Voices blog

It’s not mascots, marketing or national pride that have won me over. It’s the potential to use the Games as an allegory to teach children about equality and fairness in competition.

I have to confess I’ve never really had much interest in sporting events. Wimbledon. The World Cup. The Olympics. I rarely give them much more than a passing thought.

As a teacher in Year 5 I remember touching on the origins of the Olympics when teaching Ancient Greece, but as someone who doesn’t really do ‘sport’, I skipped over it to get to the more interesting stuff: how do Greek myths transmit society’s values, what was the importance of the gods, and why were there such bitter rivalries between the Athenians and Spartans?

How past societies worked, their values and their conflicts were always the most interesting part of history to me. Perhaps this is because I’ve always been drawn to personal, social and citizenship education, often considered a rather ‘fluffy’ subject, but is, to me, anything but. It’s what brings the historical past into the political today. An education that creates adults who are competent in English and maths but who lack personal and social skills, have never considered what they value and why, or thought about the challenges the world faces, are not only unlikely to be as successful in their relationships, but less capable of participating and bringing about positive changes in society. The unrelenting pressure on academic standards however, means there is less and less room in the primary curriculum to explore and explicitly teach any of these things.

So how is all of this related to the Olympics? I didn’t think it was until I was looking at the new Go-Givers lessons on the Olympics. As the Olympics is a rare opportunity for teachers to go off-piste, it was gratifying to discover that there are many more personal, social and citizenship learning opportunities through the topic than I realised. The Go-Givers lessons use the Olympics as a great starting point for discussion with children about the Olympic values, their own goals and aspirations, but are also a springboard for some interesting and quite philosophical debates.

It sounds obvious, but the Olympic Games are a competition. And competitions get right to the heart of some of the key themes in personal, social and citizenship education: equality and fairness.
These are concepts that children in particular care deeply about.

Who takes part in the Olympics; who doesn’t; how is a level playing field established; are all winners ‘equal’? These are especially interesting questions in a competition which aims to bring nations together around a set of values – respect, excellence and friendship - and put aside their differences, but in reality has often been used to for economic, political and ideological point scoring.

Did you know for example that Hitler tried to use the 1936 Berlin Olympics games to demonstrate that his blond-haired, blue-eyed Aryan race were superior to other races? He expected Lutz Lang, the brilliant German long-jumper would win the long jump final. When he was defeated by the ‘racially inferior’ African American Jesse Owens, Hitler reportedly refused to put the gold medal around his neck.

This Olympic snub can be compared with the selection of Cathy Freeman, an Aboriginal athlete, to light the Olympic flame at the 2000 Games in Sydney, in an attempt to make amends for the racial discrimination Aboriginal people have suffered in Australia. Such facts can lead to interesting and challenging discussions with the children about how we judge people and what attributes make someone a ‘winner’.

The Olympics are also a means for primary children to explore the subtle difference between being equal and being the same. For example, the question of whether Paralympic athletes with prosthetic limbs should be allowed to compete against able-bodied athletes. The Paralympic Games were started in 1960 following a competition in 1948 organised by Ludwig Guttmann for World War II veterans who had spinal injuries. Children can debate whether not allowing disabled athletes to compete alongside able-bodied athletes is fair and whether physical differences are the only inequalities that merit separate treatment.

Is it fair, for example, that rich economically developed countries with outstanding sports facilities compete against poorer less economically developed countries where athletes have few facilities and are unable to train with specialist sports equipment?

And finally, no teacher interested in personal, social and citizenship education could lead a topic on the Olympics without discussing the issue of drug-use by athletes. Where is the line between taking performance enhancing drugs and boosting performance by taking sports drinks, caffeine pills and wearing specially designed clothing and footwear?

So upon closer examination, I’m now feeling rather excited about London 2012 and the teachable moments it offers up. The Go-Givers lessons are a great way to introduce children not only to the history of the Olympics and the values of the Olympic movement but to some of the many controversial issues highlighted by competitions of any kind. Were I back in my Year 5 class, I certainly would have welcomed them as a way to energise my teaching of Ancient Greece – for myself and for my pupils.

The Citizen ship sailed into the TeachFirst harbour to discuss all things citizenship, including assessment and social action for a really inspiring session.

Last week I met with nine citizenship specialists at the TeachFirst London HQ for a subject development day. Having completed their first four weeks in school, this day was an opportunity for these newly trained teachers to escape the sea of young people to reflect on their collective experiences and to hear from a variety of authoritative and interesting speakers - including me from the Citizenship Foundation!

