[Interview] Virginia W. Dike

Virginia W. Dike is Professor of Library and Information Science at the University of Nigeria where she specialises in school libraries, children's literature and library services.

She is also one of the founders of The Children's Centre, a comprehensive educational and recreational facility for children and young people that includes a model children's library.

In addition to that, she is a director with the Libraries for Literacy Foundation, a non-governmental organisation that works to extend library services to schools, communities and prisons and to generate local learning resources.

Her books include Library Resources in Education (Abic, 1993) and the children's non-fiction books, Birds of Our Land: A Child’s Guide to West African Birds (2nd ed. Abuja, Nigeria: Cassava Republic, 2011) and Why We Need Trees (Cassava Republic, Forthcoming).

In this interview, Virginia Dike talks about her writing and about the state of Nigerian children's literature:

When did you start writing?

I began writing during my teenage and college years, with journals containing my thoughts and experiences, a little poetry, and long letters to friends. This was writing just to express myself and communicate with others. Writing became especially important as a means of expression during the two years I spent in Tanzania after graduating from college. I was living in a small village where no one spoke English, only Swahili and KiBena - so I relied on letters home to articulate my experiences and keep my English, even.

Having said that, I now remember childhood beginnings - in second and third grade we wrote compositions, with a drawing, of an experience we’d had each week. It was pretty rudimentary (mine usually ending with “We had fun.”), but I took great pride in it. In the middle grades, I wrote an episodic chapter book about two girls’ primary school adventures and a musical play of medieval romance (perhaps inspired by Robin Hood and Ivanhoe movies), performed in my neighbourhood and on a visit to family friends. Those were my last forays into fiction.

In adulthood, most of my writing has been academic, as a lecturer in library and information science, until I started writing for children.

Looking at this background, I wonder if young people today have the same opportunities to develop writing craft. Education in Nigeria, as I’ve known it through my children’s experiences and my work with primary school pupils, often lacks these kinds of writing opportunities, both in creative and expository writing, as well as the copious voluntary reading on which writing skills are based. And looking at the world generally, others have as well commented on the decline in thoughtful journal and letter writing in an age of e-mail and text message communication, and the implications of this for writing craft, as well as for historical records.

I think we have much to do to encourage writing and the development of written communication skills.

How did decide you wanted to be a published writer?

I don’t remember deciding that I wanted to be a published writer. What happened was that I came to Nigeria and fell in love with the beautiful and fascinating birds I discovered here. I wanted a book that would allow me to share this excitement over West African birds with my children - and I couldn’t find such a book. This was about 1979, the International Year of the Child. Conversations with a friend, Miriam Ikejiani-Clark, about the possibility of our teaming up to write books on birds and trees for IYC led to contact with her cousin Arthur Nwankwo, the owner of a local publishing house. Fourth Dimension had just embarked on publication of a picture book series, and the first edition of my bird book, Birds of Our Land, eventually became part of this series.

It was a long process at that. I had to do considerable lobbying for the book, even though my friend Judith Osuala was their very knowledgeable and committed children’s editor at the beginning of the process. After Judith left to join the University of Nigeria, the publishers tried to veer it toward being more like a textbook and for a higher level. In response, I added a brief guide for parents and teachers, which turned out to be a good idea retained in the new edition. But due to their lack of conviction about a market, few copies were printed and the book almost immediately went out of print, without reaching the intended audience, this even though there were indications of high demand.

The other problem had to do with illustration. A picture book, and a guide to birds at that, absolutely depends on illustrations of the highest quality and appeal. I was left to find an illustrator. My observation was that most Nigerian artists are more inclined to abstract or impressionistic art, rather than the naturalistic style required for a book off this nature. I was fortunate to locate a budding landscape painter, Robin Gowen, a young American woman visiting her parents in Nsukka that year. She had grown up in Nigeria and loved birds, so it was a perfect match. However, the publishers did not see the role of the illustrator as we did, as an equal partner in creating a picture book, which is a holistic blend of text and illustration. In spite of all our protestations, Robin’s name did not appear on the title page, nor was she given copyright to the illustrations. I am happy to report that these problems did not re-occur with the new edition, also illustrated by Robin and published by Cassava Republic.

How would you describe the writing you are doing?

Nonfiction literature for children.

While I very much enjoy fiction for all levels, I have not felt inclined to write fiction or felt that I have a gift for it. I began writing for children as the result of the need I saw for a particular book, a guide to West African birds. Then in 1994 I participated in a workshop organized by the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY), Nigerian Section to create nonfiction literature for children, which had been identified as a major need. For that I produced manuscripts on the uses of trees and the West African seasons.

More recently I have written on flowers. Natural history then seems to be my niche in writing, which is interesting since my background is history and social studies.

Long after I started writing, I began to read more about nonfiction literature for children as a genre - its importance as well as its under-valuation, the observations and insights of writers specializing in nonfiction literature - and so to place my writing in a larger context.

Who is your target audience?

Children from about 3 to 12 years.

My areas of specialization within library and information science are school librarianship and children’s literature and library services, so I am concerned with literature for this age-group in my teaching future librarians and teachers.

Most of my experience in sharing literature is also with this age group - first with my five children - then through the Children’s Centre Library I helped develop at the University of Nigeria and my work with local primary schools.

There is also a great need for Nigerian children’s literature at this level. It is ironic that the ages that need local literature most have the least. From the beginnings in the 1960s, the emphasis in Nigeria has been on fiction for pre-adolescents and secondarily for adolescents. There have only been a handful of picture books over the years. Yet these should be a child’s first books, since they build up an association between reading and pleasure, develop language skills essential for reading, and foster personal development in all areas.

Three major gaps in Nigerian children’s literature that impact particularly on younger children are locally based picture books, nonfiction literature, and books in Nigerian languages. I have tried to contribute to meeting the need in the first two areas by writing nonfiction picture books introducing the local natural environment.

As a writer, which authors influenced you most?

I read general literature before I came to writing for children. I believe the aspect that influenced me most in terms of my own writing style was the poetic prose found in some novels. Among those that made a deep impression were the opening of Charles Dickens Tale of Two Cities (“It was the best of times...”) and for African novels, the description of goldsmithing in Camara Laye’s African Childhood and the opening passage of Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country. Then there was poetry, including the descriptive poetry of the Bible, as found, for example, in the books of Job, Psalms and Isaiah.

More directly, in the course of sharing books with children, I came across many picture books that made such wonderful expressive use of language. One from my own childhood is The Littlest Angel, by Charles Tazewell, with such wonderful words as “precipitous,” “vociferously,” and “disreputable” - no controlled vocabulary there!

