who I am and the past that brings me here, both positive and negative;
  • The experience of planning, doing, seeing;
  • Peak experiences.

“What did you go out into the wilderness to see? A reed shaken by the wind?” What did we go out to see? What do we ask children to do when we take them outside? There is a challenge, maybe even a hint of sarcasm in Jesus’ question to the comfortable bandwagonners in Matthew 11. What attracted me to the weekend? A love of being outside, a sense of challenge, a friendship. What did I go out to see? I went to find Thoon and found Lud.

The planning taught me a lot of skills, from Digimaps to revitalising my small skills with OS on the ground. The doing – the emailing for a taxi, sorting accommodation &c., &c. – was small beer compared with the journey up, the staying in Cheshire. I could have stayed for a week, repeated the visits we made, taken a lot more time over every aspect. I talk a lot to students about the value of first-hand experience, but here I was out doing stuff  myself: the verge by John Turner’s stone; the oddness of Jenkin Chapel; the wet underfoot past Gradbach and the sound of the water on the stones – the clonter. A series of little things making one big event of discovery.

And the huge experiences. The face in Ludchurch, the struggle to Thursbitch, the hardness of the journey from the valley to the Tor (and Mat’s driving us back to Oxford). I feel – as I suspect Garner intends us to – torn between the opinions of the scientist Sal whose mental state is allowing her the insights in Thursbitch that drive her story, and the hesitation of her devoted companion, the Jesuit medic Ian. Where they discuss “sentient landscape” encapsulates my own dilemma:

“Are you telling me, after all we’ve seen and done here, that this is just any old gritstone anticline?”

“I’d say that it’s a powerful and dramatic sub-Alpine environment. But what I accept as appearing to be strong atmosphere is no more than our projection of our own experience and emotion onto a circumscribed place.”

“How can a man with your job talk such crap?”

And this brings me to my pedagogic questions: do we take children out for peak experiences or something more subtle? When we talk about the “learning journey” where does this metaphor (here it comes again) lead us? Is there a spiritual dimension to the week-by-week going to Forest School – and does it need actively fostering or is it just there? What do we send children out to see? Reeds shaken in the wind or something bigger?

 

 

Lessons from the History of Teaching Reading

It is now unorthodox or even heretical – except among those for whom it is not – to claim that the simple view of reading is fallible. I noticed recently a University lecturer being taken to task for “pedalling tripe” by suggesting he was going to read Davis’ critique of systematic synthetic phonics. We live in a time where vitriol is easily poured out – whether on those heartless fascists who espouse a top-down model of teaching or those careless, loveless airheads who think that children should find it all out for themselves. Such, at any rate, would be the Martian judgement (for “Martian” see the work of Eric Berne as shorthand for a commentator completely outside the system). No matter how important they seem to the protagonists, Single Issue Politics -whether at national or staff-room level – can get very nasty very quickly.

So let’s just have a look at  a few sources:

The ‘simple view’ shows that, to become proficient readers and writers, children must develop both word recognition and language comprehension. Letters and Sounds is fully compatible with the wider, language-rich early years curriculum. It will help practitioners and teachers adapt their teaching to  the range of children’s developing abilities that is common in most settings and primary classes.  The aim is to make sure that all children make progress at a pace that befits their enlarging capacities.

Yes, Letters and Sounds.

 

It is teachers themselves who will ensure our target is met. This Framework for Teaching [sc the National Literacy Strategy] is a practical tool to help teachers do precisely that.  All teachers know that pupils become successful readers by learning to use a range of strategies to get at the meaning of a text…As with reading, it is important that pupils learn to write independently from an early age.

The first NLS Framework.

 

That to this day our Crop answers not our Seed; that our Childrens Attainments come not to our just, and Rational Expectations, is so stabbing an Experience, that it ought not to be mentioned without a Flood of Tears.  The grand reason why you hear Children so much, and yet teach them so little, is because you hear them so confusedly. Put therefore as many of them into one form, as you judg [sic] to be of an equal capacity, or at least no great difference between them…Let an hour every day be solemnly spent in sounding and spelling those words, which you find in the Two last Chapters which contain most, if not all the difficulties are usually met with in the whole English Tongue.

Nathaniel Strong, England’s Perfect Schoolmaster, 1699

 

However, my concern in this post is not about the veracity of any of these claims, but the “truthiness” behind them, the forcibly put assertion that “this is the way.” We are used, now, to Secretaries of State being, claiming to be (or even overtly supplanting) experts, so this language is very familiar. It could be argued – for the first two, at least, that this is the Government showing leadership.

I am not so sure: the displeasure and downright unpleasantness shown in these arguments by this side or that seem much more to be connected with a who-shouts-loudest demagoguery than with a willingness to listen to various aspects of the argument, and this, if nothing else, is the critical job of higher education research: to read, mark, inwardly digest, rather than simply support the shrill.

Our Education Studies students (and others of the undergraduate programme taking the year 1 module on Introduction to the Study of Education) please note: education systems that demand compliance, over-loud claims for odd pieces of research, (even) jocular and plausible lecturers are there for you to sift much more than to be believed.

 

 

 

Play

It is worth speculating on the nature of curriculum. What is it? Who owns it – and by owning I suppose I’m asking “In whose gift are the decisions about it?”

As I’ve pointed out before (notably in the chapter on curriculum in Themes and Debates), while play is a key factor in a child’s learning and development, it does not take place independent of other learning; the provision of good quality experiences (in the home or in another setting) takes account of play as an enriching experience, so that adult-led experiences go hand-in-hand with the learning that arises from the children themselves and their play. Adults make choices about when and how to intervene – and this should be done sensitively and with an understanding of a the individual child’s needs and intentions.

So does this mean that play as a self-chosen activity is actually a myth? That the child is not really the free agent we fool ourselves into envisioning?

I think it depends on what is meant by play, a phenomenon every childhood practitioner might say they recognise but which actually carries a multitude of meanings so that it is really a series of interlocking experiences and intentions rather than one thing that is either here or not here. Maybe the same is true of curriculum.

“Ownership” is therefore a crucial issue for both – but maybe that isn’t  the right word. Is the problem embedded in the notion of control? Does anyone really need to “own” – as in possess and control – complexity? If play is a set of actions that involve emotion, competence, imagination, freedom, how can we say it gets owned? Or rather, if we own it, do we ruin it? A wise monk once said the Magnificat is a great, wild horse that we tame into being a farmyard pony: perhaps if we seek to limit play – Golden Time, and “Now you’ve done your work you can go and play,” and “This is an activity the grown-ups think is fun” – we take the edge off its imaginative, creative possibilities. The children may not have limitless freedom – but in play, their possible worlds are expanded and expanding, and we can limit this only when we are clear when and why we should.