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Enabling children to learn about their community and the world around them is central to the EYFS and fundamental to meeting the early learning goals for ‘The world’, ‘Technology’, and ‘People and communities’.
Dr Julian Grenier, head teacher at Sheringham Nursery School and Children’s Centre in London, and a national leader of education, explains, ‘A child’s understanding of the world should widen, rather like the ripples when you drop a stone in a pond. So, from the child’s immediate and important circle of family, close relations, and key person in nursery, through to wider relationships with staff and beginning to make friends, and then getting to know about the world outside their family and nursery through learning about people and communities.’
One project that helped nurseries to promote this widening understanding of the world and introduce ideas of democracy and citizenship was the Young Children, Public Spaces and Democracy Project, or BRIC Project.
Running in England, Sweden and Italy from 2014-2017, the project aimed to increase children’s ‘democratic engagement in public spaces’ by taking groups on regular visits to the same place to encourage sustained interaction.
Nicola Wallis, a lead teacher in the project and museum educator at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, says, ‘We say children have a lot to contribute to society, but we have to walk the walk,’ she says. ‘We have to find ways they are actually able to do that, and show they have the right to participate and that we trust them in public spaces.’
AT THE MUSEUM
Following on from the BRIC Project, Ms Wallis has been involved in the Fitzwilliam Museum’s nursery-in-residence programme, a practitioner-led research project called My Nursery is at the Museum and Garden. Based on the My Primary School project developed by King’s College London, the programme involved the same nine children visiting the museum and nearby Botanic Gardens every day for a week.
Ms Wallis says, ‘The connections children were able to make between what they saw and their own lives and experiences were at a much deeper level than we expected.
‘We wanted to make sure there was a thread weaving together the whole week, so we looked at plants and caterpillars at the gardens and then paintings of plants and animals at the museum, and read The Very Hungry Caterpillaras a story we thought would be familiar to the children. They understood the links between these, but they also made some deeper links of their own.
‘At the gardens we did some circular walks, and this became a theme. Many children then connected the idea of a lifecycle in The Very Hungry Caterpillarto the circular movements, some verbally and some using drawings. One child drew pictures reflecting this, which you could see were all related from the use of similar shapes, but each day changed slightly so you could see progression through the week.’
SOCIAL BENEFITS
‘The group of children only came together for the purposes of the project,’ she adds, ‘but at the end one of the practitioners commented that they felt they had become a little family. They had all come together in a way they were unable to at nursery, and were able to build a sense of their own community.
‘If you introduce children to an unfamiliar environment properly and carefully, so they understand how it works and how to feel part of it, that can benefit them and the whole community as well. For a museum like ours which is quite traditional, the ethos and environment can be off-putting. But if two-, three- and four-year-olds are welcome, other people feel they are too. We have only had positive comments from other visitors.’
As for the practitioners, adds Ms Wallis, ‘The community element offers practitioners a great opportunity to see children in a different light’, while professionally, she adds, ‘Community projects have a lot to offer practitioners by keeping them enriched and their practice refreshed.’
UNIQUE EXPERIENCES
‘In this country we educate children very separately, away from other areas of society, but it is important that they are part of a cultural community from birth,’ adds Ms Wallis. ‘We don’t want them to be hidden away, but to be part of our audience.
‘I would never say it wouldn’t be worth reading a book or looking online, but it can be really special to look at a work of art and think that someone painted it hundreds of years ago, and now your eyes are on it. That is not the same as seeing a reproduction, and I think children understand that. There is something unique about being in a shared public space. Children gain something they simply cannot get in other ways.’
MORE INFORMATION
www.bricproject.org/bric-the-project
www.kcl.ac.uk/Cultural/-/Projects/My-Primary-School-is-at-the-Museum.aspx
www.museums.cam.ac.uk/blog/2017/11/09/my-nursery-is-at-the-museum-and-garden
