Tag: Higher Education

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.

Light, dark, and points in between

How do we use figurative language with children when discussing issues of spirituality?

This (first attempt at a) Prezi on spirituality gives three images, which I’ll discuss here, and a couple of quotations to ponder.

The first thing is to point out that the bells-and-whistles approach doesn’t really help. I have seen Powerpoint destroy an argument in much the same way: so many ways to change from image to image, different sounds from slide to slide. Here the seasickness pills are required from when we lurch through the window to going round the sun (although I’m sneakily proud of that) to the seven-league boots leap to the Zen circle at the end.

The second is this idea of dark and light, common, as far as I can see, to all religious language. “Lead me from dark to light, from death to immortality” say the Uphanishads, and the Hebrew Bible tells us that “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light.”  A basic figure of speech in discussing spirituality – even when faced with the iconoclasm of St John of the Cross and his much-misquoted “dark night.”

But why the figurative language? What are the limits of language or experience that it seems inappropriate to discuss spirituality without reference to light, or wind, or bread (and wine)? And (for the point of view of my module on children and spirituality) what is the impact of this on children?

Bloom’s Taxonomy?

Steve Wheeler, the author of this post argues that “often a mistake to try to represent complex ideas in the form of simplistic diagrams,” and goes on to suggest that Bloom, so much hailed as a model of thinking, requires serious revision in a “digital age.”

He goes on to state in Bloom Reheated (the significance of the title is in the blog post – ergo, read it) that “We need to find ways to nurture the agile, flexible, critical and creative learners we desperately need in our communities today.”

All agreed.  No problem – except that how do I work with students to give them effective models of learning that will stand them in good stead in a classroom? There might be holes in the Bloom taxonomy (not least, for me, its pyramid structure)  but it is still very current, (as in this guidance on University Learning Outcomes), and does allow students to think about how they teach, how their pupils learn; it is an effective tool for the reflective teacher who wants to move beyond “you do what works.”

What is andecdote about?

Maybe oral transmission of ideas requires some flesh. The parable. The chalkboard, or maybe these days a set of graphics – the sort of “lecture by powerpoint” in which technology aids but can also dominate. The Wordle at the top of this blog as I post is another case in point: a picture – even, like a Wordle, a picture composed of words – can be more powerful than a paragraph or two of prose. We need to embody our ideas (and this link takes you to something I’ve just started reading about).

But I was challenged yesterday in a conversation with Tom Tyler (check out also his cyberchimp site, and the resources, for example, attached to various Brookes modules such as this) about how one might use or could use or should use personal anecdote in a teaching situation. How does the word become flesh?

First of all, a warning from a marking perspective: it is very hard to fill up a lecture with personal insight (and it could be argued that that is the most useful thing about a lecture!) and then to discourage the unsubstantiated “I feel” comments that I’m ranting about in a previous post. I need to be very clear about how academic writing explains an academic position, and how that might be illuminated by a personal anecdote but that the anecdote is, in some ways, a marginalium, a side-line.

But then to three different examples, all of which I have used in classes this year or last, presented at this point (until I return to them) without much comment:

A child from one particular ethnic group has come to school with the clear message that getting dirty is inappropriate. Planting seeds in a Spring project presents difficulties, and his key worker – who belongs to the same ethnic and religious group – spends time modelling working with compost, then putting some on the child’s hand, and so on, until the child is confident enough to participate in a seed-planting activity with a group.

I am with Maisy, my granddaughter, who takes a wooden knight from the castle and picks up his sword saying “I snip you bed, Papa. A knight snip you bed with sword.”

I am with a group of children going on a Forest School trip. One of the children, then more of them, spot a deer over on one side of the wood. It is standing quite still, chewing at some leaves it has just pulled from a bush. When it sees it, it pauses, then jumps – not quite ‘prongs’ – off into the undergrowth. I say to the child that first spotted the deer (rather foolishly) “Did you see that?” and then “What do you think it was?” He replies, “A kangaroo.” Not a bad guess: this is a deer without the antlers he expects a deer to have.

So the questions are: can I present any of these as valid illustrations of pedagogical points? Is this “inaccurate research” really useful for my students – and if it is, how do they use it? And when it comes to NSS survey results what makes a tutor “interesting,” or “enthusiastic” and a course “intellectually stimulating”? What is fun – and what part does it play in learning in HE?

We tutors might have different views from our students, of course. It might be good to know…

Teachers should, must, will

An undergraduate at Oxford Brookes is aiming (or being aimed?? Now, there’s a whole other discussion! ) at becoming someone who understands “what it means to think and behave as a member of that disciplinary and/or professional community of practice.” Thus far the current statement on Graduate Attributes. For a student in Education Studies or Early Childhood Studies – undergraduates interested in education and care but not on a direct route to teaching – this may well mean exploring how schools work, how teachers teach, how learners learn.

