Playcentre and DEHANZ

By Suzanne Manning ~ @slmanning1

When my first child was about 10 months old, I met a woman in a nearby park.  She asked me what early childhood services I would be taking my daughter to; at that stage, I had no idea.  So she launched into her spiel about Playcentre, an Aotearoa/New Zealand parent co-operative that offers early childhood and adult education, creating a parent support community along the way.  The next week I went along to my local Playcentre… 

My daughter is now 21 years old.  I was a member of that centre for 10 years, contributing as a session supervisor, adult education officer, collage corner looker-afterer, and vice-president.  I absorbed the training as fast as I could.  I was an active member of the local Association working in the adult education programme, including a stint as librarian, and was made a life member (which now mostly means I’m called on to facilitate tricky meetings).  My Playcentre work was counted as “sufficient educational experience” to accompany my science degree when I wanted entry into the Masters of Education programme.  Further, I was on the national Federation education team for four years, coordinating all the Association education teams.

Playcentre has been a life-changer for me.  When I was raising young children, it opened up a world of parent support and intellectual stimulation, and a scholarly direction I hadn’t known I would enjoy.  The community networks that developed for me are now part of my way of life.  Yet I believe that the Aotearoa/New Zealand early childhood education (ECE) policy landscape is marginalising Playcentre and endangering its survival (I’m in favour of evolution of Playcentre, but not extinction).  No big surprise, then, that my doctoral research is a historical look at ECE policy over the last 25 years and its impact on Playcentre.  History has lessons for policymakers!

Although my research is examining the last 25 years of Playcentre history in detail, I have also been exploring its longer history to put the work in context.  Playcentres started during World War II (WWII) in Wellington middle class suburbs as self-help ventures, in contrast to the already well-established kindergartens that had originally been aimed at children of the poor.  These centres quickly formed a network, combining with other similar groups such as Gwen Somerset’s nursery school at the Feilding Community Centre and Doreen Dolton’s nursery school attached to a secondary school in Christchurch.  When Gwen became the first President of the New Zealand Nursery Play Centre Federation in 1948, she influenced the organisation to develop along progressive education lines - which was familiar territory for many of the well-educated founders.  Gwen championed free play, learning through play and parent education based on child development and the observation of children.

In the post-WWII era, government and society strongly reinforced the traditional nuclear family and the associated gender roles: male income earner, female household manager and child carer.  Playcentre was a mixed bag in this respect as it supported (rather than challenged) women as full time carers of their children, but on the other hand, it gave many women an acceptable outlet for their talents in the many jobs necessary to run a centre and/or a national organisation as a parent co-operative.

Second wave feminism from the late 1960s promoted accessible and affordable childcare as a means for women’s emancipation.  This required government support for childcare services on an equal footing to the half day services such as kindergarten and Playcentre that were seen as being ‘educational’.  The childcare advocate’s message was that care and education for young children were inseparable and that the services should not be treated differently.  In 1989 the Before Five reforms merged the administration and funding of all the ECE services under one umbrella, a big achievement for childcare advocates.  For Playcentre, however, the effects were mixed: more money and recognition, but more administration and striving to fit bureaucratic categories that were designed for teacher-led services and not parent co-operatives.

Since the Before Five reforms, there has been increasing professionalization of the ECE workforce, an ‘educationalisation of play’ (Stover, 2011), and the promotion of ECE as a child’s right.  With the rise of Human Capital Theory where education is integral to producing a productive citizen, ECE has come increasingly under government attention – partly because of its role in freeing women up to participate in the paid labour market but mostly (according to the dominant discourse) because of the educational benefits accrued to the child.  ECE has come to be seen as something that only qualified teachers in formal institutions can do.  Although partnership with parents is seen as important, the discourse firmly points to a care (parent) and education (teacher) divide, even though the rhetoric is still that care and education of young children are inseparable.  Where does this leave Playcentre, a formal education centre with educated parents as the teachers?  It is all these changes, policies and discourses, and their effects on Playcentre, that I am trying to tease out in my research.

As part of exploring the recent history of Playcentre, I have written and co-written entries for the Dictionary of Educational History of Australia and New Zealand (DEHANZ) at dehanz.net.au.  One is an overview of Playcentre’s history, and the other is about the educational philosophy of one of Playcentre’s early influential leaders, Gwen Somerset.  DEHANZ is a new and expanding resource curated by the Australian and New Zealand History of Education Society (ANZHES) which is aimed at researchers and students interested in the history of education from our part of the world.  If anyone is knowledgeable about a particular area of antipodean history and would like to write an entry, contact the editors and make their day.

