Reggio Emilia: A Triumph for Maternalism

Maternalism in the Present 

I reached one of those sad watersheds in my life in February: my mother died. She didn’t have covid; she had Alzheimers for nearly a decade, she was ninety-two, and her passing was not unexpected. But as always, such events give rise to reflection. In 2010 as she first began to decline into her final illness, I dedicated my book ‘The Early Years Professional’s Complete Companion’ to her, commenting

‘My mother was born two days after British women finally achieved the franchise on the same basis as men: what a long way both you, and we have travelled in your lifetime.’

Optimistic words. But how far have we really travelled, as women, particularly in our role as mothers?

This is something I explored in one of my chapters in ‘Everyday Social Justice’ in 2019, from the perspective that while women engaging in paid work outside the home gradually became more normalised by socio-political changes in the last quarter of the twentieth century, they still faced a formidable level of social control, particularly in their role as mothers, feeling squeezed between the demands of paid work and family labour, whilst being relentlessly evaluated in both roles; an issue that has grown with the advent of mass online media and social media.

In 2019, Yinka Olusoga and I questioned:

‘A culture of performativity and compliance... make[ing] teachers, children and parents alike feel that they are compelled to comply with its demands...broadcast[ing], in the manner of Star Trek’s Borg collective, ‘Resistance is futile’ – a message designed to ensure mass capitulation.’

McRobbie writes of a “mediated” maternalism which has resulted in ‘previous historical affiliations between social democracy and feminism which aimed to support women as mothers [being] dismantled and discredited’ (McRobbie 2013, p.128).

“Maternalism” (Koven 1993) is a communal alliance between those who work together (including men) to support the well-being of young children, particularly those from socio-economically deprived backgrounds. Its origins track back into history; but at one point in the past, it briefly burned brightly on the national stage, before sinking back into near oblivion in the wake of the Great Depression.

Maternalism in the Past 

During the early 1920s, as the rights of women were being hotly debated in Parliament, Inverness-born Margaret McMillan, the founder-manager of an internationally celebrated nursery school, brought together an alliance of apparently powerful women- Queen Mary (1867-1963) and the first two women to serve as MPs in the House of Commons, wealthy socialite Conservative Nancy (Lady) Astor (1879-1964) and committed feminist Liberal Margaret Winteringham (1879-1955) to put the case for state-funded nursery schools on the national agenda (Jarvis and Liebovich 2016).

But despite the apparently high status of this alliance, the venture proved to be perilous, and forms the basis for the insecure status that many early years settings endure in the present. McMillan’s efforts to re-create her practice in a national network of nursery schools did not meet with success due to lack of funding forthcoming from the government, and her sense of failure blighted the final years of her life (Jarvis and Liebovich 2016)

In 1932, the year after McMillan’s death, her ex-student, Miriam Lord, Superintendent (head teacher) of Lilycroft Nursery in Bradford led a protest against Bradford Education Authority’s decision to impose a limit of one-third of a pint of milk a day upon children in their nursery schools. It is a situation that continues today, nearly a century later, in the £20 per week benefit cuts recently imposed by another Conservative government, in an era where 31% of the nation’s children are officially designated as ‘poor.’

Lord’s nursery was located in an area of great socio-economic deprivation where poverty-related childhood illnesses such as rickets were rife, and for several years she had been allocating one pint per day to each child, to use with cereals and to drink throughout the day.

She appealed to Nancy Astor, to put her case to Parliament. Astor obliged, but was over-ruled by the government when the Conservative chairman of the Bradford Elementary Schools sub-committee appealed to the wholly male leadership team of the Conservative government. Lord’s biographer, Ruth Murray (1993, p.12) commented ‘on reading through Hansard one can practically hear the groans of dismay ... whenever [Astor] raised the topic of nursery education’.

Miriam Lord was subsequently left to the mercy of Bradford politicians, who demoted her from superintendent of a nursery school to assistant mistress of a nursery class located within an infant school, a post in which she remained until her retirement in 1944 (Jarvis 2016; Murray 1993).

So, has maternalism ever won any resounding victories? For this we have to look to a different historical era, to an education system that arose from the ashes of World War II, conceived and actioned by female activists in Northern Italy, seeking a better future for their young children.

