Farewell from Rachel Lofthouse

Posted on 8 August, 2017 by Francis

This month I left Newcastle University for a new post at Leeds Beckett University where I am Professor of Teacher Education. I am thrilled to be given this opportunity to work in my chosen field at a new institution and looking forward to making a contribution to knowledge, practice and the work of teachers, student teachers and educators in that region, as well as (I hope) further afield. When the job was advertised it seemed like too good an opportunity to miss, although my first job application in 17 years was somewhat daunting. I found myself writing it on New Year’s Day and perhaps that was the clincher, with the hopefulness of a new year, the potential challenges seemed enticing. There were two additional pull factors. Firstly, I was born in Headingly (where the Carnegie School of Education at Leeds Beckett University is based), but left when I was two years old, so this felt like a bid to return to a forgotten homeland. Secondly, I had been to the Headingly campus the previous summer, on a warm sunny day when the parkland and redbrick buildings looked at their best, to attend a @WomenEd event. Perhaps this application was my response to the commitment the women at that conference were making to shaping and sustaining education through their own professional lives. So, cutting that story short, and via an interview in a box overlooking the cricket ground at Headingly (where the university occupy a stand) I have taken up the post. Time will tell what this will bring, but I look forward to it. But in looking forward I also look back.

My academic, professional and much of my social life has revolved around Newcastle University for longer than the nearly 18 years I have worked there. I joined the then School of Education in Joseph Cowen House in 1990, to do my PGCE with the relatively new tutor David Leat. Indeed I was the first candidate he ever interviewed for PGCE. My PGCE was the best transition to professional and educative life I could imagine, and David should take credit for this. It was a place where we explored ideas, made mistakes, learned to outgrow our embarrassment and naivety as new teachers, gained lifelong friends, and benefitted from mentoring and university tutoring which was absolutely based on the principles of critical friendship, subject enthusiasm and professional allegiance. We learned how to reframe our perspectives on teaching and learning, and worked hard to learn to teach our subject (Geography) with both rigour and freshness. This was pre-national curriculum and pre-QTS standards – a world becoming ever harder to recall! I had placements in Scotswood and Hexham (thank you to Dave Lockwood and Gordon Whitfield my mentors), and went on to be a ‘probationer’ in Durham (thank you to Ian Short for his pragmatic leadership and support) and later a head of department in Prudhoe (thank you to Bill Graham for his subject wisdom and patience). Much of my practice development and intellectual curiosity was supported by my work in partnership with the local authority advisors and colleagues from other schools, with particular shout-outs to Mel Rockett, Robert Peers, Anne D’Echavaria, James Nottingham and many others.

I have occasionally found myself in the right place at the right time, and the 1990s was just that for me. As a teacher I kept connected to the university in various guises. I was part of the Thinking Through Geography group, a PGCE mentor and occasional visiting tutor and a teacher-coach participant in a Schools Based Research Consortium project on teaching thinking skills. I joined the university in 2000, having left behind the beckoning era of teacher performance management, threshold pay and league tables. I was an enthusiastic Geography PGCE tutor, enjoying the buzz that job offered of working with a diverse group of motivated student teachers, helping them make sense of education from their new perspectives and helping to sustain local geography departments where so many of them went on to work. The legacy of the teaching thinking skills work was significant and became a core characteristic of both the Geography and wider secondary PGCE in the 2000s. My own interest in the work of mentors also provided continuity as I transitioned from that role to the university, and aligned with my experiences as a teacher coach in the research project. Over time I took the lead in the secondary PGCE and then moved on to look the various part-time Masters programmes. This gave me multiple opportunities to work with teachers from across the region, at all stages of their careers and in all educational sectors. In the last few years my particular interest has been developing the PGCert in Coaching and Mentoring modules. From my modules, and across the M.Ed and Ed.D programmes a significant learning experience for me has always been listening to teachers talk about their work and supervising their research. I have also enjoyed working more directly with a number of North East schools (including Hermitage, Cardinal Hume and Kelvin Grove) to develop and research approaches to professional learning and development, often through coaching. Thank you to all my Newcastle University students, and to the teachers, coaches and mentors I have worked with in schools. I have gained so much from working with you.

And so to my colleagues, without whom none of my enthusiasms for my work would have translated into practice. My teaching colleagues in PGCE and Masters programmes and my research colleagues in CfLaT have been the most amazing critical friends, collaborators and co-conspirators. The educational landscapes that we inhabit have changed radically over my 18 years at Newcastle University; initial and continuing teacher exists in a topsy turvy world which maps haphazardly onto the changes in the organisations we used to know simply as schools, but now as academies, MATS, teaching schools, (to name just a few), and both our university and the wider HE sector has been transformed through student loans, the REF and global league tables. Through this my colleagues, who are unfortunately too numerous to name individually, have been a constant source of inspiration and challenge. They know who they are, some are newly appointed, some have departed and others have worked alongside each other for many years. They are all people who care deeply that education works for all in society; that it offers individuals ways of making sense of their world and allows communities to thrive. Thank you to you all, for you have continued to teach me that education is of the people and for the people; wherever they (and we) are.

