The fierce power of the past on philosophy and policy

My next uni task is to talk about my workplace's philosophy and policies in terms of its social history.

Hmm. Here I am, keeping a journal as a blog because hello, it's an electronic age, and being asked to talk about my workplace. Yet I've just had a bollicking for doing just that on my other blog from an employer (now an ex-employer). So let's start with talking about that particular 'philosophy' as an example, shall we?

At the moment, I'm told, that director is rewriting the workplace policies to prevent staff from blogging about work at all. Now, we all know that as professionals we never reveal confidential or identifying information- that would indeed be a hanging offence- but where does banning blogging which has respected those boundaries come in? Free interchange of information is the way the world is going, and ECE is already a huge part of that online interchange. Blogging ECTs all over the world are sharing stories of their experiences. I would class myself as particularly discreet in comparison with some of them (and my readers agree).

So, is all the fuss to do with the social history of this particular workplace?

It's church-run. Perhaps the church's influence suggests a certain conservatism, but they tend not to interfere with the actual running of the place (to their credit). 

I guess the centre serves a demographic where the parents can afford to sue. That probably makes the director a little nervous. But in the absence of identifying information, I'm afraid I don't see the problem, and neither does my friend with legal experience. 

 

It aspires to be a state-of-the-art centre. It's located in a well-off area, where the parents have a lot of technology at home. The centre has whizz-bang technology at every turn. I'd have expected progressive attitudes to use of the internet, reflected in policy and philosophy, in that social context.

But no; it's the attitudes of the director that have made the difference, I fear. You're only as whizz-bang as the person in charge, and so we'll have to look at her 'social history'. Someone who comes from an older generation, with many years of experience in centres running on old principles, who doesn't understand the positive power of blogging to create change in practice, who feels fearful and threatened by the openness of the internet, will tend to hold the centre back from being a truly functional part of the C21st.  And some of my readings for this course have suggested that, indeed, new curriculum is often held back by attitudes from the past; staff are indoctrinated to do things a certain way, and in the face of change they tend to cling to the familiar. 

So the distinction between a staff member sharing anecdotes from work with people at the pub (who no doubt know where one works and may know the families at the centre) and sharing anecdotes from work with colleagues who have a professional interest, anonymously, on a medium as huge as the internet may well be lost on those who cling to old attitudes. Social history kicks an own goal on that one. Internet stories are a more functional way of achieving active behavioural change in philosophy and practice than handing out copies of the EYLF to all staff.

Enough of that centre. Let's look at the social history of a contrasting centre, makeshift, ancient, tiny. It serves an old indigenous mission community and the locals of a small town.  The town has been a centre of racial unrest for many, many years. White people fight with black people, black people from one mob fight with black people from another mob. Alcohol and substance abuse is rife. Many children have developmental delay issues as a result. Also within the demographic are the children of highly respected indigenous elders, local townsfolk, graziers and farmers, many as bright as buttons.

The text of Kevin Rudd's apology is still posted in the window of a local shop. The country's past is a powerful influence on this town.

The childcare facility responds with high flexibility. The unspoken working philosophy is 'whatever works is right for today'. Sure, there's a sun-smart policy, but if an aboriginal child needs to be outside in the middle of the day because being inside is making him or her stir-crazy, then out they go. 

Cultural awareness is a high priority. Attendance policies are flexible.  Recognising the different understandings of time and priority between the cultures, the centre keeps places open for absent indigenous children for months at a time. Payment options are very flexible; the attitude is one of understanding rather than impatience.

Documentation policy has a relatively low priority. The children's safety and wellbeing requires constant supervision, as reflected in a high staff-child ratio, and taking your eyes off the children for long enough to write a learning story is generally impossible. 

What happens at this centre is unmistakably real and grounding; staff go home thinking not about how they best fulfilled policy and philosophy, but whether they met the needs of these individual children today and how they can do it better tomorrow. To some extent, the high demands of the demographic transcend policy in the presence of caring and capable staff.

The atmospheres in these two centres couldn't be more different. In one, there's a high awareness that one should follow policies and regulations to the letter and a low awareness of the true policy implications of embracing technological progress. In the other, the philosophy of flexibility leads the way and the social context makes technology all but irrelevant and policy implementation labile by necessity.

Social history has an impact, yes, but in some cases it's the social history of the centre- in others the social history of the people in power. Both are fierce forces upon policy and philosophy.

A short history of me

My next uni task is to talk about myself (never a difficult task <laughter>) and how my background has affected my professional attitudes . 

I have to answer some specific questions, like where did I grow up? I suspect I'm meant to give a straight answer to this, but I don't really do straight answers all that well. I prefer something a little closer to truth than to single-sentence simplicity. I'm a complex person.

I think they're asking where I lived as a child. As a child I lived in the far northern suburbs of Sydney- too far north to be called the North Shore, but close enough to those wondrously detached-from-reality streets to feel like the poor relation when I attended a private school a little further south. That was my physical location. But the actual words of the question say, where did I grow up? 

I grew up largely inside my own head, because I was confined indoors so much due to illness. I grew up in the world of books, imagination, arts and crafts, board games with my family and solitary play with my dolls or my mother's typewriter. And when I was let outdoors, I grew up walking with my father in the local bushland, or inhaling the view on my great-grandparents' riverside acres near Lake Macquarie, or fishing for yabbies in the creek at my grandparents' property on the Northern Tablelands. I grew up a city kid in my head and a country kid in my heart. I grew up as someone equally happy with a pen or an axe in my hands.

