Only Connect: Families, Communities, Learning and Sustainability, Perspectives From

Only connect: families, communities, learning and sustainability, perspectives from auto/biographical research

Linden West,

Canterbury Christ Church University, England

Introduction

This paper derives from in-depth longitudinal and collaborative ‘auto/biographical’ research among samples of families participating in various family ‘support’ programmes in London and the South East of England. The programmes are located in marginalized communities that have undergone profound economic and cultural dislocations. There are myriad interventions by government and its agencies in these communities, no doubt stemming from anxiety over the state of the family, especially in poorer communities, and fear of the marginal other (Ecclestone, 2004). Moreover, the family, for diverse reasons, is considered an institution under stress, which appears greatest in materially poor working class areas as structural changes in patterns of employment impact most strongly on such groups. Divorce rates for unskilled manual workers are, for instance, double the rate for the average while over half of lone parents live in poverty (Ranson and Rutledge, 2005). Furthermore, a discourse of moral deficit, alongside moral panic, can infuse the development of programmes and social policy more widely. This paper interrogates the role of programmes, like Sure Start, in such a context, including the nature and role of informal and non-formal learning. A metaphor of space infuses the paper: of family programmes as contested space; of particular projects providing sustaining, transitional as well as a transactional space in which local parents learn to talk back to power. The paper also connects these processes to notions of social sustainability and the need to think holistically, encompassing the intimate preconditions for agency and learning between people and the interdependence of family well-being and the quality of the wider social, community and even democratic space.

Contested space

Family support programmes – in which learning of various and contested kinds is an important component – have been much questioned. Some see initiatives, like Sure Start, as overly intrusive and patronising towards marginalised families, as an exercise in social control. They are seen to derive from deficit models of people and communities (Ecclestone, 2004). They and professional bureaucracies more widely have been criticised as self-serving, operating to boost professional and bureaucratic power rather than facilitate family well-being (Furedi, 2001). Parents rather than poverty, or the breakdown of adult solidarities in a more individualised culture, are blamed for diverse social ills. The fault is seen to lie within individuals rather than the social order, and issues of poverty or the distribution of resources are sidelined. A shift from more “solidaristic” language – where the aim is to help rather than hassle citizens – towards a more contractarian one, in which resources are offered, in contingent ways, has been chronicled (Dean, 2004). Levitas (1998) notes the changes in New Labour rhetoric from a redistributionist discourse (RED) towards a more socially integrationist (SID) and even moral underclass one (MUD). It is suggested that SID and MUD, more than RED, are the dominant drivers in social and educational policy towards poorer families. Moreover, Wyness (2000, p. 19) has argued that the state and its agencies are seeking to control every aspects of the child’s world, ‘in the interests of a political and economic sphere that makes ever increasing demands for a disciplined and productive workforce’.

From a very different and mainstream perspective, initiatives like Sure Start, and their associated Children’s Centres, have been a target for criticism on grounds of effectiveness and efficiency. The National Audit Office (2006) has criticised Sure Start centres for failing to provide value for money and to engage ‘the most disadvantaged parents’. Furthermore, Sure Start, according to the national evaluation, appears to have had only minimal impact on families. Researchers have yet to find any discernable developmental, behavioural or language differences between children living in Sure Start areas and those living outside. There is also evidence that parents living in Sure Start communities may actually come to feel worse about where they live (NESS, 2005).

However, the methodology used in the national study did not allow for any dynamic, sustained and in-depth exploration of such processes or underlying meanings. There are questions too as to whether ‘efficiency’ is necessarily a good thing ‘regardless of what it might serve and what might be its side effects in terms of human suffering’ (Bauman, 2005, p. 121). What may be considered inefficient, using short-term indicators – such as painstakingly involving parents in running a project, at all levels – may, in the longer term, provide resources for some wider social and even democratic renewal. And ‘success’ in a project might actually increase demands on public resources, as parents become more aware of what is needed and articulate this more confidently, like their counterparts in middle class areas.

Moreover, with reference to social control, a range of values, influences and social actors can be in play in the lived experience of programmes. There may be many agendas: including those of diverse professionals. They may seek to work in more collaborative and dialogical ways with parents. They may even, in some instances, exploit government rhetoric - on the importance of strengthening community capacity building, or to improve service delivery, via partnership arrangements – to justify experiments with new forms of sustainable local development (Home Office, 2004). If parents are initially invited into programmes, on others’ terms, with a narrow focus on the labour market or work, some parents, at least, might be enabled to claim space and resources for themselves, in diverse ways.

