Podcast Episode 1 (transcript)

1: ‘Practitioners’ knowledge and understanding of schemas and well-being in the Foundation Phase curriculum’ with Dr Alyson Lewis and Dr Amanda Thomas

Professor Gary Beauchamp is joined by Dr Alyson Lewis and Dr Amanda Thomas to discuss their article, ‘Practitioners’ knowledge and understanding of schemas and well-being in the Foundation Phase curriculum’. https://doi.org/10.16922/wje.23.1.3 

GB: Hello and welcome to the Wales Journal of Education podcast. I’m Professor Gary Beauchamp, one of the editors of the journal. Today, I’m joined by Dr Alyson Lewis from Bath Spa University when the article was written but now at Cardiff University, and Dr Amanda Thomas from the University of South Wales. We’ll be discussing their article, titled ‘Practitioners’ knowledge and understanding of schemas and well-being in the Foundation Phase’. Alyson and Amanda, thanks for talking to us on this podcast.

AL: Thanks for having us.

AT: Yes, we’re looking forward to it.

GB: So am I. To begin with, can you please tell us something about yourselves?

AL: Since 2001, I’ve worked in various education sectors. I started teaching in primary education then moved to further education, where I first started working with Amanda. I’ve also worked in forest school context and currently, like you say, Gary, in Cardiff University in higher education.

AT: Similar to Alyson, I’ve worked in various education settings. I was an early years teacher for ten years. I was the early years co-ordinator, working with children aged 3-5. Then, as Alyson said, I moved into FE, and we met. In FE, I was supervising students on their early years education degree and then, since 2011, I’ve been working in HE. I started off in the University of Glamorgan, and then changed to the University of South Wales.

GB: Thank you both. Could you please tell us what prompted you to undertake the work for this article?

AT: Alyson and I were both doing our PhDs around the same time. I was looking at exploring children’s schemas in the Foundation Phase, and Alyson was looking at well-being. We were discussing, throughout our PhD journey, about some of the commonalities we were finding within our research. Once we’d both been successful and we’d both passed our PhDs, we really felt that we wanted to get some of our research that we’d undertaken in our PhDs out there. For me, as I said, I was looking at schemas in the Foundation Phase. I knew nothing about schemas when I was a teacher. I didn’t use them at all. It was only when I was supervising an undergraduate student who wanted to look at schemas that I did some reading myself. I really couldn’t understand at that time, the more I was reading about schemas, why they weren’t being used in the Foundation Phase. Because everything I was reading about schemas, about them being child-centred, starting with the child, within the child’s interests, it’s what the child can do, everything that I was reading or knew that the Foundation Phase was based upon. So I really thought this was a missed opportunity. As I said, that sparked my interest in schemas. I did my PhD in schemas. Then, once I’d finished my PhD, I was chatting to Alyson and I said, look, we need to get this research out there. We need to get it to a wider audience than just our two PhDs. Let’s combine our findings, let’s combine what we both know, what we’ve discovered, and let’s write this paper together. Then, as I said, I worked with Alyson, and she’ll now talk a little bit about her interest and the well-being side of it.

AL: Thanks, Amanda. My interest in well-being started really from being very interested in the softer areas and aspects of the curriculum. Personal and social development, for example. What I wanted to do with the PhD was to find out how well-being was understood and practised by practitioners in the Foundation Phase. This was important to me because when the Foundation Phase was introduced in 2008, the area of learning called Personal and Social Development, Well-being and Cultural Diversity was presented as being at the heart of the Foundation Phase. Of course, with my interest in the softer areas and skills of the curriculum, I wanted to know more about how well-being was understood in practice by working with young children in the Foundation Phase. Amanda and I started to realise that we had these commonalities with the two studies. What we wanted to do with the paper was, firstly, to identify those commonalities in the paper and then use the paper to discuss the implications of these commonalities and similarities in our studies with this concept of well-being and schemas, and consider the implications for practice, for implementation of the delivery of the curriculum and also for research. That’s how it came about with the paper.

GB: Thank you. Could you perhaps tell us a little bit more about the focus of this article?

AL: The focus for us was to really share the similarities of the two PhDs. We explicitly describe the two PhDs as stand-alone studies and set the context and scene for that. Then we talk about our methodology, which was similar in design, in terms of a case study design. Then what we do with the rest of the paper, in the discussion aspect, is to consider what are the implications of these similarities. The main part of the paper is to discuss the implications for children and practice, for research and for implementation of the curriculum. Amanda, I don’t know if you want to add anything to that?

AT: For us, really, we wanted to unpick practitioners and wider stakeholders’ knowledge and understanding of schemas of well-being. It was so important that if there was that lack of knowledge and understanding, and this was going on now in the Foundation Phase, we were well aware at the time of us writing this paper that we had a new curriculum coming along in September 2022, the Curriculum for Wales. We knew already, from what we were reading, that practitioners were going to have more autonomy in this new curriculum to design their pedagogy. We felt, if there is a lack of knowledge and understanding now, with well-being and schemas, isn’t that going to translate into this Curriculum for Wales and that could be a real missed opportunity here. If practitioners had a sound understanding of schemas and well-being, they could apply it to their practice. For us, it was really important to unpick. We really wanted to showcase, if you like, almost this lack of knowledge and understanding and misconceptions around what we feel are two really important concepts.

