My Language, Our Language

Meeting Special Needs in English 11-16

Bernadette Walsh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138586116
• eBook ISBN: 9780429998058
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Originally published in 1989. Drawing on extensive teaching and research experience, Bernadette Walsh provides a practical approach to teaching pupils with language learning difficulties in the secondary school. Many of these pupils enter secondary school believing themselves to be failures in all areas because of their inability to express themselves in words. Walsh emphasises that learning difficulties of this sort often stem from emotional problems and can only be overcome by establishing warm teacher-pupil relationships based on trust and mutual acceptance and fostered by the spoken language.

The book is based around the teacher's diary which Bernadette Walsh kept as a daily record of her work in the classroom. This vivid and immediate account lends weight to her argument that only an arts-based curriculum involving poetry, story, drama, dance, art, and – above all – talk, can help the development of children with special educational needs. Student teachers will find this text a compelling and realistic introduction to a challenging area of their future profession.

1
NOTES FROM A TEACHER’S JOURNAL

‘When love and skill work together, expect a miracle’

(John Ruskin)

This book started from dissatisfaction with accepted (including many ‘progressive’) approaches to the teaching of children with special needs. Despite the claims that the GCSE examinations have been, at least in theory, designed to encompass all abilities, inevitably there will be some children who will not be entered for public examinations. It is for such pupils that an alternative approach to meeting their needs in English Studies is suggested.

Furthermore, just when more enlightened Special Needs Departments have gradually phased out the testing of ‘underachieving’ pupils, the national curriculum (Department of Education and Science/1985) proposal to test at the ages of 7, 11, 14, and 16 is only going to reinforce failure for these pupils, as before. The rigidities of the national curriculum are the reverse of the creative framework that might respond to individual need. A slight fillip of course, is that ‘statemented’ children (DES 1981) are exempt from the full national curriculum diet. But in the ordinary classroom, there are many children with learning difficulties who have not been formally statemented. How are such children’s needs to be met? Similarly, the Kingman Report (DES 1988) and the Cox report (DES 1988) seem to neglect anything but the functional use of language with emphasis upon chronological development. This view entirely neglects that the development of language begins by gradually becoming part of the everyday interchanges of life in a particular environment. Language development is inseparable from the social learning and social context and the emotional climate in which learning in the wider sense takes place.

To be fully human, requires one to live with others in a shared world. If we regard teaching as a matter of helping and encouraging the child to discover and to share the world, then teaching is a case of relating to one another as centres of caring, which was recognized long ago by John Stuart Mill:

Real education depends on the contact of human living soul with human living soul.

(J. S. Mill, letter to Rev. Stephen Hawtry,
quoted in R. Fletcher 1971: 396)

Using the word ‘soul’ here, Mill brings to mind the idea of a person as a centre of caring. It will be accepted that good teaching of a child depends upon contacting his or her being, and moreover, contacting it in a loving way. Even love though, must find overt expression and since education requires personal contact, it must be achieved through bodily encounters. There must be ways in which the contact between one living present human being and another creates an emotional channel of communication along which meaning can pass more readily than it can by way of the written or printed word. Mary Warnock has summed up this relationship thus:

And so the teacher is a teacher of individuals, even if he spends most of his time facing a class. The impact he makes on a child is essentially that of one person on another. No amount of distance-teaching, useful though these may be for certain specific tasks, will ever be a substitute for the human interchange between the teacher and his individual pupil. It is a heavy responsibility for the teacher to bear, one that requires confidence and deserves respect.

(Warnock, M. 1985: 7)

We can all identify with some teacher – often not anyone of great renown – from whom we have caught some inspiration that could not be given through books, but only by personal contact between teacher and pupil. Learning then is an act of relationship. Difficulties encountered in the sphere of relationships in learning often parallel the more measurable difficulties in the development of a child’s linguistic abilities. How then, does the association between language and relationship relate to the classroom as a context for learning, when the language curriculum currently on offer to children with special needs pays little or no regard to the individual’s emotional growth?