Extended Induction Workshops: Reflections of a Student Researcher

Posted on 19 May, 2017 by Francis

“Staff in Education value diversity, excellence and education. We aspire to national and international recognition as a centre of excellence in research, teaching and engagement, and we believe that these facets of our work are interdependent”.

ECLS Education in 2020: Developing an inclusive sense of diversity

Inclusion of students and staff from different backgrounds can be, and is, a synonym of quality in education. During the 2016-17 academic year, I have been involved in a Newcastle University Learning Teaching and Student Experience funded project, whose purpose was to promote internationalization, diversity and academic excellence through an extended induction programme focussing on expectations, inclusion, assessment and academic writing.

Dr Anna Reid and Newcastle Work Experience arranged my involvement in the project as a student researcher. To this end, I worked with Dr Reid to co-ordinate the data collection, analysis and findings from four different workshops, and prepare a poster for the Newcastle University Learning and Teaching conference in March 2017. Extended induction workshops were designed and delivered to students on the MA (Education) International Perspectives programme from October to December 2016.

In this blog post, I will reflect upon my learning experiences and how they have contributed to the development of the graduate skills expected as part of my doctorate in Education: Newcastle University Graduate Skills Framework (2017), Degree Programme Handbook of the Doctorate in Education (2015/16), Framework for Higher Education Qualification (FHEQ) (2014).

One set of skills that can be placed together, are those related to research per se. In the development of the workshops, one of my responsibilities was to take field notes as part of the data collection process. Understanding the adequacy of the data collection instruments for this research is in line with the training I received in research methodologies modules at the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences. Working as a student researcher shifted the focus from merely presenting those methodologies, to critically addressing the strengths and weaknesses of each one, providing me with an excellent set of skills for future research.

Through the analysis and synthesis of the data, I had the opportunity to investigate the different threads that ran through the development of the project, enabling a more precise view on the impact of the research. The analysis allowed me to critically review the data collected through the different instruments, leading to the production of reasoned and logical arguments, which conveyed the understanding of the topic at hand, enabling me to disseminate the research clearly. For me, the Learning and Teaching conference at Newcastle University was good opportunity to develop communication skills where research and ideas were clearly and effectively shared amongst an academic and practitioner audience.

It seems easy to point out the obvious skills gained through this project, but there were other opportunities. There are skills such as innovation and creativity, initiative, goal setting and action planning that can be acquired in many situations. Instead, in this singular project, there was one aspect I developed through the observation and implication of the project leader. Sometimes it is not about the student’s will to learn, but about the will of the educator to teach. In this case, the project leader reacted to students’ feedback and my own feedback from the notes taken in the workshops. In terms of gaining skills for a future career in the academic world, one of the most valuable lessons I have learnt is to listen. The mentoring of this project made me aware of the importance of personal skills.

In relation to my own research, I will ensure that the language used is appropriate for my audience. This implies that the audience must be identified beforehand in order to ensure my text is fit for purpose. Secondly, I have witnessed the positive impact that comes from using quantitative data collection combined with qualitative methods, especially if the latter aims are explaining and corroborating the former. Finally, I have learned the importance of oral communication, especially when there are time restrictions and visual aids are limited. This bodes well for my viva examination!

Noelia Cacheiro Quintas is preparing her doctorate in Education (EdD) here at Newcastle. In this blog post, she discusses different aspects of her role as researcher on an ULTSEC funded project designed to extend the induction period for full-time postgraduate international students.

Discourses of Ability We Live By

Posted on 12 May, 2017 by David

In some of my work I’ve argued that unless we engage more with progressive conceptualisations of academic ability overall, the concept will, by default, continue to be overly-determined by a narrowly-conceived measure of particular cognitive skills (https://www.bera.ac.uk/blog/a-new-direction-for-gifted-education-studies). To this end, I presented a paper recently at the European Society for Research on the Education of Adults (ESREA) Annual Life History and Biography Network Conference, entitled ‘Differing Discourses of Ability We Live By’. This drew on life history narratives to better understand the long-term impact, over the lifecourse, of having failed the 11+ examination taken by some adults in the last year of their primary schooling in England.

Part of my paper, utilising Foucault, focused on how psychological measures such as this and related discourses carry huge authority. The power invested in these discourses then leads to the shaping of academic identities in ways that are surely not warranted by the measures themselves (not to mention issues of socio-cultural bias, unfair access to preparation for tests and yearly variants in cut-off levels for grammar schools determined by fluctuations in the birth cohort). I was interested both in the impact of these dominant discourses of high ability, but also in what might be the potential counter-discourses that individuals draw on. In some of the life histories the 11+ was indeed a momentous event, for some both an ending – of a hoped for education and family aspirations – as much as a beginning of what was then to follow. For all it was a significant turning point in life, but a further interpretation of the life histories is that such failure can set up an ongoing present – one participant speaking about how they were ‘still failing the 11+’ much later in life when something did not work out.

