Dispositions for Learning in Childcare Students

Dispositions for Learning in Childcare Students

Childcare students: learning or imitating?

Elise Alexander

Paper presented to the British Educational Research Association Annual Conference, University of Leeds, 13-15 September 2001

Abstract

This research grew out of concerns that the training of nursery nurses, who play an important role in the care and education of young children, was poorly understood by experienced early years practitioners, by college tutors and by students themselves. My study sets out to examine the ways in which professional knowledge of nursery nursing students is developed during the two-year training period commonly undertaken by students on BTEC National Diploma and CACHE Diploma courses in childcare and education.

The study is broadly ethnographic, employing observation and interview techniques. I draw upon critical ethnographic methodology as means of understanding interpretations in the context of early education as a whole and also in a wider social context. This paper is based upon empirical evidence gathered during my PhD study, which is in progress.

In the preliminary stages of data gathering, it appears that the learning dispositions of nursery nursing students may be adversely affected by the experiences they have during their training, and perhaps also by earlier experiences in mainstream education. In this paper I examine the dispositions towards learning of a group of nursery nursing students, and tentatively explore some possible explanations for these dispositions

Acknowledgements:

Thank you to Mary Jane Drummond, Sarah Bennett and Mandy Maddock, for reading and listening. Thank you to the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) for funding this project.

Dispositions for Learning in Childcare Students

Childcare Students: Learning or Imitating?

The study is a broadly ethnographic examination of the training of childcare students at two Further Education colleges in the southern half of the country. The research was undertaken using ethnographic methods–observations of students in classroom settings in college and in their work placements, followed by a series of in-depth interviews. The study focuses on the transformations that occur in the students’ constructions of

Their work with children and of themselves as ‘professional’ childcare workers through their training. Sometimes these constructions are not what the designers of the training courses had in mind. Indeed, the ‘ideal’ childcare worker that is implicit in the course materials and related textbooks is a very long way from the students who helped with this study. That is not to criticise the students. They are all well-intentioned young women, trying to make sense of training courses that did not reflect the realities they discovered in their work placements and did little to prepare them for working with young children.

In this paper I examine some of the early findings from my study, particularly the dispositions for learning that I discerned among the students I worked with. I look at the ways in which these dispositions are affected by the students’ experiences and begin to explore the implications for future training.

Childcare workers play an important role in the care and education of young children in terms of government policy as well as the daily care of children. Without a large number of trained childcare workers the government will be unable to deliver its promises under a range of childcare initiatives, including the provision of nursery places for 2/3 of all three-year olds by the end of 2002, the National Childcare Strategy and SureStart.

If these policy initiatives are to be successful, then a well-trained, effective workforce is essential. At present, the childcare workforce is disparate, with qualifications ranging from a small number of teachers with postgraduate degrees at one end of the scale, to staff with no qualifications at all at the other (Pugh, 1998). The two most common qualifications are the CACHE Diploma in Childcare and Education and the BTEC National Diploma in Early Years, formerly the Diploma in Childhood Studies.

Both these qualifications are gained through attending a two-year course, usually in a further education college, including about 40% of the time spent working in a range of workplace settings. The principle underpinning this practice is that the students are able to take the knowledge of procedures, routines and child development theories they have gained in class and then apply it to their work with children in work placement.

Most people undertaking these courses are aged 16 or 17, although many colleges make provision for mature candidates to study on a part-time basis. My study concentrates on full-time students in the younger age range.

The two most common training courses in childcare are broadly competence-based, with detailed learning outcomes. In both courses, every learning outcome has to have supporting evidence to ‘prove’ the students’ knowledge and understanding of the course syllabus, and most of this evidence is in the form of written work. Students must provide evidence of their knowledge and understanding through assignments, evidence of practical work undertaken in work placement and professional profiles completed by workplace supervisors. The courses are ostensibly rigorous, including units on child development, health and safety, child protection, learning and play, working with parents and legal frameworks in early education and care. The content of the units expresses constructions of children that are broadly liberal, but depend heavily on theories of child development that have been challenged as being too narrow to account for the many different childhoods that children experience in modern society (David, 1998). These constructions of children will be explored in detail in my thesis.

