The Cambridge Primary Review Trust

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Getting to know the world

In April I wrote for CPRT about the sort of aims and approaches needed for ‘learning global.’  Since then, the world has moved on dramatically, and the question of what it means to ‘know’ the world has become more acute.

The world’s most pressing questions now find themselves in a ‘post-truth’ environment.  How can we best ‘deliberate the issues’ with primary children? I think this goes far beyond ‘core knowledge.’

The following news stories will help explain some of the difficulties involved in getting to know the world.  I would not use them with children, but what makes them difficult for us as adults also helps clarify our own understanding.

On 12th September 2011, a fire ripped through the settlement of Sinai, in Nairobi, Kenya.  It was caused by an oil pipeline leak, and many people were killed. On the same day, a British couple were attacked while on holiday on the Northern Kenyan coast. The husband was shot dead; his wife was kidnapped.

The story about the British couple was widely reported in the UK and remained in the news for many days. After a few reports on the day itself, the story about the Nairobi fire dropped out of the UK news. The amount of information that people received about these two events was quite different. What could be known or valued was determined by what seemed ‘newsworthy.’

What we get from the media (or a national curriculum) can only ever be a selection from the world: a selection usually made by others on our behalf.  That is one problem about knowing, and especially about what gets counted as ‘core’.

Initial news reports from the Kenyan fire talked of ‘dozens killed’, and later ‘at least 75’.  Because Sinai is an informal settlement, the real figure may well be unknowable.  It is hard too to know the consequences of all this for an already marginal community, in terms of the loss of homes and livelihoods, let alone at a psychological and emotional level.

It is hard to know these things, but as I write this I can start to imagine – and that is another sort of knowing.  It has to be handled with care (there is a risk of projecting our own assumptions onto this situation), but it has its place.

After the fire, people began to look at where the responsibility lay (or, as Voice of America reported, ‘Blame-Game Follows Nairobi Pipeline Blast’).

The newspaper and chat rooms were full of differing accounts: warnings about too many people living near the pipeline; government officials’ failure to relocate families; some blamed the residents for staying there; others pointed out that many had been displaced from elsewhere; many expressed fury at the Kenya Pipeline Company; at least one commentator talked of the murky politics behind the situation. BBC Nairobi correspondent, Caroline Karobia, said: ‘For the slum-dwellers, though, the reason is obvious: Poverty.’

How do we know which of these accounts to believe, many of them conflicting, some simplistic, some teetering on the edge of conspiracy theories? Can we know what really happened, and why?

I think that is possible to know: to seek truth, to find out, and come up with answers – often provisional, often contestable, but answers nonetheless.

What it means to know when we are dealing with contested knowledge, something so emotive, requires critical interrogation, exploration, debate, investigation and enquiry.  It may well also require an element of ‘facts’ (where these places are, key statistics), but we need far more.

It also requires the sort of knowing that comes from the imagination: to not lose sight of the central injustices in this story, of the reasons why people might say what they say, do what they do.  This story matters because it speaks to our humanity: it is not, cannot, merely become a case study.  We need both ‘felt understandings’ and cool analysis.

There is a further risk when we are dealing with a story like this one: it becomes part of what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has called a ‘single story’: a narrative where the UK is ‘developed’ but Africa is ‘undeveloped’, full of poverty and indecipherable otherness.

The information we get is often distorted, unsubstantiated … and always partial.  We think we know things, but our sources are sometimes unreliable, restricted, biased.  We – and children – need spaces where we can critically explore crucial questions of reliability, accuracy and motive.

Here are some pointers to consider as part of a repertoire for helping children know the world.

Above all, we need narrative modes of understanding. Drama and story can help us see patterns, look for what is said and unsaid, explore different perspectives, detect bias and engage with the issues in an empathetic manner.  We can deliberately seek out alternative texts and counter-narratives (‘different stories’), first-hand accounts, or news reports from around the world.

We need to be careful about ‘balance,’ as not every voice is equally authentic or evidenced (for example, the very small proportion of scientists arguing against man-made climate change).  Children need to interrogate historical and contemporary texts (including visual and web media) – what is evidenced? what is opinion? why was it written?

Stories like Anthony Browne’s ‘Voices in the Park’ offer excellent opportunities for exploring events from different viewpoints, as do ‘flipped’ stories like ‘Maleficent,’ ‘The True Story of the Three Little Pigs’ and some of Roald Dahl’s ‘Revolting Rhymes.’

Drama, especially, gets under the skin of a story, exploring how people think and feel in demanding situations.  Role-play techniques like ‘freeze framing’ offer children opportunities to explore people’s viewpoints and feelings.  Debating-in-role gives them the opportunity to create an argument from a perspective other than their own, as can writing a persuasive text in role.

Even very young children can interrogate visual images: creating thought or word bubbles for a picture (are the thoughts and words always the same?); extending a photograph beyond its frame; considering where the photographer is in every image.  They can create their own images for different purposes: to show a friend their home area, attract tourists or encourage the council to spend more.  How do these images differ and why?

Such opportunities for questioning, dialogue and enquiry can bring light, as well as heat, to the difficult business of getting to know the world … and ultimately, enable resilience in the face of demagoguery.

Ben Ballin is a consultant to Tide~ global learning, and the Geographical Association. These ideas were initially developed for Big Brum TIE.

 

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North and South

This blog takes us to two beautiful corners of the UK, one to the north and one in the far south. We begin with the south, on England’s largest and second most populous island, the Isle of Wight. As the controversy surrounding former Ofsted Chair David Hoare’s recent comments about the Island vividly demonstrates, raising matters like educational disadvantage can be dangerous ground. Whilst Mr Hoare was right to draw attention to the serious problems in coastal England which have continuously slipped under the radar when it comes to funding and interventions, solutions are not to be found in public speeches shaming or blaming those unfortunate enough to be at the sharp end of disadvantage. Labelling children and families as products of inbreeding and their homes as ghettoes was not only scurrilous but neatly diverted attention away from an educational system that seems to have failed them. Whilst Ofsted data suggests the Island’s schools are steadily improving, only 64% of its primary children attend schools categorised as good or outstanding, placing the local authority fourth from the lowest rung on the national ‘league table’.

