Understanding children’s interests as curriculum making activity
13th September 2022
Liz Chesworth
13th September 2022
Liz Chesworth
In last week’s blog post I shared some thoughts about valuing the curriculum-making experiences that all children participate in with their families. This is central to building a school/setting-based curriculum that connects with children’s lives at home and enables every child to participate in meaningful educational experiences. Children’s interests can provide a powerful bridge to connect curriculum-making at home and in settings. However, this requires us to move beyond surface level interpretations of the term ‘children’s interests’. As Helen Hedges (2022, page 3) argues,
‘We owe it to children to look more deeply at their motivations and learning….favourite pursuits provide windows into children’s efforts to make sense and meaning from their life experiences with other children and adults, and learning opportunities in their families and communities. These efforts involve multiple ongoing inquiries into, and questions about, these life experiences.’
Helen’s words resonate with our approach to understanding children’s interests as valuable forms and sources of curriculum making. For example, in a recent project funded by the Froebel Trust we* collaborated with families and practitioners in a multi-diverse early years settings to generate deep understandings of the interests that children were exploring in their play. We used the concept of Funds of Knowledge (González, Moll and Amanti, 2005) as a tool for thinking about how interests might be stimulated by children’s participation in family activities and extended through curriculum making with practitioners.
In common with all Funds of Knowledge research, our work starts from an assets-based perspective that recognises, respects and builds on all children’s capabilities. The need to enact these values is more pressing than ever in the current educational climate in which policy narratives often appear to be drawing on deficit interpretations of culturally and linguistically diverse family practices.
*Liz Chesworth, Elizabeth Wood and Aderonke Folorunsho
References
Chesworth, Liz (2016) A funds of knowledge approach to examining play interests: listening to children’s and parents’ perspectives, International Journal of Early Years Education, 24:3, 294-308, DOI: 10.1080/09669760.2016.1188370
González, Norma, Moll, Luis and Amanti, Cathy (2005) Funds of Knowledge. Theorizing practices in households, communities and classrooms, London: Routledge.
Hedges, Helen (2022) Children’s Interests, Inquiries and Identities: Curriculum, pedagogy, learning and outcomes in the early years, Abingdon: Routledge.
Do you have examples of curriculum making that resonate with our project?
Has something on the website inspired you to try a different approach?
If so, we’d love to hear from you.