Children’s Friendships through the Lens of ‘Slow Pedagogy’
[00:00:00] [music playing] Hello, and welcome to Children’s Friendships Matter. A podcast about children’s friendships post-COVID 19. In this episode Dr Caron Carter talks to Professor Alison Clark, the author of Slow Knowledge and The Unhurried Child about children’s friendships through the lens of slow pedagogy. Reflecting on what we might learn for both practice and future research directions.
Here they delve into some of the temporal issues that affect children, practitioners, and teachers today. What impact does the organisation of time have on children’s friendships, how might time support children’s friendships, and how is time to play integral to children’s friendships.
[00:01:05] Welcome Alison, to this podcast. Could we start with you introducing yourself and telling us a little bit about your background and your role as an academic.
Alison Clark: [00:01:17] Thank you Caron for this opportunity to have this conversation. I am really looking forward to this. So, I’m an early childhood academic and I’m Professor of Early Childhood Education at the University of South-Eastern Norway. And I’m an honorary senior research fellow at the Thomas Coram Research Unit, which is part of the Institute of Education, UCL, in London, where I worked for many years.
[00:01:42] I was a primary school teacher in Bristol working with the youngest children before beginning my research career and a common thread running through many of my research projects has been listening to children’s perspectives and finding out what it’s like to be children in a particular place at a particular time, and to learn from that and just carry on understanding more and more about how children experience the world.
[00:02:13] That’s great, thank you very much. I’m aware that most people will know your work, but for anyone who wants to get familiar with your research, could you tell us a little bit about your research on listening to young children?
Alison Clark: [00:02:26] So it’s been around young children’s perspectives, children under 8 in the main, and particularly those whose perspectives are often assumed rather than explored. My work in this area began in the 1990s, late 1990s when I joined the Thomas Coram Research Unit and that study was to include the voices, as it was described, of the youngest children in a review of services for children and families.
[00:02:57] I was working with Professor Peter Moss and I had that great privilege, which lead to the Mosaic Approach, a multi-method way of listening to children’s perspectives and other older participants that aims to draw on people’s strengths or whatever age really, and therefore to use a range of different modes of communication including visual modes of communication through photography, but also walking and talking and then use the things that you make through those conversations as a springboard for more conversations and hopefully for also learning and changing practice. So, I remember one educator saying to me in an early project ‘I think this is about don’t make assumptions’ and I think that is a really important reminder for me to keep listening. We might think that we know what it’s like to be other people, to be other children from other backgrounds, but we mustn’t make assumptions.
[00:04:05] Several studies followed from that first study on listening to young children, and particularly around the physics environment, so I had a project, ‘Spaces to Play’ that was around changes to a play space with young children and adults, and then a three-year study looking at changes to the physical environment including the building of a new nursery class within a primary school.
[00:04:28] So working with architects and educators and children. So other researchers have taken on the work and have adapted the Mosaic approach in their different ways, including in PhD research.
[00:04:40] Thinking back to the first study, the 3- and 4-year-olds that I was working with talked to me about friendship and bout relationships, and favourite activities were often associated with who they were with at the time, and children talked about the importance of siblings too. When they could have contact with siblings during the day at nursery, as well as who they didn’t like to play with.
[00:05:09] That is so interesting. The whole idea of not making assumptions. We only have memories of being children. We don’t know what it’s like to be a child in 2023, so I think that’s so important, that idea of those assumptions.
[00:05:25] I always find it really interesting when my son comes home and I say, ‘What have you been doing at school?’ and you kind of get the ‘Hmm, not much’, or you don’t really get that much, but then you say, ‘Who have you been playing with?’ and that often opens up a little bit more of a conversation.
[00:05:45] I think that idea of friendships is so very important to young children. Some of the things that we kind of take for granted, or the assumptions that we make, you know, we can really get it wrong if we don’t listen.
[00:05:57] I was thinking as well about recently you’ve written a book, Slow Knowledge and the Unhurried Child – Time for Slow Pedagogies in Early Childhood Education. A really fascinating read. I’ve found that I’ve read it and then I’m going back to it or going back to particular chapters and looking at things that have really spoken to me. I just wondered if you could tell listeners about the impetus or motivation for writing this book?
