Teaching Across the Early Years 3-7

Curriculum Coherence and Continuity

Hilary Cooper, Chris Sixsmith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134576623
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This practical and accessible book explores ways of developing continuity and coherence in children's learning from three to seven years old. It is based around three case studies in which tutors on Initial Teacher Training courses worked with early years practitioners in three different pre-school settings, each linked to a primary school. The book describes how they successfully managed to plan and teach integrated themes across the age-range in the context of the requirements of the Foundation Stage and the National Curriculum.Each case study has a different focus: * science, design and technology
*' the arts' - including an ICT strand
* 'the humanities' - including a physical education strandEnglish and mathematics dimensions run through each theme.The book is alive with discussion of children's art, language, drama and music, captured as field notes, writing, drawing, and as video tape. Each chapter concludes with suggestions of ways in which readers can develop the ideas in their own contexts.This book will be invaluable reading for students on Early Years courses, Early Years practitioners, and tutors and mentors in early childhood education.

Chapter 1
Mapping out the project:
aims, rationale, organization

Hilary Cooper and Chris Sixsmith

The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea
In a beautiful, pea-green boat,
They took some honey, and plenty of money,
Wrapped up in a five-pound note . . .
They sailed away, for a year and a day,
To the land where the Bong-tree grows . . .

(Edward Lear, ‘The Owl and the Pussy-cat’)

The £5000 allocated by the college research committee to ‘explore ways of developing coherence and continuity in the Early Years education of three-to-seven-year-olds was not exactly ‘plenty of money’, but it was sufficient, and the journey lasted almost exactly ‘a year and a day’. But here our story diverges from that of the Owl and the Pussy-cat, for there was no romantic tryst and we did not, as far as we know, meet ‘a pig with a ring in the end of his nose’ or ‘the turkey who lives on the hill’. Yet our search for ‘the land where the Bong-tree grows’ was nevertheless a search for that magical place where fantasy and imagination, fairy stories, nonsense rhymes and riddles merge with curiosity, questioning and attempts to observe and understand the real world, which adults delight in as much as children, and where they see their role as helping the children to make sense of it. It is a land first charted by the pioneers of Early Years education: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Friedrich Froebel, Maria Montessori, Margaret and Rachel McMillan and Susan Isaacs.

Nor was our boat occupied solely by the Owl and the Pussy-cat. (Who could they be, anyway?) It was crewed by thirteen colleagues from St Martin’s College employed in a variety of specialisms training students to work with young children as teachers, teaching assistants and nursery nurses, together with numerous teachers in our partnership schools who support our students’ school-based work. We had all originally been inspired to want to work with young children by ‘the pioneers’.

THE PIONEERS OF EARLY YEARS EDUCATION

Historically, the traditional view of childhood was that children were simply miniature adults who learned in the same way that adults learned, thought in the same way that adults thought and had the same goals and aspirations as adults. Learning was viewed as merely the acquisition of information passed on from the previous generation. No one considered the possibility that children might think and learn in a different way from adults; learning was simply a matter of the passive reception of knowledge. Not until the mid eighteenth century was this theory challenged.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

One of the first people to do so was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, born in Geneva in 1712. Rousseau held radical views that ran counter to the received wisdom of the day. He proposed the idea that man was naturally good and all children born free from sin, and that the preservation of this innocence and virtue was central to the education process. Such ideas ran counter to the teachings of the Christian Church, which held all human beings to ‘be born in sin’. He developed the concept of a ‘naturally civilized man’ who would create a moral society. In 1762 he published Émile, which described in detail the education of a ‘modern child’ based on the premises that learning is a natural process, that the young child is biologically programmed to learn particular things at particular times, and that the adult’s role is to provide an environment where this learning can take place. A central tenet of the book is that children learn through personal experience: the ‘complete abandonment of the pre-determined curriculum. Émile was to be educated entirely through activities and first-hand experience.’ Rousseau emphasized the importance of education being based on a study of the child and the provision of experience through the senses, family life and bodily exercise rather than on rote ‘book knowledge’.

