ABSTRACT
The curriculum is the planned learning offer of the school (Watkins 1989), with, among others, its moral, social, cultural dimensions. Given the requirements of the 1988 act, and often repeated aims about ‘developing the full potential of every individual’, teachers include personhood in the curriculum (Watkins 1989). The processes explored in Chapters Three to Seven inclusive are vital in facilitating the development of personhood, of enhancing the capacity for learning in children with emotional/ behavioural difficulties, and are of significance for the way in which teachers deliver the curriculum. In particular I have hitherto explored ways in which adults can facilitate the emotional development of children, and thus enable those inhibited by emotional difficulties to participate in the curriculum better. Teachers encounter in learners a range of resistances, defences, and anxieties (which were discussed in Chapter One). In delivering the formal curriculum, teachers can find opportunities to help children to develop the necessary emotional resources for learning by providing the particular qualities of relationship discussed in earlier chapters, i.e. emotional holding and ego strengthening. It is the quality of teacher-pupil relationships, particularly teachers’ capacities to provide emotional holding and strengthening, which determines the effectiveness of the strategies discussed in this chapter. This is a vital point, since it is the containment of potentially disturbing feelings that creates space in which there can be thought. It is as if thinking is made possible largely by the availability of internal emotional space for this activity. The strategies discussed in the second part of the chapter have an impact on supporting the necessary emotional development for learning when teachers bear in mind the holding and strengthening processes as a ‘filter’ for considering how the more practical strategies can be made use of.
