Froebelian Principles and Children’s Friendships (1 of 2)
[00:00:00] [music playing] Hello, and welcome to Children’s Friendships Matter. A podcast about children’s friendships post-COVID 19. In this, the first of two episodes, Dr Caron Carter talks to Professor Sacha Powell, Professor Tina Bruce, and Doctor Stella Louis from the Froebel Trust, reflecting on research and practice. Here they explore Froebelian principles and their links to children’s friendships, considering how a Froebelian ethos can support children’s friendships. This first episode explores research projects and publications, and the following second episode: Froebelian courses and the impact of COVID 19 on children’s friendships.
[00:00:57] Welcome to the podcast. It’s fantastic to be able to speak today to three people on this podcast. So, I just wondered if we could start with you introducing yourselves and telling us a little bit about your background? Could we start with you Sacha?
Sacha Powell: [00:01:14] Sure, thanks Caron. It’s great to be here today. My name’s Sacha Powell and I’m the Chief Executive Officer of the Froebel Trust, which is a charity which supports and encourages early childhood educators and researchers and teachers who work with young children, and we do that by providing grants for research and practice development but also a range of free resources and events, and some specialised continuing professional development courses.
[00:01:46] And then Tina.
Tina Bruce: [00:01:49] Hello, I’m Tina Bruce and I’m an honorary professor at University of Roehampton. I originally trained at the Froebel Educational Institute to be a primary school teacher and I found that I loved the earliest years the best and so I specialised in that increasingly across the years. And I also trained to work with children with profound hearing loss at University of Manchester, and I’ve been involved in teacher training and bits of research and all sorts of things across the years, but my passion is the children and families that they come from.
[00:02:27] Thank you very much. And Stella.
Stella Louis: [00:02:35] Hello, I’m Dr Stella Louis and I’m a freelance Early Years consultant. Currently I work as the lead Froebelian travelling tutor for the Froebel Trust and that involves leading a group of 22 travelling tutors and we deliver Froebel short courses online and universally. My interest in Early Years goes back when I originally trained as an NNEB Nursery Nurse a long time ago now, and I became really interested in children and observation. Yeah, observation and just trusting my instinct and looking for their good intentions. Although I couldn’t articulate that at the time, I think the Froebelian framework has really helped me to do that. So,I’m involved in research universally as well with Froebel short courses, so that’s me.
[00:03:41] Thank you very much. it’s really, really great to hear about how you’ve come to Early Years and a little bit about your background, so thank you.
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[00:03:55] Kind of moving on from that a little bit, but you’ve already mentioned, Stella you just mentioned research, and I think Tina did as well. Could you tell us about your research so the listeners can hear a little bit more about that? So can we start again with Stella?
Stella Louis: [00:04:11] Okay, I’ve been involved in a piece of research in Soweto, South Africa. My involvement started in 2010 where I was invited along to join Professor Tina Bruce and Professor Ian Bruce in pre-school, in a kindergarten, in a place called Kliptown, Soweto. Ian had been working with the youth project next door and Tina and been accompanying him and next door to the youth project was a pre-school and the principal of the pre-school really wanted her pre-school to be just like the European pre-schools and she kept saying to Tina that she would love to work with her, but Tina didn’t want to work with her as a white woman on her own.
[00:05:02] So I was invited, because it was felt that what would be really important, that whatever work or research that was going to happen in South Africa, there would be that level of connectedness, unity. I got involved in 2010 and it was the first time I went out to South Africa, but Tina and Ian had been involved previously and my role was as the main trainer, to train the staff that were in this pre-school.
[00:05:32] It’s been a really long project, and there has been lots of things that have happened along the way. Initially we embarked on staff training, training the staff in different parts of the Froebelian approach. We started with the principles; we looked at freedom with guidance, we looked at the community, and we used a particular framework called Asset Based Community Development, which we referred to as ‘ABCD’. And what that does is it builds on a community’s strengths rather than identifying any weaknesses or deficits and that was really challenging in Soweto but what was wonderful was that we were able to use the Froebelian principles and the Froebelian approach to really support the practice. Because even though it was a pre-school I think just historically where this township is located children would just roam the streets. And although Pam, the Principal opened up this pre-school, it was more to care for the children rather than to educate the children.
[00:06:46] So that was really our starting point and starting with where the community had strengths. Long story short: if we kind of fast-forward to 2023, Tina, Ian and I recently attended a graduation session of one of the participants in this research, which was graduating as a teacher. So, the dream behind the project has been to train the staff up so that they are not just offering the children care but they are offering the children education. But equally, the community have realised the importance of Early Years.
