© Helen Manchester
Documentation Focus Helen Manchester: Visible listening Helen is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Education and Social Research Institute at Manchester Metropolitan University and an independent educational research consultant. She has recently completed two nationwide research projects (with Sara Bragg) for the Open University and funded by Creative Partnerships: “Youth Voice” and “Creativity, School Ethos and the Creative Partnerships Programme” (in press). This research involved working closely with resident artists and creative practitioners in early years settings in the UK. Here, she is in conversation with Guest Editor, Christina MacRae.
feel like what they’re doing is being valued and it’s being seen by people and they therefore feel that they’re important and they’re seen as being sensible and having ideas that are valued and that changes the way that the adults and the children talk to each other. The children feel that they are able to ‘do’, to ‘act’, because they see that what they’re doing is being valued and being seen.
Could you talk about what your understanding of “visible listening” is?
I think that’s really useful for practitioners because as we’re saying it’s quite difficult sometimes to talk about your practice and what it is that you do and you take things for granted – your everyday interactions or whatever, with children. But I think then artists can have an important role in being another person who’s not involved in those everyday interactions and they have a fresh perspective on what’s going on and they see things differently. There was a science lesson where they’d been dealing with different liquids and the artist was taking some photos that showed how beautiful these different liquids were and the teacher said, I’m coming from a science perspective and I didn’t see that at all but just look at this, this is just gorgeous and beautiful and we’ve now got these pictures of what a sort of aesthetic experience that was for the children.
I think the best way to think about it is where I’ve seen it happening in nurseries and early years settings. It’s about listening, it’s about those everyday practices of pedagogical documentation that are going on through observations of children and their responses to the provocations that are posed. And then it’s also about the staff and the time and space that they have to talk to each other, to reflect on what’s happening with the children, and also to reflect with the children about what’s going on. That’s the basis of it, but then there’s another part of it, which is that the learning that the children are doing, which is being observed and documented by the staff and perhaps by the children themselves, is made available to them; that their learning is being made visible to them, and also to their parents, or to the wider public, and that those resources are part of the children’s learning as well. In the nursery in Birmingham that I worked in, everyday they put photos of what the children have done or examples of their work on the notice boards, which parents can see and talk to their children about when they pick them up. The children will go up to the pictures and say “oh look, that’s me and that’s what I did.” When you’re documenting what children are doing, you’re also seeing them as producers and you’re valuing their production, rather than worrying about what they’re not doing. Yes, I think that’s really important. The effects of that on the children is that they
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Sometimes when I’m in the school as an artist, I feel like some of what I’m doing is just capturing stuff that’s happening all the time but you begin to see these more extra special things happening.
In terms of my practice as an artist, using a sketchbook to capture my ideas is an important part of my practice. What role might you think artists could play in relation to documenting children? It’s that thing about the different tools that the artists bring. The same teacher that I was talking about before was saying how working with the artist is a bit like working with any other colleague. He’s not necessarily saying that the artist is this amazingly special thing because that’s dangerous, you know, to say that when the artists come in they are the saviours and can solve everything. But artists bring with them tools that are different to what a colleague or another practitioner might have. It might be digital media tools or it might be skills and resources in terms of making things more visual. It’s partly about