by James Mannion
Last year, Oracy Cambridge started a fascinating collaboration with the National Gallery education team called ‘Visions and Voices’. Working with three schools over a 3-year period, we’re exploring ways in which we can use the National Gallery collection as a stimulus to help students at Key Stage 3 develop confidence in spoken language and communication.
Part of this project required me to observe the gallery educators doing their thing – and my goodness, it is a sight to behold for anyone interested in oracy. Typically, they have around an hour to work with a group of around 30 children they’ve never met before. They sit them down in front of a couple of paintings, and it’s wall-to-wall oracy from there on in. The gallery educators are incredibly sophisticated in their use of spoken language – I’ve certain learned at least as much as I have imparted through my involvement in this project.
Recently, I sat down with Ed Dickenson, one of the gallery educators, to get the inside story…
If you prefer to read rather than watch/listen, I’ve pasted the transcript below.
James
Could you explain a little bit about your use of spoken language as a gallery educator, and the ways in which you use spoken language and oracy in your work?
Ed
In terms of the programme that we have, spoken language is pretty much everything. We do do art classes, where people sit in and they’ll respond to a painting, you know, physically, whether we’re getting them to stand up and do poses, or tearing paper, or drawing something, or splashing paint or whatever. It all starts, and I think ends, with spoken language. Which does make us think, ‘are we supporting everyone here?’, which we can chat about later.
But it’s everything. I see it very much as a way in which we set the tone. Spoken language is what we use to welcome groups, to get them excited about being in the gallery, to get them curious about the things there. We use spoken language to get them to explore, to sort of be curious… It is the main way that we interact both with the students and with the paintings.
I think at it’s worse that could just be lecturing. But when I say spoken language here, I think it’s very much a dual role of: we speak, but in a way to facilitate the children, the students to speak – and the adults and everyone else who takes part and the families to speak; children to speak to their parents and family members, and vice versa, and for each to listen. So I would say it’s the main medium with which people experience the gallery. As well as sight!
James
Yeah, and it’s in an intentional way, because I noticed when I was visiting the gallery recently, there was a group of very young children, and you know how they walk in twos, and they’re holding hands, and they’re all wearing their little hi-vis. And they’re all just talking, I was just watching them file past me, and it’s just what we do as humans, isn’t it? From a very young age, we just talk and it’s just how we process the world. It’s just like, information comes in through our senses. And we sort of just process it by speaking.
Ed
And what do people say? You know, it’s one of the first things I’ll say, people say ‘do you have to be silent in the gallery?’ And I go ‘Nooooo, that would be rubbish!’ How would we learn anything?’ You want people to obviously be respectful of other people’s enjoyment of the gallery, but they have to talk!
James
And so it’s absolutely the case, I think, from what I’ve seen and heard that spoken language is just 99% of what you’re doing. It’s very much a spoken language thing. And you get groups of kids coming in. And what I’d quite like to do for the benefit of people who are watching or listening to this or reading it, to get over a sense of what it is because it really blew my mind, as somebody who’s been working in education for a long time, to observe you and your colleagues working with these groups of kids who come in, often a bit late, often a bit bedraggled, a bit overwhelmed… I remember there was a group that I saw that slept on that famous boat at Greenwich, the Cutty Sark. I don’t imagine they’d got much sleep and so they were all a bit frazzled and they get plonked down in front of a painting. And usually you have them for about an hour, is that correct?
Ed
Yep.
James
And you normally sort of look at maybe two paintings in that time. And apart from that, it’s just wall-to-wall oracy. So please could you sort of talk through some of the talk moves if you like, some of the things that you do, and don’t do, that enable that to work as a format?
Ed
Yeah, you’ve got an hour with us from which we need to welcome you in, get you comfortable, give you a sense of what this space is, who it belongs to, what’s in there. And then to look at some examples. We always aim for three, it’s always a bit tight, and you probably only see two with me because, you know, we go on too much. But we try and get as much as we can – people want to see more, but I’m always just like, we’re going to try and slow down a bit. Because otherwise, we’re just collecting things rather than really interrogating them.
And we will use questioning to try and make sense of the painting. It could be we spend 20 minutes on a painting without even talking about who the artist is, what date it was painted, the movement, all this sort of stuff. Those things can be useful. But you also need to ask yourself the question why? Why do you need to know that that’s a Reubens in comparison to someone else? Do you need to know it was painted in 1623. And it’s just like, what is the reason for this? Otherwise, we’re just saying facts for the sake of it.
