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Feet, footwork and ‘being alive’ in the modern school.

Dr Catherine Burke, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge.

cb552@cam.ac.uk

Paper for ISCHE 2016, Chicago

‘Clothes quickly pile up on the desks as children busily undress for the dance lesson. The first to change are soon by the door, ready to make their way to the hall, their bare feet wriggling impatiently in their shoes for the moment when they can kick them off and spring on to the hall floor. On the way along the corridor the bodies bustle and an animated walk threatens to break into running ... Once inside the hall, a line of shoes immediately appears under chairs lined up along the wall and swift bare feet dart and prance in lively stepping and jumping. Some rush across the space exhilarated by the feel of air against their faces, some pluck their feet off the floor in hops and leaps, and others swing wide their arms in unrestrained gesture which sweeps them high onto their toes, or pulls them into an off-balance suspension that dissolves into the slack of a downwards spiral. Soon the teacher calls for the class’s attention and the lesson begins.’ (McKittrick, 1972: 11).

Introduction

What does a focus on the feet of pupils achieve in enriching our understand-

ing of past educational experience ? Can an historical consideration of the

lower limbs of the school pupil generate new knowledge and critical aware-

ness of ideas and practices in modern schooling ? What can we learn about

the significance of the feet of school pupils by adopting an interdisciplinary ap-

proach to these questions, in particular drawing from social anthropology ?

The paper has taken as a starting point the proposition of anthropologist Tim

Ingold that a denial of the significance of the feet in relation to cognition and

consciousness of 'being alive' in the world, is characteristic of modern soci-

eties. Ingold has claimed that 'Boots and shoes, products of the ever more

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versatile human hand, imprison the foot, constricting its freedom of movement

and blunting its sense of touch . . . (and) the mechanisation of footwork was

part and parcel of a wider suite of changes that accompanied the onset of

modernity – in modalities of travel and transport, in the education of posture

and gesture, in the evaluation of the senses, and in the architecture of the

built environment', In the above account of a school lesson, Ingold's sug-

gested ‘suit of changes that accompanied the onset of modernity’ are present.

A vivid, visual and respectful account is created that presents the body of the

pupil in free flow as a poetic phenomenon. The date of the extract is signifi-

cant as in England, the early 1970s witnessed a moment when the idea of the

power of the expressive arts at the centre of a child’s experience of school

was becoming challenged having come to be regarded as an essential com-

ponent of progressive education. The feet are fundamental to the exuberance

of being alive caught in this encounter: a reassuring depiction of freedom, ex-

pression and ultimate order and control is transmitted.

It is rare that the educational experience of school pupils is examined through

the feet. To do so forces us to regard the experience of education from the

ground up, prioritising the lower half of the body over the upper, which is

counter to received wisdom. Yet there is evidence that close observation of

the feet of pupils, coupled with a recognition of the significance of these par-

ticular body parts in the experience and design of modern schooling, opens

up a wide range of factors that might otherwise be overlooked in the history of

education. A taxonomy of feet, footwork and footwear in the history of educa-

tion would include the manufacture and marketing of shoes designed for

pupils; the requirements of uniformed feet; the exercise of feet in drill and

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gymnastics; the use of feet in school yard games for choosing who is ‘on’; the

history of pupils for whom walking was rendered impossible through disease

or disability; the development of dance and movement as art forms in school-

ing. For this paper, I only have space to begin to deal with a few of these and

have taken a cue from Ingold (2011) who has suggested that it is through the

feet, in contact with the ground (albeit mediated by footwear), that we are

most fundamentally and continually ‘in touch’ with our surroundings. He also

argues that the upper body, the head and hands in particular, have become

closely associated with notions of cognition and therefore with the identity of

the human as learner and maker of things and of meaning. The feet, he sug-

gests, and their primal links to cognition, have been left behind by modernity,

assisted in the process by the encasement of the feet in everyday footwear.

Ingold does not explore the genesis and architecture of the modern school but

offers an anthropological perspective that encourages us to reconsider the rel-

ative value placed by modernity on different body parts within the material de-

sign of school spaces.1 In adapting Ingold’s suggested ‘suit of changes’ char-

acteristic of the development of modern societies to the consideration of the

modern school, the paper is organised in three parts: first the experience of

pupils through their feet in travelling to and from school and of moving in and

around the school, classroom and yard; second, in the significance placed on

the feet in the flourishing of modern dance and movement in post war primary

curricular; and third, in an exploration of the notion of walking as learning

through the radical agenda of the education arm of the English Town and

Country Planning Association (1970s and 80s). I will demonstrate in this paper

1 For the purposes of this paper, the modern school can be thought to emerge during the mid to late 19th century in the USA, Canada,Australia, New Zealand and Europe. It was a model of education transmitted to the rest of the world via Colonialism.

