3. Starting with Children – Towards an Early Years Curriculum
by Mary Jane Drummond
The Japanese have a word for it - kodomorashii kodomo, translated by Tobin, Wu and Davidson (1976) as 'a child-like child.' Their fascinating cross-cultural study, Preschool in Three Cultures, introduces the concept of the child-like child in the context of a lively debate between early years educators from Japan, China and the USA. The debate is stimulated by video-tape presentations of a typical day in a kindergarten in each of the 'three cultures', and its liveliness stems from the startling differences in approach revealed by the videos. There are differences to be discussed in almost every aspect of daily practice; the Chinese group trips to the toilet, for example, make very disturbing viewing for the US and Japanese educators.
But the more important differences run deeper than this: differences of principle and purpose, philosophy and mission. The notion of the child-like child, so familiar to the Japanese educators, so challenging to the other parties to the debate, suggests how deep these differences can be. What is at stake is the way in which educators of whatever nation choose to think about the children for whose early years they have taken responsibility. In answering the question 'What is a child-like child, in our society?' educators and others (parents, politicians, philosophers) are forced to explore deeply held but rarely examined values and principles, in order to establish the basis for their curriculum and pedagogy.
Such an exploration is long overdue in this country. As we set about the process of reviewing and renewing a curriculum framework to take us into the millennium, I believe we will do well to start by finding our own answers to the fundamental question that runs through every page of Preschool in Three Cultures. What do we want for our young, child-like children? If we can answer this question, it seems to me we will be in a good position to work on constructing a curriculum fit for young children.
In the process of examining our own values and beliefs however, we would be foolish to neglect the work of other educators, past and present, near at hand and far away, who have much to teach us about young children and their learning. A critical and respectful scrutiny of the work of others will be an essential part of our own enterprise. For example, we might begin in Italy, in the prosperous region of Emilia-Romagna, where services to young children, from birth to three, and from three to six, are rightly world-famous. Their travelling exhibit The 100 Languages of Children is just coming to the end of its second visit to the UK (the first was in 1997). The title of this exhibition is a reference to the principle at the heart of their approach, which is recognition of children's powers as communicators. The Italian educators starkly represent this central idea with a slogan: 'Children speak 100 languages, 99 of which are ignored in school.' They try to do better in their pre-schools and day-care centres and nurseries, every one of which is furnished with an atelier, a workshop staffed by an atelierista, a trained professional artist and educator. In the atelier, children's capacities for representing the world around them, and expressing their responses to, and relationships with that world are, from the earliest age, fostered and extended (Edwards et al 1993).
For the Italians, children's acts of representation and expression are the foundations for all subsequent learning. So, for example, their approach to literacy starts from the concept of exchange- 'lo scambio'; not with the book, or the story, or the printed word, but with the early capacity of the baby and the toddler to communicate in a give-and-take process of exchange. The exchange of a look, a smile, a touch, between the baby and the primary care-givers is, for the Italian educators, the beginning of all one hundred of children's symbolic languages, including the language of books and the world of print. Their earliest provision for this foundation stone of learning is again, not the book, as it is here, but a structure of tiny pigeon holes, one for each child and adult educator, labelled with names and photographs, for the exchange of meaningful messages between children and adults. The youngest children post each other stones, flowers, biscuits, fetishes and tiny treasures; the older ones exchange marks, drawings, letters, notes and news bulletins. These children are not only learning to read and write, they are learning to give and to receive. Carla Rinaldi, a pedagogical co-ordinator who works to support curriculum development in a group of pre-schools and nurseries, summarises their approach:
The cornerstone of our experience, based on practice, theory and research, is the image of children as rich, strong and powerful They have the desire to grow, curiosity, the ability to be amazed and the desire to relate to other people and to communicate Children are eager to express themselves within the context of a plurality of symbolic languages Children are open to exchanges and reciprocity as deeds and acts of love which they not only want to receive but also want to offer.
