It has been an interesting week, mostly. The least interesting thing about it (by a long way) has been a visit from Ofsted to inspect the University of East London ITE provision that has sucked the life out of us all and added enormously to workload. It was my 8th Ofsted and I imagine will be my last. We have been wonderfully led in the inspection, and the at times heroic efforts we have made together will be the great and long lasting benefit of Ofsted trespassing on our patch.
But the week has been framed by four interesting experiences that have strengthened my conviction that Ofsted (as a representative of the neoliberal thought-world governing English education) is barking mostly up the wrong tree. The crass disrespect for schools, parents and teachers (never mind children) shown by this morning’s DfE announcement about retaining the four-grade system is a case in point. Never mind barking up the wrong tree. Simply barking.
The first experience was a visit to a student teacher in a school in Ilford on Tuesday morning. The class was not the best behaved and I was interested in the relationship of my student, an effective and hard working beginning teacher, with her ill-disciplined class, and during the feedback and conversation afterwards, I asked her: ‘What does love look like in this classroom?’ I didn’t want an immediate answer, but it seemed to me that it was an important question to ask, deserving of serious reflection.
It is part of a three-report series that Theos have published called Work Shift, which seeks to chart the changes in work patterns experienced by society, explore the ways in which work can shape (and be shaped by) our relationships with others – colleagues, family, friends, neighbours, and wider society – and try to understand how ‘recovering an appreciation of these relational aspects of human labour might even make our working lives better.’
It is, like everything that Theos puts its considerable collective mind to, timely, very relevant, theologically robust and well researched. The other two reports are about the rise of lone working (1 in 3 of us!) and insecure working – zero-hours contracts and the gig economy (The Ties that Bind: the rise of insecure and lone working and the search for mutual bonds) and about the need to relearn the beauty and joy of our divine calling to work, in the face of work patterns that are debilitating and how we might ease the conflict between the goods of employment and the goods of all the unpaid work we do (Working Five to Nine: how we can deliver work-life integration).
Although these were spoken about, the focus was on Hannah Rich’s work around the care sector, appropriate as the church we were in supports the large number of mostly immigrant workers in the hospitality and care sectors. The central argument of the report is that there is a crisis facing the adult social care sector in the UK, both economic in nature, but also relational. It means that paid care work is seen as low-grade work because of its poor pay, arising from a deep misunderstanding of both care and love. Social care has the potential to reimagine love and care within a careful economic structure where everyone benefits, because they are a set of skills of unique applicability in the social care sector. This intersection of love, work and care offers a way to revalue the work done in care homes, especially if we use the Christian theological perspectives of love and dignity, which can re-route the debate away from just cost and price. The report tries to re-imagine love in public, and how that helps us all ‘to value care work differently and more highly.’ (p.9).
There is a really significant chapter at the end of the report (p 37-45) that seeks to understand that love is work, that it is a set of skills and disciplined attitude of heart that has real economic worth and needs paying well, so that
‘good working conditions for care workers…can be envisioned as an outworking of love towards them, just as good quality care is an expression of love towards those in receipt of it. Love needs to be accounted for not just in how we think about the cared-for, but also for the carer, and to do less than this risks justifying exploitation’ (p.45)
The potential answers to the question I raised for my student are beginning to emerge here.
The third interesting experience was the privilege of being invited as a Fellow of the Chartered College of Teaching to attend an event, hosted in the House of Lords by Baroness Morris of Yardley (known to those in the profession as the wonderful Estelle, the only recent Secretary of State for Education who has actually been a teacher!), concerning the ethical and professional aspects of leadership. We were forbidden from sharing photos, so the montage above is from the House of Lords promo material and gives an idea of where we where and the view from the terrace.
We heard from a number of people after Estelle, but the burden of the event (apart from networking, scones, cream and gallons of really good tea!) was to explore the Framework for Ethical Leadership in Education and to push that agenda forward both with the DfE (a representative had appeared from Sanctuary Buildings) and to extend it towards a proper, chartered-body upheld professional code of conduct for teachers, for which collaborators were eagerly sought.
Talking to a colleague from a catholic multi-academy trust, we both noticed that the framework had its roots in a Christian understanding of leadership, but that its roots were nowhere referred to, and that the word ethical might be a stand in for the word love. A report on the implementation of the Framework for Ethical Leadership in Education is appearing in May, whilst a summary of the framework is here.
And so to the last experience, again in an Ilford school. This for me answered many of the questions that the other three experiences had raised. The school was a UNICEF rights-respecting school. I was shown to the classroom to conduct the observation, but whilst writing notes on the observation I was conducting, added this:
Children came in and spoke to me, saying good morning and introducing themselves – polite and confident. This is a sustained culture of politeness and care and mutual interest – and anticipation of learning – unlike any other class culture I have come across in this job.