Alison Clark: [00:06:27] Yeah, well I think that it partly grew out of a growing concern with the always fast-forward pace in education with little time for educators or children to pause and reflect, and I think that I’ve noticed that across the different country contexts in which I work, not just here in Scotland where I’m based, but also in other countries where I’ve been working.
[00:06:53] I think hearing this concern from educators and researchers too, worried about the emphasis on the easy to measure and the scripted answers required from children. So I applied to the Froebel Trust to research what are some of the alternatives to this hurry. What do we know from early childhood pedagogies, going back over several centuries, looking at okay, what might this have to do with our relationship with time. So it’s not about the new, but it’s about a different relationship with time. It is more of a question I think of reclaiming some of these ways of working that we’ve known given children more opportunities for play but have perhaps become a little bit lost.
[00:07:47] And do you think that the times that we have now, with post-COVID, cost of living crisis, climate change, perhaps this is a particularly good time to start thinking about re-addressing perhaps and looking at this again. When you say it isn’t anything new.
Alison Clark: [00:08:11] Yes, well I think that particularly because of the pandemic and how that has made many people I think more aware of how they think about time, with time having almost, in some senses, come to a halt, frozen time, but yet other people having to work kind of super-fast in order to change practice. So, I think it has been an opportunity to re-think. I’m not sure that opportunity has really been taken up very widely by those who lead us. But I think that it is a time, it is an opportunity, and I think that there is still a chance to grasp that opportunity to re-think in education.
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[00:08:58] I’ve noticed with your work on slow pedagogies and listening to young children has linked to young children’s friendship, which is why I was particularly interested in talking to you. For instance, if I kind of just draw a little bit on some of my research – so children’s friendships are kind of made and nurtured through play, but as children start compulsory schooling in England, in Y1, there are less opportunities for free flow play, and even playtime has restrictions. So, I was thinking they go in the morning to school, there is a bell, they might have assembly, there’s another bell, then it’s a numeracy maths related activity, there’s another bell and then it’s English, another bell and there’s breaktime, then there’s a bell for playtime to finish and so on. When I spoke to children who were in the 5-7 age bracket, they explained to me that even the restrictions, they realise that playtime is a really good time to have – to decide on what they wanted to play, what they wanted to do, there was no restrictions, but actually then they went on to explain some of the challenges that they had at playtime.
[00:10:13] So for instance, some children explained that they had to do certain things, so they would have 15 minutes but in that time they had to go to the toilet, then go and get their fruit, and then they went out to play. It seemed that this was problematic for them because if they went to the toilet and got their fruit and then went out to play when they got out there games and play were already established and they would say things like ‘It’s a two-er game/It’s a five-er game/It’s a three-er game and all the parts are taken’ and this was then really tricky for them to gain access to the play once it was started. So it seemed that they had this dilemma of ‘Do I go to the toilet when I’m supposed to and then I risk not being able to get in to the play? Or do I not go to the toilet but then knowing I will go back into the classroom and probably need the toilet, and if I ask to go to the toilet I will get in trouble’. So, I just thought gosh, that’s so interesting.
[00:11:17] Again it’s linked to this time pressure of those things have to be done at playtime, because then when you come back in, it’s time to start ‘learning’. I just thought this kind of then has a real impact on children being able to make friends or maintain friendships that they have.
[00:11:42] When I was reading your work, those things that I had kind of encountered with children came to the fore for me and I thought ‘Oh yes, that’s really, really interesting’.
Alison Clark: [00:11:53] Yes, I think what you’ve described there is the impact of how time is organised in schools on children and how it then affects these very important but personal decisions about even how they’re relating to their bodies. Being able to go to the toilet or not and deciding whether okay if I go to the toilet then I’m going to miss out on a game outside. But the bigger picture of that is how adults are deciding to organise the time and what are they giving priorities to?
[00:12:23] So if for example a school was working a system where children could go to the toilet for example when they needed to during the day, then you take that pressure out of this very precious free play time at playtime. So how time is organised can have a profound impact I think on children’s everyday lives in schools. So, one of the things that my study was doing was talking to participants who were teacher educators and educators across 11 countries talking and working in early childhood education and they were reflecting with me around what pedagogies and practices they knew about that had a slower relationship with time, that were less hurried, and then to think with them about what that would enable.
