Measures
Observations and Surveillance
What do we expect of children and of the people who work with them, and the systems that they all operate within?
The way which the lenses of observation, measurement and assessment play out in our day-to-day interactions with children, and in the make-up of the world of education, and the implications for children, has been a consistent theme arising from our research with school. In this thread, we look at just three examples.
'The Power of Normal': draws on our work with Rebecca Wright, an Educational Psychologist at Catalyst Psychology, to consider the ways in which we are all measured and observed throughout life, the origins of those practices, and how we can remain critical within our practices with children.
'Mixtures of moving surfaces': a researcher and a teacher worked together to consider bodies and their needs in the classroom, proposing a resistance to anomalous practices being labelled as 'problem'.
‘Unsettling the lens’: an alternative 'school photo' intervention in school, a playful interrogation of this scenario, which helped us gently explore how we construct and co-construct versions of ourselves and others, and in particular relation to the context of school.
The Power of Normal
The surveillance of a child’s trajectory of ‘normal’ development has no temporal beginning, nor end, it is nebulous, ongoing and unbounded.
If we enter into the middle, we observe antenatal checks, foetal screening and diagnostic tests, or postnatal events that include developmental checks from new born to 2-years-old that track physical movement, developing eating and sleeping habits, head circumference, height, weight, potty training, speech and language development. As we observe, we assess, judge, regulate, and as Svirsky (2015, p.60) notes, we become so easily “trapped in associative chains that lead the mind to look for always-already enacted contents”.
Once in school, the organisation of classes and curriculum are tied to an aged/staged model of linear development and surveillance continues with behaviour under scrutiny, as well as cognitive development with Baseline Assessment (assessment of pupils in reception in language, communication, and literacy and mathematics); Statutory Assessment Tests (Yr2 and Yr6); and later GCSE & A Levels/GNVQs....
Childhood normalcy...involves a developmental teleology up to adulthood... to maximize the possibility that children grow up “normal” and “normally,” adults tend to (their) children with a vigilant eye/I, ensuring that the telos of developmental growth fits” (Bohlmann, 2016: xiv). See references here.
Image description: a close-up image of an eyeball taken by children in their exploration of school with viewing apparatus, Sensing the School.
Image description: a yellow line painted on the wet asphalt playground, young people’s feet alongside. This photo was taken by Wasi (child in 3B at Alma Park School), Life in 1B, 2M and 3B
What attitudes and approaches might be present, and influence our ways of seeing children?
What impact might these have on how we relate to them, and in turn, their experiences?
Mixtures of moving surfaces
Educators and staff supporting children are also subject to observation and measurements that do not always take into account the fullness of what happens in school.
“The last thing you want to hear as an educator is "someone's coming to observe you". As a teacher, you constantly feel as though people are watching you to see where you are going wrong, what else you need to be doing to do better...' Gabby Birelo
What does it feel like when we try and resist usual ways of assessing children, or ourselves, or school? Can disrupting what we would 'normally' do offer new possibilities for understanding what’s happening in a flowing, evolving situation?
Colebrook (2017) notes how it is interesting to think about education, not as a discipline with a terrain of “know-how” or “expertise,” but as a process of not knowing. See references here.
To not know is to keep yourself open to possibility.
After lockdown, in January 2021, Rachel Holmes was working with Gabby Birelo, a teacher at Alma Park, hoping to understand more about children's experiences and practices in school.
Together, they navigated this problem of observing and being observed in school. Rather than standing above or outside the world of the classroom, they found themselves caught up together with the children. They found a shared interest in young children's expressions and perspectives about their lives in school in ways that did not rely on talk.
They noticed the constraints some conventions of school, including the furniture or requirement for quiet, on bodies that need to fidget, rock, dance, chant, daydream, call out.
So much about school focusses on what’s going on above the table... Rachel and Gabby attended instead to what was happening below the tables, just above the carpeted floor, as different surfaces mingled, manoeuvred, moved around, through, and in between each other, indiscernible at times in the classroom, unearthed in this, a video of feet beneath a table... Gabby and Rachel found a shared interest in how these improvisational relations could be re-framed, no longer 'problems'.
Unsettling the lens
Having your school photo taken is a widely shared experience of being in primary school in the UK. All portrait photos might be thought of as telling or constructing an 'ideal' story about a person in a moment, which connects this activity to the theme here of measuring and frames of assessment.
Image description: The 'skins of school' closeup images made by the children of Alma Park on an exploration of school reminded Becky Shaw and Jo Ray of the abstract backgrounds used by school photographers in the 1970s and ‘80s. These are images of the backdrops being set up during the School Photo activity at Alma Park.
Usually when school photos are taken, we are asked to sit in a certain way, turn our heads a certain way, to smile.
We wanted to explore all the complicated interactions that take place between child, photographer and space when school photos are made. This includes nervousness, fun, awkwardness, trying out of different ways to ‘be’ and imagining who the photo for- parents, friends, the child themselves?. What happens when children (and adults) are given a little more choice in how they make an image of themselves?
Along with artist Miles Umney, Becky and Jo visited Alma Park school to offer a ‘slowed down’ school photo experience for Year 6 students. The pandemic meant that no school photographs had been possible in the Year 6 children’s last year at primary.
They invited children and staff, to show them what they thought a ‘school photo’ looked like usually (to perform a school photo), and then invited them to have their photo taken in whatever way they wanted, choosing their posture, expression, stillness or movement.
Taking time to investigate the nuances of interaction present in a situation like this suggested much potential for understanding the often invisible, overlooked interplays in all kinds of moments in which ideas are formed about children, because they are so much part of our day to day lives.
Some incredible performances emerged from the children who took part, who showed their 'proper' school photo selves as well as their not sure, feeling awkward, indecisive, funny, confident, provocative and shy selves (and sometimes all of the above).
Sets of photos were returned to the children and parents, showing these multiple selves rather than a single story.
Image descriptions: Becky, Jo and Miles pose in a rehearsal for the school photo day, responding to the same invitation as the children. The fourth image is part of one of the photograph backdrop texture and stand. In doing these poses, Becky, Jo and Miles were reminded of their own experiences of trying to behave 'correctly' and arranging their their face and body in the 'right' way both as children and in adult roles.