Disaffection from School?

The Early Years

Gill Barrett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351980043
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation de la petite enfance

Originally published in 1989, the purpose of this book was to explore the nature and appearance of disaffection and alienation in young children and to seek to understand its significance. It deals with classroom interactions and adult expectations of children, and the context of historical and policy-related perspectives on schools as they relate to the under-8-year-olds.

Theories and assumptions about these young children are re-examined, leading to questions on interpretation of behaviours, the appropriateness of practices at the classroom, teacher education and policy levels, and the societal value that was placed on the schooling experience of young children at the time.

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Part I

Learning to be Disaffected

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1

A Child’s Eye View of Schooling

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Gill Barrett

This book is seeking to present a variety of perspectives on disaffection from school in order to gain a broader understanding of it. An essential element within these perspectives is that of the child as a learner in school but it is inevitably difficult to represent. In this chapter we explore this problem and seek to find a solution through recognising that children as thinking people make meaning of their experiences. School is recognised as a place in which children constantly have to face and respond to adult expectations. We conclude with pupils’ comments about their school experience and consider some questions about learning situations for young children.

Problems in Presenting a Child’s Perspective

As parents or teachers we are constantly faced with children’s understanding of the world particularly when obviously dissonant with our own. Children’s interpretations of how old their teachers are provide an explicit example of the differences between child and adult perceptions. What it is easy to forget is that children appear to have a complex understanding of schooling which adults have no immediate access to except through observing how they behave. Children’s perspectives, including their reasons and intentions, are important however. A number of educationalists have attempted to show how essential it is for adults to put aside their own conceptions in order to understand children’s experience and enable children to learn effectively. But to a large extent they have been ignored, misunderstood, misrepresented in action, or simply applied to one section of the school population. Montessori’s work for example is only seen as relevant to preschool children and Pestalozzi’s pioneering work became limited in application to younger children.

An implication we may draw from this is that adults do not find it easy to know their own perceptions of the world, and thus cannot readily put them aside, because they assume that their perception is the reality. We must question, therefore, adult theories of children which in effect create a particular reality of children. It follows that in this chapter we cannot roundly assert developmental ages, stages and associated children’s behaviour, as if they were representing children’s perspectives. Such theories have been created by adults who derived their ideas from disciplines or perspectives which are not based within the experience of the child, although they would claim to be based on it.

If in this chapter I am seeking to avoid those interpretations and descriptive analyses of children which make generalisations easy, I am left in a void of exploration to a large extent. This may sound rather dramatic but what I am trying to emphasise is that we still don’t know very much about the thinking and interpretations of the five to seven year old child, though we are beginning to realise this and are now devising methods that lead us forward. For example, child abuse cases have led to further development of interview techniques with children, and researchers and teachers are learning methods to enable children to communicate classroom experiences (Barrett, 1986b). This chapter reflects the tentative nature of the claim to present children’s perspectives while at the same time asserting that the child’s thinking and experience is vital to any appreciation of the issues of disaffection in classrooms.

Towards an Understanding of Children

One of the problems we have in understanding children in the early years of schooling is that we largely see them behaving, i.e., doing things, and we do not assume they can also talk to us about what they are doing. We are not taught within our education system to perceive behaviour as cognitive or higher order activity. Having taught Physical Education early in my career, it was not hard for me to make the shift of understanding to see that there are thoughts and intentions behind all the consistent actions of very young children.

During a period of research in schools (Barrett, 1984, 1986a) I was led to understand that regardless of age, no consistent changes in behaviour happened by chance and children had knowledge of what they were doing and why they were doing it, in their own or social terms. An example of such change in behaviour emerged when I was asking some six-year-olds what they liked about school because I had discovered that ‘like’ was akin to knowing, the thinking of something.

Nicky told me she now liked writing as well as reading and sums. ‘I used to write big’, she added by way of explanation for her change in attitude. ‘How did you manage not to write big?’ I asked. She thought for a moment. ‘I thinked to make it little. Helen (her friend) did little writing and I thinked to make mine little. Cos they wouldn’t understand if you did big writing up at the junior school would they.’

