Slow Pedagogies in the Early Years - A Conversation with Prof. Alison Clark

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

There is a general push towards acceleration and, you know, that has an effect on how we teach and relate to children. Listening should be at the heart of the education process. And I think in a highly measured education system, then I think it's hardest to acknowledge the value of listening to children and where that might lead.

Hi, and welcome back to the podcast. My name is Tim Logan, and the podcast is brought to you in partnership with Notosh. My conversation this week is with Professor Alison Clark and follows on from a recent episode with Carl Honoré on slow education. Alison is both a professor of early childhood education and a visual artist. She's an honorary senior research fellow at Thomas Coram Research Unit at the UCL Institute of Education in London. Her main academic work is currently in Norway, where she is the professor of early Childhood Education at the University of Southeastern Norway. Since 1999, Alison has been interested in the theoretical, methodological, and ethical aspects of young children's co-construction of knowledge. Her research theme has centered on the development and adaptation of visual and participatory methods, including the development of the mosaic approach with her colleague Professor Peter Moss, that has contributed to a listening to young children discourse in the UK and internationally. Alison co-founded the Special Interest Group on Children's Perspectives as part of the European Early Childhood Education Research Association in 2004 with Professor Deborah Harcourt. Alison's recent 2-year research study, Slow Knowledge and the Unhurried Child, was funded by the Froebel Trust and published in 2022 by Routledge as the book Slow Knowledge and the Unhurried Child: Time for Slow Pedagogies in Early Childhood Education. You can see links to Alison's work in the show notes, including the website of her visual arts work Hi, Alison.

Hello, Tim. Hi.

Good morning. How are you?

I'm very well, thank you.

Good stuff. All right. Thank you. Really good to be able to talk to you today. It's been a really interesting journey after I've been speaking with Carl Honoré on a previous episode about slow and the slow movement and slow parenting, slow education. And then I discovered your work and was really keen to talk more specifically about some of the pedagogical practices and the different classroom kind of approaches around what slow education might look like. And your book, Slow Knowledge and the Unhurried Child, I just thought, what a title for a book. Immediately inviting, makes you want to read it. It feels very necessary with all of the acceleration going on everywhere else in relation to our children. So firstly, welcome. Thank you so much for joining.

Thank you very much, Tim. It's great to have a chance to have this conversation.

Brilliant. So if we just start perhaps with an overview and then we'll dive into some of the more specifics as we go through the conversation, but perhaps you could just give a little background to what do you mean by slow pedagogy or slow knowledge?

Yeah, so I see slow pedagogies as a range of pedagogies rather than just one, but I think it's a range that shares some characteristics. So I think it's the ability to be attentive to the rhythm of children, the different rhythms, which means it's not necessarily slow, slowed down because sometimes children thoughts and actions are very quick. But it's attentive to the rhythm of children, of adults, so your colleagues, and the materials that you're working with. It values play, and play has its own sort of timescale and the present moment. But linked with that, an ability to hold the longer view. So in a sense, I talk about it being a sort of here and now and. Yes, you're valuing the present moment and you're trying to create communities, education communities where that's the case. But you're also very mindful of the histories and the cultural context that children bring to an environment and also thinking about their future, but not in such a way that it totally overshadows the present. So it's a here and now and approach. So conscious of the relationship with time, which can create these opportunities for ideas to develop. And so those are some of the sort of key ingredients.

No, that's great. And loads of concepts I would definitely want to dig into. Absolutely. But just before we do, one of the— I heard you you talk somewhere about the deep idea as well, and the kind of, because as you said there, slow doesn't necessarily have to be slow in some fashion, right? Then, and this is what I talked to Carl about in relation to it being a way of being and an attitude or a disposition rather than necessarily a temporal fact of just going slower. And so I don't know what your reflections are there on something about deep, because you know, you see deep learning being talked about as well. Around, and it's not the same adjective, but I think somehow there's some similarities there.