Friedrich Froebel

Friedrich Froebel developed these ideas further. Born in 1782 in Germany, son of a Lutheran minister, he lost his mother at nine months old, an event he was later to view as having conditioned ‘my whole future development’. His father was by all accounts a severe man whom the young Froebel feared, and he later referred to this unhappy childhood as his ‘gloomy, lowering dawn’. At the age of ten he went to live with his uncle, and five years later was apprenticed to a forester. This was to prove a significant phase of his life, one where he developed his general feeling for the unity of nature and an almost mystical appreciation of the relationship between man and the natural world. In 1805 he took up his first teaching appointment but left after two years. Having set up his first school in November 1816, he went on, in 1840, to found the German Kindergarten, the very name of which emphasizing his belief in the links between child development and the natural world.

Froebel believed an ‘eternal law’ ruled all that happened. This law expressed itself in nature and also in the mind and spirit of man. Man’s purpose was to ‘reveal the divine element within him by allowing it to become freely effective in his life’. The role of education was to develop the child’s essential nature, allowing him or her to perceive the divine as it is manifested in our natural surroundings. He felt that education should be ‘permissive and following, guarding and protecting only; it should neither direct nor determine nor infer’. This belief has a direct implication for the way in which children should be educated: they should be allowed to seek the understanding of the divine without the explicit direction of adults.

To young plants and animals we give space and time, knowing that then they will grow correctly according to inherent law. . . . But the human being is regarded as a piece of wax or a lump of clay which can be moulded into any shape we choose.

(Froebal 1974: 8)

He held that five elements were essential for healthy growth:

• Self-activity. Children are self-active if they are doing what they feel is important, playing, imitating, carrying out their own choice of activities rather than having other people’s ideas imposed on them.
• Connectedness and unbroken continuity. Froebel argued that there are no distinct domains of knowledge. The school should take a wide view of the curriculum. Part of the child’s development is to make connections between different areas and form a unified view of the world.
• Creativity. Creative growth takes place when there is disequilibrium resolved by creating a new understanding.
• Physical activity. Froebel viewed the child as comprising mind, soul and body.
• Happy and harmonious surroundings. This is in general keeping with the idea of unity and equilibrium, a situation he attempted to create in his kindergartens.

Two alternative views of how children learn and develop seemed to be emerging. On the one hand there was the traditional view that children were passive recipients of knowledge – that their role was simply to absorb the information, learn the skill and develop the understanding presented to them. This was in keeping with the approach adopted in the education of older children and university students. Students, for example, were seen to be ‘reading for a degree’, an activity whereby they presumably absorbed the thoughts and knowledge of those who had gone before. The second view was that the young were active learners in whom the capacity for learning was inborn. Learning was a natural process, one that would unfold as the child matured providing he or she was allowed to engage with the environment in appropriate ways and was not impeded in this process by adult interference.

Maria Montessori

In the early 1900s, an Italian doctor named Maria Montessori was working with children with learning difficulties in a poor area of Rome. As part of this work she spent a good deal of time observing the children and came to a number of conclusions about the learning processes of young children. She believed that children passed through sensitive periods of development in which they were particularly receptive to certain areas of learning, and that each child was born with a unique potential: development was ‘the inevitable unfolding of a biological programme’.

She viewed children as active learners who needed to be in an environment that allowed their potential to be realized. Towards this end she produced what she referred to as ‘didactic materials’ which the children were encouraged to handle in order to complete first simple and then more complex exercises; in many ways this process allowed them to teach themselves. She also designed learning environments that contained child-sized furniture and tools. She emphasized learning through the active use of the senses and not merely through the more passive activities of reading, listening and observation.

Margaret and Rachel McMillan

At about the same time, in London, two American sisters were starting to have an influence on the practice of nursery education. Margaret and Rachel McMillan believed the school should be an extension of the home and that a close working relationship between teachers and parents was essential for the successful education of the young child. They set up classes for parents to encourage them to assist their children’s development.