Yet for many who visit Tennyson’s ‘Enchanted Isle’, Mr Hoare’s description may well have come as a shock. Holidaymakers go there to enjoy the Island’s natural beauty and architectural heritage, testimony to its fashionable heyday when Queen Victoria commissioned Osborne House. Official statistics, however, paint a rather different, sombre view of the Island, with high unemployment and poverty, low aspirations and educational underachievement afflicting many Islanders’ lives. The Island’s fall from prosperity is sadly mirrored in many other coastal areas around the UK. Cheap air travel tempted tourists to resorts overseas decades ago and recession in other maritime industries has left many seaside resorts struggling to survive. Finding ways to address such complex, pervasive problems is not easy and quick-fix solutions have proved to be illusive but clearly education must lie at the heart of community regeneration efforts if they are to succeed in the long term.

Turning our attention northwards, an interesting success story can be found in the Scottish Lowlands, 45 miles south of Glasgow, and it may offer inspiration to other areas battling against the economic tide. CPRT was recently invited to attend an Education Day at Dumfries House in Ayrshire, where we heard about a heritage-led regeneration project instigated by His Royal Highness, The Prince of Wales. This innovative project is reinvigorating its local community through a cohesive strategy involving the conservation and reuse of Dumfries House, an 18th century mansion and its estate, to provide employment and educational opportunities, and to rekindle local pride and aspirations. Heritage-led regeneration initiatives like this one can serve as catalysts for economic and social improvement: although the link between heritage-led regeneration and education may not seem immediately apparent, educators know that what happens in schools and classrooms is inseparably interwoven with the culture and conditions of the communities they serve.  Aware of this crucial link, the Dumfries House project is focusing its attention on education and is working closely with schools from across the region and beyond to effect positive change.

Linked to the objectives of Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence, the Dumfries House Education programme has six centres providing opportunities for children and adults to engage with a wide range of hands-on learning experiences and training for employability. The Pierburg Building and Kaufmann Gardens have been designed for children to experience the delights of planting, harvesting and eating their own vegetables, a learning opportunity that keys into the Curriculum for Excellence sustainability requirements. For many of the primary school children who come here this will be the first time they have dug the soil, picked sugar-snap peas fresh from the plant or tasted soup made with vegetables they have grown themselves. The Morphy Richards Engineering Centre has an imaginatively-designed Harmony playpark and well-equipped teaching area where children explore topics relating to science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Activities are designed to challenge children, ‘…to imagine, design, build and test solutions to real world problems’.

However, it is perhaps the House and its estate which are likely to inspire children’s curiosity and imagination most. Just as the 5th Earl of Dumfries intended, the beautiful 18th century house and its landscaped grounds leave an indelible impression. The House breathes life into history, introducing children to a fascinating collection of artefacts and furnishings (including The Grand Orrery which is spellbinding to visitors of any age!); the landscaped gardens and the arboretum encourage children to explore and discover the extraordinary diversity of the natural world. Without the regeneration project all this would have been lost and future Ayrshire generations would have been denied these precious opportunities to wander and wonder, and to engage with their community’s heritage.

The Dumfries House Education programme reminds us that inspiring curiosity and imagination is one of the aims for primary education proposed in the Cambridge Primary Review final report, Children, Their World, Their Education. In England, the current primary curriculum has placed greater emphasis on narrowly-defined ‘core skills’, reducing opportunities for giving attention to broader aspects of knowledge, and to developing capacities for creativity, imagination and understanding. Schools should be places that allow space and time for wandering and wondering. There must be sufficient time allowed for children to imagine and to ask questions because solutions to problems and new knowledge are created through divergent thought, curious questions and imaginatively-inspired action. More urgently than ever, we need these qualities to enable us to find solutions to the dilemmas we face, whether in our own, local communities or on a global plane.

The heritage-led regeneration work at Dumfries House is just one, small example of an imaginative starting point but it offers a positive model for areas facing similar challenges and one which accepts the unique qualities of a place and its people as valuable assets. Working in tandem with Scotland’s curriculum based on clearly-articulated aims ‘to develop successful learners, confident individuals, responsible citizens and effective contributors’, Dumfries House and its Education programme are becoming part of a coherent approach seeking to establish a brighter, more sustainable future for the region.

Returning to the south, the problems identified in the Isle of Wight and other disadvantaged areas need a similarly holistic approach and their problems highlight the importance of tackling the CPRT’s priorities, particularly those regarding:

We’ve seen that it’s possible to start addressing these priorities if joined-up thinking, determination and imagination are used to kickstart change, and if we use the positive attributes of a locality and its people as starting points. It’s also worth reminding ourselves that the CPR’s curriculum model calls for around 30 per cent of teaching time to be devoted to locally proposed, non-statutory programmes of study (‘the Community Curriculum’) to respond to local interests. The CPR Final Report argued that a Community Curriculum could be:

…planned locally by community curriculum partnerships (CCPs) convened by each local authority, or where this is desirable and appropriate by local authorities acting together; each panel includes school representatives, community representatives and experts in the contributory disciplines, and its work must involve consultation with children (CPR Final Report, p. 276).

The Report goes on to say:

…by building on children’s knowledge and experience, by engaging children educationally with the local culture and environment in a variety of ways, and by involving children in discussion of the local component through school councils and the world of the CCPs, the community curriculum would both give real meaning to children’s voices and begin the process of community enrichment and regeneration where it matters (CPR Final Report, p. 275).

Wherever their home is within the UK – north, south, east or west – children have a right to succeed and fulfil their potential. We urgently need to increase our efforts to ensure that these rights are achieved for every child.

Details of the year-round educational programme can be found on the Dumfries House Education website. The programme offers an extensive range of educational opportunities for schools and organisations, including residential courses.

Julia Flutter is a Co-Director of the Cambridge Primary Review Trust.

