Here comes the sun

Now, as those of us in the Northern Hemisphere face the longest night of the year, it is time to do as communities in our cold little island have done for millennia, and mark the season in which we slowly begin our journey back from the darkness into the light. While our distant ancestors celebrated the continual fertility of evergreens and the restorative powers of fire in heat and light, as the solstice rolls around yet again in our house it is the time of year to get out the Christmas tree and put the Fat Controller on top of it. We have three grandsons, you see, and this is becoming our tradition, in the manner that traditions have always slowly blended from past into present.

Last year, I attended one of the most heart-warming modern mid-winter rituals of all, one of those 'firsts' that only take place on a few Christmases within one lifetime: my 3 year old grandson’s first nativity play. The joy in the hall was palpable- the love and pride of parents, grandparents and great-grandparents, coming together with their memories of Christmas past and hopes for Christmas future. As my youngest grandson slept peacefully beside me, the tableau began with an exuberant announcement from a tiny girl in her very best dress: ‘Mary had a baby’ and I was reminded once again that the festival to mark the returning of the light has always been about new life, and new beginnings.

As the nativity unfolded, other perennial scripts began to unfold. For example, one of the Magi had his vision almost totally obscured by a hat malfunction but nevertheless continued resolutely in his role, one of the sheep lost nearly all of his wool and my grandson (being one of the stars who announce the birth of the baby Jesus) began to realise that his costume was entirely obscuring his hands. This became particularly apparent when he had difficulty joining in the Hokey-Cokey, sung by the entire cast assembled in the stable, because it was their favourite song.

A wonderful time was had by all, in a glorious, mash-up Christmas celebration- which is precisely what human beings in Britain have been doing since they arrived here, whether they called their winter festival Yule, Samhain or Christmas. Even Santa is not immune, morphing from the pre-Christian Green Man to the Christian St Nicholas (Santa Claus in Dutch, adopted into American English) and changing his green suit for ecclesiastical red, which eventually became instantly recognisable around the world through the advertising might of Coca-Cola.

While all of us are located in our life journeys by generation, ethnicity, gender and many other individual differences, what we can all share in the mid-winter festival is a celebration of beginnings, the hope in new life and the returning of the light: Here Comes the Sun. This year, in his comment that ‘do you know, granny, it’s Christmas every year’ as he donned his bigger boy inn keeper costume for this year’s pageant, my grandson demonstrated his deepening understanding of the winter festival customs of the culture in which he is immersed. And, as most grandparents do, I reflected on how swiftly another year had passed, and how quickly he was growing up.

Following a difficult year for many Western nations, I have become fascinated by some of the articles I have been reading online as the festive season draws closer this year, considering ancient traditions of dark stories for dark winter days and the growing fascination for the ‘anti-Santa’, Krampus. In a year in which my own family has experienced the tragic loss of some young friends, these darker cultural legends have been a part of my own stock taking of the year that has just passed, helping me to reflect on the complexity of light and the dark that are inevitably part of the tapestry of every human life, a process that we are now beginning to understand is important for the maintenance of mental health.

The fact that our winter festival can be so effectively tracked back into the distant past also seems to me to be quite comforting, illustrating the continuity between generations across millennia. And this year, as midnight chimes on the 21^st December and yet again, we move slowly back into the light, I will be contemplating the long line of ancestors who took time out from the joys and sorrows of the human existence that we all share to celebrate this perennial event within the culture of time and place in which they were located.

This year instead of sending Christmas cards, we have donated to two charities to remember the three young friends we lost in 2017:

The Bradley Lowery Foundation  

The Forever Tribute Fund in memory of Heidi and Isabella Renton

Teaching and Social Reform: The Odd Couple?

When I started my studies nearly 30 years ago, and realised that the subject that most interested me was the development and learning process undertaken by human beings, I hoped that, in my future, I would be able to forge a career teaching and researching in this area. In my mind’s eye, I saw classrooms, lecture theatres and libraries, practical research and contributing to a steady progression from what we knew in the last quarter of the twentieth century to what we would know in the first quarter of the twenty first. I did not imagine myself in my late 50s engaging in various campaigns to prevent early years education heading back to the days where tiny children were expected to sit at desks and learn by rote, and I am still surprised to find myself in such a society.

I recently read a speech made by veteran American child development expert Nancy Carlsson-Paige, and found her echoing my own feelings:

I have loved my life’s work – teaching teachers about how young children think, how they learn, how they develop socially, emotionally, morally. I’ve been fascinated with the theories and science of my field and seeing it expressed in the actions and the play of children. So never in my wildest dreams could I have foreseen the situation we find ourselves in today. Where education policies that do not reflect what we know about how young children learn could be mandated and followed.... In this twisted time, young children starting public pre-K at the age of 4 are expected to learn through “rigorous instruction”... never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined that we would have to defend children’s right to play.

In England, the latter half of 2017 has been a particularly difficult period in this respect. First of all, the DFE announced that they wished to instigate ‘baseline’testing for four year olds, a topic that I considered from a child development perspective in the TES article ‘Is Baseline missing the bigger picture?’. OFSTED then published a document entitled ‘Bold Beginnings’, which communicated an intention to introduce guidelines for the Reception year at school to become more closely aligned to Key Stage 1 in the National Curriculum. This is a particularly frustrating development for those of us who remember the introduction of the Curriculum Guidance for the Foundation Stage for Reception in 2000 as a response to the ‘too much too soon’ problems that arose from the incompatibility of the National Curriculum with 49 month old children, amongst the world’s earliest school entrants, arriving the month after their fourth birthday.

