Nurturing chick and child: Maternal Thought and Practice in the School Curriculum

by Pam Nason

I have chosen to write this story about love in public education as a diary because the form is fitting for what I have to say. Diaries, a genre historically favored by women for recounting the intimate details of their lives, existed, until very recently, only in the margins of academic literature. The education canon, striving for scientific credibility, couldn't accommodate their gossipy, "subjective" style any more than it would admit their sensual, intimate subject matter. Things are beginning to change, but still it came as no surprise to me that only last week my eleven-year old daughter had to argue for the genre when the novel she is writing was criticised for reading "too much like a diary." She was able to cite a convincing stream of famous published diaries - The Gathering of Days, The Diary of Anne Frank and The Stone Diaries - to prove her point. Her novel is no epic novel of heroism - the heroine always dies in these anyway (Thompson, 1993) - but a story of the countless small victories and defeats that daily life allows a girl such as herself. The diary is the perfect genre for her sort of story. The fact that in 1996 it was still not considered quite legitimate makes it all the more perfect for mine.

May 21, 1996 12 noon

The goslings have hatched and I have joined the steady stream of professors, janitors, secretaries, university students, the siblings and the parents of the primary children who attend school at the Faculty of Education, drawn to the classroom to see how they are doing. It's not just the cheeps of new life that are so compelling, although in themselves they are sufficient to attract passers-by "just to pop in for a quick look," but it is the children's enthusiasm and sheer love for their brood which is so contagious. First the chickens, then the turkeys and now the goslings; we have all been kept well informed as to the due dates, informed by five, six and seven year olds who have maintained countdown records as carefully as any expectant mother.

A small group of children has moved over to eat their lunch with their goslings. This staying close enough to be watchful yet at the same time getting on with daily routines has come to characterise their work and play lately. They can already distinguish between turkey poults and fowl chicks, something most of the adults are still having difficulty with, and although I know that their intense watching will eventually lead to perfectly accurate, meticulously labelled drawings which we may call scientific, theirs is not the gaze of the detached objective scientist. They are besotted with their subject, speak tenderly about their beauty, take note of their growth, point out their individual characteristics and idiosyncrasies, laugh at their antics and worry about their welfare. I am reminded of the loving detail in Rachel Carson's The Sense of Wonder - a beautiful photographic essay, first published in the Woman's Home Companion in 1956 under the title Help your Child to Wonder - to show and tell mothers how they might cultivate in their children the sense of wonder. "Once the emotions have been aroused," says Carson, "- a sense of the beautiful, the excitement of the new and unknown, a feeling of sympathy, pity, admiration or love - then we wish for knowledge about the object of our emotional response. Once found, it has lasting meaning" (Carson, 1990). As I watch the children's unwavering attention to the minutest detail of the chicks' appearance and behaviour, I am reminded of Nobel laureate Barbara McLintock, the geneticist, who, "without distinguishing between 'cognitive and visual' knew by seeing and saw by knowing" (Keller, 1983). In the context of what Ellen Fox Keller refers to as an "intimate relationship between her and her kernels of corn" McLintock was eventually able to see chromosomes which had formerly eluded her and other research geneticists (Keller, 1983). As I watch a child totally absorbed in the chick she is cradling I am also reminded of how I gazed so long and deep into my newborn daughter's face that I knew every hair in her eyebrows.

May 21, 1996 2:30 p.m.

Back in the primary class again - just for another quick look. It's never really quick! Pam Wister, the classroom teacher, who has been coming in on weekends lately just to be sure that all was well with the incubator and to attend any out of school hours hatchings, showed me the gosling with the crooked bill. She told me how Sandy Latchford had helped with its hatching. In contrast to the chicks and turkeys, this gosling had cracked its shell with agonising slowness and Pam, fearing that something was wrong, had dithered between whether to help or whether to stick with the old poultryman's maxim "If they can't get out by themselves, don't help them. They won't survive anyway." Sandy, a professor in Special Education who had happened along - just for a quick look - had no such compunction. Stating firmly that, "This is what the mothers do," she helped break the shell. All three goslings were born this way. Two survive.

