The ‘Permeable’ Curriculum: a Third Space Perspective

BEd 2From Learning to Teaching

A ‘separatist’ view of curriculum context

• Home and school are often viewed as separate contexts with clearly defined and impermeable boundaries, although children participate in both spaces (Pahl and Kelly, 2005)

• This can be problematic - many researchers have suggested that mismatches between the uses of language at home and at school may be one cause of children’s difficulties with language + literacy in early schooling (e.g., Barton, 1994; Heath, 1983)

• The issue then becomes how to bridge the potential gap between home and school ...

• For example, look at the Curriculum for Excellence and the emphasis on making links with partners

CfE emphasis on partnership workingfrom

http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/learningteachingandassessment/partnerships/index.asp

• ‘Creating strong partnerships with a range of organisations helps to deliver a more personalised learning experience for every child and young person.’

• ‘Parents, carers and families are by far the most important influences in a child's life. Their support can play a vital role at all stages of education.’

• ‘Parents who take on a supportive role in their child’s learning make a difference in improving achievement and behaviour. The active involvement of parents in the life of the school can help promote a learning community in which pupils can engage positively with school staff and their peers.’

• ‘Schools can benefit from developing positive partnerships with parents by involving them in all decisions affecting their child’s education and learning. Engaging with parents gives them the chance to understand the role that they play in their child’s learning and development and fosters parental involvement.’

• ‘Schools can benefit from developing positive partnerships with parents by involving them in all decisions affecting their children's education and learning.’

• ‘Developing partnerships in the wider community allows practitioners to provide new contexts and enhanced learning experiences for all children and young people.’

But there is a problem...• Although family practices at

home often accommodate the school curriculum by supporting homework tasks, the movement is generally one-way (school to home) – in Marsh, (2003); Cook, (2005).

• This privileges ‘school’ ways of doing things, school knowledge and school practices.

• What is learned at home can be viewed as less important; children have to conform to ‘school ways’ if they are to succeed (just think about language, especially Doric)

The First Space self, home, community

• At home James sits playing a Harry Potter game on his DSi. He looks up when his sister laughs at something she’s just read on her computer. She’s on her facebook page again and someone from her class has just posted up some humorous pictures with a funny story attached. James then looks round to see his brother on the iPad 2; he’s reading a book he downloaded from a free app. Just then his dad comes in saying he’s just been on his Blackberry and there’s some cheap hotel rooms going for £9 in the Xmas holiday; does anyone fancy going to Glasgow? He starts booking up online. Mum takes out her earphones and puts the iPod down. Not ‘Take That’ again! James suddenly remembers he has homework and gets his jotter out to copy out his spellings three times before the test on Friday.

The Second Space school, workplace

At school James sits with his classmateson the rug as the teacher reads the attendance list. James looks up at the bulletin board where a calendar and the week’s poems are written on chart paper. The chalkboard lists today’s assignedworkbook pages and the day’s jobs for each group. Two friends sit nearby flipping through the book the teacher has put out for read-aloud. James thinks about what he might write during journal time after break. He hopes he’s remembered his pencil. The teacher tells Jane to put away her mobile phone and instructs them to gettheir jotters out ready for the spelling test..

Figured Worlds (Holland et al, 1998)

• Home and school/work are ‘figured worlds’ where people come to see themselves in particular ways as they interact with others and form relationships around the key tasks that they engage in together

• Hatt (2007) compared the skills young people had to learn in order to survive in their worlds outside school with the skills required to survive in school (‘street-smarts’ V ‘book-smarts’).

• When the curriculum does not link to home learning, pupils may not transfer their leaning across settings, coming to see school as remote from their lived lives and not valuing home ‘funds of knowledge’ (Moll et al, 1992).

• But when school actively attempts to link children’s home and school learning, development may be facilitated (Moll et al, 1992)

• Hatt (2007) argues that we need spaces that allow youngsters to blend ‘lived’ experiences with ‘academic’ experiences to allow them to stay connected with the positive identities they form at home and in the community, while simultaneously achieving at school.