An apparent counter-discourse was that of ‘emotional intelligence’. Recourse to discourses of affect to counter discourses based on cognitive aspects of ability alone were welcome, especially in the form of ‘EQ’, which so closely resembles the altogether more troubling, if largely discredited, ‘IQ’. Life history work itself enabled participants to explore multiple understandings of ability beyond the one dominant discourse and in this sense gave voice to frustrations. However, not withstanding this, there was much evidence of the onerous lifelong impact that resulted from having failed this one examination at such a young age. By not focusing attention on those that fail, and instead talking up the opportunities afforded to the few disadvantaged pupils who pass, we refuse to adequately acknowledge and reflect on such debilitating lifelong ramifications.

The Life History and Biography Network (LHBN) of ESREA is a space and community of researchers that I have for some years now drawn much from – in terms of both the affective and the cognitive dimensions. It is a celebration of European research in this field, with scholars hailing from all parts of the continent and beyond. My paper was presented in a session with colleagues from Italy, who (having presented both in English and French) commented that in Italy such testing and sorting of children so young would be unthinkable and simply not countenanced. It is always sobering to reflect on our own educational values and practices in a cross-cultural light and be reminded that what may at times appear inevitable is in fact highly contingent on a host of specific historical and cultural conditions.

I have argued elsewhere that we need an enriched, varied set of discourses about ability and perhaps even a more nuanced language. In this paper however, it was not necessary to follow this logic as what was being argued – and what appeared so obvious to my European colleagues – was simply that in seeking and hearing the life histories of those failed by this national test at the age of 11, we ourselves cannot fail but to apprehend the ongoing danger inherent in using narrow measures of ability to do far more work than they should ever have been called on to do. Our collective failure to provide challenging, engaging, relevant schooling for all, is turned into the personal failing of a proportion of eleven year old children. Given what we now know about the lack of impact on social mobility, the bias towards those who are coached and the harsh justice of any arbitrary cut-off score, the fact that a new round of grammar schools is once more on the horizon is testament to what happens in education when we divorce affect from cognition, and facts from values.

Dr Laura Mazzoli Smith is Research Excellence Academy Fellow in the Research Centre for Learning and Teaching, School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences at Newcastle University. She was previously Senior Research Fellow at the National Academy for Gifted and Talented Youth, University of Warwick. Her research is mainly situated within the sociology of education and she works in a social justice and education cluster. She is author of a book entitled Families, Education and Giftedness: Case Studies in the Construction of High Achievement (with Professor Jim Campbell). Previous conference presentations at ESREA have resulted in book chapters for Constructing Narratives of Continuity and Change (Eds. Reid, H. and West, L., Routledge) and Stories that Make a Difference (Eds. Formenti, L. and West, L., Pensa Multimedia), available at https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Laura_Mazzoli_Smith/publications

The Politics of the Canon: An exploration of the factors influencing teachers’ text choices for the new GCSE specification in English Literature

Posted on 5 May, 2017 by David

As English teachers in England are aware, the new GCSE specifications which will be examined for the first time in Summer 2017 mark a significant departure from previous practice in terms of curriculum and assessment. Terminal, closed book examinations, the removal of controlled assessment and an increased emphasis on 19^th Century writing, combined with changes to accountability measures, make for a challenging set of circumstances for English teachers. I had long been interested in the debate about whether or not the canon of literature we teach is contingent upon societal, economic and political values, or whether it arises simply because of a texts’ aesthetic qualities. When this debate is placed within the highly charged current educational context of Conservative reforms and austerity, interesting questions are raised about how teachers’ behaviours, values, priorities and decisions about what to teach are affected by these challenging circumstances.

In order to investigate these decisions during my Masters dissertation, I surveyed over 130 English teachers about their text choices for the new GCSE Literature Specification, as well as interviewing local Heads of Department. Whilst the question of which texts we teach may be seen primarily as one about the academic and cultural value of one text over another, pragmatic challenges faced by schools mean that the curriculum may be devised more as a result of practical factors such as the availability of texts, logistical expediency, budgetary demands and time constraints as well as finding texts which are seen as engaging and relevant to our students. All of these factors emerged as significant for teachers when making curricular and pedagogic decisions, but what was arguably more interesting were tropes in the language which teachers used to describe their decision making in light of curricular reform.

A particularly rich seam was the assumption of mutual exclusivity. I noticed how often teachers couched the choices which they were faced with as an “either/or” decision. In addition to this, I noticed that this choice was couched between what can be broadly aligned with the debate between teaching knowledge and teaching skills. Terms such as “remembering” and “rote learning” are pitted against phrases like “exploring” “enjoying” and “engaging with” texts.

Another theme to emerge from my analysis of teachers responses was that of teachers’ beliefs about representation. I was interested in the ways these beliefs corresponded with academic and epistemological debate about the canon particularly in light of ideas about social justice. Many teachers decried the new specifications as “pale, male and stale”, simultaneously lamenting the more traditional literary content which would not necessarily “engage students”. Paradoxically however, despite lamenting the more traditional nature of the choices available, the most popular text choices tended to be those mainstays of the traditional canon, with more diverse choices remaining less popular.

