14. Communities, Families and Schooling in Educational Research
Paper
Using Visual Narratives to Explore Community Participation and ‘Cynefin' Within the Curriculum
Michelle Brinn
Swansea University, United Kingdom
Presenting Author: Brinn, Michelle
Based upon a belief that sharing narratives and histories can help people feel ‘known’ (Evangelou et al, 2009) and engender a community of practice. This paper will present the initial stages of a research project wherein the lived experience and narrative histories of school staff are used to create a ‘provocation’ (Malaguzzi, 1993) to co-construct opportunities to embed child and family ‘stories’ into the curriculum. Focused in Welsh curricula developments but drawing on International School practice, wherein high levels of diversity are the norm, this research aims to develop a research network between an international and Welsh school to explore the potential for community participation in the curriculum.
Welsh education has recently undergone significant educational reform with the development of the new Curriculum for Wales (Welsh Government, 2022a). The Curriculum for Wales, (CfW) is designed to be a responsive and flexible curriculum based around a broad framework centered on the ‘Four Purposes’, six ‘Areas of Learning and Experience’ and the ‘Cross Curricular Skills’. Within the parameters of this framework, schools are encouraged to co-construct their own curriculum according to the needs of their community, engaging with, listening to and acting upon the voice of the community within its development. Thus, the CfW has community involvement and participation at its very heart.
Central to this aim is the concept of ‘Cynefin’. This concept has been noted by many authors as difficult to define (Adams & Beauchamp, 2022; Chapman et al, 2023) but it is closely related to the concept of place and belonging. Within the Curriculum for Wales (CfW), it is defined as
“Though often translated as ‘habitat’, cynefin is not just a place in a physical or geographical sense: it is the historic, cultural and social place which has shaped and continues to shape the community which inhabits it” (Welsh Government, 2022).
Each school is encouraged to embrace and respond to their unique ‘cynefin’, both within the co-construction of their curriculum. Consequently, when considered in conjunction a long-standing commitment to children’s rights by the Welsh Government (2021), the development of the Curriculum for Wales (CfW) (2022) may be a perfect opportunity for Wales to embed participative rights and community involvement in education.
Nevertheless, this aim may be dependent on a deep understanding of each community and the recognition that participation depends on giving children and communities Space, Voice, Audience and Influence (Lundy, 2007). There is a possibility that a school’s interpretation of ‘cynefin’ could be dictated by dominant views of what it means to be Welsh, based on only a certain number of ‘histories’. However, this is not the agenda of the Welsh Government, which wants to emphasise the diverse histories within Welsh communities (Welsh Government 2022b, Williams, 2020). Furthermore, it necessitates an open mind to how children and communities view ‘cynefin’, which can be unexpected (Chapman et al, 2023) Finally, it requires a commitment to reflection, responsiveness and ongoing curricula change. Previous teaching experience indicates that the exploration of children’s and family narratives may satisfy only three out of Lundy’s four categories, in that, children may be given space, voice and an audience with their stories, but the potential to influence pedagogy may not be fully embedded within curricula design, a point supported by (Murphy et al, 2022). As an essential element of CfW, embedding responsiveness within the curricula is crucial, but may require additional scaffolding for it to become a reality.
Following a successful pilot study, wherein visual timelines were used to engender a shared ‘cynefin’ within the teaching staff of a climbing gym, the paper will explore the extension of this project into school settings.
Methodology, Methods, Research Instruments or Sources UsedInfluenced by Hedegaard’s (2012) supposition that an individual’s ‘motives and competencies’ (p.130) may provoke change in the specific plane of interaction, this research uses a participatory action research approach (Genat, 2009). The researcher will collaborate with educational practitioners to explore possibilities for engaging with, and responding to, the lived experience of children and their families. The methodology draws on previous experience of developing successful networks to enhance practice within international schools, wherein community diversity is high (Hayden, 2006). Using case study approach (Denscombe, 2021) two primary schools- a British International school and a Welsh Primary School, will take part in the study. Within Phase 1, each school will engage with the research separately. After Phase 1 is complete, the schools will work together within a shared research community to share good practice.
This project will be developed over multiple phases across several years. The first phase will be presented within this paper. Based upon a social constructivist approach to meaning making (Wells 1986, Wertsch, 1985), the intention is to explore with practitioners their own concepts of cynefin and community, prior to investigating potential methods for use with children, families and communities. The approach is based on using an adult led (in this case, researcher led) ‘provocation’ (Magaluzzi, 1993) as a catalyst for further thought. Within Phase 1, the researcher will use a visual and narrative method - that of an individually created timeline - to explore with staff their personal journeys into the education and this particular school. By responding to participants unique narratives, the potential for a shared narrative and sense of cynefin and community will be explored. The sharing of personal narratives takes place in three distinct, carefully scaffolded stages, which maximise the potential for sustained shared thinking (Siraj-Blatchford et al, 2008) with the aim of enhancing relationships and creating a shared sense of cynefin.