Marginalised communities

in East London, for instance, was the setting for one parenting project designed to support young single mothers. East London can represent, in a particularly acute form, the divided, unequal condition of contemporary neo-liberal England, in which sections of society – perhaps a third of the population – are relatively excluded from growing material prosperity (West, 2007). Disaffected young mothers were recruited via outreach and there was a particular role for the arts, with the aim of boosting participants’ confidence, ‘planning and parenting skills’ as well as broadening horizons. The young mothers would also be encouraged to progress towards ‘structured educational achievement’ or into work (West, 2007). A second project, Sure Start, was located in a depressed public housing estate in Kent, on the extreme South Eastern edge of the United Kingdom. This was a different community to East London, in ethnic composition, but deprivation and fragmentation stalked this townscape too, described, as it has been, as a ‘sink estate’ where ‘problem’ families have been ‘dumped’ from all over the region. Unemployment, for many, is long-term while those in paid work enter low paid, low skilled employment. Women increasingly appear more likely to be employed than men, but in part-time, low paid jobs in the service sector. The politics of the area have been considered fractious, atomistic and failing and the extent of alienation from conventional politics is considerable (West and Carlson, 2007).

Auto/biographical research

The research can be described as ‘auto/biographical’ and we spent many hours with individual families (as well as staff). The design of our research enabled us to explore the meaning of experience, narratively, in depth and over time, in ways that other kinds of research barely get near. We spent time too visiting a range of courses and meetings – formal and informal - across a number of years.

We worked with particular families, in one project, over seven research cycles. Some parents withdrew after one or more interviews, for a range of reasons, while others remained suspicious, but a number of families stayed with us over the entire study and new ones were recruited. Our methodology is grounded in a commitment to working collaboratively with people, to understand experience, subjectively, from their perspectives. This derives, in part, from feminist research but also from the social constructivist idea – reaching back to symbolic interactionism, the Chicago School as well as Wright Mills - that the social world is not simply internalised but is actively experienced and given meaning to, which can sometimes help change it (Chamberlayne et al, 2000).

We began by asking parents to share, in concrete terms, specific experiences of programmes: of encounters with particular people or courses and how helpful or otherwise these may have been. We asked them to describe personal histories as well as experiences of living in the area; and we explored changing relationships in families, with children or a partner, as a result of particular interventions. As the research evolved, and relationships strengthened, we revisited these issues in what became a dynamic and iterative process, testing and retesting hypotheses, over time, as well as examining the process of the research itself, and the extent to which people felt able to tell stories in more open and honest ways. Some of our collaborators became more confident and increasingly curious in relation to their own lives: it was unusual, they would say, for anyone to be interested and to really listen, which, in turn, evoked greater personal interest in the forces at work in family and community life.

Interviews were taped and fully transcribed, using oral history conventions. Parents were asked to read transcripts, identify themes and reflect on the whole process, including how easy it was to talk to us. We devised a pro-forma, derived from earlier studies, to analyse the themes and process, including our own responses. Each pro-forma consisted of standard biographical data, emerging themes and reference to relevant literatures. Field notes and diary material were incorporated while we completed a proforma separately, for every participant, and then compared and contrasted our material, to build rigour and differing perspectives into the analytical process. We used our in-depth understanding of individual cases to explore patterns across whole samples.

We use the term auto/biography to draw attention to the inter-relationship between the constructions of our own lives through autobiography and the construction of the life of another through biography. And how, as researchers, we drew on experiences, sometimes deeply painful, of being parents and children to make sense of others’ experiences. Such processes quickly dissipate any lingering assumptions of deficit and moral deficiency. We sat in the car quietly after many experiences and felt a mix of humility and admiration, given the pain but also resilience of particular lives. We wrote extensively in field notes and the proformas about these auto/biographical dimensions of researching other’s lives: how we use other’s stories to make sense of our own, and vice-versa (Stanley, 1992). And how the other’s story may provoke strong, even disturbing feelings in researchers (West, 2001). Yet this aspect of research is often absent from the text, while processes of interpretation are represented as largely disembodied, one-directional affairs, under the gaze of objectivism

Sustaining space

Tom Schuller, and others, (2007), in researching the wider benefits of learning and using, at least in part, biographical interviews, have noted the ‘sustaining’ effect of participation in groups and adult learning for many mothers with young children. They observed how participation in educational programmes, formal and informal, enabled mothers to maintain a sense of personal identity whilst bringing up their children. There was physical relief at getting out of the house, at having a temporal structure to the week and access to adult conversations. Such processes are not to be judged simply in individualistic terms: understanding that others had difficulties helped strengthen social bonds.

