Towards Excellence in Early Years Education

Exploring narratives of experience

Kathleen Goouch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415566070
• eBook ISBN: 9781136948046
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación infantil

This book uniquely describes the work of two Early Years Professionals, drawing on their narrative accounts as they robustly describe and analyse their work with young children. Against a backcloth of increasing regulation and inspection of early years care and education, Kathy Gooch emphasizes the importance of building authentic relationships with children and their families, explores how play can be promoted as the central site for learning, and shows how professionals can use play to account for children's development and learning.

In analysing the Early Year Professionals' narratives, this book explores key themes including:

• Traditional notions of 'teaching' and how they can be redefined

• The significance of talk in children's lives
• Teachers' professional identities
• How children's potential in learning can be achieved through play

Celebrating knowledge, skills and understanding and re-defining what it means to be a teacher, in its broadest sense, this fascinating book brings together research and literature from across disciplines. Containing a foreword by Tricia David, it will be of interest to academics, early years educators and students on early childhood education degree programmes and initial teacher education courses, as well as others concerned with the over prescriptive nature of early education.

Part I
Research and the early learning landscape

Chapter 1
Reflections on the pedagogical context

An organic landscape?

This chapter provides the foundations on which the rest of the book is based and introduces many of the ideas and terms of reference further examined in the rest of Part I and illustrated from practice in Part II.

Through my own experience as a teacher, my experience with student teachers and with practising teachers, I have come to believe that teachers are not all of one ‘tribe’, who share rituals, customs, discourse and traditions. Instead, there are individuals, people, professionals who select, shape, reshape and transcend ways of working so that any sense of ‘tribal morality’ is ‘peripheral to [their] personal integrity’ (Allport 1955: 34). I have also begun to understand Bruner’s claim that ‘selfhood is profoundly relational’ and that the ‘construction of selfhood cannot proceed without a capacity to narrate’ (Bruner 2002: 86). This must be particularly true of teachers and others working within a professional community of practice (Wenger 1998), whose narrations inevitably find a level of interface from which individual narratives rebound and reform. This idea of self-making through narrative, in my study, can be generally applied to the children, their teachers and their researcher, which is itself the subject of analysis.

Where are we now?

In recent years there has been a closer scrutiny of teachers and teaching than I have previously witnessed in more than 30 years of work in the field of education. As a consequence of this and the proliferation of policy initiatives illustrated earlier, there appears to be more compliance by teachers with national programmes and government initiatives. However, in the early years of education there appears still to be an opportunity, however small and potentially short-lived, to account for children’s learning through a pedagogy steeped in play and led by children, and to create classroom cultures that allow children to spend time learning before they encounter classrooms boundaried by a culture of performance, driven by testing and results. Paradoxically, it is also possible in many early years school and nursery settings to witness how teachers claim the play discourse, and the play spaces – leading, directing, redirecting, approving or rejecting children’s utterances and activities as they attempt to identify and work, in a Vygotskian sense, within children’s ‘zone of proximal development’. This may take children’s performances towards pre-ordained curricula outcomes, and ‘allowing’ play, while accounting for it in nationally recognised terms, enables teachers to be creatively compliant. However, this approach also appro-priatesorhijackschildren’splayintentionsandsendsdirectmessagesinrelation to choice, freedom, control and dominance. The influences on teachers to engage in this kind of practice are discussed in the following chapters. In such circumstances, Wertsch asks the ‘Bakhtinian’ question ‘Who is doing the talking?’ and challenges the privileging of some texts and some speech genres over others (Wertsch 1991). These ideas will also be explored more fully in subsequent chapters but questions of voice and power are embedded throughout.

In spite of, or perhaps because of, very tight control of curriculum detail, pedagogy and policy, there remain individual teachers who respectfully join with children in play, engage in intimate conversations and are themselves responsive to children’s directions, language and intentions without appropriating the play for their own purposes. Such teachers, who engage in serious and complex play interactions and narrative co-constructions with young children, are rare but are still to be found in some early years settings. This kind of organic pedagogy, developing out of the moment, may be described as ‘intuitive’ (Atkinson and Claxton 2000) or, indeed, intuition may only be part of the pedagogic story, with other influences and other imperatives yet to be described. The two teachers who have agreed to participate in this research, Janette and Matthew, have not been chosen randomly, but have instead been identified as intuitive teachers who engage in such an organic pedagogy and who involve themselves in serious and complex play interactions and narrative co-constructions with young children.

