Early Years: Nick

I have two books in front of me as I write. One is the book I was going to write about – Sandra Beckett’s Recycling Red Riding Hood – the other (Rosa’s) is the movie companion for New Moon

It strikes me that the relationship between Bella and the Native American werewolves is in some ways a Conte a l’envers, as Beckett describes them.

Working from the writings of Gianni Rodari (who has more than seventeen entries in the Beckett index), she explores how Red Riding Hood has become such a universal tale that it is possible to play with the plot (including the Perrault text and images) as a tale told “Upside Down, Inside Out and Backwards.” And in finding a heroine like Bella Swan, and placing her in the situation she does, Stephanie Meyer effectively creates a Conte a L’Envers, a mixed-up version where a young woman in the woods is the one who holds the power over the wolves who are her friends, her would-be lovers. Bella smacks a werewolf on the nose as if he were a boy stepping out of line in a soap-opera prom; we are somewhere Angela Carter might recognise.

As something of a footnote, it is interesting to see this reversal taken even further in the movie book I have in front of me, where the wolves, however terrifying they are as wolves, are, in human form, mostly young and lacking in much body hair, exemplified in the website a - very far from the older, predatory wolves in so much of the Red Riding Hood iconography, yet drawing on the idea of the wargus (see this entry) as on the margins of society.

Beckett takes the wonderful Zipes exploration of Red Riding Hood to a new stage. She uses a European overview - rather she uses an understanding of countless retellings in Europe - to look at what Rodari calls A sbagliare le storie, Getting Stories Wrong, and what other contemporary writers identify as Upside-down stories.  Ths method is exemplary; it allows Beckett to explore the variety of Riding Hood stories (if Zipes removes the ‘little,’ Beckett presents a rainbow of different coloured hoods!), and in doing so to look again at what makes this story so special.  Hats off to her - hoods down, whatever - for updating the critical literature to include exploration of two lacunae in Zipes’ book: The wolves in the Ahlbergs, notably in Jeremiah in the Dark Woods and the Jolly Postman, and the RRH tales of Roald Dahl’s Revolting Rhymes.

More questions than answers in this post: a work in progress.

The more I think of there really being chalk pits in Suffolk, the more I want to explore more deeply my assumptions about the universal mythic landscape. A sideline about a pub called “The Lime  Burners” and here is their link - suggests to me all those out-of-town (or out of settlement) occupations that might have been part of the storyteller’s landscape.  Quarriers, limekiln workers, miners (like the seven dwarfs?), charcoal burners - all people whose occupation maybe allowed them a little latitude.  It is interesting that charcoal is now something of a tourist attraction, even mentionedin the sanitised Suffolk walks discussed here. I suspect no-one on these well-signposted walks will discover demonic figures gleefully plotting by a fire!

Is this part of a warning myth, as I’ve speculated before? Part of a recognition that people away from the huddle of village and town are not recognised? Not “one of us”?

Philip Pullman, in today’s Observer, is deep in Bettelheimland when he talks about the Fairy Tale protagonists and their struggle for Independence and adulthood - and maybe this is where the two themes intertwine, although this is merely conjecture:

Is there a warning about the ‘others’  in the woods because they are dangerous, or because they represent a possible different set of choices? A world away from the close-knit and settled farming community?

Or is it that, for adventures to take place for the young, the protective adult needs to be absent?

It doesn’t answer my query about Tom Tit Tot, though.

It was interesting reciting the edgy DeLaRue/Zipes’ reconstruction of the Story of the Grandmother to PGCE students in the woods today, those lovely dappled woods where the magpies chatter and one group saw a deer and we all felt at ease with children in the outdoors. In some ways it felt rather like the side-by-side comparison of Red Riding Hood stories on Katherine Harris’ site or rather the student project on the site

And it set me in mind of the power and transferability of Sendak’s Outside Over There, represented in Labyrinth , where themes such as burgeoning sexuality, sibling rivalry - not to mention the more complex issues of siblings and new babies in reconstituted families - are dealt with so openly. Is OOT more menacing because of the subtler treatment of the themes?  Or is it merely ambiguous to the point of being open to any interpretation?