May 23, 1996 1:15 p.m.

Today when I went into the classroom children were sitting around the large aquariums which currently house the chicks, poults and goslings, absorbed in drawing and conversing in the language of experts - about poults, broods, egg teeth and the like. They use, read and write words like incubator, embryo, foetus and allantois membrane with ease, teaching us, the adults, new terminology gleaned from the many reference books Pam Wister has provided. The goslings have taken to following everyone around and the need to know why has let one 7-year old boy to re-search the literature for an explanation. His account of imprinting is as knowledgeable and articulate as the one I first heard in introductory psychology at university!

Joy, a student teacher, was cradling a turkey poult in her hands. She was concerned, Pam told me, because it seemed listless. I thought it was just tired.

May 23, 1996 7:30 p.m.

The turkey poult is very sick. When I brought the students from my curriculum theory class in to show them how the lived curriculum was evolving in one multi-age primary classroom, (and, secretly, to show off the chicks) the tiny bird was lying prostrate in a little cardboard compartment which someone had made to keep it separate from the rest. Louise Berube, an education student and a mother, told us how she and her daughter Erin had found an injured bird. Erin didn't want to leave it. She lay down beside it and said, "Poor bird, mommy." Again at bed time she cried for it and couldn't get to sleep. She is just two years old.

May 24, 1996

the poult died during the night. Laid out next to the living as it awaits burial, the contrast is enormous and terribly disturbing to me. The children have talked about possible causes of the death and have planned to bury this tiny corpse next to the hamster which died last year. As they get on with performing the burial ritual, I keep thinking about the group of middle school children who were so shocked and filled with indignation when they read the epigraph on the tombstone of Sarah Clarke, a mother, who died in childbirth at Gagetown, in 1808:

"...of Gershom Clarke I was the lawful wife

In child bed was forced to resign my life

My aill born infant on my feet it lies

In the cold grave till we are called to rise."

They couldn't fathom how anyone could have been so callous as to lay the baby at her feet. It was beyond their comprehension how anyone could ever do such a thing. The baby, they insisted, should have been laid to rest in her arms.

May 26, 1996 5:00 a.m.

I am writing this article at 5:00 a.m. on Saturday morning, carving out a little time for my academic work before my family gets up. My daughter, that same daughter whose eyebrows I knew to a hair eleven years ago, has had two friends over for the night. Soon they'll be up and my quiet time for writing will be disrupted. But I don't resent the interruption. After all, it was this daughter who first introduced me to the pleasures of getting up at dawn and she from whom I learned the practical lessons of mothering, practical lessons which awakened my academic interest in the place of maternal thought and practice in the school curriculum. She has played, and continues to play an important part in enabling me to see and celebrate the inclusion of care, concern and connection in the curriculum, the three c's that feminist writer Jane Roland Martin proposes should coexist with the three r's (Martin , 1992). Before my daughter's birth I would probably have written only about how the children's scientific, mathematical and literacy developments were enhanced by the chick hatching. Now, I can see how enormously this disciplinary learning is enhanced by what Nel Noddings, mother of 10 and acting Dean of Education at Stanford University calls an ethic of caring, but what Maria Montessori called "love" (Martin, 1992, p. 20).

WORKS CITED

Carson, Rachael (1990) The Sense of Wonder. Berkeley: The Nature Company.

Keller, Evelyn Fox (1983) A Feeling for the Organism. New York: W.H. Freeman.

Martin, Jane Roland (1992) The School Home. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Noddings, Nel (1986) Fidelity in Teaching, Teacher Education and Research for Teaching Harvard Educational Review Vol 56 (4).

Oliver, Donald (1990) Grounded Knowing: A Postmodern Perspective on Teaching and Learning. Educational Leadership, September, 1990.

Thompson, Joanne (1993) The Pathetic is Political: The Educational Implications of Heroinism. Curriculum Inquiry 23(4), pp. 395-407.