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Childcare … Education, Emotions and the Future Seminar

Emma Parfitt — Fri, 31 Jan 2014 11:12:00 +0000

Childcare meeting a conference? What are you talking about, Emma? The name of the conference was Education, Emotions and the Future Seminar. I attended and spoke at this fascinating conference in Leicester (22 Jan 2014). The standard of speakers was very high. Here is a link to the presentation that I gave:-

Emma’s presentation

The programme for the day was as follows:-

Part 1: Education, Emotions and the Present

Keynote: ‘Spatial Disparities in Emotional Responses to Education: Feelings of ‘Guilt’ Amongst Student-Parents’ (Rachel Brooks; University of Surrey)

Detached Youth Work: Understanding (how to be with) Young People’s Emotions (Matej Blazek; Loughborough University)

Emotions and Disaffection with School Mathematics (Gareth Lewis; University of Leicester)

The Cry for Professional Intimacy (Fiona Birkbeck; University of Nottingham)

Reflection, Emotions, Shock and Puzzlement in the Education Workplace (Rajesh Patel; De Montfort University)

Part 2: Education, Emotions and the Future

Keynote: Education and the Construction of Hope (Darren Webb; University of Sheffield)

Atmospheres of Progress in a Data-Based School (Matt Finn; University of Durham)

Me! The Narrative of Education: A Changing Force in Society? (Emma Parfitt; University of Warwick)

Widening Participation and Educating Hope (Thomas Grant; University of Leicester)

Thoughts about the conference

I especially enjoyed Darren Webb, Matt Finn, and also Rachel Brooks’ talk on student-parents.

What I took away from Rachel Brooks’ talk is this. That historically there is an uneasy relationship between emotions and higher education. Emotions are typically erased or managed in the education system in place of rational thought (Beard 07, Clegg 13, Hey and Leathwood 09). This is an advantage to those from privileged backgrounds. I am not from such a background, and have found the educational transition hard between public school, to university (for a degree), finally returning for a PhD after working. With a lot more confidence, if not the bank balance … having worked parttime to fund my studies as a mature student.

One place where class and choices meet, where the topic of the talk was evident, is in the provision of childcare and the ability of women to have access to suitable childcare for their circumstances. For instance this effects women’s options to return to education/work or stay in the home to provide childcare. And different women have different needs and wants in this area.

I liked the idea Brooks mentioned of social patterning. What makes a good mother, what makes a good father, as being determined by the expectations and pressures of society around families. The ‘norm’ for a family, in terms of who cares for the child, who works, in the family home.

Women’s Guilt

Over all women felt more guilty than fathers for returning to university. Brooks’ argued that therefore normative constructions of motherhood are in conflict with education. And one could say that emphasis on attachment (in early childhood studies) and intensive parenting (and its effect on brain development) carries a cost for women more than men. How as woman can we validate decisions to keep working, or to return to education, if child care structures as they stand do not there to support this?

I found it interesting that more guilt was expressed by UK mothers than those from Denmark (the study compared two Danish, and two British univisersities). Brooks’ explained that in Denmark it is more usual for mothers to work while the child is young compared to the UK where women feel the weight of societal disapproval against the return of mothers to the workplace. Her work indicates that surrounding social networks have a big impact in women’s opportunities/resolve to return or continue with higher education. Brooks’ also mentioned that the state also plays an important role because they establish the ‘norms’ of child care. More needs to be done to support women who want to work, because women can feel this conflict between work and child care. Those that want to work also want to know their child is getting the best care.

Women in Denmark

Women in Denmark also received more support from their partners. Men were more involved with child care. Whereas in the UK men predominantly saw themselves as providers for the family and therefore less guilty than the women for not being as involved with child care. Though I also know, through personal experience, more men are opting to look after their children, and support their partners and get involved, to allow their partner to continue working.

The point is that those options should be there. Women should be supported and not made to feel guilty for wanting to work. Whether we like it or not female biology makes this difficult, naturally mothers want to be close to their child, they may want to breast-feed and there are not the structures to support this for the average working woman. The workplace favours men with families more than women, and understandably women are more and more caustious about mentioning family in a job interview than men. Because it is assumed that they will be the ones to drop everything and not show up to work if the child has the chicken-pox or whatever.

More provisions are needed for childcare

Therefore more provisions, more demands, need to be requested from employers, from the government, to allow women to be close to their children whilst working. And affordable child care for people who need to work to bring in enough money to live on.

Obviously any woman who intends to have a family will have concerns about how to balance these things. Especially that it is often the woman who is expected to make sacrifices either in terms of her career or in time spent with her children. We can’t have it all. That is the reality. But we can try to find a way that works for us … that at least should be an option.

Unfortunately we don’t all have the same gumption as Kara Westlund, a full-time municipal councillor to take our children to work. I have to ask… why not?

Who am I?

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Unmastered at Warwick Arts Centre

Emma Parfitt — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 14:42:00 +0000

On the 16^th June I went to a discussion about writing emotion with Katherine Angel as part of Warwick Book Festival. Katherine gave a reading that was beautiful and frank in terms of female sexuality. The book is fragmented in structure, the resulting narrative like poetry, true, unsettling, revealing… Listening to her reading it felt like many threads of the way I had been feeling were being woven together.

