What gives me pleasure in reading?

This post, as I begin it, is an instant “Save Draft,” since it will take a lot of unpicking. Even as I write I see the CLIP Carnegie Kate Greenaway list is out with Tidy, Wolves of Currumpaw and Wild Animals of the North in there. Popularity, pleasure, professional judgement come together. Complex stuff.

Do I read because something is popular?

Not always, but sometimes I have to, if only to keep up to date with other people’s ideas or trends in production. A Hello Kitty version of Red Riding Hood recently stands out as a low point. I persevered with Harry Potter because I thought I should, and was glad I did.

Do I read children’s books for pleasure?

For my own pleasure, as well as the pleasure of sharing? I get pleasure from the innocence – whether knowing or otherwise on the author’s part – which I can see even if I don’t really participate in it. Granted , as Hollindale so gnomically says “ours is the age of Lord of the Flies,” where even the bear-protagonist of Jon Klassen is vengeful and murderous, there is in much children’s literature a lightness that is engaging.

I like the simplicity, whether (again) knowing or unknowing. The foxy-looking gentleman leading Jemima Puddleduck astray; the bromance (an anachronistic term) of Esca and Marcus Flavius Aquila; the inversion of roles in the Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig: they are tricksy, or challenging, funny and poignant but simple in the storytelling in some way I haven’t yet teased out, somehow. I know I am in danger here of seeming as if I like the descent into liking the easy read, and I will only protest (using Julien Benda’s phrase (revisited by Hollindale) Le Trahison Des Clercs, the way that intellectuals do not stay true to their “calling”) that it is the subtlety and playfulness of the design and language that I find attractive, not the easiness. There’s so much more to say on this, but this will do for now.

I get pleasure from good design, from inventive use of colour, interesting cadences in prose, from irony and jokiness. I get pleasure – and did as a child – at the knowing wink towards the world of the adult in the Moomins (I like it less in Dahl). I suppose I get pleasure in the play of ideas: it’s a bit like reading poetry, where rhythm and cadence and imagery and word choice and the appreciation of all of them together makes for the biggest part of my pleasure in reading. Look at these lines from R S Thomas for example:

What is the Christmas without
snow? We need it
as bread of a cold
climate, ermine to trim

our sins with, a brief
sleeve for charity’s
scarecrow to wear its heart
on, bold as a robin.

My pleasure comes from appreciation of the shared experiences, but also from the way the words are placed, with care and attention, the slipperiness of simile and metaphor, of sacrament and observation.

And I get pleasure from the debate I have with colleagues about something we delight in together. Children’s literature is one of the reasons I came to Brookes, with my original work title of “Senior Lecturer in Early Childhood Studies, Communication, Language and Literacy. ” It is a joy to find that discussion still alive in the last years of my work.

Professional Judgment comes in somewhere?

Because of my job and my chosen area of research (now here’s a circular argument bowling down the hill of criticism!) , yes.

I can cite two voices in announcing the prize lists today :

There are journeys to be made, friendships to discover, characters to fall in love with and worlds to truly immerse oneself in.
Questions of identity, friendship and responsibility, both to others and to the natural world, are key themes this year. It is also hugely heartening to see our shortlisted writers and illustrators tackling potentially difficult and big ideas…

And I like those descriptions of the values that professionals see in books. I’d like my students to appreciate these views.

Contains Cannibalism and Barry Manilow

This was my “trigger warning” for our Becoming a Reader class this week in which we rounded off our work on traditional tales with a rendition of The Story of the Grandmother – and the meeting at the crossroads with Bzou, the werewolf – and a look at how culture informs our reading of a text, for which we used Copacabana.

I rather like this session: “What’s a ‘showgirl’?” “What do we understand by a ‘dress cut down to there’?” and just who did shoot who[m]? It allows me to present the work of Hilary Janks and Mary Roche not just as ways to look at children’s reading but also at us as adults becoming readers. I am fortunate to be able to explore this further with Mat in his Reading for Pleasure MA module tonight.

