Learning Relations (Routledge Revivals)

Doreen Grant

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317678793
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

Dissatisfied with the effects of schooling on children from low-income families, Doreen Grant left her post as head of a secondary school in Liverpool and turned to research for solutions to this perennial social problem. This is a popular account of her involvement with under-privileged Glaswegian parents and children, and her attempt to address the problem of underachievement from the perspective of the home rather than the educational establishment.

Combining the theory of international scholars such as Brofenbrenner, Bruner, Donaldson and Freire with practical experience, Doreen Grant indicates the improvements in children's active learning when parents participate fully in the process of education.

Learning Relations, first published in 1989, describes the creation of a coherent learning environment in the inner city: as parents gain confidence in their personal vocation as natural educators, it becomes clear that they are not only willing but fully capable of improving their children's chances of success.

1
The problem of mismatch

It was a beautiful sunny morning in 1974 and everything looked peaceful and possible as I approached the first address on my list. I had been introduced to a number of parents the previous week by the leader of a college of education project for young children and I was now about to visit their homes by myself. The leader’s rapport with the parents had been wonderful and I did not envisage any problems.

My planned starting point was a discussion on the parents’ role as their children’s first educators. I had thought out the work very thoroughly and prepared a little handout which I hoped would lead the parents to consider how their children had changed since they were born. We would then reflect on how much of this change came by natural growth and, by comparison, how much the home had been the centre of early learning. Despite all the preparation I felt a little uncertain. I knew there must still be a lot for me to learn about working with parents, though, clutching my list of addresses and my attractive handout, I could not imagine what it could be.

I was not left long in doubt. When I eventually found the right door, the first family was not at home. My proposed visit was unimportant in their lives and they had forgotten all about me! I was not too successful even with those I did manage to contact that first day. One problem was my prized handout. It carried two photographs, one of Julie, a newborn baby in her mother’s arms, the other of Eddie, a young boy of school age. It seemed simple and direct enough and I saw no problems, initially, in the few printed words which directed attention to the discussion theme. ‘What can Julie do?’ was the top line. Lower down it said, ‘Eddie has changed since he was a baby. He grew. He also learned. How much does learning matter?’ I discovered that morning that a handout at the start of a session is a guaranteed conversation stopper.

Reading skill caused the first anxiety. Of course I had considered this possibility and made the language as simple and short as possible. I knew there was no reading problem in that paper before I presented it. But that information could not be signalled to the receiving parents. They had to study the paper first – and listen to me at the same time! On top of these pressures was the fact that I had compressed a hard block of theory into those simple words. It was summed up in the page title, ‘Learning is change.’ I might as well have tried to open conversation with a Chinese proverb!

My naïveté about local cultural expectations created another hazard. I knew that the proximity of tenement homes in Glasgow had generated a convenient form of communication across streets or between adjoining homes. People simply leaned out of their windows, often propped up on a cushion and, while participating in a communal running commentary, watched the world go by beneath them. Those who lived in ground-floor flats could have the added enjoyment of gathering their friends round them for a chat without even opening the door. I was now going to learn how this process applied to me. Intent on my discussion experiment I looked neither to right nor left as I checked the number of the close – the communal entry to Scottish tenements – and proceeded to knock on a ground-floor door. A young boy passing to an upstairs flat looked at me in amazement and said in the voice of one pointing out a ridiculous social gaffe, ‘The window’s open!’ I leapt away from the door and hurried out of the close.

The kitchen window had been pushed up high and the couple I planned to visit were sitting at it, while a young man sat on the outside window-sill talking to them. Awkwardly I introduced myself and received a vague nod of remembrance from the lady inside. What was I to do now? The other ‘outsider’ thoughtfully moved over a little, indicating a space for me to perch beside him on the ledge. From this position I handed out copies of my little leaflet, ‘Learning is change’, and tried to begin the discussion. The conversation went surprisingly well, considering the handicaps, each trying to find some point of entry into a discussion on education. The parents called their little girl into the room to demonstrate that she could recite all the numbers up to twenty. My window-sill partner recalled his school days in the area. I looked for words to express my headful of educational theory. From these starting positions we all tried to reach some common ground.

While we talked, half of my mind was occupied by an argument with myself. ‘This really is getting nowhere! Should I go away?’ Then the counter argument, ‘How will I learn if I don’t persevere now?’ Eventually my companion on the ledge resolved my problem. ‘I really came to see if Johnny wis coming to the pub,’ he said. ‘If you don’t mind we’ll get on with oor education doon there.’

My notes that night recorded these and many more incidents like them, but without as yet any real insight. It would take much more experience and reflection before issues, which are now quite obvious to me, emerged clearly. Only after many false starts and ill-judged attempts did I eventually find an appropriate expression for my vision.

The first ‘stairhead seminars’ began when four mothers in the run-down pre-war housing estate of ‘Wine Alley’ met to help me. There was no doubt that I was seen to be the one in need. As I discovered later, these women were acutely aware of the ineffectiveness of their own educational experience and would be glad if teachers could improve their ability to facilitate the learning process before their children suffered the same fate.

