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I worked with Radcliffe Infant and Nursery School on a Year 2 'showcase' project for OFSTED week. The school wanted to show how it handled cross-curricular work and organised a democratic classroom which gave children some control over their learning. The class was doing a Geography project comparing two environments. Teacher Helen Clarke and I decided to compress an earlier, successful Year 1 project* into one day. In just over four hours the class would devise, plan, produce, screen and evaluate a video on a theme of their choice. Lesson 1A team of two boys and two girls - selected by the class - had worked with me to make a documentary of the previous week's trip to an environmental study centre. No one had yet seen the video.First, we asked the children to guess what would be in it, or say what should be in it. This got them used to evaluating videos and suggested that there were different options for their content. They then viewed and evaluated the tape. Groups discussed what things they liked about it, and what could be better. Each group voted and reported back to the whole class; their responses were displayed on a chart. We then asked how the project could be continued. After making several suggestions they decided to film material comparing their own village with the one they had visited previously. Lesson 2Back in groups, they started individual work structured by us on themes and issues. Each child drew something interesting in the village, and wrote down something they wanted to find out about it. In the report back, each child described what another member of their group was working on. We explained that we wouldn't have time to follow up 28 ideas, and asked how to narrow the list down. The children decided to vote.Groups looked again at each other's work, and chose the most interesting for the second part of the video. This left four topics, each with a question:
Lesson 3It was important to set criteria for the video. Working together, the 'commissioners' decided it had to have clear pictures and sound, get the right answers from people, and be interesting. It should not have silly people in it, be wobbly or tell us things we didn't want to know.While the team went out to ask the questions and video the answers, the rest of the class completed their theme and issue sheets to make a research booklet about the village. The team returned within the hour, to find a hushed but excited audience who evaluated the tape against their own criteria. It scored highly against most of them. So the class had been given some control over their learning and had produced a tape, based on their own criteria, 'by remote control'. Though hastier and less sophisticated than our first experiment, Helen and I were still delighted by how it helped children to work together and consider each other's contributions. They had learned something about themselves, something about geography and something about media processes and media products. And the OFSTED Inspector? Well, she told me that the work she had seen "exemplifies the values that should be underpinning all education". But will it get a mention in the report? *Watling, R. and Clarke, H. (1995) 'Our Village': Freire, Freinet and Practical Media Work with Early Years pupils. Early Years Spring 1995: 6-12. © 1997 Rob Watling First published in Trac, issue 1, Winter 1997/8 |
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