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how attention to the feet and (including absence of ) footwear illuminates a

range of contextual aspects of children's past lives. A variety of source materi-

als have been drawn from including medical reports, building bulletins, teach-

ers’ recollections, photographs, commercial advertisements, oral testimonies

and guides to best practice. The geographical reach of the paper includes the

UK, Europe, Australia and New Zealand as well as Canada and the USA. The

time period covered includes the late nineteenth to early 21st centuries. This

is a scoping piece that is intended to experiment with and open up new ways

of entering the so-called ‘black box of the classroom’. Theoretical perspec-

tives are drawn from critical pedagogy as well anthropology.

The separation of thought from action. Being in the school, classroom and

yard.

‘These staircases I hated . . . when forced to climb them in the midst of the

herd, a forest of calves and feet before me, defenselessly exposed to the bad

odours emanating from all the bodies pressing so closely against mine’ (Wal-

ter Benjemin’s memories of a Berlin Childhood)

The construction and equipment of the modern school room, from the mid

19th century onwards, required the body of the pupil to be seated and con-

tained for long periods of time. When movement occurred it was en mass,

synchronised and choreographed. The seated body, feet close to the floor,

hidden beneath the school desk and static, presented the visible upper torso,

hands and head as the actively engaged body parts of modern schooling. In

the early eighteenth century, the French priest and educator Jean Baptiste de

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La Salle described the required bodily arrangements for the school pupil in the

following terms.

'The students should always be seated during lessons, even while reading

from the charts of the alphabets and the syllables. They should hold their bod-

ies erect and keep their feet on the floor in good order' ( La Salle 1706: 59).

La Salle saw the importance of disciplined footwork in the French school room

where pupils were regarded as one body in movement.

'Teachers will be attentive and take care that all the students walk so quietly

and so calmly while entering the school that their steps will not be heard ' (48).

The feet were singled out in the following comment regarding the sounds of

schooling.

'While students are assembling and entering the classroom, they will all main-

tain such complete silence that not the least noise will be heard, not even of

the feet.'(49).

And in lessons, the feet were to be carefully positioned and teachers were to

check that the following conditions were met.

'When answering during catechism, students will keep their eyes modestly

lowered, will not stare fixedly at the teacher, and will not turn their heads

slightly from side to side. They will keep their bodies erect and both feet prop-

erly placed on the floor. ' (110).

A fundamental change in mass education corresponded with technological ad-

vances which are manifested in a conjunction between the mechanisation and

mass production of shoes and school furniture; both occurring during the latter

decades of the nineteenth century in Europe and in the modern capitalist

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economies. As Ingold has observed, ‘between them, the boot and the chair

establish a technological foundation for the separation of thought from action

and of mind from body. . . ‘. He might have been talking about the Victorian or

Edwardian school characterised by drill and recitation in stating, ‘Where the

boot, in reducing the activity of walking to the activity of a stepping machine,

deprives wearers of the possibility of thinking with their feet, the chair enables

sitters to think without involving the feet at all.' (Ingold, 2011:39). The torso,

arms and head are the parts that we see in countless numbers of classroom

photographs of seated children from the end of the nineteenth century through

to the middle decades of the 20th century. The seated child contained by fixed

school furniture performed the disciplinary act of stilling (and silencing) the

feet for lengthy periods of time. For the feet to appear, when not required to,

presented a challenge to authority. Placing the feet on desks was a sign of ul-

timate resistance; rocking a chair backwards, to and fro, by means of foot ma-

neuvering was also a way for the pupil to assert their need for movement and

resistance to staticity. From the point of view of the progressive educator, the

freeing up of limbs, particularly the feet, in movement, play, perambulation,

walking, running, dancing, kicking, jumping or even reading were essential

components of efforts towards achieving a more humane education in the

20th century.

‘Faulty feet’

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‘All were employed in mending, either their own dilapidated clothes or shoes,

or the dilapidated clothes or shoes of some of the other pupils’ (Charles Dick-

ens observations of a Ragged School, 1852).2

Feet may have been bare or shod. But to be shod was no simple business.