After Rachel’s death, Margaret continued the work they had begun together. She based her work around three main ideas:

• Children need nurturing and training. Individual adult attention is important in the education of the young child.
• Schools should be linked with the home and with health care. She introduced school meals and school medical services. She also laid great emphasis on providing a learning environment that included fresh air, gardens and areas for free play.
• Nursery teachers must be well trained.

Susan Isaacs

A further significant contribution to our understanding of how young children learn was made by Susan Isaacs (1885–1948). Drawing on the work of Froebel, Melanie Klein and Freud, she developed an understanding of the importance of giving children the freedom to think, feel and relate to others. She regarded play as an essential element in enabling them to come to terms with their world and their own development, a way of escaping into a world of imagination. Play, she believed, allowed children to solve problems, and resolve fears and anxieties. They were to be encouraged to express their inner feelings in order to avoid the dangers associated with repressing them. She felt they were restricted in their learning if they were required to sit at a desk in a classroom and follow the directions of an adult; children learned best through first-hand experience and self-chosen activities, free from the constraints imposed by adults. She too viewed the nursery as an extension of the home, and she also felt children should remain in the nursery setting until the age of seven. Isaacs was clearly in favour of childcentred education, encouraging teachers to support but not interfere with children’s learning.

Throughout the middle of the last century those endorsing the idea of the child as an active learner central to the learning process drew on the work of Jean Piaget to support their ideas. Perhaps the clearest and most powerful example of this was the use of Piaget’s ideas by Lady Plowden to underpin the views about primary education outlined in the Plowden Report, Children and Their Primary Schools (1967). This report used Piagetian theory to support educational practice not only for very young children but for all primary children. Since that time, for a number of reasons (see Sixsmith and Simco 1997), this common theoretical base underpinning primary education has changed. Educational theory has apparently moved back to the position where there are two different approaches to the way we understand children’s learning. One is the approach constructed by ‘the pioneers’: that children should be active learners at the centre of the learning process. The other, that the content of what is to be taught should be at the centre of the process and that children should be, largely, passive recipients of that content.

THE PIONEERS AND THE FOUNDATION STAGE CURRICULUM

The Curriculum Guidance for the Foundation Stage in many ways reflects the philosophy, research and practical experiences of ‘the pioneers’ and those who followed in their footsteps. It aims to promote the development of the whole child (social, emotional, physical, cognitive), to foster personal, social and emotional well-being and to develop positive attitudes towards learning. The areas of learning are seen as broad and interlinked. The ways in which children learn through play are set out on page 25 of the Curriculum Guidance for the Foundation Stage. In play, it says, children learn

to explore, develop and represent learning experiences which help them to make sense of the world, to practise and build upon ideas, concepts and skills, to understand the need for rules, to work alone and alongside others, to rehearse feelings, to take risks, to think creatively, to communicate with others, to investigate and solve problems, to express fears in safe conditions.

Learning is seen as taking place at home as well as in nursery classes and playgroups, and parents are encouraged to participate in their children’s learning. It is acknowledged that children are individuals and that each is different; that they develop at different rates. It is recognized that children le...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• LIST OF FIGURES
• LIST OF TABLES
• LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• CHAPTER 1: MAPPING OUT THE PROJECT: AIMS, RATIONALE, ORGANIZATION
• PART 1: DALESVIEW FIRST SCHOOL: BOOKS, STORIES AND RHYMES
• PART 2: CLAPPERSGATE PRIMARY SCHOOL AND BRANTWOOD NURSERY SCHOOL: AFRICA – MUSIC, ART AND DRAMA
• PART 3: MARKET GATES INFANTS’ SCHOOL AND ST MARK’S DAY CARE UNIT PRE-SCHOOL PLAYGROUP: OUR ENVIRONMENT – HISTORY, GEOGRAPHY AND PHYSICAL EDUCATION
• POSTSCRIPT
• AFTERWORD