Multicultural Children in the Early Years

Creative Teaching, Meaningful Learning

Peter Woods, Mari Boyle, Nick Hubbard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367441708
• eBook ISBN: 9781000769753
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

How do multicultural children and their parents experience the very beginning of their school careers?

How do teachers mediate the demands of the educational system, and how do the children adapt?

What kind of access to the National Curriculum is offered to multicultural children?

Originally published in 1999, the authors answer these questions by drawing on two years' intensive research in three multi-ethnic institutions. They explore teachers' values and beliefs and how they attempt to put them into practice. They describe how, at times, teachers were constrained to get things done because of pressures operating on them, but at other times, taught creatively in a way particularly relevant to the children's concerns and cultures.

The authors studied the children's experiences on their transition into school, and argue that they were inducted into not only a general pupil role, but also one based on an anglicised model of pupil. Opportunities for learning which children found most meaningful came notably from free play, but these became gradually more limited as they engaged with the National Curriculum. These young children were forming complex identities as they sought to respond to the varying influences operating them. Their parents saw a cultural divide opening up between home and school. Many suggestions for practice and policy are made in the course of the book and are still relevant today.

Chapter 1
Teachers’ Perspectives

We begin with the teachers’ approaches and philosophies, and how they resourced their teaching. In Chapters 2–4 we shall consider how they put their ideas into practice. David et al. (1992) claim that most early years’ teachers are child-centred in their approach and that they support active, as opposed to transmissional learning. They are pragmatic, as opposed to dogmatic; and are persuaded by ‘fitness for purpose’ considerations with regard to teaching method (Mortimore, 1992). Our teachers would certainly subscribe to this in broad terms. Whilst all our teachers placed the child at the centre of the educational process, their own role in this process was expressed at times in a very specific way, and at others more generally. We have identified three main elements of our teachers’ approach-holism, child-centredness, and care. We illustrate each of these from among our teachers, then go on to consider their views on multiculturalism and bilingualism, and how they resourced their teaching within a cultural context. We conclude with a note on how our teachers see themselves coping with intensification.

Teaching Approach

Holism

The teachers believed that knowledge was integral and related in all its parts. They also saw education as more than simply teaching children the content of the National Curriculum or satisfying the suggestions contained in the Desirable Outcomes for Children’s Learning (DLOs). They saw it as concerned with ‘person-making’ (Brehony, 1992). For example, at Westside Jenni believed that children were Tamps to be lit, not vessels to be filled’. The idea of empowering the whole child was also emphasised at Bridge, whose policy document stated:

The aim of the school is to provide a broad, balanced and relevant curriculum which allows for and meets children’s individual needs, giving them access to learning and ultimately working towards children taking control of their own learning, because they are articulate, literate, numerate and motivated.

The policy in the nursery at Westside stressed the importance of encouraging the children to reach their ‘full potential’ by making the ‘fullest use of the opportunities, experiences and responsibilities that our curriculum offers’.

Both the nurseries and the lower school sought to integrate much of their curriculum around topics, despite having policy documents that divided the curriculum into separate subject areas to reflect the organisation of the National Curriculum. Woods and Jeffrey (1996:122) comment that dividing the curriculum into specific subject areas ‘constructs distinct boundaries around subjects and insulates them both from each other, and from the teacher, reducing the power of the teacher over what they transmit’. By making the choice to organise the actual implementation of the curriculum through topic work the teachers are asserting their ownership of the curriculum and re-establishing a sense of power. In discussing her work in a previous school prior to the introduction of the National Curriculum Chris indicated how this approach worked:

They were children who needed lots of activities to develop concentration. There were all sorts of things, phones, and clocks, and old radios. We were looking at electricity and circuits, so they took it all apart, and put it back together again and actually got the radio working. They were very skilled… so we channelled the curriculum through that kind of thing.

The tendency at the lower school was to identify a major overall theme, for instance ‘movement’, and then to identify aspects of the National Curriculum which would apply to this topic. Examples would be science work exploring forces, geography focused on map-making and direction, and technology centred on making things that move. Yet it was clear that there were limits to developing a complete cross-curricular approach because of the requirements in the National Curriculum by which teachers are obliged to cover certain content (see Chapter 2). Subsequently, within the topic of ‘movement’ cited above, a mini-topic in history was also covered relating to the Romans (History Attainment Target 1, pre-Dearing, story, myths and legends).