The wearing of shoes from pre-industrial times profoundly communicated a

person’s precise social and economic status as well, of course of gender. For

largely agricultural societies striving to compete in the modern world of the

early to mid 20th century, the wearing of shoes was of major significance. Ivan

Illich, writing in the 1970s and drawing from his observations of Latin Ameri-

can society on the cusp of change, made the following observation.

'Shoes are scarce all over Latin America and many people never wear them.

They walk on the bare soles of their feet...their transit is in no way restricted

by their lack of shoes. But in some countries of South America people are

compelled to be shod ever since access to schools, jobs and public services

was denied to the barefoot. Teachers or party officials define the lack of shoes

as a sign of indifference toward 'progress'.' (Illich, 1974, P.59).

To step into the modern school, across the industrialised world of the 20th

century, increasingly meant to be clad in shoes of some form. The shoe’d

child was the child that was in the process of being educated. No longer were

shoes kept for Sunday best and church going, but the ultimate leather soled

shoes were to be acquired for the weekday business of attending school.

2 ‘A sleep to startle us’ An article exploring ragged schooling that first appeared in Household Words on  March 13, 1852. An earlier letter to the Morning News in 1846 described a visit to Field Lane Ragged School (Field Lane was established in 1841 as a Ragged School and Sabbath School by a Christian missionary) http://infed.org/archives/e-texts/dickens_a_sleep_to_startle_us.htm

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So, the shoed pupil was an essential and integral part of the materiality of the

modern school and once shoes were of the modern type, the advent of

schooling for many children included a ritual act of learning to tie laces. As In-

gold argues, ‘one of the most essential bodily skills that every child has to

master before being able to make his or her way in a boot-clad society is the

art of tying shoelaces’ (Ingold 39-40). However, there were exceptions to the

wearing of shoes, as images show [from 1930s Queensland and 1950s Ari-

zona.] In parts of the world where the climate was tropical, it was more likely

that the shift to cladding the feet of pupils was delayed. It has been reported

that children in Hawaii regularly went barefoot to school and there is anecdo-

tal evidence from teachers in New Zealand recounting how pupils were seen

to have warmed their bare feet in freshly dropped cow-pats on their way to

school (Middleton, oral testimony). Images of barefooted children walking to

school are plentiful but it is difficult to tell how staged or typical these records

of experience were. The website, unshod.org contains accounts from various

places of barefoot walking to school. Some examples of bare-feet within

classrooms have been recorded in South African schools and generally the

tolerance or acceptance of bare-feet was more often found in the schools for

younger children than within secondary education.

Where shoes were worn for school, we encounter a complex territory of de-

sign and use. In England, bare-feet exhibited by school pupils on their way to

or in school indicated to contemporaries levels of acute poverty at home.

Sympathetic teachers might have intervened to assist and we have evidence

that the progressive head teacher Alec Bloom regularly gave shoes to pupils

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in his Secondary school in 1940s -50s London.3 In very general terms, the ex-

perience of children was often one of physical as well as emotional discom-

fort. In certain regions of industrial England, the tradition of wearing wooden-

soled shoes or clogs extended into the early decades of the twentieth century,

severely restricting children’s capacities for running and play. [This image of

school pupils of a young age attending school at Malham Tarn at the begin-

ning of the 20th century Yorkshire shows children in clogs.4]

In other parts of the country where resources were in short supply, it was

often the case that Wellington boots were worn for the walk to school and

images indicate that for many children, these were the only option.

For children from large families and impoverished homes, it was more likely

than not that they were forced to inherit shoes previously worn by an older

sibling or stranger and therefore the fit was less than perfect. The medical

condition of pupils’ feet and the impact of poverty and material deprivation

was observed over time through medical surveys. Evidence is provided from

medical inspections carried out in England during the middle decades of the

20th century revealing very high (and increasing through the school years ) in-

cidence of damage to the feet as a result of poorly fitting shoes. In an article

published in the Medical Officer Journal, 1941, entitled ‘Feet : with Particular

Reference to School Children’, the author, E. H. Wilkins wrote of what he re-

garded as the seriousness and prevalence of faulty feet in school-children.