How to feel one’s sexuality and be a feminist, or at least a woman who believes in equality even if I can’t relate to the word ‘feminist’, regarded as extreme… as if one dislikes men. At least in my experiences it is so when walking streets outside of the academic community. For it seems to be a woman who wants equality and being a sexual being have conflicts. Katherine’s work drew out some of these conflicts.

‘stitched into myself’ was a phrase that resonated, expressing to me the difficulty women have explaining sexuality to men and one another. I have been pondering, if a woman can understand and accept the penetrative nature of sex, whilst also feeling her own engrossing, or receiving force, why can’t men accept the duality of human desire? What I am trying to grapple with is why are books, movies, and television so penetration obsessed, where is the duality?

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PhD Progress update

Emma Parfitt — Sat, 30 Mar 2013 12:43:00 +0000

My PhD had changed alot since the very beginning when I had what seems like a really vague idea now about storytelling and mental health. I then became interested in how stories teach people about their culture, including emotional language and understanding. I have clarified my thesis statement to: The civilisation of emotion: does traditional storytelling or do stories have an effect on how young people identify and understand the language of emotion?

So in my thesis I am going to explore Arlie Hochschild’s concept of how society uses feeling in relation to young people and traditional storytelling. I intend to use Hochschild’s ideas to form a link between Jack Zipes’ application of Elias and civilitie and Bruno Bettelheim’s discussions on the possible meaning and understanding of fairy stories. While Zipes debates the behavioural influences of fairy tale literature on civilization Bettelheim’s focus was on children’s psychological maturity (which is important to well-being when it comes to coping with depression and anxiety). Emotions in this way are co-dependant knowledge, we learn the language of emotion how to recognise, label, and place meaning on feelings through our interactions with others. Fitting in with ideas of social constructionism the language, meaning and expression of emotion is socially constructed and under constant revision.

So what do I mean by ‘does traditional storytelling or do stories have an effect’? I believe that narrative can help young people to negotiate transitions from late childhood to early adulthood. My research methods (comprising of interviews, storytelling, and group discussion) act in an intervention capacity, in that the students’ interpretation and experience of the storytelling performance allows their ideas to be perceived and validated, in other words tested against the responses of others. Social influences such as media, the internet, and other people, have narrative elements which combined on many levels potentially inform our emotional language and understanding. The research may be used in part to begin to separate out the processes of meaning-making which may validate why storytelling may have psychological benefits because it is exploring the student’s words and interactions over a period of time. And I hope this may take us a step closer to understanding what a marvellous thing our culture is, and how we can encourage multiple layers of tolerance and understanding between different genders, class and culture, and empower young people to make a difference in society with the right support. The support they tell us they need rather than what, in good faith, we try to impose.

On other news, going part time has helped the money situation I’m working hard to complete my PhD in four years on schedule. If anyone hears of any grants or sponsorship that my PhD might qualify for please let me know. I’ve written to my local MP, and to the Minister of Education, to appeal for more consideration of PhD funding, such as for example changing the current Career Development Loan system. It is designed to cover two years of study and provides a maximum of £10,000 which then has to be paid back in roughly £200 instalments a month. It was never designed to provide for PhD students but some of us have no other choice. I used mine to support myself and cover the bulk of my first two years fees. This past year I have applied for funding and worked part time to save up money to pay off the loan and pay for subsequent year’s fees. However the unexpected move to Warwick University with my supervisor in September has eaten up my savings for next year’s fees because I was unable to find work from Sept – January. But as in the past if I work hard I know that I will create an opportunity to find the money I need to get by. Feeling forcibly optimistic. A big thank you to everyone who has supported me thus far.

Happy Easter J

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Questions & Answers

Emma Parfitt — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 15:34:00 +0000

This month my task is to clarify my research questions and methods in greater detail. Today I mind mapped all the ideas I had and formed some questions as follows:

Overall research question: Does traditional storytelling have an effect on adolescent emotional aptitude (that is emotional ability)

This then breaks down into a set of sub-questions:

1/ How can we measure if the emotional aptitude of adolescents changes or remains the same in response to storytelling?

2/ What processes may be occurring between the storyteller and the listener that work with or against emotional aptitude? How can these be used in a creative piece?

3/ How can storytelling be compared to reading and writing?

4/ Does storytelling have an effect on social relationships at the individual, group and community level?

Creative piece: As a creative experiment I will refer to the adolescents’ thoughts from this research to inspire short stories with themes of emotional aptitude, blending reality and the fantastical.

The neurologist Oliver Sacks will be at Warwick University as a visiting professor. I hope to talk to him about some of the questions I have. As after reading about some brain processes in EI (Daniel Goleman) the neocortex seems to play an important part in the process of emotional ability.

