The Francis Review: a curriculum for joy 

This is the 6th in our series of posts about the review of the national curriculum – the Francis Review. Previous posts can be found here. As ever with NAEE blogs, the views expressed are not necessarily those of the Association.

In what follows I comment largely on the part of the Francis Review that focuses on the National Curriculum.  It may seem somewhat remiss of me not to also comment on the assessment review which is equally, if not more, significant.  This is largely because in recent years I have spent more time thinking about the National Curriculum than about assessment.  However, I acknowledge that no National Curriculum exists in a vacuum and much of what I say here applies to a curriculum-in-practice, which is what emerges in a school at the intersection of National Curriculum, assessment, school culture, community and campus.  So, despite this angle on the review, I hope you find what I have to say thought provoking and useful.  

Since becoming an educator 30 years ago, I have come to think ever more deeply about curriculum and its importance.  As a schoolteacher, I encountered the curriculum as something that I had to make real for my pupils, something black and white and flat, that I had to enliven with colour and texture and shape and energy.  I had to find a way for it become something real so that my students could relate to it.  In that role my relationship with the curriculum was intimate.  I felt I had to find a way to embody it.  The curriculum and I as its teacher, had to become together. When our values did not always align perfectly, this became very difficult.  As curriculum and the ideology and policy and policymakers that fed it changed, our values drifted further apart, eventually leading me to decide that I needed to take a break to think about what was happening to me in my struggle to embody a curriculum whose values were all too often not my own.  

Now as an academic in the field of Education I have a different relationship with the notion of curriculum.  I am able to step back from it and look at it as an entity apart from myself.  I teach about it, not through and via it.  I also think about it and write about it and have helped to suggest ways to adapt it to make it suit the kinds of aims that Kate Greer has written about. See Notes [i], [ii] and [iii].

Through these different phases of my relationship with Curriculum I have come to realize how very important a notion it is.  I have imbued it with all sorts of power, as I have become aware of ideas like curriculum-in-action and curriculum-as-practice, and more.  I have come to believe that curriculum has an awful lot to answer for.  For example, while curriculum is not the sole bearer of responsibility for the dread about going to school that some children feel when they get up in the morning, it certainly has a key influence there.  While curriculum is not the only force to shape our society as it is today, it certainly has a key role to play.  Is this society one which our children are excited to belong to?  Does it inspire joy and love for being in the world together?

What I would like to see from the Francis Review of the National Curriculum and Assessment for England is the child’s love for learning and the child’s excitement to know how they belong in this planet pinned to the top of every working document and colouring every suggested revision.  Does this revision consider the child’s joy at belonging in this world first and foremost?  Does this revision allow the child the freedom to take up space where they are loved and respected?

For me, the way to do this is to think of schooling as both aesthetic and affective – not merely about gathering skills and facts, but about emotionally and aesthetically relating with ideas and people.  Not merely about mastering an instrument, but about playing with sound with abandon.  I am convinced that if we did things this way, the rest would follow – whether that be change at the social systemic level that advocators for sustainability talk about or whether that be change at the individual level that advocators for wellbeing talk about.  

Imagine if every child every day was given an opportunity to show what they have learned through an art form of their choice?  What a cacophony of joy and creativity we would unleash!  

What if instead of teaching about the horror of war we talked about and marvelled at the joy of human or plant or bacterial ingenuity?  So, we got to know ourselves as wonderful, free-thinking, and ingenious, rather than monstrous, awful and always under threat? 

There are many more of these kinds of ‘what if’ questions I would like to pose.  And of course, I know that skills matter if we are to achieve the potential of our ingenuity.  I also accept that we need to be informed about the difficult and sad parts of what it means to be human in this world.  But I wonder if we start all of that too early, what the effects are?  What would happen if we chose to save our childhoods for joy?  

By now, I bet you are wondering what all of this has to do with the business of the National Association of Environmental Education and the Francis revie.  Well, I was recently reminded about the work of James Lovelock and his collaborator Dian Hitchcock (someone whose story has been overlooked – but that is a tale for another time [Note 4].   Encountering this work again led me to wondering what would happen if we were to make Gaia Theory the filter through which we pass all the policy we make about what we teach and how we are in schools?  If we start with a child’s (and teacher’s) place in Gaia, and their tender, germinal love of it, then the rest will surely fall into place.  If we stop treating children (and teachers) like aliens to the curriculum, and start building the curriculum around them and their creativity, then we cannot fail to support them to become (response-)able for their niche in Gaia:  and what better chance can they (and we) have than that?

For some stepping stones towards such a re-imagined approach that I would like see here:

1. NAEE wrote reports on how the 2014 Curriculum could be used in schools in both Primary and Secondary phases
2. SOS-UK and Teach the Future have done some suggested revisions of the English National Curriculum to show how minor amendments can lead to significant impacts on the inclusion biodiversity and climate change in schools
3. The Ministry of Eco Education provides a range of resources for schools to use  
4. Global Action Plan describes this resource as a conversation starter and I think you will likely agree if you have not seen it yet
5. The Met Office also produces resources on climate education.

I was involved with the first two of these but the others have come to my attention via LinkedIn or other connections.  I highly recommend them all, and there are so many more options out there and to borrow a phrase from Arturo Escobar ‘in a world in which all worlds fit’ you can choose what fits you best.

I hope you make time to add your voice to the Francis Review as soon as this is possible.  

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Elsa Lee is an academic research and educator who works on the interplays between education and the environment.  She is the executive editor of the NAEE journal, Environmental Education, and can be contacted at: elsa.lee@aru.ac.uk

Note 1 https://naee.org.uk/latest-report-from-naee

Note 2 https://www.teachthefuture.uk/tracked-changes-project

Note 3 https://naee.org.uk/track-changing-the-curriculum

Note 4 https://guardianbookshop.com/the-many-lives-of-james-lovelock-9781805302872