Partnership In Maths: Parents And Schools

The Impact Project

Ruth Merttens, Jeff Vass, Ruth Merttens, Jeff Vass

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781135721640
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

Written by authors well known in their fields, Merttens and Vass bring together diverse and different views on IMPACT of wide reading appeal. In the current economy, should teachers be regarded as producers and parents as consumers? There is no issue in education more urgent than that concerning the relationships between parents, teachers and children. The IMPACT project involves individuals concerned with formal maths education including students, teachers, parents, governors, researchers, inspectors and education offcers. Its primary aim is to bring together parents and children so they share regular maths activities together, the results of which are brought back into class to inform the following week's work. IMPACT is also an initiative in maths INSET training and a form of monitoring.; The book is aimed at therapists, educational psychologists, education students, teachers, academics, parents, governors, inspectors and education officers.

Part I
Starting IMPACT

Chapter 1

---

IMPACT: Pride, Prejudice and Pedagogy: One Director’s Personal Story

---

Ruth Merttens

Ruth Merttens describes how the IMPACT Project started and gives a personal account of the changes in practices and assumptions which she charted in her field notes kept throughout the first four years of IMPACT. IMPACT in situ is illustrated with reference to detailed case notes. The theoretical framework within which her descriptions are embedded is outlined. She then goes on to discuss the ‘knots’ or ‘points of conflict’ in the weave of IMPACT which, for her, problematize some of the more commonly held assumptions about the purpose and effectiveness of IMPACT.

In a sense this chapter has to represent a piece of biography. I am widely credited with having started IMPACT, and with being one of its main apostles. Certainly, working on, or for, IMPACT has occupied every available ounce of energy, moment of time and inch of space in my life. However, this devotion does not prevent my reflecting constantly upon the project, and being able to distance myself on occasion from the interactive aspect of my work in order to pursue the reflective, and research, side of IMPACT. There is the inevitable and, I believe, creative, cross-fertilization of the reflection with the actions involved in instigating change. These practices are not, except momentarily and financially, separable parts of the job.

This chapter is written in such a way as to maximize the intrusiveness of the ‘I’. The reasons for attempting this are first of all to accentuate the impression of a personal story told. Aristotle reminds us that, ‘Fiction is truer and more universal than history’. Second, I want to underline the lack of any pretended objectivity or scientificity which can be the hallmark of writing in education or the social sciences. Third, I hope that it will enable me to make visible the process of writing itself, to emphasize the graphic quality of language, so that the means by which the story is related instead of being transparent, becomes opaque and thereby problematized.

This is a personal and reflective history. It presents my observationally derived understanding of IMPACT practices in situ. I shall pose a few questions from a position explicitly situated within the day to day routines of running IMPACT and I shall try to make a number of grounded and quite context-specific points. The validity of their extrapolation to any other context would remain in doubt.

One final and stylistic point: it is very hard to convey in writing a ‘sense’ of IMPACT and the issues it has raised. This is because the concern I feel about IMPACT and what it is, or is not, is not primarily an intellectual concern; it is an experienced worry, a matter of feelings and of conscience. I have always found it relatively unproblematic to communicate by speaking about IMPACT. However, the speaking world, as has been pointed out by others before (Ong, 1958, Olson, 1977, Halliday, 1980, Baker and Freebody, 1989), is a ‘happening’ world, a world which is created and negotiated as the conversation proceeds. The written world, to a much greater extent, has already happened. There seems less room for negotiation, for suggestion and response and more of a tendency towards an ‘expert’ or authoritarian reading. In an effort to combat this I have attempted to render the written text both suggestive and perplexing.

Once Upon a Time…

It certainly was not the ‘me’ of nowadays who, as legend, and at least some versions of recent history (Merttens and Vass, 1990b) suggest, sat on the heath near my home and contemplated the setting up of IMPACT. In those days I could have been described as being not unlike the Paul Newman character in the film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, who says, ‘Boy! I got vision and the rest of the world wears bi-focals!’ Well, IMPACT was certainly a vision. It was a vision which meant that the next five years of my life I would work, not at the centre of the schooling process, but at the boundaries. I have always been drawn to the margins, and IMPACT was to keep me fascinated by the rationales and justifications, the assumptions and beliefs, the ‘common senses’, which made the centre the hub, and the edges marginal.

