ABSTRACT
Ideally, as a chapter, this would be redundant, since it would be so clear in all chapters. Here, I spell it out.
Humour is more important than can be put into words. If I did not have the children laugh with me about every ten minutes, I could not achieve what I attempt, especially in the extended periods of deep speaking and listening that I find so useful. All can instantly be captivated by a great laugh together. The power of classroom laughter is frightening; its avoidance by so many teachers frightens me. As I have often argued, its value is not just relief, but the closeness and togetherness it brings to the relationship of teacher and child.
Provocation-in-role is the technique I most often use to achieve humour and is the feature for which I am most criticised. When I have better ways of enchanting and challenging children, I use them.
But the technique is not just for humour. I have argued (Quinn 1994b) the importance of children learning to stand up for themselves, to resist especially undue pressure. They must identify what is provocative in what adults say to them and develop confidence to counter such edginess, not by matching irritation and aggression, but by reason and argument proper. My use of provocation, abuse, derision etc is to undermine their value. My main means of doing so is by being offensively in the wrong, and having my error identified publicly. Children love it, and still somehow seem to love me! But other teachers have other techniques that work well for them, to achieve both humour and autonomy.
Listening is a non-negotiable skill of an educator, though you can teach without it. Children sense when you want to know and attend 116to what they think and feel. They are often astonished to discover that the teacher really does want to know. Schooling, as they often put it to me, is not about that. What they are listening for, as I said earlier, is a clue as to what is the ‘right’, expected answer. I think it is true that none of us know how true this is of our teaching. I am taken aback when I attend to recordings. To allow for this, I use the previous strategy, so that I systematically disorientate the children as to what the teacher’s desired answer is. My paralanguage disorientates them. I get them to know that they cannot rely on my clues, that it is their real views I want to hear.
Challenge is a crucial feature of an educative classroom. Clearly, the challenge has to take account of the confidence resource of the children. With children I don’t know well, humour allows me to go further than I otherwise could. But the climate of the classroom must challenge their ideas, their beliefs, their attitudes, their aspirations. Children must learn that the challenge should come from them as much as from the teacher. And they must develop the important skills of giving and receiving criticism, the life-blood of challenge.
Intelligence is a climate factor often missing from classrooms. Earlier, I used the contrast between academic and intellectual; teachers often have too high academic expectations of children at the same time and in the same activities as those in which they have too low intellectual expectations. Sadly, teachers and OFSTED inspectors often do not distinguish these, using ‘academic’ for both. They thereby fail to make a distinction that goes to the heart of the difference between classrooms that do, and those that do not, celebrate intelligence. The difference is this: the academic has to do with the conventions, the routines of a subject; the intellectual has to do with the exercise, development, exploration, and articulation of intelligence. We need the latter for its own sake and for its contribution to the former. We could do with more intellectual academics, not just trained ones.
Pedagogy for judgement. For some lucky children, a single exposure to the music of the ‘cello, to horseriding, to general or specific tasks in technology or to a maths skill is sufficient for them to grasp the significance as a whole and to be able to decide educatedly about it. With most techniques in CT, as in most areas of skill, a number of exposures are necessary to develop the skill, to learn its value and to appreciate the range of its application. The Venn 117diagram is an example I have given of a skill I have taught successfully in one short lesson. But my claim is more modest than it seems. What I have taught is the basic skill, not its value and the diversity of its application. As with pointillist painting, it takes for nearly all children a number of lessons before they can not only use it but both judge and be disposed to judge when it is appropriate to use, beyond being prompted by the teacher.
But that is the criterion of success: being prompted appropriately by the circumstances of the task, the engagement, the life – not the teacher. Anything short of that criterion is, for most children, technical competence; training but not education. The pedagogic point is not one of special pleading, quite the opposite: it is to see the method of teaching/learning CT as in the mainstream of learning educational skills. It is to see thinking skills as requiring repeated, developmental practice before they become educational attainments, that is before they become judgement or critical thinking.
Common sense. The antithesis of common sense and mystification is a useful one in considering climate. Many children and adults have been introduced to science and have been put off science, because it was introduced as a series of mysteries to be remembered, a set of academic store-pieces, for them to avail themselves of, if they remember, on the occasion of certain prompts such as exam questions or others’ remarks. Science is often thus trivialised and sterilised. The expression ‘blinded with science’ suggests a more sinister power relationship based on misuse of mystery.
To avoid this sterility, it is necessary from the early stages that science be rooted in children’s common sense, that it be a development out of common sense, rather than a superimposition upon existing understanding. My use of magic, then, is deliberately an affront to common sense, rather than a bypass. Magic always works thus, at least with children, so that their Piagetian disequilibration is activated, their schemata are in turmoil. They anxiously seek a resolution that will allow their minds to rest, but crucially, from the educator’s point of view, a resolution that will have a more generous accommodation of the physical world, that will not be disequilibrated in future by evidence of hot air expanding. My educational magic triggers not the trivial detection of a sleight of hand, but a new feature in the regularity of the observable world. If the learning is mere academic learning, and does not affect their commonsense grasp of the world, my work is largely a failure.
118The point is not particularly one about science; it applies to all subjects. It is not particularly about psychology of learning, though it applies there; it is an epistemological point about the nature and ontogenesis of understanding. Disciplines of meaning like science, philosophy and the arts came about in an evolutionary way as the outcome of struggle to make sense of the world. The human birthright is not just to encounter the sense that has been made of the world, but to encounter the world that is to be made sense of and the means of making sense. The child must be helped to extend her common sense by the growing realisation of the powers of observation, of criticism, of construction etc that are abundantly evident in the dynamic of disturbed common sense.
This groundwork should be evident in my work with the children, where their common sense making sense is triggered by my anti-empirical nonsense. I see this as a paradigm case of their seeing the emergence of the scientific spirit and method. I see it also as a paradigm case of A. N. Whitehead’s brilliant prescription for education, detailed later, of the rhythm of education being romance, precision and generalisation. Romance and generalisation are the direct points of contact with common sense; in a well-handled education, precision never quite loses contact with, and is often vigorously infused with, common sense.
Acceptance is my final point about climate. Of course not everything that I hear in school is acceptable. But the children’s and my challenge must be in a climate of listening, of ‘hearing the best of’ what is offered. So often, children are done down, as I was at school, because they venture, because they explore, because they imaginatively hypothesise, because they dare to create and think beyond the teacher’s imagination or instigation. Challenge, acceptingly. The paradox of the unaccepting role I play serves to emphasise to children, as we laugh at my foolishness and as we debrief, how important the opposite disposition is, and how important it is to listen to the dismissive adult, to resist him, and to counter his dismissal.