The difficulty comes for some of them when we shift the expectation from a disciplinary discourse to that of a community of practice. Thus, when a student writes “The adult got the kids really wound up” it’s relatively easy to discuss how the language might be clearer if the incident is couched in less colloquial terms (although see below). A tutor might suggest that “get” as a phrasal verb is clumsy, that “kids” should be children, that “wound up” is too vague, or is too judgemental. There is something here about the range or tone that suggests that some distance expressed in language helps the disciplinary argument. Some of this is simply stylistic, and the Upgrade service at Brookes is very good at helping students with this.  Off at a tangent, I might spend ages arguing about class and colloquialisms, or US TV imperialism, or whatever, girlfriend. It is less easy when we come to the following:

  • Teachers should ensure that children have sufficient time outside every day.
  • Parents should read to their children, not just hear them read.
  • Children need to come to school ready to learn.

None of these three statements are necessarily untrue, and at the right place in an argument might be just what is needed – at the right place in the argument. However for the kind of distance an academic argument requires, writers may need to tourniquet their recommendations and personal opinions. This is because an academic argument cannot be based on recommendation, even if it has at its heart a set of beliefs. An essay aiming at the practical considerations of a particular project – phonics, outdoor learning, the care of looked-after children – might consider how a belief, or the conclusion of research is put into practice – but cannot be based on out-of-the-blue “teachers should” statements.
Consider, therefore, how the three statements above are transformed below:

  • Curriculum documentation [reference] recommends that teachers ensure that children have sufficient time outside every day.
  • The report [reference] concludes that parents should read to their children, not just hear them read.
  • Work by [author n – reference ] suggests that children need to come to school ready to learn.

In other words, the writer is openly entering into the “club” where these things are debated. It would also – might also – prevent the other bugbear of practically based essays: the way that personal opinion is allowed to trump any other argument. “I’m not really very fond of Piaget on this point,” as one student wrote recently. “My opinion is that children…” And while I wouldn’t want to raise Piaget to a godlike status, it did remind me of the story of the Bishop whose sermon included the words, “As Jesus said – and, mind you, I agree with him…” Assertion from personal insight, especially at undergraduate level, needs to be grounded not simply in the day-to-day experience of the writer, valuable though that may be, but also in the debate of the other members of the club. Do vobis potestatem…disputandi, as the charge for one of the ancient degrees at Oxford states: “I give you the authority to enter into a disputation.” “You now have the power to argue effectively.”
But at a time of rapid change there is a sting in the tale here, and the final question is this: How far should academics as teacher-trainers enter into academic debate, and how far are they trainers urging compliance with government directives?

It’s a slightly different case, perhaps, when we look at Initial Teacher Education. Here, the voice fr0m the community of practice the student is joining is stronger than it is for ordinary undergraduates. While I would still want to see a very healthy amount of reference to literature – curriculum documentation, research, evaluative reports by OfSTED, &c. – the voice of recommendation is (maybe) closer, and the possibility of dissent from commonly accepted notions of good practice is less. A good essay might therefore conclude with some explicit recommendation, and should include insights from the writer’s own professional refection, a simple exercise of editing out an undue number of “teachers should” statements would go some way to giving a better academic balance.

New toys

Thanks to Paul Wickens, I have been able to play with word clouds, using the Wordle software. Of course these kinds of  results need interpreting – but note the “must” in the Wordle cloud word frequency for the first chapter of EYFS – and am I right the wordle for chapter I have laboured so hard at looks rather woolly?

Or is this just the font?

The new header image, btw, is a Wordle of the introduction to EYFS.

Starting the PGCE

Well, the sun is shining, and I ended the teaching day sat under the trees in our Arboretum with the people who are going to be my personal tutees. It was easy to be upbeat, while remembering that this experience, the workload and learning challenges of the PGCE never make for an easy year. So much to learn, for some a lot to unlearn, and this year above all some key messages the Government want us to deliver.

This isn’t going to be a moan. I read, for example, the latest drafts, tweets and releases on redefining SEN and am determined to think  “here is another challenge” and then worry how the trainees and the trainers – and most importantly the schools – will deal with this, but today of all days we need to look at all this with some hope. Here is a large and competent bunch of students all looking at us, keen to get going, nervous of the step they’re taking and I feel I need to say

“We are professionals with you. As I’ve said before, we have beliefs we profess – and we want to share our vision with you.“

So what are we asking the Early Years PGCE students to learn? What does an Early Years teacher need to know?

I could list phonics, transition, pedagogies, child development, curriculum documentation, leading the team, dealing with parents, answering critics – the list is very long. Maybe I want them to know one thing: how children learn best. All being well, the rest may fall into place when they have grasped the beginnings of that.

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.