Third Spaces• Can be used to build bridges in

order to help learners navigate between different settings (home/1st and school/2nd)

• In such spaces, learners are encouraged to bring knowledge and experiences from home to bear on school learning.

• In doing so, new forms of learning can be produced, which then permeate both settings, with future learning enhanced in both settings (Moje et al, 2004)

Curriculum in The Third SpaceFrom hybridity theory (Bhabba, 1990)

• Individuals draw on different discourses to make sense of the world (Bhabha, 1990)

• Third spaces offer opportunities to integrate discourses which normally would be considered competing: home V work; home literacy practices v school literacy; informal learning v formal learning.

• Such spaces are ‘transformative’ (less hierarchical, more dialectical), where the potential for an expanded form of learning and the development of new knowledge are heightened. (Gutierrez et al, 2000)

• In such spaces, we can teach the skills required by curricular mandates in contexts that young learners are interested in, using content that stimulates them and developing skills that will be useful to them

• This process may help young learners to build ‘situational rationales’ (D’Amato, 1990), connecting them to school purposes and motivating them to achieve aims of schooling but more on their own terms

• Such a curriculum could be called a ‘permeable’ curriculum (Dyson, 1993) – with porous boundaries.

Inclusion and the permeable curriculum

• Pupils who feel marginalised in traditional school settings and who demonstrate negative patterns of academic motivation can have these experiences/feelings disrupted through linking to that which is relevant and important to the student in her/his personal life/community life

• Pupils’ personal values/commitments/perspectives can become integrated within demands of the school to help bind these pupils to the school, to enable them to build a sense of belonging to the school and to meet school expectations – as well as maintaining strong, positive home/community identities.

(Faircloth, 2009)

Some examples of working in the third space

(Faircloth, 2009)

• In textual study, classroom learning experiences were linked with what was important or meaningful to the student

• Examples, anecdotes and experiences were drawn from pupils’ backgrounds and experiences of life outwith school (and related to issues in the text being studied)

• Value was placed on pupils telling their own stories and talking about school topics (in texts read) from their own perspectives

• Teachers worked hard to bond with pupils, get to know them well and to use that knowledge to implement more relevant experiences

• Teachers worked hard to build a learning community where pupils could bond well with other pupils and offer mutual support

Another ExampleWash and Learn!

• Wash and Learn

Bertie the Bear early years’ education, Aberdeenshire • Each child in the class gets a

chance to take Bertie home for the week-end

• In his suitcase are things he’ll need – pyjamas, toothbrush, diary etc

• Children and parents fill in the diary to say what Bertie got up to during the week-end

• Photos and other artefacts (cinema tickets, bus tickets, etc) can be included in diary

• Children tell others on Monday what they did with Bertie

• Can also lead to other activities – such as writing experiences in a blog that gets commented on by parents, grandparents

More examples(in Greenhaugh et al, 2005)

• Shoeboxes used as ‘borderland’ artefacts, crossing between home and school• Children decorate them and fill them with significant objects from home culture –

photos, toys, postcards, drawings, paintings, models etc• Boxes could be themed – ‘All about Me’ boxes; (teacher brings own box)• Used in relaxed way at Circle Time to encourage talking and listening, before

becoming the focus of more extended literacy activities• Children then swap boxes and share stories about artefacts with different children

– this encourages some of them to want to read and write, at home and at school

Teachers’ Responses(in Greenhaugh et al, 2005)

• ‘I can’t emphasise enough how much speaking and listening had actually come out of these boxes and how much they had to talk about with each other. Quite often with these children, they don’t communicate terribly well and I think that the most interesting ting about this was that ... Every day I tried to sit them with different children so they didn’t sit next to the same child with the same box every day, so every day they had someone else’s box nearby to look at and to share time with and it was quite a noisy session but it was really good.’

