Children on the street.

A long absence, my apologies. Too much other writing.


This item is about my former PhD student, Barnabe D'Souza in Mumbai. He has worked tirelessly for most of his life working with street children, attempting to rehabilitate them into jobs and worthwhile lives. This means educating them about drugs and safe behaviours, and offering them a sense of togetherness and purpose. Needless to say their lives judder from one crisis to the next. Abandoned once, society at large would continue to abandon them unless strong people get up and struggle on their behalf.
Congratulations to Barnabe. His PhD thesis is available on http://eprints.worc.ac.uk/512. His book From Ecstasy to Agony and Back: Journeying with Adolescents on the Street is available from Sage. 

Paulo Freire

Paulo Freire was born in Brazil and worked as teacher in the shanty-town slums. He criticised the tradition approach of the teacher giving knowledge to passive students, comparing it to putting money in the bank - the students accumulating given knowledge. His approach required dialogue, discussion and debate, with students being active in their learning. He affirmed that such an education process should be empowering for the learner, helping them raise their consciousness about the world and about political issues. Education should, he affirmed, help people see their world differently. He was firmly opposed to workbooks, for example for adult literacy, which dominated most of his work. People learn best if the knowledge and skills they are building up are useful to their lives, even life changing. The power between teacher and learner is narrowed, removing if possible the status gulf between the two so that the learning experience is two-way, built on relationship and joint effort towards a single goal. This dynamic approach to teaching and learning he described as praxis.

More detail can be found in the on-line Encyclopedia of Informal Education .

There are lessons for teaching today.
First that teaching means establishing a positive dialogue with learners which is rooted in a good relationship.
Second that there is more to teaching than administering workbooks or worksheets. It is about creating an interest in the topic which is shown to be relevant to life.
Thirdly, that knowledge is not given and received; rather understanding is constructed together.
Fourthly, education should change the way pupils and learners think about their lives, making them more aware, more ethically concerned, and politicised (i.e. inspired to change their world).

The effectiveness of provision in schools, colleges and universities could profitably be measured against these criteria. Where structures make such dynamic learning impossible,, they should be dismantled.

Ivan Illich and Deschooling

Back in the early 1970s Ivan Illich was persuaded that school education was so bad that the only answer was to scrap them. His book, Deschooling Society was iconic. He contrasted learning with schooling. Schooling is about compliance and obedience whilst learning is about excitement, motivation and empowerment. He referred both to an inappropriate curriculum, and an undemocratic school ethos. Schooling is done to children and not with children. His vision was of a global network of expertise that people could buy into (and offer good or bad feedback) instead of the state providing an education system. To the call to introduce free schooling worldwide, his view that this was the most unhelpful thing to impose onto a developing country. More knowledge, yes, more learning, yes, but NOT more schooling.

This has been a challenging thought. The 1980s UK government imposed a National Curriculum to improve things - it was even called the Education Reform Act in 1988. That was a botched disaster which saw annually revised versions, important afterthoughts such as citizenship, environmental education and careers education. Then a bolted on personal and social education permeation. Angst about standards, behaviour and school quality provide annual post-mortems. Employers still campaign about low literacy and numeracy levels. Campaigns about respect, and 'behaviour modification' are constantly reinvented. Education costs billions, but the problems have not gone away.

Of course, the issue for Illich was what would take the place of schools. He said, a network of expertise. We now have the internet so there is a means for delivering such a network. Of course, the good needs sifting from the awful, but that is not impossible.

It is time to reconsider Illich's arguments. Do schools need to disempower pupils? How could they in contrast empower them? Do schools (or colleges, universities) need to pretend to be the only holders of knowledge? Can education institutions prepare students to become adaptable thinking adults who will live in a world where knowledge is unrecognizably different from what we now think we know? Is the internet the best way of achieving this? Or will other things follow?

So Illich argued that schools made pupils dependent and not independent. That the NHS makes people dependent on experts rather that independent pursuers of healthy lifestyles. That in general all government institutions should empower rather than disempower, and produce motivated and enterprising people. That is still an important national and global aspiration. Schools, Colleges and Universities are only as good as they are at delivering such an enriching agenda.