Janks makes a powerful point – or set of points – here:

“…decoding is often equated with reading and is associated with functional or basic literacy….The interrogation of texts, reading against the text, is tied to critical literacy and implies that readers recognise texts as selective versions of the world; they are not subjected to them and they can imagine how texts can be transformed to represent a different set of interests.”

and if I had one wish for our third year students, or maybe even just a wish arising from this module, it would be that their time at Brookes has allowed them to develop just this critical literacy – that policy, just like Garner or Shakespeare or the EPPE review, can only ever present selective versions of the world. I’m not asking for cynicism, or a world in which the principal graduate attribute is becoming a Radio 4 listener – but for an engagement with ideas which asks about viewpoint and opinion and world view in a critical way.

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.

“Are you on holiday now?”

Queen Victoria is said to have enjoyed this description from Guiseppe in the Gondoliers of what a democratised royalty would have to do.

A busy day, with some lunacy, but not unpleasant overall.

There is no moan in this post, no link to the UCU workload survey, just an account here of what happens when the students are gone. I don’t think it’s an out-of-the-ordinary account, but it is here to give people an insight as to what the elves do when the shoemakers are asleep.

I get in (because not teaching) at about 9:00 if I have no earlier meeting. Work-related social media may well have happened on the bus, if I had signal.

Coffee follows at some point – usually at my desk.

A wander round to see anyone I need to see informally. This can be a five-minute chat or (as today) an hour of fielding issues.

Emails. One is from a student who can’t decide her module choices for next semester; several are in preparation for a meeting tomorrow; lots are from students whose results came out on Monday – and gratifyingly some are from graduating students saying thank you; two are admissions queries.

A meeting about a student with progression issues.

More coffee – usually socially, but dealing with work issues as we drink.

A meeting about revalidation paperwork – interrupted by a ‘phone call around student transfer.

Lunch: 30 mins. Again, work-related conservation.

Paperwork time: composing/restructuring course materials following the recent revalidation. Another two calls about student progression and transfer; a colleague drops by to discuss a staffing issue.

Emails. See above. Another colleague drops by about her contract.

A meeting (and some phone calls) about course materials, as above, as the Education Studies coordinators check and rewrite my proposals and their own resources.

3:30 is a scheduled meeting with a colleague about a joint paper. A quick nod at a work colleague while en route turns into a corridor meeting, and I arrive in the library at 3:40. We work until 5:55.

Emails on the bus on the way home.

and then “With a pleasure that’s emphatic/We retire to our attic/With the gratifying feeling that our duty has been done.”

Now, we might argue that a better organisation might make a better day – but this is not that post. Here, in part at least, is what happens when the students are not around.

“It all hangs on one day”

One of my soon-to-be-ex-students remarked recently how fragile results are, all hanging on the outcome of one day. At one level he’s right: a few clicks to your results page, and it’s done.

But it struck me that this year I wanted to tell that story, the stuff I’m in the thick of now, the narrative that leads to results day. It’s much the same story in many Universities, and I’ve talked about this before, although without so much of the step-by-step story.

“When first the college rolls receive his name…” Well, it’s not quite like that – but there is a problem as to where we begin. The tutor deciding the assessment? The Programme Development team determining the learning outcomes? We’ll start in the library, and since this is a Brookes-based narrative, that means here (a bit arbitrarily). The student is working on an assignment, the last of the umpteen assessment points in his degree. It is week eight of a twelve-week semester, because he is a virtuous and well organised person. Whether or not that is the case, let’s make this a no-hiccups process: hand-in deadlines come and are met.

And then the marker, often the tutor, starts. There are twenty, thirty, sixty similar scripts to mark, decide on, comment on. A sample is checked – moderated – by another tutor, to make sure the team’s standards are being upheld. Marks are uploaded into the massive database of marks, according to a centrally determined deadline. The wheels in the computer crunch and click (yes I know there aren’t really wheels in a computer, and to call this huge set of processes a “computer” is a bit silly) the marks, not just to record them, but to check them against the course regulations. Administrators check, double-check, produce reports, communications with wayward tutors, and the next stage – here at Brookes at any rate – is a set of decisions to be made by course leaders and managers: do we know why Student B has no marks for this module? Should Student C be asked about this or that? Decisions are made by real people, ones in general who are conscious of the delicacy of this or that letter being sent to to this or that student.