A few of the many examples I could mention, especially where the prose has a poetic quality, are Tomie de Paola’s The Legend of the Bluebonnet and The Clown of God; William Steig’s Sylvester and the Magic Pebble; James Riordan’s The Three Magic Gifts; and Gail. E. Haley’s A Story, a Story. There are so many others, including humorous stories in rollicking verse, like Horton Hatches an Egg by Dr. Seuss and The Duchess Bakes a Cake by Virginia Kahl. What I learned from these is that literature for children can be of the highest literary quality. It can help develop a sense of beauty in language, as the illustrations can also do in terms of art.

How have your own personal experiences influenced your writing?

I grew up attuned to nature wherever I found it, including my childhood home in urban Indianapolis. Then there were family vacation trips to my grandparents’ home in Texas, the Rocky Mountains and Southwest desert, the land-of-a-thousand-lakes in Maine. When I was 1l, my parents bought a vacation home in beautiful northern Michigan - an old one-room schoolhouse overlooking the lake; surrounded by pine woods, meadows and cherry orchards; a land filled with birds, trees and wild flowers. My parents were both enthusiastic birdwatchers and given to long walks down country roads, through the woods, along the lake.

Through my mother and secondary school English literature classes, I was also introduced to poetry, especially romantic poetry describing nature. Towards the end of secondary school, I became very interested in Eastern religions and wrote a term paper on the Chinese religion Taoism, which emphasizes wholeness with nature. I was also drawn to Judeo-Christian traditions that envisioned the inter-connectedness of the whole spiritual, natural and human world, for instance as found in St. Francis of Assisi. This fed into a growing awareness of environmental issues and the need for environmental conservation and biodiversity.

When I moved to Nigeria in 1975, I was immediately taken with the many beautiful and intriguing birds I found there (like the brilliant blue and orange kingfishers and wing-beating flappet lark). I began to keep a journal sketchbook of my observations and consulted guide books in the library to learn more about them. However, when I wanted to share these birds with my children, I discovered there was no children’s book on local birds.

I was also interested in learning more about Nigerian trees and flowers, tasks which proved even more daunting since even adult guides were missing. Again, in the Children’s Centre Library there were numerous books informing about the seasons of the temperate zone (winter, spring, summer and fall), but nothing about tropical rainy and dry seasons.

I also found that many children as well as adults lack an appreciation of nature and the need for a healthy environment.

All these helped lead to my choice of nature books for young children as the focus of my writing.

What would you say are your main concerns as a writer?

As a writer of nonfiction literature for young children, specifically books in the area of science, my concern is to find ways of opening the natural world up to children, of exciting and involving them in the world around us. This involves increasing their knowledge about birds or trees or the seasons but also interpreting their prior experience with these in the local environment. It also concerns heightening their powers of observation and analysis. Equally important, I want to encourage certain values and attitudes - appreciation of the value and beauty of the natural world, awareness of the importance of a healthy environment for human welfare, scientific thinking and a sense of inquiry as well as a sense of wonder.

To accomplish this I have to find an approach that will speak to children, an approach that will meet them at a point of their own experience and stimulate their imagination and curiosity to explore further. I also need to find the words and mode of expression that will communicate effectively to children at their own level.

What are the biggest challenges that you face?

The biggest challenges are two. One is getting and verifying the information I need in areas where there are few authoritative and accessible sources, even for adults. And these are in areas of science where I am not an expert but am learning as well. After all, I began this journey to answer my own questions.

I have tried to deal with this challenge by consulting experts in the field, for instance botanists; by broadening my search to materials on other tropical areas in Africa and the Caribbean; by consulting children’s books on these topics written in other countries; and by making informed use of the many sources now available on the Internet.

The second challenge is communicating what I have found in a way that will speak to young children. The concepts have to be expressed in simple and concrete terms that children can understand. This is a challenge often cited by well known writers of science books for children, like Millicent Selsam, since scientific ideas are often complex and abstract. Moreover, these must be expressed in simple language, simple in terms of both vocabulary and sentence structure. This can be a serious constraint. One must always strive to achieve a balance between saying things in the way that best describes or expresses a thought in literary or scientific terms and being understood by the children reading it. Having said that, I believe that reading good literature expands children’s powers of expression, both in terms of language expression generally and vocabulary, and that it’s better to err on the side of style than to produce writing that is ordinary and mundane.

Do you write every day?

Since my primary assignment is university teaching and administration, writing for children, while growing out of my area of specialization, is something I do on the side.

With the bird book, ideas often came on my morning walks - like the day I saw chattering weavers zooming back and forth carrying fronds from some palms to the tree where their nests were, and began playing with words and phrases to capture this sight for children. I can mull over passages in the course of daily life - walking; cooking lunch; driving on the highway; listening to music.

Since I’m writing nonfiction, once I get an idea the next step is usually research. In writing about birds, this was a combination of fieldwork (observing the birds directly and recording notes and sketches) and library research (checking the guide books and, in a few cases, the Internet).

In preparing to write about trees in the early 1990s, I discovered a wonderful series of old articles on economic uses of trees in Nigeria Magazine, like from colonial days. The problems were that many of the names given to the trees were no longer in use and information had to be updated, since uses of tree products have changed over time. I couldn’t find a satisfactory guide to Nigerian trees, but more recently I found a great source in the Internet, especially in getting details of some specific species. For flowers, I took a lot of photographs on morning walks, then consulted with a botanist friend to identify the flowers by name and pick up any interesting facts. I’ve also been to the Internet for specific species and consulted numerous American children’s books on flowers and plants.

Along with the research, I try to develop a focus, a central idea that will organize the content. This was relatively straightforward for Birds of Our Land, since it was organized as a guide to 25 West African birds, beginning with an introduction and ending with an activities section. However, several themes ran across the various entries - adaptation, classification, the interdependence of different forms of life, observation as a method for collecting information.

The book on trees posed a greater challenge in this regard. Information on individual species was less available and aside from economic trees, there were few common English names to easily identify them. I also felt that children, and most people, have a greater affinity for birds, which have so much in common with us (behaviour, social interaction, family life, movement), than for trees and other plants. For these reasons, I decided to focus on what connects trees to us - the uses of trees, both in terms of their role in the environment and products we get from trees. So the book is organized in terms of uses, the various environmental uses and the many types of tree products - artefacts, food, medicine, industrial products, etc. When this was getting a bit dry, I took my editors’ suggestion of including portraits of a few individual species as detailed examples. So the baobab is featured as an example of trees offering homes and food to animals, ebony as an example of numerous wood products, from chess pieces to piano keys, the shea nut tree as an example of foods, oils and medicines from trees.

