Froebelian Principles and Children’s Friendships (2 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 second of two episodes, Dr Caron Carter continues her discussion with Professor Sacha Powell, Professor Tina Bruce, and Doctor Stella Louis from the Froebel Trust, reflecting on Froebelian courses and the impact of COVID 19 on children’s friendships.
[00:00:39] I’m really interested in Froebel and Froebel’s training courses and sessions that they have and I just wondered if you could tell us a little bit more about that, and maybe any links to friendships. I think Stella, perhaps you’re the person to go to first on this one.
Stella Louis: [00:01:03] What I would say first is Froebel talks about the child, their relationship with themselves, their relationship with others, contributing to a family, a community, and the wider physical environment and I think all of those things you can link to friendship. When you think about how you get to find out about yourself, it’s through your family. So although I might not explicitly mention the word friendship, I think that going back to Froebel’s core ideas about self, others, and relationships and it’s those relationships that become absolutely critical.
[00:01:44] In relation to the short courses, the short courses were developed by Professor Tina Bruce, and I have nurtured them for a long time now. I’ve nurtured them for the last five years and I like the word ‘nurtured’ because Froebel nature was really, really important to Froebel. There are six elements, each element is made up of two days, delivered by two indoors Froebelian travelling tutors and the course has been delivered in Australia, in South Africa, in New Zealand, in Wales and in Scotland and in England, so hence us being called travelling tutors.
[00:02:29] The first element really looks at Froebelian principles, and really encouraging practitioners to locate themselves in practice. The second element is looking at Froebel’s gifts and occupations, and there are links to modern day relevant block play today, which Tina spoke about, and Sacha, earlier on.
[00:02:49] Element two is really getting practitioners to think about worthwhile, you know, thinking about and reflecting on the worthwhile educational resources that they offer children. Element three is about engaging in and with nature, and it really begins to unpick Froebel’s ideas of unity, connectedness, law of opposites, and that relationship. You know, the relationship that we have with nature, for instance.
[00:03:17] Element four looks at the symbolic life of the child and how children make their inner outer, and whether they do it through movement, mark making, through their play – but again that dictates having knowledgeable educator so that they can understand exactly what it is that they’re seeing. So that is element four.
[00:03:41] Element five is Froebel’s mother songs, and Sacha talked a little bit about that earlier on.
[00:03:46] And element six is about looking at Froebelian ideas of equity, equality, diversity and inclusion. Looking at those issues through a Froebelian lens, and I would say that the Froebelian understanding of equity is that we begin where learners are, and we start with where they are rather than where we want them to be and whatever that stage we need to be that stage. But again, that comes with knowledge.
[00:04:18] But I just quickly want to go back to element four. It’s talking about the symbolic life of the child, and I think that this is a really important element. When Tina and I were in South Africa this last May we were gifted some blocks by a colleague and when we introduced the blocks to a group of children that we hadn’t met before and we weren’t aware of what block play experience they had had, one little girl, there was just something about her that we just took notice of and she started to build a structure kind of sort of upright, and then she was talking to the teacher and it transpired that that night she had been bitten by a rat and what she was doing was she was building a rat house.
[00:05:03] And even though it was like an upright structure on day 1, by day 4 it was like some kind of really solid enclosure that she had built and I think relationships are really important and I think that for me, that particular observation, not just linked to the relationships she had with the educator that she could talk about it, but what it says is that solitary play is really important and solitary play must be valued because it offers children the opportunities for repetition, reflection, consideration and it also allows them personal space that they need.
[00:05:44] If we look at self, relationship with others, and community – you can see how you can really bring this whole concept of friendships together, because a Froebelian mantra is link always. Always. Always link.
[00:06:00] It’s really great to hear that passion you have for your Frobel courses, because there’s quite a lot of interesting things there and I’m not going to say too much because I want to get everybody’s ideas in but maybe when we talk about COVID, when you were talking about links to nature, we will maybe come back to that point and how children connect with nature.
[00:06:21] Tina, would you like to add anything to the Froebel courses?
Tina Bruce: [00:06:29] I mean I think one of the things that’s so useful is that they are very practical. So, you’re asking the practitioners to try things out themselves, because Sacha talked about rehearsal for friendship, well you need rehearsal for making those relationships with the children and things like block play we’re finding on the courses are invaluable for that sort of thing. I mean I mentioned block play earlier, but when I was a child, I also mentioned I played a lot with the doll’s house and like Sacha, it was moving house that really helped me to have the solitary play that was very rich.
