The Complete Companion for Teaching and Leading Practice in the Early Years

Pam Jarvis, Jane George, Wendy Holland, Jonathan Doherty

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138824591
• eBook ISBN: 9781317580577
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildung Allgemein

Previously published as The Early Years Professional's Complete Companion, this new edition has been thoroughly updated and is the essential resource for aspiring and existing leaders of early years practice.

Covering a wide range of theoretical and practical concepts, this book helps the reader consider how they can develop excellent practice within their unique setting. Divided into three distinct sections, the book begins by exploring the origins of early years practice, before discussing principles in development, social policy and child protection. The second section considers what constitutes high quality practice, and reflects on the role of emotional security, environment, and adults in shaping children's learning and development. The third and final section examines how activities associated with continued professional development impact on teaching standards, before finishing with a discussion on international perspectives on early years practice.

Key features include:

• New chapters on safeguarding, children's rights, continuous professional development and international perspectives of early years practice.
• Chapter objectives, tasks and links to the Early Years Foundation Stage.
• Case studies with questions for reflection to promote critical thinking.
• New developments in the early years practice arena are outlined, including the emergence of Early Years Teacher Status (EYTS).

This book is an essential text for those working towards qualifications in early years teaching and leading practice, and provides a flexible basis for tutors, trainers, assessors and mentors to further develop programmes of education and training. It will also appeal to teachers and practitioners interested in considering potential routes for continuing their professional development.

1 The history of early years practice

Wendy Holland and Pam Jarvis

CHAPTER OVERVIEW

This chapter will introduce the reader to eight people in history who pioneered different ways of providing collective education and care for young children, and whose ideas have been taken forward into current early years education and care practices. It will address the following questions:

✔ Who were the ‘pioneers’ and what is their place in the history of early years practice?

✔ Where did each pioneer stand on the question of curriculum, assessment and the role of the adult in children’s learning?

✔ What relevance do the pioneers have to current practice in the early years?

The recommended reading list at the end of this chapter will introduce readers to a range of texts and online resources in which to read further on these topics.

Introduction: who were the ‘pioneers’ and what is their place in the history of early years practice?

For many generations, most children in western nations did not experience a childhood as we understand the concept today, but rather infancy followed by a quick entry into adult responsibilities. Literacy and numeracy skills (in the sense that we use them today) were not essential in order to operate as a full adult in society. The concept of original sin was strong within the Christian west, particularly in Protestant nations. Children were raised from the perspective that they were tainted from birth in this way, and that the principal role for the adult was to teach them to control their sinful urges. However, starting in the mid-seventeenth century, Europe began to experience what is now referred to as an age of ‘Enlightenment’. Scientists began to make important discoveries that explained how many natural phenomena actually ‘worked’, and this in turn led to developments in sociological and political thought, which eventually reached the area of child development. The philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) strongly criticised the traditional attitude to childhood. He said in Émile ou de l’Éducation (Émile, or on Education):

Love childhood, indulge its sports, its pleasures, its delightful instincts. Who has not sometimes regretted that age when laughter was ever on the lips, and when the heart was ever at peace? Why rob these innocents of the joys which pass so quickly, of that precious gift which they cannot abuse?

Why fill with bitterness the fleeting days of early childhood, days which will no more return for them than for you? Fathers, can you tell when death will call your children to him? Do not lay up sorrow for yourselves by robbing them of the short span which nature has allotted to them. As soon as they are aware of the joy of life, let them rejoice in it, so that whenever God calls them they may not die without having tasted the joy of life.

(Rousseau, 1762, online)

In Switzerland, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746–1827) studied Rousseau’s philosophy of education, and then determined to engage in the practical implementation of a Rousseau-inspired pedagogy. He was convinced that rather than being ‘talked at’, as was the custom at that time, children should learn through activity and through interactions with the physical world in situations where they were free to experiment and draw their own conclusions. He believed that the younger the child, the more open s/he would be to learning, an idea we know now to be absolutely correct with respect to neuronal development (see chapter 2). Pestalozzi founded several schools at different times to pioneer these ideas. However, the situation both in the time and place he was located – during the Napoleonic wars, in Switzerland, which was occupied several times – meant that although he had some clear successes, his ventures, the two most famous being located in Yverdon and Burgdorf, often came to abrupt and untimely ends (Bruhlmeier, 2010). However, his fame spread and endured, and even today in Switzerland the name ‘Pestalozzi’ is not only connected with education, but with boundless charity, rather like the name of Barnardo in Britain (Rubi, 2014).