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The call of the wild

So at last what many of us have instinctively understood is backed by evidence from England’s largest outdoor learning project. The weight of evidence is compelling. A hefty 95 percent of children surveyed said outdoor learning makes lessons more enjoyable, 90 percent said they felt happier and 72 percent said that they got on better with others.

These findings are from the four year Natural Connections Demonstration project to help over 40,000 primary and secondary school children – particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds – from 125 urban and rural schools to experience the benefits of the natural environment by empowering teachers, who often lack confidence in teaching outside, to use the outdoors to support everyday learning.

93 percent of schools said outdoor learning improves pupils’ social skills, 92 percent said it improves pupils’ health and wellbeing and engages them with learning, and 82 percent saw a positive impact on behaviour.

The evidence for teachers is impressive too. 79 percent of teachers surveyed said outdoor learning had a positive impact on their teaching practice, 69 percent said it had a positive impact on their professional development, 72 percent said outdoor learning improved their health and wellbeing and 69 percent said it had a positive impact on their job satisfaction.

But with evidence from the Monitoring of Engagement with Natural Environment (MENE) survey that only 8 percent of children (aged 6-15) in England visited the natural environment with their schools in an average month during 2013-2015, there is a real need to change perceptions about the value of outdoor learning. A blog from Natural England’s Principal Adviser for Outdoor Learning, Jim Burt, on Busting the myths on outdoor learning in schools goes a long way towards removing the barriers. For me, it’s the final myth ‘unless we can show outdoor learning has an impact on exam results we won’t be able to convince schools’ that will have the most traction with school leaders. Jim Burt writes

Obviously attainment is critical. Even in the relatively short time frame of the project, nearly 57 per cent of schools reported a positive impact on attainment that they felt was attributable to outdoor learning. Much higher percentages of teachers reported positive impacts on the other areas such as a child’s engagement and their motivation to learn, commenting that these underpinned academic performance. This reflects a growing body of evidence highlighting the important contribution that personal attributes such as resilience, self-esteem and self-efficacy make to a child’s overall performance.

These findings chime well with the CPRT aims relating to those individual qualities and capacities which schools should foster and build upon in every child, and which infuse the work of some of CPRT’s alliance schools. Making the most of outdoor learning opportunities, children from The Spinney Primary School, Cambridge, regularly enjoy play based learning in their little Wild Wood whilst children from Shrubland Street Primary School, Leamington Spa make the most of their playground whilst also regularly visiting their local green spaces.

The Natural Connections Demonstration Project enabled the participating teachers and their schools to make the most of their local outdoors. Environment Minister Rory Stewart said

What’s clever about this project is it listens to teachers, it works with the grain of an individual school, and it works out how to get children into the outdoors while improving their curriculum experience.

All teachers and school leaders can benefit from the project’s learning. Published this week, a teacher’s guide Transforming Outdoor Learning in Schools-Lessons from the Natural Connections Demonstration Project features teachers and pupils across the project talking about the benefits the project brought to their school, alongside practical advice on how teachers can successfully embed outdoor learning in their school.

Speaking at Wallscourt Farm Academy, Bristol, at the launch of the project’s findings, Natural England’s Chairman, Andrew Sells said

The Natural Connections project has empowered teachers to make the most of what’s right on their doorstep and helped children experience the joy of the natural environment. It’s brought a real culture change into schools, making learning in the outdoors a regular part of school life – and it’s inspiring to see children more engaged with learning and happier and healthier as a result.

With such a mandate as educators, and particularly at this time when primary schools in England are spending increasing time and energy on preparing their children to meet the new standards in reading, writing and mathematics, let’s consider the importance with which some countries with high ranking education systems treat outdoor learning. See Jim Burt’s blog yesterday Are we at the turning point for outdoor learning? With such a groundswell of evidence, how can one afford to resist the call of the wild?

For other CPRT blogs by Marianne Cutler click here.

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We’re all global citizens now

Migrants are rarely out of the news – mostly with negative words attached: ‘threat’, ‘invaders’,  ‘illegal’, ‘flood’, ‘swarm’, ‘crisis’,  ‘chaos’ ‘influx’, ‘sham’, ‘terrorist’ ‘suspected’. This is particularly so at present, with immigration a key issue in the EU debate. Voters have been exhorted to consider the security threat posed by migrants. Spreading fear of migrants, as human rights campaigners point out in a recent letter to the Guardian, ‘ is an age-old racist tool designed to stoke division’.

What effect does this kind of inflammatory scare-mongering have on children?  And how as educators should we respond? At a basic level, there are direct implications for schools arising from population growth: migration puts pressure on school places. But it isn’t just a question of numbers. In their recent CPRT research review on diversity, Ainscow and his colleagues report that during the last decade the percentage of the primary cohort who were from minority ethnic groups (that is, not classified as white British) rose from 19.3 to 30.4 percent.  Schools are in the frontline of response to these demographic changes, dealing, for example, with children who are non-English speakers or who have been traumatised by their earlier experiences.

Arguably however, the most difficult challenge ensuing from anti-migrant propaganda is its insidious effect on the attitudes of children themselves. This permeates all schools, not just those directly involved in receiving migrants. The controversial DfE policy which requires schools to reinforce British identity through fundamental British values, which in its turn was triggered by the ‘Trojan Horse’ affair involving Birmingham schools, is unlikely to help in this regard.

Our first concern might be to consider how to protect children from any propaganda they are exposed to. But we need to go further. Negative stereotypes need to be countered with approaches that not only redress untruths and misrepresentations, but also shift children’s gaze to the common values of humanity, generating compassion, empathy and understanding. Schools are uniquely positioned to provide such positive influences on children and their communities.

In their CPRT research review on diversity Ainscow et al makes the same point, reminding us of the opportunities for schools offered by rapid demographic change. Migrant Help aims to address the moral panic and embrace such opportunities. It argues that historically the UK has welcomed economic migrants and those fleeing war or persecution and it seeks to promote a culture of tolerance and acceptance, and the kind of community which aspires to the Bantu notion of ‘ubuntu’. Ubuntu is a central African word that means human kindness; it includes the understanding that every human action has implications for all around us and that our identities are shaped by the past and present lives of others. This concept, and the values that underpin it, resonates with no fewer than three of CPRT’s priorities: equity, community and Sustainability.