I had a little over an hour with some bright, engaging and enthusiastic professionals, who without exception seem to be making a positive impact in their school settings and upon their students. It was really refreshing to hear the understanding and passion that they have for citizenship education, but also pleasing to learn how central citizenship values are to their host schools. During uncertain times when many subject bodies are looking over their shoulder at any impending outcomes of the curriculum review, I feel assured that many academic institutions will continue to see the value of preparing young people with the knowledge, tools and understanding to make an effective contribution to wider society.

During our limited time together we were able to look at some great, free citizenship resources and discuss some assessment issues with the font of citizenship knowledge that is Julie Gibbings our Manager, Curriculum and Publication. I was also able to introduce the Giving Nation Challenge which supports cross-curricular delivery of charitable and social action initiatives to KS3 &4. With free lesson plans and teaching resources, and a new web-based project planner (currently being developed!) coupled with start-up grants of £50/class to develop charity and social enterprise projects I am sure we should be seeing many more young social activists joining our community of 600 secondary schools in the coming months.

On the day, I was also especially delighted to hear from the excellent Cathy Fallon, Senior Lecturer and Citizenship Lead, that TeachFirst has already committed to continuing to place more citizenship students next year. Naturally, I will look forward to meeting these exceptional teachers next year!

For any information on the Giving Nation programme, including free school training or telephone guidance, please get in touch on 020 7566 4141.

Get inspired. Get Active. Get involved. info@g-nation.org.uk

Earlier this year myself and Richard John travelled to Cumbria to judge the Giving Nation Cumbria final in which seven schools from the Cumbrian area took part.  The day involved the schools’ presenting their Social Enterprise activities and informing us of what they had done throughout the academic year.

Our Giving Nation Challenge allows the students to get involved with their local communities as well as giving them the opportunity to see what other schools are doing.  The exciting day ended with the girls from Ullswater Community College winning the trophy, they have developed a company called “Give your heart” which makes heart shaped chocolates to raise money for the Eden Valley Hospice.

Watch the video of the event to see what the students and teachers gained from the experience.

Giving Nation has been working with Cumbria County Council for three years, Cumbria is currently the only Local Authority that runs a Giving Nation Challenge county wide final, however due to the continued success we have had we expect to roll out this initiative in other Local Authorities.

September saw me travel to the Rheged Centre in Cumbria, this time to conduct a workshop with 20 teachers on the Giving Nation Challenge, with the sense that they will enter next years Cumbria Challenge Final to be held in June.  The training involved going through the lesson plans, looking through examples of the different activities that other schools had done, and answering any queries that the teachers had.

All in all the training was successful with two new schools being involved, with teachers commenting that they were inspired by the challenge process from start to finish, along with the ideas and variations of delivery.  You can register for the Challenge programme on our website.

We are currently updating the giving nation resources, due to be completed in November! also watch out for our new G-Blog competition.

More information

• More about Giving Nation
• Giving Nation website [external site]

A mentor once offered me this nugget during one of many iterations of my quarter-life crisis: ‘find where head and heart intersect…and stay there’. A rather lofty guiding principle. But it’s possible that through conducting evaluation research for Go-Givers, I have.

I’ve spent a good part of the last few months poring over children’s mindmaps, or in the technical language of our recently completed evaluation report: ‘pupils’ pre and post topic assessments’. Using these humble representations of their minds, I have been trying to read into the pathways and cognitive activity of 4 to 11 year olds, but with little expertise on what constitutes trajectories of progression in social, emotional and moral literacy. My intuitive self thinks that the 10-year old grappling with issues of scapegoating, for example, who states that,

‘scape goating is where someone blam[e]s a person or a animal because someone who looked like them or is in the same religion or is the same animal did something wrong, so they blam[e] it on the other person/animal that didn’t do anything wrong’,

probably has a sound understanding of the stereotyping that underlies its more violent counterpart, scapegoating. Ok, I admit he shows some confusion with the charming allegory in the Go-Givers lesson that features a character who happens to be well, a goat. But his literal interpretation indicates to me this pupil has internalised the concept, rather than regurgitating a soundbite from his teacher. I can tell, for example, that he has progressed further along than his classmate who states:

‘I have learned that the goats got blamed for what the sheep did’,

who doesn’t appear to have moved from the specific (fictitious) examples to realise the bigger societal picture. But perhaps this response from another child does signal that shift:

‘scapegoat mean that if 1 child is bad everyone think all children are bad’

Certainly, this pupil has extrapolated from the story about the goat who is a victim of scapegoating to another vulnerable group in society. Perhaps she has herself felt the unfairness of this particular strain of stereotyping. None of these pupils were answering a specific question (as on a test-based assessment), but via free associations, all of them volunteered something about scapegoating that suggests varied levels of conceptual understanding.