(Edwards et al 1993 p. 102-3)
In describing the Reggio-Emilia approach I am not advocating slavish imitation, or suggesting that we swallow someone else's programme whole. But I am convinced that we can learn from other educators, and the possibilities that their work suggests. In particular we can learn from approaches where children, and their learning, are the starting points for the educators' thinking. The New Zealand early years curriculum framework Te Whariki (Ministry of Education 1996) is one such approach. The Maori words of the title refer to traditional woven mats, with an infinite variety of patterns; the guidelines envisage the early childhood curriculum as such a mat, woven from the principles, aims and goals defined in the document. The Whariki concept represents, in a vivid and meaningful way, the diversity of early childhood education in New Zealand: from common starting points, each provision creates its own distinctive pattern. The five aims, on which the whole framework is based, are:
• Well-being: the health and well-being of the child is protected and nurtured;
• Belonging: children and their families feel a sense of belonging;
• Contribution: opportunities for learning are equitable, and each child's contribution is valued;
• Communication: the languages and symbols of children's own and other cultures are promoted and protected;
• Exploration: the child learns through active exploration of the environment.
I have argued elsewhere that the New Zealand document is especially challenging for educators in the UK because of the values at its core (Drummond 1996). Our own National Curriculum, we ruefully remember as we read Te Whariki, is constructed around Maths, English and Science, rather than belonging and contributing. Our current approach is prescriptive, rather than principled; and so, as we set about reaffirming our principles and purposes in early years education, we cannot afford to ignore the way in which the New Zealand educators make their case.
In this country too, there have been educators who still have much to teach us about children's learning. The great progressive (and one-time chief inspector of schools) Edmond Holmes summarises his life's work in a vision of children's learning as growth growth towards truth (stemming from the desire to enquire, to know and understand), towards beauty (from the desire to express oneself and to delight in the creative arts) and towards love (from the desire to communicate, to imagine, to identify one's life with others.) (Holmes 1911).
Across the channel in Belgium, Ovide Decroly (born in 1871) built an early years curriculum around the principle of active learning. His schools, which flourished in the first quarter of this century, were organised around the child's experiences 'in close contact with the real, the actual.' 'Let the child prepare for life by living' was his slogan, and the detailed curriculum plans that survive in a contemporary account demonstrate Decroly's commitment to the processes, rather than the products of early learning: 'To perceive to think to act, and to express we must not lose sight of that sequence.' (Hamaide 1925) This brief summary does not, or course, do justice to Decroly's conceptualisation of teaching and learning, and yet, in a way, the essence of his work is conveyed by the power of those four active verbs to perceive, to think, to act, and to express. An even tighter formulation can be found in the work of Diderot and the group of radical philosophers who together created the great Encyclopaedia, published in 35 volumes between 1751 and 1776. In these volumes the whole of human understanding is subsumed under just three heads: Memory, Reason and Imagination (Furbank 1992). Again, I am not making a case for nostalgia: I am proposing that we use the richness of our collective educational past and present to help us envisage and grasp the future.
As our debate proceeds, informed, let us hope, by an eclectic richness of reference, we will need guiding principles to support us in making choices. The first of these, I suggest, should be that we concentrate on children's strengths rather than their weaknesses, their capabilities rather than their incapacities, on their considerable intellectual and emotional powers, as we know them from generations of research and enquiry. My own sense of children's powers has developed both from my reading of psychology and philosophy, and from my observations, over the years, of young children living and learning in a whole variety of settings. Children's powers, their powers to do, to feel, to think, to know and understand, to represent and express, constitute for me the most appropriate starting point for thinking about an early years curriculum. By starting here, we will be able to construct a curriculum that does justice to these powers, that strengthens and develops them, throughout the first six or seven years of their life. In the process we will be able to continue the debate: what kinds of thinking, doing and feeling do we aspire to for our child-like children?
As we extend and elaborate our lists of children's powers, adding the active verbs that we value most dearly (for example, the power to ask questions, to imagine, to speak more than one language, to sorrow, to wonder, to console) we will be making progress in our enterprise. The next step is to see how such a list, however short or long, can be transformed into children's lived experiences. Here my thinking is supported by the unjustly neglected writer George MacDonald, once famous for his children's stories (The Princess and the Goblin, At the Back of the North Wind). Writing of the central importance of the imagination in children's spiritual and moral development, MacDonald advises us how to proceed:
If we speak of direct means for the culture of the imagination, the whole is comprised in two words food and exercise....