Similarly, an infant school child I had observed in the playgroup told me as I watched her drawing a cat (in response to a television story), that she knew how to do cats because her mum had taught her. She, looking across to her friend Kathy who was involved in drawing an apparently amorphous set of lines, said ‘Kathy hasn’t done cats yet’. In fact, as Kathy was responding to the task I think she was ‘doing cats’ but was drawing something of the quality of cats, i.e. the fur, rather than the stereotyped shape of cats. In these two examples the children were able to explain their changed behaviour and how they were able to do something that adults could see they could do. Other examples of pupils thinking which involved apparently little change in behaviour emerged in the research.

Individual children continued to engage voluntarily with a number of activities over a period of time, and in some instances over a year, and I came to recognise that this signalled a growing understanding even though to untutored eyes the behaviour or outcome appeared the same. I saw five- six- or seven-year-old pupils choosing to repeat work cards and remaining engaged in the task until they finally abandoned it and were just bored. I tested my understanding that they were thinking about and mastering different elements, when I observed another six-year-old still drawing space pictures after a year. To me they looked essentially the same. I asked him, ‘How does your thinking about space grow?’ He thought for a few seconds without showing any signs of not understanding the question.

‘Well! From the news and things like that … Like there’s going to be a comet in 1986 — err when I’m eight — (he does a mental calculation) yes in 1986.’ He appears to have an awareness of me as an audience and asks, ‘Do you know what a comet is?’ I confess I don’t and he proceeds to tell me — and about a meteor and a meteorite.

It would have been so easy to dismiss his drawings as pure fantasy until I discovered that most voluntary representations of knowledge, through words, drawings or actions, represented much experience and a great deal of re-thinking and structuring. For example, I watched a four and a half-year old in a playgroup and later at school. The only things he ever became intellectually absorbed in were cars and making things, preferably using tools. He frequently got told off in other situations. When I interviewed his mother I discovered he used to spend hours watching the next door neighbour repairing cars and spent long periods of time at home finding out how things were put together and frequently taking things apart when he couldn’t see how they worked. What I’m emphasising here is the fact that children are thinking, observing and listening, and making meaning in relation both to themselves and their experiences. They have preferred ways of thinking and relating experiences, which may or may not match up to those of the adults around them. Adults in school may create situations in which children cannot, or are not expected to, demonstrate what they know but they will in turn make meaning from this. This meaning, and the way that the child responds to it, may be one clue to disaffection and the behaviour associated with it.

What I am sharing here is a range of insights about children’s thinking which have been triggered by studying young children in classrooms. These insights have been expanded by reading such innovators as Donaldson (1978), Bruner (1984) and Bruner and Haste (1987). My research over the last six years has helped me to develop a new awareness of young children, both because of some very special teachers, and through the children themselves. I have listened carefully to children who have been put into the position of ‘experts’ rather than learners which enable them to express thoughts and feelings that otherwise remain unexpressed in words. The extracts that follow are comments of children about their education, derived from research about children’s learning and understanding children’s responses in classrooms.

Children’s Perspectives on School

At the beginning of this book I am trying to represent the experience of being a child who has knowledge of her/himself as a relatively powerless person in an adult society. We are, therefore, looking at the experience of school through the perspective of a child facing the shifting sands of adult expectations. We need to see children as essentially thinking and feeling people whose behaviour is affected by their experiences and the sense they make of them.

The rest of this chapter provides a range of children’s perspectives on the experiences of school and seeks to represent some clues to the meaning they make from adult expectations. Interpretations or ways in which these may be seen as significant are suggested in places; but otherwise they are left for you as reader to reflect on and think about in terms of the experience of children who have their learning environment structured with inbuilt adult and societal values which may or may not value children and their thinking.

When children start school they have usually had five years experience of living and learning at home. Home d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I: Learning to be Disaffected
• 1 A Child’s Eye View of Schooling
• 2 Deliver Us From Eagles
• Part II: Classrooms as Contexts for Disaffection
• 3 Teachers’ Perspectives on Disaffection
• 4 Creativity and the Infant Classroom
• 5 The Context of Children’s Learning: An Historical Perspective
• Part III: Home, School and the Community
• 6 Being a Disaffected Parent
• 7 ‘They’re too Young to Notice’: Young Children and Racism
• 8 School Ethos and the Individual within a Community
• Part IV: Learning and Knowing: Policy and Practice
• 9 ‘School starts at five … or four years old?’ The Rationale for Changing Admission Policies in England and Wales
• 10 Needs of Teacher Education for Early Years Teaching
• 11 Conditions for Disaffection?
• Notes on Contributors
• Index