There appear to be some key characteristics of the context and practice created by intuitive teachers. These include wide-ranging play areas generously resourced with story props (for example, traditional ‘home corner’ accessories, dolls and teddies), blocks and boxes, blankets and cushions, physical space and, most significantly, dedicated adult time – for incidental as well as focused interactions. Another common characteristic is the respectful nature of the interactive events, with teachers attentively listening, being themselves directed, cooperating and also at times offering guidance and possible solutions. It seems as if the teachers are servicing the learning and the learners. The nature of such service is worthy of very close scrutiny if it is not to be mistaken for a laissez-faire approach to teaching and learning and it is this that I intend to examine in the research conversations and observations that follow in Part II.

Policy and play

In the Early Years Foundation Stage Framework (Department for Children, Schools and Families 2007), while there is clearly evidence of influence from central government in the form of the Independent Review of the Teaching of Early Reading (Department for Education and Skills 2006), there remains a robust commitment to some sound principles of early education, particularly in relation to the connectedness of children’s development and learning, the acknowledgement that children learn at their own pace, the importance of enabling children to develop a positive sense of self and the central idea that learning most often occurs in social contexts. There are still, however, conflicting views being represented and the discourse in relation to play remains a challenge to some of us working and researching in the field. In this policy document (Department for Children, Schools and Families 2007) there are repeated references to ‘planned, purposeful play’ (ibid.: 11, 2.5) and the Independent Review of Early Reading refers to ‘instructive learning play environments’ (Department for Education and Skills 2006: 105). This contradictory use of terminology, the conflation of ‘instructive’ and ‘planned’ with play, appears to emanate from the difficulties that we have in deciding what we (that is, society, represented by a democratically elected government and their civil servants) want from and for children, childhood and schooling. The recent, much heralded and frequently cited, DfES-funded Effective Provision of Pre-School Education study (EPPE, Sylva et al. 2004) and Researching Effective Pedagogy in the Early Years (REPEY, Siraj-Blatchford et al. 2004) concluded first that ‘good quality provision’ can help to limit the effects of social disadvantage and then, most significantly:

The provision of exploratory play environments (e.g. sand/water play) will only be ‘effective’ if the materials/apparatus are chosen carefully to provide cognitive challenge within the zone of proximal development and positive outcomes for the activity are either modelled, demonstrated, explained or otherwise identified in the children’s experiences and actions, and encouraged.

(Siraj-Blatchford and Sylva 2004: 727)

Although this statement is then qualified slightly, it remains the case that such predetermined outcomes, the intentions of teachers following a curriculum, extolling behaviours and language that are preconceived to be ‘appropriate’, are all intended to precede or potentially overpower the intentionality of the child. It seems that teachers are caught in a dichotomy of either planning to allow play in unregulated, and therefore by association, unimportant corners of the classroom and the curriculum classroom (an example of this may be ‘golden time’) or allowing play as long as it fulfils, or can be shaped towards, preordained curricula intentions – the ‘positive outcomes’ to be encouraged, above. However, in some definitions, play is defined as being ‘self-chosen; risk-free; totally engrossing; interesting and meaningful to the learner; intellectually demanding; set in a community of other ‘players’ with a shared understanding; more transparent to the player than to the adults’ (Smidt 2003: 121) which would not fit neatly into either of the above so-called play pedagogies.

Currently, there also seems to be an ‘inter-discipline’ battle between psychologists, some of whom claim that, for example, the teaching of reading is straightforward if teachers simply deliver the code to children at the earliest possible opportunity and certainly before the age of 5, as recommended by the Independent Review of Early Reading (Department for Education and Skills 2006), and educators and educationalists who claim that how this occurs is as important as how early it occurs. It is interesting to see, in this new age of fascinating insights from neuro-science and increasing technological support for understanding how we develop, think and learn, that there remains a naïve view that ‘instruction’ is synonymous with ‘teaching’ and that children therefore learn when ‘taught’, in a straightforward causal way. As Hall reminds us, ‘Teaching is not an explanation for learning. Teaching is neither necessary nor sufficient for learning to occur’ (2007: 94).

Understanding and conceptualising pedagogy have never been more important or more widely challenged than now. In his examination of international pedagogy, Alexander defines six pedagogical values which he claims ‘reflect views on the purposes of education, the nature of knowledge and the relationship of teachers and learner’ (2003: 26):

• Teaching as transmission sees education primarily as a process of instructing children to absorb, replicate and apply basic information and skills.

• Teaching as induction sees education as the means of providing access to, and passing on from one generation to the next, the culture’s stock of high status knowledge, for example, in literature, the arts, humanities and the sciences.

• Teaching as democracy in action reflects the Deweyan idea that teachers and students jointly create knowledge and understanding rather than relating to one another as authoritative source of knowledge and its passive recipient.

