The People's Republic of Neverland by Johnson Robb;

Author:Johnson, Robb;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PM Press
Published: 2020-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Some Songs of Experience

Landing by accident in Andrew Ewing School, that infamous hotbed of progressive schooling in the London Borough of Hounslow, I have to admit that, for a while, I fell into the habit of vanguardist thinking prevalent among some of my colleagues, that Andrew Ewing represented the very cutting edge of educational progress, and so was the very paradigm of “best practice”. Best practice, we thought, was therefore exclusively described by the characteristics that distinguished Andrew Ewing School from its neighbours. Best practice was open-plan, team-teaching, vertically grouped and committed body and soul to the concept of a child-centred education. It wasn’t until I went off to see the world in 1987 in the capacity of a London Borough of Hounslow supply team teacher that I realised that good practice wasn’t only the province of open-plan, team-teaching, vertically grouped and committed body and soul to the concept of a child-centred education. Indeed, while I did my best to interpret the principles of cooperation and child-centred education in classrooms and schools that had been constructed long before anybody had ever thought of open-plan learning environments and cooperative teaching, I also appreciated how important the physical reality of the environment is in facilitating or inhibiting education.

In my subsequent travels, I worked with colleagues who aspired to be inspirational within the confines of traditional classroom organisation. I also worked with colleagues who either metaphorically or literally were intent on sledgehammering away the structural inhibitions inherited with traditional schooling structures and traditional classroom organisation. But it was also obvious that a lot of good practice and good education was happening in places that had been built more in accordance with Victorian specifications than in accordance with post-war education radicalism. Although not always an insurmountable problem, the physical reality of the school’s building conditions practice, and the existing economic reality of levels of funding limit options and possibilities for changing these conditions.

As a fairly typical example, the last school I worked in was built in the 1930s. It was an elongated L shape, originally with classrooms opening off a corridor that was open to the elements, with toilets situated unhelpfully at either end of the L. The corridor was eventually covered over, presumably as part of the post-war nanny state’s pampering of the working class, and the air raid shelters were firmly blocked off when someone fell into one by accident. At some point, two temporary classrooms were tacked on at the end of the longer corridor, access to both involving another bit of covered corridor that was all stairs and steps, which had to be negotiated by children wishing to use the toilets, creating dead spaces both on the stairs, up the stairs and round the corner by the toilets, and dead space between the “temporary” classrooms that when I arrived generally served no purpose other than to offer opportunities for any child wishing to avoid adult supervision for the purposes of negative manifestations of imitations of unreconstructed patriarchy or bourgeois individualism.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.