1

Exciting, challenging, refreshing- but no easy ride! Student perspectives of interdisciplinary study: the

MEDAL project

Professor Kay Sambell

Dr Mel Gibson

Dr Liz McDowell

Northumbria University

2

The MEDAL project

• Fund for Development of Teaching & Learning (HEFCE, FDTL5)

• Consortium of Childhood Studies Lecturers– Northumbria– Durham– York– York St John– Roehampton

3

What are the main issues MEDAL seeks to address?

• Childhood Studies is an emergent field of inquiry• Taught in a massively diverse range of course

contexts– ‘Dedicated’ Childhood/Early Childhood degrees– Children’s Literature taught on English, Education,

Childhood, Media and Cultural, Librarianship, Information Studies

• What does this mean for staff and students?

4

Childhood

Sociology

English

History

PsychologyMedia/CulturalStudies

Health

SocialWork

Education

5

Teachers’ views of ‘ways of thinking and practising’ childhood teaching

• Problematising the concept of childhood– Threshold concepts– ‘When they’re using ideas about childhood, they tend to have one

uniform, homogenised sort of image of what ‘the child’ will do. Getting them to think beyond just a set of very crude images is the real challenge, because they haven’t thought about it before.’

– Authenticity- childhood matters– I’d hope they’d carry that with them, as it were, all the rest of their

intellectual lives and they’d have more ideas or more insights into childhood

• Conscious inflections towards multiple disciplines– ‘Informational ecosystem’ (Ganon, 2001)

6

Two case studies: strategies used when teaching children’s literature

• Show different perspectives of childhood by• Involving students in debates/role play of different views of the

child• Designing different environments ‘for’ children according to views

of the child

• Encouraging student involvement in close textual analysis and active discussion of children’s books

• (seminar communities of practice, online discussion groups, group work, posters)

• Modelling different theoretical approaches• Drawing on the real world

• Children’s voices (voluntary aspect, but encouraged)

7

Students’ views: exciting, fun• It’s brilliant! The best module I’ve done! It’s

different, it’s sort of fresh, somehow. A fresh way of doing things. (L)

• It’s partly that everyone feels that they can have a view, don’t they? More relaxed. ..you know you’ve understood the meaning at some levels so you’re quite confident about it, you’re happy to talk about it.

• It is an exciting unit, I got really excited and talkative about it. Because you’re looking beyond the text…and if you give anyone a picture book you can get into discussing it, even with people not on the course. Textbooks are really difficult to discuss, but everyone can talk about this. (CS)

8

Sense of (unexpected) complexity and theoretical challenge (L)

• Children’s literature is actually based on something that’s a value judgement, and you can’t define a child really, so how do you define its literature? And all those sorts of issues. I think in any kind of approach to children’s literature you get all those are there under the surface, whether you tackle them or not. But they’re not very easy.

• I’m discovering a lot more in it than I thought was there in the first place

• you can go into particular schools of theory if you want. It sort of..it brings a really serious edge to it, which I didn’t think theory was going to go into it. I don’t know why, but……

9

CS students’ sense of challenge

• I thought at the beginning, twelve weeks is going to be far too long! What on earth can you discuss about them? How will we fill a whole module about this? They are so easy, how can you have a whole module on it? And now it feels, well, far too short!

10

Literature students import familiar theoretical models

• At first I couldn’t get my head round the act of studying children’s books in the context I’d studied before. But it’s been interesting because it is very relevant in a modern way.

• There are so many theoretical kinds of discourses you can apply to the text - I find that very interesting and it gives me lots of scope to do that. Using recent theoretical discourses of place and emphasis on the reader, so in terms of that, it’s perfect, because you’re looking at how Marxist ideologies could exist within a children’s text, even though you wouldn’t think so

• You can put any theory you want into it- gender, narrative, voices.

11

 CS students experience material as a new field • It’s been intense. You feel a bit like you’re starting from

scratch, you’ve got no other knowledge to pull on, so you’re taking an awful lot in over a short period. You draw on the stuff from first year Childhood Studies- different perspectives of the child. But I’d never done literature before, so it’s hard to know where it’s coming from.

• When you look at the picture book now I think the depth to which you read it now, compared to 12 weeks ago, it’s a completely different read. You think, well, crikey, it’s only been twelve weeks and I’ve gone from that to that in a few hours of lectures. I think we’ve had an instant changeover in a very short period of time. I think I’ve changed a lot. I’ve got a very different view of literature.

12

Studying Childhood as a new sense of direction

• You see whole layers of things that you never thought you would see and you don’t feel fettered by critical books..it’s all about original thought more throughout. There is almost an accepted viewpoint, or a few viewpoints, on more traditional modules. You don’t have to conform to agree with what everyone else thinks, because there isn’t anyone else and no fixed viewpoint. (L)

13

Informational ecosystem experienced as a sense of freedom and adventure

• There’s no sense of absolute…you know there’s no book in the library that says ‘This is what you should think about Jacqueline Wilson’. You have to use your own head and I think that’s what’s so good about it really.

• It does encourage you to come to your own standpoint as well. My essays for this module have been more, well, experimental. It’s mainly because I’m taking a more analytical or sociological approach- it’s things I would never have thought to do before this module, and it’s great.

• There were more different sections in the library to read, all sorts of different takes. There was political and sociological thought and things concerning how the child thinks as well. It’s very interesting, but you have to be careful- go through and see of there’s actually anything relevant because a lot of the time it’s not actually relevant at all, you have to be careful you don’t just read something that’s completely different to your topic..

•  I went to the Education library, and you can, and it was useful in its way. But it is from a different perspective. It was useful in terms of some basic ideas that helped to get them sorted in my mind, but the emphasis is obviously very much on the teaching, and this isn’t a teachery module – it’s not what we’re doing.

14

CS students experience interdisciplinarity very differently• [The whole course] comes at you from all directions..

and it’s difficult to piece together sometimes. It’s not like doing English where everyone walks out with the same amount of knowledge- everyone is going to take something else out of this course. It’s different, isn’t it- you’re all going to cling on to different bits of this. You take your own line (Y1 CS)

• I feel, well, there’s a whole world out there, what on earth am I going to look at here? You go from area to area and you find stuff, but I do keep finding that some of it is very, very broad. (Ch’s lit CS Y2)

15

Developing ways of thinking and practising that help students

• Develop peer communities of practice– Getting the materials out and saying ‘Let’s,

everybody’ have a look at this. Talking through the books.

– It helps you test out what you’ve done. Quite honestly, when I looked at a book at first I didn’t see it for myself, it grew over the semester so that you could start doing that yourself

16

Moving beyond the university

• I’ve done the unit with my daughter, who is 15. It can help you explain the ideas and what you study

• When I was reading Granpa with my husband at first he said ‘it doesn’t tell you anything’ and that was because he was only reading the words and the words don’t tell you an awful lot. Once he’d learned to look at the pictures too, it was different.

17

Passionate advocates of/for the field

• I’ve even talked things through with my boyfriend, who knows absolutely nothing about children, and doesn’t really care much, either, and I had him talking about Rose Blanche, because it is interesting and you want other people to see that the picture book isn’t just a picture book after all. 

• It’s not just for kids, definitely reading children’s books!