School inspections revealed that at 5 years, 20 per cent of children’s feet

were damaged; between 5 and 10 years this had risen to 45 per cent and in

3 Ref Bloom. The school was St George's-in-the East.4 The History of Education in Malhamdale, http://www.kirkbymalham.info/KMLHG/schools/maltarn.html

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the 11 to 15 years period, 70 per cent. Defects aligned closely with poverty

and malnutrition leading the author to comment, ‘In so far as footwear is a

cause of bad feet the poor quality of footwear in the lower classes is more po-

tent than that of footwear generally.’ A survey carried out just over ten years

later in Salford, an industrial part of the north of England, detailed some of the

painful problems experienced daily by school children.5 Of the feet of 3,532

Salford schoolchildren aged 5-15 (1, 816 boys and 1, 716 girls) where one or

both feet were unsatisfactory, 1,125 exhibited a weak longitudinal arch; 914,

hallux valgus (deformity of the big toes or bunion); 518, defects of the lesser

toes; 63 had corns; 17 had problems with nails; and 13 had warts. In almost

half of the total, the footwear did not fit accurately and in 431 this was consid-

ered serious. Already, there were problems associated with fashion and style

of shoes. Hallus valgus in girls at ages 13-15 was 15 per cent. This was attrib-

uted in the report to tight-fitting, narrow, pointed-toe shoes worn by older girls.

These detail a painful experience of attending school for a large number of

children and given the norm at the time was a walk to and from school, ill-fit-

ting shoes or boots made life difficult.

But the wrong, ill-fitting shoes could also be a cause of emotional trauma,

bullying and peer pressure. In the past, the condition of footwear, strongly

marked and articulated a pupil's economic condition of relative wealth or

poverty revealing a child’s home circumstances. Shoes have long been

signifiers of social status, and on the feet of school children, their fit or

otherwise, condition and (later) style have been powerful expressions of

5 Mr. Charlesworth who published the survey was the consultant chi-ropodist, Salford Education Committee. Medical Officer 1954, Jan. 29 Vol. 91 No. 5 pp. 49-51.

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position in the delicate social hierarchy of the school playground. In an

ethnographic study carried out in 1998-9 London primary schools Jon Swain

discovered how this was particularly true for young boys negotiating their

emergent masculinity (Swain). According to Swain, ‘It was the training shoes

that had the greatest currency in terms of status, with their signifiers of wealth,

choice, freedom, equality, sportiness, casualness, anti-school, and of

collective belonging.’ (Swain p 61 )

It has been noted by historians of education how the precise requirements of

school uniform in the modern school effected ‘ meanings of identity and

difference (enacting) the disciplining of the body by a power that subjects and

subjectifies’ (Dussel, 2005). But from the point of view of children, that

experience of power and disempowerment was culturally generated and

transmitted and was experienced in ways that connected the economics of

home, community and school.

'Let them play with their fingers and their toes'. Rudolf von Laban.

The rise and fall of enthusiasm for movement as an art form within the

elementary curriculum of Physical Education closely mirrored the rise and fall

of enthusiasm for child centered education and progressive approaches more

generally in England and in parts of the Commonwealth. The artistic

expression of bare feet in the school has a rich history that has remained

largely unexplored by historians of education (Vertinsky, 2004: 275). A focus

on the feet along with extended limbs in free movement and dance in the

curriculum of the post-war primary school touches on one of Ingold's 'suite of

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changes that accompanied the onset of modernity – in the education of

posture and gesture' (Ingold).

Since its inception as a concept by the English New Ideals in Education

movement in 1914, new education 'in an atmosphere of freedom' was

considered as having physical as well as cognitive characteristics .6 Critique

of how children were encased in unsuitable or uncomfortable school furniture

or drilled and marched through school yards especially built for that purpose

featured in progressive educational discourse during the first half of the 20 th

century. In an article exploring the progressive image in the history of

education, Burke and Grosvenor have noted how the exposed limbs of school

children at play or at work was an enduring progressive image during the

middle decades of the 20th century (Burke and Grosvenor, 2007). And at key

moments in the history of primary education when a particularly experimental

approach to teaching and learning was celebrated – as in the recognition

offered to Steward Street School in Birmingham by the Ministry of Education

in 1949 – the image of the child enjoying education in an atmosphere of

freedom is illustrated through images of exposed limbs and aesthetically

pleasing physical poses.7

In England and —as a result of international visits— later in the United States

of America, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and other parts of Europe, the

decades from the 1930s to the 1970s saw the image of the school child

expand to include and embrace freedom of movement, choice of activities and

dispositions of isolated quiet concentration, contemplation and thoughtfulness. 6 Catherine Burke, ‘”The school without tears”. E.F.O’Neill of Prestolee School, History of Education, 3, 263-275; Catherine Burke and Mark Dudek ‘Experiences of learning within a 20th-century radical experiment in education: Prestolee School, 1919-1952, Oxford Review of Education 36, 2, (2010), 203-218.7 Ministry of Education, Story of a School, Ministry of Education Pamphlet no.? (London: HMSO, 1949).

