Parent education
7706
Parent education: the Sheffield University extra-mural department's mothers' group programme
Alan Wellings
Introduction
The Sheffield University Extra-mural Department’s Mothers' Group Programme, (so called from only recently, for the sake of a convenient label), had its origins in 1971. It started simply from the idea of organising daytime courses in child psychology for mothers of young children. As the work has continued, it has evolved through the integration of experience in it and the ideas and understanding generated by that experience to become a very different kind of activity. It is now a main preoccupation of the author and three part-time tutors, although the Programme has never been a large one even in the current year there are only six mothers’ groups in operation, together with a training group for intending group leaders.
The aim of this paper is to pick out the main ways in which the Mothers’ Group Programme has developed and to try and illustrate aspects of the thinking which govern the present approach to it.
Evolution of the Programme:
The initial ‘courses ‘ were typical extension courses; they were advertised in the annual course booklet, attracted an audience of mainly ‘middle class’ mothers to meeting rooms in the University or adult education centres, and, where possible, child care facilities were provided. The subject was child psychology, which was taught by psychologists or educationalists (usually University staff), and the teaching was probably as flexible and responsive as most adult teaching operating within the constraints of a syllabus with content headings and pre-prepared subject matter.
The current work is seen not as ‘courses’ but as work with ‘groups’; recruitment is by going out to the potential clientele rather than relying on responses to formal publicity; those who come to the groups are now almost exclusively ‘working’ rather than middle class; meetings take place in settings chosen for familiarity in their particular neighbourhoods and child-care facilities are provided almost as a matter of course. The ‘subject’ is now what mothers choose to talk about or work on and the function of the tutor (now really a group leader) is no longer to ‘teach’ through the structure of a subject area but to try and create situations in which learning will take place through the mothers structuring and elaborating the experience, understanding and skills they identify or endorse as relevant to them. Although at the time of writing the group leaders are still paid professionals, it is probable that in the next session many groups will be organised and led by volunteers, including two mothers who have ‘graduated’ through mothers’ groups.
Underlying the original courses was an implicit assumption about the obvious relevance of teaching child psychology to mothers and this sprang from a conventional kind of understanding of the roles and needs of mothers and of what it was appropriate for an extra-mural department to provide. The work has now become a kind of exploration of the situations of mothers and children in family and community settings; it takes place in a context of still largely unformulated hypotheses about the nature of unequal opportunity in our society, and remedies for it, but is at the moment focusing on the idea that improved conditions for child development might come about through building on the pre-existing competencies of mothers in a way which formal social institutions seem to fail to do.
One more contrast between the original and current approach to the work seems worth describing. It was originally seen as likely to become an established but small and conventional part of the Extra-mural Department’s work load, using paid, part-time staff in the usual way. However, even in its earlier forms, the work stimulated a high level of interest from potential clients, from professionals in adult and other branches of education, and from those engaged in social work and health services. Much of this interest was accompanied by suggestions for additional provision, and often by offers of meeting places. It became clear that the level of activity required to respond to this interest could not be sustained by the resources available for paid staff and so a pilot training group for potential group leaders has been set up. This has a membership of practising teachers, playgroup organisers, and teachers and social workers who have left their professions to raise families.
The Present Approach:
Most of the present groups meet in nursery or nursery and infant schools. For the purposes of the Programme the advantages of such schools are seen as: their familiarity (if only externally) to local mothers; their possession of the sort of facilities required for groups, and group members’ children; their association for mothers with their concern for their children, even if only prospectively and their ‘legitimacy’ as places to visit for the many mothers whose husbands keep them on a tight ‘chauvinist’ rein. Schools are also an obvious place to work given that one of the aims of the Programme is to explore ways of extending the roles of teachers to facilitate a different kind of relationship between them and mothers (this same kind of aim also has prospective applications with other ‘helping professions’, and it is hoped to extend the programme into the agencies of some other professions).