[00:07:28] When we first went in there, there were 50 children in a room with one member of staff and that is challenging. Now you go in there, and we were there recently I think in May, and there was one room in particular that you go in and you could be anywhere in Europe and you wouldn’t know, anywhere around the world, not just Europe. I’m not going to just limit it to that. Children were autonomous, you could see the Froebelian principles really in action. Staff were knowledgeable, they were observing children, and children were constantly engaged in doing or reflecting or contemplating them. Children were playing on their own and there were children in friendship groups. There was so much going on for the children and it was such richness, but that has been a really long process and it’s easy to look in in 2023 and say this is wonderful, but we have actually come a really long way.
[00:08:22] So it’s been about staff training, working with the community, and building on their strengths rather than focusing on weaknesses.
[00:08:31] Really interesting to think as well, you know, that starting from the community strengths and that idea where you can actually think about, you know, what can we learn from one another, from the different communities. So it’s really interesting to hear about that and to hear how those Froebelian principles have kind of become embedded over time. Really interesting. Thank you. And Tina, can we move on to you and hear a little bit about your research?
Tina Bruce: [00:09:01] I think it segues in to what Stella was talking about because I thought of this one lovely little example, which Stella and I observed, where children had been involved with block play and they had made a wonderful – they said it was the Carlton Tower, and we realised, talking with the staff, that this had been one of the most important days when President Mandela became president and there had been huge celebrations at the Carlton Tower and I think that some of the children knew about this and they started to dance around this fabulous construction and so this was the kind of thing, you know, these little friendships that are occurring with the children and how they begin to work collaboratively together. They feel comfortable to develop their ideas together and they begin to listen to each other in what they’re doing and then you get a wonderful group community enterprise.
[00:10:12] So these were some of the ways that we could see the things that Stella was talking about; the autonomy, the nurturing, and the joy in being together. All of these things which are deeply part of the Froebelian approach. And the block play has always been something dear to my heart, because some years ago now I was given some grant funding by the Froebel governing body to undertake some research with block play because blocks were Froebel’s gifts, and we did this using unit blocks in five different schools; they were primary schools. And we worked with the youngest children and again if I give you an example of the kind of thing that we began to see across the two years was two little girls, Pat Gura was the research director and she would share her findings with us all and we wrote a book about it, which was published by Sage, and we noticed that these two little girls had made a wonderful – it was a cantilever bridge, which is pretty good engineering, and Pat said to these two little girls how did you manage to get these blocks in place? And one of them said ‘Well, you need a friend, because one of them has to hold the block while the other one positions the block and it’s quite a delicate exercise’, and so that was an example of the kind of things that were emerging from the research. And we called our book ‘Exploring Block Play’.
[00:11:55] It’s still in print, Caron. It’s one of the most used books on block play, which is very heartening.
[00:12:02] It’s so interesting to talk about play and friendship because play is so integral to friendship and making sure that friendship and play and those opportunities for play are still there and for children to have free play, and you talked about that agency and that autonomy. So important for nurturing and maintaining friendships. So thank you. And Sacha?
Sacha Powell: [00:12:30] Thanks Caron. I was thinking about what both Stella and Tina have said and thinking about block play. And this is not my own research, but it’s research that the Froebel Trust has funded in Wales at Cardiff Metropolitan University, which has just been reported and will be published very soon. It’s by Jennifer Clement and Sian Sarwar, and in their research, they had invited classes of teachers and young children to come to what they call Froebel House in the campus of Cardiff Met University. And at the house they have a range of resources including all of Froebel’s gifts and occupations and one of the things that they particularly noted in their report where they had spent many months observing young children’s free-flow play was that where the children were playing with Froebel’s gifts and engaged in block play, in an ethos where the children were supported to be autonomous and grow in that autonomy that new friendships began to develop because of the open-endedness of those block play resources and because of the autonomy that the children were allowed to developed by the teachers stepping back and observing what was happening and engaging with and alongside those children as and when the children indicated that they might need some support to extend their thinking and their learning.
[00:14:05] So I think that that was a really lovely example of the continuing relevance, or the timelessness if you like, of block play in 2023 in Wales, where these new researchers are finding the benefits in today’s society for young children.
[00:14:30] That’s great. I think across all three of you, the things that you’ve said, you know, talking about play and Stella talked about going with your instincts and I think that we know that children need those opportunities for free flow play and they need those opportunities in order to sort of instigate friendships, maintain and nurture their friendships. So, so interesting. Thank you very much.
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[00:15:00] I also walked to talk to you a little bit about things that you’ve written. So it might be books, articles, or things that you’ve written. Obviously, the audience will be so interested. Listeners will be so interested to know about the things that you’ve written and any links that there might be to children’s friendships. So could we start with Stella?