Much of the curriculum for children with special needs is founded on the belief that refinement of language and its enrichment can only come through teaching language skills. This results in a narrowing of aims in English Studies, with a corresponding loss of imagination and vitality in the pupils’ responses. Nor does this sort of approach reinforce the teacher’s own stimulating ideas, but tends to become a substitute for her own initiative and does not alert attention to the particular needs of individuals. The teacher’s responses must meet the real needs of the children and not just the material needs of reading and writing. A curriculum that is worthy of a place in our educational system provides an opportunity to enrich the child’s life far beyond the academic requirements. Feeling, like thought, is complex and in order for it to exist with full intensity, it needs an environment in which it can flourish.

For a curriculum to offer satisfaction rather than frustration, its content must be in tune with the individual child’s potential and so give the child the means to grow. An imposed curriculum expects the child to conform to its contents without considering whether a child can contribute to its demands from his or her available resources. A curriculum with which the child feels no affinity, attacks self-esteem by persuading the child that his or her interests and aspirations are of no account. Acquiring language is a natural, creative process and English work should be seen to offer creative extensions and a creative discipline to a child’s existing language through art-discourse. One will then be building on foundations laid before the child has ever reached school, in other words, upon each individual’s cultural and natural endowment, the acceptance of which is the crucial factor for establishing relationships. For the organization of language always starts within the original relationship of mother (caregiver) and child.

A succession of writers – Witkin (1974), Ross (1978), Abbs (1982), Harrison (1983b), Dunlop (1984), Best (1985), and Walsh (1988) – have called for a creative curriculum directing the whole spirit of learning towards renewal in our language and living. True education does not neglect those critical skills of communication that a pupil needs; but this is not to be seen as resorting to a diet of ‘the basics’; for, deprived of creative content and activity, a language has no basics. If we stopped inferring to the child, through the sparse curriculum we present, that he or she is poor in language, but instead listened a moment to what the child is struggling to say, then living language would become interwoven with living being.

Language functions in the classroom context to convey meanings and these arise as interpretations and are placed upon the behaviour of others, including the teacher. In attempting to be explicit for others, the child is able to guide his or her own thinking and feeling. He or she begins to understand his or her relationship to others and to express feelings and attitudes. Language is part of the process by which meaning is articulated. Merleau-Ponty (1962) consistently maintained that ‘language accomplishes thinking’, and here he referred to the spoken language by which the speaker organizes his or her words in order to actualize this meaning:

What then does language express if it does not express thoughts? It presents or rather it is the subject’s taking up of a position in the world of his meanings.

(Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962: 193)

Meaning then, often comes with the act of talking. Thus talk is an individual expression of questing thought when every word and silence is capable of revealing the living individual to the listener. That language is the medium through which thought can articulate itself is a view held by Vygotsky who concluded that:

The relation between thought and word is a living process, though born through words. A word devoid of meaning is a dead thing, a thought unembodied in words remains a shadow.

(Vygotsky, L. S. (1932: 153)

By way of comparison to this view, Harrison (1986) has pointed out (‘Modes of Learning’, unpublished manuscript) that when John Dewey (How We Think, 1910) defined thought as cognition or as problem-solving, he pointed a view of thinking which has more or less remained intact, at least in educational psychology, during the twentieth century. This remains in many ways a useful definition, though Dewey himself was wary of narrow definitions; his view that logic is to thinking as grammar is to language, implies that while thinking includes logic, it also transcends it and may be as elusive to definition as language itself.

Within the sphere of imaginative insight, the centrality of language is of paramount importance to learning, yet there has been a tradition of viewing language only in terms of reasoning power. Since all aspects of learning (and thinking and language) have emotional roots as well as rational roots, however important the cognitive function of language may be in school, it is inseparable from social and emotional contexts. Language patterns can be seen to emerge complementary to aspects of encounter within the developing relationships of a given group. (This will be illustrated more fully in subsequent chapters.) Such aspects of encounter are authentic responses to living and show that language grows from within the body-life of an individual through an interplay between perception, subjectivity, and inter-subjectivity to become a wholeness of capacity.

