Finding Our Feet

Finding our feet in the world of education with collaborative research in school.

In January 2021, after the national lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Professor Rachel Holmes worked with Gabby Birelo, the class teacher of 1B at Alma Park (who Rachel previously worked with in the class 3B).

Rachel wanted to understand more about children’s experiences and practices in school.

As Rachel got to know more about Gabby’s approach to being with the children in class, they found a shared interest in facilitating young children’s expressions and perspectives about their lives in school without relying on talk.

They became interested in the feelings that escape linguistic utterances, such as the atmospheres and tensions, affects and sensations that inform relationships and the gestures and glances that invite and reject feelings of belonging.

This also includes the affective responses when a young child finds her or himself inside or outside, as well as moving more fluidly between groups of friends - much of which is always insufficiently captured by talk and always inadequately interpreted by adults.

Gabby's experiences

“The last thing you want to hear as an educator is ‘someone’s coming to observe you’.

As a teacher, you constantly feel as though people are watching you to see where you are going wrong, what else you need to be doing to do better.

Whenever the word ‘observation’ is mentioned, I think I can speak for many educators when I say our guards automatically shoot up.

Many of us are scared of judgement. We want to do what’s best for our children, however we face criticism from parents, other members of staff, the Senior Leadership Team and even outside forces.

It’s difficult to manage the stress of wanting to impress all of them and, even worse, manage the possible criticism from all of these too as well as push all your class to ‘age-related expectations’. I hate that term.

So, at first I had expected this experience to be filled with consistent nerves - worrying what Rachel thought of me but thankfully what followed was nothing of the sort.

The first few weeks were slightly awkward, with the mention of recording children during lessons and their play times, all I could think about was how am I going to make even more time in my packed day to manage this?

But as time went on, I really wanted to become a part of the research and have thoroughly enjoyed everything since.

I’m already upset at the likely prospect that we won’t be working together with the same group of lovely children next year.

Being only four years into my career, I still feel I have so much to learn and that I’m developing as a teacher in many aspects. I, like others, want to do well but only have so much (or little should I say) time to achieve it.

Much of the time, I end up feeling very down about myself as a teacher and then find it hard to want to spend time on self-improvement.

Having Rachel in my class has helped me feel more confident in the way I work with my children and I feel as though the positivity makes me want to do better.

Having positivity within a class opposed to negative observations where you know you’re going to be greeted with criticism was a breath of fresh air.”

- Gabby Birelo, class teacher of 1B at Alma Park school

Image of object used by student for Cluster of Promises project

Rachel and Gabby’s collaborative work inspired an abstract, a short film and a paper presentation ‘Finding our feet’ (see below), which they co-presented online from Alma Park at the Childhood and Time Conference at Tampere University, Finland.