Is it easier to teach students when they are reading texts which are ‘relevant’ to their lives?

Furthermore, the question of relevance became a pertinent one in my data. Was it the case that teachers believe that texts ought to be relevant to students’ lives as a matter of principle, or did relevance function as a more pragmatic criteria? Is it easier to teach students when they are reading texts which are ‘relevant’ to their lives? And should the criteria of relevant and engaging apply to content and curriculum, or to the pedagogical methods employed to deliver this content? There were also, some would argue, pernicious assumptions, that certain literary knowledge was not necessary for particular cohorts of students who might require “more functional language”.

As a classroom teacher myself, I am sympathetic to the challenges teachers face in preparing students for these new examinations. However, these demands must be balanced against the laudable aim of allowing all students access to powerful literary knowledge, which English teachers know to be transformative and liberating. The problem is that pragmatic factors often mean that teachers are forced to act in a way which does not correspond with their beliefs, (what Ball terms “values schizophrenia”) and that teachers currently work within a performative culture in which they feel that they face a mutually exclusive choice between knowledge and skills, rather than an optimistic belief that students can be taught powerful literary knowledge which they can then explore, engage with and enjoy. If these barriers of performativity and pragmatic constraints were reduced then teachers could find a way through this new and challenging territory.

Taken from the BERA blogs.

References:

Ball, S. (2003). The teacher’s soul and the terrors of performativity. Journal of Education Policy, 18(2), pp.215-228.

Young, M., Lambert, D., Roberts, C. and Roberts, M. (2014). Knowledge and the future school. London: Bloomsbury.

Anne Clough studied English Language and Literature at the University of Edinburgh, graduating with a First Class Honours degree in 2006. She then trained as a secondary English teacher and has taught for 9 years in the North East of England. She is now Head of English at St Mary’s Catholic School in Newcastle. She recently graduated from her MEd in Practitioner Enquiry from the University of Newcastle, where she was the winner of the 2016 Marie Butterworth Prize for Excellence for her Masters Dissertation. Her interests are epistemology and the relationship between curriculum and assessment.

Democracy through Pedagogy: the Mantle of the Expert in Initial Teacher Education

Posted on 24 February, 2017 by David

In his powerful speech at the Cambridge Primary Review Trust’s (CPRT) conference in November last year, Robin Alexander suggested, in relation to recent electoral outcomes in the UK and the US, that discourses of hatred and derision might be interpreted as ‘education’s failure’. Soon after the CPRT conference, Primary PGCE and School Direct students at Newcastle University were offered two days of training on the Mantle of the Expert. In ‘Mantle’, which was initially developed by Dorothy Heathcote, imaginary contexts for cross-curriculum learning are created through drama and enquiry. In this process pupils take on the role of a team of experts, charged with a specific project outcome (Taylor, 2016). As an HE Initial Teacher Education provider we aim to empower our students critically with a range of pedagogical strategies, including those which are innovative, and we regard Mantle as a powerful and potentially transformative approach. Tim Taylor has provided workshops for our ITE students in Mantle of the Expert for a number of years. However, this year the module was offered at St John’s Primary School in Newcastle, which was recently awarded Mantle of the Expert Training School status.

Mantle has enabled colleagues to make the curriculum meaningful

St John’s is situated in one of the country’s most disadvantagedwards. Many of its pupils live in extreme poverty, and many of them have English as an Additional Language. Despite these challenges and ‘low starting points’, Ofsted has judged pupils’ achievements close to national averages, and described the curriculum at St John’s as of ‘very high quality’. Both the head teacher, Tracey Caffrey, and Ofsted ascribe this to the use of Mantle of the Expert. Children’s enjoyment and sense of responsibility and engagement is palpable, and they are not only keen to talk about their learning, but able to do so with confidence and eloquence. Again, Tracey Caffrey attributes this to the impact of Mantle since its whole-school introduction seven years ago, and the extent to which Mantle has enabled colleagues to make the curriculum meaningful. Mantle at St John’s offers what Smyth and Wrigley (2013) would describe as ‘rich teaching’. St John’s is thus a very powerful context in which to introduce our students to Mantle.

During one of the sessions, Tim worked with a large group of Year 4-6 pupils and 12 student teachers, creating the context of a nineteenth century mine, in which the pupils first took on the task of inspecting the occurrence of child labour, and then the role of miners. The amount of deep learning about Victorian times and social justice that had taken place by the end of the afternoon was profound: it was in the faces and words of the pupils who had ‘lived’ the drama, and in those of our student teachers who had seen the transformation in the pupils. It was on our side too, with the recognition of what can be achieved in Teacher Education when innovative pedagogy is integrated within a university/school partnership and theory and practice become one.

