Six years ago, Owen Jones’s book Chavs highlighted, carefully dissected and questioned the ways in which it had become acceptable in Britain to demonise people from working-class backgrounds and some of the attributes assumed to be associated with working-class cultures. The book was published at a height of media and populist sentiment characterising parts of the British working class as ignorant, lazy, with poor parenting skills and questionable morals.
Our recent review of early childhood research in the UK from 2003-2017, presented at the British Educational Research Association conference, made it apparent that young children’s experiences differed across class lines. This led a colleague from overseas to question why UK ECEC research seemed to be ‘obsessed’ with social class. ‘Social class’ is not one of the ‘protected characteristics’ covered by the Equality Act 2010, discrimination against which is illegal. So how come we found it so important to draw people’s attention to it?
Historical perspective
From 2010, early childhood policy in England has departed from the universal approach to provision, encapsulated in the Every Child Matters agenda of the Labour years. This is partly because of austerity measures following the economic crash; if there is less money to spend, the Government argues, it should be reserved for those who really need it.
But this complicates the message about how society should respond to disadvantage. Targeted support, such as the Pupil Premium, inculcates children, families and practitioners into a philosophy of difference under the cloak of reducing inequality. It is a short step from observing that middle-class children tend to do better in the education system to trying to make working-class children more like children from middle-class families. The argument is complicated by interconnecting categories such as poverty, disability and class, which stem from overlapping systems of oppression, discrimination or disadvantage. These characteristics are likely to co-occur, but one should take care about attributing causality: disability, for example, can be associated with limited employment opportunities because of lack of access to transport rather than limitations in individual capacity, and so lead to poverty.
What is talent?
Another kind of targeting can be identified in attempts to promote social mobility for ‘talented’ and ‘hardworking’ individuals. This ideology has underpinned Conservative education policy for many years and was still apparent in the 2017 manifesto’s vision of Britain as the ‘Great Meritocracy’ where everyone should be able ‘to go as far as their talent and hard work will allow’. What counts as a ‘talent’, however, depends on what is prized by social and cultural values. A child is more likely to be praised for naming a wide range of animals, seen perhaps on holidays, than fantastical creatures encountered in comic books. If you are not ‘talented’ in the ways that are recognised by those in positions of influence – those in the middle and upper classes – a meritocratic approach actually makes it less likely you will move up the social mobility ladder.
Not obsessed enough
In sum, perhaps we haven’t been sufficiently ‘obsessed’ with social class in ECEC research and practice. We’ve blurred concepts of working-class cultures, cultural deficiency, disadvantage and social mobility, and failed to examine the possible consequences of seeing some children’s home backgrounds as educationally less desirable. At the same time, there is a need to recognise that social class is strongly associated with educational attainment (DfE 2015) and illness and mortality rates (Marmot 2010). There is an urgent need for early years educators to value all children’s cultural heritage and experiences.
Why focus on class and culture?
Luis Moll developed an approach to understanding children’s home and community everyday practices, or their ‘funds of knowledge’. Working with low-income Hispanic students and their families in Arizona, USA, Moll carried out ethnographic research to map the cultural and social resources that families used (Moll and Greenberg 1990). After interviews with children’s families and observational visits, Moll then worked with teachers to explore how these funds of knowledge might support children’s learning. Many family members were employed in the building trade, so new material was devised encouraging children to draw on this in the classroom. Parents and community members were invited into school to share their expertise.
As Moll et alexplain (1992), the funds of knowledge approach ‘…represents a positive (and, we argue, realistic) view of households as containing ample cultural and cognitive resources with great potential utility for classroom instruction… This view… contrasts sharply with prevailing and accepted perceptions of working-class families as somehow disorganised socially and deficient intellectually, perceptions that are well accepted and rarely challenged…’
Leading pedagogy
Although initially writing over 25 years ago, we can clearly see the continuing relevance of Moll’s approach today. While Moll and colleagues were working with older children, there is nonetheless much in the approach to support a respectful and generative way to working with young children, their families and communities, as research in New Zealand has demonstrated (Hedges et al 2011). These rich examples from home, many of which for very young children will be based on what they see and do as much as on what they hear and say, can become bridges to new learning.
Children’s play that might at first glance seem mundane and commonplace can lay the foundations for important aspects of social and cognitive development. There are features of play episodes based on superhero/cartoon characters that are easily identifiable by other children, making it possible for children to play together even if they don’t know each other very well, or have a great deal of verbal language at their disposal. We have observed two-year-olds, for example, offering action figures to playmates and orchestrating a ‘battle’ following a to-and-fro encounter ending in defeat – all without words.
Such play episodes, as well as domestic play, develop the ‘script-like’ knowledge that informs our understanding of the world. Involvement in reciprocal play routines encourages understanding of another’s point of view. Engaging in pretend play based on a child’s everyday life is meaningful to them. While the everyday events can be expanded to experiences that go beyond the everyday, a meaning system is needed as a foundation for this to happen.
CASE STUDY: FISH AND CHIPS AND LOLLIPOPS
Paul is three years old and has just started at a pre-school. At first he says very little there. Ali, his key person, tries to find out what he likes, observing him and asking his mum to answer the All About Me questions. She says Paul likes pretending to be Spiderman and Superman, play-fighting with his older brother, and Ali has seen him watching the other children dress up in cloaks and hooded outfits.
Ali makes a concerted effort to talk regularly to his mum and his gran, who sometimes collects him, and arranges to make a home visit.
She finds out that Paul’s mum works in the local supermarket, overseeing the self-checkout area. Paul has seen the self-checkouts operating and is fascinated by the lights, bleeps and the bagging area, which magically knows whether or not an item has been placed in the bag. Paul’s gran lives with them and sometimes works as a lollipop lady at the local primary school. Paul loves the large ‘lollipop’, her long white coat and the way that she can make the traffic stop. On Fridays, after pre-school and work are over for the week, Paul, his brother, gran and mum often have fish and chips. Paul loves waiting in line in anticipation at the shop and the feeling of the warmth of the food coming through the wrapper as they walk quickly home to enjoy their meal.
Ali has soon found aspects of Paul’s home experiences to build on and value. Role-play at pre-school takes on new guises: a supermarket and checkout with baskets, trolley, bleeps, lights and money, with small posters and leaflets brought in by Paul’s mum from work; a cloak, ride-on vehicles and a lollipop constructed from a stick are used as a ‘lollipop crossing’ and in Superman play; a fish and chip shop is created where orders are taken on notepads, ‘chips’ are scooped out and wrapped into paper parcels. Paul has the ‘script’ knowledge for these contexts and soon he is not just joining in but taking the lead.
Ali joins in too, offering the supporting vocabulary that will help Paul develop his experiences into concepts. And soon Lollipop Man Paul has acquired a Superman cloak to aid his efforts to save children from the onrushing traffic, and Spiderman Paul leaves his day job in the chip shop to stop a thief who has rushed past the checkouts without paying.
It can sometimes be hard to see the ‘value’ of everyday routines in the context of an education system that prioritises acquisition of an official knowledge (as set out in national curriculum documents), but providing opportunities for the enactment of familiar everyday routines gives children the confidence and the space to build on what they know in ways that are crucially important for their cognitive and socio-emotional development.
- This article has been adapted from ‘Social class and culture: bridging divides through learner agency’ in Beginning Teaching, Beginning Learning: In Early Years and Primary Education by Jan Georgeson, Jane Payler and Janet Moyles (Eds), published by McGraw Hill Education (£28.99). A 20 per cent discount is available for Nursery World readers until 5 March at http://bit.ly/2Cyjy9S code NW2017.
