Learning Stories in Practice

Margaret Carr, Wendy Lee

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781526480316
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Early Childhood Education

Margaret Carr and Wendy Lee have often been asked for a follow-on practical companion to their seminal 2012 book Learning Stories; a complimentary book that provides practical advice for teachers who are embarking on a 'narrative assessments-for-learning' journey. After much anticipation that book is here at last! Packed with a wide range of full-colour examples of real life learning stories from all over the world this practical guide is influenced by their ongoing work with teachers across many countries and the thoughtful comments and questions that teachers have asked during conversations at conferences, lectures and professional development programmes. They have turned these conversations with teachers and students into key ideas, and a practical framework on how to initiate and create good learning stories and why they are valuable. They show you how to write stories that capture the magic and excitement of each young child?s journey through the early years and how to develop a deep professional understanding of the learning that takes place during this special and influential time in their lives.

1 Introduction

Throughout the ages and across cultures story continues to express the fundamental nature of humanity. Stories are not to be treated lightly as they both carry, and inspire, significant obligations and responsibilities: stories must be cared for as they are at the heart of how we make meaning of our experience of the world. (Janice Huber, Vera Caine, Marilyn Huber and Pam Steeves, 2016: 214)

Key messages

• The power of stories
• Continuing a conversation about a dispositional theory of learning
• Funds of learning disposition
• Assessment for learning in early years or early childhood education: the purpose and structure of this book

The power of stories

The viewpoint of Janice Huber and the others named on the title page of this chapter is also the view in this book. It is that: stories of teaching and learning are at the heart of how we make meaning of our experiences. The classic storyteller about the power of stories is Jerome Bruner; his writing about education and development in terms of language, learning and narrative has inspired many of the ideas in this book. In Chapter 4 of his book Making Stories he asks ‘So why narrative?’, and responds to his own question (2003: 89, 93):

One truth is surely self-evident: for all that narrative is one of our evident delights, it is serious business. For better or worse, it is our preferred, perhaps even our obligatory medium for expressing human aspirations and their vicissitudes, our own and those of others. Our stories also impose a structure, a compelling reality on what we experience, even a philosophical stance.

Through narrative, we construct, reconstruct, in some ways reinvent yesterday and tomorrow. Memory and imagination fuse the process.

Vivian Gussin Paley writes about the children’s stories in her classrooms. Her many books document the stories told by children, written down by teachers, and acted out by the children. In her 2004 book A Child’s Work: The Importance of Fantasy Play she states that:

If fantasy play provides the nourishing habitat for the growth of cognitive, narrative, and social connectivity in young children, then it is surely the staging area for our common enterprise: an early school experience that best represents the natural development of young children. (2004: 8)

Perhaps Learning Stories are a combination of the teachers’ stories about their children’s stories; often teachers will ask the children’s advice, and certainly they will have a curriculum in mind. But they will be stories, and they will pay attention to ‘Making Learning Whole’ as David Perkins argues in his book with that name. The power of Learning Stories is not restricted to the early childhood sector. It is increasingly being adopted in the primary sector and Bevan Holloway, a secondary school teacher, says in his paper on assessment and play (Holloway, 2018: 39), ‘Learning Stories made me notice the front end of the curriculum in a way I hadn’t before, giving me an authentic way to acknowledge students exhibiting those “soft” skills’.

Continuing a conversation about assessment and dispositional theory of learning

Bruner and Paley also inspired two earlier books on Learning Stories (Carr, 2001; Carr and Lee, 2012). Assessment in Early Childhood Settings: Learning Stories (Carr, 2001: 4–11) argues for a shift in outcomes from skills and knowledges to learning dispositions, and the development of Learning Stories is told in Learning Stories: Constructing Learner Identities in Early Education (Carr and Lee, 2012: 34–40). A reason for this book was to finish a conversation that began towards the end of our 2012 book on Learning Stories, where we used the term ‘Stores’ to refer to ‘the intermingling of stores of knowledge and stores of disposition’ (Carr and Lee, 2012: 130), and in note 4 at the end of the first chapter in that book, we acknowledged the significant introduction to the literature of the expression ‘funds of knowledge’ by Norma Gonzàlez, Luis Moll and Cathy Amanti (2005). This expression referred to ‘historically accumulated and culturally developed bodies of knowledge and skills essential for household or individual functioning and well-being’ (Moll et al., 1992: 133). For the children and families in an early childhood centre or a school classroom these household funds of cultural and community knowledge meet the funds of knowledge (both informal and the formal, espoused and hidden) in the curriculum. In the 2005 book Funds of Knowledge, Norma Gonzàlez writes about the hybridity that emerges from the intersection of these diverse funds of knowledge. She argues that it is with a ‘mutually respectful dialog’ that ‘we can cross the constructions of difference’ (2005: 44). We agree. The viewpoint in this book is that assessment practices like Learning Stories can cross boundaries via assessment portfolios to begin conversations about learning between teachers and children, children and children, teachers and families, children and families. These conversations and the revisiting of Learning Stories with adults and other children build, celebrate and critique the children’s growing funds of learning disposition.

