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uploaded 14th February 2007


what children learn about work
OPENING DOORS

Bill Law

This article announces an update of Opening Doors, now available, for the cost of postage, from the Careers Research and Advisory Centre.  The resource pack sets out a key-stage one and two ideas-for-action in enabling career-related learning among 5-10 year-olds.

But it is not an argument for careers education for young children.  Far from it.  Career-related learning has more in common with playing than with working out what you need to do to get a job.  That comes later.  But, Bill here argues, the usefulness of the latter depends on the engagement of the former. 

The article points to three features of the games we play – all useful to career-related learning.  There are games:

  • that carry invitations, challenges and surprises;
  • that engage story-telling, dialogue and listening; and
  • that serve both personal well-being and group membership.

Opening Doors has examples of all three kinds of activity.  Primary school educators will find it useful.  But, Bill also argues, so will careers workers in other sectors.  It is for people who can see the possibilities for opening up links between primary and post-primary educators - in local networks of help.

 

 

 

 

 

go straight to how to get your copy of Opening Doors

Much of childhood is about adulthood.  To paraphrase what you already know - ‘the child begets the adult’.  And much of what your childhood has taught you, you learned at play.

work, talk and play.  Along with our closest species-cousins, we play games which rehearse adult behaviour.  Most basically, chimpanzee games involve variations on grooming, provoking and chasing.  You may not be too surprised to learn that there are equivalences between jungle games and playground games.  The invitations, challenges and surprises they bring help to set us and our chimp-cousins up for life.  They equip us to find acceptance in the group, and to maintain our own well-being - ultimately they equip us to survive.  The word ‘skills’ barely does justice to the learning that the chimps and we gain from that kind of hanging-out and running-about fun.

We may owe ‘doctors and nurses’ to our other cousins, the bonobos - who are into love, not war.  I'm grateful for the the variations that I – and, maybe, you - still remember.  No place to go into detail here: but, in general, games like this can only be played through some combination of story-telling, dialogue and listening.  And, so, they bring a deeper and wider range of learning – no less essential to our membership of the group and no less necessary to our well-being.  The word ‘skills’ comes nowhere near these subtle levels of learning.

'you may not be too surprised to learn that there are equivalences between jungle games and playground games'

fun with patterns.  In our nature, things that have served us well feel good – we enjoy them.  And so, in finding out about adulthood, children enjoy playing at work.  They are driven by a useful curiosity about what ‘grown-ups’ do.  From the toddler years they assemble mind maps, form images, and tell anyone who will listen their stories - all about what seems to them to be going on in grown-up lives. 

The drive is strong.  Strong enough, it seems, that when they stumble over gaps in recounting what they know, children are troubled.  Troubled enough that they fill in the account with what they imagine must be going on out there.  Completing the pattern feels good. 

Careers workers have, in the past, characterised this tendency to make things up as ‘fantasy’.   But there’s nothing wrong with fantasy.  Because our children's ability to foresee things, anticipate things and change things depends on that kind filling-in-the-gaps imagination.  Fantasies about work are well worth talking over with our children: they need us to help them put that imagination to good use, and we need them to tell us what ideas they are working with. 

'our children's ability to foresee things, anticipate things and change things depends on fantasy - their filling-in-the-gaps imagination'

losing touch.  But it is getting harder to stay in touch, even with our primary-age youngsters. 

There is a history to consider. Any complete history of childhood will have accounts of how children learn about work.  Work-talk and work-play have been - over centuries and as a matter of course – part of family, village, neighbourhood and community life.   In varying ways, children have watched work, used work stuff as playthings, pretended to be at work, questioned people about work, shared in work, been sent to work, been taken to work.  Images, experiences and talk of work was part of any upbringing. 

But for reasons that you don’t need me to spell out, we don’t do it so much now.  If any of this is to happen now it requires special arrangements (‘special’ in the sense of ‘unusual’).  Over many decades, and for good and not-so-good reasons, we have progressively separated children from working life.  It’s hard for them to know much about what it feels like to hold down a job-of-work.  No wonder the preferred career option of some of our eight year-olds is ‘celebrity’.  How would they know any different?

