“Owt ‘e wants!” – working under the constraint of too much freedom?
Russ Law, Consultant and University of Surrey
Context/Situation/Challenge
It was my first teaching and proper job after university. My training had been in secondary modern languages, but the job was to teach a class of 11-12-year-olds in a middle school, where I would also be responsible for other subjects including English, maths, art et al.
Characteristics of the situation that engaged me in an immersive way
·I had a strict timetable – there was no escape from the structure of my duties.
·It was my job. My livelihood, career and self-esteem depended on it.
·There was an area on the curriculum for integrated, experiential, topical, visit-based work that left a great deal open for me to create, develop and enjoy. It was known by the pupils as “owt ‘e wants”
·Additionally, I was given virtually no guidance as to how to approach the teaching or the curriculum in other subject areas; indeed, in those days and at that school the term “curriculum” was contested, and all sets of text books regarded with suspicion or disapproval.
·I had to create many of the teaching materials myself, despite my lack of training.
How I was changed (or what and how I learned)
·The situation, which was highly stressful at times, made me more self-reliant.
·However, it also made me appreciate the expertise and example of other friends and colleagues.
·It made me engage in huge amounts of a priori reasoning, reflection, planning and practice, in the absence of any prescribed, agreed approaches or even content.
·My own predispositions and interests were encouraged by the circumstances, so that these could be used as resources: for example, playing the guitar, bird-spotting, doing sports, finding links between subjects, being restless in focus.
·I had to learn a lot very quickly, and learn by making mistakes as well. It was a true example of that hackneyed “steep learning curve”. The second year bore no comparison to the first in order of difficulty.
·The experience, not that I knew it at the time, helped equip me with the intellectual and practical tools and knowledge to move on to further challenges in curriculum design, pedagogical philosophy and practice, interpersonal management and other areas.
Descriptions of the immersive experience
Serious
Alarming
Worrying
Unsettling
Humbling
Focusing
Preoccupying
Exciting
Developmental
Empowering
Self-affirming
Emotional
Enjoyable
These and other descriptive elements could probably be mapped on to some kind of graph to indicate the clear progression that occurred from day one until the end of the school year. As the list shows, things got better as we went along!
Principles and lessons to be drawn
·There is nothing like the pressure of real life to focus the mind, body and heart.
·It would have been more efficient if there had been some formalised procedures to share and discuss the experience as it occurred, so as to get some cross-pollination and also to make things more richly creative.
·The hardest times were also those when I was “loneliest” (aahh, diddums). I don’t think this helped my effectiveness, either. Some mentoring or similar back-up would have made me better quicker.
·For me, the sheer variety of the work was a big positive component.
·The feeling of actually having an impact on something (in this case, the progress of the pupils) was a good motivator.
·The opportunity for creativity (“owt ‘e wants” in this case, as well as those other undefined bits of the curriculum) had great appeal.
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