I am assisting a graduate student working on the inclusion of children with
Downs syndrome in regular classrooms. She has a mass of observational data
and interviews with the children, teachers, parents. The problem arises
from the observation that the children play multiple roles in relation to
each other and the teacher. Inclusion/exclusion is only one of the many
complex ways relationships can be described. A child may be included and/or
given choices in ways that are personally demeaning and destructive. A lot
seems to depend on how the teacher influences the children's relationships
with each other and herself, and this seems to be relatively independent of
any formal characterisation of the classroom as teacher-centered or
learner-centered. Children's beliefs about each other and what to value in
each other seems important and that takes us into deeper cultural factors.
The other thing I have been doing is interviewing children individually as
we jointly watch videos of the them at work in their classrooms. I use the
videos as cues for the children to talk about what they were doing. It
takes a while for each child to get into the role of being her/his own
observer, but seems to work well in the sense that I have been confronted
with children's perceptions that are quite different from adults/educators
assumptions about what happens in classooms. Using the videotapes 2-3 days
after the events the children seem to recall well what is happening for
them. They can anticipate what is going to happen next on the video, burst
into laughter, are embarrassed, surprised. I have been struck by how
accepting they are of activities for which they can see no educational or
personal outcome. They are just the things you have to do, and if they
involve writing down what you see (e.g. in a science activity), then that
is what they do. They do it because they like the teacher and that's the
kind of thing this teacher makes you do. Or they do it because their friend
is doing it, and they like to do things with their friend. And that's
really all there is to it.
I guess I simply don't know any more what the relationship is between the
world of children in classrooms as they perceive it and negotiate their way
through it, and the classroom world as the adults see it. I think we need
to develop a much clearer and more consistent understanding of the
relationship between the child-world and the adult-world. One of the
teachers whose class I have worked in has won national prizes for her
excellence as a teacher. One day she accidentally overheard me interviewing
one of the children in her class. I was interviewing in a remote corner of
a resource storeroom. She stayed to listen unbeknown to me or the student.
Later she told me that this was what she had done, because she could not
believe that the child I was interviewing was the same child she knew in
her classroom. The picture I was gettingf rom the child was entirely
different from her perception of her classroom.
None of this will be news to Gordon. I believe we have a lot of
observation-based theoretical work yet to do to understand exactly how
students' classroome experiences shape their beliefs and their lives
Sorry this is so long
Graham
Graham Nuthall
Professor of Education
University of Canterbury
Private Bag 4800
Christchurch, New Zealand
Phone 64 03 3642255 Fax 64 03 3642418
http://www.educ.canterbury.ac.nz/learning.html