Teaching Assistants

3 Aug 2015

Mitra Myths – Slum children with No English?

Teachwell Teaching and Learning Child-Centred, Children, Discipline, Early Years, Methods, Parents, Philosophy, Primary School, Teachers, Teaching Assistants, Theory 4

Sugata Mitra was much discussed by the Twitterati yesterday.The Guardian article is here.The TES article earlier this week is here. Tom Bennett’s critique is here.

For some it was the confirmation they needed that self-directed learning is real and superior. For others he is a charlatan whose research is deeply flawed and does not stand up to scrutiny.

One of the most interesting aspects of the Guardian article was that it did interview one of the children who took part in the original Hole in the Wall experiment. He is now a Yale PhD student – amazing success for a project you’d think.

Arun Chavan’s testimony is interesting (all the more so as it was ignored by those enthusing about children teaching themselves). The following is what he had to say about his experience.

Later, I get hold of Chavan to ask him about the impact of the hole-in-the-wall project on his educational achievement, and there’s a pause while he thinks about how to answer. “I’ve been asked this before and I’m always really uncomfortable with the idea of this as a hole-in-the-wall to Yale kind of story,” he says. “I feel like some of the most important influences I had were the people I had the opportunity to meet. It opened up my mind to a lot of things.”

It’s not a magic bullet, then? “No, technology is not a magic bullet. I wouldn’t be the only person saying it. But then, when it comes to something as complex as education, nothing is magic.”

From the horses mouth.

I then came across a TEDBlog interview with Chavan here. Here’s the crux of the matter. Mitra never looked into the backgrounds of these children or investigated them in any way. But he has categorically stated that the children were from the slums. Chavan’s testimony in that article does not seem to suggest this was really the case. Look at his answer to the following Q & A in the TEDBlog interview.

What were your first thoughts when the street-side computer appeared in your community?

I was a kid then, studying in the sixth grade. I had never handled a computer before. I thought it was great to have those computers lying around to play with. I don’t remember being afraid to use them. I think we figured out soon enough that restarting the computer fixes almost every problem!

The hole in the wall computers had been placed near slums not in them. Chavan may have been poor but that doesn’t mean he didn’t attend school. Chavan goes on to state that his father wrote and directed plays.

I really doubt even in India that a playwright lives in slums and well they write plays so are literate… which I am guessing would have benefitted his child.

Thing is, in India, as in many places, people with different levels of income may still live cheek by jowl. Just because you put the computer in an area where there are slums nearby does not mean only those particular children would have accessed them.

Chavan’s testimony in both articles does state that he feels he learnt to use the computer from scratch – fair enough. But these were not the illiterate slum children that Mitra makes them out to be. Here’s another one of Chavan’s answers in the TEDBlog:

Are you still in contact with the kids you studied with using the “Hole in the Wall” computer?

Unfortunately, I am not in contact with many of my friends from that time. Some of us went to different cities to attend college after high school. Most of those who stayed back attended vocational training programs and are working now.

Education in India is not a free affair – many costs have to be paid even for state schools. It is not even in the same league as the UK in terms of children from lower SES having the same opportunities as their peers. While Mitra emphasises the areas where children from slums could use the computers they were placed in villages. Villages in India do not contain a poverty ridden population anymore than they do in England.

Does this mean none of the children who took part were from the slums. No of course I imagine some were but the idea that it was poor illiterate slum children learning to surf the internet from scratch is far from the truth in at least some of the cases. The children were in school and had been in primary too.

Children did learn how to use a computer. Indeed Chavan states in the TEDBlog interview that this is what he takes away from it all but it is just this. It did not have a wider impact on his learning.

In the Guardian article Mitra states how he wanted to innovate further still in light of the hole in the wall project so:

“I set myself an impossible target: can Tamil-speaking 12-year-old children in a south Indian village teach themselves biotechnology in English on their own?”

He has gone into more detail in a different Guardian article here. Impressively they did. Another victory for self learning by children using the internet!! They even learnt it in a language they did not know and obviously taught themselves English through the internet (at least that is the impression that is given).

Slight problem here – the children were in a village not a slum and were not tested prior to using this technology. There is more than just a small chance they would have been attending school.

The best bit? They may have been Tamil speakers but what Mitra has conveniently omitted is that India has a three language policy.

It has done since it became independent, as a compromise solution to the need for a national language, as well as preserving local languages. Not everyone was happy about having to learn Hindi as many had learnt English as their second language up to that point. So the three languages policy was born – all children who attend school learn Hindi, English and their local language.