The working world has become a well-kept secret.  It is not easy for us even to find out what kinds of fantasies our kids are working with.

'we have progressively separated children from working life... no wonder the preferred career option of some of our eight year-olds is "celebrity"... the working world has become a well-kept secret'

new games.  A child’s drive to make sense of what she or he sees and hears will not be thwarted.  Our imaginative and pattern-seeking young will go on making the best sense they can - of whatever they can find.  It is a species-deep drive - to know what’s going on, and to get control of it.

And now, finding-out through play is changing.  The internet and Big Brother are like games – they tell of invitations, challenges and surprises.  But they do that in altogether more compelling ways - even than ‘doctors and nurses’.  And story-telling, dialogue and listening are as likely to be based on what the iPod and the camera-phone can convey, than on what adult acquaintances can show and tell. 

And so primary-school playgrounds are changing - with new forms of hanging-out and running-about.  And new levels of gossip, bullying and alliances. All those mind maps, images and stories are increasingly formed around what the media portray.  This is becoming the new plaything for learning.

And it does a whole-lot less than justice to the realities of working life.  And to our children’s right to learn about it.  So, if our families are no longer in a position to help our children, then our schools must.  And, the media being as they now are, waiting until children get to secondary school is waiting too long.  Because if, by then, nobody has helped them to find out what’s going, they will have already filled in the gaps for themselves.

'if families can't help, then schools must.... and waiting until children get to secondary school is waiting too long... because, by then,they will already filled in the gaps for themselves'

habits of mind.  The ability to fantasise is not a weakness, it is a strength.  We don’t try to ‘school’ it out of children, we enable them creatively to use it.  Thinking fantastic thoughts is the beginning of imagining alternatives to the way things are. We all need all of our children to be able to do that.  Now more than ever.

The enemy of career development is not fantasy, the enemy is habits-of-mind.  When, in the history of childhood, the lives of the parents predicted the lives of their children, then the children could learn about the working world in family and community.  But, as working life becomes more varied, and less predictable, those close-up sources of help become less useful.  And child-formed habits-of-mind become more dangerous.

That is how careers work first emerged. It is a consequence of that long and variable transition from predictability to unpredictability in working life.  The faster the change, the more help families need with their children. And a core concept in careers work is, therefore, change-of-mind.  Whatever our students and clients are thinking they might do when they come to us, we want them to leave with the idea that they could do something else.  If that doesn’t happen we allow their life chances to be hedged-in by early learning.

And if habits-of-mind concerning working life are to take a grip on young people, that hold will have tightened long before they move on to secondary school. 

Stereotypes are an example.  Stereotypes are about who is in a position to do what.  They cause people to believe that some work is

‘not for me’,

or

‘not for the-likes-of-us’,

or would put me where

‘I wouldn’t feel right’. 

These are habits-of-mind – they are pervasive, culturally acquired, and formed early in life.  Stereotypes are negations of career.

Careers work is not to compel change-of-mind; it is to make change-of-mind a possibility.  Family and neighbourhood upbringing still feature in children’s life chances.  Media and peer pressures increasingly do so.  And gaps in knowledge of work will always be filled by seeking minds.  It is not for careers work to dismiss it; it is to say that all this is a starting-point, not an end-point.  It embarks a child on process of working out what to hold onto, and what to let go.  Postponing any kind of start of that process until the secondary years is to allow habits-of mind to harden - and to hedge-in life chances.

'the enemy of career development is not fantasy, it is habits-of-mind... stereotypes are habits-of-mind – and negations of career'

how long is life-long?  There are important policy links here.
The careers-work field has been canvassing for a policy on life-long careers work for some time. And key government-policy documents,
Youth Matters and Next Steps, contain the seeds of strategy for establishing it.  They do so by inviting schools-and colleges and Connexions companies into partnerships with neighbourhood networks for child care. 