At the end of the ‘provocation’, participants will reflect on the process and its impact on relationships within the school community through a semi structured interview. This will be analysed using Reflective Thematic Analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2022) and will form the basis for reflecting on the ‘theory’s adequacy’ (Cole, 1996).
Once this phase is complete, further participatory action research will be undertaken with practitioners, to co-construct opportunities to embed child and family ‘stories’ into the curriculum. This stage will be the basis of further papers.
Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or FindingsFinal conclusions will be presented at the conference. However, as the research is ongoing, at the point of abstract submission initial expectations will be outlined. Within the pilot study, three stages were used to share narrative timelines with the teaching staff of a climbing gym. First, visual timelines outlining each individual journey into teaching climbing were produced. These were then shared with other members of staff before a final community timeline was produced, highlighting shared values and experiences drawn from each individual story. Initial findings from this pilot study indicated the potential of this process to enhance participant understanding of their own values and history in relation to the community, increase their feeling of being ‘known’ (Evangelou et al, 2009), build relationships with others within that community and create a shared sense of ‘cynefin’. These findings are cautious due to the small sample size within the pilot study but supported the initial motivation, that an individual’s ‘motives and competencies’ (Hedegaard, 2012, p.130) may provoke change in the specific plane of interaction and prompted the desire to expand the research into school settings. It is hoped that expanding the research will enhance and refine the researcher’s and participant’s understanding of engaging with and responding to the multiplicity of narratives within any community and, through dialogue and co-construction between Welsh and International School educators, provoke further thought on methodologies with which to do so.
ReferencesBraun, V. & Clarke, V. (2022). Thematic Analysis. A practical guide. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Chapman, S., Ellis, R.,Beauchamp,G., Sheriff,L., Stacey,D., Waters-Davies,J., Lewis,A., Jones, C., Griffiths, M., Chapman, S., Wallis,R., Sheen, E., Crick, T., Lewis, H., French, G. & Atherton, S. (2023) ‘My picture is not in Wales’: pupils’ perceptions of cynefin (Belonging) in primary school curriculum development in Wales, Education 3-13, 51:8, 1214-1228, DOI: 10.1080/03004279.2023.2229861
Cole, M., 1996. Cultural psychology: a once and future discipline. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap/Harvard University Press.
Genat, B., 2009. Building emergent situated knowledges in participatory action research. Action Research, 7(1), pp.101–115.
Denscombe, M. (2021). The good research guide: For small-scale social research projects. McGraw-Hill Education (UK).
Evangelou, M.; Sylva K.; Kyriacou, M.; Wild, M. and Glenny, G., 2009. Early years learning and development literature review. London: DCSF (Research Report DCSFRR176).
Hayden, M., 2006. Introduction to international education. London: Sage.
Hedegaard, M. (2012) Analysing children's learning and development in everyday settings from a cultural-historical wholeness approach. Mind, Culture and Activity, 19(2), pp.127- 138.
Lundy, L. (2007) ‘Voice’ is not enough: conceptualising Article 12 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. British Educational Research Journal 33(6): 927-942.
Malaguzzi, L., (1993) The Hundred Languages of children, Norwood, NJ: Albex.
Murphy, A., Tyrie, J., Waters-Davies, J., Chicken, S., & Clement, J. (2022). Foundation Phase teachers' understandings and enactment of participation in school settings in Wales. Inclusive Pedagogies for Early Childhood Education: Respecting and Responding to Differences in Learning, 111.
Siraj-Blatchford, I.; Taggart, B.; Sylva, K.; Sammons, P. and Melhuish, E., 2008. Towards the transformation of practice in early childhood education: the effective provision of pre-school education (EPPE) project. Cambridge Journal of Education, 38, pp.23-36.
Wells, G. (1986). The meaning makers; children learning language and using language to learn. London: Hodder and Stoughton.