There could, of course, be various explanations for the impact of Mantle: although the experience of a nineteenth century mine was clearly fictional, the events were, it could be argued, real in the cognitive and emotional experience of the pupils. It did not seem unlikely that some of the pupils’ questions related to their own life experiences, and it may be the opportunity to discuss such experiences in a fictional context, which adds to the power of Mantle. On the other hand, as Tracey Caffrey suggested, it may be the opportunity to have experiences that participants would not normally have, which is at the root of the Mantle’s transformative potential. There is a definite need for research into the reasons why, the extent to which, and the circumstances in which Mantle is effective.

It is clear, however, that creating such learning experiences for student teachers is, to return to Alexander’s speech, ‘education in spite of policy’, and provides hope. There is hope for democracy and education in pedagogies such as Mantle, plenty of hope for schools like St John’s, and hope for HE Initial Teacher Education providers, as long as we are able to introduce our students to examples of transformative pedagogy.

References

SMYTH, J. & WRIGLEY, T. 2013. Living on the Edge – Rethinking Poverty, Class and Schooling, New York, Peter Lang.

TAYLOR, T. 2016. A Beginner’s Guide to Mantle of the Expert: A Transformative Approach to Education, Norwich, Singular Publishing Limited

Dr Hanneke Jones was born in the Netherlands, but her interest in a career in education was first sparked when she visited schools in Yorkshire’s West Riding. She trained as a teacher at the Hervormde Pedagogische Akademie in Amsterdam, which was largely founded on the principles of the French educator Célestin Freinet. After her return to the UK, Hanneke worked in primary education in Northumberland before taking up her position as a teacher educator at Newcastle University. Her PhD focused on creative thinking in the Community of Enquiry, and her research interests lie in creativity, dialogue, social justice and comparative education.

Taken from the BERA Blogs.

Rethinking a National Curriculum and finding space for the local

Posted on 21 September, 2016 by David

On 14 July 2016, the Prime Minister Theresa May announced her new Cabinet, following a significant reshuffle and re-structure of Government. In this context, researchers from all over Newcastle University express their thoughts on the challenges and opportunities for the Government in the Ideas for May’s Ministers blog series, considering how individuals, communities and societies can thrive in times of rapid, transformational change. Professor David Leat is Professor of Curriculum Innovation in Newcastle University, and he directs his Idea to Justine Greening.

From: Professor David Leat, Newcastle School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences

To: Justine Greening, Secretary of State for Education

One of the principles of a nation having a National Curriculum is that pupils can move from school to school with some continuity in their education. There is the added attraction to policy makers that they have more control over schools. However, the social and economic turmoil of the last ten years has moved the political goalposts as both radical right and left wing movements have proved attractive to many who feel that they have been left behind as social inequality grows. Political elites are rethinking and renegotiating the relationship between the nation and its component parts – regions, cities and communities. In England, we need our government to give the message to schools and teachers that they should be using ‘the local’ as one of the building blocks of the curriculum to put meaning back into learning.

Successive governments, however, have learned that exerting control by detailed specification of curriculum content has a considerable downside. They are open to attack from many quarters about too much content or the wrong content. As a result, they have shifted from ‘input regulation’ or the specification of content as a means of control, to ‘output regulation’ or the setting of exam targets as a means of control. The targets-related data has had the added incentive of helping to marketise education as it provides a means of comparing schools and ‘driving up standards’. However, there are signs of considerable collateral damage from this policy fix:

Teachers teach to the test and can lose sight of any wider purpose to education – a message which pupils internalise as education becomes a steeplechase of exam hurdles. This is a dangerous context for adolescent mental health and learning to learn.
Teachers are de-professionalised as their role is restricted to delivering content. Teachers who do not develop their own curriculum do NOT develop ownership of the curriculum. It is hardly surprising that so many teachers are leaving the profession. The National Union of Teachers data shows that 50,000 teachers (11% of the workforce) left the profession in 2015.
Young people are poorly prepared for further and higher education and indeed for the labour market as demonstrated by the Independent Advisory Group report (Anderson, 2014) commissioned by Pearsons Publishing
It tends to make schools look towards the DfE and Ofsted for all their cues and not to their locality and its resources. It is astonishing just how many organisations, businesses and individuals want to help shape the lives of young people and society in the most positive ways – but few get the chance.
As a consequence engagement is a serious issue. Across the developed world, there is strong evidence that pupils begin to lose interest in school work from the middle of primary school, even for many who are successful in the exam system (see for example Berliner, 2011). One of the reasons is that the curriculum lacks meaning for them, and they find precious few connections to their lives, despite the best efforts of dedicated teachers.

There are some real advantages in having a locality and community dimension to the curriculum, especially if there is a strong focus, through demanding projects, of going places, meeting people and making and doing things.

Horizons are broadened as pupils encounter people who have interesting jobs (not just professional jobs) and life histories – providing both role models and powerful raw material for developing their own identities. Pupils can take real pride and find meaning in the things that they make and do, both for and with the community. It should also be remembered that digital technology is changing the learning landscape as it provides the power to access, analyse and present information and understanding to a wide range of audiences through a variety of media. A local dimension to the curriculum can provide an element of service learning in which young people are given responsibility and make a contribution. Some of these principles are elucidated in the work of Mimi Ito and colleagues (see http://clrn.dmlhub.net/).

