AuthorMoles, Joanne

TitleYou say potato…………….Implications of a prescribed

curriculum on three Irish physical education teachers:

Paper presented at the British Educational Research Association Annual Conference, University of Glamorgan, 14-17 September 2005

Abstract

This paper revisits data collected within a case study about three Irish Physical Education teachers who work in a child-centred way (Moles, 2003). These teachers’ practices are analysed with reference to what and how they taught within structures provided by Bernstein (2000). At the time of the analysis, with no official syllabuses , these teachers had relative freedom to select what they taught. Since then the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NCCA) has provided syllabuses for Junior Cycle, Senior Cycle and Leaving Certificate Physical Education (2000). The Junior Cycle Syllabus is currently (2005) being piloted in Irish post-primary schools.

My original study examined the teaching of physical education in Ireland within a socio-cultural framework and acknowledged rapid changes in Irish society consistent with successfully embracing global capitalism. Concerns about the effects of globalisation, outlined by Maguire (2004), resonate within my analysis of the Irish education system.

This current paper progresses my original concerns by looking at the roles of these teachers through a philosophical lens of care theory, described by Noddings (2002). Implications for the caring practices demonstrated by these three teachers are considered by analysing changes implied within the introduction of prescribed syllabuses.

Suggested key termsPrescribed syllabus; globalisation; caring; child-centred; physical education; Ireland; Bernstein; Noddings

You say potato…………….

Implications of a prescribed curriculum on three Irish physical education teachers:

Introduction

This paper revisits a case study (Moles, 2003) with benefits of hindsight informed by new insights. The case study looks at three Irish physical education teachers, happy to be described as ‘child-centred’. Each of them is happy to justify and defend his and her curriculum. Based on dialogue over at least two decades during which two of the teachers were PETE (Physical Education Teacher Education) students of mine we believe ourselves to share values regarding teaching physical education. The three teachers, Fiona, Siobhan and John indicate the centrality of their pupils’ well-being within their practice consistent with care theory. A quote from Noddings (1998) reflects concerns raised in this paper:

The odd notion that establishing national goals will make teachers work harder and more effectively, thereby making students work harder and more effectively is part of a long tradition that assumes an autonomous agent can logically plot a course of action and through personal competence somehow carry it out, even if others are intimately involved.

Noddings (1998:196)

Rapid changes in Irish society over the last twenty years are reflected in education in Ireland (Tovey and Share, 2004, Sugrue et al, 2004, Lynch and Lodge, 2002, Moles, 2003). Extrinsic justifications for education are now explicitly defined. Changes within Irish education are consistent with globalisation. Commentators have observed that:

The global trends of school improvement and effectiveness, performativity and management are working together to eliminate emotion and desire from teaching – rendering the teachers’ soul transparent but empty. (Maguire, 2002: 266 quotes Ball, 1999: 26)

Ireland’s ‘Celtic Tiger’ economy increased mobility and work practices causing a diminution of informal social support within communities. Young people in Ireland have the dubious honour of topping the European league table for ‘binge drinking’, (Ramstedt and Hope, 2005). Irish young men are currently more likely to die from suicide than from any other single cause. [The rate of suicide among Irish males ranks twenty-fifth of thirty-five surveyed countries.] (Anderson, 2003)

Care theory places responsibility for these young people firmly within the education system. Noddings (2005: 4) indicates how, when care for the child is central, teachers respond to their pupils in a positive way:

…………….as we acquire knowledge about our students’ needs and realize how much more than the standard curriculum is needed, we are inspired to increase our own competence.

The three teachers in my case study are all concerned to provide opportunities for their pupils to find intrinsic satisfaction from their physical education classes. All three teachers involve their pupils in reflection and consideration of their own responses. John’s requirement of non-active participants that: ‘You may not always know the answer but you have to know the question’, is a message about the need for all pupils to listen and be involved in the class.

Fiona’s approach with disruptive boys was to involve them in reflecting on their behaviour, not simply punishing them within the framework provided by her school.

Siobhan provided an opportunity for a girl who was bullying others to stop, not because she was told to, but because she was facilitated in changing her behaviour and encouraged to reflect upon the reasons for changing. These examples show teachers who interact with their pupils. Their interactions are not dependant on pupils’ achievements of measurable outcomes.