How will that help establish life-long careers work? The causes and their probable effects are not hard to trace. Primary-school teachers understand that the more interest we take in our children’s well-being, as a part of their own communities, then the more likely it is that families and their offspring will turn to us for help all kinds of help.  And once they have turned to us with a good result, they will return to us, and again – life long. 

A policy is only a policy; becoming part of a local network of accessible and useful help is is a strategy. But if any momentum is to be made for assigning to schools and colleges that kind of credibility, we will need to start in the primary years. 

Establishing that level of demand and trust for careers work at local level will set up a life-long strategy. And it will have a dynamics all of its own – with or without policy support. Indeed, the action will become a cause of policy, rather than an effect. Policy will not be able to ignore that kind of demand.

What we do about that now can manifest a compelling case for life-long access to the services we offer. But it all depends on making a start in the toddler years.

'policy is policy... becoming part of a local network of help is strategy... and we we need to start in the primary years' 

networks.  The whole Youth Matters and Next Steps process can radically reposition careers work. What goes on in these local networks will hinge on how children’s trusts commission services.  That work will sets up networks of pre- and post-natal help, baby-care, child-support, together with youth-, social- and guidance- services. Some will be familiar, some new. Many will be voluntary.  All will need to be seen as accessible, credible and useful to families - in their neighbourhood communities. 

What schools and colleges do about engaging with local networks will, in any event, be essential to attaining the aims set out in Youth Matters and Next Steps. Work in key stages 1 and 2 is critical. But no less critical than the opportunities we now have to develop curriculum in key stages 3 and 4. 

Local networks are central to all of this. Networks link people and organisations and their people. They depend on people who know enough to acknowledge the contributions of other organisations and their people.  They certainly need an acknowledgement of the mutual dependence of primary and post-primary educators.  What is done in any stage in that progress depends on being understood and supported elsewhere.  And nowhere is this networked understanding of what each can do more compelling than in enabling career development.

And so Opening Doors is not just for primary-school teachers and their managers.  It is for the network.  And in particular it is for any secondary-school coordinator who can recognise the opportunity to open doors - to a partnership with feeder schools.

'nowhere is this networked understanding of what each can do more compelling than in enabling career development'

opening doors.  None of this means that we should be trying to equip six-year-olds for employability, or asking eight year-olds to come up with a career plan.  Far from it. 

Neither does it mean that teachers in key-stages one and two must become experts in career-development.  But they know, better than any, what needs to be done about playing talking, imagining and thinking for learning about work.  And so, Opening Doors points to how they can usefully adapt what they are already doing.

The 114-page spiral-bound resource-pack helps with:

  • developing classroom ideas;
  • getting colleagues, families and neighbourhoods to help;
  • helping children to make sense of what they find;
  • building progression – starting with basic learning and steadily developing from there;
  • organising the work into a programme;
  • making links between this work and mainstream subjects;
  • developing local resources;
  • pursuing useful learning outcomes;
  • enabling children to set down a words-and-pictures record of their learning;
  • engaging on-going community interest in planning the work;
  • evaluating the work and professional action-planning.

Written by Bill Law and Barbara McGowan, Opening Doors is one of the first development programmes to incorporate ideas and material now incorporated into the post-DOTS ‘coverage-processes-influences’ (CPI) framework for career learning.

Barbara and Bill are grateful to Julia Jones for updating the list of published material, and sources of further help.

'primary teachers know what needs to be done about playing talking, imagining and thinking for learning about work... this points to how they can usefully adapt what they are already doing'

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WHERE NOW?

get your copy of Opening Doors – send a cheque for £5.00, payable to ‘The Careers Research and Advisory Centre’, and enclosing a delivery address, to Julia Jones, CRAC, Sheraton House, Castle Park, Cambridge CB3 0AX

make other enquiries about Opening Doors - e-mail Julia

tell a colleague - cut and paste
www.hihohiho.com/magazine/features/cafdoors.html
and e-mail.

back to the beginning

download the CPI model underpinning this work
examine changing cultural pressures on career development
examine the LiRRiC proposals for locally developing a careers-work curriculum

have your say on 'Opening Doors' - use the Café's new feedback page

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