(MacDonald 1882 p. 36)
I propose that we kidnap these categories, and hold them up against our consideration of children's powers, asking ourselves what food and what exercise will sustain and strengthen our child-like children.
The 'food' we set before our young children is, as it were, the stuff of curriculum: the stuff in the cupboards, the photocopier, the garden, the clay bin and the atelier (see also Anne Fine's The Granny Project for a brilliant analysis of the Social Science curriculum as stuff). But stuff is not enough; children also need daily opportunities to exercise their growing powers, their intellectual and emotional muscles. In their scientific studies, for example, young children will encounter, amongst other things, woodlice, gravity, shadows, seaweed, moss, yeast and water; but these first-hand experiences are not enough. They must also act as scientists, observing, comparing, connecting and demanding explanations. There must be time and space and opportunities for them to exercise these developing powers, to flex their growing muscles. The more opportunities there are, the more exercise they will take. As R. A. Hodgkin so memorably puts it,
Rather than asking, 'what stick or carrot will make children active in certain ways; or what will make them go in this direction rather than that?', we would do well to turn the problem round and to say: children will go in any case, for it is an expression of their being to be purposeful and energetic...
(Hodgkin 1985)
Conclusion
In recent years, discussion about the National Curriculum and the new curriculum for teacher training has been dominated by the subject-specialists, and the core and foundation subjects established by the 1988 Education Reform Act. I have argued here that in developing an early years curriculum we would do better to start with children, taking into account everything we know about their learning, their motivation, and their impressive intellectual and emotional powers. In so doing, we will be able to express and implement our most dearly held aspirations for the education of the child-like children of the future.
Mary Jane Drummond is a lecturer at the School of Education, University of Cambridge. She started teaching in an overcrowded infant school in London's East End in 1966 and since then has taught in a variety of inner city primary schools; she was the headteacher of a school in Sheffield for four years. In 1985 she joined the Institute of Education in Cambridge, an in-service institution working for teachers and other educators all over East Anglia, which was incorporated into the University of Cambridge in 1992. Her work has become increasingly inter-disciplinary, and her Early Years courses are now attended by educators from the education and social services, and from the voluntary sector. She has close links with the Early Childhood Unit at the National Children's Bureau, and with them has published two in-service development packs of materials for early years educators. Her book, Assessing Children's Learning (1993) is published by David Fulton in the UK, and by Stenhouse in the US and Canada.
Contact:
School of Education, University of Cambridge
Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 2BX
Tel: (01223) 369631
Fax: (01223) 324421
E-mail: sf207(at)cam.ac.uk
References
Drummond, M. J. (1996) 'Play, Learning and the National Curriculum some possibilities' in Cox, T. (ed.) The National Curriculum and the Early Years. London: The Falmer Press.
Edwards, C., Gandini, L. & Forman, G. (eds.) (1993). The Hundred Languages of Children: The Reggio Emilia Approach to Early Childhood Education. Norwood, New Jersey: Ablex Publishing Corporation.
Fine, A. (1990) The Granny Project. London: Mammoth.
Furbank, P. N. (1992) Diderot, A Critical Biography. London: Minerva.
Hamaide, A. (1925) The Decroly Class: A Contribution to Elementary Education. London: J. M. Dent.
Holmes, E. (1911) What Is and What Might Be. London: Constable.
Hodgkin, R. A. (1985) Playing & Exploring. London: Methuen.
MacDonald, G. (1882) Orts. London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington.
Ministry of Education, New Zealand (1996) Te Whariki. Early Childhood Curriculum. Wellington, New Zealand: Learning Media.
Tobin, J. J., Wu, D., Davidson, D. (1989) Preschool in Three Cultures. New Haven: Yale University Press.
This chapter is reproduced, with permission, from Take Care, Mr. Blunkett: powerful voices in the new curriculum debate published in 1998 by the Association of Teachers and Lecturers.