Don’t shield children from reality – help them navigate it
The world is a frightening place, but pupils need to be heard and given the power to act
- by Debra Kidd
The world must feel very scary for children at the moment. They’ve lived through a pandemic and now a war, and are highly attuned to the impending difficulties of climate change. It’s hardly surprising that we are seeing record numbers of children reporting mental health issues. Some might argue that it is the role of a teacher to protect pupils from such issues and events, but we can’t. We can’t switch off their ears and eyes or stop them talking to friends in the playground. But we can help. We must help.
In order to do so, though, we need to consider what children need; to be heard; knowledge to understand the problems they face; empathy and compassion – both to be shown to them and to develop the capacity to show them to others.
Pupils also need to feel that they have some agency in the world – an element of power. If we took those things in turn, we could almost develop a pedagogy for dealing with difficult events:
- Listen to their questions.
- Provide factual information.
- Consider how these issues are impacting on others.
- Take actions to help in any way we can.
The fourth point is the most critical. Without action, children can be left floundering in a sea of emotion and fear.
By taking initiative – even in small ways like raising money for a charity, campaigning or joining in with a boycott – children can feel that they are making a difference to theirs and others’ worlds. There are also pedagogical tools we can and should draw on.
Use allegories and stories
Stories, as Daniel Willingham says, are “psychologically privileged” in the human mind. They offer a way of making learning more memorable, but they also offer a way of making it safer.
If children can be distanced from a traumatic real-life event, but explore the pertinent issues through a story, they are a) distracted from the real emotions, but b) able to access the important elements.
For example, a class reading The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe is really exploring the difficulties of fighting a seemingly more powerful enemy, living in a world where fear is prevalent and all seems lost.
And yet, hope is there – in the characters who resist, take risks, and come together to challenge the Queen. They offer pupils a vision of what it might take to be brave and an ending that shows that hope will win in the end.
We can take this further into dramatic play and explore the characteristics that people might have in order to overcome difficulty.
The pedagogical approach of Mantle of the Expert in particular is deeply empowering for children, placing them in the role of a responsible team with a problem to solve.
The focus is on agency and using knowledge to overcome obstacles placed in the pupils’ way by a teacher.
Story led dramatic approaches can be helpful for a number of contexts:
- Having problems with social integration and/or bullying among the younger children in your school? What if a troll puts in a complaint to the council that he is being picked on by three goats? How would the council respond?
- Want children to have a deeper understanding of the problems facing refugees? Get the children to create a cruise ship that encounters a boat of desperate people in difficulty in the middle of the Med. What would happen if we took them onboard but then the port authorities at our next destination would not let us dock?
- Tackling deforestation? First, we need to understand why some people in the world cut down trees or capture rare animals. Consider if the class were an organisation travelling to Indonesia to help local people to train to do other jobs than logging or bird selling. Would it be enough to simply say ‘stop’?
Dilemma-led learning
At the heart of these approaches is dilemma-led learning. Placing children in difficulty – making them wade knee deep through dilemma – teaches them something important about life; that there are rarely easy answers to difficult problems and sometimes we have to make difficult choices.
If we can develop approaches in our schools that place this kind of approach at their heart, then we start to develop cultures and capacities in our schools in which the problems of the world don’t feel as insurmountable or frightening. We begin to empower. And an empowered child can change the world.
Debra Kidd is an author and teacher trainer, and taught in schools for over 20 years.