Note the absence of peer relationships.

My childhood? Was I ever a child, really? I suppose I must have been, though I spent a lot of my early years feeling like I was looking after the emotions of everyone around me- a singularly unchildlike characteristic. I particularly avoided displeasing my mother. She was a great mother. At some level I understood very early that it wasn't fair to give her a hard time, because she was so fair with me. 

Play? I played intellectual games with her and with my brother- Scrabble was a favourite, but we also wrote some screamingly funny stories which generally took the mickey out of my French grandmother's supply of 'penny dreadful' romantic novellas- and complex games with rules with my father and brother, such as Five Hundred and how to understand and write musical harmony.  Laughter was a constant companion to all of these except the music, which even then I recognised as somehow important and serious in my life. I remember disliking the competitive nature of chess, at which my brother excelled, and so I never took to it.  

I don't think many of my peers had that sort of childhood play. But I wouldn't really know, because- well, did you note the absence of peer relationships?

So culturally, I was something of a hothouse academic, insulated from the world of bikes and hopscotch and The Beatles (the radio was only ever tuned to the ABC station 2FC, which played a lot of classical music and hooked me on Brahms' 4th Symphony before I had a clue who he was). I never heard a pop song till I was 12, I never took part in team sport, I was never a Girl Guide. I was a girl in a bottle.

Education was valued like a rare jewel, because both my parents wished they'd had a better shot at it themselves. My brother and I both had IQs off the scale- we were tested early, due to our ridiculously precocious attainment of milestones and our peculiar lack of childishness in our manner- and were encouraged to turn the learning up to whatever level we wanted.  

We were poor, but we were never denied books; we were members of the local children's library- if I close my eyes I can still see and smell it- and both read voraciously, to the exclusion of other senses (one of the few times I remember my mother smacking me was when she thought I'd been kidnapped after calling me for lord knows how long without reply; I was sitting on the back steps, out of sight, completely engrossed in my 'Bobbsey Twins' book. I would have been 4 years old, at the most).  My brother and father again led the way in some outdoor activities, such as gaining an encyclopaedic knowledge of the insect world (I still have one of our old butterfly nets) and the botanical names of wildflowers.

I don't sound much like a typical child, do I?

I lived in a society where not everyone had a car or phone, the local grocer delivered to your door in a little green panel van with wooden trim, the baker and milkman turned up at our door, ice creams only came scooped into cones or as soft-serve from the Mr Whippy van, we walked to the station to 'go to town' (ie to the shops in the Sydney CBD- there were no suburban malls), everyone had a radio but not everyone had a TV (and if they did it was black and white), magazines like 'Women's Weekly' were delivered by post, toys were made of metal not plastic, and nobody gave a damn about saving water unless- like my grandparents- their only supply was from a tank.

So how does this socio-cultural background affect the way I think about children, teaching and the Early Childhood curriculum?

It makes me aware that children are often far more capable than we think. I set the bar higher than most and lower it only when I need to, rather than starting too low and risking losing the respect and interest of the most capable children. My awareness of the bright sparks in my rooms gives me a head start in crowd control, because sure as eggs, it'll be the bored bright child at the centre of any ruckus.

I love the interest-based curriculum, because I acknowledge that it used to drive me mad to be restricted to what other children were interested in or could do; treating children as individuals is important to me, because I was so different from other children myself.

It makes me good at scaffolding and extension, because I had such good Vygotskian role models in my parents. My parents and my brother were always there to feed me some more information, or brainstorm another method, or add a new material to my resources. I try to do the same for my children, and I'm better than most at spotting an opening for scaffolding or extension because I've seen it done all my life.

It makes me aware of the importance of childhood connection to the natural world, because I was, for example, taught to turn off the tap by my father, who was taught the same by his tank-reliant parents. I still have a deep connection to the bush after all those years of walking and playing there; it shapes my sanity and is a vital emotional resource as well as a physical one. How many children have I helped to overcome a fear of spiders by letting one crawl across my hand and showing them how you can get it off you if you want, by knowing that it always crawls upwards? 

It makes me a walking advertisement for the fact that girls can do pretty much anything boys can do. Unfortunately, it also tends to make me a bit irritable about the 'pretty princess in pink' sort of little girl, and I really have to try hard to connect with these children. I'm drawn to the boys and the tomboys. I have to work hard on instilling self-belief and resilience in over-protected little girls. That's one of my challenges.

My other big challenge, thanks to my background, is getting on with my own peers. I never have a moment's difficulty getting on with the children- far from it. But my colleagues? Honestly, sometimes I think I have mild Aspergers, because I'm so bad at reading them- I never have a clue what they're really thinking about anything- but maybe it's just that I missed out on peer interaction when I was a kid. So that's something else that's a work in progress. I got too used to talking with my family, who were brilliant, insightful and totally on my wavelength. Now I don't even recognise when a relative stranger's not on the same page, so my self-belief ends up making me tread on toes. How on earth do I teach myself that, at this stage of my life? 

That difficulty of mine makes me aware of the importance of letting children work it out, socially. As an adult, I'll prevent fisticuffs, but I won't prevent conflict- just scaffold it a bit if they're stuck. 

And I encourage social play, because heaven knows it's cost me to miss out on it myself.