Powerful Learning

I am reminded, sorting through my papers, of a paper at BERA in Warwick in 2006 by Peggy Lee (peggy@power-ed.co.nz) from New Zealand. Based on interviews with primary and secondary children, she proposes ten principles of powerful learning:
1. Make learning fun
2. Trust us to choose who we work with some of the time.
3. We need to make some choices about what we learn so we can work on things that interest us.
4. Let us walk around when we are learning. Silent static kids are not necessarily learning best.
5. Learning needs to be hands-on, doing things, even teaching things to others.
6. Using technology helps me - we done use computers enough or properly
7. Let us know how we are doing and how to make better progress.
8. We like to set some learning goals for ourselves.
9. Give us time to do things properly, and don't waste it by repeating over complicated instructions.
10. Make learning more real, going out more, meeting people and linking with children around the world. Learning needs to be communal.

A powerful conclusion is to involve children and young people in their own learning and schooling, and make sure they have a proper voice.
Peggy adds: I have continued to work with these ideas and am currently leading a NZ Ministry of Education project working in 10 rural schools looking at student decision-making: teachers and student views and practices. Our revised curriculum here has allowed this kind of investigation with a focus on ‘key competencies for learning’. I am also working in four other primary/middle schools helping with strategic planning, curriculum & assessment practices and implementing the new key competencies for learning.

Disenchantment

Many people are disenchanted with life, and many children disenchanted with school. This reveals itself in demotivation, with a lack of meaning or purpose to life, work and study. A disenchanted person is cynical, and without joy, aspiration or vision of what is possible. It is a kind of personal disintegration. Depression may be a consequence.

So what is the enchantment they have lost? Pooh Bear’s Enchanted Forest is a place where the imagination can run riot, in a place filled with possibilities and potential. In today’s stories of witches and spells, enchantment is caricatured and made ridiculous. Enchantment as a deep and transforming inner experience should not be jettisoned as similar nonsense. We either view our world as enchanted or boringly ordinary. We either see the beauty of the butterfly or flower, or we do not. We either see an animal, a creature, or a pet or pest. We may see our ordinary relationships and friendships as magical and beautiful, or only as useful to our own needs, the same but more so with our special relationships. The magic in the air on any ordinary day has nothing to do with spirits, angels or fairies, but with our responses to beauty, deep meaning and human hope. We have moments of enlightenment, insight and inspiration - thoughts, mental pictures, unexpected connections and links, music, art.

The world in an enchanted place if we are open to joy, curiosity and wonder. It is full of possibility if we aspire to act positively. It is a good place only if we learn to see the good in it. Our relationships will be good and positive if we are respectful and sincere, and receive respect and sincerity in return. The world does not make this an easy path. When respect and sincerity are rebuffed, we may with persistence win respect over time, or we may despite effort fail. This may be our fault, but if we have done our best it probably will not be. We all make positive and negative choices when confronting illness, bereavement, ill will, injury and misfortune. The quality of our lives will depend upon those choices. Even the forgiveness of those who harm or kill those we love are examples of these often difficult choices. We can criticise without hating and work to change the perpetrators.

Disenchantment is the negative choice, a negation of life and of relationship, a refusal to be positive, cooperative or supportive. It is a rut from which it is hard to escape, a habit of disagreeableness and neurosis. To fail to get out of this rut condemns us to unhappy and unfulfilled relationships and experiences.

Te Whaariki , Empowerment Education

Te Whaariki is an educational philosophy in New Zealand based on the empowerment of children. It aims that children are able

To grow up as competent and confident learners and communicators, healthy in mind, body, and spirit, secure in their sense of belonging and in the knowledge that they make a valued contribution to society.

(New Zealand Ministry of Education 1996)

This way of thinking is woven into everything done in schools, homes and care situations – the phrase means in Maori “a woven mat for all to stand on”. Its core principles are:

• empowerment to develop
• focusing on all aspects of children’s needs and requirement
• involving the family and community
• learning through positive relationships with adults and peers

Adults should therefore not be authoritarian. The backgrounds and cultures of all children are respected, and the sense of belonging that go with these. Children should be involved actively in their own learning and development, active learners rather than passive recipients of information. Teachers become fellow learners with the children and with their families and they are free to develop their curriculum and strategies within this framework of empowerment and positivity.