In the aftermath of war: a triumph for maternalism
Five days after the Nazi surrender in 1945, the women of Reggio Emilia in Northern Italy determined to build a school for their young children between the ages of three and seven. They were members of two organised associations of women, the Union of Italian Women (UDI), an anti-fascist association founded in 1944, and the Catholic Italian Women’s Centre, created in 1945 (de Haan et al 2013).

Together with young teacher Loris Malaguzzi, the mothers of Reggio Emilia formulated a plan to create their own early years education system in which their children were not required to passively and obediently memorise and regurgitate ‘lessons;’ but to develop self-awareness, intolerance of injustice, a sense of equality and the confidence to stand up to an overbearing state or religious institution (Wortham 2013). In this way, they proposed, Italians would never be subjugated and led into disaster as they had been by Mussolini’s fascist regime.

Over several years, the mothers and teachers of Reggio Emilia worked together to produce a model of a child as strong, powerful and competent, confident to develop and explore original ideas and theories in collaboration with others, under the guidance of adults. Children aged between three and seven brought their own original questions into the classroom, from which teachers launched a programme of research around a topic agreed by the group. For example, a question like ‘how does the water get into the tap?’ would result in a range of discovery activities around plumbing, rainfall, water treatment centres and a study of the history of sanitation, amongst other potential lines of investigation.

The Reggio Emilia early years framework, which endures and has spread around the world, has no standardised testing system or fixed curriculum; teachers work by researching topics and learning about them alongside the children. The children are fully aware that adults don’t know everything, but that their greater experience enables them to act as lead researchers in project work.

Teachers’ professional evaluation is conducted on the basis of portfolios produced on the topics that they have researched with the children, which includes examples of children’s work. Adults work collegiately within the Reggio Emilia system, with additional input from parents and local communities, who are welcomed into the classroom to share existing expertise.

What now for Maternalism?

As a contributor to Scotland Upstart’s ‘Play is the Way’ manifesto (currently a candidate for a Nursery World award) and an emerging fiction writer currently in the process of publishing a novel rooted in my Scottish ancestry, I am now increasingly hopeful that a similar early years revolution may be emerging in Scotland, rising from the ashes of Brexit and Covid and fuelled by the movement towards Scottish independence.

Scotland has made plans to adopt the UNCRC into their policy for children and families, which has sadly but predictably been challenged by the UK Government, which has now all but lost the leading role it played in children’s rights in the post World War II period. A United Nations challenge to the Commission on Racial and Ethnic Disparities report stands to have a heavy, negative impact on equality and diversity policies for children. There are also plans afoot for September 2021 to introduce a new Early Years Foundation Stage curriculum in England which emphasises rote memorisation, and an entry SAT for all England’s four-year-olds. ‘Baseline’ is a highly flawed data-gathering exercise, which will negatively impact on the youngest pupils in a year when families will still be recovering from the ravages of the pandemic. Sadly, the Westminster government has lost its way.

Scotland, by contrast has already explored the Reggio Emilia framework, and how it might be applied to a new nursery education phase for three to seven year olds. Is it possible that Scotland will provide a beacon in the British Isles, rekindling the flames that were previously extinguished by “malestream” politics? I would like to think, the journey that began for women, and for their young children, at the time of my mother’s birth is still alive in the land of our ancestors and will continue to shine the light that shows the way for those still stumbling in the dark.

What Now For Childhood?

As we now hopefully leave the era of extreme lockdowns behind us and reflect on the huge disturbance that has impacted on England’s education system, due to its excessively rigid curriculum, the time has come to reflect very honestly about issues of school, curriculum, pedagogy and ‘not school’ in children’s lives. And in a world where we will have to learn to live with Covid, we need to rethink what patterns of provision will best serve children and families’ needs, going forward. Hopefully, parents and older children’s voices will be strongly heard in such a discussion. It is after all, the parents’ tax money that is being used for state funded children’s services, and the children’s future that is at stake in terms of the way that they are cared for and educated.