This is the kind of intuitive ‘leveling’ that has guided my qualitative analysis of the ‘data’ in this evaluation, that is, the mindmaps that were completed before and after pupils engaged with Go-Givers resources around themes ranging from ‘anti-bullying’ to ‘rights and responsibilities’ to ‘sustainability’, among others. (See a sample of pupil mindmaps [pdf])

Teachers probably make these kind of intuitive judgements every day to determine if their pupils are progressing. But here in the office, far removed from the ‘field’ and the constant observable clues, our cerebral selves are supposed to take over. We are bound by sector imperatives to ‘demonstrate impact’, ‘measure social value’, ‘assess outcomes’, and so on. I don’t need to be convinced that if we are in the business of creating change, it is important to know if we are doing it, and doing it right. It’s equally important to know if that change would happen anyway (deadweight in eval speak) and whether that change is indeed due to our intervention (attribution)? In short: do we need to exist?

But does a fixation with neatly standardised data to provide an evidence-based justification for the work we do compromise our affective sense of what comprises change? Conducting an in-house evaluation certainly is rife with issues about objectivity. But at the same time, with our institutional knowledge of our users, our acute awareness of the roadblocks to participation (in the programme and in its evaluation), and perhaps somewhat childlike sensibilities that allow us to get ‘inside’ the heads of children, we (a team of ex-teachers excepting myself) may be the best equipped to apply the wealth of evaluation best practices and make them age appropriate, and of educational value, for our cognitively specific stakeholders of primary school children.

Our evaluative process has been riddled with questions I feel we have not satisfactorily answered: How do we know change has occurred? How do we know pupils’ intention will translate into action? How do we know the impact will be long-lasting? How can we be rigorous and flexible in methodological design? How can we make evaluation meaningful for the participants? But we have made some (qualitative) progress towards negotiating these tensions. (For a fuller discussion of the methodology, see p.5 of the full report)

Even though we may not be able to quantify the social value we generate, or scale and score the non-standardised data with any confidence that this would be meaningful, we may at the very least have come up with a way to visualise internal changes in our beneficiaries. The best we can do is observe, interpret and make judgements that justify the content and opportunities we are providing through our intervention, as teachers so often do.

Perhaps evaluating outcomes in children is precisely about being affective and analytical at the same time, about trusting our intuitive sense of what qualifies progress. Perhaps, as a reflective activity for us as practitioners, it is ultimately where head and heart intersect.

As part of Refugee Week, events are being held across the country to celebrate the contributions refugees bring to the UK. This week also sees the launch of InterACT in Bradford, one of the five participating cities this year. InterACT aims to celebrate the contributions young refugees and asylum seekers can bring to their communities. Last Thursday, I went to visit the Bradford InterACT group to introduce them to the project.

One of the aims of Refugee Week is to encourage a better understanding between communities. InterACT has a similar aim of building greater community cohesion and uses social action as a tool to bring together young people from different backgrounds. Each InterACT group is comprised of young people from the local area and young refugees and asylum seekers.

This year, the project is working with Bradford Youth Service and Bradford College ESOL Programme. Initially, young people from both groups worked independently to explore issues in their community through photography. They took photos of a range of issues in Bradford, including littering, graffiti, derelict buildings and vandalism.

Last week, I visited the team to introduce them to the InterACT project. This was the first time both groups of young people had met, so the focus was on games and activities to help them to get to know each other. In the session, the groups presented their photographs to each other and found that they had identified similar issues. The photographs formed a starting point for the team to explore the ‘good’ things about their community and the ‘bad’.

Among the good things they listed diversity, history, sports and culture (including the Bradford International Film Festival). The team then moved beyond the photographs to identify less visible problems in their community. We discussed everything from discrimination and drug abuse to the negative reputation of Bradford (last year voted the place tourists least wanted to visit).

InterACT aims to celebrate the contributions young refugees and asylum seekers can bring to their communities. At 4.30pm on Tuesday 21 June I will be interviewed by BCB radio about InterACT in Bradford. After they have completed their social action project, the final stage of the project involves the team organising a Celebration Event in their community to showcase what they have achieved. I will blog again at the end of next month, after the Bradford team have held their Celebration Event.

Read more about InterACT here, which this year is running in Cardiff, Barnsley, Bradford, Liverpool and Leeds.