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This reflected new ways of seeing childhood, education and the built

environment that established what came to be called a ‘Revolution in Primary

Education’ (Clegg 1971).

Teachers, advisors and others observing children in acts of free expression in

the primary school were inspired to spread this practice as it was considered

to underpin educational growth and character building more generally. Visual

evidence of what was possible in schools powerfully replaced, in the public

mind, images of caged or drilled bodies with those presenting children in full

artistic expression ‘Moving and Growing in the Primary School’ is the title of a

two volume curriculum guide designed for teachers of physical education

published in 1952 and 1953.8 The English Modern dance pedagogue Diana

Jordan had been inspired by the approach to dance education made popular

by Rudolf von Laban after his exile from Europe and settlement at Dartington

Hall after 1938.9 While the Hadow reports of the 1920s and 30s had signaled

a shift in policy towards ideas of child-centered education, it was during the

last years before the war that an enthusiasm for the notion of education

through the arts became established among international progressive

networks. At Dartington Hall in Devon, the Elmhirsts had established a

progressive school containing within it a modern dance school, led by the

emigre dance pedagogue Kurt Jooss. In a short time, ‘the views on child-

centered and holistic education fostered in Dartington Hall ...became the main

vehicle for Laban’s modern dance and movement education in schools’

8 Ministry of Education, Moving and Growing:. Physical Education in the Primary School Part 1 (London: HMSO, 1952), Ministry of Education, Planning the Programme: Physical Education in the Primary School Part 2 (London: HMSO, 1953). The photographs were mostly taken by Edith Tudor Hart, a communist sympathiser committed to social documentary photography.9 Diana Jordan Children and Movement (Oxford: Blackwell, 1966); Michael Young, The Elmhirsts of Dartington: the creation of an Utopian community (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982)

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(Vertinsky and Hargreaves, 2006: 42). In turn, Diana Jordan, whose own book

was published just as Laban arrived at Dartington, emerged as the principal

exponent of education through dance and movement for the younger child

(Jordan, 1938).

In an earlier article, I have argued, that in the immediate post-war world

learning to manage freedom was essential to the democratic project and was

at the heart of the changes envisaged in schools for the young (Burke, 2016).

It was agreed, by those striving for a new transatlantic vision of the primary or

elementary school, that it was only through exercising it that children would

learn to use freedom without abusing it (Washburne 1952: 41). As Arthur

Stone explained in his 'Story of a School' (1949), movement, and especially

the quality of movement was a foundation for learning across the primary

curriculum as well as an essential component of 'being alive' in the modern

school. He explained how movement was a fundamental characteristic of

personal growth.

'If you become interested in the quality of how you move, then you go in-

wards, not out wards, and you find yourself in the world of yourself, and the

imaginative world and the world of yourself are one. When you come into

drama and into dance you are no longer concerned with an outside purpose,

you are concerned with the whole of yourself'10

Being concerned with the wholeness of self was for progressive educators in

the mid 20th century, an essential purpose in education. Movement and ‘the

dance’ were considered not as frivolous additions to the ‘real’ subjects of the

curriculum but rather foundational building blocks of these. In this sense, the

10 Arthur stone in Ruth foster 1976:96

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bare footed pupil in the progressive modern school was purposeful and their

experience unrelated to climate, to social or economic status but to artistic ex-

pression and the discovery of what it means to be human.

During the 1940s, Jordan worked closely with Alec Clegg who was at that time

an educational advisor for Worcestershire LEA and through the

commissioning work of Senior Inspector of Primary Education, Christian

Schiller, saw for herself the bare-footed expressive bodies of children in mime

and in dance at the celebrated Steward Street School.

In Moving and Growing in the Primary School, skillfully and artistically

illustrated throughout with closely observed photographs of individual and

groups of children, we are led through a discussion about the ways that

growth and educational development can be observed through movement.

Taken as a whole, the images presented in the publications contain such a

high proportion of children in extended postures, running, jumping, leaping,

that a cinematic quality is achieved in spite of the limitations of still

photography. The last part of that volume devotes thirteen richly illustrated

pages to movement as art and drama.11 The message was clear: movement

and dance were not to be taken as simply confined to physical education but

rather were integral to the development of body, mind, character and the

whole education of the child. In Children in Distress (1968) Alec Clegg and

Barbara Megson noted how in what they identified as a positive school

environment, 'pupils move easily'.

