The Multiple Identities of the Reception Teacher

Pedagogy and Purpose

Anna Cox, Gillian Sykes, Anna Cox, Gillian Sykes

• Publisher: Learning Matters
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781473968189
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Early Childhood Education

The Reception Year is a special time for children and their teachers.

This text celebrates the uniqueness of the Reception Year and the unique role of the Reception Teacher. This is a book for those aspiring to be reception teachers, those new to teaching in reception and for those with a love for the reception year. This text addresses many key features of working with 4 and 5 year olds in the reception class environment. These include:

• creating a positive learning environment that values every child
• involving parents and carers in children?s learning
• understanding about child development to support your role
• spreading the word on the importance of early years teaching and learning
• discovering what works for you and your class
• creating effective learning spaces and resources
• harnessing the learning potential of the outdoor environment
• taking risks and challenging yourself and your class
• being the best teacher for your class this year and in the years to come

Working in Reception you are not just a teacher. You will also be a carer, a collaborator in learning, a partner in play, a creator of magical environments, a leader of your team and an observer of the creativity and skills of young learners.This text will help you to understand your role and be the best Reception teacher you can be.

1 Time Travel, Kaleidoscopes and a Hat Shop

Anna Cox

Eleonora Teszenyi

In this chapter we will begin to consider:

• models and ideas about the identities and roles of a Reception teacher, including Bronfenbrenner's ecological systems theory and ‘the hierarchy of the heart and the head’;
• new ways of looking at the roles to support a personally negotiated understanding;
• child-centred pedagogical approaches and care-full practice;
• the social construction of the teaching role;
• the different hats teachers wear according to the roles they fulfil in children's lives.

Starting Points

The demands and pressures on the teaching profession are influenced by political change, and this cannot be avoided. The most successful Reception teachers fend off the favours and fancies that come about from this. Good teaching can become a contested notion in a climate of change and teachers need to be able to defend their own good practice. This will come from a strong sense of ‘who you are as a teacher’ and more specifically for the purposes of this book ‘who you are as a Reception teacher’. In this book the term multiple identities is used as a concept that portrays a range of personal and professional roles within an educational context. This poses the questions ‘what is identity?’ and ‘what is role?’. By identity we mean a sense of self, developed from experiences across a range of contexts – personal, professional and cultural, for example – which is ever evolving and changing through the life course. The notion of role is less dynamic and is the label given to a set of functions, and so is the practical and utilitarian aspect of identity. So, a Reception teacher can be seen to have a complex and interlinked set of identities and roles. In this chapter these ideas are explored and new ideas generated. It is important to remember that multiple identities are not fixed nor are they shared among Reception teachers. They evolve, are negotiated and change; they are deeply personal. Some of the features discussed in this chapter will resonate with you and others less so. Over time some of the features you relate to will take centre stage and then they will recede – who you are as a Reception teacher is always in flux. The value of discussing the many identities is to help individual teachers to identify and develop their own identity as a teacher of the Reception year. It should also help to reassure you that it is wholly appropriate that your work is an integral part of who you are as a person and as a professional.

Team talks and tasks

Ask everyone in your team to write down five words that capture parts of their roles in the Reception classroom. Share the lists and combine them to make a master list. Use this to help you to clarify your shared purposes in the classroom.

One of a number of existing models is proposed by Rose and Rogers (2012) who unpick the role of Early Years practitioners into components. They suggest Early Years practitioners act as: critical reflector, carer, communicator, facilitator, observer, assessor and creator. This ‘plural practitioner’ (p.5) has undoubtedly shaped our thinking. The roles that they propose are recognisable in Reception teachers but do not cover all that it means to be an effective Reception teacher. We have expanded some of the categories here and others are left for your consideration (facilitator, observer, assessor and creator). Their first component, the skill of reflection, will undoubtedly have been highlighted throughout your training. Once in practice you are more likely to wake up thinking about how to redesign your role-play area than to use a reflective model to do this – it will be in your blood! The second Rose and Rogers category, the Reception teacher as a carer, is explored more fully in a later section of this chapter, but at this point it is sufficient to say that caring about the children in your class will go alongside caring for them but must always be done in the context of a vision of the strong child, not one based on viewing the child as a collection of needs to be met. The next role in the list, the teacher as a communicator, is explored very fully in other chapters and so does not warrant much additional comment. The importance and diversity of communication does allow us to explore briefly just how skilful young children are at reading our faces. An often-mentioned expression is that ‘eyes are the windows of the soul’ – this is thought to be part of a quotation from Hiram Powers (an American sculptor, 1805–1873). He said ‘The eye is the window of the soul, the mouth the door. The intellect, the will, are seen in the eye; the emotions, sensibilities, and affections, in the mouth’. The children in your class will be very able to attend to your features and learn a lot about you and for some of them what they read there will set the tone for their day.