One of the areas that had wanted English was… drum rolls please… Tamil Nadur. So it seems that for quite a long time now people in that part of the India have been learning English at school, as their second language. Good chance their parents, grandparents, etc have too. They may even have grown up with books in different languages.

It is still impressive if they learnt and understood the basics of biotechnology but please let us not pretend that they taught themselves English as part of this process.

There are many reasons to doubt Mitra’s research, this is just the tip of the iceberg. To say that it should be adopted in classrooms is a throwback to the 1970s.

If there is one thing that does need to change in our education system – it is the attitude that any idea that a teacher likes can and should be implemented in the classroom because they are the teacher and a ‘professional’. Being professional is a state of mind not a quality that one possesses regardless of ones actions.

25 Jun 2015

Deprived Children – The Politics of Sympathy

Teachwell Behaviour, Progressive Education, Social Class, Teaching and Learning, Traditional Education Child-Centred, Children, Discipline, Early Years, KS1, KS2, Parents, Primary School, Teachers, Teaching Assistants 5

Empathy – the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.

Sympathy – feelings of pity and sorrow for someone else’ misfortune.

(Source Oxford Dictionaries online: http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/)

It is easy to mistake the sympathy for empathy but as the above definitions highlight, the difference is huge. Sympathy is driven by one’s feelings whereas empathy would encompass both feelings and thoughts of another. Understanding events in a person’s life and feelings from a different perspective and not simply those confined to your own world view.

Empathy enables the other to understand but to understand, one needs in the first place to accept that those who you are attempting to empathise with may feel very differently to what you do or what you think they should or ought to feel. This is rarely the case with the ubersympathisers within primary schools. This is even more the case when the child is from a deprived socio-economic background, is considered vulnerable or has behavioural problems.

So the story would go something like this:

Child comes to school. teacher realises (via school register, area being taught in, etc) that the child is from a deprived background and this instantly invokes sympathetic feelings. If the child has behaviour problems, then the sympathy goes up in proportion to the extent of the poor behaviour. The worse the behaviour is the more sympathy is felt by the teacher, as they imagine the misfortune suffered by the child is proportionate to their anger/violence/aggression. The other children who are not badly behaved (but may still be going through some difficult situations, equal to and possibly more than badly behaved child) do not elicit the same sympathy as them because, after all, there is nothing to be sympathetic about. They are not showing any outward signs of what they are feeling about their home life that can be latched onto by the said teacher, so they believe it is fair to presume the child is not subject to or suffering any ill effects from their home life. The child seems fine – they have no need for your sympathy.

This is the same tale told in many a primary school and it is stifling for those of us who have learned the power of empathy and find offering sympathy a poor second. This lack of empathy is also due to the inherent ‘romanticised’ view of childhood which is deeply ingrained in the primary schools. This colours the explanations for children’s behaviour – the parameters for what their feelings are and why they are exhibiting particular behaviours – is placed in a pre-designed framework of all children are innocent, blameless and not responsible for their behaviour. Therefore any behaviour must be the responsibility of the adults – parents or teachers – as the child is ‘being made’ to act that way or can’t help it. This leads pleasantly to the myth of the miracle teacher who can come in connect with the child, nurture them and make it all better.

To understand the feelings of someone who lives in a family which is less than perfect does not mean basing it what you already know, it means finding out from those who have actually experienced it. I once taught a child who had been subjected to sexual abuse from the age of 0 to 3 before she was taken into care. She chose to discuss her father with me on one occasion. Her feelings were that of a far more mature person than maybe even I was at the time. She told me that her father simply could not look after her (her mother had abandoned her just after birth) and that it was better for her to be with her foster family, who were in the process of adopting her. She would have two older siblings and she seemed positive and happy about the situation.

Now I accept that her feelings may change as she grows older but is it really so shocking that a child who has been given appropriate counselling and support for many years is not bitter or angry. She was sad that it did not work out with her birth parents but was open and willing to trust those offering her an alternative, given that living with her parents was simply not a possibility. Her situation was a happy one so she went with it. Who is to judge her feelings or thoughts are wrong – they may not be what I or indeed others would imagine them to be but if she was trying to forgive and move on then good for her. I would have believed that she would be angry at the world for letting her down and giving her such a bad hand.