I have written many referenced pieces around this topic, most recently about the nature of and history of pedagogy and issues emergent from the ways in which children’s behaviour is dealt with in schools. I’ve written a blog about some feedback I received from parents relating to their children’s engagement in learning activities on lockdown, and another about my acute concerns about the ways in which a curriculum for older children is now being used to remould the current early years framework. This is not going to be a blog of this nature. It is going to be a short commentary on a key issue for children’s services in England in a post-COVID-19 world, and an invitation to discuss.

There have been endless discussions about the nature of pedagogy dating back into antiquity. On social media, these have evolved, like many other fundamental questions about human life, into a format in which individuals take entrenched positions and use it as a topic around which to rage, and through which to evoke political rhetoric.

Perhaps then, we could take a step back and consider that ‘school’ was only a feature in a few highly privileged children’s lives prior to the industrial revolution, just over 200 years ago. This is not to say that school is not necessary in a modern rapidly advancing technological society; it most certainly is. But all our discussions about what children do from day to day seem to have become fixated upon what they do at school. This seems quite dysfunctional when we consider what human beings actually are: linguistic primates who have evolved to learn, particularly in early childhood, largely through play.

The out-of-school elements of children’s lives in the UK prior to the last two decades of the twentieth century were very different to the lives of contemporary children. Whilst the schooling of the past was frequently boring, mechanical and encased within harsh disciplinary regimes, children had another arena that they inhabited during their everyday lives which was at least as important to them as school, and sometimes more so. The vast majority of them engaged in many hours of collaborative free play in streets, wooded areas, beaches and etc around the area in which they lived, using features of the environment as ‘loose parts’. The folklore of children’s play in the past has been extensively studied, notably by Iona and Peter Opie who, during the mid-twentieth century, wrote many books about children’s free play and folklore.

But things gradually changed over the 1980s and 90s. As Upstart Scotland proposes:

‘There isn’t one simple reason that children don’t play out anymore. The build-up of road traffic, break-down of local communities and changes in parents’ working patterns are all implicated, as are the ready availability of indoor sedentary entertainment and a generally more fearful climate (probably related to occasional horrifying media stories about abduction).’

Upstart Scotland (2018, online)

The emphasis on highly adult directed behaviour and learning that grew slowly since the advent of the National Curriculum in England in 1988, and gathered speed under the post-2010 Department for Education in England also had the result of reducing breaks in the school day in which children could play in relative freedom within their school playgrounds. This is a phenomenon also seen in the United States, in response to similar initiatives.

In 2007, American educational researchers Henley, McBride, Milligan, and Nichols from Arkansas State University commented:

‘The playground at Maple Street Elementary School is quiet these days. The only movements on the swing sets are a result of a strong west wind edging the swings back and forth. The long lines that once formed for trips down the sliding boards are empty. There are no softball or kickball games nor are there any games of tag or duck-duck- goose being played…. No, Maple Street Elementary School is not closing. It is squeezing every minute of the school day to meet the mandates of the [2001] No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB)... Maple Street Elementary School is a metaphor for elementary schools across the nation.... With all the diversity among Maple Street’s student body, the one commonality is that each student has affective and social needs that, according to some, are being compromised.’

The collective result has been that, even prior to Covid-19 lockdown, contemporary children in these societies are far more inclined than their ancestors to move from one adult organised activity to another, and particularly in the recent pandemic situation, spend many hours online, associating with each other in artificial, programmed environments in which a lot of human signalling in communication is missing. This is problematic for both social and physical development, and of great concern when it comes to increasing obesity amongst children.

The emergent question is therefore whether the holistic development of modern children is far more constricted by ‘exam factory’ schooling than that of children from previous generations. This is a crucial issue that is seldom raised in the endless discussions about what schooling should and should not be. Perhaps then, our most important consideration is more fundamental: the possibility that the pursuit of a healthy human life should not make school the entire focus of children’s lives, any more than it should make working life the entire focus for adults.

It may be because ‘school’ has increasingly filled the frame within which we discuss children and childhood that we are not looking at all potential answers to the increasingly polarised debate in which we find ourselves. A way out of this deadlock would be not to begin with the concept of school, but with the concept of childhood. From that point, we would gain a wider perspective from which to discuss what parts school and other pursuits might play in producing adults who have a highly fluid, problem solving approach, an ability to think ‘in the moment’, to work well both independently and in collaboration with other people, and to remain calm, courteous yet robust in competitive situations.

