I told you already, I LOVE the readings on eReserve. I've just read the Kathryn Noori account of teaching within different educational and cultural contexts, 'Writing my own script: Pathways to teaching' (see reference below), and it gave me one of those 'aha' moments I was talking about.
In New Zealand, Kathryn discovered that teachers were allowed to be "the real actors in the classroom and had a real voice in the schools" (pg 18). In Ethiopia, "Teaching became a real joy and a creative process" (pg 19).
The parallel was apparent to me immediately. This freedom to be the 'actor in the classroom', this delight in the creative process of educating and caring for small children is what was missing from my last job. How crushed I felt by the constraint of a system that didn't allow my voice to be heard. How deprived I felt by the lack of ongoing creative teaching process in a system that allowed no continuity of care.
I recognised my own dilemmas; reading this article made me feel less 'wrong', less isolated by my (unpopular) decision to move on.
But there was still more than this for me within the article. Reflecting on her experiences as I saved the file to my desktop, I compared the cultural contexts of the two centres where I now work. Chalk and cheese was never a better analogy than for these two centres, each excellent in their own way in the art of meeting children's needs within their demographic.
I'll call Centre One 'Red, White and Blue' for its largely Caucasian context. It's a state-of-the-art, brand new long day care centre located in a nest of McMansions near the beach. Its grounds are carefully textured and landscaped with bark chip, Astroturf soft fall, sand, rocks of different sizes and projection and pavers. Low-growing shrubs, many scented, dot the playground near low wooden structures like 'stages'. Shade sails cover almost the entire area.
Internally, RWB is flooded with natural light, spotlessly clean and orderly. Care routines are quite tightly structured, with fairly strict adherence to free play time versus group activities time. These activities are open-ended, but with careful preparation and intentional teaching moments built in.
Then there's Centre Two, which I'll call 'Red, Black and Yellow' for its largely indigenous demographic. It's a preschool run by the CWA from an old building in a tiny riverside town where the local aborigines still have a foothold of accepted ownership. The classroom is half of the CWA hall, split off by ancient wooden dividers, brick-walled, echoing and naturally a little dark, with a carpet which is past its use-by date. The yard is sunny and grassed, with a small hill and medium sized native trees which can be climbed (though it's usually discouraged), a small bike track, a sandpit in its own latticed shed and a large bark-chip soft fall area with shadecloth over it, where old tractor tyres are the basis for most of the modular equipment.
At both centres, I would describe the children as being generally happy and almost always well cared for. At both centres, I feel content in my role, knowing that I have a voice and can be as creative as I like.
But Kathryn Noori's writing made me imagine taking a child out of each centre and swapping them. I read of her Ethiopian children sitting in the sun talking about the local wildlife and the strict enforcement of routines on Afro-American children in Denver, Colorado, and drew parallels with my own two centres. What would the effect be of placing a child in a different cultural setting from that which served his individual needs?
I imagined 'Ricky', a 3-year-old indigenous boy with anger and violence issues from RBY, in an environment of loose rocks of throwing size, no grass and not much room to run without hurting himself when he falls. It is physically impossible to be in touch with the earth, the dirt, at RWB. I thought of him caught in an ordered and fairly inflexible structure which required him to be out of the sun between 10am and 3pm, either resting or playing in a group situation- no exceptions.
The word that comes to mind is 'carnage'. At RBY, Ricky is regularly taken outside when he starts to lose control. Never mind that it's between 10 and 3, and the regulations say we should all be bunkered down out of the sun; this child, in his natural family setting, would certainly not be bound by such fearful over-regulation- and given his cultural need to be in touch with the natural world, plus his athleticism, emotional needs and high energy levels, I see that RWB could not serve this child's care needs without major philosophical changes by the teaching staff (and possibly some physical changes to the environment).
I think of 'Graeme', a 5-year-old Anglo-Saxon boy with anger and violence issues from RWB, in an environment where there is minimal daily structure.
The word that comes to mind is 'chaos'. I've seen Graeme in an unstructured environment at another centre, and I was constantly on the run trying to prevent him from (for example) beating other children over the head with whatever came to hand. Since moving to a highly structured and predictable environment, Graeme- whose family have moved house, state and country constantly since his birth- has started to regulate his own behaviour. A move to a centre where there was a level of permissiveness like that at RBY would undo him all over again, unless the staff were prepared to rethink their ever-flexible philosophy (which serves them well) and introduce a little more routine.
Dilemmas like this are ever-present in our lives as educarers (to use Magda Gerber's term). Children like Graeme will turn up at RBY; children like Ricky will turn up at RWB. The challenge is to adjust our EC culture to meet their needs without disrupting a way of 'doing and being' that serves other children well.
Am I up to that? I hope so. Thanks to Ms Noori for making me think about it.
References
Noori, Kathryn 1996 'Writing my own script : Pathways to teaching' Source : Young children. Vol. 51, No. 3, 1996, pp. 17-19
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