Under the ‘ubuntu’ umbrella, Jonathan Barnes and Alex Ntung of Migrant Help Education are involved in projects that directly address these values and priorities.  One of them draws on the work of Bern O’Donoghue, an artist who addresses perceptions of migrants through her art, challenging myths and prejudice about immigration. Bern places fact-filled paper boats in public places for people to find.  So far 7000 tiny origami paper boats inscribed with little known facts about migrants have been placed around Europe and the USA (translated into 6 languages) in nooks and crannies, bus shelters, on fence posts, wall cracks and signboards in the hope that passers-by will pick them up and read them.

Bern has been working with 9 – 11 years old in Hastings primary schools associated with the Education Futures Trust. When introducing the subject of refugee boats in the Mediterranean, Bern asked children to consider parallel situations in their own lives – being in a new place, moving house, changing schools – and what might help them settle in. This drew them into conversations about what ‘our’ (European), response should/could be to migrants fleeing war and persecution.  Children too made origami boats to carry messages, and were then involved in the analysis and discussion of the messages they and others had created. Common themes emerged including friendship, kindness, fairness, home and safety – all suggestive of understanding and clarity about humanitarian values.

This small research project seemed highly meaningful to the participants, perhaps because it involved a current emotive issue that had already engaged the children at a profound emotional level and involved the application of values to an authentic context.

For the education team at Migrant Help UK there was more learning. They were reminded that youngsters are often much more generous in their responses than adults. The threat-laden language of the tabloids and ultra-nationalists was entirely missing from the children’s responses. The team reflected on how much adults have learned to live with values-compromises, values-inconsistencies, values-conflicts and values-suspension on a daily basis. Perhaps we should listen to the moral guidance of 9 year olds more often.    

Another CPRT research report, on global learning and sustainability from Doug Bourn and his IoE colleagues, reminds us of the capacities that young children have for reasoning and discussion of complex or controversial topics. They say (p23): ‘With regard to cultural diversity, research indicates that while children begin to develop prejudices at an early age, they also start to understand concepts of fairness, empathy and justice early too.’  However, the report observes that schools tend to prioritise global and sustainability themes in order to foster empathy, rather than taking a more critical approach to controversial issues such as injustice and inequality. Early intervention, the CPRT Bourn report suggests, ‘can challenge negative stereotypes before they become entrenched, and provide a scaffold into which more complex themes can be added at a later age or stage of schooling’.

While evidence from the Cambridge Primary Review Community Soundings suggested that primary aged children are generally aware of and concerned about these issues, Bourn et al note that a good deal of research shows that teachers feel less comfortable with tackling controversial issues in the classroom, perhaps fearing backlash from parents or – given recent events – government. At the NUT conference in April 2015, executive member Alex Kenny commented:  ‘The government’s promotion of “British values”, the Prevent agenda and the use of Ofsted to monitor these is having the effect of closing down spaces for such discussion and many school staff are now unwilling to allow discussions in their classroom for fear of the consequences.’

School leaders need to take their courage in their hands and counteract this prevailing culture of fear, especially with the prospect of Brexit triumphing on 23rd June.

Vanessa Young and Jonathan Barnes lecture at Canterbury Christ Church University and Vanessa is Regional Co-ordinator for CPRT South East. Find out more about the activities of this very active network and its member primary schools, and how you can join in.

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Learning global

Before you’ve finished your breakfast this morning, you’ll have relied on half the world. (Martin Luther-King)

The Cambridge Primary Review Trust prioritises a rounded primary education that does not shirk the ‘everyday complexity’ of the contemporary world. In February 2016, it published the report Primary Education for Global Learning and Sustainability, which called for further work on ‘the development of a pedagogy of global and environmental social justice.’

The following are some thoughts about what ‘learning global’ looks like. It draws on insights from a project at Tide~ global learning which involves teachers from the UK, Spain, Kenya and The Gambia.

What are we trying to do?

CPRT’s February 2016 report points out that ‘learning about global and sustainability themes raises wider points regarding the purpose of education.’

Our aims will dictate the approaches that we take. Most serious commentators on the purpose of education go beyond test results to consider both individual and societal purposes. CPRT aims for ‘Self, others and the wider world’ are particularly (but not exclusively) relevant here. The following two aims deserve a careful reading:

Promoting interdependence and sustainability. To develop children’s understanding of humanity’s dependence for well-being and survival on equitable relationships between individuals, groups, communities and nations, and on a sustainable relationship with the natural world, and help children to move from understanding to positive action in order that they can make a difference and know that they have the power to do so.

Empowering local, national and global citizenship. To help children to become active citizens by encouraging their full participation in decision-making within the classroom and school, especially where their own learning is concerned, and to advance their understanding of human rights, democratic engagement, diversity, conflict resolution and social justice. To develop a sense that human interdependence and the fragility of the world order require a concept of citizenship which is global is well as local and national.

It is also worth noting that a set of outward-looking aims are also now enshrined within the globally-agreed UN Sustainable Development Goals as SDG 4.7.

What are our theories of knowledge and learning?

The next step on our pedagogical journey is to consider knowledge itself. How do we know the world?

Let’s take the issue of climate change as an example. Knowledge about it is contentious. Scientific predictions and solutions vary. We are dealing with change itself, so new knowledge is coming into being all the time. Our response therefore needs to be flexible, rather than fixed.

With an issue like this (or conflict, the refugee crisis etc) Mr Gradgrind’s ‘facts’ are only going to get us so far. If we think that human suffering, injustice and environmental devastation actually matter, we need something more.

Since climate change is already a pressing reality for millions of human beings, meaningful knowledge about it is not just a moral imperative but a growing necessity. It is not accidental that countries like Bangladesh have made it a compulsory element in their National Curriculum.