In those sitting-on-the-heath days of early IMPACT, I shared my vision with Dorothy Hamilton (1984) of ‘PACT’ (1) fame. She and I used to air certain worries which were appearing like cracks in the new plaster of the imposing Cockcroft (1982) edifice. Questions which seemed to us to be important were, it appeared, disallowed by those in the higher regions of the maths educational world. This we found strangely disquieting; and the discomfort which the very strength of the Cockcroft orthodoxy caused us was to prove a fertile breeding ground in which were germinated many of the developments on IMPACT. Questions which bothered Dorothy and me at that time included:

Is not a serious gap developing between the maths curriculum and its related pedagogy, and what parents expect maths to look like in schools? Does this matter?

Should rote-learning and skills practice be so heavily discouraged when we observe, with parents, that many children do give every appearance of doing well at these things, and that, although they are sometimes working a little ahead of themselves, ‘relational understanding’ (Skemp, 1964) almost always follows the initial practice?

Is it possible that the emphasis on practical maths and investigational tasks actually disadvantages certain children? Might we be unwittingly engaging in discriminatory practices rather than combating them?

Are not some children bored by investigations and practical activities? Is this any better for them than the previous curriculum was for those bored by pages of sums?

It might be imagined that after five years on IMPACT, which is after all a major research as well as intervention project, answers to these questions and others like them would have been found. Of course, IMPACT has generated answers. But I am now as dissatisfied with the answers as I was then with the situation which produced the questions in the first place. IMPACT has been a voyage of discovery but, I suspect like any such voyage, it has caused those on board to encounter more storms than calm.

The last and lingering troubadour to whom the bird has sung.
That once went singing southward when all the world was young;
In that enormous silence, tiny and unafraid,
Comes up along a winding road the noise of the crusade…
Lapanto (John Masefield).

Sometimes IMPACT has felt like an ‘enormous silence’, while times at other it has resembled a positive cacophony. Only at rare moments have I had the sense of a symphony or opera. Of course, we have made it almost a point of principle that there is not step-by-step prodecure or set of procedures which determine ‘good IMPACT practice’ or by which IMPACT can be defined (Merttens and Vass, 1989; 1990b). It presents no difficulty for us on IMPACT that each school, or each area, or even each classroom, has a different flavour. Different features of IMPACT may be emphasized in different regions or areas, and this results in a marked variety of IMPACT practice.

So IMPACT is not easy to describe. It is not a whole, a unified or unitary object. It does not name a particular set of practices, an educational philosophy, or approach to teaching or learning, or even an identifiable group of people no matter how large. To be sure, there are IMPACT schools; we can point to IMPACT teachers or IMPACT parents. We can even call upon the odd IMPACT child or two! Some of the above, however, would not describe themselves as ‘IMPACT’. Yet others would not be described as IMPACT at all by some IMPACTers!

IMPACT is amorphous, fragmented and dispersed. What it is depends, as the cowboys say, upon who’s asking. For some it describes a set of experiences, for others it may be a methodology. For some it represents a particular type of approach, for a few it is a materials-based scheme, and so on. The descriptive list could be long if not infinite. Amidst this confusion of criteria, this plethora of descriptors, this human chaos, IMPACT does retain an identity as a community. It may be scattered, but it is still a real and living community. It has its hangers-on and its central characters, its marginals and its safe seats, its grey areas and its better-lit zones.

What sort of a community? Sociologically and philosophically speaking, the community cannot be said to embrace any particular set of assumptions or system of beliefs. There are not even any specific identifiable shared attitudes to classroom practice or to home intervention. IMPACT includes very formal schools, and schools who could be regarded as progressive in their ethos and approach. There are village schools, urban schools, small schools, large schools, private schools, church schools and state schools. The community is widely scattered, not merely geographically, though IMPACT now exists in Germany, Canada, Australia, Ireland, and in many other places as well, but also professionally and spiritually. This scattering does not in any way negate the strong sense of ‘communitas’ which exists on IMPACT. There are identifiable insider-practices, codes, rhetorics, forms of knowledge and behavioural strategies.