Stover, S. (2011).  Play’s progress? Locating play in the educationalisation of early childhood education in New Zealand. Unpublished PhD thesis, Auckland University of Technology.

Teachers’ Lives, Teachers’ Voices, and Educational Development in Central Asia

By Peter Cunningham

Teachers’ life histories make a significant contribution to educational development in a Central Asian centre of key economic growth.  Nazarbayev University Graduate School of Education has recently published a project from within their Professional Development Programme.

Stepping Stones: Recording the Voice of the Past, is the product of 65 teachers from across Kazakhstan collecting oral testimonies as an integral component of their action research. The resulting data is published at www.nupdp.weebly.com  

The teachers’ accounts in Kazakh or in Russian languages are archived as edited video extracts conveniently subtitled in English, and edited transcriptions are available for download in the language of interview and in English.  The benefits of video for the oral historian are evident.  We see and hear the interviewees, their facial expressions, body language and gestures. Their transcribed memories are then also accessible for detailed analysis.

Teachers’ accounts provide immensely rich stories of learning and growing into their professional role.  Their own educational experiences in family, community and school evolve into reasons for career choice, patterns of initial training and career development.  Personal ideals, political and ideological contexts, economic conditions and geographical contexts all come into play in understanding the evolution of teachers’ identities.

Hugely encouraging is the view of this project’s integration into the overall programme of educational development in the republic.  Alongside the ‘drivers’ of ‘internationalization’ and ‘modernisation’, space is made for ‘preserving cultural values, contextual ambience, historical mores and grassroots perspectives’, as the project explains in its goals.  Cultural and historical content are seen as making a significant contribution to educational development, and authentic oral history research is identified as a key methodology.

The wide range of perspectives opened up by the project is reflected in captions chosen to title these oral accounts: ‘From a dream to reality’; ‘For the love of children’; ‘For the love of teaching’; ‘The language of my ancestors’; ‘Passion for music’; ‘”Think from your heart”’; ‘Teachers that inspired us’; ‘Through thorns to stars’; ‘A brilliant life of hands-on innovation and research’; ‘Looking back, moving forward’; ‘The best of the Soviet education system’; ‘Democracy and authoritarianism in the school’.

What evidence do historians of education need to reconstruct the past?

by Heather Ellis and Stephen Parker

The History of Education Society was recently invited to take part in an open consultation process organised by National Archives regarding its operational selection policy (OSP) concerning the records of the Department for Education for the period 1974-1997. What at face value appeared to be a dry exercise, in fact raised some important historical methodological questions, centring upon ‘what should be kept for posterity in order for future historians to engage with and reconstruct the past, in all its multi-faceted complexity?’ The issues we raised in relation to the policy also required us to anticipate how historians of the future may wish to read these papers, predicting questions they might ask and gaps in the archive they would be frustrated by.

Having read the consultation document outlining a number of themes chosen as a basis for selecting particular documents to be preserved from the Department for Education’s (DfE) records, Stephen Parker and I, on behalf of the Society, prepared a detailed response requesting clarification on a number of key points. Amongst the issues were raised were matters around selection, such as who was responsible for selecting the material. Had the DfE itself been directly involved? We also wanted to know what would happen to material which was not selected: would it be digitised or simply destroyed? Likewise, we asked for more information regarding the rationale behind which particular themes and documents would be selected. We asked this, in particular, as we felt there were certain underlying preferences or biases apparent in the topics proposed for selecting material.

We also raised questions about the time span covered by the material, in this case 1974-1997. In particular, there seemed to be a decided emphasis on selecting material post-1979 with the years 1974-1979 receiving only scant attention. We wondered why this might be, given the importance of the shifts occurring in education policy in this period of Labour administration. Similarly, we wondered why there were no important events listed in the ‘timeline’ appendix prior to Thatcher’s Education Act of 1988. In some places, we were also struck by what seemed to be an undertone of criticism of the education policies of the Labour government in the 1970s. Point 5.3.1, for example, referred to school building programmes being ‘particularly badly hit’ by Labour’s ‘cuts in public expenditure’. We noted that there were likewise substantial cuts in education spending under Thatcher but (apart from the reference to the famous limiting of school milk at 5.23.1) these seemed to go largely undocumented. In this the policy interestingly appeared to reflect the politics of the selectors!