Flowers presented even more of a problem than trees in terms of identification and human connections. I looked at a number of children’s books on plants, flowers and trees and found such a variety of approaches. Some were general guides to trees or wildflowers, for instance one in which children talked about their favourite tree. Some took up a particular group, like poisonous or medicinal plants. Others focused on a particular species; one I especially liked was on the banyan tree as the centre of an Indian village. Still others looked at the life of a tree, why we need trees, the role of flowers in plant reproduction, pollination, and the role colour plays in pollination. I decided to focus on colour as a way of introducing flowers to young children, with more detailed portraits of a few familiar or unique flowers. I also became interested in the socio-cultural role of flowers, as brought out so effectively in the book about the banyan tree. All this is preliminary to the actual writing.

How many books have you written so far?

• Library Resources in Education (Enugu, Nigeria: Abic, 1993). A university-level textbook in three sections: the first discussing the relationship between modern education and school libraries; the second on various types of resources, nonfiction, literature, and audiovisual resources; and the third on the role of the library in promoting readings habits and skills, developing information skills, and expanding learning resources.
• Birds of Our Land: A Child’s Guide to West African Birds (1st ed. Enugu, Nigeria: Fourth Dimension, 1986; 2nd ed. Abuja, Nigeria: Cassava Republic, 2011). An introduction to West African birds, including basic features of birds and hints for observation; portraits of 25 memorable birds; and bird watching activities. 
• Why We Need Trees (Cassava Republic. Forthcoming). Focuses on the uses of trees, first in helping create a healthy environment and then in providing products of so many kinds, from furniture to musical instruments, from foods to art, from medicines to varnishes. Finally, a conclusion on how to save trees and activities involving trees.

Also books on flowers and seasons and perhaps more, all part of a nature series for children.

How did you find a publisher for your latest book?

My latest book, and also my first children’s book in a new edition, is Birds of Our Land: A Child’s Guide to West African Birds, published by Cassava Republic Press of Abuja in 2011, but just out. The name indicates the content: the new edition features 25 familiar or notable birds of West Africa. I wrote the original edition about 1980-1981, based on my observations of Nigerian birds carried out from about 1978.

The new edition developed out of my meeting with Bibi Bakare-Yusuf of Cassava Republic at a seminar organized by the Spanish Embassy in 2009. There was little additional editorial work: I added seven new birds and an activities section to the new edition, made more inquiries about names of birds in the three major Nigerian languages, and conferred with the illustrator in creating all new illustrations.

In this case, the publisher found me. Bibi was attracted to my book, which I used as an example during the seminar. It was just the kind of book she had been seeking for a new nature series of picture books that Cassava Republic wished to bring out. She immediately proposed they publish a new edition of my bird book.

What advantages or disadvantages did this present?

I already knew of Cassava Republic from their novels, which impressed me greatly both in terms of literary and production quality.

From everything said, it was apparent we shared a common philosophy about children’s books and a fruitful partnership was born. We agreed on the crying need for local nonfiction literature for Nigerian children. We likewise agreed on the importance of quality in every aspect of the work, including illustration and physical production, and on the need to acknowledge the crucial role of the illustrator in creating a picture book. I have also appreciated the very thorough editing of my proposed book on the uses of trees and the team of critics who helped to improve the work.

Any disadvantages have been due to Cassava Republic’s status as a new, small and yet to be fully established company. There have been delays in production - due to efforts to find sponsorship to support the work; due to locating a printer with the best balance of quality and cost and, as a result, relating to one in faraway India; and due to other unforeseen circumstances, like the January general strike over fuel price increases.

Marketing is also a major challenge for Nigerian publishers, especially those aiming at innovation and quality. But the need is so great, as are the possibilities: I feel Nigeria is where I can make a meaningful contribution.

What will your next book be about?

Three books in the nature series are at various stages - the one on uses of trees has been edited and is at the stage of layout and illustration, those on flowers and the seasons have been accepted.

Ideas for future books include small mammals and reptiles, insects, fish, foods... there is no end to possibilities.

What would you say has been your most significant achievement as a writer?

I think it is too early to talk of significant achievement. However, I believe I have created a beautiful book that can open the world of West African birds to children, and even adults. (Actually, many of the same or very similar species occur in East and Southern Africa as well.)

I believe that the three of us working in cooperation - I as writer, the illustrator and publisher - have created a model for a quality nonfiction picture book based on Nigerian environment. I hope this book will call attention to the need and value of nonfiction literature for children as a way of opening up the world of knowledge and discovering the pleasure and excitement to be found in the natural world. I hope it will help begin to fill this enormous gap in Nigerian children’s literature and lead to more high quality books in the future.

Photo credit: Nigerian School Library Association

Related books:

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Related articles:

• Q&A with Virginia W. Dike, by Abubakar Adam Ibrahim, Sunday Trust, February 26, 2012
• Representations of Nigerian Culture in Children's Literature, by Ariel Villano, Nigerian Literature, March 21, 2012
• Birds of Our Land by Virginia Dike [Audio Interview], Africa Unchained, March 25, 2012

[Interview] Paula Leyden

Paula Leyden was born in Kenya and grew up in Zambia. She spent most of her adult life in South Africa. Currently, she lives in Ireland.

She made her debut as an author with the publication of The Butterfly Heart (Walker Books, 2011).

In this interview, Paula Leyden talks about her writing:

When did you start writing?

I started writing fiction late in life – when I moved to Ireland eight years ago. Before that my writing experience had been mainly in the field of human rights, more agitational and reporting kind of writing.

Once I had decided that I would like to try my hand at fiction I registered for a course called Write That Novel. It was run by Siobhán Parkinson, now our Children’s Laureate.

I found it extremely useful as it was a very practical course focussing on things like plotting, character development, dialogue, pace etc.

While on that course I did an exercise that then turned into my first novel (written before The Butterfly Heart and not yet published) for children. Once the course finished (it was a part-time course, two hours a week for three months) some of the students in the group felt they would like to continue meeting as a writer’s group – and we have been meeting since then for the past five years. We call ourselves The Crab Apple group.

How would you describe the writing you are doing?

I am writing various things.

My first book and the sequel to it are for children aged 10 upwards, these are the ones published by Walker Books. If I was to categorise them I suppose they would be part fiction, part fantasy and part adventure. The first one addresses a serious issue, that of child marriage, but I hope not in a pedagogic fashion. I would not like to read a book that hectored me so I see no reason to write one.

I have also written a couple of adult books (not yet published) one set on Death Row in South Africa under Apartheid, and the other also set in South Africa which, in some way, deals with a sense of belonging and apartness.

Who is your target audience?

I do not write for a target audience – I write and if the story ends up (as with the Butterfly Heart) appealing to children, then so be it. I have, however, had a lot of very good feedback from adults who have read it, so I like to think it has crossover appeal.

In the writing you are doing, which authors influenced you most?

There are authors whose writing I love – but I am not sure whether they have influenced me. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Barbara Kingsolver, Elmore Leonard, Williams Carlos Williams, Aesop’s Fables and folk tales mainly from Southern Africa that I have read and re-read. The writing of these has been largely a re-telling of stories handed down through the ages, so no one writer could be identified here.