Then the Examination Committees convene. Tutors from other Universities have been recruited as External Examiners to look at standards, at decisions, at processes to ensure good order, compliance, fairness. The meeting processes all the marks it needs, and all the degree classifications, and this is fed back into the University central systems as if they were a cross between a refecting rabbit and Deep Thought from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. More rushing for paperwork follows, more checking. This part of the cycle ends here at Brookes with a meeting of all the Programme Leads with more External Examiners, a Vice-Chancellor (or similar), and lots of central administrators, ironing out any difficulties, checking any serious cases. Questions are asked, eyebrows (occasionally) raised, final decisions taken on Student Q and Student R.

The computers are fired up again, and a few days later, the results that have been determined by the complex interaction of assessed marks, University regulations and this series of meetings are available: we are at that “one morning” on which it all hangs. Then the final rush to graduation, and I try to scrub up well enough and learn to pronounce everyone’s names for the ceremonies, and then it’s academic dress, and bubbly and meet-the-parents…

…et ceux qui vivent encore vont commencer tout doucement à les oublier et à confondre leurs noms. And those who are still alive begin imperceptibly to forget them, to mix up their names… [Interesting that I had misremembered the quotation until I checked it here]. But we don’t always subside into forgetfulness, and it really is nice when you keep in touch.

Why Education?

Well, there’s a question.
I’ve been asked to be a voice in a school at a presentation for parents:

The core purpose of the event is to help potential applicants to consider more fully what they should ask themselves as they look into the breadth, depth and format of u/g courses available in the UK; and to help parents to understand more fully what students need to be doing doing now and during summer holidays, to strengthen their applicant profile. The sessions also reinforce understanding of personal skills, traits and level of academic ability that universities are looking for.

And so I’m starting way, way back, not at the philosophy per se but at the history that brings me to be back in Dorset over 50 years after I left it.

Schooling began for me in the Reception Class in Blandford Forum, all high-up windows, and time in the sandpit and water tray. I narrowly escaped being registered as Christopher, a hazard I encountered from then on until I hit twenty, for some reason. My friend Paul was crying and I had to be brave for him, something I felt a bit unfair, since I rather wanted a quick cry, too.

Maths and I parted company the following year, when I was kept in for not learning what I would now call number bonds to twenty. Reading and I were already best friends; my mum and dad bought me the next reading book in the scheme we used –The Tip and Mitten McKee Readers – whenever I needed it. I learned to tell the time, learned to hate jigsaws, became a dreadful non-completer throughout my life (as a consequence of the 300-piece jigsaw incident), got engaged to Susan in the year above (it didn’t last)…. I had a wart on my right hand, and still find myself curling my right hand if I’m thinking of directions. My infant career ended and I moved to Blandford Junior, only to make a much bigger move quickly when we moved to Harlow in Essex, but not before learning to hate carrots and football and that I was a bit “behind” for not being able to tie my shoe laces.

And here began my interest in education. No high windows in Harlow New Town. We had books for problem solving, cuisenaire rods (which I never mastered), and the ability to go back to a water tray I had forgotten for three years. I went into the infant wing to help with reading – only to be puzzled by ITA. I learned more about unfairness, I learned some French, some pottery, misread C S Lewis, murdered the descant recorder (but I still play) and got the best school report ever:

Nicholas is a mine of useless information; if he can find a job where he can use all this stuff, his fortune will be made.

