For my new class at my new school, each week ends with a community visit - to a local park, for example. With my mainstream head on (I can’t quite shake it off!), I wondered about the point of this. What was the purpose? How should I phrase the learning objective? What would the children get out of it? Shouldn’t we be doing something more academic; some extra maths, perhaps? Was this all just a bit of a jolly?! I’ve quickly realised that I have a lot to learn about working in special education and the needs of the children in my class and I have an open mind, so I kept these wonderings to myself.
As my first week drew to a close, our first visit loomed and on Friday afternoon, we boarded the minibus and headed for a park by the estuary in a nearby town. It was somewhere they had been before so from a new teacher’s point of view, it was a safe option. The choice had gone down well with the children too, particularly one who - it turned out - lived close to the park and was excited to show us his scout hut and by the car dealerships we would be passing. He’s something of a ringleader in the class too, so his excitement and approval proved infectious.
It’s a good, modern park with plenty of up-to-date equipment - no tired and rusting swings, seesaws and roundabouts, but a zip-wire and all sorts of climbing apparatus and swinging and spinning contraptions, designed to make a middle-aged teacher like me look ridiculous! The kids were in their element.
The effects and the opportunities were remarkable. These are children who often find the classroom environment and the challenges of curriculum-learning difficult, for whom the pressures of the regular timetable have to be carefully and sensitively managed, whose stresses are frequently on show and whose relationships with each other can be strained. In the park, they relaxed as they played. Instinctively, they joined in with each other, supporting, encouraging and joking with each other, and they were happy to make fun of each other and smile and laugh together. One charming boy smiles a great deal in the classroom but says very little - usually just one-word answers to questions, and often simply, ‘Don’t know’. As he and I played together on the zip-wire, I noticed his nervousness of a gull perched on top of one of the struts and we joked about how the gull was waiting for his turn! As we confronted the challenge of a strange standing seesaw, we were able to talk more than we had done before about his interests.
From the play-park, we ventured to the water’s edge where I watched as the children attempted to skim stones then poked and dug among the pebbles and mud to find a crab-claw, a live crab and various rocks that they claimed to be fossils. It struck me that what they were doing was wonderfully childlike. Then, as we prepared to return to school, our ringleader - who sometimes has a bit of a swagger and can disregard the more difficult of his classmates - turned to probably the most difficult and, with supreme humility and kindness, said something like, ‘If you walk with me, we can keep looking for another crab-claw.’ It was a really thoughtful and lovely moment.
Back in mainstream, in my previous school, we dealt on a daily basis with the effect on children of the pressures on them, whether from home, from their friendships, from learning difficulties or from the challenge and pace of the curriculum and impending tests. The mental health of children has become a hot topic of debate in school staffrooms. With their customary enthusiasm, school leaders and teachers are taking the initiative and trying out their various ideas whilst rightly pointing out that they are untrained to address this significant dimension of teaching and learning. I remember a one-off, off-timetable day at my previous school when children were introduced to tai-chi and mindfulness activities as strategies to enhance their mental well-being. The problem was (and is) that the next day, we were all back to the normal timetable with its challenges and pressure and before long, the good intentions and ideas of that great day of well-being were just about forgotten.
Once they’ve got their heads around the risk assessment and accompanying paperwork, most teachers I know love a trip, whether it’s a one-day visit or a longer residential. Commonly, we talk of the precious moments on those trips when we saw a different side to a child or got to know each other better and relationships were enhanced. More common though are the really sad reflections at the end of another frenetic day in the classroom when we realise that there are children in our classes to whom we barely spoke all day.
The problem in mainstream schools is that these opportunities are too contrived and they are too few; above all, rules the academic curriculum, its accompanying regime of tests and the pressures it brings. Anything else is an aside, to be squeezed in if possible. The advantage for me and my class is that their well-being ranks alongside those other things - it has to because any academic learning and progress depends on it. (Surely, the same could be said for children in mainstream schools.) It isn’t as easy to take a visit like this in a mainstream school, not least because classes are bigger and supervision ratios are tighter. These opportunities are important for children though and they ought to be given greater value in schools, even if it means using that trim-trail more often, being imaginative about how to use the school field, the outdoors classroom or that patch of woody scrubland, or walking the class down to the local rec., to the beach or into the woods.
The doubts I had about the importance of our community visit are gone. The childlike scavenging in the waterside mud was the best example of mindfulness activity I have ever seen; the thoughtful kindness the boys showed each other was simply natural and it was wonderful; we all know each other better; and their playfulness was good for the soul - mine as much as theirs. I’m looking forward to our next visit.