And have your own personal experiences influenced your writing in any way?

Every part of my life has influenced my writing.

I was born in Kenya and then grew up in Zambia, then lived my adult life in South Africa – bits and pieces of all of these places are in my writing.

My childhood, my observations of people, being a mother, my working life – every little bit of me goes into my writing. I am sure everyone who writes is like that – we live and we learn, in every sense of the word.

What are your main concerns as a writer?

My main concern is to make sure that I always am the best that I can be. To be true to myself and what I know. Never to slip into lazy habits or assume anything. To keep disciplined – because that is what you have to keep if you are to make progress. Without discipline you may as well fold up the computer, or throw away the pencil!

What are the biggest challenges that you face?

My challenge, now that we’re on the subject, is discipline. Each book that I write, my discipline improves (I think ...)

Do you write everyday?

I write most days and in the morning. If I am on a deadline I can write later but I find my brain is freshest in the early morning.

I have a room in our home in which I write, which is a privilege. I start each writing session where I ended, if I am in the first draft. However I have a horrible tendency when editing to go back to the start each time – then I end up with a tightly edited first section and a scrabbled second section! I am trying to cure myself of that.

How many books have you written so far?

I have written six books – but only The Butterfly Heart is published. The sequel will come out next year – no title yet.

The Butterfly Heart was published by Walker Books UK on March 3, this year, it was endorsed by Amnesty International.

I have also had a short story published in a Jack and Jill Foundation book, and a short story published in African Writing.

What would you say The Butterfly Heart is about?

My latest book is The Butterfly Heart – it is set in Zambia and is told through two voices, Ifwafa and elderly man who has a magical way with snakes, and Bul-Boo, a young girl. It follows Bul Boo and her twins sister Madillo’s efforts to save their friend Winifred from being married off to a much older man. To do this they seek help from their friend Ifwafwa.

How did you chose a publisher for the book?

I am represented by a wonderful agent, Sophie Hicks of Ed Victor Ltd. In London. And it was Sophie who secured a publishing deal with Walker Books for me for The Butterfly Heart and its sequel.

Walker Books have been absolutely fantastic to deal with and I am extremely happy to be published by them.

Which aspects of the work you put into the book did you find most difficult?

I didn’t really find it difficult once I got started. My usual difficulty is in plotting – not in writing. I work from character, and find that characters come easily to me. So I usually write with little idea of where the characters will take me, which has both advantages and disadvantages. But once I have a general idea then the writing comes easily.

I enjoy the feeling I get when I feel I am getting on top of the story, when it almost feels as though it will write itself.

What sets The Butterfly Heart apart from other things you've written?

Probably the magical realism element within it. And I love that that emerged in this story.

What will your next book be about?

The next one follows Bul-Boo and Madillo into another adventure – but this time the main narrator will be Fred, their next door neighbour.

What would you say has been your most significant achievement as a writer?

Being accepted onto Sophie Hick’s books and signing with Walker Books! It led to me being published.

Related articles:

• Hearting Zambia: An interview & 'review' of Paula Leyden's, 'The Butterfly Heart', By Mwanabibi Sikamo, uprooting the pumpkin, July 12, 2011
• The Butterfly Heart, By Paula Leyden [Book Review], By Bwalya Chileya, Zambian Economist, July 7, 2011
• The Big Break with Paula Leyden [Interview], By Vivienne Dacosta, Serendipity Reviews, June 23, 2011

[Interview] Chris Nicholson

Chris Nicholson is a lecturer in the Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex and has worked in a range of children's services for over 10 years.

In addition to that, he is a trustee of the Charterhouse Group of Therapeutic Communities; a fellow of the International Institute of Child and Adolescent Mental Health and a regular speaker at bi-annual conferences on the poet and author Robert Graves.

Chris Nicholson is also co-author of Children and Adolescents in Trauma: Creative Therapeutic Approaches (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2010).

In this interview, he talks about his work:

How did you first become involved in children's services?

In the mid-90s I was finishing a joint honours degree in English literature and Philosophy at the University of Kent, in Canterbury. I had rather immersed myself in the reading and read way beyond what was required for these courses. In consequence I had an experience which the poet Robert Graves illustrates in "The Philosopher" where Threading logic between wall and wall he finds that he has Truth captured without increment of flies, or, in other words, the impingement of actual physical existence. I left university with a strong desire to avoid bookishness, and so determinate to find direct work with people.

In this way I arrived, naively, with my neck exposed to the axe, in a small residential children's home in Kent. Here staff worked a straight 50 hour a week in 12 hour shifts including waking nights, often back to back - I was told this system provided continuity to the young people. In fact it exhausted staff leaving them less able contain the disturbing feelings being projected into them by the young people.

There were five young people living in the home aged 11 to 18 often with only one or two staff members on shift. They presented with regular violence, self-harm, absconding and property damage, and seemed to exult in creating chaos. There wasn't anything in the training or culture of the home that could be considered a theoretical model by which these things could be understood, but there were a few books in the staff office. Over the long waking nights, on those occasions where the young people were settled and the long list of staff chores were complete, I fell upon these books in desperation despite my earlier edict to avoid them.

I discovered that there was a distinction to be made between control of children, which the home focused on implicitly, and something called containment which I didn't fully understand. I also learned that where children's homes were experiencing a large amount of 'acting out' this could be due to the way the home was managed as opposed to simply being down to the children. This was a shock as I have great respect for the managers who seemed to be good people. Still, I began to look for any correspondence between management structures, policies, or care arrangements and children's behaviour.

Why are creative therapeutic approaches good to use when working with children and adolescents in trauma?

There are many reasons why creative approaches are good to use with young people.

I'll emphasise two.

The first has to do with the relationship that exits between art and psychodynamic thinking. In creative activities, for example, film, painting or literature, the interpretative potential of the underlying symbols, metaphors, and analogies, finds a commonality with psychodynamic thinking. In art, as in psychodynamic work, it is not merely the outward appearance of things which holds our attention, but all that lies beneath. When young people engage in creative pursuits they have the opportunity to offer their own instinctive metaphors and symbols. They can develop their own narratives throwing up exactly that kind of material which psychodynamic practitioners utilise.

The second concerns the need to address a certain rigidity in thought and behaviour. In reasonably healthy families, infants experience attunement to their emotional and physical needs so that they can internalise good experience and so come to trust their relationship with caregivers. Their own experience become validated through the recognition and adaptation of caregivers to their needs which in turn provides the internal space in which the core self (a strong ego or sense of self-worth) can become established. Gradually the infant develops a sense of understanding and adaptation between its internal world and that of others, especially through flexible, creative play and communication.