Maisie, the hostess, had heard me out almost in silence when I first proposed my plan. Then she responded thoughtfully, ‘I could gie ye an hour a week, if that would help you.’ She could see no immediate benefit for herself – except perhaps a little gentle entertainment at my expense. It was the pain of her own schooldays, expressed in detail later, which prompted her co-operation. I was to meet this humbling response many times in the years to come.

Thanks to such kindness, two small groups of mothers met me each week. (Fathers, though invited, were not to join till much later.) At the centre of each group was a housewife in her early thirties, who had made a commitment to work with me for ten two-hour sessions. Each had agreed to use her own home as the base and bring friends and neighbours to join us. First Maisie, Cathie, Peggy, and Maureen met me on Monday afternoons in the gap between washing up the dinner dishes and their five-year-olds coming home from school. The second group, meeting in a dilapidated Victorian building, began some weeks later.

Small groups of mothers, who already influence one another and unconsciously affect common norms, form a fragile yet powerful network of easy communication. If I could introduce my ideas to these women and hear them discussed, re-expressed or changed through shared experience and reflection, we would all be able to learn. From the very beginning we had a sense of partnership in a joint exploration as the ‘stairhead seminars’ began.

This 1974 attempt to find a new way to tackle under-achievement in inner-city education was written up and video-taped at the time. It taught me a number of lessons. First of all, I had the opportunity to witness small everyday examples of how families approached the mismatch between home and school. One such incident occurred as I sat in Maisie’s living room waiting to begin a discussion on education. Maisie could be heard talking to her small son in the hallway of her home. ‘I’ll gie you five pence, Ted.’ ‘Well, I’ll gie you ten pence – if you’ll go to school.’ ‘Oh Maisie he’s only five!’ her friends remonstrated when she joined us, ‘What will you have to pay to get him to the secondary school?’

The infant school at the root of this conversation in Maisie’s home was a bright, colourful, interesting establishment. Why did Ted not want to go? Why were Maisie and her friends even discussing the possibility of bribing a child to go to school, never mind the appropriate level of external reward? Learning should have held an intrinsic reward for Ted and school should have been a place where he found the knowledge he was eagerly seeking. Why was this not so? Maisie and her friends, who were gathered with me in that living room, were not being paid or bribed to be there. We wanted to learn and we were all enjoying the whole activity of searching for solutions. Why was it different for Ted? The question was not new. It was merely a new angle on the problem of ill-fitting relationships which had brought me out of the classroom, after more than twenty years of teaching, to sit in Maisie’s home in Govan.

Ted’s attitude thrust me back into my own memories of the mismatch puzzle. I had begun my teaching career after the war in the then notorious Gorbals area of Glasgow. My twentieth birthday was spent trying to make some meaningful impact on a class of fifty-two squirming six-year-olds there. By Christmas of that year I was visiting the homes of all the pupils who had been absent from the class Christmas party. With small ribboned serviettes of festive food I trudged up and down tenement buildings on that dark winter’s evening after school. I was so intent on making sure no children missed their buns that I thought nothing of my surroundings, until one mother exclaimed on opening the door, ‘Oh Miss, you shouldn’t be here!’ Then to my dismay, she turned to an unkempt looking man who was watching me warily from the kitchen doorway, ‘See the teacher down to the main road, Wullie!’

What new world had I strayed into? What was so unsuitable about this environment that I had to be escorted quickly out of it? Certainly the tenement was like something out of Dickens with its worn stone stairs lit only by tiny gas lamps. Many of the two-roomed flats, served by communal toilets on the landings of the public stairs, were subdivided into ‘single ends’ in which entire families ate, slept, and lived their whole lives. But was the source of distress completely the building and its lack of amenities, or were there other ways in which a teacher did not match this home setting?

I was facing fundamental differences here between home and school. Even at twenty I could feel vaguely that these were differences in expectations, in the meaning of learning and eventually of life. This mismatch had a greater effect on children’s education than the poor physical environment and would not be removed merely by building huge housing estates around the city. Awareness of this dissonance was to be heightened in the following years by joining the Sisters of Notre Dame, a religious congregation concerned with education and social justice.

Another twenty years passed. In the Liverpool post-war housing estate of Speke I began to appreciate the question, if not the answer, in this puzzle of home/school mismatch. I was then head of a secondary modern school which had been set up to cater for pupils whom the examination system deemed of lower ability. From many points of view it was a progressive, exciting place. Children related personally to staff and grew in self-esteem while discovering their creative powers through both academic subjects and opportunities for craft, music, and drama. A caring ‘one world’ approach led many to explore career prospects which offered a service to others. A few extended their Third World interest by nursing as far afield as Africa.

Despite the obvious developments which made the school ‘successful’ to the officials and inspectors of Liverpool in the 1960s, I felt that I was failing. There was no real match between staff effort and pupil learning. Many pupils gained a great deal, but too many left us without having ‘caught fire’ intellectually. The few wild, destructive pupils were less problematic to me than these pleasant but puzzling children. They are to be found in any classroom, tidying shelves or running errands with friendly eagerness, but only tackling schoolwork to please the teacher. Such children never seem to discover the pleasure of learning, at least in the school situation – not even in ‘my’ school where we tried so hard! Now a five year old in Maisie’s home was expressing what had seemed a secondary school’s problem.

