Body and mind as the elements of curriculum design for young children
Angela Anning
Professor of Early Childhood Education, University of Leeds
Paper presented at the British Educational Research Association Annual Conference, University of Sussex at Brighton, September 2 - 5 1999
Introduction
Anne Edwards has outlined the aims and research methods of the project on which we worked together. The project aimed to create an informed community of practice amongst a group of educarers through their involvement with action research. A significant outcome of the project was the enhanced professional knowledge embedded in their practice across all constituencies of the team: university based researchers, Local Authority officers and educarers. A second tangible outcome was a curriculum framework (with an emphasis on the starting points of literacy and numeracy) co-constructed by the project team and published as a set of materials called Loving to Learn. This paper will focus on the processes through which the constituent groups from traditions of care and education in the project team shared their understandings of best practice in the early childhood services. By confronting their competing priorities and taking time to try to understand them they were able to use similarities and differences creatively to co-construct an innovative curriculum framework, Loving to Learn. One of our greatest challenges as a group was to tune into each others' languages and create a genuine dialogue from our sometimes conflicting imperatives.
Theoretical framework
The paper draws on Bronfenbrenner's seminal 1970s ecological model of human development. He argues that too little attention has been paid to 'the person's behaviour in more than one setting' and 'the way in which relations between settings can affect what happens within them' and 'the recognition that environmental events and conditions outside an immediate setting containing the person can have a profound influence on behaviour and development within that setting'. (Bronfenbrenner 1979: 18) A persuasive feature of his argument is that he perceives any person within a setting, adult or child, as active agents in shaping their environment: 'a growing, dynamic entity that progressively moves into and restructures the milieu in which it resides' (ibid: 21). In other words he rejects the deficit view of humans as passive victims of the contextual features and constraints within their environments and argues that 'the interaction between a person and environment is viewed as two-directional, that is characterised by reciprocity' (ibid:22).
Bronfenbrenner's model delineates a complex hierarchy of systems in which the interactions of individuals within those systems are nested. (Figure 1). The micro-system is the immediate setting in which a child or professional may be at any one time - play group, home, school, day-care centre. That system will be characterised by particular physical features, rites, rituals, discourse, activities and objects. Within the micro-systems people assume specific roles and responsibilities: manager, teacher, support assistant, parent, carer, child, pupil, younger brother or sister. The meso-system in which each of the micro-systems is nested consists of the networks or relationships between the settings in which the people live and work: for the child this will include the networks that link home and pre-school and for an adult networks of other local providers and local authority support systems with whom they have regular contact. The exo-system is a third level which may not involve the developing person directly as an active participant though it will impact on their daily lives: for example patterns of employment in the community around their workplace or the nature of community services resourced by their local authority. All these systems are nested in the macro-system, the overall cultural/political/social/historical setting.
In the USA (Beatty 1995) and the UK (Whitbread 1972; Moss and Penn 1996) the micro-systems and meso-systems of day-care and pre-school education have traditionally been dominated by women who have prioritised a family and child-centred approach to provision for young children. However, at the exo and macro-system levels policy has mostly been determined by men who have prioritised in educational contexts institutional learning as a preparation for schooling and in care contexts accountability systems under the ubiquitous label of 'quality' measures/indicators. Naturally the social constructions adults create of childhood determine the kind of environment they construct for children , the sort of activities they plan for them and the kind of training systems they design for the adults who have responsibility for the education and care of young children.
The project took place during a decade when women early years practitioners felt increasingly that their long-held beliefs, values and ways of being were under threat from macro-level priorities. In the late 90s all settings were under pressure to prioritise educational aspects of their work. The male dominated 'disembedded', school/institutional forms of learning figured explicitly in policy documents on early childhood services emanating from the DfEE. It is the mind of the child that is the key focus. For example in 1997 the Labour party's key document on Excellence in Schools contained the following extracts:
'Investment in learning in the 21st century is the equivalent of investment in the machinery and technical innovation that was essential in the first great industrial revolution. Then it was physical capital; now it is human capital ...
We know that children who benefit from nursery education - especially from disadvantaged backgrounds - are more likely to succeed in primary school. And we know that children who benefit from a good primary education are more likely to succeed at secondary school..