The process of setting up a new school-based group starts with gaining the consent of the headteacher (who may herself have made the initial approach, perhaps through the LEA adviser). What is required in the school is a meeting room for the group, coffee/tea making facilities, and provision for the care of group members’ children. Often, the children will be looked after in existing nursery classes, otherwise, a single teacher, helped by local secondary school pupils, will take responsibility. (When the teacher is prepared to see this situation as a learning context for these pupils then this has a clear value on its own.)
For a school to find a spare room, or rooms, seems in this region to pose little difficulty, many school buildings being under occupied. On the other hand, finding a spare member of staff is often an acute problem.
The headteacher is asked to recruit mothers for the groups, no more than ten to fifteen of them. She might do this by inviting mothers whose children are on the nursery waiting list, mothers with older children already in school, mothers met at the school gate delivering or collecting other mothers’ children, or known through the home visiting of school staff, an educational home visitor, or a health visitor. Initially, the invitation is to ‘drop by’ for a chat and a cup of tea or coffee, with the assurance that the children will be looked after, and in this way and over a few weeks a social group of regularly attending mothers is established.
It is only when this social group is established that the headteacher will suggest the idea of ‘someone from the University’ joining it to chat about ‘bringing up the kids and suchlike’. By all accounts, although this suggestion may cause considerable discussion, and perhaps take some digesting, it has not so far seemed to require overt persuasion for its acceptance. It seems plausible to suppose that the suggestion may be seen as an implicit condition for continued ‘approval’ of the group by the headteacher, and that the satisfactions of being able to gather for a chat without the kids are great enough not to risk disapproval and on the other hand, to risk the intrusion of someone from the University. Certainly, there must be doubt that without the induction process described, and involving a period for the establishment of a group, that a group would gather with the explicit prospect of meeting a University leader, although this possibility has not been tried.
A leader’s concerns in the first meeting with a group might be described as procedural - making sure that all the members do actually know each other, negotiating and understanding about the procedures of the group, and generally trying to weld the individual members into a group in which each member is confident about talking and prepared to listen to, and respect, what other members have to say.
These concerns are not only important at the beginning of a group, but also at later stages if new members join.
Even though a leader goes into a group which is already established ‘socially’, it is common to find that it has been operating with many members not knowing each others names. Given this, and given also that having a label to use for others is a useful, even essential condition for a productive group, the leader’s first initiative might be to set the group members learning names by one or another name association technique. As well as achieving its explicit object, this perhaps has a value of modelling a gentle but direct technique for coping with social embarrassment, and certainly can be counted on to generate some relaxation producing humour.
From the beginning the leader will try to convey that he or she has no more formal rights in the group than any other member, that discussions will be about whatever the group is prepared to discuss and that as far as the leader is concerned, anyone may introduce any topic. The leader will also try to establish as a presumption that the group is only useful to the extent that its members find it so, and that its value might best be found through individual members being prepared to share with each other their ideas and experiences, whether these be about problems or pleasures.
It is difficult to generalise about how long groups take to reach a state where their members do have the confidence to raise and discuss matters in other than either a detached, superficial or indirect way. A few groups have difficulty in reaching the state at all but the process follows a fairly clear pattern of mothers moving from discussion of a neutral and everyday gossip kind to discussion in what sometimes appears as a dramatically uninhibited way of their own feelings, behaviours or experiences. Two things should here be made clear though: first that the groups are not sombre problem clinics, for right from the first meeting one or more mothers will probably introduce a bawdy note - perhaps by raising some aspects of toilet training. Second, that although groups will rapidly identify any pattern of expertise possessed by the leader and indicate deference to this ‘expertise’ where they judge it relevant, the leader emphasises that he or she is not there as an ‘expert’ and can only help as just one member of the group as it engages in telling about and developing an understanding of a particular topic or problem.
The effectiveness of a group leader lies in the extent to which he or she is able to acquire acceptance by, and the confidence of the group in the initial meetings, and subsequently in the extent to which he or she is able to model open, structured and progressive ways of thinking and talking, and able selectively to reinforce similarly characterised behaviours by members of the group.
