I have always been uncomfortable with the term "work" to describe children's learning engagements and was pleased to come across Guy Claxton's humorous way of pointing out its absurdity.
Check it out at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqRu74M_1Gw (Watch from 14:00 - 18:00)
Check it out at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqRu74M_1Gw (Watch from 14:00 - 18:00)
In a PD session this week I shared the extract with my team and one group of teachers decided to look up the dictionary definition of work. Here's what they found:
work
wəːk/
noun
- 1.activity involving mental or physical effort done in order to achieve a result.
"he was tired after a day's work in the fields"
synonyms: labour, toil, exertion, effort, slog, drudgery, the sweat of one's brow; More
- 2.a task or tasks to be undertaken.
"they made sure the work was progressing smoothly"
synonyms: tasks, jobs, duties, assignments, commissions, projects;
chores"haven't you got any work to do?"
- 1.be engaged in physical or mental activity in order to achieve a result; do work.
"an engineer who was working on a design for a more efficient wing"
synonyms: toil, labour, exert oneself, slave (away), plod away; More
- 2.(of a machine or system) function, especially properly or effectively.
"his phone doesn't work unless he goes to a high point"
synonyms: function, go, run, operate, perform;
This produced lots of wry laughter but really raised serious questions in our minds. Why should children be expected to complete "work"? For whom are they 'working'? If learning feels like work, i.e. toil and drudgery, then what place does it have in a progressive education system? Why does the notion of play get wiped out beyond the early years? Why is play marginalised, left only for break times or those rare occasions when an activity is presented as a game? So much is known now about the value of play in children's cognitive, social and physical development but we fail to acknowledge this value once children reach a certain age. Suddenly children are pressured to "work", "complete tasks" and "finish assignments", all of which are designed by (well-meaning) adults who hold their own agenda. Could it be that pursuing and interest, a passion, a question and refining the skills to do so through play and self-directed activity becomes the the thing that drives learning in children rather than a series of pre-designed tasks with pre-designed outcomes and measures of assessment?
While discussing work, play and learning it is worth reflecting on the notions of childhood and education. Coming from a certain background as I and many of my friends and colleagues do, I would identify myself as holding a view which emphasises adult guidance and direct teaching of children. I feel it will be necessary to relinquish a lot of the adult direction and control and hand this over to the child if learner agency is going to be realised to its fullest.
Perhaps a dive into anthropology offers us some food for thought? There have been numerous studies conducted into how children are raised in various cultures around the world and some of tribal communities with little access to the predominant culture of western industrialised countries. A recent book by David Lancy (2014, 2nd ed), The Anthropology of Childhood: Cherubs, Chattel, Changelings, draws together "the findings of over 100 years of anthropological scholarship dealing with childhood and adolescence" and discusses contemporary issues related to the topic. Another fascinating read is The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? (2013) by Jared Diamond which presents an in-depth study into the lives of tribes people in New Guinea and looks into child-rearing and education. A brief introduction to the book can be found here:
These texts are definitely fascinating reads and offer the reader some alternatives to contemporary ways of bringing up children. Many of the tribes give great freedom to their children, allowing them to engage in activities which might seem dangerous to us or learning by involvement in adult activities. There are many examples of community involvement of child raising and social skills being learnt from all members of the tribe, both old and young. However, I find it hard to draw much of deep value from these studies which can aid in the process of re-thinking childhood. There are too many other practices found in these tribal cultures which I find abhorrent - enforced widow suicides, regular infanticide and condoned child neglect to name a few - which make it hard for me to see what we can really learn from them. We cannot simply apply practices found in traditional societies to our modern complex societies as we are fundamentally very different beings. Many of the cultural practices found in traditional societies arise from an environmental need to ensure the survival of the tribe so hold no relevance to us. Picking and choosing elements we like from this tribe our that is a very shallow and ill-conceived approach to thinking about childhood. Considerable shelf space in bookshops across the modern world is dedicated to books telling us how we should look to this tribe or that tribe for the way they bring up their children and how we are getting it all wrong.
So if traditional cultures don't really provide us with many valuable ideas, perhaps it might be more productive to begin with a blank canvas free from the layers of history that have brought us to this point in the evolution of education and 'childhood'. An extremely thought-provoking read comes from a blog post by educator, Joe Buscemi, in which he poses the question, "What if schools had never existed?' (Click on link to read: Joe Buscemi What if Schools Had Never Existed?) He encourages his readers to think about what a learning community might look like if there were no preconceived ideas about education. Doing this exercise would allow us to expand our horizons of education, cross-question our long-held beliefs and push the boundaries of what what be possible for the redesign of education.
What I am convinced about at this stage of my reflective thinking on educational change is that play, experiential learning and student-led inquiry are going to be hugely important and that adult-directed activities are going to take a back seat. If we really see children as capable beings then we will need to afford them much greater control over their learning and remove the concept of 'work' from the worldview of both children and teachers.
No comments:
Post a Comment