Interestingly, many parents in our research mentioned periods of depression or other mental health problems. A recent study (LSE, 2006) has described ‘crippling depression and chronic anxiety’ as the biggest cause of misery in Britain today. One in six people may suffer from depression or chronic anxiety disorder, which is worse in marginalized communities.Heidi was a young mother and her narrative touched on such themes. She was part of a Sure Start project in Kent and described being moved in her life history from one foster family to another, like her partner Joe. She had never been able to talk to anyone about her experience before, she stated. It was hard to explain, and she did ‘not really understand myself why the things that had happened had happened, and not knowing how or where to start’. She had been recruited to Sure Start by a community worker and had been suspicious and fearful that they might take her two children away. It had been ‘important’, she said, ‘ to keep the fridge full’, even if there was little money. Over time suspicions decreased and she recently began a new parenting course:

… [this] gave me more confidence to know what to do with my two children. At the end of it all I got this certificate. So I was really happy and pleased about it….

But her troubles, she said, were ‘big’, and she struggled with them most of the time. She talked about being upset with her children, ‘when they laugh at me’:

….That literally upset me because I was trying my hardest when I’m not well, I’m trying my best to tell them off and say ‘don’t do this’….

Heidi became more trusting of a community worker and other Sure Start staff and was given speedy access to counselling via the programme. This was important, she told us, in learning how to handle the children but also in understanding her own problems. Other mothers were important too:

They are more like mums to me. Like I’ve never had in my life. It feels more a part of my family as well as a friend…they feel like I am part of their family as well. Because I go to family group…and I meet with other mothers there.

Heidi talked further, in a subsequent interview, about what she called her ‘psychological issues’. These prevented her from cooking, among other things, she said. There were too many ‘unpleasant memories’ in which her confidence ‘had been destroyed’. She went on to elaborate the importance of contact with other mothers and workers as well as her feelings of achievement in a number of classes as well as improving relationships with the children. The social contact had been crucial as had the counselling but progress was fragile.

Transitional and transactional space

The psychotherapist Donald Winnicott was exercised with what happens in the spaces between people – in relationships - and with what may be life enhancing and facilitative of psychological growth or its converse (Winnicott, 1971). He offered a way of thinking about interpersonal experience that built on what people said they felt and the nature of their interactions with others. He developed the idea of transitional space in which people might imagine themselves differently, or are able to experiment with who they are and might be, in relation to others, in new and even radical ways. It was a potentially fluid space for movement, play, creativity and experiment with identity. Spaces may be entered more or less willingly, although for some people movement may be difficult because of what the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein termed ‘memory in feeling’ (Klein, 1987). Early experience of entering such space, between self and others, may have intensely negative associations and risk taking might have been discouraged.

Family support programmes can enable some nervous, diffident, often self-disparaging parents to enter new spaces and challenge others’ agendas and take on new roles. If local people enter the space on others’ terms, some, at least, had made it more their own (Coare and Johnston, 2003). The parents, in two projects, especially, began to learn a new grammar of community activism. Margaret, for instance, struggled in an abusive relationship. Going to meetings, on her own, was a major step. She lived in isolation, as she put it, with her young child and told us how she got to know a lot of people at a time when she needed to rebuild her life.

She joined a programme’s management board but struggled with its rituals and language. Meetings could be fraught and fractious. There was a particularly difficult meeting in which a Council representative and representatives from a neighbourhood centre were suspicious that the project was grabbing too much power and resources. She shared her intimate struggles, at this time, to find her voice in meetings and to claim some space. She felt strongly in a particular discussion about child protection:

I was very nervous about saying it; I got it out the way and thought it wasn’t too bad… It was about the child protection …I knew I wanted to say it but would it come out properly, and it did so I was happy. It was a big step for me…

The moment probably went unnoticed by others. For Margaret, in the totality of her life, it was a major transitional step. She had been scared to speak out at school and in her adult life. She was never encouraged to by her parents or others and yet she was beginning to find some agency in her life and was challenging dominant agendas.