Somehow, not in a complete way, but in a way that led to these Year 2 children being able to work easily in groups without squabbling, being left to work and able to work collaboratively, of being deeply respectful of their teacher, the student in the class, and me (a stream of children came and introduced themselves and shook my hand), I had found a place where the ‘public love’ of a teacher, expressed as a set of skills and attitudes of heart, had had a rich impact, a first glimpse of what love might look like in a classroom.
These photos arrived in my inbox last month from my youngest daughter, finishing her work on Waiheke, a small island east of Auckland, of this year’s wine harvest. Along with crates of chardonnay, Syrah and pinot gris, there is the sense of completion she feels as she heads out to set up a new adventure in Kerikeri near the Bay of Islands. Watching both a harvest being reported (in our spring!) and a planting of a new prospect (in her autumn!) put me in mind of the lovely scriptures in Genesis 49 about Joseph (‘Joseph is a fruitful vine, a fruitful vine near a spring, whose branches climb over a wall’) and Psalm 1:
Blessed is the one who does not walk in step with the wicked or stand in the way that sinners take or sit in the company of mockers, but whose delight is in the law of the Lord, and who meditates on his law day and night. That person is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither— whatever they do prospers.
The scriptures are full of references to how we plant or reap in season (Numbers 13:20; Job 5:26; Proverbs 20:4; Mark 11:13) and how God in his wisdom has ordered the earth (before we messed it up with our stupid burning of fossil fuels) to bring forth rains in season (Leviticus 26:4; Deuteronomy 11:14, 28:12; Jeremiah 5:24; Ezekiel 34:26; Acts 14:17). This is a properly creative act on behalf of our God, who sustains within the creative act and enables our efforts at farming and animal care (see Psalm 104) to bear fruit. When we bear fruit is, therefore, not up to us. We have to be ready, we have to do the preparatory work, not like the sluggard of Proverbs 20:4 who had not ploughed in season, and be perceptive enough to notice when harvest is approaching. Paul, in writing to Timothy (2 Timothy 4:2), tells him to preach the word, but to be prepared in season and out of season for what might arise. This is merely wisdom. But it is also wisdom to wait until the harvest is given, and then remember that it is not we who enabled this. All harvests belong to God.
There has been a great deal written over the recent high court decision to side with Katherine Birbalsingh’s ruling as headteacher of Michaela school in Brent, that a child could not take time for prayer within the school day. The court obviously did not rule on whether prayer in schools was wrong, but upon Michaela’s right to decide as they did. The key arguments on each side are listed helpfully here in this article by Schoolsweek. Those humanists and secularists proclaiming this a victory for all schools have failed to see that this is an issue of what schools are for, and what education is for, rather than the narrow obsession they have that ‘religion has no place in schools’ as though they do not hold their (religious) position with (religious) fervour.
But fundamentally Michaela has made the ban on the grounds of ‘inclusion’ and wanting to maintain harmonious relationships. Birbalsingh is quoted in the Guardian as saying her policy was necessary to ‘maintain a successful learning environment where children of all races and religion can thrive.’ They are saying (and have for a long time) that what is offered here is schooling plain and simple. They teach well, have high standards of conduct that many other schools would secretly give their eye teeth for, and have an interesting curriculum. The purpose of being at Michaela is to learn, and to learn what they have to teach. Why do I say that their laudable efforts are foolish?
For one thing, what this ban does is to say that, you as a child belong here, you can be included, you can learn here, except for the part that is most fundamental to you, your faith and your community. People of faith have faced this forever, and I have experienced it in workplaces that assume that secularism (or liberal democracy) is a neutral, rather than a religious, position, and that those with religious faith belong elsewhere, not here. The child in the case said exactly that – ‘like somebody saying they don’t feel like I properly belong here.’
Secondly, it fails to recognise the uniquely ritual nature of Islam. If they tried to do this with a Christian, firstly the right would be up in arms, but secondly, how would they know? We tend to pray quietly, in the day to day work of a school, occasionally voicing it in the staffroom with another believer, or meeting in a time convenient to the school. None of this does Islam allow. It is a faith of observance, and observance needs time slots, even if they can be rearranged (as a lecturer, with our Muslim students, we have to do this from time to time). The school would be wiser to say this openly as policy and as an act of welcome and appreciation, and make a space and time available in consultation with senior Muslim students and staff.
Thirdly, it fails to notice that giving expression to one’s faith in public life is to a large degree a human right, protected by various conventions (I can’t see the court’s reasoning very clearly on this point). In accepting the reality of Islam as a significant faith in Britain today, it allows young children growing up at home to have their faith life affirmed as part of their education and celebrated as part of school life. Education, as Comenius, Augustine and al-Ghazali would all agree, is integral to faith and integrates faith into the educative process. This article by Nadeine Asbali can help us think clearly on this one.