[00:13:13] So a slower practice, for example, could be around everyday routines. So it could be around lunchtimes and how lunchtimes were organised, and some of the things that we noticed were that a slow practice could be one where children have the opportunity to go off-track, so where it was facilitated learning but there was the opportunity for children to develop their ideas and to go in to depth, so completely different from a very scripted ‘You need to learn this and then we’ll measure you’. I think in these types of slow practices where children are given more opportunities for what’s been called ‘unfragmented time’. So unfragmented time, it’s from a phrase I first heard by an American educator, Harrier Cuffaro, who has worked with John Dewey’s ideas. She talked about unfragmented time or stretched time. I love those two phrases.
[00:14:11] So if children are experiencing unfragmented time it gives more opportunities for them to talk, to explore their ideas, or not to be so driven always by the bell and very tight timetables. Currently I’m working with Early Years settings in Orkney; two of the settings have decided to think about slow practice at lunchtime to sort of give them a way in really to thinking can we be less hurried across the day. Let’s start by looking at lunchtimes and how we organise it and then to look in detail about the way that they organise lunchtime. What does that enable children to do, and what does that kind of prevent them from doing?
[00:14:53] For me, part of that, in a less hurried lunchtime do they children have opportunities to chat to each other, is it a social event, or is it just a kind of mechanical being fed event? Is it seen as just the gap between morning school or nursery and afternoon or is it actually really embraced as part of the day? And this sort of built on an early practitioner study that I was involved in in Falkirk in Scotland. This was led by Donna Green, who is the lead Froebel pedagogue Falkirk. Two of the Falkirk Early Years settings chose to look again at lunchtimes and how children’s agency could be increased, how there could be less rushing, more chance to help themselves and each other, and I think again a more social event.
[00:15:53] I recently visited a pre-school in Iceland, and they’ve been thinking there over several years about mealtimes and democracy and interestingly one of the changes that they made to the lunchtimes was that the children – there would be a sort of buffet system where children would come along and choose from a choice of options, but children serving themselves. And then children could choose where they sit and also who with, and that was really interesting just watching the children coming in and you could see them coming in with their friend or whatever and thinking where they wanted to sit, which might be in a different place on a different table.
[00:16:32] So it wouldn’t work everywhere, but I think that it was an interesting example of ‘Okay, let’s think about what does that organisation of time, what does it enable and what does that maybe prevent’ and then to think together as a group of staff about that.
[00:16:54] That is so interesting Alison, the things that you’re talking about, particularly around lunchtime because again in my research children did talk a lot about lunchtimes and about wanting to sit with certain people or certain friends, or sometimes the table was full so they couldn’t sit with their friend and again those things were really, really important to them but actually sometimes were barriers for them again in terms of nurturing the friendships that they’d established. I was thinking also back to when you were saying that, to when I first started teaching and I was working in an infant school and we used to have what they called family service and each table would have reception children, Y1 children, Y2 children, they were mixed up. And then the Y2s would act like the parent almost and they would serve everybody’s food. So, they might have a lasagne or something and they would serve the lasagne up to each of the children and so on. It was very much like a family meal. And also, I feel that was really nice because children of different age groups, it gave them opportunities to interact with different age groups and make friends with children in different age groups but I think the sorts of work that you’re describing, again I think we do have to take some time. Sometimes we do have to sort of take some time to reimagine or requestion the things that we’re doing and how that’s working for children.
[00:18:24] And again, not make those assumptions. We might think as adults it’s working but is it actually working for children.
Alison Clark: [00:18:30] And I think that ‘is it working for children’, I guess that takes us back to the importance of listening as well, because I think that part of that ‘is it working’ can be talking to members of staff who are working over lunchtime in different capacities and also talking to the children as well, as well as observation. So, I think that there are different ways of thinking is this working. And I’m sure that it’s often the case of trial and error as well and that it’s not necessarily going to be something you can change very easily because it might be timings involved in the number of children, or in terms of catering schedules, but I think that it’s such an important area to think about because of its impact on children’s wellbeing and the quality of their day.
[00:19:17] And again that brings me back to I did a little bit of research with a particular setting that talked about, well their lunchtime staff or lunchtime welfare supervisors and it did really bring home to me the value of that role and the difference that can be made to those children because it’s a full hour often, so really, really important and I think really important to children, particularly socially.