And at the end of what would now be Y6 but then was Top Juniors, we moved to Burnley, to Todmorden Road Juniors. I suppose my name is in here somewhere, but I see the school’s closed now. Two months I wouldn’t wish on anyone, despite the kindly interest of Mr Brown, my teacher, who must have seen something worth taking an interest in and who I floored by asking about Elidor. High Windows. Maths in the morning, Maths in the afternoon. Tech drawing for the boys, sewing for the girls. The cane and being beaten up after school.

So my interest in education began from a very practical standpoint. Why is this school like this, and that school like that? Are they all aiming for the same thing?

And what I’d really like to say at this talk I’m giving is this:

If you are interested in what makes schools the bizarre mixture they are of workhouse and adventure park, or if you are interested in engaging with small, lost people who can’t tie their laces – or gnomy little lads who hide in books, or – erm – overconfident recorder players – then education is for you. It could be the mixture of theory and practice that is an Education Studies course; it could be a more profession-facing course like a BA leading to Qualified Teacher Status. But think about why education has the power to fascinate, to engage, to challenge, and maybe think about why is still has that power over me, as I near 60. Just don’t model your UCAS statement on this blog post.

Dirty

This is a really neat overview on YouTube of my favourite module, “my” Outdoor Learning module. It can serve as a version of the fictionalised examples I have picked up over the years that I present below. As I burble on in the video, I raise the question about where does the passion and interest lie in being outdoors. We whet the appetite in Year 1 in the module Introduction to the Study of Education, pick it up in Year 2 with this module, and some will go on to a final year placement in Forest Schools or maybe do a dissertation around the outdoors. I’m never sure quite what to make of the student evaluation questions about “challenge,” however: U70124 is a popular module, whatever that means, and the eager student will doubtless go beyond the procedural, the basic literature (however valuable) – but we sit, perhaps ambiguously, between the placement modules and the theoretical. What do we mean by challenge, then? Is there a difference between academic challenge and physical challenge? Between physical challenge and overcoming resistance?

Here’s one student: she joins the module with a (largely unacknowledged) antipathy towards sustained reading. She is not alone in finding essay writing an awkward mixture of thinking out her opinions based on class input and “finding the right quotes” for the essay.

And here’s another: she is a solid practitioner who finds the academic stuff hard, but equally finds the alternative perspectives she meets uncomfortable. There are real points in the outdoor learning module where she finds herself thinking “I would never do that with my children.” At heart she is here to make her setting better.

And in the rule of three, here is the last: a good student, an experienced EY worker, she is nonetheless convinced by voices from her past that a stick on the floor is dirty, that sitting in the floor is unpleasant. Even being in the little wood here is several steps into an unknown.

Are their challenges the same? Are engaging with effective reading, linking theory to practice, overcoming tactile defensive systems all fundamentally about overcoming some resistance? And what does their tutor do – what do I do – to help them face their challenges, to see the threshold idea as something to be welcomed ?

I confess I find myself hampered by my big question from the YouTube video, around where the “passion and interest lie.” So often we talk about passion, about well-being, or (worse) “allowing children to be children.” These ideas – sometimes surrounded by metaphor or given authority simply the power of the slogan – may well have power in the advocacy that student 2 may need, but are well-nigh fatal to the thinking and engagement required by student 1. And while this is familiar territory to me as an academic, where does this leave student 3? How do I look at student well-being and challenge on all three levels? It’s as if I need a set of resources or an approach that will

encourage engaged reading
improve practice
support challenge without acting as Mother-Hen.

Oh, wait: that’s probably my job: to develop a package (a class, a module) that enables as well as challenges; where reading is expected, opinions are welcomed, and even den-building in a muddy wood has its place. Maybe that “place” (metaphorically) also has to make the discomfort of changing minds acceptable to students. A tall order: the students aren’t the only people who have a challenge in the module on Outdoor Learning.

Transitions into HE

“What’s on my mind?”, asks WordPress whenever I start a post. How to work with students is always on my mind at work, whether it’s the ex_CACHE Year 1 student talking about time management or the final semester over-deliverer. This research report from MMU, published by QAA has given me a lot of think about: as University admissions seeks for more and more diversity in its intake, it is ever more essential that we don’t just plonk the new students in the middle of the quad, so to speak, and say “There you are: Uni!”