A philosophy of holism was also applied to the way the teachers viewed the purpose of education, as Chris illustrated: ‘I do still very much believe in child-centred education and that you educate for a whole person and that you educate through all kinds of activities.’ She believed that the education system should be led by the needs and the rights of the child:

I’m a great believer in children having the right to achieve, having the right to learn, and the right to focused, quality teaching. Lots of the way we’re working now is very much setting targets for achievement, but targets about the children not targets just plucked out for somebody else. They’re not machines, and it’s all got to be meaningful and relevant and useful and make sense to them … Learning is for life.

Chris’s belief that education has an impact on ‘person-making’ extended to her own children who had all become high achievers:

They are very nice, caring, kind, supportive people, which has always mattered more than their sense of achievement through school. It has been something that makes me feel that life will be reasonably kind to them because they know how to take pleasure in how they spend their time.

One way in which Chris believed that children could develop their learning beyond the confines of the National Curriculum was through the relationships that teachers create with their pupils:

I’m interested in [the children’s] reaction to what I say, I’m interested in their reaction to what other children say, because that is all part of the learning development. You don’t have to like what they say, but you need to be able to gain their understanding, their views about things, how far they enjoy it, what they can achieve, that they can do that, that learning is about all sorts of things, not just topic work, but it is also about them as people.

Developing positive views of self amongst their pupils was an integral part of all our teachers’ philosophies. Chris said:

The way that they know how to learn in school, they know they need to learn, and in order to get the best results they have to try, they have to be aware of what education can give them. It’s again involved with this whole process of what makes a good relationship with anybody, or with anything… but their attitude to learning, their attitude to themselves, their attitude to really learning, that there are challenges, and how they approach things, how they take on new things.

This aspect of person-making and belief in the rights and needs of the child is closely linked to a philosophy of child-centredness and care.

Child-centredness

The Early Years Curriculum Group (1989:2) suggests that young children should be provided with ‘a broad and stimulating environment which reflects the cultural backgrounds and interests of the children’.

Each child starts school with a unique set of experiences gained at home and in his or her community. A learning environment should respond to each child’s need for something familiar, something new and challenging, and something which enables him or her to pursue a current interest. An environment and daily programme which offers maximum choice to individual children in terms of access to equipment and space, use of time, and opportunities for collaboration with others is most appropriate.

This approach embodies Rosalind’s view that ‘the nursery exists for the benefit of the children it serves and without the children we wouldn’t be there’. She described her own pedagogy as ‘implicit subtle teaching’, whereby the educator rather than acting as a direct imparter of knowledge becomes a facilitator, sensitive to the children’s particular interests:

I see that the essence of nursery teaching is the essence of good teaching: getting the children involved, not teaching too directly in an isolated way but binding it up in lots of other contexts and being meaningful. If you structure the nursery too much, the children don’t bring their own interests so you can’t develop the real, important learning experiences.

Jenni echoed this idea when she justified the approach taken in the nursery at Westside:

I think it’s probably more spontaneous than teaching is in a lower school. Do you remember when we had the Irish dancers and the little girls came back and put the record in? That’s what I like about it because we can do that, you can just follow on, it’s spontaneous. You can say, ‘Well let’s do it’, or, ‘Let’s go and paint because the paint’s out already’ and you haven’t got to set it all up and plan it.

Learning is considered best achieved through active rather than passive involvement of the child in the learning process. Children become the agents of their own learning, and are given the opportunity to make discoveries for themselves (Edwards & Mercer, 1987). Thus within the nurseries there were two main approaches to learning. ‘Unstructured play activities’ allowed the children to select activities and explore for themselves, and provided them with pre-school skills. For example, painting and drawing were an introduction to writing; tracing and puzzles became aids to fine motor control; and sand, water, the outside area and construction activities formed an introduction to science.

These were not entirely self-operated activities (Bruner, 1980), as Jenni explains:

Children aren’t naturally going to know how to investigate tilings on their own … We were exploring bubbles this morning in science and [Anne and Linda] said, ‘What about bubble follow-up activities?’ and we said, ‘Well, bubble painting’. Now children wouldn’t think of doing that on their own, they wouldn’t say, ‘Well let’s put some paint in bottles and put paper on the bottom and blow bubbles on them’. We actually have to show them.