However, traumatic experiences are, to some extent, deterministic. If a child has grown up in a family where one or both adults operate in ways we would define as neglecting or abusing there are usually rigid modes of communication in place and these have the opposite effect to the healthy kind described above. For example, traumatic events during the first two to three years of life have far-reaching effects on neurological development. Those who experience early trauma are prone to a certain rigidity of intellectual and emotional response. Howe (2005) emphasised this trait:

They fail to adapt to and cope with change, whether in their own feeling states or external relationships. In effect, the brain lacks complexity. It operates in a relatively rigid, compartmentalized way, lacking integration between many of its key social, cognitive and emotional operations. 

(p.262).

The importance of a creative approach then, is that it can divert negative thinking and feeling down a different and altogether more positive pathway. Through sensitively handled, creative interaction and by the use of creative approaches with traumatised young people, their characteristic rigidity begins to loosen. New possibilities emerge, the mutative nature of create endeavours. In time, they may be able to see painfully familiar situations in different and helpful ways that can lead to their forming a new response.

Could you describe one creative approach to us and how it could be implemented?

I will briefly describe a creative approach I used with a group of five 15 to 16-year-old care leavers at Donyland Lodge in Essex.

Children who live with their own families tend to stay at home today into their early 20s due to extended education and economic dependence. The time allowed for looked after children to finish growing up is, by contrast, incredibly compressed, as they generally leave for independence or semi-independence at around 16 years. While this is happening, they have to cope with a host of problems which put added pressure on them, e.g. painful and chaotic family dynamics, how to make reliable friendships, overcoming huge distrust, not infrequent changes of social worker, finishing school and exams, not to mention the giddying psychological and physical experience of middle adolescence. It must feel to them like being in the back seat of a car as someone else accelerates along a dangerous highway.

Due to this, the outcomes for young people include having higher levels of homelessness, lower educational attainments, higher rates of unemployment, greater dependency on welfare benefits, unstable career patterns, higher levels of offending, and problems with mental health and substance misuse. With poor interpersonal skills, low self-esteem and confidence the scene is set for social isolation and further disaffection.

How can we help already disaffected young people in such a way as to prepared them for what lies ahead? How can we help them to gain the kind of experiential learning which might give them some slight grasp of how important it will be to prepare now?

At Donyland we integrated Life Skills into the curriculum from age 15 years and included a wide range of teaching relevant to care leavers. We began the course with bridge building. The young people are provided newspaper, cellotape, glue, string, scissors, a ruler and other arts and crafts items. They are asked to build a bridge that spans, say 10 centimetres in height and 40 centimetres across, and that a toy car can travel over. We give them 40 minutes to do this exercise. But 25 minutes in, we tell them that there has been a change of plan and then now have only 5 minutes left to complete their bridge. This causes great anxiety. But then, just as the 5 minutes are nearly up, we inform them that things have again changed and they still have 5 minutes left.

You can imagine how much emotional holding and support the young people need during this activity and how robust the staff need to be to manage the consequent acting out in terms of resentment, sabotage of their own and other's bridges, doubt about completion or quality and so on. But all this comes to fruition later as we unpack the underlying significance of the bridges: This is your bridge from Donyland into independence. How easy is it to get on and off the bridge? How stable is it? Does it have any supports and who or what are those supports going to be on your actual journey? How did you deal with the stress evoked? Did you help or hinder each other? Did you ask for help from adults or feel that you had to go it alone? What influence did this have upon your bridge? The young people are asked to assess each other's bridges and say what might improve it and how this links to leaving care.

We also connect this exercise with research into leaving care, for example Mike Stein's What Works in Leaving Care? (Barnados, 1997) and talk to the young people about what has been learned from previous care leavers. Finally, to really help the staff team get in touch with the plight of young people at this stage in their lives, they (and they means, care, education, administrative, ancillary and management staff) were all asked to undertake the same exercise in training.

Would you be able to tell us about your work with Therapeutic Communities?

Whatever people say about Therapeutic Communities (TCs) they are remarkable places.

After my first experience of working in a children's home, coming to work at a therapeutic community for 21 mixed gender adolescents in the Essex countryside was a revelation. Here there was a model based upon a number of key theorists, only some of whom were involved in TCs ... Winnicott, Bion, Dockar-Drysdale, Bowlby and the American Efrain Bleiberg (who emphasizes reflection function).

There were also pot-belly pigs, goats and rabbits, gardening, hovering and mountains of washing up.

Alongside community meeting and art therapy, the routines of daily life were conscripted as a part of the therapeutic milieu ... everybody could play a part to support community life.

The TCs I've worked in were always striving to develop, to redefine themselves in the light of the ever new experiences young people brought to the community. They advocated not so much children's rights (which is policy driven), but their equality and humanity, and ability to take ownership of their lives and the life of the community to which they'd come.

Children appreciated the fact that what they had to say, however distorted by previous experience, mattered to the adults and would be thought about. They also witnessed staff having to learn, and be self-reflective and take responsibility for their own actions openly. The sense of children and adults struggling and striving together could be very powerful and enabled some very hard to reach children to make contact with others in a meaningful way and feel a part of something larger.

My work was mostly around admission, assessment and leaving care. For young people, these experiences can feel like being forced, being judged and being pushed out especially where they already feel dragged from pillar to post and constantly assessed. The art was in finding ways to ensure these actives could function as a part of the therapeutic endeavour, and might, if careful handled, become a corrective experiences of which the young person was very much an active part.

I am pleased to find that London Placements are using membership of the Community of Communities annual review cycle as a criteria for determining if a placement is considered therapeutic. In my experience, a therapeutic community, like any therapeutic service, can only remain therapeutic, through constant striving, reflection about how it operates, experiential training and a process of assessment and review from external sources.

What are you currently reading in your spare time?

Most of my reading, spare or otherwise, relates to the course I teach at Essex University, Therapeutic Communication and Therapeutic Organisations.

Staff working in residential child care, in psychiatric adolescent units or in schools need to have read Hinshelwood on organisations, Salzberger-Wittenberg on the emotional issues of teaching and learning. They need to know about early development from Klein, Stern, Bowlby and Wadell.

But if they are anything like me, they may also be sustained by poetry, like that of Robert Graves, who I'm always reading, or Rilke who heals the heart while breaking it over and over: Each torpid turn of the world has such disinherited children, to whom longer what's been, and not yet what's coming, belongs.

Cary's recent biography, The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies is fascinating. Golding wrote well about children and how they see the world in many of his books other than Lord of the Flies, and Cary, despite his superior tone, can't help but admire him.

The next novel I plan to read is Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children. I discovered this through the extraordinary introduction by Randall Jarrell which is a work of art in its own right.

My wife has just lent me several books on the Oedipus Complex, and I'm reading Pollyanna with my eldest daughter. So, happy families!

Finally, I'm half way through Richard Glover's 1804 epic poem Leonidas (as in the recent film, 300). This suits me nicely. A different kind of egg for Easter.

