Page 6

American adventurer

Thanks to the NUT and ESU, early years teacher Sarah Hovington is off on the trip of a lifetime to find out how pre- school education in the US compares to that in England.

As an early years teacher, I admire Paddington Bear's analogy: "Life is like a marmalade sandwich. You only get out, what you are prepared to put in.”

Teaching is a demanding and complex job: the pressures of achieving targets, regardless of where children start their learning journey; the welter of publications teachers are meant to read, digest and implement; as well as the endless initiatives that are introduced but never have time to embed before the next round of initiatives are released.

Wouldn’t it be refreshing to take time out, visit other schools, meet and talk to other professionals, and observe classroom practice at first hand? Wouldn’t it be exhilarating to pursue such professional development in another country?

For two weeks in the next academic year, I am going to be an American adventurer as an NUT/Walter Hines Page Scholar. I will travel to the USA to pursue an early years educational project. Accommodation and food are being provided by the English- Speaking Union (ESU).

Who was Walter Hines Page?

Walter Hines Page was an American journalist, publisher and diplomat. He was the US ambassador to the UK during World War I. Page believed that free and open education was fundamental to democracy.

Today, scholarships are awarded by the ESU to NUT members from the UK to study in the States.

My study project

I’ll be conducting a thematic study of early years education in elementary schools in the state of Massachusetts. The key questions underpinning such school visits are:

• What kind of educational experiences are offered in early years classes in elementary schools?

• What evidence is there of the impact of such programmes as Head Start and Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) settings?

Background

In the USA, virtually all states offer some publicly funded pre-kindergarten and/or kindergarten education.

Pre-kindergarten children are usually aged four to five, while kindergarten caters for five to six year olds. Kindergartens are often part of local elementary schools. Compulsory education commences at around age six, but this varies between states.

Pre-kindergarten and kindergarten classes are a preparation for the compulsory school system. The US has embraced the link between education and care. Some ECEC centres have been established which incorporate a comprehensive set of services designed to foster children’s social, emotional, cognitive and linguistic readiness for school.

The known correlation between birthweight, later long-term health and educational achievement were prime motivators for initiatives such as Head Start for the under-sixes in the US. A similar programme, Sure Start, has been developed for under-fours in England. These initiatives show that policy-makers in the two countries are beginning to look at care and education as a whole.

Curriculum

In the US, education is not written into the national constitution so remains the domain of individual states. This means there is no national curriculum!

In most states, the curriculum for the kindergarten year is within the individual state’s overall framework. But there are some states that provide curriculum guidelines for the pre-kindergarten phase – Massachusetts being one such state. Since 1993, state-wide curriculum frameworks have been developed for pre-kindergarten to grade 12 across seven subject areas. These are:

• mathematics

• science and technology

• social sciences / social studies including US and world history, geography, economics, civics and government

• English language arts

• world languages

• the arts, including dance, music, theatre and the visual arts

• health, including health education, physical education and family and consumer science education.

These seven subject areas define the learning outcomes. For example, there are learning standards for the ‘number sense and operations’ strand of the mathematics curriculum framework for pre-kindergarten and kindergarten children.

CONTINUES ON PAGE 7