Early British industrialist Robert Owen (1771–1858) met with Pestalozzi in 1818. Owen’s father-in-law, factory owner David Dale, had started a school for his young workers in Lanark, Scotland, to ensure that they had sufficient literacy and numeracy skills to cope with the requirements of their working role. On marrying Dale’s daughter, and taking over major responsibility for the Lanark enterprise, Owen carried out careful research to discover the most progressive, current pedagogical ideas. While Dale’s motives for educating his workforce had been overwhelmingly pragmatic, Owen was searching for a more fully articulated pedagogy, underpinned by philosophical concepts (Davis and O’Hagan, 2010). Owen was much in agreement with Pestalozzi’s focus on children’s emotional well-being and their sense of civic responsibility, and with his emphasis on vocationalism and learning through ‘hands-on’ interactions with physical objects, rather than simply through listening. However, he did not share Pestalozzi’s religious and somewhat mystical approach, thinking it impractical and over-romanticised.

Influenced by the ideas of Pestalozzi, German Friedrich Froebel (1785–1852) developed one of the first comprehensive pedagogical frameworks for young children: a child-centred approach, with the emphasis upon active learning. He was the originator of the term ‘kindergarten’ (children’s garden) for the Play and Activity Institute he founded in 1837 at Bad Blankenburg in Germany. Froebel challenged many conventions of his time, one of which was the giving of inappropriately delicate and complicated toys to children. Children at this time were still considered to be adults in the making, a concept which Froebel rejected. His design of open-ended learning materials (often referred to as ‘Gifts’) can be linked to today’s ideas around play with educational toys; for example, block play. At the time, Froebel saw such play in a more spiritual sense than we regard it today, as a means to helping children discover the interrelatedness of things. Unfortunately, he, like Pestalozzi, met with social and political challenges that meant that he did not see the blossoming of his children’s garden; in 1851 the Prussian court banned kindergartens (Le Blanc, nd). Froebel’s ideas, however, did survive and began to permeate more widely through Europe, with various pioneers re-interpreting them to fit their own cultural niche, as we will see below.

Pestalozzi’s sense of the mystical was reproduced in the pedagogy of Rudolph Steiner (1861–1925), who had been an established scientist, thinker and published scholar before becoming involved in education. His humanist views were well known, and after the chaos and devastation of World War I, he began a tour giving lectures under the title of ‘Social Three-Folding’ to factory workers, on the topic of a restructuring of society. Such restructuring involved the independent operation of economics, government and culture whereby no one area could dominate. Steiner also introduced the concepts of Anthroposophy (a focus on individual freedom through spiritual development) and Eurythmy (communication through movement and gesture) to the early years education environment (Anthroposophical Society, 2015).

After one of Steiner’s lectures to workers at the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory in Stuttgart, requests came from both the factory workers and the factory owner, Emil Mott, for Steiner to found a school based on his humanist principles. Steiner agreed, and developed a pioneering institution which disregarded many of the conventions of the time, most prominently introducing principles of co-education – boys and girls educated together. It was also inclusive, being open to children of any background and of all ages from pre-school to high school. Steiner recognised the importance of parents in children’s learning and development and welcomed their participation. The other essential ingredient Steiner thought important was the independence of education from any centralised control or interference (Pope Edwards, 2002). This last aspect was one to which the 1933–45 Nazi regime was opposed; they also objected to Steiner’s emphasis on passive humanitarianism; this was seen as dangerously subversive within Hitler’s National Socialism, and resulted in the closure of Steiner schools in Nazi-occupied Europe for the duration of World War II.

The pedagogy of Margaret McMillan (1860–1931) sprang, like Pestalozzi’s, from firm religious beliefs, but in her philosophy, these were blended with political conviction: Christian Socialism. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, McMillan took an indirect route into early years education, from her beginnings as a highly effective socialist orator. From this basis, she was elected to the Bradford School Board as a representative of the Independent Labour Party in November 1894, and in this role she became a remarkably active and extremely practical social reformer, instigating medical inspections and free school meals in all Bradford schools and securing the installation of bathing facilities for children in some of the schools in the district. In 1906, in collaboration with her sister Rachel, McMillan led a deputation to Parliament to lobby for the compulsory medical inspection of school children. When this aim was realised in the Education (Administrative Procedures) Bill of 1907, Margaret and Rachel received sufficient charitable donations to open a school clinic in the socially deprived district of Deptford in South London. When they realised that children regularly came and went from the clinic due to constant re-infection caused by their poor living conditions, the sisters set up an experimental overnight camp in their small but well-kept garden in which children between seven and 12 were provided with sleeping and washing facilities under a canvas shelter, fresh air, play time and good food (Jarvis and Liebovich, 2015).

When one of the local girls was permitted to bring her ailing little sister along, and the child died a few months later, Margaret proposed ‘We must open our doors to the toddlers … we must plan the right kind of environment for them and give them sunshine, fresh air and good food before they become rickety and diseased’ (Stevinson, 1954, p. 8). In 1914, the McMillans acquired premises from the London County Council for a dedicated nursery in Deptford. They soon established a familiar regime: cleanliness, sunshine, fresh air, good food and open access to an abundant garden. The nursery was a great local success during the war years of 1914–18, but sadly Rachel McMillan died in 1917. Following the Armistice, national and international interest began to coalesce around the newly christened ‘Rachel McMillan Open Air Nursery School’ and its holistic, outdoor-oriented regime (Jarvis and Liebovich, 2015).