Fourthly, it reduces the humanity of each child by separating out the religious (and hence communal) reality of a child from all the other realities that that child experiences. It does the work of the Enlightenment in privileging reason above other aspects. This brings us back to the quote in my last post from the museum of the Melk Benedictine Monastery in Austria, abbreviated for the present purpose:
One-sidedness, in this case the emphasis on human reason, was to start processes which were intended to separate something integral. There are so many aspects to human beings that all are important….living faith fulfils the heart and the reason of man…the whole human being is more important than individual aspects. The whole person in his ups and downs lives from faith, fulfils his duties, is culturally effective and sees his economic and social relationships flourish.
As well as being pertinent to how Christians learn to position themselves so as to live from faith, it is important for school leaders, who are seeking (or should be seeking) to create whole people with the tools at their disposal. My worry about English education generally, and some aspects of what Michaela have been (successfully!) trying to do, is the isolating out of the teachable bits of a child and saying that schools serve those teachable bits. This is patent nonsense, and actually may not be what they are seeking. But it does seem to be what they have ended up with. Schooling, to quote my Ed.D. supervisor Julian Stern is ‘care and curiosity in community‘ – and even then there is the temptation to say that the ‘community’ is the ‘school community’ and not the larger polity that each school serves. The nature of schooling is awry in Britain, so it is of course not beyond the bounds of possibility that school leaders do things that are awry.
Faith belongs firmly within education, and can be welcomed and challenged legitimately within education. Separating out this key aspect of a person’s life from the 12 years that they are at school serves nobody.
The photos in this post are of the stift in Melk, lower Austria. The monastery is Europe’s largest assemblage of Baroque religious architecture, and was a Benedictine monastery, though it’s overwhelming Baroque-ness somehow masks the Benedictine simplicity intended by its founder (work, pray, read).
As with most churches we have seen in Vienna, gold leaf and gold paint (and gold, full stop!) has never been subject to a commodity shortage. The stift is an enormous structure, completely dominating the town of Melk which has its own architectural beauty and whose houses and shops would comprise a place to visit, ewven if the Benedictines had instead built the place 5 km down the Danube.
It has an enormous abbey church right in the centre of the monastery walls. Like the other Austrian churches we have visited, it has not been straightforward to find a grown-up Jesus not attached to a cross. The church has a magnificent gold crown above the altar, but it isn’t clear whose crown it was. A couple of crucified Jesuses on paintings and sculptures, and a smattering of infant versions, and that was it. No king, risen and ascended, no teacher or leader. No ruler of the kingdoms of the earth.
So to say that I was expecting to be blessed and instructed at this abbey is a shade generous; my reformed and anabaptist prejudices were already asserting themselves. However, in the very interesting abbey museum and in a temporary exhibit of contemporary Austrian art housed both in the church crypt and in one of the halls, there was much to think about and look at.
There was, for one, a narrative epistemology about the nature of being human, knowing God and belonging to Him. This was mostly in German, but in places there were useful translations that genuinely helped me. The most significant was this piece of writing, from one of the panels in the museum, that tried to describe the impact of the reformation and the Enlightenment on the flourishing of the Benedictines in Austria and at Melk in particular:
One-sidedness, in this case the emphasis on human reason, was to start processes which were intended to separate something integral. There are so many aspects to human beings that all are important….It became clear [after the church had seen the impact of the separating out of reason during the enlightenment upon the monks at Melk] that living faith fulfils the heart and the reason of man, that institution must be supported by inwardness, that the whole human being is more important than individual aspects. The whole person in his ups and downs lives from faith, fulfils his duties, is culturally effective and sees his economic and social relationships flourish. He knows his limits, knows he has not yet achieved his goal, but perceives himself as on the way to it. He is open to his God.
Jacques Maritain, as a young man, took issue with Luther’s reformation because of Luther’s centring of authority in the individual and his relationship with God, rather than through and within the church. He believed that this decoupling meant that eventually each person could decide for themselves what is right. Of course Maritain was wrong and right. Protestantism did develop in an Enlightenment-dominated direction, through German critical theologians and biblical studies, and a line has been drawn from the Prussian version of the reformation all the way through Hegel to Marxist atheism. But it also retained, through reformed and revivalist strains, a deepened respect for the scriptures as the source of God’s authority, but without the accumulated trappings of Marian soteriology and the accumulation and veneration of saints. We played a useful game yesterday trying to imagine the shape and size of the abbey church without any gold, saints, statues or paintings. Still impressive, less likely to lead to idolatry).
But the insight that the Enlightenment emphasis on human reason, as opposed to any other aspect of our humanity, led to a decoupling, breaking what was created to be integral, is useful. It is not just a religious insight, but an agrarian one as well. The decoupling of any part of our persona and treated specially has led to all sorts of heresies and poor educational practice, which is why Church of England schools who are looking for ways to ensure that their education reflects the fact that their children and staff were made in God’s image will be successful educators: the whole child stands a better chance of being taught than if they are seen as cognitive and behavioural entities only, as imagined in the current slew of Ofsted and DfE (England) documents.