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[00:19:48] Going back to your book, Slow Knowledge and the Unhurried Child; I read the chapter 3 a couple of times actually on playtime. That starts by sort of addressing the impact of COVID 19 and what that had on children’s opportunities for play and friendship and of course that is something that I’ve been thinking a lot about because it’s such an unprecedented situation that children were socially isolated. They weren’t with their friends, they couldn’t be with their friends, and there were a couple of things that spoke to me in that chapter. A piece from Helen Dodd, who is professor of child psychology, and Michael Absoud, a consultant paediatrician, and so Helen was talking about time for children to reconnect, and us making sure that children have that opportunity to reconnect.
[00:20:47] And Michael was addressing social play and he said that he would prescribe it if he could; it was that important. He felt that this was something that he would prescribe at this point. So I wanted to ask you about your thoughts on the unhurried child and friendships post-COVID now that we’ve got this new context that we find ourselves in.
Alison Clark: [00:21:09] Yes, I was really struck by those comments by Helen Dodd and Michael Absoud, and I think that emphasising the importance for children coming out of this global event, to have the opportunities to play and not to have the emphasis on catch up.
[00:21:35] I must prefer an emphasis on recovery – which I think is something that we still need to be thinking about. So, it seems even more important than ever to create more opportunities for play in school, especially in the view of all these lost opportunities for social interaction that many children have experienced. I think in the research that has been conducted during COVID, and I think in your own work looking at children’s friendship, you can see huge creativity in children looking for ways in which to keep up these friendships online, or for example in your examples of doorstop visiting where that has been possible. So looking for any opportunity to keep the friendship there, but also the challenge of needing to reestablish friendships if they’ve been locked in the home and then coming back in to the school and nursery settings, so many different skills for children re-learn here, and so I think that this recovery phase is vitally important, and one of the things that we need to do, I think, is to prioritise play, not just for the youngest children but for older children too.
[00:22:45] As I was saying about the catch up narrative, you know, catch up appears to be around this kind of concern to pour as much knowledge back in to children, but we know from looking at established pedagogies that children learn far more by being able to explore firsthand for themselves, facilitated by educators, but if we’re looking at long term learning and learning that includes enjoyment then I think that we need these more opportunities for play. And I think that takes me back to that idea of stretched time.
[00:23:26] So when does the approach to the timetable limit the opportunities for children to engage in depth, which may involve working collaboratively with others, or perhaps companionably alongside others. So, this kind of coming alongside others, I think sometimes of myself as quite a shy person but I do love the company of doing something I enjoy, knowing that somebody who I like is there. I wonder with children too, it’s not just these opportunities to do things together in a group but perhaps to have more opportunities side by side.
[00:24:07] I really like that idea of the companion idea, of doing something alongside. I was also thinking about my experience in school sometimes that some children don’t want to jump straight into something. Some children do and they want to participate immediately, and some children don’t, and they want to observe and they want to see how it is for other people and then they will decide whether they want to participate or not. And it almost reminds me a bit of that really, about again that time that we might give for children and say do you want to participate or do you want to just observe what’s going on here.
[00:24:47] And again, when there’s been those gaps socially particularly, you might not know what’s coming or what’s going to happen, or you might just want to see what it looks like. And again I was thinking about a child that I know who doesn’t particularly like football but would like to play football because they know that there’s a social element to it, but then at first was thinking ‘I have to have this skill in order to participate’ but once they had observed and they saw what it was about they thought ‘Oh actually they’re just kicking the ball back and forwards to each other, it’s not like a full game or anything, it’s just knocking it back and forward’. So I think that it’s that opportunity again to allow children to participate or to observe at their own pace when they are ready to do so.
Alison Clark: [00:25:41] And I think that idea of giving children opportunities to engage at their own pace is very important, and that pace will be different. So, some children, yeah, you know, almost 99% of the time are on kind of fast-forward, rushing around. So, when I talk about slow pedagogies it’s not around slowing everything down to a kind of almost standstill, but it’s about this being sensitive to the different pace and rhythm of children and that will include some moments of really rapid attention and engagement, but not necessarily all the time.
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[00:26:23] So I was going to ask you now, as a final question, what take home messages would you like the listeners to take away from this podcast. We’ve talked about quite a lot of things so I just wondered if there was anything in particular you would like people to take away with them?
