Learning how to become human

Working on the book with my colleagues David Leat and Wilma Barrow through and beyond the Covid lockdowns was both a great opportunity and a challenge. Amongst other things, it forced me to think about what I had done in my professional career (now almost 50 years to date) from my initiation as a maths teacher in an enlightened comprehensive, a brief encounter with two secondary modern schools, then retraining and working as an educational psychologist before becoming an academic in Newcastle. Along the way, many texts have given me food for thought.

These range, for example, from the work of Carl Rogers to Albert Bandura, David Wood (who supervised my PhD), Herb Simon and, in 1984, Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons. Most recently, however, it is Gert Biesta who has most challenged and nourished my thinking about education. His 2006 book, Beyond Learning: Democratic Education for a Human Future, in particular, did two things for me. First, reminded me of the ethos and social care of the comprehensive that I joined in 1973; second, Biesta's insistence that education should be a creative endeavour, requiring 'an educational system that is not obsessed with outcomes and league tables, but allows teachers to spend time on finding the delicate balance between the child and the curriculum' (p.139).

It was stuff like this that motivated my attempt (in Immoral Education, 2018) to articulate what might be wrong with education in the UK and, with David and Wilma, to embark on Transforming Professional Practice. I am indebted to Biesta for his determination to reclaim education and grateful for his challenge to find ways of liberating teachers and young people from the shackles of the fatally flawed neo-liberal vision of education as a marketable commodity that has usurped the life and soul of learning how to become Human.

Simon Gibbs
Emeritus Professor of Inclusive Educational Psychology and Philosophy, University of Newcastle

Around 1975 I was at the stage of writing up my PhD thesis on the role of pressure groups in planning. I was sharing a house with a trainee teacher at St Luke Teacher Training College, studying what we would now call Design and Technology, and he had some ideas on education that were not mainstream. This led me to read (light relief?) a few books on schools and education, having decided that pursuing a career in university geography was not for me. One in particular grabbed my imagination – How Children Fail by John Holt.

I had a general disquiet about my own education, which had been in a single-sex academic school, and the range of experiences I had at university, not least in the aforementioned house, had opened my mind to the value of experience – in my case horticulture, wildlife surveys, sport and traditional dance. As I explored the option of undertaking a PGCE course I visited a local comprehensive and the routine and lack of engagement were alarming – the lessons I saw were so formulaic and devoid of motivation.

So, Holt's description of school students in the US had somewhere to land. He describes a school system that stunts children's natural curiosity and desire to learn and where many learn tricks to satisfy the teachers' and system's desire for the right answers. They learn to dread making mistakes and see being wrong as a failure. Holt's book was not the first, and indeed not the last, to critique schools: but it was the book that got into my head and shaped the way that I wanted to teach.

I duly taught in the state system for 11 years, trying to realise my ambitions, and on a scale of 1-10, I expect I only rate a 3 or 4. However, the four years I spent teaching in a residential field centre were a highlight, because for so many students from Luton and Bedford, four nights in a big old house, wearing Wellington boots, being let off the leash (with a purpose), having a laugh with peers, teachers and centre staff and cuddling my Irish Setter in a minibus was a revelation. Of course, so much of this chimes with Holt's slightly less well-known book How Children Learn.

David Leat

Edward Sampson's Celebrating the Other: A Dialogic Account of Human Nature scratched where I was itching psychologically at a pivotal point in my career. I trained almost 40 years ago and while other approaches were taught, I struggled with the prominence given to behaviourism – it didn't fit my assumptions about who we are as humans. I also felt frustrated, on starting practice, by the relentless pressure to swoop in and fix individual young people.

Some years later, I took some time out and had the opportunity to explore literature outside psychology. I became increasingly focused on human relationality and in particular relationship with difference. I was struck by theologian Colin Gunton's argument that 'otherness without relation is as destructive as relationship without otherness'. Seeking a psychological perspective, I came across Sampson, who with Cushman and others, offered a critique of Western psychology's emphasis on the autonomous self.

Celebrating the Other, originally published in 1993, argued that by ignoring diverse needs and voices, dominant psychological models could be considered undemocratic. Drawing on Bakhtin, Sampson saw the transformative potential of working in the 'space between' self and other/s but argued that when we focus only on empathising with others, there is a risk of 'losing the edge of awareness that difference provides' (p.158).

Ideas such as these lit a spark in me and led to a journey of discovery through reading the work of Markova and others in psychology. They enabled me to find a more hopeful direction in my practice and university work and deepened my understanding of the transformative potential of collaborative practices such as consultation, Video Interaction Guidance and co-production in research.

Thirty years on, I have reservations about Sampson's use of 'celebrating' difference in the book's title. Bauman's notion of 'honouring the otherness in the other' sits more comfortably with me as it seems to point to ethical obligation. Sampson, however, set me off on a psychological adventure. His questions about how the psychology we apply positions those we work with continue to resonate in the present day, where there is considerable emphasis on relational practice in educational psychology. They provide an ongoing critical challenge.

Wilma Barrow