[00:07:09] There was a little boy who lived down the road to where we moved, and he had a train set. Wow. Now I had all that experience of my solitary play with the dolls house, and he had a lot of experience of solitary play with the trainset because he had actually broken his leg and couldn’t move around a tremendous bit for a while and so I went to his house. I took my dolls house things, and we made towns and villages and all sorts of things on this route of the trainset and it was absolutely fabulous and we became very good friends.
[00:07:45] So sometimes I think solitary play is a rehearsal for – and then you’ve got things to talk about because friendship is actually about shared interests and finding things that chime with each other, it doesn’t just happen, and we’re not going to be friends with everybody and so for children they need to begin to try out, you know, who are the kind of people that it’s going to be lovely to have the deeper kinds of friendships. Because we have companions and people that we get to know and we go through life there, but actually when you talk about friendship it’s something that’s quite deep.
[00:08:19] So I think the courses actually are very helpful to the practitioners and they do things like dance together and they make up songs together and they tell stories together and so they are beginning to think how do we create this nurturing environment where we can actually use our knowledge as practitioners to help those children learn.
[00:08:40] I’m just thinking that one of the stories actually that I absolutely love is about a little girl, a refugee context, small boats, she as part of this experience of arising on a beach finds a pebble, and that pebble becomes her friend, and another little boy becomes her friend through the pebble. They draw a face on the pebble with a pen that they find on the beach and when her family leaves obviously to go to a better place the little boy is left behind and she gives him her pebble. And that is a very deep friendship, and it deals with loss as well as becoming friends.
[00:09:23] So I think that this kind of training that Stella is leading is very, very important in helping people actually to try things out in a very practical way.
[00:09:31] Thank you for that amazing story and again that idea of objects and how they can initiate or develop friendship is so important. Sacha, would you like to add anything to that?
Sacha Powell: [00:09:45] The courses, as Stella has already said, the courses start where the learner is and of course in those courses the learners are educators who are working with children and families. So, if the pre-occupation of a learner or a group of learners was aspects of children’s friendship then that is what the course would be about, regardless of whether it’s element oner or element six. You might think about equity in relation to children’s friendships. It is very practical and practically oriented and the kinds of activities, whether it be writing songs or something else that take place during the courses build on what interests preoccupy those learners on the courses. So, I think that was just one thing that I wanted to say around friendships.
[00:10:36] Thank you, that’s great. There is so much I would love to pick up on but I know that we really need to move on.
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[00:10:47] This is the penultimate question. I wanted to ask about the COVID 19 pandemic of course, because it’s such an unprecedented situation that we’ve had with children being socially isolated and I’ve recently done some research with children and parents looking at kind of exploring how children had maintained or tried to maintain their friendships during lockdowns and returns to school and I just wondered what your views were on the COVID 19 pandemic and the impact on children’s friendships, so can I start with you Tina?
Tina Bruce: [00:11:22] Yes, I mean it’s been such a major part of our lives for several years hasn’t it, the pandemic. One of the things that stuck me was seeing two little sisters who were playing out their ideas and it linked so strongly with the research which the Froebel Trust has funded with Chris Pascal helping Sally Cave, who leads school, she is head of school at Guildford and the family centre and how the children actually want to be very informed about COVID and didn’t want things to be kept from them about people dying and they were creating private play spaces in the garden, because they couldn’t be in the classrooms very much, and playing out death scenes. All sorts of very interesting things.
[00:12:16] And these two little sisters had been involved in Froebelian paper folding so they had made lots of paper cones. One of the children was lying down and had put the cones all over her stomach and said ‘I’m a corona virus’. Those are the ones that I’ve been thinking about.
[00:12:36] Yeah, that’s so interesting. And Sacha, can I go to you next?
Sacha Powell: [00:12:41] Yes, thanks Caron and thanks Tina for reminding us of the fantastic research that Chris and her colleagues did in England and Scotland. I think it was not the first, some the first research ever to take place about young children’s experiences of the pandemic in 2020 and what I think was really striking about it was the way that children express their anxieties. Whether that was about loss of friendship, loss of family, loss of freedom and a whole host of other things, or anxiety about the virus, but in so doing also showed huge knowledge and wisdom about what was going on around them in their worlds and that they had a thirst for knowledge. They didn’t want to be closeted away. They didn’t want to not know what the realities of COVID were and I think that as really a fascinating aspect of the project and undoubtedly through other research that we’ve funded, for example an Access to Nature project which was about equity, we know that there are huge inequities that occurred as a consequence of COVID and the aftermath for the young children and their families.