(c) Jessica Kingsley Publishers 2011

This article was first published in the Jessica Kingsley Publishers Social Work Newsletter in March 2010

Related articles:

• Children and Adolescents in Trauma: Creative Therapeutic Approaches [Book Review], By Sarah Huline-Dickens, Times Higher Education, May 6, 2010
• Norfolk care leavers need more support, says report, By Stephanie Brooks, EDP24, July 23, 2011

[Interview] Deborah M. Plummer

Deborah M. Plummer is the author of books that include: Helping Children to Improve their Communication Skills (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2011); Helping Children to Cope with Change, Stress and Anxiety (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2010) and Anger Management Games for Children (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2008).

Formerly a clinical lead therapist working within the NHS, Deborah Plummer now lectures at De Montfort University, Leicester and runs workshops and short courses on the uses of imagery and issues of self-esteem.

In this interview, Deborah Plummer talks about her work:

What are the common causes of stress and anxiety in the children you work with?

For the last 15 years or so of my work within the NHS I specialised in working with adults and children who stammer. Although public awareness about the complex nature of communication difficulties is certainly improving, children who stammer still often experience a considerable amount of anxiety related to their speech, sometimes to the extent that communication becomes something to fear and avoid.

Many of the children I saw for therapy were also susceptible to other sources of stress. Teasing and bullying are perhaps the most publicised of the stresses faced by children with speech and language difficulties but there are other factors such as low self-esteem, coping with difficult family circumstances, coping with change, problems with friendships, hypersensitivity to exam stress, or a drive for perfection which can cause great frustration and anxiety.

Working with these children highlighted two important points for me - that stress is an inevitable part of every child's life, although the degree to which each child will experience stress will, of course, vary; and that children are remarkable in their capacity to adapt to stress and find their true potential if they are offered appropriate and timely support.

Can you describe one of the coping techniques featured in your new book?

The main emphasis in this and my other books is on fostering mindful interactions. We need to be very aware of the impact that our own ways of communicating can have on how a child views himself and on how he views the world.

So one technique is to help children to formulate their own solutions by pointing out the little successes, capitalising on their strengths, using solution-oriented language, praising appropriately and so on.

The other main orientation of my work is imagework.

What is imagework and how does it help with building self-esteem?

We tend to live our lives guided by the internal 'images' that we create about who we are and how the world works. The term 'imagework' was created by Dr Dina Glouberman, who leads imagework training courses internationally. It literally refers to 'working with images', although it is often image 'play' rather than 'work'! I think this concept of play is especially useful when we are helping children to utilise their imagination in a constructive way.

In relation to healthy self-esteem, let's say a child has a fear of 'being on show' and getting things wrong. If I asked this child to draw a picture that would show me what it's like to have such fears he might draw a time when he has experienced the fear or he might draw an animal or an object or just use colours to represent the fear. This is a fairly common strategy.

In imagework I would then help the child to explore the nature of the image in more depth. For example, I might encourage him to make up a story about the image and its 'opposite', and to explore how someone (or something) might move from one towards the other.

When a child comes up with an image that represents how he feels about a situation, he is tapping into something that goes way beyond logical thought processes. And when he realises that he can 'play' with these images and be creative in forming new images, then he can begin to take more control.

Imagework often triggers insights and shifts in perspective which may not come through logical thinking alone.

Children are naturally imaginative - it seems a waste not to use this capacity to support their emotional wellbeing.

What do you find most satisfying about the work you do?

I am currently devoting the majority of my time to lecturing and writing.

I am enjoying the opportunity of sharing concepts and strategies learned and developed over many years of working with adults and children in a therapeutic context.

I find it immensely satisfying to be able to engage students in exploring the psychological aspects of health and illness in a wider context (I teach students on health studies and public and community health degree courses as well as speech and language therapy students).

Frequent or prolonged periods of stress and anxiety can have far-reaching effects on physical health and emotional wellbeing. Practitioners working with children, young people and families therefore need to be skilled in assessing needs, addressing stresses and promoting resilience.

Occasionally I hear from social workers, teachers or parents who have used one of my books and they tell me about a breakthrough that they have had with a child - that is incredibly satisfying for me too - I love to hear how people are adapting the work for different needs and different settings.

You are currently working on a PhD proposal involving your titles what do you hope to find during your research?

The central theme of my books is that there is an identifiable set of criteria which will allow adults to maximise the potential for effectively supporting the emotional well-being of children. My thesis will be an exploration of these elements and will include an evaluation of how people are using the books in a variety of fields.

I am designing a questionnaire which will be available on my website. I am hoping that as many people as possible will take time to respond to this. Responses will be used to examine whether or not there is a specific or 'favoured' aspect of the approaches adopted in the books which practitioners find helpful, or if there is a certain combination of factors that appeals.

What are you currently reading in your spare time?

I am rediscovering books by James Hillman (e.g. Re-Visioning Psychology) - he has influenced my work for some time and I am thoroughly enjoying devoting time to re-reading some old favourites - his work with images and his love of language and metaphor are so incredible. I find new inspiration each time I read his work.

I am also reading Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin - an amazing book about the humanitarian vision of one man and his belief in the power of education to promote peace. Children are our hope for a more community-minded, peaceful future - we should be nurturing their imagination and emotional well-being in every way that we possibly can.

(c) Jessica Kingsley Publishers 2011


This article was first published in the Jessica Kingsley Publishers Social Work Newsletter in February 2010

Related Articles:

• 40 million children live in 'healthcare deserts', By Sarah Boseley, The Guardian, July 20, 2011
• Movement teaches parents to deal with anxiety from raising children, By Pooneh Momeni, The Daily Texan, July 17, 2011
• Chris Taylor [Interview], Conversations with Writers, June 27, 2011

[Interview] Chris Taylor

Chris Taylor is registered manager of a residential home and a company trainer. He works with young people with attachment difficulties and delivers training on the subject to foster carers, social workers and residential childcare workers.

He is the author of A Practical Guide to Caring for Children and Teenagers with Attachment Difficulties (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2010).

In this interview, Chris Taylor talks about his work:

How did you first become involved in working with children and young people with attachment difficulties?

I had a 15-year career in industry and, having worked through two recessions, I was feeling a bit jaded with commerce. A broken hip from a cycling accident gave me time to think about my future. My own children were young teenagers, and I believed I had something to offer adolescents, and that I would be motivated and rewarded.

I found a job as a 'house a parent' (it's 20 years ago, language was different) in a therapeutic community. I don't think I really knew what I was getting into. The model of working was psychodynamic, but attachment wasn't the dominant paradigm. Many of the children in the community had been severely neglected or abused. They were often traumatized and struggling to find an internal representation of safety. All this was then acted out in desperate and often self-defeating attempts to resolve their insecure past.

