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.