The closure of schools as a result of Covid 19 has led to many parents and carers having to take a greater role in their children’s education. Dr Jane Andrews, Associate Professor (Education) at UWE discusses a selection of published research articles which explore different aspects of learning at home for children in early years and primary education. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The arrival of Covid 19 has meant that home schooling or learning at home has been much discussed and there has been a sharing of ideas and experiences on social media and in news stories. The stories have ranged from the serious, such as a consideration of the impact on children\u2019s learning given different levels of parental time and access to resources, to the light-hearted, such as observations from parents or carers announcing \u201cwe\u2019re having an INSET day today\u201d. It is interesting to note that in his message to the French people about a partial return to normal living from 11th<\/sup> May, the French President, Emmanuel Macron<\/a>, stated that the opening of nurseries and schools would be a priority. His rationale is a concern for children who do not have access to digital resources to continue their education at home who will be falling behind in their learning. The focus in France on children and their education at this time could lead us to pose questions such as: <\/p>\n\n\n\n No doubt there are many other questions besides these. However, long before this period of schools\u2019 partial closure and children being given activities to do online or worksheets to complete at home, educational researchers have been exploring the roles of parents or carers in their children\u2019s learning. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The purpose of this blog post is to provide a brief review and discussion of a selection of published research articles which address different dimensions of learning at home. The articles all refer to children in early years and primary education. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The full details of each article are given at the end of the blog post. I look forward to hearing your thoughts on these articles in the comments section below this blog post and please share any articles or blog posts which have caught your attention at this time. You might wish to share your thoughts or research which looks at secondary age pupils and their learning out of school. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Learning with\nteachers or learning with parents and carers – same or different? <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n In an article from 1998 Greenhough and Hughes reported on\nhow parents or carers and teachers approached the task of listening to young\nchildren read (the children were aged between 5 and 7). Distinctive differences\nwere noted between parents\u2019 or carers\u2019 and teachers\u2019 ways of engaging with\nchildren as they read. The researchers\nwere careful not to judge which strategies were more effective but, rather,\nthey teased out patterns of interaction evident in the transcripts of teachers\nand parents or carers talking to their children during reading. These patterns\nwere possibly surprising. Parents or carers tended to focus their talk on\nhelping children with decoding the words in the text. Teachers, on the other\nhand, used more \u201cconversing\u201d, a term used by the researchers to describe\ntalking about the text as a whole, including linking the text with children\u2019s\nown experiences. These different strategies might go against what we might\nexpect. Wouldn\u2019t we expect decoding and \u201cgetting it right\u201d to be what\u2019s done at\nschool? Might we not imagine linking reading with shared life experiences to be\nmore naturally done in the home environment? <\/p>\n\n\n\n What might this research mean? The researchers suggest that it may be useful for children\u2019s development as readers if parents or carers are supported in trying out a wider range of strategies when listening to their children read. The implication is that parents or carers would be better off not seeing themselves as \u201cbeing the teacher\u201d when listening to their child read. Instead, there are roles they can play which will be of benefit for children\u2019s reading which also fit better with their relationship with their child. Chatting about texts and linking to shared experiences (e.g. talking about pictures and asking children about them) should not be undervalued or neglected when we are considering how to develop positive skills and dispositions in reading. <\/p>\n\n\n\n One-way traffic from\nschool to home? <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The next article I want to reflect on is by Jackie Marsh from 2003 and it explores the literacy practices (e.g. reading, imaginative play, mark making) of 3 and 4 year old children at home and compares whether these literacy practices overlap with the kinds of literacy activities and texts used at school. The first part of the article discusses a rich range of activities and engagement with text at home (as reported by parents) which all tended to revolve around popular culture and media texts e.g. play stimulated by TV programmes or characters from films such as Toy Story 2. Marsh\u2019s discussion then moves onto considering the kinds of literacy activities these same children experienced when at nursery. The key difference appeared to be that the nursery was stocked with picture books which are described as \u201ca canon of well-loved texts\u201d but there were no popular culture books such as books based on Disney films or TV tie-in books. Does this difference matter? Jackie Marsh believes that it does and she suggests that children\u2019s literacy experiences could be further supported if the texts they are familiar with and love at home could be acknowledged and included in their learning at nursery. The line of argument is that all literacy practices are valuable and should be shared across the settings of home and nursery. Conversely there is a message that educators should resist following a \u201cone-way traffic\u201d model of sending nursery books home without asking about or encouraging children to share what they engage with spontaneously in their homes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The home as a\nlearning environment <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The final paper which I have been reflecting on recently\ncomes from Iram Siraj-Blatchford who is known for her large scale, longitudinal\nstudies into learning in the early years in homes and in early years settings\nand schools. The specific article I find fascinating was published in 2010 and\nexplores the impact of children\u2019s \u201chome learning environment\u201d on their later\nschool achievement. This is a complex study but some key messages shine through\nregarding which activities are seen to be most beneficial for children and\nparents or carers to engage with at home. The beneficial activities are (helpfully)\nsimple ones and are as follows:<\/p>\n\n\n\n What can we conclude?<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is interesting to note that each of these 3 articles highlights how activities engaged with at home are very valuable for children’s learning in their own right. There is a value of a style of learning at home which is not just a mirror image of (teaching and) learning at school. Clearly we are in different times at the moment with enforced closure of schools and nurseries for many children, with parents and carers finding themselves leading or guiding learning at home and structuring the daily activities. <\/p>\n\n\n\n My concluding thought is that parents and carers should not necessarily feel they have to forget how they usually engage with their children and turn home life into a form of school. There will be continuing benefits for parents and carers to engage with their children in informal activities which they all want to give time to! <\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n References<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Greenhough, P. & Hughes, M. (1998) Parents’ and\nTeachers’ Interventions in Children’s Reading in British Educational Research Journal<\/em>, 24\/4, 383-398<\/p>\n\n\n\n Marsh, J. (2003) One-way Traf\ufb01c? Connections between Literacy\nPractices at Home and in the Nursery in British\nEducational Research Journal<\/em>, 29\/3, 369-382<\/p>\n\n\n\n Siraj-Blatchford, I. (2010) Learning in the home and at school: how working class children \u2018succeed against the odds\u2019 in British Educational Research Journal, <\/em>36\/3, 463-482 <\/p>\n\n\n\n Photograph by Annie Spratt<\/a> at Unsplash<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The closure of schools as a result of Covid 19 has led to many parents and carers having to take a greater role in their children’s education. Dr Jane Andrews, Associate Professor (Education) at UWE discusses a selection of published research articles which explore different aspects of learning at home for children in early years … Continue reading “Learning at home \u2013 what has previous educational research said?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":29,"featured_media":556,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wds_primary_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,199],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-541","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category--early-education-and-learning","category-home-learning"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uwe.ac.uk\/education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uwe.ac.uk\/education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uwe.ac.uk\/education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uwe.ac.uk\/education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/29"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uwe.ac.uk\/education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=541"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uwe.ac.uk\/education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":562,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uwe.ac.uk\/education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541\/revisions\/562"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uwe.ac.uk\/education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/556"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uwe.ac.uk\/education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=541"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uwe.ac.uk\/education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=541"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uwe.ac.uk\/education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=541"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}