I definitely think there's a connection between slow and deep, and when I'm talking with educators, this connection has come up very strongly. And so, you know, taking time can enable children's explorations to go deeper. And I think to me, this is in contrast to Stephen Ball's warnings about the shallowness of education. Yeah. So if you're allowing ideas to grow, children to explore, whether that starts with a teacher initiation or child initiated, but you're still giving time for that depth to be reached. And I describe this as diving deep, but not a deep dive as we've heard in some of the English evaluations into a subject necessarily, but diving deep with children. It's the 'with children' that I think is so important.

Yeah, interesting. And so you mentioned time. I'd love to pick up on that and then we'll get on to play and wonder and all these other important concepts. But you've done, as I understand it, part of your research was across 11 countries. And so you were part of it, maybe, I don't know whether it was a byproduct of the, the places and context you were working in or an explicit focus of the research, but I understood that you were kind of seeing different cultural relationships with time. And I think that is an important factor in terms of the way we, the way we think about and parcel up time, just even just the kind of broader concepts of what our relationship with time is. And so what did you kind of understand from different cultural relationships there?

So I guess that's the starting point was as an early childhood academic, I work, I'm based in Scotland, I work part-time in Norway, and I'm part of a European early childhood education research network. So I have a number of different influences and it kind of led to a 2-year study which the book has come out of working, looking at in-depth interviews with 20 participants participants across these 11 countries. So it's what I call a purposive study. So it's not claiming to be representative of these different countries. But just to give you a flavor, I mean, one of my participants is Mari Mori, Professor of Early Childhood Education in Japan. And some of our early conversations was her concern about the hurried child in the context in which she was working. So working in teacher education and also visiting preschools. And as she described it, this kind of concern about the commodification of children and seeing parents being very anxious to find out as early as possible what was going to be the particular talent that they could develop and in some cases sort of earn money from.

Yeah.

So that was pretty scary.

Absolutely.

And if I sort of contrast this to, say, so some of my Norwegian participants, interesting, a less hurried education system, children starting school at 6, but also a sense from the educators that they are too busy, that they don't have enough time. So that even if you're working within a cultural context and a professional context where there is potentially more time, I think there is a general push towards acceleration of more is better. And, you know, that has an effect on how we teach and relate to children. So Professor Kari Karlsson, who, one of my participants and who I'm now working on research projects with, she said about the Norwegian context, well, there is lots of freedom within the framework plan in Norway in terms of early childhood education, but that freedom is not necessarily realised. And I think that's interesting, you know, that you can have a curriculum framework that actually allows you to spend more time to let ideas grow. But actually, there's still, even within that context, this feeling, I know I need to be getting on, I need to do this. Oh, maybe if I use this intervention, this off-the-shelf package, then, you know, I can show people what I'm doing more.

Yeah. There's so many kind of cultural influences coming in there. Like, as you said, in the Japanese context and many other contexts, it makes me think of linking back to the previous episode, but, you know, he talked about children as a, as a kind of project management, a project to manage. And I think that just that idea. It seeps in in all sorts of ways, doesn't it? In terms of just all of the kind of cultural influences about optimization or efficiency, or as you say, more is better. And there's a lot of different influences in a lot of contexts, not necessarily in every cultural context, but I think in more and more in kind of, you know, post-industrial capitalist context, there is that feeling, isn't there?

Yes. Yes, I think so. And I guess the pandemic, I think, is another factor here when we're thinking about time and education and the relationship with time. And I think that's obviously, there will be very many different experiences of that personally and professionally, but I think we can see different countries reacting differently and coming out of the phases of the pandemic and how children have been impacted by that. And you know, that the rhetoric say within an English context of catch-up And we need children to catch up. And I think that's just been another factor that has added to the greater pressure on educators.

Absolutely. And kind of even within that, there's a linearity, isn't there? There's this kind of perception that life is this kind of linear race to be run. And, you know, if you've fallen behind in relation— I mean, it's just there's so many cultural dimensions to this kind of narrative that we've got to keep moving forward as quickly as possible. And You know, to where is the question, right? But, but it's strong, I think. Yeah.

Interesting.

