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Title of Learning Resource: Designing
children’s environments according to particular views of ‘the
child’: using student-created posters as alternative literacy practices
Name and email address: Mel Gibson and Kay Sambell mel.gibson@unn.ac.uk and kay.sambell@unn.ac.uk
University: Northumbria University
Key
Concepts/Threshold Concepts:
views of childhood, supporting students’ writing whilst working
with large groups, getting started with academic writing by using alternative
literacy practices, implications of theories of childhood, how children
are valued, theory/practice, working with/for children/young people.
Background: Module - Perspectives
on Childhood.
• Key theory module on BA Joint Honours in Childhood Studies
The module introduces first year undergraduates to key theoretical perspectives
on the academic study of childhood. 120 students, many of whom are ‘non-traditional’,
lack confidence and are not sure what to expect.
Aims
Issues
We use the learning resources below (thumbnail pen-portraits of different
views of the child) as a central part of an activity which helps students
begin to appreciate the importance of, and differences between, key concepts
of ‘the child,’ many of which are tacitly held, and seem,
at face value, to be simply ‘common-sense.’
We are keen to encourage students, as early as possible, actively to practice
the problematic business of meaning-making within the course, in ‘low-stakes’
formative situations, well before it ‘counts’ in their summative
assignments. We have deliberately chosen a playful, graphic, cartoon-like
style of utterance (collaborative posters) as the medium for this task.
This casts us, as tutors, less in a traditional tutor-evaluator role who
passes judgment on the student’s writing as finished product, but
instead ideally enables us, as well as students’ peers, to explicitly
engage together in the ‘construction of text as meaning making in
progress’ (Lillis, 2001, 44).
The thumbnail pen-portraits upon which our poster activity is based are
downloadable and can be used or adapted for teaching sessions.
What we are trying to achieve
It is important that students who are new to our degree begin to think
about, question and perhaps confront some of the taken-for-granted views
of ‘the child’ which they bring to their study, and which
underpin everyday conversations, practices and media debates about childhood.
We want to enable students to take the first steps towards recognising
that the language surrounding childhood is not neutral, and, for example,
could be seen to imply a preferred set of practices for working with children.
Above all, what we are trying to achieve is to begin to establish a process
of analysing (rather than passively receiving) language, ideas and assumptions
about children and young people.
This approach is not something many of our students really expect when
they register on our degree, and some can see it as rather abstract and
divorced from their previous experiences of studying childhood or working
with (or caring for) ‘real’ children. The resource below is
simply designed to help them begin to get a feel for the diversity and
heterogeneity of views about childhood, paradoxically by showing them
some key differences between starkly opposing homogenised views of ‘the
child’. This enables them, in groups, to identify and apply key
ideas in authentic (simulated) contexts, by using the resource to design
different schools in line with different models of ‘the child’.
The overblown, exuberant and exaggerated nature of the representations
of schools they produce in response is key: their posters relate to recognisable
trends in the ‘real world’, but the relationship of ‘theory’
and ‘practice’ is actually much more subtle and complex, and
we explain that their course will help them think further about this.
Learning Resource
The following sets of descriptions (thumbnail pen-portraits) represent
different definitions of childhood which are consciously starkly different,
and overtly simplistic. They are broad stereotypes of childhood, and we
stress to students that these are just that: they represent some common
ways of thinking and talking about the child. They might often appear
as truisms in the everyday world in which students (and children) are
immersed, usually in a rather more jumbled and eclectic fashion than the
activity might, at least at face value, suggest. Nevertheless, we have
found that for students working in a new area it is usually important
to get the ‘big picture,’ firmly establishing this threshold
concept before moving on to the detail and inevitable complexity of the
field.
Thumbnail pen-portraits of the
child
The Romantic child
The popular view of the Romantic child is highly sentimentalised.
Children are perceived as sweet, innocent and playful creatures. Children
are seen as pure and unadulterated: a source of innocence, hope and goodness.
They are often associated with nature and the rural, natural world.
Here children’s qualities are seen as something adults would do
well to hold onto, offering a shield against cynicism, immorality and
the harsher realities of adult life. They are, however, valued in their
own right as children, not simply as adults in the making, because they
are viewed as naturally capable of a sense of awe and wonder that many
adults have lost.
Childhood is believed to be a special, precious time, almost a kind of
paradise. Theirs is a time to be protected, cherished and respected. Common
images of the Romantic child include children sitting on carved rocking
horses, playing in cornfields or other natural settings, eating apple
pie and playing with innocent and wholesome past-times, such as blowing
bubbles.