The ideas and practices illustrated in these volumes profoundly influenced the

physical education curriculum elsewhere, such as in Australia and Canada

11 Ministry of Education, Moving and Growing, 59-71 Photography by Edith Tudor-Hart

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(Francis and Lathrop, 68). After World War II, a number of English teachers

familiar with the Laban-based work in physical education migrated to Canada.

In Ontario, English-trained educators such as Nora Chatwin, Rose Hill, and

Mary Liddell, together with local administrators and teachers supported this

new approach (ibid, 69).

‘Being alive’ through movement and dance in the modern school was certainly

visible, as the numerous images promoting the idea demonstrated, but the

concept had qualities of intangibility as Ruth Foster explained in her book de-

signed to entice teachers into embracing modern dance as part of the curricu-

lum. She described dance as '. . . that rhythmical process that we find hard to

describe, but which we recognise at once as an expression of vibrating life.

Your reaction to the thing is not intellectually or with any kind of critical faculty

but primarily because of the sense that it gives you of being alive in a living

world ' (Foster, p. 26.)

‘The Dance’ (meaning European modern dance) was potentially revolutionary

in the modern school as it engaged with the primary emotions and not directly

with the intellect as commonly regarded but with an intelligence ‘not located

exclusively in the head but (is) distributed throughout the entire field of rela-

tions’ (Ingold, 2011;47). It challenged still prevailing notions that the bare

footed expressive dancer whose body was suffused with rhythm was a primi-

tive (non-civilised by Western notions) being. With Laban's personal involve-

ment in instructing teachers in the new dance form, it attracted in the main

women teachers and in spite of the efforts of Arthur Stone, recruited by Alec

Clegg to be movement advisor for the West Riding of Yorkshire during the

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1950s and 60s, many male Physical Education instructors resisted the ap-

proach.

Stone pioneered the educational force of movement through dance-drama at

Steward Street School during the 1940s.12 There he was able to demonstrate

that despite material conditions it was possible for elementary school age chil-

dren to experience the curriculum taught through the creative and performing

arts. Bare footed pupils are pictured in full expression in the illustrated text

Story of a School. The Edwardian building design had hardly envisaged chil-

dren moving out of their allotted place never mind in such dramatic free ex-

pression now encountered. Dance advisor Diana Jordan was acutely aware of

the significance of the built environment of school in effecting the experience

of this new approach to curriculum. Here we come to Ingold’s fourth ‘suite of

changes’ brought about by modernity; ‘the architecture of the built environ-

ment’. Jordan noted the inadequate conditions that teachers, however en-

thused about the possibilities of movement in the curriculum, were forced to

work with in the West Riding region directly after the war.

'Floors were hardly suitable to movement with bare feet and the shedding of

garments... Gymnasium floors often showed the ravages of oiling combined

with the grime from neighbouring pits which filled the atmosphere. … Floors

were knobbly with protruding knots which had resisted tile washing and chan-

nelled with splintery grooves where the wood had succumbed to it. Such was

the setting for our great revolution in physical education.' (Diana Jordan,

March 1974 in 50 Years of Dance YMD 1997: 9).

12 See Story of a School (1949)

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Architects, designing schools in the 1950s and 1960s, were inclined to take

seriously considerations of qualities of wood used for hall floors where it was

intended and expected that bare feet would be essential in the full experience

of the movement and dance curriculum. There is evidence in the comments

on these matters made in several Building Bulletins published at this time that

they did so.

'Very different forms of movement were taking place in the schools

visited . . .there was movement merely to “let off steam”, movement as an ex-

pression of children's own ideas, or of stories they had heard, movement re-

lated to the training of certain skills; there was also movement related to mu-

sic, dance, mime and drama' (BB16, 60).

Feeling (touching) the material environment through an imaginary identifica-

tion with a young child, was a strategy of school building design. The material

– designed – environment of education was perceived as a key pedagogical

force in an education which emphasized the role of the senses. This is well

captured in the following statement by Alec Clegg.

'Children learn mostly from that which is around them and from the use of the senses. These impressions so gained will depend a great deal on interests that will vary considerably. If children are interested they will listen more care-fully, look more closely and touch more sensitively. With interest there is cre-ated the element of wonder, the most precious element of life' (Sir Alec Clegg, 1964).