And so then another really important concept, I think in your earlier research has been listening. And I wanted to ask you about that because I think again, maybe in the pandemic there was a bit more of a call to stop and just kind of be more present and be more attuned to what's actually going on and listening more. I don't know. Maybe there's been a strong ping back after that as we come back. But I love the quote. I don't know if it's from the book or somewhere I read that listening has become countercultural in a system driven by measurement. And that's, I mean, that's a huge statement, right? It's like, especially in education, so many measures driving, you know, accountability and driving practice. And listening is almost some kind of, you know, resistance move. It's a countercultural move.

Yeah. I first started my research on listening to young children, so children under 5, in 1999. And within the research context, that was quite unusual to be able to get funding to look at the perspectives of those young children. And not to say at all that listening wasn't happening, but in the research environment, it was unusual to be recognized. It was unusual to get through an ethics committee, et cetera. And over the years, I've had to fight for funding. So for example, there was a Carnegie— Carnegie initiative to look at participatory projects with children, and they were funding projects for children over 10.

Right.

And managed to squeeze in and say, I think we could do a project with 5-year-olds, 4 and 5-year-olds, it'll be fine. And I did. So yeah, so you can see the, there's certainly been a sort of countercultural aspect to listening to the youngest children. That phrase actually first came up when I was doing some training with educators in Lambeth in London. And one of the participants and said to me, you know, yeah, I think all this stuff is countercultural. And it was quite a stark statement to make, I think, because I think listening should be at the heart of the education process. And I think in a highly measured education system, then I think it's hardest to acknowledge the value of listening to children and where that might lead, because that might lead off track. And I think the ability to take children off track is one of the key features, I think, of a slow pedagogy. Because listening, you know, opens you up to the unexpected, whether that's as an individual, as an educator, or a school community. And this ability to deal with uncertainty, I mean, I think it can be very threatening if you have an education system that's very transmissive. So it's about pouring the information in and the set information and giving teachers scripts to work from, you know. So if you're working in that way and then you start to say, oh, actually we need to listen to the children about this. Oh, hang on a 'Hold on a minute, that might, you know, rock the boat.' And it might raise questions like, 'Well, how long is this going to take?' And, you know, 'What if we don't agree?' And I think there's a challenge within the system. I think there's a challenge to educators. If you're— certainly seen this in my work in teacher education, you know, if an educator themselves has a student who's in teacher education, if their own education has been very transmissive, so, you know, they've it's been about receiving information and writing it out, then it can be very challenging if you then meet a teacher education where you're being opened up to other possibilities, other ways of working with children. And that can be professionally scary, I think. Absolutely.

Yeah. Do you think, can I ask, because there's systemic barriers and challenges for sure, which I'd love to ask you about, but also Just going back to where you started, do you think there's a trust issue of the insights of young people? I don't— I've just come back from India. We were in India with a, with an IB project called Festival of Hope, which I've been running. And part of the discussions there was about listening to young people. I mean, that, that, that's what the whole Festival of Hope has been about actually. And there was a really interesting conversation there about, about whether young people could be wise, you know, whether they have insights about life, life lessons that they can pass on to other people. I just wonder, yeah, what, what do you think in terms of perhaps there's just a lack of trust of young people that they actually have anything of, of import to say?