• Teaching as developmental facilitation guides the teacher by principles which are psychological (and more specifically Piagetian) rather than social or epistemological. The teacher respects and nurtures individual differences and waits until children are ready to move on rather than pressing them to do so.

• Teaching as acceleration, in contrast, implements the Vygotskian principle that education is planned and guided acculturation rather than facilitated ‘natural’ development, and indeed that the teacher seeks to outpace development rather than follow it.

• Teaching as technique, finally, is relatively neutral in its stance on society, knowledge and the child. Here the important issue is the efficiency of teaching regardless of the content of values, and to that end matters such as structure, the economic use of time and space, carefully graduated tasks, regular assessment and clear feedback are more pressing than ideas such as democracy, autonomy, development or the disciplines.

(ibid.: 26)

Alexander seeks to compare pedagogy in England, France and Russia and draws on the values listed above to frame this comparative study. However, this list is only useful in the context of this study as it defines characteristics of teaching found in practice and can be used, not to pass judgement on teachers or to identify a ‘correct’ approach, but instead to support the identification of aspects of practice in order to understand where practice may be located in order to develop an ideological stance, which, it could be argued, is missing from some teachers’ work. And in play the world of teaching and learning becomes a much more complex site. In play, power changes hands, from adult to child, and ‘in classes where the how is more important than the what, the journey more valuable than the destination, good educators value what it is that children choose to do and then seek to understand and extend it’ (Smidt 2003: 125). Values and aims then become significantly more difficult to characterise simply within discretely identified definitions, as above, although a pedagogy that allows play may be closer to Dewey’s theories than any other.

Such narrow views and systems of accountability for practice in evidence exist that simple causal connections appear attractive, that is, teachers teach and so learners learn; with the implication that if children are unable to achieve specified objectives in this way and at the time also specified, that they, or indeed their teachers, are in some way deficient. However, as Hall explains in her discussion of literacy policy, ‘the notion of “doing” rather than “knowing” gets to the point of it’ (Hall 2007: 94), that is ‘doing phonics as opposed to having acquired phonic knowledge’ (ibid.: 94). And equally this notion could be applied to the fact that some teachers ‘do’ what is required of them, literally, and others seek to participate in the knowledge debate, what is to be known and how that may occur, described by Sachs as ‘activist teachers’ (Sachs 2003).

Broader references

The approach that I have described above as ‘organic’ and ‘intuitive’ is particularly worthy of study, first, because I am making claims for it to be of enormous value to children but also, second, because it is happening in a particular climate – of political certainties in relation to education, of robust managerial drives towards prescriptive curricula and tightly controlled levels of accountability. All of this seems to be counter to intuitive practices and organic pedagogy. The dominant culture, and therefore the dominant discourse, in contemporary educational policy recognise only technicist/rationalist ideologies. Further, it is clear that in some educational fields, for example primary literacy education, where central government has taken new and overarching control, ‘teachers may be regarded as blank slates, or “palimpsests”, tablets on which successive scripts are written’ (Bryan 2004: 143). In this study, I intend to discover whether my two teachers have escaped such government inscription and, if they have, is it because they are working with the youngest children or because of who they are, as people and as teachers?

In conversation, the teachers talk about satisfying children’s interests but they also express the ways that this fits into a bigger picture, that is they feel themselves to be considering ‘the interests of children, what is in their interest and what is in the public interest’ (Peters 1966: 167). In order to fulfil the enormity and the multi-faceted nature of this claim, they are making judgements, mostly unconsciously it seems, about values and beliefs they wish to impart and support in their practice with young children. They are accomplishing all of this, however, by occupying ‘the plane of the personal’ rather than a ‘purely functional position’ (ibid.: 94) and that, perhaps, marks them as different from other teaching professionals. The ‘plane of the personal’ in these early years contexts is evident at all levels, in all interactions spoken and otherwise, but takes a very visible form in activities that involve storying, story play or play narratives, consciously valued and given time and both physical and conceptual space by the teachers being studied. It is during these moments of often incidental intimacy between the teacher and one child or an infinite number of children, when the children’s own discourse takes precedence, their intentions are paramount and their choices apparent, that an attendant aspect of the teachers’ role becomes visible. And it is these storying moments that I have focused my attention on and the principles upon which such pedagogy is based.

Narratives

Any research study of teaching and learning must inevitably contain very complex layers of narrative, often at least three and potentially as many as eight narrative layers. These are non-hierarchical and could be the narratives of: (1) the children; (2) their teachers; (3) the researcher; (4) parents/family; (5) the school/institution; (6) local policy; (7) national policy; and (8...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Illustrations
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Research and the early learning landscape
• Part II The Teachers’ Story
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index