Including children on the edge of the classroom

Many years ago, when I was still relatively new to the process of Mantle of the Expert, I spent a day working in a school with a class of six-year-old students. They were studying a topic based on the story by Oscar Wilde called ‘The Selfish Giant.’ Working together, we set up as a team of landscape gardeners given the job by the giant’s sister to create a memorial garden in memory of the giant and his kindness to children. The students started by creating a statue using their bodies ‘enactively,’ then began work on making the garden using two large sheets of cloth, paper with drawings, and pieces of wool.

Throughout the first hour of the session, one boy sat at the back of the class with his support worker and didn’t get involved. He was, the teacher explained to me, a child with autism who often found it difficult to work with the rest of the class and had full-time support.

At break time, all the children went out to play; the boy at the back of the class was the last to leave. As he went into the cloakroom, he pretended to drive a car, turning a steering wheel and going ‘brum, brum.’ As he put on his coat, I asked him what kind of car he had. ‘A BMW seven series,’ came the immediate reply, and he disappeared outside, ‘Brum.’

While the children were outside, I asked his classroom support what he had been doing while the rest of the class was creating the garden. She showed me a drawing of a set of traffic lights coloured red, amber, and green.

When the children came back, I asked the boy if we could use his traffic lights in the story. He agreed with a nod, and while he returned to his place at the back of the class, I asked the rest of the children how we might use the traffic lights. One child suggested they could go at the entrance of the garden car park. The rest agreed, so I stuck the picture on the wall next to where the children had created the car park.

This contribution had a transformative effect on the boy. With his support worker, he came over to join the rest of the class and began to draw a road map (see above) to help people find the garden. It wasn’t a road map like anyone had ever seen, but it made perfect sense to him and the rest of the class. He then started to build a narrow-gauge railway out of wool. Soon, all the other children were helping, and by the end of the lesson, the boy was sitting in a cardboard box (found by his support) driving the ‘train’ while the rest of the class were sitting in the ‘seats’ behind, going around the garden.

This session remains with me as one of the most memorable experiences of my teaching life, a remarkable testament to the power of children’s imagination and the effectiveness of Dorothy Heathcote’s amazing approach.

Tim Taylor