Alison Clark: [00:26:40] Well I think that it’s maybe more a question of what questions to think about. So, I am interested in what does slow enable. What do slow practices enable. So slow is not meant as a destination in itself, but it’s more a question of thinking about what becomes possible if we have a less hurried approach and if we think more explicitly about our relationship with time and then which children might benefit most from this because, for example, if I take children who are coming in from – for who English is a second or third language coming in to a new setting for them and a new country, there is so much learning socially, emotionally, and intellectually that needs to happen. Thinking of slow practices, I think, could enable those children to make a smoother transition into this very new environment.
[00:27:44] So that might be, for example, in more opportunities to be outdoors, it might be through more opportunities to work with certain materials, say for example in my book I look at working with clay as a material that holds time in a particular way, that kind of enables children work with it on many different levels and across time can use it as a one-off material but can also watch what happens when it dries and watch what happens when it’s fired or when it’s painted, for example.
[00:28:22] So there are these different examples I think of slow practices that may be of particular benefit to children needing to work at a different pace and to enable children with different abilities to flourish, including children with special needs.
[00:28:40] And I think that there’s potential here for more opportunity to support children’s friendships as our conversation has maybe showed. So that is my first question: What do slow practices enable. And then the second question would be how does the organisation of time in early childhood education and care and in schools’ impact on children’s lives, because I think that a lot of our relationship with time in education is implicit rather than explicit. We take it for granted that we work with timetables in a particular way and that we work with the clock, and many of those routines are necessary, but I think that there is opportunity to rethink them and to think okay, what does working with time in this way – what does it enable but what does it also prevent?
[00:29:30] And then a third question I think is what opportunities do children have for unfragmented or stretched time? To follow through ideas and to work in depth, or to revisit earlier work? And on that last question of revisiting, I think that is also about how we relate to time. You know, education does tend to be always fast forward, and I think that there are very few opportunities for children to go back and look at what they have learnt so that they can kind of celebrate it, they can think about it again differently, because our ideas will have changed, but I think because we split children usually in to different year groups, we move them through the system, and it’s all about what they’ve done with the immediate learning, rather than accumulative knowledge. And I think as lifelong learners it’s around how we embrace the learning that we’ve done over time, and I think that our education systems need to be better at supporting children to do that.
[00:30:33] And there is a lovely example in your book of that, isn’t there, where you go back to a child and talk to them about, it’s a few years later, you talk to them about their previous learning, and I think that is a really nice example because again, like you say, we don’t really have time to do that. But actually, children really do like to revisit that and to really talk about things. It’s almost like we think that they won’t remember, but they do. They have amazing memories for these things, and it’s a really nice example in the book of being able to go back to children and talk about that learning in other year groups or what’s gone before.
Alison Clark: [00:31:13] Well something that really struck me as a researcher. So, I was lucky enough to be working on a three year study in the living spaces study and so I talked with children when they were in nursery class, and in reception class, and then went back 18 months later and talked to them again about the changes to the physical environment. And it was great, being able to take in the work that they had made with me, and their photographs and maps and things and sit down to chat to them.
[00:31:42] And it struck me, as a person who had been a primary school teacher, thinking there are so few opportunities in the system to do this, because we are always working towards the next targets, but the children were really interested in what they had done before and had things to say about it. I think that there is more room for us to give children these opportunities to revisit and I think maybe to not make assumptions about what children remember and what they don’t remember, because my research as taught me that actually children remember far more than they might imagine.
[00:32:21] And just one final thing; I like that point of you saying about it might be children with additional needs, or refugee children, or – and I was thinking about particular children after COVID, because sometimes there’s an assumption now that COVID has happened and children have caught up and they’ve moved on, but I was just thinking about Christine Pascale and Tony Bertram’s research that talks about the long-lasting effects of COVID for some children and again thinking about those individual children or individual groups of children that we could do with really thinking about how we can support them and listen to them.
Alison Clark: [00:33:09] Yes, absolutely, and I think sometimes in re-thinking some of these organisational and pedagogical structures it can benefit a whole range of children, but maybe some children, maybe the less visible children in particular.
[00:33:22] That’s great, thank you very much. it’s been a privilege and a pleasure to talk to you Alison, thank you very much.
Alison Clark: [00:33:30] Thank you very much Caron, it’s been great to have this conversation.
[music playing] Thank you for listening to this podcast. For more information on Caron’s research and other related podcasts. Please visit https://research.shu.ac.uk/friends. This podcast was made possible by a fellowship opportunity funded by Sheffield Hallam University. [music playing] (end of recording)