Gemma Parker, a Newcastle University doctoral student, has found that many more recently qualified teachers have no conception of curriculum, equating it to schemes of work or a yearly plan, usually ‘given’ to them to teach. Generally, they do not see themselves as having a role in curriculum development, which undermines their professional standing.

In the last 30 years the voices of government, of ministers, of the DfE and of Ofsted have become the dominant ones for teachers, and their vocabulary around ‘standards’ and ‘targets’ is repeated and relayed by senior leaders in school – ultimately this cramps thinking about what curriculum is possible in school. We need government to usedifferent words, in order to give permission to teachers to take up the opportunities for demanding curriculum projects in their communities, localities and through digital technology. Teachers need to hear that voice.

We need good professional training and support so that there is rigour and challenge in community generated curriculums. In particular, many teachers will need to learn about the process of curriculum development, how best to work with community partners, how to find the balance between guiding work and allowing pupils to take greater responsibility for the pace and direction of their work, how to harness digital technology to its fullest and how to map projects back to important subject questions, methods, concepts and principles.

All across the world there are serious questions being asked about exam driven education. In response, there are also numerous organisations promoting and developing enquiry and project based learning and competence-based approaches. These include the International Baccalaureate (IB), Expeditionary Schools, Connected Learning, Self Organised Learning Environments (SOLEs), the Partnership for C21st Skills and Opening Minds. England could position itself as a world leader in educational practice if it embraced the principle of schools developing much of their curriculum through the medium of high quality locally generated and resourced projects.

References

Anderson, R. (2014) Careers 2020: Making Education Work, London: Pearson.

Berliner, D. (2011) Rational responses to high stakes testing: the case of curriculum narrowing and the harm that follows, Cambridge Journal of Education, 41:3, 287-302.

To engage in the conversation, tweet @Social_Renewal #IdeasforMaysMinisters

This entry was posted in Ideas for May’s Ministers, Uncategorized and tagged children and young people, Community, Curriculum, justine greening, local education, May’s Ministers, Policy, Schools byFiona. Bookmark the permalink.

The Case for a Community Curriculum Making

Posted on 17 June, 2016 by David

Picture the scene, it is Monday afternoon and twenty 14 year olds are listening with rapt attention to a group of elderly men and women. Some are writing furiously while others are using their mobile phones to record what is being said. Back at school with the guidance of their teacher the students will spend the week crafting beautiful stories. The spelling and punctuation will be accurate, the presentation stunning. On Friday, the students will revisit their new friends and present them with their Story. There will be tears on both sides and teachers and care workers will look on with pleasure as they see the generations collide in an exquisite display of affection and understanding.

This is CCM in action and is a real example taken from Park View School; I could give you many others. The students are Year 9, the teacher is Alison Moore. Alison has planned everything meticulously. She has talked to the care home manager and the residents. She has briefed the students and worked with them to plan how they will conduct their interviews and the importance of listening with respect and understanding and of course of being dressed smartly. She has discussed with the students how they might present their finished work and has helped them plan their return visit.

Alison has planned for all eventualities however, she could not have anticipated how emotionally engaged the students would become and how their desire to represent the lives of the residents would drive their desire to ensure that they produced beautiful, meaningful and honest work. Nor could she have anticipated the emotions that would overwhelm both residents and students when the stories were presented framed and gift wrapped. There were laughter and joy but also tears and sadness for a life once lived but now gone. Rarely do young and old have the opportunity to share something so powerful.

Such an experience enriches the lives of both young and old and is at the very heart of why CCM is so important. If we wish our communities and our young people to grow and prosper to be compassionate and kind we must make this part of the way we organise our schools and plan our education. This is how we build social capital and never has that been so important. Building social capital is absolutely critical in our increasingly complex and chaotic world, a world in which young people and their families are faced with evermore challenging economic and social circumstances. At Park View 26% (and rising) of our school population are Pupil Premium and increasing numbers of them are ‘Looked After’. Yet hidden behind these statistics is a darker story, the families who do not qualify for Pupil Premium but are struggling to cope with the demands of daily life and the many young people and their carers facing the catastrophic fallout from declining mental health.

Ron Berger (The Ethics of Excellence) talks about the need for authentic audiences to inspire young people to create beautiful work, which is what Alison enabled. Keri Facer (Learning Futures) talks of the need for schools to really be the centre of their communities and Mick Waters (Thinking allowed on Schooling) tells us that it is social capital that will rescue children and their families from poverty not ‘intervention and catch-up’. Waters passionately believes that schools should give young people the skills and the courage to network to challenge themselves to meet their aspirations. They need to be able to be able to present themselves with skill and confidence. They need to experience the richness of their cultural heritage, just as their ‘better off’ peers do. Money and connections may not buy happiness but it at least makes prosperity more likely.