My latest blog on the LTU blog site considers the additional problems that Baseline testing will pose for the 30% of British children who are exposed to the additional stress of living in families whose income places them below the official poverty line. Famously, Nelson Mandela commented that 'The true character of society is revealed in how it treats its children'. When I started my studies all those years ago, I thought that as a nation, we had steadily progressed along this pathway over the previous few centuries; however over the years, my studies and most recently, the research I undertook for my chapters in Everyday Social Justice and most particularly, Early Years Pioneers and made me think rather more deeply about this prospect. 

In reading about social reformers Johann Henrich Pestalozzi and Margaret McMillan who became teachers, industrialist Robert Owen who became an educationalist and social reformer, pioneering female physician Maria Montessori who became a teacher and social reformer and teacher Loris Malaguzzi who became a psychologist and social reformer, I realised that perhaps history is not quite as linear as my younger self had perceived it to be, and that in negotiating the mixture of roles in which Carlsson-Paige and I find ourselves, we are actually in very good company.

Perhaps that indefinable line between teaching, researching and campaigning is something that all who engage or aspire to engage in education should more explicitly contemplate prior to and throughout their time in practice, particularly how these different but intertwined identities might eventually fuse together in the more mature stage of an individual’s career. As poet Robert Frost comments:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,  

But I have promises to keep,  

And miles to go before I sleep,  

And miles to go before I sleep.

Merry Christmas everyone; and here’s to defending UNCRC article 31* in 2018.

*UN Children’s Rights on Leisure, Play and Culture

The Psychological Historian

Why ‘the psychological historian’? Well, to effectively explain my own research focus, I need to go back nearly thirty years to the start of my first degree studies. In those days, Open University students had to begin with a multi-disciplinary “foundation course” and when I completed this, I found it hard to choose between psychology and history for the main focus of my degree, as I was required to do. Psychology won in the end, and over the course of that degree, I eventually followed a developmental psychology pathway. 

A few years after I graduated with a BSc (Hons) in Psychology, I was invited to become an Open University tutor; this meant I was able to study their programmes free of charge, which was how over the following twenty years I was eventually able to add a BA (Hons) Open (History and Sociology), an MEd and an MA History to my CV.

I completed my PhD at Leeds Metropolitan University (now Leeds Beckett) in the early 2000s, with a study of the learning that a sample of children aged 4-6 experienced in active, social free play. At this time, the curriculum advice for schools, and eventually for early years providers was becoming more and more directive; this set up a dichotomy for me, having spent nearly four years observing the immense amount that children learn from activity that is completely free from adult direction. Based on my knowledge of developmental psychology, I am convinced that much contemporary practice in education, particularly in the early years, is poorly conceived due to a lack of understanding of human development amongst policy makers. I regularly blog on this topic in the Huffington Post.

After publishing several articles relating to my PhD research, I became interested in the origins of child-centred practice, and it was this that led to me to register with the Open University for an MA by research in history, focusing upon the life and work of Margaret McMillan, one of the founders of modern early years education and care practice. This led to subsequent publications, including my book, Early Years Pioneers in Context: Their lives, lasting influence and impact on practice today.  I have also drawn upon the history of children’s rights in one of the chapters that I contributed to my latest co-edited book, Everyday Social Justice: Perspectives for the 21^st Century. 

  

Early Years Pioneers in Context explores pioneers in both the UK and the US and I am currently further developing my research into these links, in particular the work of Abigail Eliot, who founded the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development at Tufts University in Boston. Eliot’s first exposure to early years practice was as a student at Margaret McMillan’s nursery in Deptford during the 1920s.  I carried out some research in the Abigail Eliot archive at the Schlesinger Library at Harvard the last time that I was in Boston, and hope to extend this in the future.

It is clear that a strong thread of what I term ‘developmentally-informed practice’ underpins my research focus. Debates relating to human development and practice informed by this concept has both a long history and a high level of currency, particularly in the light of recent policy developments. For example, the recent DFE publication Bold Beginnings is clearly intended as a document to pave the way for formal education to effectively begin for children at the age of 4 in state-funded English school, a policy that is not supported by empirical or theoretical research in either the psychological or historical paradigm as I outlined in my article Is Baseline missing the Bigger Picture? 

When I taught in school (psychology, sociology and history), principally due to the way that I (very occasionally) taught history, my colleagues used to joke that I was ‘the psychological historian’. It is also a fairly apt description of how I orient to my research, which has become increasingly interdisciplinary. Over the past decade it has become increasingly clear to me that human beings of different generations grapple with many of the same existential problems, and that an overview of the history of a particular issue can help to avoid the same mistakes being made over and over again. 

I have also seen fabulous projects that develop from interdisciplinarity, such as ‘The Ordered Universe’ . In conclusion, I agree with Robert Twigger that ‘by being more polymathic, you develop a better sense of proportion and balance’. I therefore look forward to continuing with my psychological/ historical research in the future, and using this blog to reflect upon my progress.