Stella Louis: [00:15:24] I’ve recently written an introduction to Froebel for beginners actually, for Tapestry, which is an online learning journal, but you can access this Froebel for Beginners free, and it looks at the Froebelian principles, as articulated by the Froebel Trust, and very kind of relevant for today.
[00:15:45] And what it does is it brings together Tina Bruce’s principles, Helen Tovey’s principles, and it just connects them together. So that is something that I’ve written recently but something else I’ve written recently is this book here: Observing Learning in Early Childhood, and it is relevant to friendships because it’s based on Tina’s work. In 1996 Tina wrote about The Network for Learning and as an NNEB student that did things for me, in ways that I cannot describe. It really does describe learning and it guides educators in knowing what to observe and how to intervene and when a child may need help. Because, you know, sometimes – depending on their experiences, there will be children that need help to play but educators need to know what those cues are. They need to know what that looks like, so observing learning in young children really just bigs up, I think, Tina’s Network for Learning and it uses it as an observational and navigating tool to really get to know your children and what it is they’re expressing externally. Yeah.
[00:17:09] Thank you, that’s so interesting. What we will do with the podcast is we will make sure that these links to the things that we’re talking about are available next to the podcast, so you know where to go and find them. So, you’ve mentioned the book and a Tapestry and we’ll make sure that those links are on there.
[00:17:21] As well Stella, when you were talking about – you know, we’ve talked a lot about children having agency and autonomy and that is definitely the case with children’s friendships, but also, you’ve talked about when children might need scaffolding or they might need support or they might want that help and support. And interestingly I wrote an article about the lunchtime period and children’s play and friendships and that came up where children said sometimes, I do want someone to help me. So, I think that’s really important, isn’t it, that we think about children’s agency on autonomy, but also we’re tuned in to children for those opportunities and those times when they do want adults or more able peers or others around them to support and help them. So that is really interesting, thank you. And could we move now to Tina?
Tina Bruce: [00:18:15] That Network Learning which Stella talked about from one of my publications, I started off thinking around that in 1991, and I wrote a book called Time to Play in Early Childhood Education. It’s a long time ago, but I sort of extracted from the canon of literature on play 12, they seemed like recurring themes really and they became 12 features of play. Some of them were to do with children being involved in solitary play, you know, having imaginary friends, which children will sometimes do when they’re alone, but it was also not about children being lonely and not wanting to be engaged in solitary play. And I was thinking back to my own childhood and how we moved house, and I loved my doll’s house and I loved my doll’s house and I had all these characters and people I can still remember; a little girl called Flora who lived in that doll’s house and went to school and all sorts of things. And so those 12 features of play are sort of trying to look at the different things that children need and, as you say Caron, the kind of help that they might need at a certain point.
[00:19:30] But as Stella said, knowing when to help them and when to hold back. It all helps you to make sense of people like Vygotsky and Winnicott and Erikson. All these giants in the field of play. So it’s quite practitioner friendly, because when you’re with the children you just have to do what your heart- As Stella said; what your instinct is saying to you. So, it’s trying to sort of strengthen practitioners to have confidence, to feel that they can really have some agency and autonomy and the right kind of control so that they don’t invade children’s play.
[00:20:09] So I wrote Time to Play, I wrote Cultivating Creativity in Early Childhood, and then I became involved in a research project which the Froebel Trust funded about children’s storytelling, because also the kinds of stories that we read to children, they begin to come out in the play and that very often turns in to quite a collaborative kind of play. Because as well as the story you need some other characters and so if they’ve not got a doll’s house or smaller – you might want some other children to participate in that play.
[00:20:42] And actually that won an award that book. It was different chapters by different practitioners all thinking about storytelling and how stories can help children to learn through their play. I have recently written a book about Friedrich Froebel because I just felt I was on a journey and it was where I had sort of landed up in 2021, and it’s called Critical Debates and Aims, or something like that, An Introduction to Froebel. That is not so practical, but I have got practical examples in that but it’s kind of taking stock of the Froebelian framework, which as Stella said, is something that we all try to work with.
[00:21:22] Yeah, it’s really interesting that you pick up on imaginary friends. I remember having an imaginary friend that got up to all sorts of things, including taking a bite out of the cheese in the fridge and all sorts of things. My imaginary friend got blamed for lots of things. You know, I’ve written something around imaginary friends that come in the form of objects, and so that might be a cuddly toy or some other object like a Lego figure. Also, I think those stories that you get from practitioners, from children that you hear about are so vivid really and so important, and it shows this other meaning of what these object friends have.