It is important to understand that children’s peer interaction experiences must include opportunities to develop the ability to decipher primate signalling such as facial expression and ‘body language’. We need to be mindful that many of these abilities are emergent from independent participation in collaborative free activity; they do not emerge from sitting in a classroom, closely tracking a teacher and memorising ‘facts’, or through adult social ‘training’ initiatives or harsh disciplinary interventions. One of the most important lessons we need to learn as human beings is how to flexibly collaborate, cooperate and compete with each other in fast moving, organic situations. These can only emerge from independent interactions with other human beings in childhood, in which learning how to regulate our own behaviour amongst peers plays a very important part in the development of essential social skills.

If we could fully recognise our own humanity in this way, we would be able to consider services for children and families with a greater degree of clarity. While school- and teachers- are inevitably an important piece of the jigsaw of childhood development and learning, there is far more to holistic child development. Mass schooling is only a few centuries old. And while it will continue to be a significant part of a modern childhood as preparation for a literate, numerate and technological society, it will never be able to supply everything that developing human beings need.

We need to look back to our roots as linguistic primates who heavily rely upon complex social skills to thrive in the collaborative and competitive cultures that we create. From this perspective we will be more able to realise that a childhood spent being closely directed by adults whilst sitting at a school desk and communicating with peers remotely in online environments where all but word-based signalling clues are missing simply cannot address the full spectrum of human developmental needs.

Once this point is clear within our collective consciousness, we will be more able to effectively discuss how to facilitate the best possible childhood for the nation’s youngest citizens, and through this, to nurture mentally and physically robust adults to manage their lives within a complex globally networked society.

The Narrative of Curriculum

As the 2020-2021 school year draws to a close, early years settings are making their final preparations to engage with the new Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) for England, from the beginning of next term. It contains many amendments that have caused a furore amongst the Early Years community. I have already raised my overall concerns with the trajectory of England’s Early Years framework towards a highly top-down emphasis in another blog on this site, so here I would like to raise a specific and more abstract concern: that of narrative.

Where the 2017 EYFS proposed that children should ‘develop their own narratives and explanations by connecting ideas or events’ (p.11), its equivalent in the new framework is ‘demonstrate understanding of what has been read to them by retelling stories and narratives’ (p.13) and ‘show an ability to follow instructions involving several ideas or actions’ (p12). And while the 2017 document considers stories as an important part of children’s education in the context of ‘experiences…stories or events.’ (p.10), the 2021 document places more emphasis upon children ‘retelling’ stories (p.13) ‘perform[ing]’ songs, rhymes, poems and stories’ (p.15) and more generally constructs knowledge as emergent from reading rather than from practical experience. It also ignores multi-media engagement, as technology has been completely dropped from the Early Learning Goals and, indeed, from the EYFS document entirely; it had six mentions in the 2017 iteration, but none in 2021.

The way the term ‘narrative’ is used in the 2021 document seems to indicate that those who wrote it believe that the term is interchangeable with ‘story’, but this is a grave error. While narrative is overarching, stories are more local and specific. This misunderstanding is at the heart of cultural narrowing by the most dominant echelons of society, muting less powerful voices via a mainstream focus on ‘retelling’ and ‘performance’ of their own cultural interpretation of events, pushing other communities’ interpretations to the fringe. This process is explained in detail by David Olusoga. This is highly relevant to early years practice, because one of the roles of early childhood education in a multi-cultural society reliant upon an international, technologically connected economy must be to take children on the first steps of a journey to the complex understanding that there are many stories within the shared narratives of the ‘global village’ that they will inhabit as mid twenty first century adults. It is therefore very worrying to see that the new EYFS is highly likely to erode this process.