My case study (Moles, 2003) analysed data within structures provided by Bernstein (2000) which indicated how the processes of schooling combine to describe a set of experiences. A teacher’s role within these structures is crucial to each child’s experience and the extent to which teachers’ values are acknowledged and foregrounded is significant in the discourse. ‘What we learn in the daily reciprocity of caring goes far deeper than test results’ (Noddings, 2005). This paper reflects on the implications of placing pupils’ experiences within an explicitly caring process. Children are not necessarily undergoing the same personal experiences when they are performing apparently similar activities. The joy of moving through water does not necessarily coincide with mastery of a named swimming stroke. Knowing whether joy is present is more complex than observing whether a skill is performed efficiently.

Different perspectives – can we see them?

Apparently when the Gershwins originally wrote the song ‘You like potato and I like potato etc.’ they showed it to their producer who said that the melody was very catchy but he couldn’t make anything of the words.

When my son was about eight he was discovered to be in need of glasses because of short-sightedness. Coming home wearing his new glasses he asked, ‘Were those hills always there?’

These two anecdotes serve to remind us that we cannot assume that other people’s understandings are the same as our own. The producer was presumably enlightened by dialogue between the writers and himself. If my son’s eyes had not been diagnosed and an appropriate prescription supplied, perhaps he would never have known about his surroundings. The people in both cases were unaware that they were seeing incomplete pictures. If the producer and the boy were teachers, they would be unlikely to be aware of their limitations to appreciate their pupils. The position of someone who sees the whole picture is not simply an alternative to someone who does not.

Teachers’ autonomy:

I intend to indicate how teachers may be focussed on achieving measurable outcomes, even though pupils may share the teacher’s vision, ‘you say tomato’; or the teacher may not share their vision ………. ‘and I say tomato’. A boy whom I taught in the swimming pool, wore arm-bands long after he could swim efficiently. He was clear that he wanted to wear them. His grandmother came to watch one day. She was delighted that he was swimming as his cousin had been tragically drowned and he had been around at the time of the incident. Eventually he took off the buoyancy aids when he recognised and believed that he didn’t need them. In an outcomes based approach the boy’s ability to swim would have been the significant factor. In this case his care for himself was privileged over any extrinsic goals indicating a value based position. Noddings (2000: 7) indicates that:

A caring adult notices and approves of what a child has done. It is quite another thing to set up a system in which rewards for appropriate behavior become an incentive for which children compete.

I am interested whether teachers whose central concern is care for their pupils are compromised when they have to pursue ‘learning outcomes’ which they may not think appropriate for the individuals concerned. In Ireland, physical education teachers are still (2005) able to select and pursue their own goals. They are still largely free from what Mahony and Hextall (2000) describe as ‘regressive postmodernist performativity demanded of teachers in contemporary educational reforms in the UK’. Teachers can develop personal responses which reflect professionalism as described within the ‘New Basics programme’ in Queensland, Australia (Lingard et al, 2003:10f).

The National Council for Curriculum and Assessment(NCCA), a statutory Irish body, (2003) has provided three syllabuses for physical education one of which, the Junior Cycle Syllabus is currently (2005) being piloted in Irish post-primary schools.

Fiona read the Junior Cycle syllabus and wrote:

Syllabus - Junior Cycle

Maybe I have a problem with the whole idea of a syllabus for all schools, rather than developing what your pupils need*. I found loads of things that annoyed me - I know I’m supposed to let you know how it would change our syllabus, however I feel it is not so much a difference in content as a difference in focus/Aim.*

By this I mean I would probably “do” a lot of named areas on the syllabus but in a different way with very different reasons for doing them.

*Fiona’s emphases.

(Moles 2003: 105)

Siobhan speaking about a pupil who had given birth and wanted to rejoin the volleyball team said: ‘She’s thinking Volleyball and I’m thinking baby!’

When John attended a meeting about a new syllabus (November, 2000) he reported that: ‘No-one there understands those things that I value in my teaching, for example, the development of attitudes and values in pupils.’

Three child-centred Irish physical education teachers:

This paper is revisiting data from and about three Irish physical education teachers in a case study (Moles, 2003). The practices of these three child-centred teachers are situated within contemporary Irish society. All three are explicitly aware of the effect they can have on pupils’ lives beyond the classroom. Each of these teachers is very concerned to work effectively both with their pupils and within thestructures of their schools. They are all praised unreservedly by their school principals and also by the children who they teach. These affirmations were not dependant on achieving extrinsic goals but on dialogue, and observation of the teachers at work formally and informally.