“The whole person in his ups and downs lives from faith, fulfils his duties, is culturally effective and sees his economic and social relationships flourish…” is a wonderful, Benedictine-inspired description of how we integrate. It speaks to how we see education – living from faith, and not just in it, and communally aware (fulfilling duties) within whatever setting we find ourselves, so that all our relationships flourish. I am particularly taken by the inclusion of ‘economic’ relationships, referring to our care for and with money, the management of household relationships and the way we treat those who are lower or higher than us on the socioeconomic scale.
A word on the paintings here. The lovely etching at the top is by Silvia Ornezeder and is on hand-made paper. The painting of the girl looking at an Austrian church is by Brigitte Rauecker (her home page features a wonderful charcoal self-portrait that was also in the exhibition), and is entitled Höhenrausch (‘intoxication from being up high’ is perhaps the best translation). It is challenging, partly because it perhaps describes a child enjoying the feeling of being up high, but unsure as to what this building in front of her actually is. It made me wonder again whether the ornate beauty of what we put in churches is a barrier or an attraction to those who have not yet experienced the goodness of God.
I am writing this in Vienna, where we are spending a week of celebration of one wedding anniversary and two birthdays with our family.
In the gaps I am wrestling with aspects of agrarian thought through the works of Jack Baker, Jeff Bilbro and Jane Schreck. The wrestling is to create the shape of a paper I am presenting at TEAN 2024 in Manchester in May, offering an agrarian perspective on teacher education.
This blog may contribute to that thinking, but it is more of a holding operation around one aspect: pedagogic subject knowledge.
For the last three years on the primary PGCE at UEL, we have been using a definition of subject knowledge that derives from Tony Cotton’s maths teaching primer Understanding and Teaching Primary Mathematics. It works well for maths, or seems to. But I think now that it is weak as an overall model. I have taught using it, and my teaching has been the poorer for it, I now realise, because of aspects I have ignored, through my own ignorance, mainly.
Cotton’s definition defines subject knowledge as a combination of the knowledge of the discipline – the maths in maths, if you will – with that of the curriculum pertaining to that subject, with the pedagogic skills and approaches required to teach the subject well. These three elements need a strong critique, I believe, because of what they omit. The Chartered College confuses the picture somewhat with its article for Early Career Teachers on developing subject expertise, but it comes from a different understanding of teaching and learning than mine.
The strengths of Cotton’s model, however, in the English system, are obvious: the inclusion of curriculum is critical because the English curriculum in most subjects is lopsided, particular, and needs good student teacher knowledge. The narrow demands of the pedagogic offer in the ITE Core Content Framework means that student teachers can find straightforward ways of learning and adapting teaching methods to each subject. And of course we need skilled teachers in each subject: the poor knowledge of most English primary teachers is a constant brake on pupil progress. These three aspects we do well, by and large. But there are two aspects we omit.
The first thing Cotton’s definition omits is children. Subject knowledge must acknowledge the children we are teaching – not simply their prior understanding and attainment (though that is important), nor their special needs to which we must adapt our teaching (that too is important), but their very selves and their relationships and the class in which they find themselves. The child-ness of each child matters to our subject knowledge as much as the pedagogic skills. In omitting them from consideration, we make two assumptions: that a. required subject knowledge is largely independent of those for whom it is offered and taught, and b. that the contribution of children and their lives and experiences has little to offer the content we have decided to teach. And a further implication of the latter is that the content of what we teach is divorced from any knowledge that the communities from which those children emerge have to teach our schools or their children.
You won’t see the requirement to take the children we are teaching into account on any lesson plan, by the way. With the best will in the world, children have slim agency in the English system. It is an expectation that this divorce from the communities we teach is near-total. Professionalism, it seems, must bring an external standard to children and communities who need it. A glance at how parents are instrumentalised in the Core Content Framework will tell you that. Even the type of school is hardly mentioned in most ITE courses (see Lynn Revell’s chapter in ‘Christian Faith in English Church Schools‘ (2016) for insight about this)
The second omission from our approach, more controversially (because the omission of children will elicit the reaction ‘oh, of course we mean children are being educated’) is place. Where children live, their wider communities and the physical characteristics of the watershed they live in, the climate, the proximity to the sea, mountains or forests, the degree of urbanisation, the economy and work patterns, the linguistic and ethnographic mixture of people who live and belong to each school, will – or should – make a difference to the way that children are taught, and how each subject is approached and what use it can be put to. It will also impact the extent to which, and the nature of that extent, parents are involved. If parents have low English competency, they will be different in what they can offer their children and the school from parents with a high fluency in English. Those less fluent in English will know other things, perhaps better things, that they bring to the school as a sense of place. I remember a school in the West Midlands I visited, 95% of whose families came from three villages in the Punjab, and who returned there each year. It was a church school that did well with what it offered, but beyond celebration of Muslim festivals, I don’t know whether they had opportunity to incorporate the learning from their parents into their curriculum. It would be wonderful to think that following the community’s annual return from the Punjab, all that they had learnt and experienced would be enfolded into the curriculum.