Maria Montessori (1870–1952) was born in Italy in 1870, as the only child of middle-class, devoutly Roman Catholic parents. Montessori showed her strong convictions and beliefs early on by flouting conventional wisdom, a trait she would demonstrate for the rest of her life. At 13 she enrolled in a technical school mainly attended by boys, determined to become an engineer. This later changed into a wish to become a doctor, a profession that in nineteenth-century Italy was not thought suitable for a woman. True to her early feminist beliefs, she endured considerable prejudice, qualifying as Italy’s first female Doctor of Medicine in 1896 (Hainstock, 1997). However, her first appointment was not of her choosing, as an Assistant Doctor at a psychiatric clinic in the University of Rome. One of her tasks was to travel round asylums selecting children for treatment at the clinic. As she observed these children, institutionalised and traumatised as many were, Montessori came to the conclusion that it was not the children or the ‘labels’ they had been given that were the core problem, but the way that they had been treated by society. She initiated the technique that was to become a mainstay of her pedagogic method: close observations of her charges, through which she determined that, given the right kind of stimulation, the children would develop and learn. This ignited a need to strengthen her pedagogic knowledge, and for this, she turned to the work of two pioneers in the field of special education: Jean-Marc Itard (1774–1838) and Edouard Seguin (1812–80), even travelling to London and Paris in order to document their methods for herself, such was her need for scientific scrutiny. Not content with this, she returned to university study, attending courses in anthropology, philosophy and psychology. This effort was rewarded in 1904, when she was appointed Lecturer in Pedagogical Anthropology. In 1907 she was given the opportunity to work with children of slum workers by opening a children’s centre in a deprived district in Rome. This became the first Casa dei Bambini or ‘House of Children’ (American Montessori Society, 2015, online), and the beginning of a pioneering method of childhood education. There have been and continue to be critics of Montessori’s method, yet it has survived almost unchanged in its essential features for over a century.

Susan Isaacs (1885–1948) was both a trained teacher and a psychoanalyst. She undertook teacher training at Manchester University under Grace Owen, who had trained in Froebelian methods at the Blackheath Kindergarten Training College and at the University of Columbia in the US (Jarvis and Liebovich, 2015). Later in her career Isaacs undertook psychoanalytic training. She may have been initially drawn to psychoanalysis due to personal issues relating to the early death of her mother and the subsequent failure of her first marriage; however, by this time Isaacs was not only a teacher, but an educational researcher, and it is likely that she felt that a depth of understanding in this area would be of benefit to her in both her teaching practice and her research (Graham, 2009, p. 71). She went on to write a highly practical guide to child development entitled The Nursery Years (in 1929) which became a bestseller to both parents and teachers, winning the 1937 outstanding book of the year medal awarded by Parents Magazine (M. Almy, in Isaacs, 1968). Between 1929 and 1933 she worked as a teacher–researcher at the Malting House School, publishing her detailed observations and analyses in Social Development in Young Children (1933). While some of Isaacs’ analyses would be seen as highly contentious today, given the heavy influence of Freudian psychology upon them, her key contribution to early years practice is her emphasis upon the requirement for detailed observation of young children, to inform practitioners’ in-depth, holistic knowledge of the child, not only to indicate ‘next steps’ in learning, but also in the diagnosis of emotional problems which may be creating barriers to learning and healthy development.

Loris Malaguzzi (1920–94) originated a Rousseau-influenced curriculum in his native northern Italy in the Region of Emilia (Reggio Emilia). Like Pestalozzi, Froebel and Steiner, Malaguzzi saw the child as rich in potential and capable of thinking for themselves, of being the ‘co-constructors’ of their own learning and development. Like Steiner, his vision of education followed a period of political and social unrest which had led to the catalyst of war. He was moved to action in the late 1940s, on learning of a community of women who were rebuilding their lives and their schools in the Reggio Emilia region of northern Italy. The pre-school first established by the people of Reggio Emilia was paid for by the sale of leftover armam...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• About the authors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The Complete Companion for Teaching and Leading Practice in the Early Years
• 1 The history of early years practice
• SECTION 1: THE CHILDREN’S AGENDA: PRINCIPLES IN CHILDREN’S DEVELOPMENT, SOCIAL POLICY AND INCLUSION
• SECTION 2: LEADING PRACTICE IN THE EARLY YEARS SETTING
• SECTION 3: WIDER PERSPECTIVES IN EARLY YEARS LEADERSHIP
• Index