I would like to say that the scene I painted in the opening paragraphs was the everyday story of Park View. It is not. You will find examples of such richness throughout the year as teachers fight to preserve the joy in learning, but general such experiences take place at the end of the Summer Term in ‘Enrichment Week’. They do not inform the mainstream curriculum which is increasingly constrained and restricted by a government hell bent on returning to the 1950’s. The teaching profession must stand against this and CCM is a powerful method of reasserting our independence and our commitment to nurturing creative and compassionate young people. If we choose to accept this ‘Impossible Mission’ I have no doubt that together schools and their communities can build a fairer society in which all are valued and all can succeed. The case for ‘Community Curriculum Making’ has never been so strong.

Written by Kim Cowie
May 2016 – Park View School
Kim Cowie has recently been appointed as Lecturer in Education specialising in Professional Learning and will join the ECLS team in September 2016.

‘Turning Schools Inside Out’: Developing Curriculum with Community Partners

Posted on 6 August, 2015 by David

In this blog I will be arguing that it would be extremely beneficial for many schools to engage in community curriculum making (CCM) whereby some of the curriculum is developed with community partners using community resources. It is notoriously difficult to define community, but suffice to say that such an approach would strongly feature the immediate locality but not be confined to it.

The Education Reform Act (1988) established in England that schools should follow a National Curriculum which lays out what subject knowledge and skills should be taught to school pupils. When first introduced, it was characterised by input regulation, in that copious content was specified as the chosen method of government control over schools. Successive reviews have chipped away at this content, and the preferred method of government control has become examination targets, or output regulation. There is a parallel context in the US where the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act imperatives work through state departments of education then down to districts and onto schools, creating strong pressures to teach to the test.

this is a very introverted system which determines curriculum, pedagogy and assessment strictly within the confines of the recognised education ‘industry’ following the policy lead of national government.

Anderson-Butcher et al. (p.161 ) critique the resultant school improvement process as follows ‘ … walled-in improvement planning reflects traditional thinking about schools as stand-alone institutions focused exclusively on young people’s learning and academic achievement, and also reinforces the idea that educators are the school improvement experts’. They argue that resources, opportunities and assets are ‘walled out’, creating an unnecessary gulf between in-school learning and out-of-school learning. In their view this is a very introverted system which determines curriculum, pedagogy and assessment strictly within the confines of the recognised education ‘industry’ following the policy lead of national government.

However it is increasingly argued (e.g. by the Cambridge Primary Review) that schools need greater freedom to offer a curriculum that is locally developed to reflect local resources, opportunities, issues and needs for a proportion of the school week.

The advantages

One of the early advantages one might expect from CCM is interest and engagement. Much CCM work would naturally be issues focused, either national/global issues in local context such as an ageing population or substantial local issues. Evidence from the Royal Society of Arts and our own local evidence in North East England is that primary and secondary students find such work compelling, especially when it brings them into contact with local residents and adults other than teachers.

At a time when many young people have vulnerable identities with regard to sexuality, appearance, personal finance and ethnicity a CCM approach can provide very valuable raw material in terms of role models and experience

A second major advantage is that CCM projects and enquiries have the potential to help students build more complex identities. Generally identity is multi-faceted (albeit with a core), has individual as well as social dimensions, and is dynamic as it is being constantly updated. At a time when many young people have vulnerable identities with regard to sexuality, appearance, personal finance and ethnicity a CCM approach can provide very valuable raw material in terms of role models and experience. At a more basic level students would get to meet a far wider range of people if their school is outward facing. So meeting a dietician, a curator, a care worker, a sound engineer, an allotment holder, a fashion buyer, a joiner or a university researcher can all add to an early store social capital, as well as create insights into working and volunteering worlds and career opportunities. A third advantage is that via CCM, students can undertake commissions for community partners, working to a brief, which gives meaning to their work. This counters the problem that school work only produced for one’s teacher to mark, grade and provide feedback/target can very easily lose any meaning beyond compliance. Furthermore such community or even school briefs can lead to a wide spectrum of project products including reports, displays, films, cartoons, events, plans, food, gadgets, webpages, guides and menus. Although there is no clinching evidence, a compelling argument can be made that such approaches could have wider social leverage through encouraging more informed labour market choices, widening participation and greater social justice. These issues are significant research agendas.

Whilst many schools, particularly primaries, do use local issues and resources, so much is possible if schools open their curriculum development processes to community partners. For this to happen there is the need for mediators to help schools with process and for a very different model of accountability where much is devolved to the local level.

David Leat, Professor of Curriculum Innovation, Research Centre for Learning and Teaching (CfLaT), School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences, Newcastle University. David is the Executive Director of the Research Centre for Learning and Teaching (CfLaT) at Newcastle University and Professor of Curriculum Innovation. His 13 year geography school teaching career took him round the country, before becoming the geography teacher trainer at Newcastle from 1989 to 2000 and subsequently a researcher.