It is that wider narrative that makes all the messy information meaningful. However, a nine year old child may need specific stories to access that big picture: the polar bear stranded on an ice floe; the teenager generating renewable energy from a hamster wheel; the Maldives’ president holding an underwater press conference to draw attention to his islands’ plight; a demonstration or a summit that brings people together around a call for change. Some of those stories will want to counter potential pessimism with tales of hopeful action.

If we are to make sense of big, messy issues, then we are most likely to do so as active makers of meaning. We can start to make sense of the stories and information we encounter through investigation, comparison, experimentation, experience, dialogue, drama, debate, critical reflection, synthesis and application. To borrow from Jerome Bruner, we will mostly be using ‘narrative’ ways of understanding the world.

Learning may ultimately happen in each individual brain, but the business of effective global learning is a social activity. As CPRT’s final aim and seventh priority remind us, dialogue is paramount. Our ideas – and the values that inform them – are in play with those of other people. We make meaning together.

Rather than imagining a helpful and omniscient answer-book for big global issues, I like Edward Said’s idea of thinking ‘contrapuntally.’ He takes his metaphor from an orchestra, and how its individual instruments play distinctive lines that together make a greater whole.

In the example of climate change, these instrumental lines can be played by different subjects (Science, Geography, Citizenship etc), by accounts from contrasting parts of the world (big carbon emitters like the USA, vulnerable countries like The Gambia, rapidly-industrialising countries like India), or by the stories of people with different roles and viewpoints (the climate scientist, the fuel company employee, the Alaskan villager needing to move her home). When we put them together, we make a bigger whole, and in so doing we avoid the trap of ‘the single story.’

How do we connect action to learning?

If we are talking about global learning, challenging pessimism and fostering hope, then we are not only talking about understanding but about positive action.

I think that it is best to imagine action and learning in a dialectical relationship, where one constantly leads on to the other. Positive action, as part of a learning process, is not only informed by new knowledge, but leads on to further knowledge.

Seen this way, positive action can serve as a way into deeper learning. For example, a Year 4 class adopts a simple energy-saving measure, switching lights off in empty classrooms. This only makes sense if pupils locate what they are doing within the bigger picture of climate change and energy use. (‘We are doing this because …’)

Pupils can then subject their idea to scrutiny. Is this the best course of action, given the big picture? How much energy does it save? Where does the electricity come from? (e.g. if it is all generated from renewable sources, is it having any effect on climate change?)  Are there safety or security benefits to sometimes leaving lights on? If so, is there a way around this (e.g. installing movement sensors)? And so forth …

In this instance, positive action leads to legitimate learning, and thus to further action. All-knowing adults are not grooming children into predetermined forms of ‘behaviour change’ (where switching off the lights is always an unquestionable good), but empowering them to arrive at their own ideas about what is responsible and effective. Children are acting as agents both of their own learning and of social and environmental change.

Moreover, 2016’s solutions are unlikely to be those of 2056, so children’s growing ability to criticise, analyse and imagine plausible courses of action is not only educationally richer, but more likely to be useful and sustainable. Professor Bill Scott describes this as ‘learning as sustainability.’

Global learning lenses – a useful scaffold?

The following offers some useful pedagogical scaffolding. It comes courtesy of Tide~’s Spanish project partners at FERE-CECA in Madrid, and takes the form of four ‘global learning lenses.’ These can help us look into any global issue, for example the international food trade.

The Magnifying Glass opens up the issues, including becoming aware of hidden questions about values and the way we use language. We might start by looking at food labels, identifying where things have come from, and finding the places on the map.  Using a questioning framework like the Development Compass Rose we can investigate images of growers and producers in some of these places. We could give them thought or speech bubbles, freeze frame the images, and discuss why they are thinking or saying those things.

The 3D Glasses offer diverse perspectives. These could be subject or place perspectives, the viewpoints of different people in the production cycle. Who earns what from growing a banana?  We could debate-in-role as a banana grower, an importer and a supermarket manager. Are the processes just? Older pupils could look at an international news website and consider what people in different countries are saying about the latest trade talks.

The Microscope looks deeper and more critically into the issues. What would happen if we were to fill a lunchbox using different criteria, such as trading fairly, being environmentally friendly, healthy eating, living on a budget, tastiness?  What would go into only one box? Into all? Which would we opt for and why?  Older children might look at the way a big supermarket chain or a leading brand works. Who is involved and what are the processes?

The Telescope envisions solutions and engages us in ‘utopian thinking’. We might write or draw an imaginary classroom, school or community of the near future where all its food is provided fairly and with the environment in mind. From this, we might decide to set up a food growing project at the school, or to support a particular producer, and present our work to peers and parents. Outputs of this kind not only concentrate and focus learning, but lend it real purpose.

Like any pedagogical journey, we need to consider our aims, the kind of approaches that best suit the content (and the children) and to have some useful tools at our disposal. I look forward to hearing how readers’ global learning journeys go.

Ben Ballin works for the educational charity Tide~ global learning. He is also a consultant to the Geographical Association and Big Brum Theatre in Education.

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From pessimism to hope: global learning and sustainability

When the Cambridge Primary Review conducted its Community Soundings in 2007, it encountered a widespread sense of the world as a threatening place for children. The Review’s Final Report (p 189) explains:

We were frequently told … that the wider world is changing, rapidly and in ways which it is not always easy to comprehend, though on balance they give cause for alarm, especially in respect of climate change and environmental sustainability.

However, it then adds:

Pessimism turned to hope when witnesses felt they had the power to act. Thus, the children who were most confident that climate change need not overwhelm them were those whose schools had replaced unfocussed fear by factual information and practical strategies for energy reduction and sustainability.

I have spent a quarter of a century thinking about how primary schools can help children engage with such information, and adopt such strategies. It remains work in progress. I hope that the following will help teachers as they create their own professional repertoire.

Let us begin with pessimism.

Frightening visions of the world often impinge on children’s consciousness. Aged six in Cardiff, my  teacher told a horrified class about the nearby Aberfan disaster. Could this happen to us? My childhood nightmares revolved around nuclear war and the scene in the Sound of Music where the family crouches in terror, hiding from a Nazi search party. The nature of the challenges has mutated, but there remains much for children to be anxious about.