Funds of learning disposition

In our 2012 Learning Story book, we chose the term ‘stores of disposition’ rather than ‘funds of disposition’, and we set them beside ‘stores of knowledge’ having reminded the readers of the significant work on social and cultural funds of knowledge by Moll, Amanti, Neff and Gonzàlez (1992), and Gonzàlez, Moll and Amanti (2005). However, in this book we have entitled them funds of learning disposition. Developments in early childhood and school contexts of Learning Stories and learning dispositions have convinced us of the sociocultural parallel of funds of knowledge with funds of learning disposition. In 2016, Bronwen Cowie and Margaret Carr contributed a chapter to an Encyclopedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory that set out the possibilities that narrative assessment offers in documenting, supporting and reporting the breadth of children’s learning. That chapter is titled: ‘Narrative assessment: a sociocultural view’. It discusses the implication of a sociocultural understanding of assessment through a focus on three points:

(i) narrative assessment as a way of acknowledging the distributed nature of learning, (ii) narrative assessments as improvable objects and opportunities for developing a learning journey, and (iii) narrative assessments as boundary-crossing objects that mediate conversations across interested communities. (2016: 397)

The first point acknowledged that ‘learning is entangled with, and made possible through, the material, social, cultural, and historical features of the context for learning’. Children are sensitive to the opportunities to learn, and these features are designed to encourage children to be ready and willing to engage with the opportunities in this place (the topic of Chapters 2 and 3). The second point is about boundary-crossing from one community (the early childhood centre or the school) to another (the home); it is the topic of Chapter 7. The third point is about progress over time (Chapter 8). We return to the notion of learning as a ‘tangle’ in, Chapter 8.

In the 2001 Learning Stories book we explained our assessment frame as children being ‘ready, willing and able’ to learn. We acknowledge our debt to Lauren Resnick (1987) and to David Perkins, Eileen Jay and Shari Tishman at Harvard (Perkins et al., 1993) for their paper entitled ‘Beyond abilities: a dispositional theory of thinking’. In that paper, thinking dispositions are described as having three parts: ability, inclination and sensitivity to occasion. We had adopted this triangle to refer more broadly to learning. These three dimensions overlap, but inclination includes the notion of a preferred and positive attitude towards this opportunity to learn something; sensitivity to occasion includes a ‘reading’ of the environment or the culture of the classroom (for example, whether the environment encourages curiosity and exploration; who will be chosen; whether expressing uncertainty or critique is OK), and ability includes having at least some of the skills and knowledge needed to approach and to learn this ‘something’. These three aspects of a learning disposition have been translated as ‘being ready, willing and able’ (Carr and Claxton, 1989); this book has more to say about a learning disposition, and we include many Learning Stories that illustrate this in practice. Here is a quote (abridged) from Gary, a primary school principal, talking to researchers during a research project on key competencies, assessment and Learning Stories. The five school key competencies are dispositional ‘capabilities for living and lifelong learning’.

We need to make a mind shift in terms of how we go about assessing Key Competencies. You can’t tick off ‘I’m a caring citizen’, ‘I participate and contribute’. That form of assessment doesn’t sit comfortably cos these are dispositions that we are developing throughout our lives. … So teachers need to make that shift from the tick box mentality. What’s a better way? How can I show development and growth in the Key Competencies? … How am I going to show that children are reflecting on their learning? Learning Stories have the ability to do that in a very powerful way. (Davis et al., 2013: 19)

Guy Claxton, Meryl Chambers, Graham Powell and Bill Lucas (2011) write about split-screen and dual-focus lesson design. On the one hand the focus is on content or subject area (or the learning area). On the other hand the focus is on learning dispositions (the key competencies). They argue that:

All lessons have a dual purpose, irrespective of the age and ability of young people or the subject area being taught. There is the content dimension, with some material being mastered; and there is the ‘epistemic dimension’, with some learning skills and habits being exercised. The risk in conventional classrooms … is that students can be learning habits of compliance and dependence, rather than curiosity and self-reliance. Where teachers are making conscious choices about what habits they will introduce and stretch in the course of the lesson, we call that split-screen, or dual-focus, lesson design. (Claxton et al., 2011: 93)

In the Claxton et al. book, there are graphs that represent data over time from when teachers in seven primary and nine seconda...