Yes. And I think, I think that can lead to when people do begin to open up important discussions where children and young people have so much to offer, think, oh, that's really surprising. They have this insight. I mean, for example, at the moment, that there's the COVID inquiry very slowly happening in the UK, and we're really fighting to get children and young people's perspectives as part of that conversation. And there's been no sign that that's going to happen. And yet there have been many research projects that have happened during the pandemic that have actually have very important messages from children and young people about what the lockdowns were like, what it was like learning online. And we need to take on board these experiences and build them in because it will happen next time and we need to be ready. So, you know, that's just one very specific but very important example. And taking it down to a school level, I think, you know, there are unique opportunities there when you have children across the age range together to actually model really how you can listen to children's perspectives of different ages. So, so for example, in, in an earlier study, the Living Spaces study, it was around physical changes to the environment. So working with architects and a school and a children and family centre around physical changes. And as part of that project, we were looking to changes to the outdoor play space. And I worked first of all with the nursery and the reception class, so the 5, the, so children under 6. And then from the, using the research approach that I developed with Professor Peter Moss called the mosaic approach, which uses a range of different communication tools for children to explore what they think about a topic. So for example, children be walking around the space, children taking their photographs and then making maps. And then these, having made maps with me around the existing play space, those maps then went to the school council in the school where there were representatives all the way up to the 11-year-olds. And the school council then looked and discussed the maps of the youngest children, and then sort of themes came out around what was maybe important and what could the changes look like. So that's just a small sort of example of how we can model listening, I think. And how— and how— and the head of the school was really engaged in the project. And, and one of the key principles in the Mosaic approach is recognizing children as experts in their own lives. And that was a phrase I first heard by a Danish sociologist, Ole Langsted. So I've used that phrase a lot, and I remember the head saying to me, "Cool, never thought about that," you know, that children are experts in their own lives. And it's kind of lovely to that moment of like, "Oh, what a difference that might make within a school community if you're working with a group of experts." We're not trying to make the children into the adults, but actually, you know, if you want to know what it's like to be 3, you need to be talking to 3-year-olds.

Love it. Absolutely. And that's such a great phrase. And I think, I mean, it kind of speaks to that kind of epistemic justice piece, doesn't it? In terms of everyone has something to say. And as you say that, you know, I mean, what arrogance to imagine that you have more insight into their lives than they do. It's just that many power structures are set up that don't necessarily always give voice to everybody in those different spaces. And that's—

Yeah. But I think it does raise a challenge to different professions. So, for example, for the architects I was working with, I'm not wasn't trying to make the children into the architects as such, but to bring the children's knowledge to the architect's knowledge. And I guess I think that's maybe there's a parallel with educators, you know, you're not trying to get the children to take over, but it's how you bring together this different knowledge.

Yeah, 100%. And I think that's a really important insight there because it's not either or, you know, that's the kind of traditional versus progressive dichotomy, right? False dichotomy because We're not trying to privilege subjective experience over anything, some, some, you know, whatever objective means, but there's a dialectic between those two things. I think people like Gert Biester actually speak to that really interesting, important ways because it's not that the, you know, sometimes the kind of romantics in progressive education, Pestalozzi and Froebel, and you know, they are seen to be privileging the subjective experience sometimes that maybe is an unfair criticism, but I think I think it's an important balancing act, isn't it, to have those two things in tension as you're listening and speaking. Everybody's listening and speaking and, you know, transmitting and taking on board. I think there's a dance going on there that is really at the heart of what happens in education for me anyway.

I think so. And I think if I take up on that about Froebel, I mean, one of the principles of his work that I'm interested in is this idea of freedom with guidance. So I think, you know, I think that's, to me, that sits in that bridge between the sort of child-initiated, teacher-initiated, and how, you know, saying yes, it is freedom for children to explore, but it's also this deeply skillful facilitation by adults to know when, to know what to introduce into dialogue, to know how to record it, to know how to revisit it. So this hugely skillful process, but yes, to where the children have a key role.

Yeah, and I think that's one of the reasons why I've always admired really, you know, highly skilled early years practitioners, because some of them are really, you know, incredibly in tune to exactly that, knowing when to intervene, when to leave children to explore further or push a bit more. And that's something actually that I think a lot of educators up the age range could learn a lot from. Yeah, interesting. So in just then, in relation to, because I think we mentioned the systemic barriers, there are, you know, they are real. And I think one of the challenges that I'm, I find particularly difficult is the level at which we define the fixed outcomes that we're trying to manufacture as such, right? And that, that really is a challenge for listening, as we've just talked about, but also for things like play, which is a, and again, you mentioned earlier, and it's a big part of your work. And I think I think that's a really important aspect of, you know, how do you kind of create that space for that play? And wonder was another concept. How does that connect with the idea of the slow pedagogies?