Spending a morning with year four children in a Worcestershire first school, I observed their efforts to make sense of some enormous numbers on the Worldometers website. As they watched the figures for births, deaths, carbon emissions and arms sales ratchet up in real time, like a demented gaming machine, the children began to decipher what they were seeing. They compared figures and applied what these meant to the real world around them. Within fifteen minutes, the children were cross-referring statistics on global literacy to what they had seen on Newsround about Malala Yousafzai.

The absolute figures for access to water and sanitation showed slow but steady progress. One child related this tellingly to population data: ‘About once every second someone else gets clean water and sanitation. But look at how many people there are: it’s not very nice.’ A nine-year-old child who can not only understand factual information, but interrogate it critically, and thereby create new knowledge, is already on a journey from pessimism to hope. That child will certainly not be easily duped by statistics, although he or she may also be in need of some wider perspectives and some practical solutions.

If we censor the world for children, in all its scariness and wonder, we can end up failing to protect them. In our quite proper desire to keep children safe, this can sometimes seem counter-intuitive. Time and again, however, surveys show that even very young children are already aware from family and the media of what is going on in the world. They will also often be very confused about it. If we delay our responses until children reach an imagined stage of developmental ‘readiness’, we merely allow fear and confusion free rein.

Many schools provide safe spaces where children can talk about what is going on in the world. This might be a daily ‘in the news’ slot, or through circle time, communities of enquiry, or within dedicated humanities, PSHE or RE time. Story can offer a powerful way in, offering as it does the protection that children are dealing with the world of fiction and the imagination.

I saw some powerful work recently from a year five class in West London, based on Pandora’s Box. The class created its own box, into which children placed what they most hated in the world. Importantly, clear ground rules had been established in advance, including the option to keep feelings private. Several families came from conflict zones, and many children related fears about violence and war. Others talked about unfair adult treatment, frightening things that they had witnessed, or deep-seated negative feelings about themselves. This activity was possible because these children had a high degree of trust in their peers and teachers, including a belief that their fears would be heard and responded to. Their own Pandora’s Box set out quite an agenda for the school, embracing curriculum (e.g. the literature, history and geography of war, conflict and refugees), wellbeing and safeguarding. Some of this had implications for the whole school and the local community. However, without the school having bravely provided a safe space for the children to reveal their ‘furies’, they might easily have remained silent and unattended in the children’s hearts and minds.

Pessimism requires a considered response. There is also cause for hope, but we may not hear so much about it. I think our highly-numerate year four child would be encouraged by these figures from the United Nations Development Programme:

  • Since 1990, the number of people living in extreme poverty has declined by more than half.
  • The proportion of undernourished people in the developing regions has fallen by almost half.
  • The primary school enrolment rate in the developing regions has reached 91 percent, and many more girls are now in school compared to 15 years ago.
  • Remarkable gains have also been made in the fight against HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis.
  • The under-five mortality rate has declined by more than half, and maternal mortality is down 45 percent worldwide.
  • The target of halving the proportion of people who lack access to improved sources of water was also met

(Of course, our canny child would not be alone in asking how these figures had been arrived at, what they omit, and about the use of a term like ‘the developing regions’).

In September this year, leaders from 193 countries agreed 17 Sustainable Development Goals, setting out objectives for sustainable human and environmental development for the next fifteen years. Crucially, SDG4 for ‘Quality Education’ also sets the following target:

By 2030, ensure that all learners acquire the knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development, including, among others, through education for sustainable development and sustainable lifestyles, human rights, gender equality, promotion of a culture of peace and non-violence, global citizenship and appreciation of cultural diversity and of culture’s contribution to sustainable development.

The Cambridge Primary Review and CPRT have been ahead of the game, embracing sustainability and global citizenship as both a priority for the Trust and two explicit aims for all schools. The commitment has been implicit from the very beginning in CPR’s strapline – ‘Children, their world, their education’ – which was also was used for its final report and a 2014 seminar in which CPRT was involved, and there have been three recent CPRT blogs on this issue. The 2014 seminar also drew on pilot work carried out by the cross-European project DEEEP, considering the tricky question of how we measure progress against this UN target.

Frankly, all this may be a bit hard to digest. For me, the test is therefore what best serves the needs of particular children and their education. My instinct is to start with a question: what is happening and why does it matter? We can then move on to what different people are saying about it. It will be important to ensure that children have access to a good range of varied perspectives: this is one place where the specialists can help. From there, children can move on to the ways forward that might be available (there should usually be more than one, even at key stage 1). There may then be appropriate action that children can take: themselves, through others, often both.

From a pedagogical point of view, one of the great things about big global issues is that they may appear abstract, but they are actually very concrete. This means that children are engaging with real questions in real time, and this can lend a clear purpose to their enquiries, their talk, their writing. Moreover, because we are dealing with the real world, we are necessarily engaging with its glorious messiness. The world is perennially changing, what people say about it is contested, and our knowledge of it is constantly being updated. Such global knowledge is enormously rich: there is no answer-book for the big questions that face us in the real world.

This also means that we are to some extent necessarily co-learners. Indeed, it has been argued that human and sustainable development is itself a learning process, in which case we are all de facto participants on a shared learning journey. This can be challenging, but it can also be liberating for both teacher and pupils.

To put this into sharper focus, let us imagine that a year six class is learning about the forthcoming climate change summit in Paris. Yet again, world leaders are going to determine what is to be done about our collective futures. By borrowing an enquiry process that Tide~ has used in the past, we could ask:

  1. What is climate change? There is some solid science here, including the opportunity to take weather measurements, look at leaf-fall and bud-burst. Children could examine what so-called ‘climate sceptics’ have to say, and where the balance of evidence presently resides.
  2. Why does it matter? This allows children to move into geography, and the differential impacts of climate events on, say, the UK, the Sahel and small island states. They could use a ‘mystery’ to explore complex chains of cause and effect across the globe. They could follow online news reports about what people are saying in different places in the lead-up to the Paris summit.
  3. What can we do about it? This includes geography and science. Children could look at technical solutions in design technology, personal action and morality in PSHE and RE, the decision-making processes at Paris. They might write persuasive texts to send to local delegates to Paris. For a whole school response, a scheme such as Eco Schools would come into its own.
  4. What have we learned and how? This is a chance for children to share their learning with others, and with a purpose in so doing. For example, they could create an assembly, a film, a blog or news bulletin for their peers and the community, thereby meeting an ‘extended writing’ brief for National Curriculum 2014. In reviewing the ways they have learned about this issue, they may well devise further questions for the future. This is about empowering children not only as learners, but also as confident citizens.