Welsh Government (2021) Raising Awareness of Childrens Rights: Your rights, your voice, your Wales Children’s Rights Wales https://www.gov.wales/sites/default/files/publications/2021-11/raising-awareness-of-childrens-rights.pdf
Welsh Government (2022,a), Curriculum for Wales Education Wales https://hwb.gov.wales/curriculum-for-wales
Welsh Government (2022,b) Annual report on implementation of the recommendations from the Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic Communities, Contributions and Cynefin in the New Curriculum Working Group report. Welsh Government https://www.gov.wales/sites/default/files/pdf-versions/2022/6/3/1655886053/annual-report-implementation-recommendations-black-asian-and-minority-ethnic-communities.pdf
Wertsch, J. (1985) Vygotsky and the social formation of mind. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
14. Communities, Families and Schooling in Educational Research
Paper
Social Educational Contract and Community Educational Pacts: Formats and Impact Indicators in the Context of Italian Schools
Giuseppina Rita Jose Mangione, Stefania Chipa, Rudi Bartolini, Chiara Zanoccoli
INDIRE, Italy
Presenting Author: Mangione, Giuseppina Rita Jose
UNESCO (2021) advocates for the need for a new educational contract that calls on civil society to become capital serving the school, as an indispensable tool to counter educational poverty and school dropout. Already in 1972, the UNESCO report Learning to be: the world of education today and tomorrow, identified in the concepts of lifelong education (éducation permanente) and educational city (cité éducative) (Aglieri and Locatelli, 2022; Cannella and Mangione, 2023) the basis of a new pedagogy of the contract whose intention was to collaborate all the parties involved in order to facilitate a responsible and autonomous appropriation of knowledge. This new social contract must strengthen education as a public commitment and common good, therefore make use of “pedagogical approaches that also cultivate the values and principles of interdependence and solidarity” and that connect “the assumptions of students” with wider systems, processes, and experiences, beyond their personal experiences" (UNESCO, 2021, pg. 54). In Italy, the social contract takes the form of “Community or territorial education Pacts” tools to realize the social contract and to establish proximity alliances between the school and its community. The alliances between school and territory are “privileged” mechanisms to address social and educational fragility and inequalities (Nast and Blokland, 2013; Valli et al., 2018) and can be attributed to different Constructs:
Construct 1. School as a stronghold of “social justice and cultural identity” also defined in terms of “reconciliation”. The school is understood as a “social glue”, as a space for the participation of the local community, as a consolidation of identity to promote actions that strengthen belonging to a community.
Construct 2. School as an expanded training system in which the territory is a “social artifact” in which to graft the space of educational experience (De Bartolomeis, 2018; Cerini, 2020).
Construct 3. School as an amplifier of “Societal Challenges” (Vranken, 2015), single actions oriented towards the generation of value that become participated territorial pacts and, generative of community (Equitable, Ethical, Sustainable)
Construct 4. School as a “regenerator of the territory” outpost for maintenance strategies in view of a community school. The evolutionary scenarios shift attention from the building heritage to the areas of relevance, to the spaces of proximity and context (Chipa et al, 2023)
Construct 5. School that feeds the “pedagogy of common action” (Puig, 2022) and overcoming its own isolation, multiplies educational experiences making them sustainable through attention to the partnership of a new “local educational ecosystem”.
INDIRE, through the realization of the National Observatory on Educational Pacts, has been analyzing this strategic tool for over a year and promotes moments of training and information to support schools and communities (Bartolini et al., 2022). In this contribution, through a pilot case in the territory of the city of Verona, the constituent elements of an educational pact will be presented, and some experiences will be re-read in the light of impact indicators built starting from the dimensions considered priority for a school that opens up and takes care of its community. The proposed case has the peculiarity of being born from the clear awareness on the part of the administration of the Municipality of Verona that the territorial problems concern the entire community and must be addressed in a synergistic way to try to find adequate and effective solutions. Thus, an alliance is structured at several levels: between the Municipality and other institutional actors (territorial pact); between the school institutes of the city of Verona and the institutions of the neighborhoods to which each belongs. The community educational pact is part of a systemic action on a large scale that embraces an entire territory.
Methodology, Methods, Research Instruments or Sources Used
The need to investigate and describe the proximity alliances built through Educational Pacts led the INDIRE research group to identify a pilot context and define an interpretive qualitative research path aimed at understanding the forms that the pacts take in the territories. In a first phase, the researchers prepared a project format of the Pact to be compiled by the involved school realities: 12 Comprehensive Institutes, 80 teachers, and 12 school managers have benefited from a training course as a guide to the drafting of Pacts for proximity alliances. The collected data are subjected to content analysis, identifying a series of essential categories for the constitution of the pacts: educational visions of a community ecosystem (Teneggi, 2020); needs and objectives that the pact aims to satisfy; actors and roles within the pacts with attention to the interprofessionalism provided by the alliance (Cannella, Mangione 2023); types of educational spaces used (classrooms extended to the territory, unconventional indoor and outdoor spaces, etc.) and teaching situations provided therein.
Subsequently, to the drafting and sharing of the Pacts, it is proposed to the schools and the staff in training the monthly compilation of a documentation notebook (logbook) to return, from an educational point of view, the experiences put into practice.