Our aim is that all children should begin school with a head start in literacy, numeracy and behaviour, ready to learn and make the most of primary education'. (DfEE Excellence in Schools, 1997: 14-16, London: HMSO quoted in Dahlberg, Moss and Pence 1999: 44)
As Moss points out, such statements make explicit a particular view of childhood, as 'a knowledge, identity and culture reproducer' in the service of efficient state systems of education and employment.
There are passionate advocates of alternative views of childhood. Blenkin and Kelly (for example, 1994) have long argued for a 'developmentally appropriate' view of young children in designing systems for early education and care. Such a view takes 'the developmental level of the individual child' as the starting point for determining practitioners' priorities. Their argument is that we must take a holistic view of the child, catering for mind, body and emotions when determining how services, in particular early education, should be designed. 'Education is defined .. in terms of it processes rather than its content or its extrinsic aims and objectives...Cognitive development is seen as dependent on, or interlinked with psychomotor and affective development. The social context of learning is identified as the most crucial element in human learning. Informal and interactive styles of instruction are .. advocated... the importance of play in learning and development is emphasised.'(ibid:28)
In even greater contrast to the DfEE view, an extract from a National Children's Bureau publication defines a particularly nurturing body and heart view of priorities for early childhood settings:
'Investigation and exploration, walks and puddles and cuddles, books and blankets and anything that is part of the child's day, play and routines.' (Rouse 1990)
There is a surge on interest in what Prout and James (1997) call 'a new paradigm for the sociology of childhood' in which children are seen as having power and agency in their own right, not simply in relation to the social constructions adults around them assign them to. In searching for models of pre-school provision which might exemplify the concept of children as active co-constructors of knowledge and culture within their own identities as people and learners, commentators have looked to the traditions of the Reggio Emilia in Northern Italy. The Reggio Emilia approach to early childhood is exemplified in this extract from their founding father, Malaguzzi (1993):
'Our image of children no longer considers them as isolated and egocentric, does not see them as only engaged with action with objects, does not emphasise only the cognitive aspects, does not belittle feelings or what is not logical and does not consider with ambiguity the role of the affective domain. Instead our image of the child is rich in potential, strong, powerful, competent, and most of all connected to adults and other children. (Malaguzzi 1993: 10)'
Beliefs from the traditions of care and education in the project team
The twenty pre-school practitioners, based in three Local Authorities, brought to the project a wealth of background experiences and expertise:
eight worked in Family Centres or Children's Centres, mostly with training and traditions from social services day-care systems, though one employed in an educational role
three worked in independent day-care nurseries, with nursery nurse training and health services experience
five worked in support services - family literacy, multi-cultural, childminding - with a range of training and background experiences in welfare and education
four worked in nursery schools or classes with teacher training and educational experience
Though it was possible to characterise the twenty professionals as coming from a particular kind of tradition or work culture - welfare, education, health - their personal lives and work histories gave each practitioner a unique set of values and beliefs. Likewise the settings within which they worked, though categorised as for example day-care or educational provision, were products of the unique history of that setting and of the current chemistry and expertise of the practitioners, parents and children who at this moment in time made up its community. The influence of the Local Authority systems at the exo-levels of Bronfenbrenner's model also impacted on the beliefs and priorities of the professionals in each of the settings. So, of course, did National policy changes.
The Labour Government's push to drive up standards in literacy and numeracy in schools had filtered down into the pre-school sector. All the project team were familiar with the pre-school curriculum, The Desirable Learning Outcomes (SCAA 1996). Those with a background in education felt comfortable with the framework. However, those from day-care settings were intimidated by the prospect of Ofsted inspections to monitor its implementation in their settings and worried what the Baseline Assessments of children leaving them to start school would mean for them. Many of them were caring for more babies and toddlers than three- and four-year-olds. Some day-care practitioners were hostile to the concept of being 'colonised' by education and clear that their priorities should be different. One said:
'Some of our four year olds are here with us for a long day. They've got all their school years ahead of them. We're not teachers. None of us has been trained to teach a child to write their name, or read, or count. We did the basic things on NNEB courses, but we are not teachers and we don't feel qualified to teach these kind of things to the children. You hear horror stories about nurseries teaching the children the alphabet and then teachers have to re-teach them sounds - you know they've been taught 'ay, bee, cee' and they want 'a,b,c' - and we're not teachers. But we can give them all the opportunities they need to prepare them for school'.