Her perspective is as valid as any other person who has suffered such abuse, to empathise with her involved me really examining my own thoughts and feelings in terms of holding onto the negative from the past and what that achieved. She was willing to let it go – a big thing to let go – but she seemed to want to. I accepted it and put myself in her shoes and really why would she or any other child wish to endlessly replay and be affected by early trauma for the rest of their lives. If they can move on, rebuild their lives, be happy then why not choose that option?

I suspect that part of the issue is that those who are offering their sympathy are needy and would struggle if there were no one to need them. Therefore outcomes such as the above, which it is within their remit to support, would not enable them to play the role they desire. This is an issue, particularly in primary school, both among teachers and TA’s. Like any other job, people do come into it for a variety of reasons.

In addition, I think that it would require a good long look at the current ideas within education on this issue. They do not really seem as though they are based on the experiences of children with difficult backgrounds. It is such a complex area and in comparison the ideas that are taught are highly simplistic – child is from a broken family = needs your love and care. If they reject it, it means they need it even more.

Attachment disorder is an interesting one, even more interesting as it only seems to affect the children of the poor. How many nurture groups are there in middle class schools? Yet there are children in those schools who grow up in abusive or difficult environments also. They do not suffer from poverty on top of that but the emotional pain of watching one parent abuse another for example is not based on the amount of money in the bank account or how nice a house you live in.

Furthermore, I think many would find it hard to accept that often the children who are not acting up despite problems at home do so due to their overriding need for stability. They leave their problems at the school gates, I know I did. I wanted to be in a different environment to the one I experienced everyday. How can anyone go from that to believing that people like myself would want teachers trying to act like substitute parents or indeed compensate for what is going on at home? The answer is of course simple, they are not empathising or understanding what is actually happening.

School can be the one place where people like myself could feel a calm, normalised atmosphere and could learn an alternative way of being, which is vital for those who want to break away from their home environment in the long run. And it is a long-term issue for those children who grow up in such families. Quick fix pity is unlikely to do much good.

When I look back, what I really wanted was for my parents to be happy and to get along, failing that for them to separate and to be happy apart if that was the only way. Not a parent substitute, not pity, not sympathy, just for the situation at home to get better. Therefore the notion that the school or teachers could have intervened in some way is so off the mark. However, the research in this area is focused on those children who come from such backgrounds and are a problem in society. People like myself are of no real interest because I am not being abused or abusing anyone. So am I an outlier? the norm? in the minority or in the majority of people who come from such families? Until there is more comprehensive research I can not say but suffice to say there is more than one way to react to even the most challenging of circumstances.

Ultimately, those of us who have difficult family backgrounds have to come to terms with it, not be allowed to misbehave at school and have such behaviour reinforced (which can surely only lead to recreating the same circumstances of their own family). If we wish to move on, then we need to understand those circumstances, not have well-meaning adults trying to substitute parents. More to the point, no adult is ever going to substitute your parents. They are real people and in some way or another the individual has to reach an understanding or learn to be at peace with the situation. There are ways , including counselling, however it is not a process that others have the right to interfere with unnecessarily. If a child is at risk then you know what to do in terms of safeguarding. Let’s put to bed the ideas and notions though that these children are not moral and spiritual in the same way as others. Maslow’s hierarchy has a lot to answer for in this respect, as it seems to give some adults all the reasons they need to decide that the child can not be responsible for their actions as they are lacking in an area of need. The truth is that evidence does not bear this out, either individually, across societies or cultures.

Those who perpetuate the myth that teachers unwilling to spend their time making such children happy are uncaring or detached need to take a good long look at themselves. Caring teachers, who act professionally and do the right thing by the children in their class by enabling them all to learn, have done far more good than all the bleeding heart liberals throwing pity parties. It is they who give the children the real means to transcend their situations.

It is just unwise that untrained and unsupervised adults at school put in place policies (such as nurture groups) or act on a set of principles which are based on ignorance. It has in my mind gone further and become unethical given that not one of these strategies has been scrutinised properly, not one longitudinal study has taken place that shows this type of pastoral care is either warranted or effective, and lastly there is no feedback from the children later on in life to assess the extent to which such interventions were or were not helpful.

It is time that those, especially in primary schools, took a step back, read a bit more, asked more questions and thought more carefully before attempting to support children emotionally and psychologically. To base it on a set of assumptions which are never questioned is wrong and this situation has lasted far too long already.

We all want to help children who are struggling or who have difficult lives. Ask yourself though if being a teacher is that role or whether there is a different role which involves care more than education as the focus which you are suited to. If you genuinely believe that the school environment is for you then at least attempt to be educated, be empathetic and be ethical before intervening.