His research interests started with teaching thinking skills. In subsequent projects, he has been involved in research on Learning2Learn, metacognition and teacher coaching. Between 2001 and 2004, David worked on secondment for a government school improvement strategy, where he wrote many teacher development modules, including Big Concepts, Thinking Skills, Reflection and Coaching.

His current projects revolve around Inquiry/Project Based Curriculum and Community Curriculum Making, in which schools, teachers, students and school partners have far more control over and responsibility for the curriculum. David has worked with Professor Sugata Mitra on both Self Organised Learning Environments (SOLEs) and Skype Grannies/Seniors.

Taken from BERA

Written by David Leat, Professor of Curriculum Innovation

School-Community Advisory Groups: ‘Turning Schools Inside Out’

Posted on 10 April, 2015 by David

To turn schools inside out, develop a localised community curriculum, argues Professor David Leat from the Research Centre for Learning and Teaching (CfLaT), School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences. To read other Ideas for an Incoming Government, view the entire series hosted by the Newcastle University Institute for Social Renewal blog.

What’s the problem?

We have a national curriculum which lays out what should be taught to school pupils. When the National Curriculum was first introduced the mistake was made of cramming in too much content and successive reviews have chipped away at this content. However it is increasingly recognised that schools need greater freedom to offer a curriculum that is locally developed to reflect local resources, issues and needs for a proportion of the school week. We need a policy which allows and supports schools, in partnership with local stakeholders, to develop a localised community curriculum.

The solution

Schools should be able to apply to the DES for licence to devote between 20 and 40% of their school year to curriculum which is developed locally in partnership with community stakeholders which would include businesses, community organisations/charities, specialist societies, public services and universities. The submitted plan would include the aims of such curriculum work related both to the goals of National Curriculum and to individual school aims and characteristics of the region/locality. Once accepted the plan would be included in the school inspection remit. Relevance comes from the meaningful work that is produced by the students which will address many of the challenges facing schools in relation to motivation, behaviour, transitions and wider educational outcomes (such as self-concept and resilience).

In practice schools would establish a community curriculum advisory group (CAG)which would advise and assist in developing inter-disciplinary, challenging and authentic projects for the students. The advisory group would consist of 5-12 members (larger in large secondary schools) drawn from the constituencies outlined earlier, but including one or two governors. Many might be parents and there should be a minimum of one from the business community and one from the culture/arts sector. The school would have the final say about the composition of the CAG. The aim of the CAG would be:

To review curriculum plans for year groups or subject departments;
To advise on and support curriculum development that uses the potential of the locality and community – thus acting as a conduit for school-community relationships;
Have regard to soft skills and EU competences;
Guide and support the school in recognising and validating the wider learning outcomes of school students, from both school activities and out-of-school activities – which would include possible development of digital portfolios.

The school could also submit an application for a community curriculum award at one of three levels (for the sake of argument: bronze, silver and gold). Such an application would have to include evidence of the wider learning outcomes for the students, and of the ‘products’ generated by the students validated by users or others in the community.

Benefits

The policy would make a substantial difference to schools, allowing them to release the creativity of staff and school leaders and free them from the excesses of ‘teaching to the test’.
Pupils would feel the difference through the authentic work and challenges that they are offered – thus engaging with work that matters.
Universities would feel the difference in having students who are better prepared for research and both collaborative and independent study.
Employers would benefit from having employees who have a wider spectrum of skills (with no diminution of basic skills).
The creation of CAGs would also bring fresh air to the feverish issue of accountability. Currently the government and its agent, Ofsted, determine the criteria for judging the performance of schools. This is an over-centralised model which is unresponsive to local need and creativity.

There would be teething troubles over how representative CAGs are and it is important that schools have control of their composition, so that they do not feel that they are being ‘done to’.

The evidence

A Demos report (Sodha & Gugliemi, 2009), detailed the disaffection and alienation evident amongst young people of school age, and the harm that they encounter. Recently, an Independent Advisory Group, coordinated by Pearson, recommended that England must adopt a framework of key competences such as that developed by the European Union (e.g. learning to learn, working as part of a team and intercultural competence) AND a recognition of vocational learning for ALL students (Anderson 2014).

The RSA have produced a report (Facer 2010) which summarises the literature relating to ‘Area Based Curriculum’ and reporting on two ABC projects in Manchester and Peterborough. The outcomes in Peterborough, where Curriculum Development Partnerships were pioneered included:

Teachers learned about the locality and felt more connected
School and partner representatives reported a change to the way organisations engage with schools
Partners reported that more schools are now open to working with outside agencies

In the US there is a substantial resurgence in interest in Community Education (although with a greater involvement of social workers that we are suggesting) and here the evidence is for far greater engagement. ‘High Tech High’ in California has a very high profile and reputation for project based work, often but not always, linked to the community (http://www.hightechhigh.org/about/results.php).

Taken from the Newcastle University Institute for Social Renewal blog

Written by Professor David Leat, Prof of Curriculum Innovation

Education @ Newcastle University

Category Archives: Curriculum