Well, I think play is one of those activities— it's more than an activity, but it takes as long as it takes. You know, it's not something that sits well within a, well, you've got 20 minutes and then it's tidy up time. And particularly if children become very engaged in an idea, this is why I think it connects with Csikszentmihalyi's ideas about flow. And, and, you know, I think that they fit very closely together. So this ability to be deeply immersed in the moment, for there to be these, these different rhythms, sometimes very fast and, and sometimes really slowed down. And I think wonder, I think, is, is also something that is difficult to fit into a sort of scripted curriculum. And there are these spontaneous moments where, where children bring something new into a conversation discover something that's happening outside. It's part of the attentiveness, I think, as an educator, attentiveness to what's happening, to the weather, to the seasons, and that can take you off in a slightly different direction.

Yeah, absolutely. It's that kind of, that's part of the art of educating, isn't it? Is that kind of, there's so much going on. It's such a complex movement and swirl of different influences, especially when you've got, you know, 25 or 30 young people with all with their own wanderings in the classroom, and then you've got, as you say, all these different external influences. It's attentiveness to all of those and responsiveness to all of that is incredibly— I mean, that's what makes teaching a phenomenally difficult job, but also a great art, I think, when it's done incredibly well.

Yeah, and I think that word art is interesting because I think that's why it can cause problems within a very tightly prescribed teacher education process, you know. So if you're trying to teach something that has some elements of it are an art and a craft that doesn't sit well within very tight timetables because some of this you want students to experience for themselves. And as I was saying earlier, you know, if that's not been part of their own education, then that can lead to great frustration. You know, why aren't you telling me the answers here? Why aren't you showing me the end point? Because I need to know what the end point is. And then if you factor in things like the huge cost of study now,, you know, that actually, yes, you need to tell me the endpoint because I've paid for this.

Absolutely.

Yeah. And, you know, and I, you know, I need to see, I need to see where I'm heading. So all these things kind of make it harder to explore some of these concepts, you know, the value of play and wonder.

Exactly.

Yeah.

And then because it's like they're almost seen as trivial or frivolous, right? Play. And it's that, and you know, it's, there's so much going on there, especially for young, you know, well, for everybody, I would say adults as well, but particularly for children. But somehow the, yeah, if they're seen as trivial, they're not seen as therefore as valuable in when we start defining value in this market economic kind of way. Yeah. I'd love to ask you a bit more about flow because I think that for me, I'm fascinated by that concept because I think the idea that people, need to experience flow, which is, you know, this kind of getting lost in the moment, lost in an activity. As you say, you can't just switch it on and off. It's, you know, the bell's going here and, you know, so stop what you're doing. You know, there's, that's such a common thing in education, but these, sometimes you need that open space, that freer time to get lost in activities where, you know, the, the skill level is just a bit beyond what you, where you're at. So you're really kind of engaged with skill development, but you're also totally engaged in the activity because it's something you, you love and are passionate about. There's, it's a hugely rich space for young people to be in. And I, I wonder how much of our current education system allows them to get into that state of flow.

Yeah, I think if you have a very fragmented education system, fragmented timetables split up into 42 minutes or whatever it is for a lesson, then you've got a problem there. And I think that really pulls against this opportunity for this more sort of open space. In terms of the vocabulary use, and I think, you know, I think that word flow is very interesting and what that opens up. I mean, another word I like is timefulness, looking for more opportunities for timefulness. And I've heard that word from two different very different disciplinary directions. So one was from the theologian John Swinton, and he talks about being friends of time, working with people with learning disabilities. And then I've heard it from geologists, so from Marcia Björnerud. And so if you take theology and geology, they're both disciplines that are used to taking the longer view, and they're not just about the immediate, the now. They actually have this huge time span involved. And I think, I think that has things to to say to an education system that's very caught on just on the moment.

Yeah.

So this idea of timefulness, and because I think the words that we use to talk about time then impact on what then becomes possible.

For sure.