Individuals then, develop in language and through language. Meanings are created when the presence of both the subjective self and the presence of the other are acknowledged, and where there is an individual effort of reaching from one to the other; discourse cannot be conceived in a disembodied form. To illustrate the point, is the case study of David.

Case Study 1: David

David ‘I’m too slow at this, me.’

(Teacher’s Journal, 1 October)

A poor attender, David found difficulty in all aspects of English Studies. Because, in two years of close observation, David would not speak on cassette tape, the discourse which appears in this case study has been recorded verbatim by the teacher in her journal.

David was a gauche, lumbering lad with a shock of unkempt hair and very thick-lensed glasses. He was acutely aware of his limitations and was often the butt for ridicule, not least because of his surname – Fiddler. The following diary extracts illustrate the extent to which he suffered at the mercy of the class. That the entries span a year is sufficient to show the continuance of his peers’ contempt:

9 October

An irritating habit from this group is that despite constant reminders they seem always to forget to put their names on their work. When I held up one such piece of paper and asked to whom it belonged, someone remarked, ‘It’s yours, Fiddler. No-one else would write: the leaves are on the threes.’ It was John who’d made everyone laugh with this joke at David’s expense.

Then about a year later:

12 October

I simply refuse to read aloud to a class who is not giving me their full attention – what is so annoying is that they like the book Collision Course by Nigel Hinton, but they still continued to chatter. I said to Katrina as she screwed her neck round to distract David,

‘Katrina, what is so attractive about David that you’ve got to keep on looking at him?’

‘His eyes, Miss,’ came the pert reply, ‘and his legs!’

Well – I did ask for it didn’t I? But then David started:

‘What are you saying about me, Miss?’

‘What would I want to talk about you for, David?’ I sounded as bad as them.

Then I told them straight – how kindness didn’t work, and shouting certainly didn’t. When I praised them, they consider it to be ‘creeping’; when I reprimand, I’m always on to them – can a teacher ever win with such an exasperating group? So we sat silently – reminiscent of D. H. Lawrence’s ‘Last Lesson of the Afternoon’. When they received the message, they read on their own, in silence. Katrina saw me on duty at the end of the afternoon and said,

‘You’d really got it in for me today, Miss.’ Had I?

It was hardly surprising then, that David had a poor self-image, and in a group which is so demanding, it is easy for the teacher to overlook, unintentionally, her pupils’ more fundamental emotional needs, while attending to the seemingly more urgent need of improving their basic competence in literacy.

David never came to his lessons with equipment for writing, as if forgetting a pen meant he could avoid a task which he found tortuous. Holding a pen in an awkward fashion, David took a laboriously long time to write anything and it was always printed. He was always ashamed of his efforts and on at least two occasions destroyed his work rather than let the teacher look at it in order to assist him. One such incident occurred during the autumn term of his fourth year and is one which illuminates his mistrust of others:

21 October

A strange happening today. I used ‘A Winter’s Tale’ by D. Macleise and after showing the picture to the group asked them to write down a story with a supernatural content. David, the weakest in the group, began to write copiously – at least by his standards – then screwed up his efforts when I came near to read it, saying

‘It’s not good, that.’

I unravelled the paper and told him that it was too good to be thrown away. David was clearly upset that I wanted to keep this story.

‘Don’t go showin’ it to all t’ teachers, Miss.’

‘Course I won’t, David.’

‘No, well I don’t want ‘em looking at my spelling.’

I surreptitiously hid the paper beneath a pile of books near the teacher’s desk, whilst I helped others in the group. David meanwhile was trying a second attempt. When I looked again, David wa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• General Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Notes from a Teacher’s Journal
• 2 Beginning a Dialogue
• 3 Shared Learning
• 4 Learning Through Playing
• 5 Learning Through Reflecting
• 6 The Learner as Maker
• Bibliography