‘We make the road by walking’13

13 ‘We make the road by walking’ is the title of a book of conversations be-tween educationalists Paulo Freire and Myles Horton (1991)

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‘I think we are going to see in your lifetime the end of schools as we know them. Instead there will be a community centre with the doors open 12 hours a day 7 days a week, where anybody can wander in and out of the library, workshops, sports centre, self-service store and bar.’ (Harry Ree, 1971)

It has been said that in the nineteenth century, ‘walking was for the poor, the

criminal, the young, and above all, the ignorant (Jarvis 1997: 23). Walking

was associated with an absence of knowledge and life on the margins of edu-

cation. Walking as a way of knowing has been disregarded by the modern

school which if noticed at all saw walking as incidental rather than fundamen-

tal to knowledge acquisition. However, in the 20th century there were excep-

tions and challenges to this rule made by educationalists and social reformers

who would have agreed with Ingold that 'locomotion and cognition are insepa-

rable, and an account of the mind must be as much concerned with the work

of the feet as with that of the head and hands' (Ingold,17). Examples of practi-

cal experiments in walking as education include the Parkway Educational Pro-

gramme established in the city of Philadelphia, USA during the 1960s. In this

‘school without walls’ children learned at sites provided by the urban environ-

ment: museums, galleries, the zoo, business hubs and garages. As the edu-

cationalist and anarchist, Colin Ward explained, ‘students, going from ‘class’

to ‘class’ will travel around the city (normally on foot)’. Around the same time,

in London, England, The White Lion Street School in Islington similarly experi-

mented with using the city as a resource for learning.14

The nature walk has been a feature of progressive educational design since

the Enlightenment as evidenced in the writings of Rousseau, Pestalozzi, and

14 The school existed between 1972-1990. Colin Ward (1924–2010) was an anarchist and educator who, together with Anthony Fyson, was employed as education officer for the Town and Country Planning Association in the UK during the 1970s. He is best known for his two books about childhood, The Child in the City (1978) and The Child in the Country (1988).

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Froebel. The 20th century saw the continuation of this tradition, particularly in

progressive schools where summer camps and hikes were obligatory. In Eng-

land, state schools led by progressive head-teachers were often places where

walking out from the school into the town and countryside was regarded as an

essential part of the curriculum. As cities developed and schools were estab-

lished more often in the suburbs rather than the city centers, urban walking as

curricular activity became more difficult to achieve. However an anarchist

strand of thought pressed for an interpretation of environmental education to

embrace the idea of pupils walking out of school, guided by their teachers, to

identify and investigate pressing social issues (Fyson and Ward and 1973).

This was to be a different animal than the school trip to such as a ‘stately

home’, imagined by Ward as one where the pupil might be condemned ‘to

wander, like moujiks shuffling beneath the painted ceilings of the Winter

Palace, through some certified bit of ‘our architectural heritage’ (Fyson and

Ward, 1973: 3).

The notion of learning through perambulation or ‘incidental education’15 was at

the heart of a vision of education campaigned for by educators wedded to an

anarchist interpretation of environmental education and a belief in the power

of education to bring about social change. During the 1970s and 80s in Eng-

land, the Bulletin of Environmental Education (The BEE) was published and

distributed to subscribing schools once a month. The notion of streetwork

transformed environmental education into a radical urban form which envis-

aged children and young people as resourceful responders to their immediate

environment. Through his fiction, Paul Goodman developed the idea of the

15 incidental education was a term used by Paul Goodman and others such as Colin Ward. See http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1969/04/10/the-present-moment-in-education/

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“exploding school” which realised the city as an educator. Playing with the no-

tion of the school trip as traditionally envisaged, he created an image of city

streets as host to a multitude of small peripatetic groups of young scholars

and their adult shepherds. This image was powerfully expressed in Good-

man’s 1942 novel, The Grand Piano; or, The Almanac of Alienation. In a dia-

logue between a street urchin and a professor, Goodman has the elder ex-

plain:

‘. . . Instead of bringing imitation bits of the city into a school building, let’s go at our own pace and get out among the real things. What I envisage is gangs of half a dozen starting at nine or ten years old, roving the Empire City (NY) with a shepherd empowered to protect them, and accumulating experiences tempered to their powers . . . (Goodman in Ward and Fyson, 1973: 18).