So for example, in a project I'm involved in at the moment in Orkney in Scotland, working with 4 early years settings who are looking at slow pedagogy, slow practices. So they're looking for these more sort of timeful moments within the day. And so two of the settings are looking at lunchtimes and routines. So very practical, looking at how the children can have more agency there, but also how it can be less rushed and how it can become more of a part of the day rather than just this event that happens between the morning and the afternoon. And another couple are thinking more around their relationships with the children through the day. So one is thinking about slow moments in planning. And so looking there at how they can create these more opportunities for children to revisit what they've been exploring, and then how those moments can be celebrated among— with other children and with the staff. And then in order to think, well, what next? So it's not just learning as a— in these little silos of disconnected moments in time, but this is an idea of accumulated knowledge as well.

Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Can I ask you, what, are you collaborating with other researchers or other practitioners higher up the age range? Because obviously your focus is early years, but I would be interested to know if you're aware of other people doing similar kinds of things. You know, in some ways the constraints get, I don't know, maybe, maybe you would disagree with this, but it feels like the constraints get more pressing and urgent as you go higher up because because the stakes get higher in terms of standardized testing, etc. So therefore perhaps it's harder to find those times to do that work.

Yeah, well, I think, I think there's some interesting work happening in that is maybe not being looked at under the same umbrella at the moment, but could be seen as a slow pedagogy. So for example, I've just read a book by Deborah Kidd called The Curriculum Code.

Group.

And I think in Deborah's work, and I think in that inquiry-style learning, I see connections there between, you know, how children's agency, room for exploration, celebration. I think there are some very interesting connections, but we've never been quite in the same room before because, you know, we work within different sectors. I mean, one of my participants was Mara Kravesky from Project Zero at Harvard. And so she's working in the International School in Billund in Denmark.

Oh yeah.

Some of the work there where they have been looking at having particular weeks where they come off timetable and enable a more sort of project-focused deep dive type approach.

Yeah.

Yeah. So there are these kind of, you know, can see these different possibilities there.

Yeah. Yeah. Connections, but maybe not, as you say, under the same kind of language. But I would agree, it's, I mean, there's kind of an attempt to create spaces in different ways, whether that means moving the timetable so you shift to a different mode of the timetable for a week, or as you say, there's more kind of structured inquiry spaces or curricula that, I mean, I do a lot of work with the IB and there's a lot more of that there. But it does get challenging. I mean, the external constraints are very real as you go higher up into high school and, you know, Absolutely.

So, so for example, in Scotland, the whole sort of— there's a strong play pedagogy emphasis, I think, is beginning to come through into P1, so into the first year in school. And I think there are huge possibilities there for sort of demonstrating what can be possible.

Yeah, interesting. And can I ask you, because I know just personally you, you have your own creative practice, right? You're, you're an artist as well doing all this amazing work in research. Do you make a connection there in terms of— obviously we've been talking about flow, or we talk about just generally slow practices— where do you see creativity coming into any of this kind of discussion?

I think it's such an important aspect of, you know, talking about children, or of giving children the opportunity to express themselves in many different ways. And that can be digital and online, not necessarily physical. So In all this, it's not a question of trying to be a Luddite, and you know, around all different sorts of creativity. In my own artist practice, I think it's been important to look at slow practices, so the things that can develop over time, not just the sort of one-off quick moment and then share your photo on Instagram or whatever. So in some of my work has been around sense of place, so it's around gathering, pressing grasses one summer and then coming back and printing from them. And then, you know, so there's a sort of a longer timescale on some of my artwork. But I think this connection between creativity and slow pedagogies, I think it's about to— something in here is around slow practices with materials and giving children the opportunity to explore different materials. So for example, In early childhood, Play-Doh is one of the kind of things that is a very standard—

Core materials. Yeah.

But Play-Doh has a particular set of properties.

Yeah.

Including being squashed into the carpet and very difficult to remove.

And being edible, I seem to remember.