So we will ask them to observe. And we will ask them what they see. I always like to say, ‘I can tell you what you’re looking at, but I don’t know what you see’. And I cannot tell you what you see. The only way I can find out what you see is if you tell m. You know, if you see a double decker bus in the back of a Renaissance painting, you see a double decker bus, but I don’t find those things out until they can communicate it. Then we can reason things and go, ‘Do you think the artist intended to do that? Do you think they knew what a double decker bus looks like? What else could it be? Do you see the same thing? You don’t see the same thing as them, why do you disagree with that? Or you agree with that?’ You know. And so we can have those discussions.
But it’s got to start with observation, and then telling me, telling each other, listening to each other. We can build towards understandings. We could say, you can do exercises where if you were to ask 10 questions about a painting, what would they be? And what order would you put them in? You know, you usually follow things like Bloom’s Taxonomy, where you start lower order, collecting things, closed questions, building to more sort of inferential higher order things. What do you think about that? What do you do the same thing in that position? Maybe even, you know, throwing out a statement and having a bit of a debate. You know, ‘I don’t think that guy’s a hero, actually, what do you think?’, we have an agree/disagree. Something like that. So yeah, generally, that sort of thing with each painting on a particular theme.
James
Lots of questioning then… One of the things that I remember speaking with one of your colleagues about, she talked about the tower of received knowledge, that there’s almost like an edifice isn’t there of stuff that you need to know. Lots of the paintings are of mythological scenes, and if you don’t know the mythology, if you don’t know who the characters are, then it’s quite hard to get an ‘in’, to get any purchase on this edifice as it were.
And so you use lots of questions and just asking them to see stuff and notice stuff. But then is there a tension that you have? Because there is some stuff that you have to impart in order to open up the background story. Do you find that there is a tension? You were saying some people might be quite didactic, and just say, ‘I’m just going to give you a one hour lecture about this painting’… Do you try to do that as little as you can? How do you impart the stuff that you impart?
Ed
It’s always that big thing. It’s like when you’re a teacher, particularly when you’re a classroom teacher, there’s always the student voice, teacher voice. What should the ratio be? The good ratio should be 90% student talk, 10% teacher talk, this sort of thing. And you get a similar sort of thing when you’re in the gallery. Okay, well, how much is going to be didactic? And how much is going to be discursive? So like how much am I going to tell you stuff? And how much are you going to be discussing, making reasoning? Yeah, it always is a bit of a tension.
But at the same time, and certainly the oracy project taught me that actually, you know, didactic stuff isn’t necessarily bad, the same way closed questions aren’t necessarily bad. They all serve a purpose, as long as you’re making sure in your planning, but they do serve a purpose. So we’ll do storytelling sessions where the children won’t really have a huge amount of input apart from making suggestions or gasping at the right moments and things like that, you know you’re taking them through a story. But I could show you, definitely through the evaluations afterwards, that they’re engaged, and they’re making meaning, and they’ll then take these ideas, and they’ll build upon them.
So it’s a case of, when do we actually do that storytelling element, where we know they’re actively listening, or we’re helping them to actively listen? When do we give them some of these facts? And that the way I usually approach it is I want to see what they see. And we build up some sort of meaning, and then I’ll drop something in and then go, ‘Now what do you think?’ If I told you that this was painted when he was a really young guy or really old or something like that’. I’ll drop a fact in, but it’ll serve a purpose.
And if the facts don’t serve the purpose, I’m just saying it to show you what I know. Or to impart something. Yeah, we’re in the danger of facts for facts sake. They can be really useful and I think as well, particularly when to get to dates and things, it’s almost like learning the alphabet or the times tables. You know, by themselves, they don’t really mean anything, but they serve a huge purpose. And if you can internalise them to the point where you don’t have to struggle and go, ‘Oh, hang on, when was…’. You know, if you can do that, then I think there is a purpose. But we run the risk of facts for fact’s sake, and you’re just you’re reciting 1066, and all that.
James
What’s the role of humour would you say, in your work?
Ed
Again, it’s all the purpose, what are you trying to do? Are you trying to make people laugh to make yourself feel better? Or are you trying to make them laugh to feel relaxed, to feel comfortable, to realise ‘Oh, actually, you can do these sorts of things in the gallery’. And I think mainly, I’m just passing it on, because I was lucky enough to be taken around a gallery at an impressionable age by someone who just skewered stuff and said, ‘Yeah, this baby Jesus looks like a little Goblin, you know, because the guy painting it couldn’t care less about the baby, he’s fascinated with the Madonna’ because he was looking at the person behind it. And I was like ‘Oh, you can say things like this about art. This is fun.’
And it wasn’t… I tend to call it being irreverently reverent. You are using irreverence actually, in quite a reverential way. And you’re building respect for something by actually being able to laugh at some of the things he doesn’t get quite right. Or it seems a bit silly. Because I think kids can handle that duality, that cognitive dissonance of actually laughing at something but loving it. And I don’t think we give kids enough respect for that. I don’t think people do that enough, because it’s seen as you either love it unconditionally, or you’re taking the mick. And if you’re taking the mick, then you’re challenging the whole structure of this, and it’s in danger. I don’t think it is.