We were also concerned, from a methodological and policy perspective, that there was too strong an emphasis placed on the ‘finished products’ of educational reform. We stressed that key documents relating to the creation of particular reports and Acts of Parliament should also be preserved to illuminate process as well as end product. The role of the DfE in driving and promoting visible changes, especially Acts of Parliament, we felt, also received a decided focus, creating a particular impression of the Department as a dynamic and progressive actor in bringing about educational change. We wondered about the need to adequately represent the agency of other actors in educational reform and those policies which did not make it to statute, for example, those desired by lobbyists and opposed by elements inside the DfE. Although there were a few references to initiatives and policy directions which failed or lapsed (e.g. 5.2.1 – proposed organisational changes within LEAs; 5.5.2 – an abandoned voucher system and 5.8.1 – a rejected system of leaving certificates), these did not seem equally represented and were scattered throughout the proposal rather than being treated consistently. 

In the selection of themes such as the development of the National Curriculum, there appeared to be a focus on one narrative development - the increasing involvement of business and the private sector in education (and the attendant reduction in the role and powers of LEAs). There are other narratives of educational development from the years of Thatcher and the Conservative government which could be told, but the OSP appeared to us to be asserting one in particular. There seemed to be an assumption in the proposed selection of documents that the Conservative policy of reducing the powers of the LEAs was universally acknowledged as necessary. Thus, it was claimed in point 5.4.1 (without citing any evidence) that by the early 1980s ‘a need to radically overhaul the governance of both primary and secondary schools was recognised.’

As representatives of the Society (and as historians), we felt that the selection of themes had been driven primarily (if not entirely) by the topics of parliamentary legislation rather than events considered important in a broader historical context. Developments such as the race riots of 1981 were occasionally referred to (5.12.7), but there was no systematic attempt to situate legislative events against a broader historical framework, something we would recommend if a revision of the OSP were to be undertaken. The timeline of key events given in the appendix could have provided a good opportunity to do this but instead it comprised a simple list of Acts of Parliament and policy developments. 

There are also particular curriculum areas which do not seem covered in the detail which their historical and contemporary importance deserves. Although RE, for example, was mentioned briefly (in the context of the 1944 Act – 5.6.12), there was little, if any, consideration given to the significant role of church and faith schools during this period and the complex relationship which these schools enjoyed with LEAs. Likewise, the controversies around the changes occurring in curriculum RE from 1974 onwards were not explicitly mentioned. Other omissions would seem to include international influences, in particular, the substantial impact of EC/EU legislation and policy matters related to teachers’ professional development, especially major changes to teachers’ contracts and the creation of ‘Baker days’. 

Perhaps we’ve missed out other factors and issues you might have mentioned from all this. What was clear to us is archiving history as well as its researching requires methodological astuteness and historical awareness. Likewise, knowing what to keep and what to discard also requires a surprising degree of political sensitivity. 

Exploring the history of education through pop music

by Charlotte Rochez

“The times you lived through, the people you shared those times with — nothing brings it all to life like an old mix tape. It does a better job of storing up memories than actual brain tissue can do. Every mix tape tells a story. Put them together, and they can add up to the story of a life.” 

― Rob Sheffield, Love is a Mix Tape

Did you ever make a mixtape when you were younger? What memories do those songs bring back? How do they relate to your educational experiences? Do you think your mixtape was similar to others of your generation? Would those songs bring back similar memories for them? A top hit would likely be meaningful to many different people of similar ages, though it may be imbued with distinct recollections.

If, rather than reflecting on your own experience, you were to nominate a song relating to the broader theme of 'education', which would you choose? And if we were to take these collectively, what might such a 'people's playlist' tell us about the history of education over the last 60 years?

Popular music is not only culturally reflective, it may be prophetic, provocative or ameliorative. Charting such a musical history may afford insights into popular perceptions, the creation and proliferation of contemporary ideas and the dialogue between them.

In following playlist of British popular music relating to education we witness the movement of positive associations or reminiscences of schools and teachers to a criticism of the school system, its methods and aims. This is not a simple trajectory; Madness's 'Baggy Trousers' celebrates good times within a flawed system was as a response to Pink Floyd's critical condemnation of schooling in 'Another Brick in the Wall'. Through time similar motives reappear: Busted’s ‘What I go to school for’ sexualises the theme of teacher admiration in Lulu’s ‘To Sir With Love’ and Elton John’s ‘Teacher I need you’; the Kaiser Chiefs’ ‘Never Miss a Beat’ echoes Madness’s ‘Baggy Trousers’ in celebration of cheeky youthful defiance, but with young people’s location moved from messing around in school spaces, to playing truant on the streets.

In US music, too, there is a movement from celebrating schools as a place of learning to challenging the pedagogy and curriculum of conventional schooling, and more recently to questioning the impact of social stratification according to popularity on adult life experiences. 

Which songs do feel provide particular insights into the history of education? Share with us on Twitter or Facebook.