Although publicised by the IOL, it actually comes from the English Outdoor Council:

This is one of their aims for the week:

Encourage your school to be doing something adventurous in the outdoors this year. Book a week at a centre. Produce leaflets showing the opportunities that are on offer in your local area. Invite the media to visit some of your initiatives.

And it is a media-focussed initiative, to some extent. So what does a practitioner do?

A full text of the guidance - some of which is from last year, so the dates aren’t quite right - is to be found here.

One of the things that isn’t quite right is a broken link to teacher net. Using the (rather cumbersome) search facility found an interesting case study that looked worth sharing, from Turners Hill in W Sussex.  This is where it gets interesting from my point of view.

Wouldn’t it be great to share good practice, not in the spectacular but in the particular? What if schools - Growing Schools or not - told their parents, their local community, and perhaps most importantly their neighbouring practitioners what great things they have been doing outside? The synergy (not sure I really like the buzz word) demonstrated at Turners Hill is exemplary.  As the case study reports:

…it was impossible to plan for one area of learning without thinking about the other areas. What is started at one stage needs to be developed in another. Learning should be for life!

And where this might be a Shibboleth for some, it seems to be real practical work in this school.

They aren’t alone, of course, and in the “Thinking Primary” section of QCA’s pages on the Rose Review, are case studies from schools. Here, for example, we see Berkswich Primary School Head teacher Martin Holmes and deputy Head Jill Pearce-Haydon publicising their school with a similar vision: “We use the environment to support learning. Our work has an ecological theme and we have created a rich outdoor learning area to curriculum delivery.”

How rich is rich, then? The article continues:

In fact the school has an outdoor theatre, a mathematical garden, a play area designed by the learners, a scientific quadrangle and a water harvesting area that provides power for the school’s other ecological areas such as the weather station and irrigation system!

But how does all this relate to a successful learning experience?

“It is all designed to provide an active learning environment for the children. The wormery is open to all and water system has transparent pipes so that the children are able to observe it working. Our curriculum is one that focuses on direct experience and creating ‘wow’ moments. We know that children don’t see learning as subjects, they see learning as learning.”

Seeing learning as learning. Not seeing subjects as  separate things, however we deliver the bits we need to deliver. Not seeing walls between English and Geography any more than between inside the classroom and outside. All tall order for a school: a tall order for teacher-trainers who are preparing students for jobs in schools like this.

This was just going to be a place to put some links for Play Day really, but it is interesting to see BBC reportage on the issues around play. On the one hand, it reports that Parents feel something is fundamentally wrong with modern childhood - and this is the link - but Over-cautious parents stop play in the report linked here. One of their latest posts bemoans the lack of knowledge about nature, but it’s a shame that BBC Wildlife’s article is only half-heartedly represented here, as a sort of teaser for “go and buy the magazine.”

The tension is not just from the BBC needing both stories and balance, however; it comes from the ambiguity we have around seeing outside as a place of danger, something I suspect we get, at heart, from maintaining the warning stories of a rural past (e.g. Red Riding Hood from France [although note that the link takes you to the great book by Jack Zipes rather than a text of the story per se], the almost global Witch-in-the-Woods type stories such as Teeny-Tiny and the Witch Woman, which is the folk-tale basis for our generation’s flagship fear-of-the-woods experience, the Blair Witch Project) in urban environments, so that the myth comes about that Outdoors is Bad. It is possible that we feel somehow that children should learn from adults to fear an Unknown and possibly supernatural evil in the Antiqua Sylva. I don’t know.

Tragically, this juxtaposition has a further complication in today’s story from S Wales, and there might be more to contemplate about incremental exposure to hazards being part of the education we need to give children, if we are not to seem as if we accept awful occurrences like this with a callous “accidents will happen” shrug.