Events Archive

'Making the Parts Whole' Madeley Nursery 2019This session will explore the concept of ‘languages of evaluation’ – the idea that there are many different ways of understanding and conducting evaluation, and not just evaluation as ‘performance management’, a language that is very dominant today.
In particular, we will consider what language of evaluation can do justice to a complex and distinct pedagogical project, for example, that of the municipal schools of Reggio Emilia or many of the Children’s Centres in England, in a way that embodies the value of participatory democracy, and supports researchful education.
Peter Moss, from UCL Institute of Education, will share some of his preliminary thinking about this challenge; while Louise Lowings, from Madeley Nursery School, will share some examples from current practice that have evolved from a two year international research project in early childhood centres.
There will be time for questions and discussion about this vital subject.

Documentation as a tool for assessment/evaluation gives us an extremely strong 'antibody' to a proliferation of assessment/evaluation tools which are more and more anonymous, decontextualised and only apparently objective and democratic.

Carla Rinaldi, President of Reggio Children Foundation

This online session is for Sightlines Initiative Network members and settings to reconnect, share journeys, and current planning in this ongoing time of global health crisis.  

What a strange time this has been and is!  

There have been so many challenges to the early years sector both financial and emotional big decisions had to be made. Was it safe to open? How could we keep safe but also still be here at the end of all this? How could we support our children at home?  How could we stay connected? 

Log in first in order to register - see 'Community Login' at the left of the webpage.

In this session we will considering our ideas of play – what is it? what is it for? who determines this? – to focus on playfulness. The basis for this will be an exploration of children’s naturally playful learning and how this compares with adults’ constructs about play.

Adults who begin by closely considering children’s feelings associated with playfulness are far better placed to be insightful in their provision of dynamic learning environments.

We will

• look at how we can foster playfulness and creativity through our relationships and ways of being with children
• explore playful possibilities within the learning environments we create, and
• discuss the value of developing our own playfulness to work in reciprocal, playful ways with children.

This seminar is organised in collaboration with House of Imagination, of which our guest presenter Dr. Karen McInnes is an associate.

Dr Karen McInnes has a background in working with children as a speech and language therapist, early years teacher, play therapist. Her PhD focused on play and playfulness in young children, and she continues to research, write and present on play and playfulness.

Our profession needs to be researchful, and connected with its libraries of evolving thinking, research and knowledge.

The last 33 years or so (in the UK), exemplify the blank slate model of teacher and educator development.
The trouble started in 1987. In the years before the (UK) Education Act of 1987, by and large, teachers did their own thinking, turning to a variety of sources to enrich their understanding and help them make a case for their principled pedagogical decisions. But soon after the arrival of the DES National Curriculum document, the first signs of professional amnesia appeared in our midst. Slowly but surely teachers began to act as if professional knowledge were only to be found in glossy ring folders, training packs and videos and all manner of other pronouncements from politically-led authorities.

[from Mary Jane Drummond, Professional Amnesia, Refocus Journal 2008]

Transformative change requires attention to pedagogical as well as structural principles….we have the good fortune, in evolving pedagogical principles and educational action, of a rich tradition of educational thought and experience. We must take full advantage of the invaluable cultural heritage represented by the thought and work of past pedagogues such as Froebel, Dewey, McMillan, Isaacs, Freinet, Freire and Malaguzzi.
Drawing on these cultural reserves, as well as the intelligence and expertise of today’s practitioners, a pedagogical transformation can be embarked upon, turning away from a culture of targets [and] measurement.

[from Peter Moss, Transforming Early Childhood in England 2020]

In this session we will be reflecting on the contributions of some of the recent giants of educational thinking so that we can better articulate and explain the beliefs and understandings that can and ought to underpin our practice. We will examine a range of perspectives developed through the last century, so that we can draw on these in the choices we make for children and to tell a better story about the nature of education, based on the way young children learn rather than on the target-driven instincts of politics.

We will provide participants with further reading and references, to continue your encounters ....

A one-hour online session to introduce the principles of 'Learning to Learn in Nature'. It is for all early years and primary educators who want to engage in creating investigative learning opportunities and develop thier reflective. creative pedagogy.

Learning to Learn in Nature is about young children learning in wild places, and educators learning with them. It is about being in connection with nature and bringing that connection back to the classroom. But it is also about something more, something that is seen very clearly when children are given the freedom to explore the wild outdoors on their own terms, with daring and imagination.