Yeah, that's right. You know, some possibilities. But if you contrast that with clay, clay has many more different possibilities. So, and I think it's Lemsky, Jay Lemsky talks about how materials hold hold time in different ways. Fantastic. So, you know, clay holds time in a particular way, and, you know, you can go and you can actually find where clay is in a river. You can show children what happens when it's wet, when it's fired. You know, there's a whole kind of story. Similarly, if you're working with wood, you know, if you're actually going to find a tree that's been cut down, bring that wood in, what can you do with the wood? What you can you make it into? So that whole kind of journey. So I think materials hold time in different ways. I learned a lot through Sylvia Kind, who was a participant working in an atelier in a studio space at Capilano University in Canada. And Sylvia talked about the importance of being with, in terms of a slow pedagogy, being with children, being with your colleagues, and being with materials. And I think in that there's this idea of— it takes us back to the idea of being confident with the uncertainty. Of kind of seeing what happens if you allow children the possibilities to work with these different materials. What do the materials teach the children? You know, what do they learn from, from this relationship, as well as what can the educators bring to that conversation?

Yeah, I love that. It also makes me think of Gert Biester again, because he talks about resistant materials. As a subject in secondary schools in the UK, particularly. But that idea that— I love that idea that the materials hold time. I think that's beautiful, but also just that they— you meet reality with a material, right? There are only certain things that Play-Doh or clay or wood can be made into, right? It's not that anything is possible because you meet the constraints of the material and the reality And I think that's a really important lesson for everybody, particularly when we're fed this kind of freedom to choose narrative of kind of neoliberal capitalism. Like anything's possible. You can choose anything. Well, that's not true, right? That's a fiction. That's a kind of convenient fiction that is very economistic in a way. So the idea that you meet reality in the material, I think is really kind of importantly humbling for young people to learn. And you don't, you don't quite get the same thing in a metaverse experience or, you know, in an online digital experience, because there are just more things which are possible. There are still constraints, but they're just different. So I think, I just think that embodied experience of meeting reality with the material in, in learning is, is a really interesting one.

So that takes me back to where I first heard the phrase slow pedagogy. It was slow pedagogy of place. And this was two Australian academics working in environmental education, and they talked about how they were challenging what they described as takeaway pedagogies, which I think, you know, like a kind of fast food pedagogy. And that takes us back to the sort of the when slow education movement sort of 20 years ago or so, talking about the sort of hamburger approach to education.

Yeah.

And I think so if I go back to Payne and Wachor, they then looked at how they could give their students, and this was in higher education, the opportunity to have more firsthand experience to revisit places. So rather than say, well, okay, you know, you've in their environmental education, they'd already been to that beach. So tick that, that's done. It was like, no, let's work with them in one year with one particular set of theories. And then in the later on in their education to take them back to the same environment with a different set of theories and see what happens. So this ability to revisit, I think, is key. And then to bring in feelings and the senses.

Yeah.

And I think that's another very important ingredient.

Absolutely. And I've been doing a lot of reading around the kind of 4E cognitive science that is increasingly mainstreaming because I think that idea of embodied embodied knowing is increasingly, you know, there's increasing science to back up how fundamentally important that is. And I think especially with all of the AI surge as well, that kind of sensorial embodied experience is even more important because that's, that's the uniqueness of human beings, right?

Yes. And one thing I haven't mentioned is quite influential in my work has been the work of the preschools in Reggio Emilia in Northern Italy.

Yeah.

And so Malaguzzi talked about the 100 languages of children, and that has become a very overused phrase, but I think there was something key there that, you know, in our education system, how many expressive languages do we give to children? And there may be some children who actually, if there was more imagination showed into what languages they could use, expressive languages, maybe they could shine more.

So true.

Yeah, absolutely. Rather than this kind of, yeah, McDonaldized language monoculture.

Yeah, that's true.

Absolutely brilliant. And then if I can just finally, just I'd love to ask you, because I heard you talking about, so one of the reflections I think from some of the educators you were working with that they felt that they've been given permission to be in the moment. And I think that speaks there to me about the role of leadership in creating, and that may be kind of systemic leadership, broadly, or, you know, government level, policy level, etc., or it may just be within a school. But I think that's really important to guard, create those spaces where educators are given permission to be in the moment, to explore these kinds of practices that you're talking about. Yeah, what your reflections are on the role of leadership there.