The second thing I have come to believe about IMPACT is that it fundamentally concerns ‘otherness’. It is worth exploring this idea. We are attempting to instigate change: changes in the ways in which teachers and parents interact, changes in the relationship parents have with the school, changes in the classroom practice to take account of the shared activities at home. In this sense, IMPACT concerns what is not, rather than what is. We do not, as a matter of routine practice, comment on existing conditions, much less do we attempt an analysis. (It is, however, true that such an analysis must form a part of the construction of the theoretical explication of IMPACT in practice). In creating the conditions in which change is possible—even probable—we imagine possible worlds rather than dissecting lived experience; we envisage possibilities rather than detailing actualities. Any intervention project like IMPACT must, in the Sartrean sense, concern itself with ‘that which is not’ rather than with ‘that which is’.

IMPACT also implies the constant consideration of ‘otherness’. In the training sessions with teachers, it is often parents who are predicated as ‘the other’. When talking with parents, it is usually children, or sometimes teachers or psychologists, who are thus positioned. In almost any given situation on IMPACT, a multiplicity of possible positions for ‘the other’ will be constructed.

Because IMPACT involves working always at the margins of what is constructed as professional discourse, the constitution and reconstitution of particular subject positions is a constant feature. These positions are the subject of repeated explication and negotiation on the project. This not only enables the transformation in and through practice of these professionally defining roles; it unfortunately also allows the development of a particular space for discriminatory practices. Through the construction of boundaries, with the concomitant notions of insiderness and outsiderness, particular forms of ‘otherness’ are construed and created. The use of generalization and universalizing descriptions assist in the formation and maintenance of stereotypical positionings. Thus statements of the type, ‘Parents like that won’t/can’t help their children with maths…’ both create a position and simultaneously force its occupation upon those who might otherwise cause disruption.

IMPACT then, involves mechanisms which eventually come to be transcribed in the process of schooling. Such mechanisms are effective but they also have an effectiveness beyond the scope of either the predictions or the justifications produced by those involved. The ways in which certain groups or individuals can come to occupy the role of ‘other’ mean that IMPACT can be particularly vulnerable to the development of new forms of discriminatory practices. By such means can others be positioned so as to render them impotent. Through relegation to the ‘outside’, potentially disruptive elements become safe.

There is an important sense in which these dangers are not confined to IMPACT, but are merely made more visible, or highlighted by the IMPACT processes. In this way, IMPACT acts rather like one of those mouth-wash dyes which are designed to display plaque. Discriminatory practices exist at all levels in education, and even those most committed to their eradication in one area are always open to the (self) accusation of failure in another. Once a dye has shown us the extent of the contamination, it becomes a matter of conscious decision whether and how to address it. This is a subject to which I shall return later on in the chapter.

Once Upon a Time There Was a School…

Before continuing to address the issues on IMPACT which perplex and trouble me now, it is important to share an image of IMPACT in practice. Since IMPACT cannot be characterized as a set of routines or procedures, it is impractical to attempt a description of a theoretical IMPACT scenario. Furthermore, such a description would inevitably fail to communicate a sense of IMPACT in situ, of everyday experience, the ups and downs, the minor hurdles, the small triumphs, and so on. These contingencies, minor and context-dependent as they may be, are crucial for the formation and transformation of specific IMPACT mechanisms in any particular situation. The specifics which are developed in response to contingencies characterize ‘IMPACT in practice’. Unless the description centres around the particularities of a given situation, then the attempt to prioritize experience, and to take account of the ways in which immediate reflection can inform action, is of little practical value.

However, in the story of a particular IMPACT school, no matter how carefully I attempt to transmit an accurate representation of events, there will be a problem inasmuch as there will inevitably be more than one ‘reading’ of their personal history of IMPACT. The headteacher will have one reading, IMPACT teachers another, non-IMPACT teachers another, and so on. The logical end product is a multiplicity of readings in a futile attempt to represent the plurality of shared experience.