This sense of place, and the communities that inhabit the place, must constitute an agrarian imperative on the sort of curriculum we teach. How we lead and educate our student teachers must vary depending on a range of factors of place, geographic, historic, economic. cultural and agricultural. This speaks directly towards issues of standardisation in education, which is no education at all, and as I argued elsewhere, is a false equity that assumes that all children and families have the same needs and the same educational goals. They don’t, so we need to educate our beginning teachers to take account of local adaptation and complexity, and learn to teach accordingly.
I have, on reflection, been bored to tears by quite a lot of the teaching I have needed to observe over the last 3 years as a so-called teacher educator. This is in no way a reflection on the teaching students that I have observed. Nor does it say anything about the host of wonderful teachers who serve as mentors to our lovely student teachers.
I have written about this before, often, but it continues to exercise me. In our own teaching at UEL, there is an ‘expectation’ (how I detest and despise that word!) that Slide 2 of each PowerPoint we use (and yes, there has to be one of those too – ridiculously) has the learning objective and success criteria on it.
What I see, everywhere, in all the schools I have visited, is the insistence that lessons have a learning intention or learning objective. Not, note, a teaching intention or teaching objective. Then there need to be success criteria or ‘steps to success’ to make sure that the precursors of that learning intention are met, and that children are ‘on track.’ Often there are vocabulary lists the children have to rehearse at the beginning of the lesson and this might be followed by a retrieval exercise where previous learning is revised.
None of this is necessarily wrong (some of it is, obviously!) and all of these enforced practices (and they are usually enforced by MAT leads, heads, etc.) have some clear ‘evidence’ behind them that they work. Gert Biesta calls this the ‘learnification’ of education, the obsession that what is learnt is the only measure we can use to say whether education has taken place.
I led a school that used this approach for some years and we found it one useful way of supporting learning and, more importantly, a way of creating enthusiasms in children that they would have a successful lesson and, with hard work, be able to achieve all the things we wanted them to achieve in that lesson. We developed strong feedback approaches and used them to support teacher development; staff researched them and had them published, bringing the success criteria or ‘steps to success’ to life.
All of this was good and worthwhile,
…provided that these objectives and criteria did not get in the way of the teacher and the way s/he taught;
…provided that teacher imagination and intellectual curiosity was allowed to push aside the learning objective or success criteria;
…and provided that teacher autonomy was privileged over consistency between classes.
In other words, it was worthwhile whilst the teacher (and who he or she was or loved), was honoured more than what she or he had to teach. But what I am seeing is the opposite of this: teachers are becoming servants (slaves?) of the content; the content does not arise from the teacher but from the content deciders, often curriculum planners in a MAT or a federation, or simply the demands of a bought-in, off the shelf curriculum. I have seen this time and again in primary schools. It is a joke among many of the teacher mentors I work with: goodness knows whether the students are learning to regard this as normal. Teacher skill is increasingly reduced to getting content effectively into children’s heads along a particular pathway.
Whilst this need not say anything about the teachers or teaching students in the classes I observe in, it says everything about the obsessive neoliberal mindset that insists on standardization of the curriculum, the taught content, a planning format heavy on detail and low on imagination, and a top-down lesson structure which is defended in terms of a faux equality which effectively removes the agency of the teacher from the intellectual part of the lesson.
This might be many things, but teaching is not one of them. Of course, many would argue that this supports the teacher to do their job properly. They would argue that it ensures that all children get the same ‘provision’ as though that is some kind of holy grail: that children all need ‘the same thing at school.’ I think that these assumptions are questionable.
There is a lot of work going on currently seeking to minimise the disadvantage experienced by coastal schools in England. This is laudable, and I am sure comes from the best motives. But it seems a terrible shame, and quite wrong, that schools in a coastal rural setting should expect to get the same education as children in inner city Manchester, whose world experiences are so different. Whilst I harbour a secret desire that all children should be taught animal husbandry, gardening and the principles of crop rotation and hedge care, those in rural areas should know something about traditional and modern agricultural practices, whereas it is more important that children in inner city settings know different things to those, and more about the history of cities. ALL children, of course, should be taught how to garden, to grow vegetables and to repair things that break or are torn (like clothes).
At the moment, the curriculum is, to be truthful, dull in the extreme, especially for teachers who have to prepare their minds and their smiling faces to teach it enthusiastically yet again to another cohort of children. It takes a teacher of some skill to take the content and make it thrilling for children to learn so that they will never forget it and not be satisfied until they have learnt it all.