• ‘You know, hearing Douglas talk so animatedly about what he had ... His birds and everything, because he’s not one who does often contribute to class discussion, although he is very bight, and if you talk to him he’s very interested in a lot of things ... And I would have expected him to have been a bit shyer, I suppose, but when he had things to talk about that he cared passionately about, it was ... You know, he did a very good presentation. There were other people that I thought – yeah, now that’s really ... You know that shows they’re actually more confident and outgoing in this situation than I’d expected.’

Family Literacy Projects(in Pahl and Kelly, 2005)

• School provided learning spaces within building for pupils and parents to work together on ... storytelling, book making, reading together, writing, talking (treasure boxes)

• Another project made use of digital cameras which parents were given to use at home to record ‘learning journeys’ of their children; put into PPP at school, then worked on at home and at school

• Bilingual storytelling project – story told from own culture, using props and artefacts from home, stories developed, shared and videod

Third Spaces are Liminal Spaces

• ‘The concept of the family literacy classroom as a liminal space also signals to teachers the nature of what they are doing by working with parents – they are working at the threshold of home and school. Rather than imposing a school literacy curriculum upon parents, they are listening to parents’ voices to create a shared curriculum.’ (Pahl and Kelly, 2005)

One Final Example – The Digital Novel as a Third Space

Take a look atInanimate Alice – a digital novel

• “After the first episode, I was burning with curiosity to see and read the other episodes in the series. Finally I finished episode 4 and felt like I had just fell off the building like Alice. The story is heart-pounding, exciting, and adventurous.” (Scottish pupil)

One Final Example – The Digital Novel as a Third Space

• ‘Born digital’ (Fleming, 2011): conceived, written and produced within the digital domain (but has ‘book’ dimensions)

• Multimodal – incorporates, images, graphics, moving images, games, text, music, sound

• A ‘simulated, multi-tasking environment’ (Harper, 2010)

• Interactive – reader participation and indeed immersion

• Readers become co-participants who are invited to expand the narrative (Routledge, 2011)

• ‘Bildungsroman’ format (similar to Harry Potter): development of character, and level of linguistic and gaming challenges increase as episodes progress

• 21st century themes – relationships (to family, to technology); the journey, migration and identity

• Complex structure (‘story grammar’ conventions of plot and sub-plot)

Inanimate Alice(from a third space perspective)

• Children are familiar with multimodal texts from home/personal experiences• Working with IA in school validates these experiences, motivating pupils

through an engaging, modern, relevant, ‘cool’ context for learning• Schools can help pupils to develop critical literacy skills that will enable

them to interact and engage in richer, more extended ways with the text• The skills pupils develop in this context can then be brought to bear back at

home when pupils engage in future chosen activities online - including making their own digital stories.

References• Bhabha, H (1994) The location of culture. London, Routledge.• Cook, M (2005) ‘A place of their own’: creating a classroom ‘third space’ to support a continuum of text

construction between home and school, Literacy, p85-90.• Dyson, A. H. (1993) Social worlds of children learning to write in an urban primary school. New York:

Teachers’ College Press.• Faircloth, B (2009). Making the most of adolescence: Harnessing the search for identity to understand

classroom belonging, Journal of Adolescent Research, pp321-348.• Greenhaugh et al, (2005) Boxing clever: using shoeboxes to support home-school knowledge

exchange, Literacy, pp97-103.• Guttierrez, K, Baquedano-Lopez, P and Tejeda, C. (2000) Rethinking diversity: hybridity and hybrid

language practices in the third space. Mind, Culture and Activity: an International Journal, vol 6, no 4, pp286-303.

• Hatt, B (2007) Street smarts V Book Smarts: the figured world of smartness in the lives of maginalised, urban youth. Urban Review, 39, pp145-166.

• Marsh, J (2003) One-way traffic? Connections between literacy practices at home and in the nursery. British Educational Research Journal, 29, 3, pp369-382

• Moje, E, Amanti, C, Neff, D and Gonzalez, N (1992) Funds of knowledge for teaching: using a qualitative approach to connect homes and classrooms. Theory into Practice, 31, 2,pp132-141

• Pahl, K and Kelly, S (2005) Family literacy as a third space between home and school: some case studies of practice, Literacy, pp91-96.