My PhD was focused upon narrative and storying. I studied rough and tumble play in children aged four to six; a spontaneous activity in children that evokes the physical play styles of earlier primate species. However, human beings add cohesive narrative to make ‘human sense’ of the activities in which they are engaged (Jarvis 2007), because we are a linguistic species whose survival depends upon making sense of the world through narrative and ‘storying.’ This is reflected in the fact that the ‘once upon a time’ concept is present within nearly every human language on Earth. Chasing and catching games are found amongst children across the world, for example in societies such as that of the Zhun-Twa (!Kung) hunter-gatherer society in the Khalahari Desert and amongst the diverse, ancient cultures in Oaxaca, Mexico. The game is familiar to generations of British children as ‘he’, ‘tig’ or ‘tag’, depending on regional origin, to Spanish children as ‘El Dimoni’ and to Japanese children as ‘Oni’, both of which translate to ‘demon’, signifying the underlying play conflict in the game.

In summary, the chasing and catching narrative endures through time and from culture to culture, but the specific story that children attach to the activity varies. For example the children I observed commonly scripted their play as ‘superheroes catching bad guys’, whilst such play I recalled from my own mid twentieth century childhood was commonly scripted with stories created around Allied and German armies fighting in the two world wars. Only one generation later, this story had entirely disappeared, but the chasing and catching narrative endured, underpinned by more contemporary stories. The process of narrative constancy amidst story fluctuation is illustrated over time in many other ways; for example, the ever-changing face of the hero within the perennial ‘hero’s journey’ tale. One of the first European written versions relates to Odysseus sailing the Aegean in wooden ships, which then moved through many guises in many cultures over the centuries to the most recent American story of Luke Skywalker traversing the galaxy in his X-Wing fighter and the Millennium Falcon, which has only just reached its conclusion in the final Star Wars film.

Given the wealth of knowledge that we have about the rich, ancient process of human storying, why would the new iteration of the EYFS seek to restrict young children to ‘retelling’ ‘following instructions’ and ‘performing’? For this we have to focus upon the ways in which it has been aligned with the current iteration of the National Curriculum, which is firmly rooted in Michael Gove’s understanding of the theories of American education academic E. D. Hirsch. This is somewhat confusing from the start as ‘the best which has been thought and said’ which is often quoted by policy makers in connection to Hirsch is in fact a quotation from the writings of the Victorian British poet Matthew Arnold whose name does not appear in the index of any of Hirsh’s most commonly referenced books. However, it is most certainly the case that Hirsch created a list of ‘what Americans need to know’ in the appendix of his book Cultural Literacy (1988, pp.152- 215). It is interesting to peruse, then to consider which elements of the content would or would not be what Britons ‘need to know’ (if indeed, ‘Britons’ can be lumped together under one umbrella in this manner). And from that premise, a fundamental problem thus emerges from narrowly specifying what counts as ‘essential knowledge’, particularly with respect to the arts and humanities.

Hirsh’s proposal created a storm in the US as soon as it was published. Estes et al. (1988) commented:

‘Hirsch’s major argument is based on the assumption that the foundation of literacy is the ability to recall and associate a superficial level of knowledge… Hirsch inadvertently represents the basis of literature as the pursuit of trivia… Before a person can acquire culture from information, however, that information must be set in a context.’

This is particularly so for the youngest children in educational settings, who are only just emerging from the family and community into which they were born to enter the wider community. To eventually become competent adults within this milieu, it is essential that they learn about the diverse, globally connected culture that they will inherit. This process starts from a teacher engaging with the stories that are present within the environment from which the child originates, and subsequently supporting him/her to connect these to the wider narratives of national and international society. This is accomplished via a process that is known as ‘sustained shared thinking’ (SST) within early years practice, which I have explained at length in another article, also considering the problems created by the fact that SST is a term conspicuous by its absence in OFSTED documentation for early years practice.

Long before the advent of curriculums or even of schools, the Xhosa people of Southern Africa developed a process whereby people engaged in creating new stories by drawing upon underpinning narrative in their traditional oral storytelling tradition called iintsomi. The purpose of iintsomi is to create an original, cohesive, engaging story from pieces of existing folklore: ‘there is no concept of a fixed or correct text in the iintsomi tradition’ (Gough 1990, p.205). In this way, Xhosa children are supported to draw upon existing narratives and develop original stories rooted within them, from the basis of their own experiences. If only the current English curriculum was so inclusive and enlightened, rather than so tightly focused upon ‘teaching and absorbing’ (Hirsch 1988). Indeed, Hirsch’s concept of ‘validity in interpretation’ (1967) requires extreme passivity in the learner, negating the importance of creative engagement with the contents of a story.