Amazingly, and no thanks at all to the curricular content, we produce such teachers. Yes, they have to learn the subtle arts of curricular subversion at times, but mostly they become amazing through a rich subject understanding and growing reserves of love, trust and joy.
These, I think, are more likely to be the guarantors of genuine equity in education than any externally enforced curriculum.
This wonderful phrase, from Laurie Lee’s 1955 account of his return to Andalucia, A Rose for Winter, is his attempt to describe the effects of ‘civilisation’ upon himself and his wife Kati. It follows an encounter with an Algeciras fisherman called Pepe, who sang to them and drank with them in what Lee describes as a ‘low-arched drinking tunnel, full of fishermen, dim lights and flickering gothic shadows.’
After asking Lee’s permission to ‘be him’, Pepe sings love songs to Kati, ‘songs of such tenderness and grace, of such delicate perfection, that I grieve that I can no longer remember them.’
Lee envies Pepe, seeing him as one inhabiting ‘the pure sources of feeling that once animated us all’ and it is these sources that Lee describes as ‘clogged by each new triumph of enlightenment and comfort.’
He is in no doubt, though, about the cost to those thus enlightened and comforted: these pure sources of feeling are ‘preserved by the paradoxes of poverty, illiteracy, bad roads and the great silences of the mountains and the sea.’
It has been a complete joy to re-read Lee’s three Spanish books back to back. I loved Cider with Rosie as a child, but for me, these three books belong in a true trilogy, even though A Rose for Winter was written many years before either As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (1969) or A Moment of War (1991).
But the phrase serving as this post’s title is what is troubling me. It seems constantly that enlightenment and comfort do dull, smother and inoculate us against the kind of humanity God calls us to be. Evangelical churches do this with their rejection of mysticism and slavish modernist interpretations of the Bible, whilst established churches wield their authority to crush the multicoloured glory of God in people, relational, equally earth-bound and mystical, and seeing the two as entwined.
I am a person, anabaptist in my instincts – communal, agrarian and pacifist – but reformed in my theological commitments, who finds himself constantly longing for the mystery of Jesus in the world, what the Celtic Church called ‘thin places,’ the holy intersection of heavenly and earthly. This often, as Wendell Berry has taught me, consists in seeing the world properly and thinking clearly about it, seeing earth as heaven. But more often it is the discipline of worship and gratitude that reveals those thin places, and offers places for the gentlemanly Holy Spirit to slip past our defences and melt our hearts.
Yesterday, for instance, I had a longing to sing a hymn by the great puritan divine Richard Baxter, Ye Holy Angels Bright. The most common tune is called Darwall, after one of the later co-authors (John Darwall) of the hymn, and it is a great tune, inspiring faith and reinforcing a strong Puritan certainty on the pilgrimage. But it doesn’t approach the deep yearning for the presence of God and sense of inadequacy before his throne that Baxter wrote about. So I wrote another tune yesterday that described both the pilgrimage, the “plod of God”, as well as the cry of the heart in worship that is entwined in Baxter’s writing. He wrote it around the time (1680) that he was being arrested, when he was in his mid-sixties, though very ill, and though he was released so he could die at home, all his papers and books were seized. The year after, his wife Margaret died, while Baxter himself lived to 1690.
Singing the new version over and over again helped me understand that worship creates its own thin places where God’s glory and presence breaks through.
So how does Laurie Lee help here? I think his perception that comfort clogs the arteries whilst enlightenment (of the Kantian type) disallows the heart-cry of ordinary people, is extremely useful to us as Christians, and as humans. As I argued yesterday, clarity of thinking and intellect is done best in the presence of God, allowing his word to shape how we think. But beyond that, the overwhelming of our senses and thoughts by his great love and majesty, terrible as an army with banners, can break into our heart and release its cry back to him. And in some ways, this is what Lee encountered in Pepe’s love songs to his wife.
I cannot remember when I have longed for spring more. It is symptomatic, I think, of the hunger for God I have found in my reading and singing, and of the ache for some kind of renewal of our national life after the desolation of the last 13 years of selfish and self-serving politics, bolstering the wealthy and leaving the poor to fend for themselves. Listening to the passionate and deeply thoughtful Andy Burnham at a fantastic IPPR launch presentation on healthy lives and prosperous communities two weeks ago brought it all into focus again: this country is run by about 50 people, tops, and to create real health and prosperity we need a complete overhaul of the political structure of the country, with much greater devolution and local control of health, of employment conditions, of housing and housing benefit. Some days I can feel the ossification of this country’s systems, the inertia, the sheer shallowness of the solutions proffered to the country, the blurring of the language which either becomes sticky and diffuse, or is used to describe the opposite of what the words actually mean. We see this all the time in the current administration, and it is clogging the intellectual arteries of the nation around the silly prejudices of the right. As Bertrand Russell said in The ABC of Relativity:
We all have a tendency to think that the world must conform to our prejudices. The opposite view involves some effort of thought, and most people would die sooner than think—in fact, they do so.