The Rose and Rogers model of Early Years practitioners can shed some light on what it is to be a Reception teacher but you are a distinct group among Early Years practitioners. Below, in the point to ponder, another model is reviewed and commented on, as a further step on the journey to unpick the multiple identities of the Reception teacher.

Point to ponder

Hiram Powers

Try to find an image of the sculpture ‘fisher boy’ by Hiram Powers. The figure is a nude holding a shell to his ear. Take a close look at the shell and at the child's face. Can you think of an activity for your children stimulated by this image or another of Hiram's works?

Hierarchy of needs to Hierarchy of the Heart and the Head

The well-known hierarchy of needs (Maslow, 1954) has been revisited by Robinson (2007, p.10) to support practitioners who work with the youngest children. Here we use the term ‘hierarchy of the heart and the head’ to describe this model and reflect on it from the perspective of Reception teachers. As can be seen from Figure 1.1 overleaf it rests on the personal passion of the Reception teacher; a person who has chosen and wants to work with the youngest children in the school context. Working with young children whom you care for should allow you to be your authentic self, to share with them the person that you really are. All Reception teachers are different and they manifest their personalities as teachers and as people in different ways. What is really important is that you should be the Reception teacher that you know you can and should be. This is one of the things that make the role both draining and sustaining, challenging and affirming. You may be the butt of jokes about playing all day in the sand or not being able to count to more than ten; prejudice about working with the youngest children still exists in schools. This is discussed more fully later.

This hierarchy of the heart and the head reveals a person who in their practice creates sensitive relationships and high quality interactions; understanding the link between education and care for children who may be away from their familiar adults for longer in a school day than they have ever been before. An ethos of edu-care and a child-centred playful pedagogy must be embraced by Reception teachers; both suit a Reception teacher both personally and professionally. This is where the personal and professional identity merges the most. Think, for example, about the sense of security demonstrated by young children to a degree where they call teachers ‘mummy’ and invite them to their house for a play or birthday party. This depth of relationship with a young child is a real privilege but not one that is widely understood by others. Care roles are not valued as highly as the roles associated with education even though the expectations are that children develop lifelong learning skills in their earlier years of schooling to ensure they become useful citizens of our society. Creating the balance between care and education within their pedagogical approach to children places demands on Reception teachers more so than those of any other year group.

Figure 1.1 The basis for the ‘hierarchy of the heart and the head’

Alongside all this, the heart and the head of our Reception teacher need to be full of secure knowledge of child development and in particular a deep and always evolving understanding of four year olds. The significance of the developmental understanding of four year olds is fully explained and explicitly stated in Chapter 2. The Reception teacher's application of pedagogy must be in line with a full understanding of the children in the Reception classroom. One of the phrases which draws out the importance of the work of the Reception teacher is that we should always consider children as ‘beings’ and not mere ‘becomings’, somehow less important and worthy of all that is best in the world than adults are. Focus always on a credit model of the child that relies on the understanding of children's strengths and interests and avoid the energy-sapping deficit model where the focus of attention is on what the children cannot do or have not developed yet.

As the model indicates, self-awareness too is crucial. It is essential partly because it is a precursor for self-assuredness and resilience in the politically changing world of education. In addition, it is essential because self-awareness gives reassurance to Reception teachers to rely on their instincts to do the best for and by the child. This is particularly needed because developmentally children in a Reception class are on such a broad spectrum. A resilient teacher, who is self-aware and self-assured, can interpret curriculum expectations and local or national drives/initiatives in light of what is best for the children who are actually in the class at any given time. They practise intuitively from a self-assured stance so they can justify decisions. You need to understand yourself from both a personal and professional perspective – as these aspects of identity play out strongly in the intimate relationships of the Reception classroom.

Nurturing the Reception teacher's soul is something we believe in strongly and it is part of the purpose of this book, so continuous professional development tops the hierarchy for the heart and the head. A model for the Reception teacher reflects the importance of this year in children's lives and the positive choices made to do this job. For the authors of this book the Reception year is full of vital opportunities, not something that happens between nursery or pre-school and the start of the National Curriculum. You will thrive most when you are driven by professional and pe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Publisher Note
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction to the Editors and Authors
• Introduction
• 1 Time Travel, Kaleidoscopes and a Hat Shop
• 2 Children at Four
• 3 You as an Advocate for Early Childhood
• 4 You as a Collaborator in Learning
• 5 You as Creator of the Learning Environment
• 6 You as a Landscape Architect
• 7 You as an Auditor of Children's Learning
• 8 You as a Partner in the Lives of Children, Families and Communities
• 9 You in a Team of Researchers
• 10 The Mirror in the Hat Shop
• Index