GB: Thank you for that. Can you please explain how you collected data for this article?

AL: Yes. I’ll talk about the well-being study. For me, that was an exploratory case study design. I conducted research in two primary schools in two very different socio-economic areas, and I adopted various qualitative methods. For example, there were eight focus groups that I conducted with practitioners, 21 interviews, 342 hours of classroom observations in the two different schools and various documentation analysis.

AT: For me, for the schema study, again it was a case study, in one Foundation Phase setting, in one primary school. I was working in the early years, with children aged 3-5 years. For me, it was action research. I worked with the nursery teacher, the reception teacher and one of the additional practitioners based in the nursery. We worked together over the course of one school academic year to observe children’s schemas, then to see how we could add them into the planning, what resources we could add in. I also did focus group interviews with these three practitioners to find out, at the start of the study, what their knowledge of schemas was, which was very limited, if any. Then, at the end, I redid the focus interviews to see how they felt after the action research. I also sent out 100 questionnaires across Wales to various stakeholders working with early years children, and I had 87 questionnaires back. Again, the findings were very limited knowledge and understanding of schemas. Within my PhD, there are six children that I focus on. I carried out observations with those six children over three terms and I tell their story. They’re the stars, if you like, of my PhD. I tell their stories and how they’re using their schemas to construct their knowledge and understanding.

GB: Thanks again. Having established the wide-ranging data that you collected, could you please describe the most important findings of your research?

AT: I’ll start. I’ll talk a little bit about the schemas, then Alyson will talk about the well-being aspect. Alyson and I found three commonalities within our research when we came together. The first one, and I’ve touched on it briefly previously, was a limited understanding of schemas and well-being among some practitioners working with children. In terms of the schemas, some of the answers I was getting back were, oh, it’s something I did in university, something to do with Piaget. Nobody was actually saying to me that they were actually using schemas within their practice. I actually contacted the Welsh Government and asked why schemas were not part and parcel of the Foundation Phase curriculum because I was reading about the Early Years Foundation Stage in England and they were including schemas in their developmental matters policy. A lot of the research I was reading had come from England. The Pen Green Centre in Corby has done a lot of research on schemas, and we seem to be missing out in Wales. The Welsh Government replied, saying that they did provide training on schemas in one of the Foundation Phase training packages. But when I went back and I asked practitioners about this, they may well have included it but they weren’t translating that into their practice. There was definitely this lack of understanding and this lack of knowledge. To be honest with you, a lot of practitioners, when I would talk about schemas and about some of the ways they could be evidenced, would say, oh, they’re not doing that, I’ve stopped children doing that, that’s not happening in my classroom. They were actually constraining the schemas, which was more of a concern for me than not actually using them. So that’s one, the limited understanding of schemas. Alyson, do you want to talk about the well-being bit there?

AL: Yes. Again, there was a limited understanding of well-being, but what I started to notice was that there was this uncertainty and a lot of hesitation about what well-being means in their context. But when practitioners started to talk more about it in detail, what the methods were helping me to establish, was that they saw well-being as what’s often described in literature as something called the developmental orientated view. So to know about a child’s well-being is to basically rely on their skills, their achievements, observable characteristics of well-being, rather than, or as well as, a child-subjective experience of well-being. Listening to their voice and a child-subjective experience of well-being. Also, when they were talking in more detail about what they understood by well-being, they referred to well-being as three domains. The domains were psychological well-being, social well-being and physical well-being. That’s often described as a view of well-being that’s reducible to parts, reducible to certain domains, and those were the three main domains that were coming through in the data.

GB: As we’re based in Wales, as the Wales Journal of Education, could you tell us what implications your research has for education in Wales?

AT: For us, we knew there was a limited understanding. There was a limited understanding of how to support and recognise well-being and schemas. As I said, and I mentioned it briefly before, we felt that we had this play-based curriculum, 3-7 in the Foundation Phase, which was brilliant. Everything in the policy documentation was really supporting starting with the child. The child was the centre of the education. I certainly felt that if you’re not going to use schemas, and it’s not in Foundation Phase policy, and you’re not enacting it in your practice, that was a missed learning opportunity. I think the fear then was, you’re going to change the curriculum to this Curriculum for Wales, and it had already been said from the Donaldson review that they like the Foundation Phase. It’s almost taking the best part of the Foundation Phase and then making them go from 3-16, the learning continuum going from 3-16. I think, for both myself and Alyson, the concern was, if you don’t understand these concepts now, that’s going to translate into this new Curriculum for Wales and that’s a real missed opportunity. So, we really wanted to get this research out. We really wanted to say to practitioners in Wales, you can embrace schemas, they can be part of your pedagogies. The same with well-being. You need that understanding. One of the things that came out of my PhD – as I said, it was action research – was that, along with the practitioners, we were designing a toolkit to support schemas. Although this toolkit was based on the Foundation Phase, there’s no reason why it couldn’t translate into the Curriculum for Wales if it’s available on the Hwb. We really wanted to get the message out there. We really wanted to say, embrace schemas. They’re innate for children. They’re going to use this schema anyway, but it almost makes your job easier. If you can channel, or get that window into a child’s thinking, you can use schemas in order to promote the learning and development, it’s going to help you with your planning. It’s going to help you get on board with that child. The child’s going to be enthusiastic, they’re going to want to learn. I think that was really important for us. Cathy Nutbrown has a really great quote. “You can change the curriculum but you can’t change the way children learn.” So, for us, some children do need to learn through schemas. We wanted to get this research out there, to say, this is another opportunity in Wales now with the Curriculum for Wales. Let’s start using the schemas, let’s start to embrace them. The Welsh Government does have my toolkit on there. They are producing playlists that are going to be available in September. One of them is on schemas and loose parts. So there are going to be resources out there for practitioners to use. My hope really is that using our paper as well that we’ve talked about today, that we are getting the message out there. There is an opportunity.