Others felt inadequate to take on the government's 'standards' agenda. One of the most talented and experienced managers of a Family Centre said 'I felt I was entering an educational arena I was not fully equipped for.'
At the start of the project those with educational backgrounds appeared confident in what educational expertise they could bring to the project but they were aware that their experience of working with very young children was limited and were keen to learn from those in the care sector about working with under threes. One way and another, all of us felt that our professional identities were fragile in the national climate of creating 'joined up services' across the traditional boundaries of education and care.
It was clearly inappropriate to graft an educational framework or discourse onto ways of working with very young children in non-school settings. But the problem for practitioners in informal non-school settings, as many of these were, is that as yet there is no identifiable discourse about children's learning in their professional literature. As Munn (1994) pointed out, before children enter formal school settings their learning is often centred around 'everyday' practical activities such as learning how to get shoes on and off or social skills such as sharing toys or taking turns in a games. Such 'knowledge' tends to be dismissed as 'trivial', or if attempts are made to codify it, educators work backwards from the discourse of schooling and retrospectively accord such activities the 'status' of educational language. Munn gives the following examples:
Buttoning up coats involves one-to-one correspondence and therefore maps onto counting
Distinguishing colours and shapes involves perceptual discrimination and therefore maps onto letter recognition
and points out that 'By such extrapolation, cognitive aspects of the pre-school curriculum are created from basic tasks and educational discourse is constructed.' (ibid)
However this reshaping of everyday learning activities into educational frameworks and discourse leaves early years practitioners from non-educational backgrounds feeling disempowered and alienated. So they tend to dismiss curriculum models as irrelevant to their own professional knowledge. When Blenkin and Kelly (1997) analysed the returns of practitioners from a wide range of pre-school settings in the Principles into Practice in Early Childhood Education project (the PIPS Project), they found that many of them, including some formal school settings, did not respond to the question, 'How would you describe a quality curriculum for young children?'. Others simply stapled on local authority or national curriculum guidelines as if the documents had become a reason for them not to engage with ideas for themselves.
What was important for us was to promote a dialogue amongst the twenty practitioners which would not dismiss their routine activities with young children as 'trivial' or simply recast them as 'preparation for schooling'. We wanted to build on the intuitive knowledge and expertise embedded in their workplace practices and support them in articulating their tacit knowledge .
We also wanted to confront the prejudices and misunderstandings those from the distinct traditions of health, welfare or education might have of each other's workplace practices. This would mean breaking down defensive posturing about who had the' right' approach and confronting mutual distrust. It was therefore essential that we based out exchanges around the authentic evidence of what was common place in each other's workplaces. The evidence was based partly on documentation - logs, field notes, accounts of conversations with colleagues and parents, photographs, children's drawings/paintings/models - as described in Anne Edward's paper. But it was also based on all of us quite literally, though of course metaphorically too, stepping out of each other's boundaries and visiting as many of the settings as we could. In addition to attending the meetings, between us Anne and I as researchers visited every setting represented in the project at least once. Our project meetings were sited quite deliberately in different geographical locations and settings. Sometimes these meetings involved quite difficult and lengthy journeys and in a sense the journeys also were a metaphor for stepping out of our own comfort zones and opening up to 'otherness'.
The professional discourse
What is fascinating in the data recording our conversations is evidence of how the boundaries between different ways of thinking about young children's learning began to shift and open up new ways of thinking about a curriculum for young children in informal settings.
The practitioners in day-care settings chose as the focus of their action research cycles:
involving parents in their children's everyday mathematics learning
mark making to promote literacy in the construction play area
sharing books and nursery rhymes at home and in the nursery
young children learning mathematics through stories and rhymes in home and nursery settings
encouraging childminders to promote children's learning through everyday mathematics
the role of adults in enhancing children's learning through construction play
encouraging parents to 'tune into' babies' languages of gesture and sound
the importance of music in children (and their parents') lives
It is significant that parental involvement in children's learning figured prominently in their choices. In their accounts of their action research several stated explicitly where they were 'coming from'. 'We consider our roles as family supporters and as educators of children'; 'We look at the child as part of a family unit and community in which he or she lives'; 'I want to develop the work with the mums from a social work perspective'; 'our role is to work to involve parents in their children's learning as a top priority'; 'staff are always available to discuss children, issues, problems, advice, discussion on feeding, children's behaviour problems, benefits etc.'