At present there are approximately 100,000 childcare workers working in the UK (Cameron, Owen, & Moss, 2001). Current government policy demands a huge increase in the number of people employed in childcare, but there are signs that the people who traditionally enter childcare employment are choosing other careers. Cameron et al (2001) report this phenomenon and suggest that it may, in part, be due to the increase in education standards in recent years. Young women who previously opted for childcare as a career now obtain higher GCSE grades and are choosing to work in better paid office jobs in service industries.

Childcare workers are also important in ways other than the delivery of government policy. They care for and educate the children of this country. What they do with our children has a profound impact on the shape of the children’s future lives and on their dispositions for learning. What could be more important than that? Yet the work is poorly paid, demonstrating the low status of people who work in childcare, and conditions of employment, such as long hours, absence of a career structure and short holidays, make the work unattractive.

In my study, the students were a homogeneous group: they were all white, aged between 16 and 20 and had all had experience of childcare before entering the course, either through work experience in school or through baby-sitting for family and friends. They came to the study as volunteers, and so I had little control over who participated. Students enter the childcare courses with a minimum of three GCSEs at grade C or above, and so have not generally construed themselves as high achievers in their school careers. The students in my study construed themselves as women who were good with children, by which they meant they had the right personal dispositions and traits: patience, kindness, ability to work with others in a team. They also tended to see themselves as ‘practical’, as opposed to academic. Very early in the study, they expressed the view that they preferred work experience to the college-based, academic part of their training, and indeed often found their college work irrelevant and out of touch with the practice they saw in the work place.

This finding is not, in itself, surprising. In her thoughtful exploration of the impulse towards respectability in working class women training as social carers, Beverley Skeggs (1997) noted that work placements were seen as totally worthwhile. After all, this is the forum in which a trainee carer’s skills can be legitimised. Who can question the relevance of a work placement? For the students in my study, work placement was where they actually had a chance to work with real children, in real settings.

In the course of my research, however, it became clear that the students were experiencing difficulties when they tried to reconcile what they found in work placements with what they were being taught in college. Students found that practitioners’ ways of interacting with children were not what they expected, resources in the work settings were often scarce, and pragmatism often seemed to come before quality. One student, Louise, felt strongly that her college tutors held an ‘ideal world’ view of what happened in work placement: “we should aim for these wonderful placements, but that’ s not what we’re working with” (Louise 1:19.46). She felt that tutors should acknowledge that work placements were not perfect and they should use more realistic case studies in the course materials, so that students would be better prepared to deal with the ‘real’ situations they found.

Louise was a thoughtful, perceptive student who was generally unwilling to accept what her tutors told her without question. Throughout the study she was notable for her calm and reasoned way of challenging what she was taught. None of the other students reflected upon their own practice and learning in the way that Louise did. All of them, however, valued what they learned in the workplace much more highly than the programme they were taught in college. When I asked about the most important thing they had learned in college, these were some of the answers I received:

* “How to work to a deadline” (Hailey)

* “I don’t really learn much in class” (Jess)

* “To respect myself, and to balance elements in life – work, family

and personal space” (Lynne)

* “You don’t learn much in college. That’s the conclusion I’ve come to. We may as well just have assignments sent to us in through the post to do, and just do work experience throughout the whole two years” (Rosie)

* “Organisation and time management” (Chelsea)

These students are clearly dissatisfied with the college-based part of their course, seeing their written work as a regurgitation of things they have been taught, and not intrinsically valuable. They saw assignments as tasks that must be completed in order to gain the qualification.

Indeed, this is how the course providers represent assignments to the students. With each assignment brief, students are given a list of the criteria they must meet in order to pass, and the additional things they must do to get a higher grade. Each piece of work is broken down into its component parts. In the CACHE Diploma in Childcare and Education, each assignment brief sets out the task that the student must complete, followed by details of the background to the assignment in the form of “What do I need to Know?” Then, there is an explanation of how to begin the work:

What should be researched, to whom the student should speak about the work,

How the work should be presented and, always, a reminder to ensure that anti-bias practice has been considered throughout the work. After this, there is a page detailing how the work is to be marked and what must be included in the work to achieve each grade. There are also notes to guide the tutor in how to prepare students for assignments, including instructions about how each unit should be taught: teaching should be varied and a variety of methods should be used.