Potential effects of imposing a syllabus on these three teachers:

One of the teachers whom I observed was working within a syllabus which he and his colleagues compiled and which they amend regularly. The same activities are undertaken through the pupils’ schooling, with increased opportunities for choice and higher levels of performance encouraged. Skills for playing sport are valued in this, apparently traditional, programme which shares characteristics of the NCCA syllabuses. The classes which I observed were tightly structured, with pupils required to work hard and to respond to the teacher’s directions. Two non-participants who were talking to each other were quickly involved by the teacher in answering questions about what the others were doing with the reminder that they were part of the class even if they were not moving.

Siobhan adapted her programme for a small gymnasium. She claimed that her programme was restricted because of the lack of space. Her concern about teaching pupils to work independently and cooperate with each other was based on her perception that her pupils had difficulty in accommodating each other in their activities. There was constant dialogue during her classes, with both pupils and teacher contributing to the progress of the class.

The third teacher I observed thought that the structures of named games and named skills in Gymnastics restricted her pupils’ responses. She gave tasks inviting pupils to think creatively. On their first meeting she asked a first year class to make the word ‘Sycamore’ (their class name) with their bodies and when one young fellow declared himself the full-stop at the end she did not admonish him for taking an easy way out. Humour was clearly an acceptable part of the discourse.

I include the examples above to illustrate how different each of these teachers is from the other two, although they share a desire to make their teaching relevant within their understandings of the subject and the pupils. All three are consistently involved in progressing their knowledge of both pupils and content.

Each of the teachers is concerned with individual pupils’ responses, not with their normative achievements. None of them was enthusiastic about physical education becoming an examination subject although Siobhan thought that she could ‘teach her own way’ while pursuing the objectives of the examination syllabus. She did however indicate that: ‘their (the NCCA) notion of assessment is farcical if you consider that at any time teachers who are polar opposites will be grading their students using completely different criteria.’

Two positions identified in this paper:

Drawing on Bernstein’s (1991) theory using the concepts of production, reproduction and recontextualising knowledge, it is possible to differentiate between these three teachers and other teachers who are working exclusively from prescribed syllabuses. Teachers who prepare their own syllabuses are reproducing knowledge which they themselves select and probably value. This is different from recontextualising content which is provided from an external source. The anecdotes about the Gershwins and my son, indicate how recontextualising information which someone else values, may lose in the telling – either because of limitations of the transmitter or of the receiver, or both.

Care theory articulated by Noddings (2005), indicates that where relationship care is valued and people are involved in genuine dialogue incorporating shared inquiry it is probable that meaningful learning will occur. When the Gershwins explained their lyrics, the publisher realised the word-play that he had missed. My son’s appreciation of his surroundings occurred as a result of concerned interventions to help him see more effectively, consistent with a caring dialogue. The ability to identify a need for glasses, reflects a caring discourse within which concern for another person is central in progressing their understanding.

Irish primary schools are to have standardised testing by 2007 (Department of Education and Science, July, 2005). It seems unlikely that when teachers are required to be accountable to extrinsic standards they will also be required to develop meaningful personal relationships with the pupils. Teachers’ autonomy and sense of professionalism is apparently being sacrificed within a need to demonstrate that their pupils can do what is expected of them. There is little scope for the teacher who wants to explore new ideas, to be creative and to enhance the pupils’ sense of self in an intrinsic way.

I am in no doubt that children who are attending schools deserve to be brought into a relationship of care in which they feel valued and develop confidence about who they are. Education occurring within personally relevant supportive structures may obviate the need to chase measurable achievements. If the main indicator of a teacher’s success results from transmitting knowledge while maintaining control, it is unlikely that there will be much need for caring. When institutional control is relaxed, pupils will feel free to use their knowledge in whatever way they can. Caring allows us to understand that there are differences between ‘tomatoes’ and ‘tomatoes’ which matter in contexts when the subtlety of communication is acknowledged. Perhaps there are mountains out there which none of us has seen yet!

I am influenced within this paper by theory from Nel Noddings and Basil Bernstein, so I will finish with concerns from one and a solution from the other.

Davies (1995: 145) writing about Bernstein indicates that:

He saw (their) reliance on traditional outcomes and increasingly sophisticated, commercially prepared work schemes, no matter how openly displayed, as having the human-relations approach limitation of not reaching questions of deficiencies in underlying structures, positions, and practices.

The underlying structures which Noddings (2003:261) believes have to be ‘got at’ are indicated in the following quote:

Happy children, growing in their understanding of what happiness is, will seize their educational opportunities with delight, and they will contribute to the happiness of others. Clearly, if children are to be happy in schools, their teachers should also be happy. Too often we forget this obvious connection. Finally basically happy people who retain an uneasy social conscience will contribute to a happier world.