But the faithfulness of God, his eternal commitment to the earth we have sought to destroy for profit, is seen in the brightness of the days, the warmth of the sun and the readiness of trees and plants to set leaves and flowers. A pair of blue tits have taken up residence in our bird box, and their singing, and that of their kind, is everywhere. And on Lodge Lake in Great Holm, the cormorants are back, and have taken up their place in what we call the “cormorant tree.”
Each spring, I feel awakened, both by the demands of spring – garden preparation, planning a planting schedule and enriching the soil – but also by the sharpness of the light. As an artist, I have always loved contrast, which is why relief printmaking appeals to me so strongly. Spring is a time of sharp edges of sky against leaf, against roof, against flower. And the sharpness of the light is a reminder to keep the tools of my mind clean and sharp, to think clearly and in the presence and light of God. This morning, Chloe Lynch, writing a short meditation on Isaiah 50 for the London Institute of Contemporary Christianity, wrote this about John of the Cross’ understanding of the purpose of God withdrawing the experience of his presence:
Through this experience, God is establishing a new capacity for knowing him. John calls this new way of knowing God ‘faith’. Faith is not a denial of knowledge through intellect, but rather indicates a purifying of intellect. It sets our capacity to reason in proper relationship to God’s Word.
“Who among you fears the Lord and obeys the word of his servant?” asks Isaiah. “Let the one who walks in the dark, who has no light, trust in the name of the Lord and rely on their God.”
At the moment, in many ways, we as humanity, especially secular western humanity, are walking in the dark. The best we can hope for is good health and more money, and to die without pain. Lesslie Newbigin once said that because there is no legitimate debate about the ends of humanity, we cannot truly understand what the purpose of human endeavour should be. The Anglican church bangs on about human flourishing but seems reticent to place that in the light of faith, at least in its schools work, where it is happy to accept the prevalent view of neoliberal libertarianism. As Brian Walsh has said – the “economistic worldview is in the air everywhere and the church provides no gas mask.”
Chloe Lynch gives us a clue, in her quote above. Faith purifies our intellect and “sets our capacity to reason in proper relationship to God’s word.”
This, I think, gives sharpness and clarity to our thinking, and de-fuzzes the intellect from the onslaught of false liberal postmodernisms and self-serving right-wing cant. It enables humility and clarity at one stroke. It calls us to worship, to walk with God in the darkness, whilst allowing us to see the light of God as that which gives definition to our thinking.
And somehow, that to me constitutes the essence of spring. Or at least Spring 2024!
We had the most interesting day yesterday – five PGCE student teachers and I – visiting the Design Technology and Engineering facilities at Highgate School. Alongside soldering PCBs and programming Vex robots and Microbits, we were shown around the beautiful junior school by the hyper-enthusiastic Adam, and it was there I came across this sign on a number of doors: do not enter without a teacher.
It is, obviously, a safety notice to children not to trespass in science labs and art rooms.
But it’s a good way of thinking about a rule for life. Don’t embark on anything without a teacher. Don’t imagine that your wisdom will be sufficient to live a useful and wise life. Rely on the wisdom of those who through hard work, prayer and considered patient thought, model a way to live. Don’t imagine you can take risks without consulting those who have walked that way before. Don’t go without a guide.
Trust in the Lord, said the writer of Proverbs, with all your heart. Don’t lean on your own understanding. And certainly don’t lean on your emotions. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will direct your paths. This is good advice, and I have proved it, over and over again, however imperfectly.
Two days ago I was in conversation with a lovely friend, and we got talking about choice and the Equality Act (2010), which defined the concept of protected characteristics. I was making the point that some aspects of our identity – ethnicity and sex particularly – are different from other protected characteristics in the degree of choice we have to modify them. Obviously there are degrees to this, but changing religion, sexual behaviour, and gender involve severe degrees of choice in a way that ethnicity, disability and biological sex do not, or cannot. Certain things about us are more fixed than others. Some are subject to choice, others are not, or at least not without doing great damage to ourselves. I have another great friend, raised Muslim, now happily atheist while he figures out how to live life. Hard to do, especially in a strongly observance-focused faith like Islam, but surely possible. This is a huge problem with the Equality Act (2010) by the way, but that is not the point of this post.
I should be able to be criticised as a Christian as I chose that identity. In fact, I can expect it. If I don’t get flak for being Christian, I am not doing it properly. Is it right I am discriminated against for being a Christian? Probably not, but it’s inevitable anyway.
The heart of the conversation with my friend, was that as a Christian, those identity choices that are left to me need to be done with my teacher as a guide and reference point. And that means asking Jesus about how he would act, think and speak if he was living my life instead of me. I may not like the answer, I may not even do what he is telling me (Christians excel, unfortunately, at disobedience), but considering that question before any decision I make has to be done, if I live in the hope of the resurrection and his eagerly anticipated return. We accept his yoke, and walk with him.
