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Key Course Themes
- This chapter is designed to help you to make the move to the university-level study of childhood as smoothly and swiftly as possible.
Knowing what to expect
CS/ECS courses usually attract people with a wide range of prior experiences, and so students are likely to have an equally wide spectrum of feelings about studying childhood at degree level. Some may lack confidence because it seems that many of their peers have previously taken child-focused courses, while they have not. Others may initially feel that theyâre being asked to cover old ground and that they know the subject well already.
This chapter shows that no matter what you have done before coming to university, everyone has something new to learn, adjustments to make and study skills to develop. No matter how much, or how little, prior experience of studying childhood or working with children you have, you will usually need to adjust your thinking, and your approaches, to study so that you can contribute and draw from the new learning opportunities university study affords. Indeed, you may well hear lecturers say that they are still learning about childhood themselves, because the sort of learning you do at university is never âdoneâ â there are always new insights to be gained and connections to be made.
Itâs worth remembering, too, that everyone has valuable experiences to offer. We hope by the end of this chapter you will see how much you have to gain from developing good working relationships with your fellow students, as well as your lecturers.
How can you tell what your courseâs approach is?
Where is it located?
The first thing to do is to identify where your course is taught within the structure of academic disciplines in your university. Broadly speaking, CS/ECS is usually taught under the umbrella of Social Sciences and Humanities, but you can learn a lot by getting a closer focus on it than this.
One way of sorting this out in your own mind is by looking at which School, Department or Faculty your course sits in. For example, is it in Education, Health, Cultural Studies or Social Studies? Is it offered in just one department, or a few? Getting answers to all these questions can tell you a lot about the sort of emphasis it is likely to have.
Who teaches on the course and what are their particular research interests?
What a lecturerâs discipline and research interests are is not always apparent to a student, but it is important because each discipline has its own academic outlooks and perspectives, and this has an impact on what is taught and so on what you need to know to do well. So, for instance, an individual who teaches you may view themselves as primarily a historian, an anthropologist, a psychologist and so on and that will influence the course. On the other hand, your course may be taught mainly by professionals who are trained to work with children and families (such as qualified teachers, health visitors, playworkers, social workers) and will base their teaching on those professional perspectives. Finally, the course might quite consciously set out to offer you a mix of professional and academic perspectives on the child. We will help you identify your lecturersâ perspectives by looking carefully at the words they use to describe the study of childhood and finding out what terms they find problematic or even offensive. You can start, though, by looking up their publications, either through an online bookshop, or, even more usefully, by looking at the university website, which should offer both biographies and bibliographies of the staff teaching on your course. What they write and what their professional background is should help you to find out whether their CS/ECS teaching is the main aspect of their job, or if they teach on other courses too.
What approach does your course take as a whole?
Many of the people who work on CS/ECS courses would class their work as interdisciplinary. However, they wonât all mean the same thing by âinterdisciplinarityâ. Sometimes they will mean you get to study childhood from different academic disciplinary perspectives, sometimes they will try to meld this into a holistic approach. Some courses concentrate on the many diverse ways childhood is viewed with regard to time, place, age, ethnicity and other variables. CS/ECS can also be informed by a critique of the ways in which childrenâs lives are governed, regulated and dominated by adults. Courses may also be underpinned by an emphasis on children as participants in society and decision-makers â and consequently will have a child-centred approach or childrenâs rights as a dominant theme. Asking yourself, âwhere does my lecturer stand in relation to this?â or, âdo all my lecturers agree, or do they have quite different viewpoints?â will help you to sort this out. In asking these questions you will start to develop a reflective approach to your course.
You and the course themes
Generally speaking, the new student of childhood must learn to take a thematic approach to study. Childhood is the theme at the core of your study, but there are lots of different ways of approaching that theme. Students on CS/ECS courses are encouraged to engage simultaneously with a range of interlinked disciplinary perspectives, which means they might be expected to draw on recent research and theories including sociology, psychology, cultural studies, social history, philosophy, social policy and childrenâs rights. This also means that students have to âknow their way aroundâ a whole host of disciplines and the different ways they talk about childhood, and be able to use the different patterns and ways of constructing and talking about the knowledge that these contain. As you read across a number of disciplines you will discover an extensive lexicon of terminology, approaches and conventions, in what can be described as a âjoined upâ approach to study.
In very practical terms, the thematic approach means you will have to learn to navigate round a large number of areas of the library, as texts on childhood will appear in all of them, rather than being located together. Chapter 2, âReading into Writingâ, guides you through the tricky process of managing the various languages used by different academic cultures, which you will need to learn to use in your writing if you wish to do well.
Problematizing childhood
Making the move to studying childhood at university, however, basically involves seeing childhood in new and increasingly complicated ways. Most courses will encourage you to identify and take stock of what you already know about children and childhood, whether that is theoretical knowledge, the practical work of bringing up children, professional practice, or your own experience of being a child. Your lecturers, though, are likely to move you gradually away from personal to more theorized views of children and their lives, encouraging you to see childhood as a complex, problematic concept, rather than as a straightforward, natural phase that we all go through. This chapter highlights some of the ways they might encourage you to see childhood afresh, waking up to âtaken-for-grantedâ notions about children and childhood.
In short, your lecturers are looking for far more than commonsense ideas, or a set of facts about childrenâs development: they eventually want you to be able to analyse childrenâs lives and environments; the products and policies that are made for them; their experiences and the views of professionals who work with and for them. In a nutshell, they will want you to be able to analyse ideas and meanings associated with âthe childâ and âchildhoodâ and to see that talking about childhood is actually a very demanding thing to do. They will hope that during your time at university you will get deeply involved in exploring, discussing and debating a range of varying ideas and perspectives on the meanings of childhood.
The words lecturers might use to describe this process include:
The implications: thereâs no âcorrectâ answer
From your viewpoint as a student, itâs crucially important that you grasp this, because it means there is rarely a single correct answer to the assignments that are set. Put bluntly, it means that no one can tell you what you should put in an assignment. Studying childhood at university, therefore, is not a case of simply knowing and remembering facts, but being able to show that you genuinely understand complexity, can question everything and shift between diverse viewpoints.
However, although there may be no right or wrong answers, from an examinerâs point of view, there are certainly better and worse ways of producing good assignments about childhood. The rest of this chapter is geared to helping you get off to a flying start, by assisting you in using the teaching sessions, your experiences, your peers, your lecturers and all the activities offered on your course productively.
What will the teaching of childhood be like?
When people first come to university they typically anticipate more structure. They expect to sit in huge, tiered lecture halls, simply writing down whatever pearls of wisdom the lecturer utters. Studying CS/ECS is rarely like that. Besides, this is a very passive learning strategy which wonât help much. Instead, you will be expected to play a highly active role within and beyond the classroom. Whilst you may find you have relatively little scheduled class time, compared to students on other degrees, you will be expected to undertake a lot of independent or directed study. Becoming an active learner is the key to success.
What is an active learner?
Active learning is an approach or a learning strategy. It means becoming:
- Personally involved â for example, by trying to understand a range of viewpoints, recognizing debates, doing things which help you to make sense of your learning about childhood, discussing ideas, linking information/concepts and looking for patterns of ideas, linking your learning to what you know.
- Critical and analytical â for example, by not taking things at face value, always asking âwhy?â, examining beliefs about childhood from many angles, comparing the same issue from different theoristsâ points of view, being attuned to hidden agendas, weighing up the arguments for and against something, looking for contradictions.
- Creative â for example, by applying your imagination, searching for connections and patterns, asking questions, being curious, thinking laterally, weighing up how others see ...