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Therapeutic Ends

Emma Parfitt — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 12:18:00 +0000

After months of waiting I read Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends, by White and Epston, and discovered that it wasn’t particularly relevant to my research. Mainly because it focuses on individual therapy sessions and I am working with groups. However I liked how White and Epston discussed the importance of imagination. It is through communication of their “story” that individuals are able to externalise thoughts. This begins the process of reforming the meaning around certain events in order to ‘revise their relationship with the problem’ (p63). Verbalising allows recognition that what is causing distress quite often is a miss-match of our story with how things are, or how we would like them to be. A letting go of the need to control others, of expecting others to act in a certain way; an understanding of what we feel, why, and how to process it. These things take time to reshape in the brain.

While my study hopes to examine the changes that occur in adolescent’s emotions as a result of storytelling what I have mainly learnt this week is that coding is complex and time consuming. This is where it is invaluable to have a clear and focused idea from the start; otherwise you end up scrapping a lot of work. I admit there were one or two false starts this week. The outcome is that I’ve accepted the idea that being specific at this stage is a way to allow ideas to expand over time. The words we use to express emotions are very complex. Often a word like frustrated is not used, rather expressed through tone which I have to ignore at this stage of simple word counting. I need to count the words to see patterns that otherwise might be overlooked and later return to a more critical analysis. The transcripts I’m currently examining may inspire new directions once I get my head around using NVivo.

In other news I have been asked to write a guest blog for Youngminds. And Scientific American published an interesting article in issue 23 this month. In Schools add Workouts for Attention, Grit and EmotionalControl, Ingrid Wickelgren discusses the importance of emotional control being taught in schools: ‘Thinking about thinking, known as metacognition, may give kids better control over how they think and feel in ways that could enhance learning.’ It is a very good thing that recognition is being given to teaching positive psychological skills in schools. Although, letting down the side somewhat, Charlie Taylor, the government expect on behaviour, in his April 2012 report on Improving Attendanceat School suggested more focus at a primary level to prevent problems. This seems to be the governments go to area. Sure, I don’t disagree, primary care is very important, but what are you proposing to do about those pupils who are older and need our support? They need us to teach them to engage in life, they need their emotional needs met, and the current system is failing to do this. Especially where one of the suggestions to control truancy places a financial burden on the family by fining parents, how is that going to encourage a positive attitude to school? It could backfire, big time. Of course, I’m biased, but I think storytelling could engage pupils where other methods have failed. Thoughts?

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Questions about the stories surrounding us

Emma Parfitt — Wed, 18 Jul 2012 09:34:00 +0000

‘some methods are more useful for the questions they offer’(Arthur W. Frank, Letting Stories Breathe, p.72)

Questions and crossroads

My question is how can traditional storytelling be used to support emotional health? It’s a tough one. The term narrative therapy was coined as a result of the work of two men, Michael White and David Epston (see https://narrativeapproaches.com/books/narrative-means-to-therapeutic-ends/). Though they didn’t want to be associated with any formal definitions. What exactly they did, I don’t know yet, because I am waiting for their book to come into the library. However in my search, of what felt like every periodic journal in an electronic maze, I found Pennebaker.

In the United States, Pennebaker took the idea of narrative and health further by attempting to test it empirically. He and his colleagues did experiments on writing therapy and discovered that writing had a positive effect on not just mental but also physical health! Which brings me to another question, how do we test this? Pennebaker used qualitative data analysis, the measure of positive versus negative words and how these changed over the test period. I am about to trail this myself in a test run of what I hope will be a larger project in 2013, so I’ll let you know how it goes.

Mental health

There aren’t any definitions that really cover ‘positive’ mental health. In medical dictionaries the definition states that problems in mental health are more measurable. It is like trying to define what makes a ‘whole’ person, sometimes we need different things in our lives to feel secure and comfortable. However individuals know for themselves when they feel well adjusted to the environment around them. T hose moments where things flow perhaps, where we don’t only get on with things but feel truly alive and engaged with our environment. We can feel an emotional and physical balance. When it comes to measuring this I’m still trying to figure it out, I’m sure many other researchers are also.

So where am I starting from? I got the core idea of my PhD after reading The Women Who Run With The Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés. She discusses stories from a female and Jungian perspective. I got to wondering what, if anything, had been tested on the emotional effects of story? At first there was very little. I found mention of an experiment after 9/11 demonstrating that stories helped people cope with anxiety. But these were real life stories. What of fiction? Because of Estés’ book I was drawn to folk lore. My mum encouraged me to read fairy stories as a child, and that later developed into an interest in science fiction, fantasy and horror.

Weaving the threads together

Could I find a way to bring storytelling and mental health together? White & Epston’s idea was also to bring different disciplines together so that people could learn from one another. If only someone had told me this in school when I was conflicted between studying English or Science! To me the two things went together, apparently a lot of other people think this way outside of the curriculum. And so despite being funnelled initially into a biology degree, I gave up science to pursue writing, and here I am attempting once more to bring the two things together. A storytelling based research project, resulting in a mix of qualitative methods, a book of short stories, and the development of another new skill, blogging. Then went back to an old skill and passion: writing!

Get your copy here!

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