I'd read [John] Bowlby's work in the late 60s and I, as I began to explore ways of understanding the troubled and vulnerable children in the community, I began to think more deeply about how their attachment pattern was deeply intertwined in their difficulties and their presenting behaviors: their developmental pathway.

How does understanding attachment help childcare and social workers?

I think we have to caution against suggesting that an individual's attachment is a catch-all for their current condition.

Development is a pathway, and each individual is where they are because of a huge and complex array of innate and environmental factors acting on each other. However, that basic biological drive to be close to the primary caregiver for safety, comfort and reassurance is a powerful mechanism in an individual's early development. Although initially the attachment relationship is a descriptor of the dyadic relationship between child and caregiver, as the child becomes older, the pattern of attachment becomes increasingly an aspect of their individual functioning.

Our attachment history affects us all, and children who have had sub-optimal early care are likely to be anxiously attached and to carry this anxiety as a self-fulfilling prophecy into other relationships, developing behavioral coping mechanisms that may make them difficult to care for. If the caregiver is also frightening, the child cannot organize their coping strategy in a coherent way. Such a child presents a huge challenge to be adequately cared for.

Understanding attachment allows professionals charged with this task to unpack the child's adjustment and work out ways of responding to the child that answers their attachment need and switches of the child's self-defeating behaviors. Understanding caregivers' attachment history can give us insight into the kind of support they may need to adequate parent a trouble child.

Would you be able to tell us about your work in a therapeutic unit?

For the last 10 years, I have managed a four-bedded therapeutic unit. In that time, every child who has been resident has had some degree of attachment difficulty. The children (or young people) may access individual psychotherapy, but, helpful though that can be, therapeutic means something more than that.

The model is one of supporting and enabling development whilst challenging maladaptive coping mechanisms. We promote a holistic, planned environment that provides a secure base for the child to explore their past and current relationships in the here and now. Working as a symbolic attachment figure, the staff team provides the sensitive attunement to enable the child to begin to use information from both emotions and cognition in a flexible way, to gather a coherent understanding of their attachment history and gradually possess 'earned security'.

We also think about the staff's needs from an attachment perspective. The children we care for challenge the secure representations of their caregivers; support needs to be matched to the internal pressure exerted on the caregiver by the child's coping mechanisms. Adult attachment models provide a powerful framework for doing this.

What developments have been made in the area since you first started working with children with attachment difficulties, and what is your hope for the future?

Many foster-carers, residential workers and social workers are now hugely interested in attachment theory, which has become one of the foremost paradigms in child development. It is now more common to see at least an attempt to think about the child's current experiences in the light of their attachment pattern.

I think some fostering agencies have gone a long way in thinking about both the foster child's and the carers' attachment styles when trying to make placements. I also now see more placement decisions in residential care where the child's attachment needs are mentioned, but there still seems to be little serious thought about what to do with this. What this means is that there is often a description but little idea what may help, perhaps a vague idea that something therapeutic is required.

I'd hope that in the future we may continue to develop holistic, psycho-social models for promoting recovery; children develop anxious attachments in their first relationships, recovery takes place in supportive and enabling relationships and social environments.

I also hope that the resources careful and effective work requires are forthcoming; social area budgets are going to be under pressure, but these children deserve a chance to have useful and fulfilling lives.

What are you currently reading in your spare time?

I like to have two or three books on the go for spare time reading, and often my leisure interest reading rubs up against my work.

I'm currently reading Bedlam: London and its mad (Catherine Arnold). As well as unraveling historical social constructions of madness, it's an engaging social history from mediaeval to recent times.

I'm also reading Jarheads (Anthony Swofford), the author's account of living through the fear and boredom of the first Gulf War, and Opening Skinner's Box: great psychology experiments of the twentieth century (Lauren Slater). The experiments are familiar, but Ms Slater writes about them in a way that makes you think you were part of them.

(c) Jessica Kingsley Publishers 2011

This article was first published in the Jessica Kingsley Publishers Social Work Newsletter in January 2010

Related articles:

• How to build life skills for a lifetime: what the evidence says, By Deirdre Croft, Social and Emotional Development Blog, Australian Research Alliance for Children and Youth (ARACY), June 23, 2011
• What would Carl Jung make of 2011?, By Mark Vernon, BBC News Magazine, June 6, 2011
• Rhidian Hughes [Interview], Conversations with Writers, May 25, 2011

[Interview] Jan Horwath

Jan Horwath is Professor of Child Welfare at the University of Sheffield

Her books include The Child's World: The Comprehensive Guide to Assessing Children in Need (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2009) and Child Neglect: Identification and Assessment (Palgrave, 2007).

She also co-authored Effective Staff Training in Social Care: From Theory to Practice (Routledge ,1998); Working for Children on the Child Protection Register: An Inter-Agency Practice Guide (Ashgate Publishing Limited, 1999) and Making Links Across Specialisms: Understanding Modern Social Work Practice (Russell House, 2003).

Before becoming an academic, Jan Horwath worked as a practitioner, trainer and manager in both voluntary and statutory social work settings.

In this interview, she talks about her work and the writing it inspired:

How did you initially become involved in social work with children and families?

As a young social work student I always intended working with children and families therefore, when I completed my training, I looked for a job that would enable me to focus on this user group.

My first social work position was with a non-governmental organisation, Middlemore Homes, in Birmingham. The charity provided residential placements lasting between one and three years for families that had both a history of chronic neglect and the Local Authority was considering care proceedings. My job was to work intensively with a small number of families to improve parenting capacity and address the impact of neglect on the children. I particularly enjoyed having the opportunity to really get to know the families and to use a range of individual and group approaches.

I maintained this interest in children and families whilst working as a generic social worker for both Manchester and Oxfordshire Local Authorities and continued to develop my group work skills by, for example, running groups for young people exhibiting challenging behaviours.

A move to Sheffield provided me with an opportunity to further develop these skills with children and young people when I became an intermediate treatment officer. I am particularly proud of the pioneering work I engaged in with colleagues in Sheffield in the mid 1980s which included establishing groups for parents of young offenders. One of our most successful groups was for parents of young men who sexually abused. These experiences provided me with the foundation to go on and practice abroad; provide education and training and manage staff working in the child welfare field.

How has practice with children and families developed and changed since the first edition of The Child’s World eight years ago?

Whilst editing the chapters included in the second edition of The Child’s World, I was continually reminded of the significant research, policy and practice developments that have had an impact not only on social work practice but also on the practice of all professionals who come into contact with children and families.

Not long after the first edition of The Child’s World was published Lord Laming’s inquiry report following the death of Victoria Climbiè and the Government’s response: Every Child Matters began to have a significant impact on policy and practice.

As the book is about assessment practice I’ll focus on that area of practice.

One of the most striking changes to assessment policy and practice is the broadening of focus of assessment in order to identify early concerns and children with additional needs. This has been achieved through the introduction of the Common Assessment Framework.