In Streetwork.The Exploding School (Ward and Fyson, 1973), we are invited

to envisage an education that transcends the school building and passive ac-

quisition of knowledge through a subject based curriculum. This way of know-

ing and being in the world is fundamentally perambulatory. The authors envis-

aged children and young people as positively engaged participants in an edu-

cation empowered by richly ever-changing, dynamic forums of interactions be-

tween people, places and things. In Streetwork and in the many articles that

they wrote for the BEE, Ward and Fyson evidenced and illustrated a view of

the child in urban streets as purposeful, energetic, determined and engaged in

positive community decision-making and development. Feet are certainly im-

plied in Ward’s Chapter 4, “Up and down the escalator”, which confronts the

difficult challenges for teachers who might wish to use the city as a resource

for learning. The text is also a reminder that the anarchist characteristic of

freedom to roam and determine one’s learning path was regarded as literally

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possible through peripatetic wandering, but always within a purposeful and

structured framing of pedagogic intent.16

Conclusions

Consideration, of the regulation, inspection, manipulation, containment, libera-

tion and artistic expression of pupils’ feet takes us towards a grounded and

bottom-up exploration of fundamental relationships of schooling. When I first

considered how to respond to the theme of this conference, I decided to reach

for the extremities and to start at ground level: here is where we find the the

first body parts – the feet. I had a hunch that a micro-history of the feet of

school pupils would open up new pathways of considering past experience.

Thinking with the feet satisfied my curiosity to engage with the overlooked,

forgotten or undervalued aspects of the experience of schooling. I have been

guided in this enterprise by the words and insight of Antonio Novoa who might

have been talking about the pursuit of feet and foot work in schooling when he

argued '...Nothing is more useful than useless knowledge. It prepares us to

see and to think outside the rigid frameworks in which we so often let our-

selves be trapped' (Letter to a Young Educational Historian by Antonio Novoa,

2015). It was the discovery of Edith Tudor-Hart’s exceptionally beautiful im-

ages of primary school pupils in expressive movement and dance within the

Ministry of Education publication, Moving and Growing in the Primary School

(two volumes, 1952) that first stimulated my interest in the significance of the

introduction of European modern dance into the mid-20th century English pri-

16 Burke, C. ‘“Fleeting pockets of anarchy”: Streetwork. The exploding school. Paedagogica Historica 2014 Vol. 50, No. 4, 433–442

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mary school curriculum. But I have found in researching this subject that shift-

ing the focus of the eyes towards the lower part of the frame in a wide range

of images, reveals rich relevant data otherwise hidden or overlooked. In other-

words by systematically examining my collection of images gathered for other

purposes - such as the Latvian School Mural shown in the first slide - or an

image of Mary Crowley and her sister - I have posed what we might call 'pedi-

tory' questions to them and in so doing have begun to see far more than I had

done previously.

For example, an image of a school classroom, previously regarded as provid-

ing evidence of progressive educational practice, is now viewed in a way that

attends to what is lower in the frame and focuses on where and how and un-

der what conditions the feet touch the ground. Images, very familiar to me

which I have used in discussing other issues, speak now differently and stimu-

late new questions and avenues of thought. So in sum, one could say that the

method I have developed is one that might be called a returning and refram-

ing exercise that fixes the point of interest at the edge of the one perhaps orig-

inally intended by the maker of the photograph. This satisfies my conviction

that it is from or at the edges of bodies of knowledge, rather than the centre

points, that the potential for new insights is likely to be generated.

Modern schooling, as it developed into its present form from the mid nine-

teenth century in industrialised nations, has, apart from some exceptions ex-

amined here, denied the lower half of the body in favour of the upper parts in

defining what it means to be educated. Since the invention of the institution of

schooling, intelligence has increasingly been located exclusively in the head.

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This has become concentrated still further with the advent of brain studies in-

cluding from the 1980s neuroimaging, a technique that attempts to locate the

precise areas of the brain associated with certain tasks and activities consid-

ered as learning experiences. However, counter to these developments is the

argument that intelligence is not located in any body part but is distributed

throughout the entire field of relations comprised by the presence of the hu-

man being in the inhabited world (Ingold,47).

What is evident from this exploration of travelling, being, dancing and walking-

out-of the modern school is that those parts of the body traditionally regarded

as less significant in learning and development have at certain times and by

certain educators been regarded as crucial elements in a progressive vision of

the possibilities of becoming fully human through the education process. Feet

and footwear have been significant indicators of social, economic and global

inequalities in schooling and the shoed pupil has been a key indicator of na-

tional progress on a global scale as well as local status on a national scale.

The body of the schoolchild propelled by expressive feet in dance or at play

was envisaged as at the core of an excellent education by those who sought

to design a more humane school and curriculum in he 20th century. Finally,

the touch experienced by feet in the world was taken seriously by designers of

the modern school building where the school floor affording delight was con-

sidered as significant as the school window channeling light.

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