I have decided to circumvent this difficulty by presenting three ‘petites histoires’. The will consist of three separate conflations of IMPACT-school experiences in which I participated as an active member of the IMPACT team. In each of the three, the aims, reasoning, rhetoric, behaviour patterns, justifications and subsequent accounts of IMPACT are remarkably dissimilar. It is therefore the extent to which they are different which makes them, as ‘histoires’, interesting and illuminating.

The three case studies described should not be read as consisting of three individual and actual schools. Neither can any of the descriptions as given, be mapped in a linear fashion on to any particular sequence of circumstances experienced by myself on IMPACT. But taken as ‘histoires’ they present as nearly as I can make it, an account of IMPACT in situ.

Histoire: Primrose School

11 était une fois…

Primrose school has seven teachers and a headteacher. Each teacher has a year group of thirty children. The children in the school come from a wide variety of different backgrounds, in terms of social class and of ethnic origin. Many different—and conflicting—assumptions about education exist within the school community. Some of the children have English as their second language.

The school could be described as a fairly informal school, where most of the children’s work is topic-based. However, they do use a commercial maths scheme, and there are some fairly rigid timetabling structures which exist across the whole school, such as reading after lunch and maths or language work first thing in the morning. The school has a headteacher who is keen on IMPACT and who agrees to support any staff who would like to give it a go. There are two very keen staff—one a probationer, Linda, the other, Sara, a young and confident teacher in her third year of teaching.

Linda feels ill-at-ease in her first year of teaching. She feels particularly vulnerable in maths and she believes that IMPACT will give her some extra and individual support in this area. She has a vague feeling that to involve the parents would be ‘a good thing’ and certainly has no wish to keep them at a distance.

The other teacher, Sara, embraces the idea of IMPACT with great enthusiasm. She talks about her own parents and what a support they were to her and her sisters, and she describes how she has instigated a ‘PACT’type shared reading initiative with diaries in which she and the parents write. She is certain that this programme has made a big difference to the childrens’ progress in reading and also to their attitude to books.

Both teachers elect to send activities home on a weekly basis. I am in the school for approximately two half-days a week, and participate in all the planning sessions as well as teaching on occasion in each class and helping to organize the follow-up work. We often work together and share ideas, and it is common for the other staff to participate in these discussions.

IMPACT gets a good response in both classes. Sara regularly gets twenty-six or twenty-seven of the children sharing the activity at home. Even the ‘non-responders’ will on occasion bring something in, especially if it happens to be an activity with which the child does not need much help. The parents are extremely enthusiastic, to the point of suggesting activities, helping to mount displays and coming in to play maths games or do maths tasks with the children in class.

Linda gets fewer responses, but still averages around 60-70 per cent and sometimes higher. She is very pleased with the way that the IMPACT activity sets up the subsequent week’s maths in class, and she finds the help with planning invaluable. Some parents are critical of the type of activities sent home. They would like to see more formal mathematical recording, and feel that some of the activities are ‘too easy’. They are worried that their children are not acquiring the ‘proper’ mathematical skills such as multiplication and division.

After a year, it is decided at a staff meeting that all the staff will have a go at sending out regular maths activities from September onwards. This decision is reached at least in part because of Sara’s enthusiastic lobbying. Another important factor is the amount of help offered by IMPACT in the shape of my time and expertise. However, all the staff do agree to give it a whirl.

The following year sees IMPACT activities being sent to all the children in the school with varying degrees of ‘success’. The three most enthusiastic teachers get extremely good responses in terms of the numbers of children taking part. The others get fewer, but the response rate is haphazard and reflects a large number of contingent factors as well as more stable characteristics. A great deal of support is still offered and accepted from IMPACT and I continue to spend a great deal of time in the school. I assist with planning the IMPACT activities, designing sheets, and take care of some of the reproduction of the actual activities. I occasionally work with small groups engaged on follow-up activities in class, and I attend parent meetings.

After eighteen months, the school has a new headteacher. She is reticent about her commitment to IMPACT and although she does nothing to impede its progress, neither does she offer particular assistance or support. The practice on IMPACT then was to withdraw external support after two years, and in fact this school was left very much on its own after the initial two years.

Teachers are left to run IMPACT or not as they choose. The headteacher does not positively discourage them from sending activities but she makes it plain as the year wears on that she has grave reservations about this form of parental involvement. She feels that parents should not be encour...