[00:22:09] Some years ago there was some concern about imaginary friends, and that was this okay for children to have imaginary friends, was that going to be at the expense of peer friends, or sometimes concerns of children being on their own. I think now what’s really good is that we look at imaginary friends and we see actually no, this is a creative process, it’s kind of enhancing, it’s kind of opportunities for rehearsing things with your peers and so on. So, I think that it’s great that we can see that there’s a real value in those imaginary friends that might be there.
[00:22:48] I had a really nice story that was shared with me of a child that had a little Lego figure that was their friends and I think they used it to sort of initiate friendships with other children, you know, kind of used the object and would say ‘Do you want to play with me and my little Lego friend?’ and what have you.
[00:23:09] And also, it kind of brought home to me the value of that object as a friend, because they talked about keeping it with them. I think they were in Y1 and so I think that there was some concern that I think the adults were less keen on them bringing objects to school in case they got broken or damaged but he really wanted this little figure with him and he talked about going to PE and putting shorts and a T-shirt on and then not having any place to put the little Lego friend, but he really needed the Lego friend to come to PE, so he put the Lego friend in his pump and did PE with the Lego friend in his pump, you know, and he was saying ‘It was really painful but I really needed my friend with me, to do PE’, you know?
[00:23:54] And again I think all of those little things, it’s kid of us tuning in to children and thinking about what they need, and what they need in terms of supporting them with those friendships whether they’re peer friendships or imaginary friendships and providing those opportunities for those friends to be present. Sacha, coming on to you.
Sacha Powell: [00:24:15] You’ve reminded me of my imaginary friend who was with me for quite a long time I seem to think, when I was probably around 3, 4, 5 years old when we moved a lot and I wonder now, with us talking about imaginary friends, whether that imaginary friend, whose name was Crudger, because his language went ‘crudge, crudge, crudge’, and I think I was the only person who could understand what he was saying, but we understood each other perfectly; I wonder whether he was a form of constancy and continuity for me, because I moved a lot when I was a little girl. But I am also interested in this idea that you talked about, of objects and perhaps connected to Crudger being with me as I moved from lots of different places, whether that connects to, and we’ve talked about this in the past, Winnicott’s idea of transitional objects. And I think Tina you have said that for you it became objects of transition and perhaps for me that’s what that imaginary friend partly represented.
[00:25:16] You also talked, Caron, about rehearsing friendships and perhaps we do that through our imaginary friendships but my particular research interest, for a very long time, has been in babies and toddlers. Very little children from birth to three. Arguably we could say that The Network for Learning, for babies and toddlers is often family, and in some cultural contexts that might be a very large, wide family. Or it may be one or more parent or carer, and I think that we could argue that they are the baby’s first friends but also through those intimate relationships with their carers they are rehearsing many of the elements of a successful friendship or friendships that they’ll develop throughout their lives. And I think that my interest latterly was in singing with babies and young children and I think through singing there is, as Froebel said, an affective and emotional connection that goes on which is why we know that being sung to as a baby is so much more interesting to babies than listening to music through a CD.
[00:26:31] Not that that is wrong, of course it’s not, but babies love being sung to because singing isn’t just about the sound, it’s about the facial expressions and it’s about being held, it’s about synchronising heartbeats and other physiological aspects of our bodies.
[00:26:51] And I think that turn-taking, eye contact, negotiation, anticipation, trying to understand what the other person’s next move is going to be – All of those things are the elements of what it is to be and have friends. We need to know how to do all of these things, so in their infancy when they’re being sung to, babies are learning all sorts of amazing things that will stand them in good stead for their friendships as well as being good at that moment in time.
[00:27:21] So I think that’s an area for me that’s been of particular interest in relation to some research that I had done with Kathy Goouch in particular around babies, and Vanessa Young as well around singing with babies.
[00:27:38] Thank you Sacha, that was really interesting to think. As we’re all sort of talking it feels like we’re kind of all sparking off of each other and we’re all thinking of things, which is great. You know, when you were talking about friendships as opportunities for rehearsal I thought ‘Yes!’ and then I was also thinking also thinking that friendship at that present moment and the value for it as it is, as it stands is so important. Not just for what’s coming in the future.
[00:28:06] So that made me kind of think yes, that’s so important that we don’t just think that it’s something for practice for something in the future. It’s the here and now and the value that that relationship has.
[00:28:13] And also, all the links to friendship, whether that’s play, whether that’s singing, whether that’s story telling – it’s not something that sits in isolation, friendship.
[00:28:34] [music playing] Thank you for listening to this podcast. The second episode of this Froebelian Friendships podcast can be accessed by visiting https://research.shu.ac.uk/friends Here you will also find more information on Caron’s research, and other related podcasts. This podcast was made possible by a fellowship opportunity funded by Sheffield Hallam University. [music playing]