So, the existing literature indicates that the human impetus to actively engage with story and narrative begins before children start to read and is present in oral storytelling within non-literate societies. The ability to re-interpret a narrative, to ‘story’ is a fundamental, biologically primary skill, which develops within individuals, within groups of playing children and thence within cultures as part of our unique individual and collective human development process (Jarvis 2007). The removal of this process from the national early years framework is therefore a very serious issue, because being apprenticed within the natural human capacity for storying within a community is a fundamental and ancient component of a natural human childhood.

What does Hirsch himself have to say about the way in which his theories have been utilised in the English National Curriculum? In 2015, the TES interviewed him, reporting that Michael Gove, then Secretary for Education had in fact never spoken to Hirsch during the time in which he was developing the 2014 ‘knowledge’ curriculum that has now clearly extended its tentacles into the EYFS. Most worryingly, Hirsch proposed ‘I have ended up being a poster boy for the Right and that is worrisome…From the very first day, I was misinterpreted by both the proponents and the adversaries.’

Hirsch proposed to the TES that universities should be in charge of curriculums rather than governments. He is quoted as saying: ‘it would be astonishing to me if there are schools that are just pumping knowledge into kids by rote…’ The evidence therefore suggests what is happening here is a similar process to that which I recently described in a TES article outlining the simplistic misappropriation of psychological theories in education, and the negative effects upon the hapless theorists who are misquoted and misunderstood by policy makers.

The Schools Minister Nick Gibb calls for ‘a society in which we all understand each other better’, but is currently pursuing a route which will lead to young children being programmed to ‘retell’ ‘perform’ and ‘follow instructions’ rather than bestowing them with the full human capacity of ‘connecting ideas and events’. It will therefore not have the result that he proposes. As Estes et al., (1988) propose:

Telling is not teaching, told is not taught… if learning is defined only as those things that objective pencil and paper tests can measure, then only teaching that produces successful scores on those tests is relevant…[but] a dictionary of associations and a test of achievement will not enable students to create a context, it will only exacerbate their inability to do so.

Story sharing in order to learn more about one another and to explore cohesive, shared underpinning narratives such as truth, honesty and justice is the route to deep social understanding. Human beings, as inherently social creatures, must be actively engaged in this process within their first years in education to feel that they belong to one another, and that all are equally valued in the wider community. This is the concept with which New Zealand began to construct its highly successful early years framework ‘Ti Whariki’ (1996), a Maori phrase which translates to ‘a woven mat on which all can stand’.

As such I implore the Department for Education to withdraw this poorly conceived EYFS document forthwith and to reissue it in an iteration that fully recognises our rich, multi-cultural society and its intricate connections with the wider world. The very best that we can do for our youngest citizens is to bestow the gift of iintsomi upon them; the ability to independently and creatively ‘story’ within an underpinning narrative. In an increasingly uncertain world, we need to open our children’s horizons to independent, creative, problem solving thought, not narrow them to ‘retelling, performing and following instructions.’ This will prepare them to weave their own generation’s mat upon which all will finally be able to stand as fully equal citizens, regardless of class, race, ethnicity, culture of origin, disability, belief, sexual orientation, age or gender.

References

Gough, D. (1990) The principle of relevance and the production of discourse: evidence from Xhosa folk narrative. In B. Britton and A. Pellegrini (Eds), Narrative Thought and Narrative Language, pp.199-218. New Jersey: Laurence Ehrlbaum.



Hirsch, E. D. (1967) Validity in Interpretation. New Haven: Yale University Press.



Hirsch, E.D. (1988) Cultural Literacy. New York: Vintage.



Hirsh, E.D. (2006) The Knowledge Deficit. New York. Houghton Mifflin.



Hirsh, E.D. (2016) Why Knowledge Matters. Cambridge, MA. Harvard.