So I think, I think this is a big question around, so what, what would slow leadership look like?

Interesting.

And I think it's up for grabs really. But I was very taken by Wieste's comments around when he's written about the impatient look in education and how, you know, I think that goes to the heart of this acceleration, always fast forward. And so I've been taking that phrase and turning it around and thinking, so what does a patient look, what would a patient look like? In terms of early childhood education, but also across the education system. And I think part of that is, it will be around leadership. What would it mean to be a slow and patient leader? And I think part of it, this is around what is seen as of value. So if a leader demonstrates that actually you need to look busy in this place, otherwise, you know, you're going to be reprimanded, then that obviously has an effect on the relationship between, between educator and child. So one of the characteristics I think would be around this demonstration of what is of value. Do you value this striving for more unfragmented time? You know, are you as a leader looking at the impact of the clock and the routines on children's day-to-day experiences, and could that be different? And of course there are very many practical difficulties. So for example, just to take the example of lunchtime, there may be constraints in terms of who's providing the catering and your welfare assistant timetables and things. So there will be very many practical constraints, but then it's a question of, well, let's think about the experiences, what this feels like to be a child here.

Yeah.

Or a young person. And how could that be different if we look at our values? And I think it's also about, you know, slow to me is not an end in itself. So I think as a leader, it would be about, so what does slow make possible and who does this advantage most? Because I feel quite strongly that there will be children who, because of their special educational needs or because maybe coming in with their second and third language into a learning environment, where actually a different relationship with time actually would benefit them hugely, you know, more of these timeful moments. Could actually make a huge difference in terms of their transition in. I had a conversation with a leader in Reykjavik in Iceland, and she's working with refugee children coming into that environment. And Iceland, as I understand at the moment, is very keen on very rapid language development in Icelandic. And so we were thinking together about, okay, but what would it mean if these ideas of a slow and patient program, yeah, for that transition, which was more play-based, for example, would that maybe, you know, to be more of an advantage for those children? And perhaps let's have a look at how they pick up their language through that way of working and maybe how long it lasts. And I think this is— that takes us back to this shallow and deep, I think, because I think, you know, how children are picking up the new language, you know, does it go deeper if they're allowed to take it more slowly and to learn through play.

Yeah, no, absolutely. It made me think as you were talking about this kind of, it's, it's like the qualitative aspect that sometimes is forgotten, right? It's like there's all this quantification of like how quickly or how much, but actually there's this qualitative aspect of, it makes me think of a previous conversation I had about Montessori education and just, you know, putting flowers on the tables, you know, as the young people are coming in to have lunch and just taking care of the quality of the experience, it may temporarily be bound by the same amount of seconds, you know, but there's a qualitative difference to the experience that makes it feel very different and therefore makes, potentially makes it feel more timeful.

Yes. And I think that's very, I think that's an interesting aspect to this. So, so what part can the environment play and how we work with the environment in, in this discussion around slow pedagogies?

Yeah. Ah, good stuff. Well, thank you. This is amazing. I mean, there's, there are huge implications, aren't there, for people, leaders and teachers in working in these systems that are so accelerated and obsessed with measurement and speed. But it's such huge implications, I think, from your work for that.

And we haven't even mentioned about taking children outside. So of course, we do. Part 2. You don't have a, you don't have a clock on the tree when you're working outside. So that is obviously a very big part of how the environment can play in a slow and less hurried education.

No, it's interesting. Yeah, it is interesting. We ended up staying inside for the whole conversation, right?

We did. We now need to go outside.

We do. Part 2 outside. Yeah, I love it. No, I mean, that's huge as well, isn't it? You know, absolutely.

Definitely.

Good stuff. Well, thank you so much. It was a real pleasure to meet you and thank you for taking the time to chat.

Great to have a conversation. Thank you, Tim Logan.

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