The logbooks are analyzed through a coding process based on categories considered as priorities for the territory by the same actors signatories of the pact: students who participate in the expansion of training activities; families who participate in training activities; opening of schools in the afternoon; spaces used in the afternoon.
The further development of categories and subcategories is developed deductively, selecting in the texts significant units of description (Mortari, 2010, p. 50): the resulting system of categories and subcategories is a codebook that guides the reading of the texts. Only by way of example, regarding the analysis of the Pacts, the subcategories of the ‘educational vision’ category will be developed directly based on the data, combining the development of categories deductively (without data) and inductively (with empirical data). For content analysis, the QCAmap software will be used, an open-access web application for systematic text analysis in scientific projects based on qualitative content analysis techniques (Mayring, 2022).
These instruments allow collecting information about educational design through the Pact and understanding the impact with respect to some priority dimensions for the community, guiding its future developments.
Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or FindingsThe Educational Pact can be the tool used by educating communities to create equitable and inclusive education systems that are participatory and the result of social responsibility. The research conducted both nationally and in the context of intervention in the Veneto region aims to validate the Educational Pacts as a reification of a social educational contract (UNESCO, 2023) that allows for a new vision of a school capable of reading the needs of the educating community. In particular, the research will allow understanding the level of complexity of the Pacts constituted in the proximity alliances of the schools of the Municipality of Verona and how the realized Educational Pacts will be able to respond to the identified priorities: increase in the number of students who participate in the expansion of training activities; increase in the number of families participating in training activities; increase in the number of school opening hours in the afternoon; 4) increase in the number of spaces used. The reading made through the result indicators will allow monitoring the implementation of the Proximity Pacts and understanding through longitudinal research the impacts in the medium and long term. The study will also allow us to return different forms of “network management” between the school and the actors of the proximal alliance.
The interpretive research on the pilot case will not only allow validating an “experimental model” of a community educational pact to be promoted on a large scale through coordinated training and information actions within the National Observatory on Educational Pacts but also dialogue with UNESCO proposing the ways in which Italy is able to realize forms of social educational contract for community schools.
ReferencesBartolini R., De Santis F., Tancredi A. (2020), Analisi del contesto italiano. Piccole scuole: dimensioni e tipologie. In: Mangione G.R.J, Cannella G., Parigi L., Bartolini R. (a cura di) Comunità di memoria, comunità di futuro. Il valore della piccola scuola. Roma: Carocci. 77-93.
Cannella, G., Chipa, S., & Mangione, G. R. J. (2021). Il Valore del Patto educativo di Comunità. Una ricerca interpretativa nei territori delle piccole scuole. GRJ Mangione, G. Cannella e F. De Santis (a cura di), Piccole scuole, scuole di prossimità. Dimensioni, Strumenti e Percorsi emergenti. I Quaderni della Ricerca, (59), 23-47.
Chipa S., Mangione G. R. J., Greco, S., Orlandini, L., Rosa A. (a cura di), 2022, La scuola di prossimità. Dimensioni, geografie e strumenti di un rinnovato scenario educativo, Brescia: Schole' – Morcelliana. ISBN 978-88-284-0513-9
De Bartolomeis, F. (2018), Fare scuola fuori della scuola. Roma: Aracne Editrice.
Labsus-INDIRE, Le scuole da beni pubblici a beni comuni. Rapporto Labsus 2022 sull'amministazione condivisa dell'educazione, Labsus, ISBN 979-12-210-3123-2 (https://www.labsus.org/rapportolabsus-2022/)
Locatelli, R. (2023). Renewing the social contract for education: Governing education as a common good. PROSPECTS: Comparative Journal of Curriculum, Learning, and Assessment.Springer, 1-7.
Mangione, G.R.J., Cannella, G., Chipa, S. (2022), Il ruolo dei terzi spazi culturali nei patti educativi territoriali. Verso una pedagogia della riconciliazione nei territori delle piccole scuole. Milano: Franco Angeli, in press
Mayring, P. (2022). Evidenztriangulation und Mixed Methods in der Gesundheitsforschung. In Gesundheitswissenschaften (pp. 137-145). Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Teneggi, G. (2020), Cooperazione. In: Cersosimo D., Donzelli C. (a cura di) Manifesto per riabitare l’Italia. Roma: Donzelli Editore. 103-107.
Toukan, E. (2023). A new social contract for education: Advancing a paradigm of relational interconnectedness. Education Research and Foresight Working Paper 31. UNESCO.
UNESCO (2021). Reimagining our futures together: A new social contract for education. Report from the International Commission on the Futures of Education. Paris, UNESCO.
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