[00:13:55] But I think that what Chris Pascal and her colleagues’ research really showed was that yes, there are some terrible things that happened but what they were able to focus on too was some of the amazing things that young children were knowing, and doing, and expressing about COVID and during COVID lockdowns, which showed their incredible resilience and ability to adapt and be flexible in circumstances that are incredibly difficult.
[00:14:25] Thank you Sacha, and that reminds me of what I was talking about earlier, that you’ve reminded me of but also Stella reminded me of in terms of children connecting with nature. So, the research that I did, it was quite fascinating really because the children started to talk about how they had made connections with nature, because they’d been going out on walks more, they’d been spending more time in their gardens. And one of the children actually drew a lovely picture and drew, they said some of the friends that had visited them in their garden. They said there was a hedgehog and a fox, and they had kind of got all these sort of animals but they were referring to them as friends. And I thought it was so interesting because they had also previously spoken to me about ‘Actually I used to play in the garden with my friends’, you know, peer friends that came to play, and now they were talking about this connection with nature and I just thought that was really, really interesting.
[00:15:23] Let me move to you Stella before we come to our final question, in case you want to add anything on COVID.
Stella Louis: [00:15:30] I think what I would add actually builds on what both Tina and Sacha have just said. During COVID I was doing a training session online because everything moved to online and I was working with a nursery school and they were talking about they were closed down for a while but when they opened they had decided this is what we were going to be doing with the children, we were going to have maths stations, we were going to get the children to learn about shops and counting but actually the children wanted to develop their knowledge in very, very different ways. Like Froebel believed, they kind of said no, we don’t want a shop. And within their friendship groups and their relationships with others they were like no, we don’t want a shop. What we want to do is we want to make masks and we want to be able to draw arrows on the floor to say it’s two metres between this person and this person in the queue.
[00:16:27] Firsthand experience, we mustn’t underestimate it in relation to children’s wider relationships with the world. And I think that kind of sort of just brings together what both Tina and Sacha were talking about, that it is that engagement that will help children develop an understanding of not just themselves but their relationship with others and also what they need and want.
[00:16:54] Again, it shows that real attunement with children and what do they need at this moment in time, instead of trying to go ahead with the sort of maths and the shop agenda, but we’re thinking no, this isn’t what’s needed at the moment, this is what’s needed at the moment.
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[00:17:14] So I will just go to the final question now: What sort of take-home messages, or it might be reflections or it might be a question would you like the listeners to take away from this podcast? So, could I start with you Tina?
Tina Bruce: [00:17:29] Well, that’s an enormous question isn’t it. I think that there are three things that really beam out for me. One is the way that relationships matter so much. Knowing yourself, being aware of yourself, your sense of identity and that helps you to link with others. As Stella said, always link, Froebel. And to move to the wider community of people that you don’t know and haven’t met, but you begin to think about them.
[00:18:00] So relationships matter. Play is a wonderful way for children to be getting to grips with these things. Solitary play we’ve talked about a lot, but also the play with other children, and play with adults. So, play matters, and throughout we keep coming back to adults needing to be very knowledgeable about how children develop and learn, and being very good at creating a nurturing environment so that children can grow and develop their thinking, having ideas, and relationships that really work well for them.
[00:18:45] That’s great, thank you. And then Sacha?
Sacha Powell: [00:18:48] Well mine is very short really. I agree with everything that Tina has said. Friendships start from birth.
[00:18:56] Yes, thank you. And Stella?
Stella Louis: [00:19:00] I think I would draw on Tina’s twelve features of play and say something that is really important that we take away when we’re thinking about these relationships is that play; we need to see play as an integrated mechanism that brings together children’s ideas, their feelings and their relationships. It is in play that children co-ordinate their ideas, their faults, and feelings well as their physical body. But they are also able to make sense of their social relationships and their sense of themselves and the world around them.
[00:19:39] Thank you. It has been a real privilege to talk to you today around children’s friendships and also to hear a lot more about Froebel and Froebelian principles and how they link so closely to children’s friendships. It’s fantastic to hear about the ongoing work that you do and the passion that you have for Early Years and for children and young families. So, I think that’s brilliant. Thank you very much.
[00:20:12] [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]