There is a great deal of material for those wanting to go deeper into the pedagogy and ethics of global learning and sustainability. Elaine Miskell has produced a succinct document on some common pitfalls, and how they can be overcome. Teachers at Tide~ have produced a discussion paper on teaching about climate change as a focus for staff meetings. Thinkers like Vanessa Andreotti have written compellingly about how to challenge development stereotypes.

Eventually, the choice of what to do comes down to the individual teacher, the circumstances and opportunities that exist in her or his school, classroom and community, with specific children in mind. When I think about the many children I meet, like that year four child in Worcestershire, the fears that they share, the tricky questions that they ask, and the potential solutions they undertake, my own anxieties about the world start to feel more hopeful. If children can become agents of their own learning, authors of their own future and makers of sustainable change, those ‘darker visions’ of the world look a little bit brighter.

Ben Ballin works for the educational charity Tide~ global learning. He is also a consultant to the Geographical Association and Big Brum Theatre in Education. The example from Worcestershire  previously appeared in the article ‘The World in Numbers’ in Primary Geography 33.

The ‘darker visions’ in Ben’s final paragraph is a reference to the scene-setting in the Cambridge Primary Review final report and a reminder of why the Review and the Trust are committed to equity, global understanding and sustainability. The report said (p 15): ‘This is the era of globalisation, and perhaps of unprecedented opportunity. But there are darker visions. The gap between the world’s rich and poor continues to grow. There is political and religious polarisation. Many people are daily denied their basic human rights and suffer violence and oppression. As if that were not enough, escalating climate change may well make this the make-or-break century for humanity as a whole. Such scenarios raise obvious and urgent questions for public education.’

by Robin Alexander

2015: teach local, learn global

We ended 2014 with one official consultation. We begin 2015 with another. The two couldn’t be more different.

In December we responded to the online enquiry of the House of Commons Education Select Committee into the UK government’s use of evidence to inform policy. Not for the first time, but in common with many of the enquiry’s other 500 respondents, we voiced deep concern that despite DfE’s ostensible interest in ‘evidence-informed policy’ its approach to evidence is all too often selective, ideologically partisan and methodologically naive.  It remains to be seen whether the Select Committee will call DfE to account on this score, or whether its members will merely shrug and say ‘That’s politics.’ Which, depressingly, it is.

But all this will seem parochial in comparison with the agenda to which another organisation invites us to respond, for it deals with nothing less than the responsibility of national educational systems, including our own, ‘to improve the quality of life, promote decent employment, encourage civic participation and enable all citizens to lead a life with dignity, equality, gender empowerment and justice’. All citizens, everywhere, not just in the UK.

The quotation comes from a UNESCO concept note outlining how progress in global education should be monitored after 2015, the year in which the current UN Millennium Development Goal of universal primary education (which in many countries won’t be achieved) is superseded by an even more ambitious set of goals which apply as much to rich countries as to poor, and tie education firmly to the increasingly urgent global imperatives of equity and sustainable development.

Both of these happen to be among CPRT’s eight priorities, and if you check the new CPRT priorities in action page of our website you’ll see how we and our partners are beginning, within our modest resources, to pursue them. But if you want a sense of the gravity of the challenge we all face, read the UN’s December 2014 synthesis report The road to dignity by 2030: ending poverty, transforming all lives and protecting the planet.

The report ends thus:

Today’s world is a troubled world, one in turmoil and turbulence, with no shortage of painful political upheavals. Societies are under serious strain, stemming from the erosion of our common values, climate change and growing inequalities, to migration pressures and borderless pandemics. It is also a time in which the strength of national and international institutions is being seriously tested. Because of the nature and the scope of this daunting array of enormous challenges, both inaction and business-as-usual must be dismissed as options. If the global community does not exercise national and international leadership in the service of the peoples of the world, we risk further fragmentation, impunity and strife, endangering both the planet itself as well as a future of peace, sustainable development and respect for human rights … 

The year 2015 is hence the time for global action … We must take the first determined steps toward a sustainable future with dignity for all. Transformation is our aim. We must transform our economies, our environment and our societies. We must change old mindsets, behaviours and destructive patterns. We must embrace the integrated essential elements of dignity, people, prosperity, planet, justice and partnership. We must build cohesive societies, in pursuit of international peace and stability … We have an historic opportunity and duty to act, boldly, vigorously and expeditiously, to achieve a life of dignity for all, leaving no one behind.

‘Think global, act local’ has become a cliché. Worse, it has been hijacked by multinationals to advance enterprises that are anything but sustainable or equitable.  But educators can reclaim it. The UN’s global education agenda is directed at governments, so at the start of 2015 we should demand to know how our own government will respond, or whether this major report and the evidence that informs it, will be kicked into touch like so many before it.  But the UN’s education agenda requires no less energetic action in the classroom. Teach local, learn global.

www.robinalexander.org.uk

If your school is working to advance the UN – and CPRT – goal of ‘a sustainable future with dignity for all’ and you would be willing to share your ideas with others in the CPRT network, please let us know. Contact administrator@cprtrust.org.uk.

You will find websites of these organisations relevant and helpful:

Sustainable Schools Alliance
Sustainability and Environmental Education
Think Global (the Development Education Association)
Tide Global Learning
TEESNet (formerly UK Teacher Education Network for education for sustainable development and global citizenship)

Read the full December 2014 UN synthesis report on global education after 2015, quoted above.

Contribute to shaping the focus of the 2016 report on Education, sustainability and the post-2015 development agenda (closing date for comments: 28 January).