School could not be the sole root of the trouble – nor the centre of the answer! A Liverpool community worker had already forced me to concede this point. In the middle of all our highly inventive but completely school-linked work, she came to see me. She suggested various ways in which I could disrupt my precious timetable to involve the school in local events in the community. I looked at her in astonishment and kept giving answers like, ‘How could I take part in things I haven’t planned, or to which I have not even been asked to contribute my ideas?’

She wanted to challenge me, she said, to let the life of the neighbourhood really affect the school. What could it mean? I puzzled over what she was trying to tell me about this grim housing estate and the people who lived in it. I was so professionally oriented that I could make no sense of her demands. If evaluators had strayed into the school they could have written, ‘The headteacher views the neighbourhood simply as her catchment area. The professionals are the experts and therefore know best. The parents – whom she feels she does her best to help in every way possible – cannot be allowed to pester her staff or tell her how to run the school.’ That was the general tenor of my thoughts.

‘My’ school was not closed to the neighbourhood, oh no! Involvement of parents seemed important – but the school chose the timing, the topic, and the organization. It was all done with families in mind, so that Careers Night rivalled ‘Coronation Street’ for entertainment and attracted a 90 per cent attendance. But it never crossed my mind to ask parents what they wanted or to share the planning with them. Yet, when the community worker had put the proposition the other way round and expected the school to fit into a neighbourhood programme, I could not begin to comprehend how anyone could plan in this way without involving the ideas of the other participants – in this case me and ‘my’ school!

We had no idea what the local people thought about anything, outside the narrow confines of the particular piece of school work in which we wanted co-operation. They had no identity except as ‘first-year parents’ or ‘school leavers’ parents’. Conversation was confined to ‘new maths’ or career guidance or whatever else we, the specialists, had chosen. Only two other areas for communication were considered. Parents were sometimes called in because of discipline difficulties. At other times I acted as a willing, if completely unqualified, counsellor in their domestic problems. So I was always the donor, the parents were always the recipients and I could not begin to imagine a different relationship.

Yet the community worker bothered me with her challenge. What had the parents to offer? Of course they knew their families better than we did. But we tried to affect them at a deep level by running residential courses and sharing our lives with the children. When I said this she countered ‘What about sharing their life?’ What was this ‘life’ she was talking about?

I was unwilling to stop and try to find out what she meant. My mind was full of all the good plans I had for these children and when those were completed I had more in the pipeline. Notwithstanding this effort, I still felt unsuccessful. Wilful or biddable, truants or attenders, some pupils remained outside the circle of my enthusiasm. I began to have doubts about the omnipotence of school. So I left my headship and returned to full-time study in search of a solution.

The academic input I received at the universities of Glasgow, Liverpool, and London over the next ten years was enlightening. Even closer to my need was an invitation to become part of a small seminar group in Oxford.¹ There I listened to the views of leaders of large-scale intervention programmes from both sides of the Atlantic. They brought a wide range of research and innovation to the problem of under-achievement. It changed the whole focus of my efforts. I am sorry I have forgotten the name of that community worker, who visited me so briefly in Liverpool, yet caused me eventually to down tools and listen. I would like to tell her that she won.

At the culmination of my action/reflection decade I sat in Maisie’s home that day in 1974 when she was bribing Ted to go to school. Serious study had alternated with successive attempts at implementation. It was clear now that mismatch has two sides. I had to find ways of listening and talking to parents as well as teachers. Two-way understanding applied to me too. It was painfully obvious that I was in this household to learn, though I would also try to raise parents’ awareness of the roots of school failure. Working with schools must wait until 1975. It was enough, that September, that Maisie and her friends were willing to talk out ideas with one teacher, myself.

Ted’s unhappiness was an obvious starting point. Even at five years of age he needed particular language skills to deal competently with the school system and the classroom process. I wanted Maisie to understand some of Jerome Bruner’s ideas about the power of words. Bruner’s influential work both at Harvard, USA, and Oxford, England, was summed up some years later in his autobiography (Bruner 1983). Language, he points out, determines the shape of our thoughts since it is a system for cutting up the world into categories and relations.²

To succeed, Ted had to be able to formulate in his own mind the intention as well as the ideas in the speech of this unknown adult, the teacher. He might well hear in class, ‘I wonder if there is a clever boy or girl in this room who could bring me the red plantpot from the window-sill?’ Ted had, first, to be able to analyse that sentence and organize all the component parts even to think, ‘I wonder if there is such a person?’ Translating the teacher’s request int...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue
• 1 The problem of mismatch
• 2 ‘Stairhead seminars’
• 3 As others see us
• 4 Learning to listen
• 5 The other foot forward
• 6 Experience-based learning
• 7 Shared awakening
• 8 Partnership in preparation
• 9 The watershed
• 10 Towards a working model
• 11 Risking reality
• 12 The system — and the sugared almonds
• 13 Learning to relate
• 14 Seeds for the city
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index