AL: Just related to the point I made about the limited understanding of well-being, but particularly around, the dominant view wasn’t around children’s subjective well-being. For me, one of the implications of that is, if we as practitioners knew more about, or took on board, a child’s subjective view of something, their feelings and their voice, in practice, then this for me offers a more rounded and secure understanding of what we know about young children. If we have a particular, maybe dominant, way of understanding a concept, then I think that can be limiting, particularly in terms of meeting the four purposes of the Curriculum for Wales in moving forward. If I could just backtrack, when Gary asked about some of the most important findings, another one for me in terms of the well-being study – and I think, Amanda, this was one of our other commonalities – was this uncertainty about how to promote and support well-being in practice, and how we do that effectively as practitioners. The other one was around inconsistent messages in policy, around the concepts of well-being and schemas. For us, some of the implications – you drew on some of them, Amanda – is about having consistent messages in policy, particularly – even more so now as we have a Curriculum for Wales going forward in September – and having clarity, or aiming to have clarity in guidance for practitioners. Particularly when you could say, for some practitioners, there’s quite a lot of change coming their way. Hopefully, what we’ve tried to achieve with the paper is to inform people about this concept of well-being and schemas and help think about what it might mean in moving forward for the Curriculum for Wales.

GB: Thanks very much for telling us about the paper. Is there anything else that you would like to tell the listeners about this piece of work we may not have discussed?

AT: Read the paper. Our e-mail addresses are on there. If you want any further information, contact us. I could talk about schemas forever! If they want any further information, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

AL: Sorry, can I just add, in terms of reaching out. I think it’s your contact that’s on there, Amanda, because I was at a different institution.

AT: I’ll pass them on, Al.

AL: The contacts need to reach out to you.

AT: Anything on well-being, I will pass it on, yes.

GB: Always good to be able to pass things on! One of the things that’s interesting is, you’ve both described working as relatively early career researchers after the PhD and also writing together. Could you tell us some of the benefits of working together rather than trying to write articles on your own?

AL: Amanda and I have known each other for many, many years before coming to this stage of writing together. That really helps, in terms of knowing the person you’re writing with. Knowing their strengths, and enjoying working with that other person. That’s really important. We had lots in place at the start of this paper, which made it easier. Having somebody else who is excited about their research and excited about mine too, and seeing what we could achieve by coming together, and achieving, not saving time, just making sure that readers can benefit from both our work in one particular paper. I really enjoy working with Amanda. It really helps to motivate me, and as lots of us know, finding the time to write can be challenging sometimes. Finding the right writing partner for you is important, but they also have to share that enthusiasm and interest in what you’re writing about as well. Amanda, have you got anything nice to say about me?

AT: Before Al and I actually wrote this research, we had done some writing before. We’d written a book on the Foundation Phase, so we were used to writing together. But as Alyson said, we like to bounce ideas off each other. There are certain parts of the writing process that I like, and I hate checking references, and Alyson’s really good at that. It’s really good. You work with someone so I can do some bits and then I’ll say to Al, can you just look at this? Also I think it’s nice, when you write something, to have someone else read it. Alyson will come back to me and say, is this what you mean? Is this what you’re trying to say? You’ve almost got an audience before you put it out there. I think that was really, really important as well. We’ve collaborated on quite a few projects. We’ve got another book about child development coming out around Christmas time, I think. Like Alyson said, it’s finding the right writing partner, knowing each other really well and relying on each other. I know, if I say to Alyson, we’ll do this by this deadline, then it’s going to be done, and that’s really important, I think. It could be really frustrating otherwise. We enjoy it, and Alyson gives me lots of Diet Coke when I go down her house and I can get away from my children and all the pets, so it’s lovely.

GB: To those of you listening, as Amanda said just now, hopefully you’ll be tempted to read the article. If you’d like to read the article, visit the journal website. All articles are available, Open Access, in English and Welsh, which means there’s no cost and you can download them as many times as you like. Thanks for listening and thank you to our guests, Alyson and Amanda. This is the first episode in a series of podcasts where I and the other editors will be discussing the research published in the Wales Journal of Education. You can subscribe in your podcast app or listen on our website. Thanks for listening.