Read responses to the House of Commons Education Committee enquiry into DfE’s use of evidence.

by Robin Alexander

Campaign for sustainability

Sustainability and Environmental Education (SEEd) is currently campaigning to have the 2002 Education Act amended to make education for sustainability an obligation on all schools, notwithstanding the fact that it has been excluded from the new National Curriculum. The Secretary of State has said that while she accepts the importance of sustainability it’s up to schools to decide what to do about it, if anything. This seems a somewhat feeble response from a government that in 2010 proudly billed itself ‘the greenest government ever’ .

In this matter DfE appears to be out of step not just with its own rhetoric and groups like SEEd and the Cambridge Primary Review Trust – which lists sustainability and global citizenship among its eight educational priorities – but also the UN and OECD. UNESCO’s agenda for global education after 2015 will link education to sustainability, global citizenship and equity, while OECD is likely to include ‘global competence’ in the next international PISA tests. Since so much educational policy these days, including the new national curriculum, is PISA-driven, we wonder why this should be an exception.

This autumn, as noted in an earlier blog, CPRT will be joining forces with other organisations to raise the educational profile of sustainable development and global understanding. Meanwhile, SEEd is seeking support for its own campaign.

www.robinalexander.org.uk

by Robin Alexander

The parts the National Curriculum doesn’t reach

Numbed by the unrelenting horror of this summer’s news from Gaza, Israel, Syria, Iraq and South Sudan, and the heartrending images of children slaughtered, families shattered and ancient communities uprooted, we ask what on earth we in the West can do.

With our historical awareness heightened by the current centenary of the 1914-18 war and what, in terms of the redrawing of national boundaries, it led to, we also recognise that the fate of countries such as these reaches back in part to political decisions taken, like it or not, in our name and as recently as 2003. So collectively we are implicated if not complicit. If, as H.G. Wells warned soon after the 1918 armistice, history is a race between education and catastrophe, we must surely ask at this time why, for so many, that race has been lost; and whether and how education can do better. If ever we needed a reminder that true education must pursue goals and standards that go well beyond the narrow confines of what is tested, here it is.

We know that England’s new national curriculum mandates what DfE deems ‘essential knowledge’ in the ‘core subjects’ (the quotes remind us that these are political formulations rather than moral absolutes) plus, in the interests of ‘breadth and balance’ (ditto) a few other subjects of which much less is said and demanded. But we’ve also been told that the school curriculum is more than the national curriculum. We should therefore take this opportunity to think no less seriously about what is not required than about what is.

One of my keenest memories of the period 2006-9 when the Cambridge Primary Review was collecting and analysing evidence on the condition and future of English primary education is of visiting an urban Lancashire primary school that exemplified England’s ethnic, linguistic and religious diversity. We were there as part of a journey crisscrossing the country to take ‘community soundings‘ – a few days earlier we had been with Roma and Travellers in Cornwall – and having heard from children, teachers, heads, parents and local officials we found ourselves in a small room discussing faith, education and social cohesion with an imam, a rabbi and a priest.

What was illuminating about this encounter, apart from the manifest respect each religious representative had for the other, was the extent of common ground between them. Predating by several years the current DfE consultation on ‘British values‘, our three faith leaders readily identified a moral core for education to which they and we could all subscribe. Significantly, this did not merely look inwards at Britain and to cosy clichés like fair play but unflinchingly outwards to the fractured and despairing world we see daily on our television screens.

Partly in response to soundings such as this, the twelve educational aims proposed by the Cambridge Primary Review included the promotion of respect and reciprocity, interdependence and sustainability, culture and community and local, national and global citizenship; while the Review’s curriculum framework sought to advance the knowledge and understanding with which values in action must always be tempered through domains such as place and time, citizenship and ethics and faith and belief. The last of these was deemed integral to the curriculum because, as our community soundings confirmed, ‘religion is fundamental to this country’s history, culture and language, as well as to the daily lives of many of its inhabitants.’

Yet where is any of this reflected in the national curriculum that England’s schools are about to implement? The exploration of faith and belief (which is not necessarily the same as compulsory RE) remains anomalously outside the walls, even as religion is invoked to justify unspeakable atrocities. World history receives scant treatment, the ethical dimension of science has been removed, culture – however one defines it – gets short shrift and in the primary phase citizenship has disappeared completely.

For the society and world in which our children are growing up is this an adequate preparation? Some of us think not, and this autumn CPRT hopes to join with other organisations to explore curriculum futures which engage more directly and meaningfully with that world, believing that citizenship education is not only more urgent now than ever but that it must be local and global as well as national.

So when schools consider how they should fill the gap between the new national curriculum and the school curriculum they may care to start by reflecting on another gap: between the curriculum as officially prescribed and the condition and needs of the community, society and world in which our children are growing up.

Of course, we speak here of the task for education as a whole, not primary education alone, and we must be mindful of what is appropriate for children at different phases of their development. The vision of a childhood untroubled by adult fears and responsibilities cannot be lightly dismissed, though such a childhood is beyond the reach of millions of the world’s children. Yet consider this, from CPR’s community soundings report: ‘The soundings were pervaded by a sense of deep pessimism about the future, to which children themselves were not immune … Yet where schools engaged children with global and local realities as aspects of their education they were noticeably more upbeat … Pessimism turned to hope when witnesses felt they had the power to act.’

So in the global race between education and catastrophe what exactly should England’s primary teachers do and what should England’s primary children learn? The question is entirely open: please respond.

  • A detailed discussion, informed by extensive evidence, of the wider purposes of primary education and what these imply for the curriculum appears in ‘Children, their World, their Education: final report and recommendations of the Cambridge Primary Review‘, chapters 12 and 14.
  • To contribute to the DfE consultation on promoting British values in independent schools, academies and free schools, which closes on the 18 August, click here.
  • Information about CPRT’s coming global citizenship work with other organisations will be posted shortly.

www.robinalexander.org.uk

 

Contact

Cambridge Primary Review Trust - Email: administrator@cprtrust.org.uk