Whilst teachers in the lower school felt more constrained by the National Curriculum than those in the nurseries (see Chapter 2), they too sought ways of involving children in their own learning and reacting to the children, as Chris indicated:

Every aspect of the curriculum is covered, but there are lots of ways you can take things on, and most of the time it does work, but you must take the time to react to the needs of the children. You must remember these are people you’re dealing with. They are not going to sit there quietly waiting for an input. It is there, and we do follow it, but we also take on the interests of the children.

As we shall see in later chapters, Chris often abandoned planned lessons in responding to the children’s interests.

Theresa sought to utilise children’s individual skills and interests in different areas of the curriculum through the use of ‘fluid grouping’, whereby she would group children in different ways in order to develop a sense of whole-class feeling, but additionally to encourage the children to learn from each other:

I don’t like to keep children all in the same group because I like them to be a class so that they do have opportunities with other children. I don’t like having ability groups because I think children have different things to offer. Some of the children aren’t perhaps very able, like Sadyia, who actually can be very good at the artwork or practical work and she’s often got quite a lot to offer. I like to give them opportunities to work with other children and make new friends and to use their skills, whatever they are, with a different group.

Theresa recognised the importance of social learning to the child in the lower school:

Number one is them being happy in the class and their social skills and their self-confidence, that they can do things, and that they’ve got points of view. I do like them to settle down and feel that they can say things and express their views and their feelings. It doesn’t always work out in practice - things are so busy that you just have to decide, but that’s the theory. And particularly with difficult children, I do try and spend more time on listening to them, find out why they’re not happy… because invariably the ones that aren’t getting on are children that are having social problems. Once they’re in friendship groups with the other children, they learn just as much really from the other children as they do from you.

Teachers were pragmatic, rather than dogmatic, in their approach. Jenni, for example, rejected more traditional styles of teaching partly because ‘I have never found anybody who could explain it to me … I couldn’t see the reason behind it… I couldn’t make it work for me.’ However, she did believe in a more directly interventionist role for the teacher in certain circumstances (Bruner, 1986) because this did ‘work’. This was outlined in policy documents as including ‘carefully planned activities providing for conceptual development and mathematical language’ in Mathematics Experience, structured as well as unstructured activities in Music, and working freely or ‘with direction’ in Creative Arts and Physical Education.

Jenni stressed the value of ‘what worked’. She saw her job as ‘exploring and developing personality and understanding and creativity and imagination rather than cramming them full of facts’, but there was no one route to achieving this:

You use things you’ve learned because I’ve never felt that one idea was always right… what works for one child won’t work for another … It’s changed a lot since I’ve been here, we’ve brought things in and said, ‘No, that doesn’t work and we’ll try this’, and it’s been a flexible, ‘what does everyone think?’ process really. You’ve got to work with something that works with you, haven’t you?

This echoes Alexander’s (1997: 270) ‘fitness-for-purpose’ concept:

The stance is pluralist: there are many versions of good practice, not just one or a few, and these are defined not away from the classroom but within it, since they arise directly from the decisions of teachers as they seek to match professional practice with educational purpose, and from the unique contexts and dynamics which have influenced these decisions.

Thus, whilst the initial focus of a lesson might be determined by the National Curriculum and a teacher-directed framework, teachers do see opportunities within sessions for children to support each other, and to take some control of their own learning. They use a number of methods to help achieve this. However, despite their concerns for children as people, and with their interests, none of the teachers referred specifically to how their views related to teaching children of ethnic minorities. Their beliefs seem culture-free in the sense that the child of ‘child-centred’ education is a ‘universal child’, and that regardless of colour, creed or class all children have certain needs and rights.

Care

Care is often considered a central aspect of primary teaching (Acker, 1995; Hargreaves & Tucker, 1991). As the majority of early years teachers are women, it has also been suggested that the teaching of young children is merely an extension of such teachers’ natural ‘mothering’ instinct, the development of the ‘mother made conscious’ (Steedman, 1988). We have documented elsewhere Chris’s strongly caring nature...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Glossary
• Introduction
• 1 Teachers’ Perspectives
• 2 Teaching the National Curriculum
• 3 Creative Teaching
• 4 The Educational Significance of Stories
• 5 Bilingual Children in Transition
• 6 Opportunities for Learning
• 7 Children’s Identities
• 8 The Parents’ Perspectives
• References
• Index