It’s a pressure valve for me. And I think when you allow children to go, they relax a bit more, and adults as well. I mean, the number of times I’ve said something and someone said, ‘I’m really glad you said that, because I wanted to ask that question but I thought it’d be too silly’. It’s a fine line, you can get it wrong, and I’ve got it wrong in the past, and people have gone ‘Ooh you dumbed that down’. And maybe I did.
James
And there’s a thing that you do, and I’ve seen a few of your colleagues do it as well, where you suddenly ask the children to all face away from the painting. Why do you do that?
Ed
Well, again, it’s your assessment for learning. Getting the kids observing, and then if you remove something… one, they’re having to recreate what they’ve seen in their head. But we don’t just get them to face away, we get them to face away and then tell us what they remember. So they’re trying to create something collectively, through verbal reasoning. And they will say something that someone else will repeat but change. You know, we’ve got a painting with a stretched skull at the bottom. The Ambassadors, it’s a really famous one – you have to see it from a certain angle But I love it because one kid will say ‘I saw a surfboard at the bottom of the painting’, and another kid goes ‘yeah but I saw a skull at the bottom of the painting’, and both those opinions are equally valid. So it gives them a chance to express the painting in a way in their terms before I start ‘saying the official line’ or we get towards that (and we hopefully don’t try and do the official line). But then they can express it in their own terms and they can tell me what they see and that is a great starting point for learning. Because once I see the painting through their eyes, I can start addressing, ‘no one’s noticed this, that’s interesting’, or ‘everyone’s saying this, but they’re not recognising it’. So I know we need to spend more time trying to analyse what this might be. Or ‘no one’s mentioned this thing over here, so I know it hasn’t stood out for some reason’. So it’s a really good starting point. And again, like we said, get the kids talking as quickly as possible. And the best way to do that is to give them a challenge.
James
What would you like to see more of or less of in the way that spoken language is used in the gallery?
Ed
Oh, I was having to think about this one. Can I put it as succinctly as possible? Spoken language in the gallery, I was thinking about it both within our sessions, but within everything. Because you see a workplace and a public space, you know they are mirrors the rest of society in a lot of ways. And I think, for me, it’s more forums. More opportunities to discuss things and be heard.
I don’t know if you’ve seen anything about the kids rights index? It makes very sobering reading, because the UK is right at the bottom. You know, there’s not a one for one saying,’ Well, this is directly a worse place to live if you’re a child’, but because of the UK’s position within the global economy and everything else, and its ability to provide for children’s rights. What it’s ranked really low on is children’s ability to advocate for things that really matter to them. Their ability to actually have a say in policy that affects them.
I think for me, it comes down to forums, it comes down to an opportunity to express yourself and to be heard and to listen to others. Whether it’s through, you know, regular practice of, ‘OK, this is the thing we do every morning, where everyone gets a chance to bring something to the forum’. And just that little and often. It needs to be little and often just constantly having an opportunity to express yourself. And maybe today’s the day that you just shut up and listen, because actually, they’re the ones who need to speak. Does that make sense? I’m feel like I’m trying to solve the world’s problems…!
James
I couldn’t agree more. And it’s a really political question. Because you’re right… Lots of the work I do is around creating these slice teams. Decision making in society, in schools, in businesses, everywhere, really in the health system is always made by a few people at the top of the tree. And they’re often very capable, well qualified, intelligent people. But they are like minded. They are like one another. They are leaders. And they have quite a narrow view of what it is to be human. And they make bad decisions. Groupthink has happened throughout history. And we’ve known about this for decades. You know, space shuttle disasters, aeroplane crashes, the financial crash of 2008, COVID… We see groupthink all over the place and that the antidote to groupthink is absolutely what you’re saying, which is forums and people being empowered and people being elevated and having their voices elevated. And you get much better decision-making because you look at everything in the round. And also people come with you on whatever the journey is that you want them to go on. People feel like they’re a part of something.
Ed
We only speak to our peers don’t we? If we genuinely spoke and listened to more people in different hierarchical positions as peers… I wonder if things will change? Who knows?
James
What a perfect note to end on! And if anybody hasn’t been to the National Gallery recently, I urge you to go along. And, if I may, to loiter with intent at the back of one of the gallery educator sessions. Because what you guys do is really impressive, and it’s quite something to behold.
Ed
Please do come and check us out on social media. We’re trying to do more learning content on social media. So if you looked us up on Instagram, or Twitter or YouTube, you’ll see as well as the curatorial, the academic side of the gallery, we’re also trying to put forward the questioning and oracy and teaching and learning side of the gallery too.