The Schooled Child
This view of the
child arguably began to emerge with force, at least in the UK, when compulsory
schooling was introduced in the mid-nineteenth century. Education was
seen as a means of improving society. Schooling was as much about teaching
children how to behave in a socially acceptable manner as it was about
learning how to write and read. Children became known as ‘pupils’
and all children, regardless of class and background, were expected to
attend school. School attendance officers were appointed to enforce this.
School sought to instil norms of behaviour, discipline and obedience.
The teacher was seen as the font of all knowledge and a bastion of authority.
Good children conformed to the school’s expectations. The schooled
child learned to respect authority, and any that didn’t could expect
physical punishment. Children were seen as being in need of a particular
kind of discipline and education.
From this viewpoint, an enormous financial investment has been made in
children, who then become seen as the mainstay of a stable democratic
and economic future.
The Delinquent Child
In this view of childhood,
children are seen as young monsters, which must be controlled. They are
represented as a threat to society and as creatures to be feared. Tight
discipline is required in all sectors of society, whether at home, school
or other institutions.
Common images of and references to the delinquent child allude to ‘youths’
‘hooligans’ or ‘hoodys’ (rather than children).
Youth crime is seen as being on the increase, and a nationwide crackdown
to obliterate it is seen as appropriate and, indeed, necessary. Citizens
are terrorised by media images of muggings, burglaries and street corner
gangs adding to a climate of fear of, rather than for, the young.
Parenting Orders and Anti Social Behaviour Orders are viewed as an important
way of keeping the delinquent, who is often viewed as male, plural (usually
found in gangs) and clothed in specific ways (currently seen as wearing
a hoody), in check, together with curfews and electronic tagging of young
offenders. Police forces will be called upon to target truants and stamp
out drug-related crime. Numbers of young people in secure accommodation
or even prisons is seen as very likely to increase.
The child as victim to be protected
From this viewpoint the child is someone who needs the protection of adults.
Children are seen as frail, vulnerable and incapable of making decisions
on their own behalf, because they are too young. The role of adults is
to guide and nurture them through their childhood.
Adult power over children is thus seen as benign, supportive, but quite
firmly held. Parents are regarded as being the best judges of what their
children need, and adult authority will be needed and used benignly to
prevent the child from harm, which may be caused by activities as diverse
as playing out in the streets, climbing trees, smoking or risk-taking.
Responsible carers are those who provide suitable toys for children, often
with an educational objective. Homework will be well-supported by good
parents, and good parents will limit children’s TV viewing, computer
gaming and online interactions. Adults should restrict children’s
access to inappropriate online material, and will carefully monitor children’s
activities, which will include installing routine surveillance mechanisms,
to guard children against the Internet and unsuitable TV stations: keeping
them safe from harm.
Outside the home, children of neglectful or abusing families will be quickly
removed to a more caring, protected environment. Those who work with children
will be screened to ensure they are not likely to perpetrate abuse, and
high standards of health and safety will be enforced. Stranger danger
will be regarded as an ever-present risk and surveillance systems installed
in the streets and shopping arcades to monitor children’s safety.
The child with rights
This view of childhood
arguably has its origins in the 1960s, with the beginning of the Children’s
Rights Movement, leading to the Year of the Child in 1979. Here the child
is viewed as an active citizen with rights. According to the United Nations
Convention on the Rights of the Child these rights include the right to
a name and an identity, to express views, to freedom of thought, to health
services, to a decent standard of living, to education, to leisure, recreation
and cultural activities, to protection of one’s privacy, to information
and to protection from abuse.
Here adults have a role in campaigning for and facilitating children’s
rights (e.g. via agencies such as the Children’s Rights Alliance
for England, ChildLine, appointing a Children’s Minister….).
Children are seen as having legitimate views of their own and as people
who should be respected.
The systematic inequalities between children and adults are questioned.
Children’s committees and youth parliaments are seen as important
aspects of the decision-making process at local authority and government
levels. School councils should have real powers to make decisions (such
as appointing staff, school rules) and spend money. Projects where children
are enabled to speak for themselves, carry out surveys, to hold meetings
and conferences would be common.
Sample Strategy
We ask students to work in small self selecting groups and, in class time,
we provide each group with flip-chart paper, pens and crayons with which
to draft a poster. Each group is also provided with one of the thumbnail
sketches (which we distribute, to make sure that there are posters produced
on each view of the child). Every group is then asked to design a school
according to the thumbnail sketch they have been allocated.