The perceptions of learning and teaching in pre-University experiences crystallise for me in the table which talks about dependency:

Answers always provided;very short cycles of input,testing and feedback; all resources provided; monitoring system provides motivation and nudges; daily contact with same staff member; activity is always directed; some structured activities (for example, writing frames)

and contrasts it with how things might be in HE:

Students find answers for themselves; some resources provided, students expected to find more resources; students expected to largely find their own motivation;contact with same staff member weekly or less; activity required is essentially undirected (for example, lecture) .

This is about challenge and independence (something the report acknowledges) and I would be among the first to say that Year 1 in HE becomes all but useless if challenge and independence are minimised – but how do we increase them while teaching the “survival skills” that getting through Year 1 requires? And what about getting on in subsequent years?

A first thought: this is partly about expectation (again, the report is right to look at this, and the vignettes/quotations from the students are fascinating), but also, I think, about how the study skills debate gets clouded by the issues of mental health and wellbeing. They are both vital components in success – but it can’t be that HE tutors become welded to their students, any more than students are told “just cope.” Perhaps as school/college-based learning has changed, HE Y1 provision now needs to look (again and again, and more seriously) at differentiation?

That Candle Thing

Way back, a long time ago – as in before I had become a teacher (i.e. before I had QTS), Lynne Scholefield produced an interesting article called ‘Can we do that candle thing again?’ (British Journal of Religious Education, Volume 5, Issue 2, 1983). I found it inspirational when, a few years later, I began to train, first as an RE teacher and then teaching in a variety of schools. That Candle Thing used a candle to focus a brief meditation session, an exploration of prayer that was part of experiential RE.

It comes back now as I prepare a series of short sessions for the Westminster Chapel here at Harcourt Hill, a non-faith-based experience of what I am calling “mental refreshment” which will draw on the traditions of mindfulness I first met the same year as I read Scholefield’s article, in the work of Thich Nhat Hahn.

Fifteen minutes of settling, sitting and then… well, classes for some, buses and the weekend for others. And a hope that I am doing something that people will find useful, not jumping on the mindfulness bandwagon.

Or at least jumping on it mindfully.

12:35 – 12:50, Semester 2, 2016, Westminster Chapel.

‘That Candle Thing’

Provision and entitlement

“…Cowl, tunic, stockings, shoes, belt, knife, stylus, needle, handkerchief, writing tablets.“

What is the equipment the lecturer needs? St Benedict gives a quick list of what a monk needs – interesting to note the needle, I always think – and the communal way of living of Benedict’s first communities finds other tools safely in the cellarer’s stores or in the library. What do I need that the University can provide me with?

What it provides me with (apart from being couched in terms of office space, desk, bookshelves, &c) is not so very different from what the early monastics sought: management; a structured semester (if not a day); tools.

But today (15th Jan) is the feast of SS Maurus and Placid, and other, Benedictine writers such as IBenedictines are writing today much more coherently on aspects of the feast. The only thing that struck me – partly after feeling put upon yesterday (and messing up some paperwork) – was that it is very well to talk about HE provision and entitlement, and dress it up in early medieval clothes, but that is to overlook other aspects of organisation: that odd new(ish) [?] idea of followership, and what Benedict rails against: grumbling.

But is questioning the same thing? An ex-colleague (and neighbour) retweeted this news from Oregon this morning. What does the follower do when parts of an organisation need changing? I suggest that the answer is (in part at least) again found in Benedict, back with the Cellarer:

“…one who is wise, of mature character, sober, not a great eater, not haughty, not excitable, not offensive, not slow, not wasteful”

Because this obedience – in the sense we see it in Placid and Maurus – is a community practice, an “ethos statement,” where an organisation listens to its constituents. Followership is therefore not as new an idea as I teased with earlier; it is a modern-dress version of a proper obedience, in which trust is at the heart and the leaders are listening and responsive as much as anyone.