I was Head of Humanities in a secondary school in Ashford in the early 1980s and studying on a part-time masters course at Canterbury Christ Church. This was before the Education Reform Act (1988) when teachers still had the freedom to discuss the curriculum and explore innovations for ourselves. On the MA course, I discovered all the great curriculum studies writers, many of whom were at the London Institute (e.g. Bernstein, Lawton, Young etc). I also read Stenhouse (1975) and Bruner (1960,1976) who introduced me to ideas such as ‘the spiral curriculum’, ‘education as process’, and the MACOS programme. Now, 40 years later, I discovered that the UCL IOE ‘s Library in Bedford Square has an archive of MACOS materials which has prompted me to reflect on my transformative experiences in the 1980s.

Image source: Life Cycle of the Salmon

In 1984, I observed MACOS in action when I visited a school in Nottinghamshire. In one lesson, the teacher reminded the students of their previous work on the social structure of baboons and the concept of ‘domination’. She asked them to use the twos and fours group discussion approach to talk about how they had experienced domination in their own families and then how they would want to exercise domination when they have their own families when they grow up. The discussion that arose was extraordinarily rich — personal and social education at its best. The teacher in Nottingham spent time with me showing me MACOS materials and explained the structure of the programme. We discussed how it enables students to learn about what it is to be human by exploring topics such as the life cycle of the Pacific Salmon, the way Herring Gulls bring up their chicks, and the family structure of Baboons. These explorations lay the conceptual foundation which support the study of pre-industrial Netsilik Inuit in which human characteristics such as the use of tools, language, culture transmitted between generations, social organisation, and extended childhood are examined. The pedagogical approach enables students to pose questions about what it is to be human through contrast and comparison. I returned to my school bursting with excitement and contacted CARE (Centre for Applied Research in Education), founded by Lawrence Stenhouse, because they were responsible for disseminating MACOS. In discussions with my school’s senior leadership team, it was agreed that MACOS would be part of a redesign of the curriculum for Year 7 to ease the transition from primary to secondary school. Their form tutors would be those who also taught their subjects, including MACOS.

Forty years later, I still have some clear memories of teaching MACOS. For example, early in the programme, small groups of my students gathered round a desk-top film projector to watch a film about the life cycle of the Pacific Salmon. They had read the book about it and were discussing it and posing questions. One big question was: ‘How can they find the streams they were born in, having been swimming about in the ocean?’. We discussed ways we could find the answer. This was before the internet, of course, but I had seen a piece in the newspaper about marine biologists at the University of Southampton who were working on this. One of the students said: ‘Why don’t we phone them up and ask them?’. The nearest phone was on the desk in the Head of Year’s office down the corridor, so we crept along the corridor, ducking down below the windows of the classrooms we had to pass, and then squeezed into the Year Head’s office which was empty at the time. I dialled the number and struck lucky. The person we were speaking to happened to know about the research on how Salmon navigate by sense of smell. When I explained that I had 28 kids crammed into the Year Head’s office, she became very sympathetic and helpful. Students shouted out their questions and the researcher shouted back her responses with me holding up the phone so that everyone could hear. I am not sure whether we got a definitive answer about how Salmon find their way back to their home streams, but the students did learn about the nature of questions, enquiry, and the provisional nature of knowledge.

Learning to be human

Learning about the Salmon’s life-cycle was a powerful experience for my 12-year-old students. The idea of the parents dying before the young were born led to a lot of reflection about the role of parents, the gradual pace of childhood, and the importance of schooling for humans. It led to intense discussion about learning and how we can all work together to get the best out of this precious opportunity. Learning arose again in the study of the Herring Gull, which focused attention on the concepts of innate and learned behaviour.

Another activity that was particularly memorable for me was ‘life-ropes’ through which the students could reflect on and talk about the human life-cycle. The idea was for them to create a set of illustrated cards, each one representing a significant milestone in life — being born, beginning to walk, going to school, and so on. Then the cards were pierced so that a string could be threaded through them and the life rope could be pinned up for discussion. A group of girls had made one which seemed overly focused on their anticipated love-lives, so milestones included ‘going steady’, ‘getting engaged’, ‘getting married’, and ‘having children’ with dying following on rather abruptly after that. There was one milestone which still puzzles and amuses me to this day — ‘becoming eternalised’ — which came after going steady, I think. What we — both the students and myself — learned through MACOS continues to be relevant.

Image source: Fishing at the Stone Weir

One of the defining characteristics of being human is the role of beliefs and traditions which are passed on through stories. Let me illustrate this with the story of Kigtak. 

The idea of the spiral curriculum underpinned MACOS, so when we explored the lives of the Netsilik Inuit, life cycle was revisited and a memorable aspect of this was our discussion about the story of Kigtak, an old woman at the end of her life. The nature of the Inuit’s livelihood meant that they had to keep moving to follow the Caribou and respond to changes in the season. Kigtak’s increasing frailty presented an insurmountable challenge for her nomadic family and tribe. When she couldn’t keep up with the others and was left behind to die, she accepted it because in her society this was understood as natural. Sitting on the ice as your final moment was inevitable. In my own household, we have been following the current parliamentary debate about assisted dying, and my partner is actively involved in the field of palliative care through her Being Mortal campaign. Kigtak features in our current, ongoing discussions.

Just two years after I had started teaching MACOS, I was asked to join the university as a teacher educator. As I made this transition, I drew confidence from an enhanced professional identity based on a strong moral purpose and clear pedagogical principles. This was due in part to critical scholarship as a student on the masters in curriculum studies but also to teaching MACOS, which was perhaps even more powerful. At an early stage, I had met a teacher educator from Goldsmiths College, Gwyn Edwards, who had taught MACOS himself. He often came to my school to sit in on MACOS lessons and engage me in a continuous dialogue about pedagogy. What I learned through this experience – for example, about the value of learning through discussion and enquiry, about the teacher as a facilitator, and about the power of reflection on experience – became the golden threads in the fabric of my knowledge and capability as an educator over the four-and-a-half decades of my career. This led to the development of non-positional teacher leadership through which teachers are striving to address matters of social justice around the world. We might say that we are learning what it is to be human and how we can become more so.