It is about learning as a process of continuous enquiry: an expression of insatiable fascination with the world, in which children learn together and individually, and educators and children work together to discover and make meaning. School life is part of human life, connected to its cycles, desires, dreams, wonderings. Educators best meet the interests of children when fundamental human values inform and shape their pedagogical practice.

During October 2020 - March 2021 we will be offerring a five-session online course - this September session will introduce the contents.

Clay Forest 2018: House of Imagination

An invitation to explore an education of co-enquiry, humanity and relationship, from Directors of Sightlines Initiative, Robin Duckett and Liz Elders alongside Dr Penny Hay, Director of Research, House of Imagination, Research Fellow and Reader in Creative Teaching and Learning at Bath Spa University.

Our organisations are grounded in the awareness of the potentials of all children as innately creative, ready and eager to explore and make sense of the world. They have the right to expect an education which recognises that.

In the spirit of opening doorways for interest, we will be presenting examples from our portfolios which illustrate how we are working to demonstrate ‘environments of enquiry’ and how we can co-construct an education based on these principles, rather than from the dominant performance-led agenda of treating children as empty vessels to be instructed and tested.

There will be opportunities for reflection and discussion as part of the one-hour session.

A one-hour online session to introduce the principles of 'Learning to Learn in Nature'. It is for all early years and primary educators who want to engage in creating investigative learning opportunities and develop thier reflective. creative pedagogy.

Learning to Learn in Nature is about young children learning in wild places, and educators learning with them. It is about being in connection with nature and bringing that connection back to the classroom. But it is also about something more, something that is seen very clearly when children are given the freedom to explore the wild outdoors on their own terms, with daring and imagination.

It is about learning as a process of continuous enquiry: an expression of insatiable fascination with the world, in which children learn together and individually, and educators and children work together to discover and make meaning. School life is part of human life, connected to its cycles, desires, dreams, wonderings. Educators best meet the interests of children when fundamental human values inform and shape their pedagogical practice.

During September 2020 - February 2021  we will be offerring a five-session online course  - this July session will introduce the contents, and also give some ways into pleasurable holiday-time preparation.

Here is the second of our seminars on Metaphor, by Viviana Fiorentino. It is not necessary for you to have participated in the first one, but the material does follow (it is not a repeat.)

In the festive intuition of metaphors, we pack our mental goods down into tight, neat bundles, we load them as carefully as we can into the ‘metafora truck’ of languages; it drives from me to you, and then we unpack. A fundamental part of the process of metaphors is communicating and empathy: a circular process that builds the bond between each other, between us, adults, and children, between child and child, adult and adult, human being and human being. This territory is rich of possibilities, trust, open, a new ground we explore re-inventing together names of everything around.

a metaphor truck

We will explore the metaphors through the perspective of poetry and art as a way of imaging and exploring the world. Thanks to the “metaphor attitude”, we will investigate what is possible and what is impossible, how many possibilities we have as citizens to rethink the world around us for a better society.

The seminar will encourage you to put yourself in the state of creating metaphors leading to unusual, unexpected procedures that children spontaneously use. We will talk about how and what children do and of the use of metaphors as fundamental bridge between (what we believe is) the world of adulthood and the world of childhood.

This seminar is designed to inform the current Sightlines Initiative early childhood pedagogy action-research project into Visual Metaphor.

It will also be pertinent to all who are interested in the ways in which adults tune in to young children’s thinking and learning.

It is free to Sightlines Initiative subscribers. If you are not currently subscribed to our network it is easy to so do, and will enable you to register. SUBSCRIBE

Viviana Fiorentino was born and grew up in southern Italy. After achieving her Doctorate, travelled across Europe, from Switzerland to Germany, England and finally Belfast where she now lives, writing novels and poetry, teaching Italian literature, and leading creative writing workshops for cultural minorities.
In 2018, she was awarded two Italian poetry prizes. Her poems have appeared in literature blogs and international magazines. A selection of her poems is published in ‘Writing Home: the New Irish poets’. In 2019, she published a poetry collection in Italy and her first novel.
She has been involved in many different festivals, poetry readings and projects, such as the 2019. ‘Sky, you are too big’, which revolved around the themes of travelling, migration and displacement.
She is in the editorial staff of Carteggi Letterari (Italian periodical Lit magazine) with the column ‘Neither here, nor there’ and she periodically writes for the magazine TerreLibere about migration and politics.