Procedural aims seem to shade into substantive aims on the part of the leader when group members start to show a consciousness of the process of which they are a part - discussions take on a more systematic quality and are more sustained and members of the group bring more precisely into focus the things which concern them. It is at this stage that groups appear to cross a kind of threshold and members seem to become more aware of potentials for their own development. The leader is now able more explicitly to encourage mothers to think about their own assumptions, perceptions, aims and behaviour patterns as mothers and individuals.
The emphasis comes to be on group-aided diagnosis - how the fact that one mother manifested severe neurotic symptoms (the author’s label) might be associated with her having for weeks on end communicated with no one but her husband and children (and then mostly non-verbally) and, once a week, a shop assistant and the milkman; and how the fact that another mother’s child’s behaviour problems are getting worse may be associated with the fact that she only gives him attention when he’s misbehaving - and on the establishment of goals and on the pacing and evaluation of procedures and activities directed towards goals .
It is generally perceived that mothers who come to groups seem to be motivated by concerns which arise from their roles as mothers and child-rearers and this seems associated with the experience that when, after perhaps six to ten meetings, a group has reached the stage just described and its members seem increasingly to be disposed to seek opportunities to extend their learning experiences they take readily to the suggestion of developing their skills with their children and their understanding of child development.
At this stage, if circumstances permit, a new leader will take over the group and engage with mothers in a phase of activity in which they will be encouraged to bring along everyday materials with which to devise, construct and use games with each other, and with their children in the group setting. The aim is to try and illuminate of the relationships between everyday possibilities, not only in games but also in domestic and other situations, and children’s development of conceptual and linguistic skills.
Whenever possible, a teacher from the school is brought into the group at this point with the aim of establishing between teachers and mothers a consultative relationship based on the teacher’s expertise and the mothers’ particularistic awareness of their own aims and needs. The aim is to model for both teacher (and indeed the host school) and mothers a relationship in which educators give mothers tangible recognition of their crucial value in the education of their children and in which mothers move from their typically mystified and deferential view of teachers and schools.
In the one case where a whole school has seemed to respond to those ideas (although it was already very ‘progressive’ in this respect), mothers from the group meeting in the school can be found there frequently, at other than group meeting times, working alongside teachers in activities with groups of children.
The stage in a group’s development described above usually lasts from ten to fifteen weeks and after this time the initial group leader returns with the aim of encouraging the group to start and think how it might sustain itself without the presence of one of the group leaders. Groups’ self-initiated activities have included devising programmes in which a sequence of professionals from health, social work or education agencies have been invited each to join in one or two of a group’s discussions; asking a teacher of the host school to work with the group for an extended period for them to extend their exploration of educational development in early childhood; organising and running holiday play schemes; organising trips for village mothers; and becoming a general purpose ginger group with and for mothers in a village.
This last stage may go on indefinitely with a group using the resources of one of the group leaders intermittently. What is sought ideally is a situation in which a group initiates with others in its community some of the same processes to which it has itself been exposed. So far, there is evidence from only five groups about this potential, but it should be borne in mind that these have been the only five which have been organised, out of two dozen or so since the start of the programme, in the light of anything like the kind of thinking described above.
Concluding Comments:
Clearly there can be no confidence about the value of the model described above for work with mothers without some ways of measuring changes of the kind the model seeks to bring about. The subjective and impressionistic evidence which has been acquired in various ways is encouraging. Group leaders are coming to see it as essential that after each meeting they write a report on the progress of a group and these are starting to provide a record through which evidence of both the development of whole groups and of individual mothers can be traced. Additionally teachers (as well as mothers) report changes in the ways in which mothers use the school, and in their own relationships with mothers, as well as claiming to identify what they describe as quite substantial changes in the confidence and behaviour of the children of some mothers who belong to groups.
However, it is essential to have more objective techniques for assessing the changes which are sought or might be expected. In particular these techniques could be applied in assessing changes
(a) in mothers’ self and other perceptions and their goals and behaviours in relation to their children, other adults and the schools and their teachers; and