Obviously, the course providers could argue that the clarity afforded by the extreme prescription of content and assessment in the courses is to the students’ advantage. They know exactly what they have to do in order to fulfil the requirements of the course, and practitioners know exactly what they are getting when they employ a newly qualified member of staff holding a CACHE or BTEC Diploma. And they even help beleaguered tutors by telling them how to teach each section of the course. Competence based training ensures that everyone knows where she stands.

Assignments, placement portfolios, reports and practice records all provide evidence that students have mastered the professional knowledge that enables them to work as competent, effective childcare workers.

But I want to argue that this kind of training is pushing students into learning in a very superficial way, and indeed is preventing them from achieving true mastery of the knowledge that forms the basis of their work with children. Without mastery of knowledge about work with children, students cannot think critically about the experiences they have in work placement and in college, and so cannot construct reliable knowledge upon which to base their judgements about children. I return to this point a little later. I used Entwistle’s (1997) helpful synthesis of empirical work on deep and superficial learning to help me to understand the students’ learning, and also drew upon the empirical work carried out by Dweck (2000) in which she examines the development of learned helplessness in school children.

In the course of the research I noticed that all the students complained about the amount of written work they had to produce. At first, I thought this was merely students complaining and looking for an easy life, but gradually it became clear that the students I was talking with were finding it difficult to take the knowledge they gained from one course unit and use it in another. It was no wonder that they all expressed dismay at the amount of work they had to do for the coursework; they appeared to be starting from the beginning with each assignment, unable to make connections. Further, they found it difficult to take the knowledge about routines, procedures and other information they had learned in college and apply it to practical situations. Yet, if learning outcomes were to be taken as trustworthy evidence of students’ learning, then surely they should be able to make these connections, and so make sense of their training. After all, college tutors were ticking off the learning outcomes they achieved throughout the course. Perhaps students were not learning as much, or as thoroughly, as their tutors and course providers expected.

There are several possible explanations for the students’ apparent difficulty to apply their college-based learning to practical settings and real children. The first is that the college-based knowledge may not be appropriate anymore, located as it is in child development theory. I examine this possibility at length in my thesis. Another explanation may be that the students have been badly taught, and so have not learned or mastered the theory of work with children, and I also explore this idea elsewhere. Or perhaps the explanation lies in the students’ own dispositions to learning, and how these dispositions help or hinder their efforts to master the professional knowledge of their chosen careers. The question is then, why have students developed these dispositions? Perhaps the system under which they are being trained is responsible for the students developing dispositions that actually hinder their learning.

There is research evidence that students in a range of post-compulsory educational settings adopt different approaches to their studies. Entwistle (1997) refers to an empirical study he carried out in 1987 to describe a surface approach to learning in which students set out to reproduce what they are taught simply in order to meet course requirements. The defining features of this approach are:

*Studying without reflection on either purpose or strategy

*Treating the course as unrelated bits of knowledge

*Memorising facts and procedures routinely

*Finding difficulty in making sense of new ideas

*Feeling undue pressure and worry about work.

(Adapted from Entwistle 1997)

These features seemed remarkably relevant to the evidence I am accumulating about the students in my study. Gibbs (1992) further elucidated the surface approach to learning, observing that students reduce what is to be learned to the status of unconnected facts, in order to reproduce them at a later date, say in an examination. The students in my study did not necessarily store facts up for examinations, but they certainly reproduced a series of unconnected facts in their assignments. I read through some of the students ’ coursework and found that, in some cases, the work consisted entirely of lists: lists of activities, lists of how to carry out activities (like a recipe) with children, and lists of how the students would know that the children had learned what they intended in the activity. There was little explanation of why the things listed had been included, or whether other possibilities had been considered, and yet the work was given a pass grade.