This paper reports on a small-scale project in Scotland that focuses on children understanding and applying Skills for Learning, Life and Work to enhance their perceptions of what, how and why they need to learn. The context is a Moving Image Education retrospective designed to allow young learners to explore and compare themselves as learners currently and five years previously. The project took place on one primary school and was commissioned by Creative Scotland. The research element was also funded by Creative Scotland.

Examples of children’s work created during the first year of a Moving Image Education for Early Years, Scottish Screen Project (2006) had been archived and the Lead Practitioner involved in the project considered that it might be interesting for the pupils involved to reflect on their learning from that earlier period.  Staff had recently mentioned that a number of the children involved in the project still spontaneously talked about this experience. Consequently the idea of a retrospective project to facilitate the children to revisit this earlier experience and interpret it through a skills for learning, life and work framework was born.

Aims of the project

The main aim of the project was to identify the benefits for children working within year 5 and 6 of primary education (known as second level in Scotland) of reflecting on a shared learning experience that they undertook during year 1 (early) and year 2 (first) levels of learning.

Subsidiary aims of the project were for pupils to:

•  create a representation of the processes of this prior learning experience;
•  identify the skills and attributes that they were learning during the project;
•  make links between what they learned in the past and current learning;
•  consider what might be the benefits of historical reflections on learning experiences.

Research

Creative Scotland invited Dr George Head of the School of Education, University of Glasgow, to research this initiative. Specifically, Creative Scotland wished the research to generate data on the following aspects of the initiative:

•    The benefits, if any, for learners and teachers (including any impacton teachers’ pedagogies);
•    Participants’ (pupils and teachers) experiences of the project in terms of engagement, participation and impact on attitude, motivation and disposition towards learning;
•   The implications of this project for future use and development of MIE in this context

The retrospective project was structured over the course of one week (known in the school as MIE week). Initial reflective activities in which children were presented with examples of their work from the MIE Early Years Project occurred on the first day.  Children were invited to plan and develop a representation (talk, exhibition, book, film, web page, multimedia presentation) of this experience and the learning that occurred during it.

Giroux, H. (2011) 'Breaking into the Movies: public pedagogy and the politics of film'. Policy Futures in Education 9 (6), 686-695. Gee, J.P. (online) 'Good Video Games and Good Learning' available at Florian, L. and Black-Hawkins, K. (2011) 'Exploring inclusive pedagogy'. British Educational Research Journal 37 (5), 813-828. Head, G. (2011) ‘Inclusion and Pedagogy’ in McMahon, M., Forde, C. and Martin, M. (eds) Contemporary issues in learning and teaching. London: Sage. Head, G. and Jaap, A. (2011) Creative Scotland’s Moving Image Education Retrospective In conjunction with Maisondieu Primary School, Brechin. Glasgow: Creative Scotland.