Last Thursday we had our annual festival of research. This is a great chance for all the Primary PGCE students at UEL to meet their secondary colleagues, which we hardly ever do (a lot of chat between us staff that that must change next year!) and present to them and to one another, in speed-dating style, the conclusions of their research assignment completed last term.
For all the primary crowd, this was work rooted in one of the two Intensive Training and Practice (ITaP) pilot weeks, on behaviour for learning (back in September, and which I wrote about here) and on explicit instruction. The brief was to create a poster presentation on a single PowerPoint slide and then be able to talk to it, and take questions, for about 5 minutes.
My colleague Marwan Elfallah and I kicked off the day with an introduction to the 150+ who had gathered. My contribution was to highlight why and how we might become teacher researchers when we as teaching students get our first placement.
The argument that I wanted to make is that in short order, most of those assembled would find themselves in jobs in schools where research is probably the last thing on their mind. This being so, they would need to be clear about the reasons that they went into teaching in the first place. clear about which aspects of their practice were in good nick, and which bits weren’t, and how their passions and motivations for being a teacher met with the demands of the Early Career Framework with its very limited understanding of what research was for.
We know quite a lot already. We know that we are sending teachers into a compliance-dominated environment where the space for innovation and independent thought is at a premium, and where many school leaders, especially in London with its competitive falling rolls, are looking at pupil outcomes, not the fertility of imagination, as a guide to survival. Some primary teaching students have discovered that already, on placement. We also know that the teachers we are producing are reflective practitioners, full of questions about what they see on placement, and that they are thus well positioned as action researchers, even if what they want to explore might not initially seem to them like research. We have given them some tools as to how to set about action research, and they have written about it in a 5000 word assignment.
So the question then becomes: how do they, as early career teachers, function as reflective practitioners with a research bent, within a compliance based system? The first answer to that is that they came into education, at whatever level, not to meet the needs of the 2012 Teacher Standards, but to ‘change the world’ in whatever small amount, to ‘make a difference’ and to ‘make education better’ (as Biesta, 2020, puts it in the title of Chapter 2 of Educational Research). That motivation has to serve whilst learning the practice of being a teacher.
The second answer to that question is to disabuse them of the notion that the Core Content Framework and the Early Career Framework are going to be an effective guide to thinking within their practice. Both documents take a lot for granted and present research as answers that the early career teacher can take and use, but their root, as Jim Hordern and Clare Brooks have shown, is in the ‘science of learning’ field, sometimes known as the ‘what works’ literature, that omits and marginalises huge chunks of valid educational research that early career teachers need. If newly-prepared teachers want to understand themselves as teachers, their children as learners, the education system as leading to both of those outcomes – they will need to rely on different literature. The reference list of the ECF won’t help them much.
What we want – what most teachers appear to want – for our children and our schools is more person-centred, communal, local and complex than that provided by the ECF.
Beyond that, there is context. Referring back to the stark contrast between a high school in the township of Khayelitsha outside Cape Town, and one like Westerford that sits in the richer southern suburbs of Cape Town, it is clear that what works in one place will not be appropriate in the other. This context varies even within the parts of east London that most of our student teachers come from and where they are practising their teaching. There will be differences from postcode to postcode, and what works in one place may not work in another.
I suggested to the student teachers that once under the radar of a school’s SLT, there are things that will usefully present themselves as opportunities for research, and which they will be able to think about and devise methods of researching and discovering.
In a shameless plug for the Chartered College of Teaching, I used their journal Impact as a place to start seeing what other teachers had researched. Of course, this is only one place – albeit a strategic and well-regarded one – to find out what the teaching profession is researching. Other local avenues are possible. But if we know what is there, then it becomes possible to frame expectations and workload as researchers.
The worst that could happen, in my view, is that we send newly qualified student teachers into schools with a big heart and strong expectations of what they can achieve, and hone that simply into existing practice, disregarding the rich thought and intellectual foundation that must be part of any teacher’s inner life. I hope, possibly in vain, for each of our teachers, that some wise head might say to them, welcome, I am so glad you were wanted to work here. How can we shift our practices to help you have the maximum intellectual impact on your children and your team?
Welcome to this blog. I am an educational researcher by choice, a teacher by vocation, musician, artist, husband, parent, Christian and resident of Milton Keynes. The blog contains reflections on issues that affect or just touch on the education of children in the UK and the culture they are growing up in.
Welcome to this blog. I am an educational researcher by choice, a teacher by vocation, musician, artist, husband, parent, Christian and resident of Milton Keynes. The blog contains reflections on issues that affect or just touch on the education of children in the UK and the culture they are growing up in.
Faith in Learning 