Here are a few illustrative examples of the sorts of posters our students
prepared:
The Romantic Child
The Schooled Child
The Delinquent Child
The Child as a Victim to be Protected
Once the posters are ready, students
can be invited (space permitting) to display them, and walk around viewing
the collection as a whole, noting any similarities, differences, and,
most importantly, questions they have for other students about the thinking
behind some of the features they have chosen to depict.
These can be all be fed back and discussed in depth in plenary, and used
to tease out some of the key issues (e.g. perimeter fences are usually
a key feature- are they to keep children in, or undesirable others out?
What is the role of adults, and why are they shown like that? What are
the roles of children? Uniform? Curricula? Resources? Rules- who makes
them?... and so on…. )
As an aside, it’s interesting that in our experience the students
who are assigned ‘The Child with Rights’ thumbnail pen-portrait
usually complain their job is much more difficult than the other views
of the child. Often they resort to lists of words, rather than physical
school designs, which is interesting and worth further discussion in plenary
in its own right. Why is it so tricky to represent a school along these
lines? How far do the word-lists they come up with represent a manifesto
rather than a visual or physical ‘reality’ (students in the
larger group will usefully pitch in at this stage with concrete educational
alternatives- such as Summerhill, Forest Schools, or others). How far,
as was recently the case in one of our recent sessions, do the word-lists
consciously draw upon the language of ‘Every Child Matters’,
and which aspects of ‘Every Child Matters’ seem most closely
to relate to which views of the child on their posters?
Advice to others who might be thinking of using this resource.
In large groups, of course, more than one poster on each thumbnail pen-portrait
is produced. This can be very useful, because posters on the same thumbnail
often reveal differences and varied interpretations, as well as key similarities.
This helps to introduce the interpretive complexity of language and meaning
making surrounding childhood. It offers a platform on which to build in
terms of developing students’ sense of the dynamic nature of a dialogic
view of ‘language as utterance’, in which ‘utterances
are neither unitary nor fixed, but embedded in socio-cultural practices’
(Lillis, 2001, 41). In this sense as tutors we hope, within the learning
environments we create, to model the extent to which, from our own personal
inter-disciplinary viewpoints, meaning making is dynamic and dialogic,
because this is central to the ways in which we approach the study of
childhood ourselves, and, therefore, central to the ways in which we encourage
our students to study and write.
It is also useful to encourage students to record any debates or anxieties
they had within their group whilst collaborating on their poster. Sometimes,
for instance, some individuals respond quite strongly, typically when
the view they are ‘meant’ to be representing militates against
their own values, attitudes and beliefs. This is useful to flag up as
an issue, as it helps begin to explain the difference between the ‘academic
I’ (Crème and Lea, 1997) who identifies, articulates and
discusses different viewpoints in relation to her/his own ideas and to
enable the student writer to reflect on them, as opposed to opinionated,
personal writing which doesn’t acknowledge diverse ways of seeing
the topic. In our experience, this is particularly challenging when teaching
and learning about childhood and takes time, support and space to develop,
perhaps because
1. Childhood is felt and experienced by students (like most of us) to
be intensely important, personal and emotionally charged
2. Students, arguably especially those from so-called ‘non-traditional’
backgrounds, are frequently perplexed, anxious and unclear about the issue
of the personal voice and the ways in which the ‘academic I’
or what Lillis (2001) calls ‘the I as part of a wider community’
(p.148) can be managed in their academic writing. Opening up frequent
and informal, even playful, opportunities for recognising and discussing
the challenges, and approaches to meeting these challenges, even at (or,
in our view, especially at) this early stage in students’ academic
careers could be a crucial way of allowing students to begin to explicitly
bring questions of the ‘relationships between language, social identity
and institutional practices’ (Lillis, 147) into our pedagogic interactions
with student-writers in the context of Childhood Studies.
3. Some students’ anxiety about writing ‘appropriately’
at university may best be approached, at least initially, not via formal
writing tasks, but by more playful, collaborative and varied performative
tasks, which in this context the poster hopefully suggests.
References
Crème, P. & Lea, M. (1997) Writing at University. Buckingham:
Open University Press..
Lillis, T (2001) Student Writing: Access, Regulation, Desire. London,
Routledge.
Sambell, K & Gibson, M. ‘Designing
children’s environments according to particular views of ‘the
child:’ using students alternative literacy practices’ in
The MEDAL Casebook, MEDAL Consortium (2006)
http://medal.unn.ac.uk/learning_resources/posterthumbnails.htm