Throughout history, women have
started schools. Some famously - Mary Wollstonecraft, the Bronte sisters, Maria
Montessori... and others, lesser known, like Margaret McMillan - and Helen
Parkhurst, who is the subject of this blog. The world’s oldest university
was started by a woman, too – not a fact that we hear about as often as we
should. Fatima al-Fihri founded the very first University - of al-Qarawiyyin,
in Fes, Morocco in 859. Women have been stamping their mark on education
for thousands of years – often fighting battles of inequality, or just quietly
finding themselves able to do something amazing, sometimes through privilege,
but also by seeking out like-minded, forward-thinking supporters and taking
action where others did not.
Of course, women (being generally
the primary care-givers) are also responsible for educating children every day,
at home. As @francesbell pointed out (in response to my call for women
educational theorists) – ‘I’m thinking of every mother through the arc of
history who did everyday theorising of her children’s learning’. From
women who choose to home-school, to those who just naturally teach their kids
through the course of the day, taking opportunities wherever they occur.
Men start schools and do all these
other things too, of course – but the difference is that they are generally
more highly regarded, recognised, and praised for it. You only need to
follow popular educators on Twitter to find evidence that women are still being
side-lined, patronised and having their voices often literally silenced by the
‘mute’ button. It’s so common, it’s almost accepted without
question – woe-betide the woman who tries to make it a gender issue, however.
So when presented with the recommended reading list for the Cert Ed/PGCE
course I teach, my first thoughts were ‘Why these writers? Why not others? Who
is standing in the background just behind them?’
A quick look at a university
reference list won’t generally tell you anything about the writer’s gender -
and gender is only one part of diversity, of course - but I would encourage
students of every discipline to consider the diversity of what is recommended to
them, and to ask questions like these.
My first 'lost voice' is Helen
Parkhurst - contemporary of John Dewey, and founder of schools still operating
all over the world today.
Helen didn't name her theories
after herself but instead chose the name 'Dalton' for her teaching plan and
later her first school (the name was taken from Dalton, Massachusetts, a town
that she frequently visited). The Dalton Plan was essentially a scheme
aimed at helping children to achieve individual goals but in doing so, taking
learning wider than the classroom – fostering collaborative skills, community
and self-responsibility.
She used contracts to develop autonomy amongst her students, as well as making learning projects highly personalised. Her thinking was that, whenever a student is given responsibility for a particular piece of learning, he or she would instinctively seek the best way of achieving it. The notion of ownership would encourage rigour and application, and self-determination to see it through to the best of the student’s ability. Students are helped and guided through a process of coaching and peer-mentoring however - not just sent off with work to do and told to report back.
The Dalton plan
organises schools into three work-strands:
Assignment - students are provided with individualised learning
projects according to ability and interest
Laboratory - pupils are supported through one-to-one coaching and
peer collaborative support to find the best means of achieving their learning
goals
House - lesson-based element where children are encouraged to
learn as a community.
Helen defines differentiation (often a slippery concept) in this way:
As educators, we hear lots about
the skills needed for work today – the focus however, is often on the skills
needed for yesterday. How much do our schools prepare children for modern ways
of working, really? Helen’s ideas are about collaborative working alongside
individual planning and decision-making; in the Laboratory strand:
"Discussion helps to clarify
[the student’s] ideas and also their plan of procedure. When it
comes to the end, the finished achievement takes on all the splendour of
success. It embodies all [the student] has thought and felt and
lived during the time it has taken to complete. This is real
experience. It is culture acquired through individual development
and through collective co-operation. It is no longer school - it is
life.”
As I type this, my own daughters are playing schools upstairs, and it makes me think that, as teacher educators, we are all, in a way, starting our own school. Better than that, we are enabling our student teachers to develop their own teacher identities and discover what THEY truly believe teaching and learning to be about. In doing this, we are of course ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’ – the old guard of educational theory, the progressive thinkers of more modern times, the scientists, philosophers and cod-psychologists who inform our thinking, but don’t determine all of it. I'm adding Helen's thinking to my varied list of theorists in the belief that my teaching practice will all the richer for it.
References:
Not surprisingly it was hard to find much about Helen and the Dalton Plan on-line. These are the best I could come up with in snatched moments - any additions would be very welcome.
Parkhurst, Helen (1922). Education on the Dalton Plan. New York: E. P. Dutton & Company retrieved at https://archive.org/details/educationontheda028244mbp
A look at the University of Huddersfield's online library catalogue makes it clear that Helen published absolutely loads (some with very modern sounding titles, like 'Logical Realism' and 'The Evolution of Mastery') but no-one seems to have written recently about her. Time to put that right in a bigger way @kaysoclearn?
ReplyDeleteYes definitely. I'm only skimming the surface at the moment which is really frustrating. Looking forward to getting access to Huds systems so I can check out some more of her writing!
ReplyDeleteGreat post Kay and thanks for introducing me to Helen Pankhurst. I can't talk about women's and people of colour's voices in public discourse without getting a bit incoherent but do have a post in the pipeline. This post will help.
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