There have been considerable changes to organisational and practice contexts which were designed to address concerns about weak accountability and poor levels of service integration. These changes have reinforced the contribution that practitioners from a wide range of disciplines can make to both assessing and meeting the needs of vulnerable children as well as children in need. The changes have also emphasised the role and responsibilities of senior managers in creating a climate that promotes effective practice.

Practice has also changed as a result of increased research regarding, for example, the impact of issues such as domestic violence and drug and alcohol misuse on a carer’s ability to meet the needs of their child. We have also become increasingly aware of the impact of child maltreatment on brain development.

Whilst Every Child Matters placed considerable emphasis on measuring outcomes to children, rather than focusing on processes and outputs, performance management systems in adult and children services have, in my opinion, continued to overemphasise processes and outputs, such as measuring the number of assessments completed within prescribed timescales, meaning that the focus on the child and their needs has taken second place.

We have also continued to learn lessons from serious case reviews over the last eight years.

Similar messages have emerged in terms of making sense of information and using professional judgement and ensuring staff receive adequate supervision. The recent death of Baby Peter highlighted the importance of assessing parents’ level of engagement in terms of motivation to change.

Reflecting on all these developments, the most important learning point for me was made by Lord Laming in his inquiry report following the death of Victoria Climbiè in which he emphasised the importance of practitioners understanding what a day is like in the life of a child when assessing their needs.

What, in your opinion, are the main challenges facing social workers today?

Those in the profession have always been aware of the many challenges social workers encounter. However, in the past few months, these challenges have really come under the political and public spotlight.

The interim report of the social work taskforce, for example, outlines many of the challenges and indeed there are many. For example, complex cases, a demoralised workforce; lack of clarity regarding the role of the social worker; an emphasis on performance management and the very negative portrayal of social workers in the media. Yet against this backcloth frontline staff are undertaking some excellent work and not only safeguarding but also promoting the welfare of numerous children.

For me the biggest challenge is recognising effective practice and in the same way that we have begun to pay more attention to resilience amongst children and young people we should be considering what makes for a resilient workforce. Why is it that some practitioners can continue to work effectively with service users when others in the same or similar settings struggle?

What do you do in your spare time?

Living in Sheffield with the Peak District on the doorstep it is hardly surprising that I spend much of my spare time walking those hills and dales. I also enjoy walking long distance paths and my current project is the Thames Path. However since the end of June I have been spending much of my spare time with my first grandchild, Oscar. He is an absolute delight and no I'm not biased.

(c) Jessica Kingsley Publishers 2010

This article was first published in the Jessica Kingsley Publishers Social Work Newsletter in September 2009

Possibly related articles:

• Baby P: In His Mother's Words, Panorama, BBC One, December 13, 2010
• Belinda Hopkins [Interview], Conversations with Writers, November 20, 2010
• On the topic of Social Work Practices, By Carl Packman, Though Cowards Flinch, November 18, 2010

[Interview] Belinda Hopkins

Belinda Hopkins is a Director and Lead Trainer at Transforming Conflict, a centre for restorative justice in education.

She is also the author of Just Care: Restorative Justice Approaches to Working with Children in Public Care (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2009); The Peer Mediation and Mentoring Trainer's Manual (Optimus Education, 2008) and Just Schools: A Whole School Approach to Restorative Justice (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2003).

In this interview, Belinda Hopkins talks about the work she is doing:

How did you first become interested in Restorative Justice?

In some ways I have always been interested in a restorative approach when working with young people – although in the early days I would not have used the phrase ‘Restorative Justice’ or ‘restorative approaches’

My first experience of teaching, in the field of English as a foreign language, radicalised me in terms of thinking of my students as autonomous, self-directing partners in their learning. Having subsequently trained as a modern language teacher, I found the authoritarian regime of school difficult to accept. I was inspired by Reimer (1971), Postman and Weingartner (1971), Holt (1966) and Freire (1982), who questioned the role of adults vis-à-vis children and the issue of children’s rights and responsibilities. I also read about non-violence and conflict resolution in schools (Isaacson and Lamont 1982; Judson 1982).

My teaching style was informed by a desire to create a democratic classroom, and I often used a format which is now called classroom conferencing (Thorsborne and Vinegrad 2004) – resolving differences and problems by sitting in a circle, actively listening to each other and finding ways forward together. I based much of my modern languages teaching around the social goal of creating community and trust in the group, using game-like activities to develop self-esteem, communication skills and cooperation, albeit in French and Spanish. Eventually, in 1994, I left the teaching profession to become a freelance trainer and consultant in the field of conflict management and mediation.

In 1997 Terry O’Connell, a police officer pioneering Restorative Justice in New South Wales was invited over to the UK by the then Chief Constable of the Thames Valley Police Force, Sir Charles Pollard to talk about his work with young offenders to youth justice professionals and educationalists. Hearing O’Connell speak, I saw the relationship between work I had been doing in schools for many years and the potential of restorative justice philosophy to provide an overarching framework for this work.

After O’Connell’s visit I was invited to be involved with the Thames Valley Police to develop work in schools, and I began to write about the connections between restorative philosophy, conflict management, mediation and circle time, urging people to consider restorative justice more as a whole-school approach than a discrete intervention (Hopkins 1999a; 1999c; 2002b; 2003a). These ideas all came together when I wrote my first book on the whole school restorative approach – indeed the first book ever to be written on the subject- Just Schools (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2004). (This section is an extract from an article that can be found here and was adapted for my doctoral thesis.)

What do Restorative Approaches have to offer that the more traditional routes of blame and punishment don’t?

Traditionally, in families, schools and in the criminal justice system there has been a response to wrongdoing that could crudely be described as ‘name, blame, shame and punish’. In other words, if someone does something wrong then they must be punished for it. If there is no punishment then the miscreant has ‘got away with it’. Certain key questions inform the mindset of those with the power in such settings:

• What happened?
• Who is to blame?
• What is the appropriate response to deter and possibly punish those at fault, so they will not do the same thing again?

The first question - What happened? is based on the belief that something factual happened, some essential ‘truth’ and that this can be discovered by interviewing or even interrogating whoever was involved or whoever witnessed the event. Words such as ‘interview’, ‘interrogate’ and ‘witness’ give away the origin of this approach – the criminal justice domain requiring people to be detectives! In this approach discrepancies are viewed as suspect, inconsistencies considered proof of dishonesty and written testimonies acquire the status of evidence, often with priority given to those statements given by those with more age, rank or status.

The second question – Who is to blame? is informed by the belief that when something bad has happened there must be a culprit or culprits. ‘Dealing with the situation’ comprises first identifying this guilty person or people and laying the blame for what happened at their feet.

The third question –What sanction will deter and punish? is based on the belief that accountability comprises being punished, and that punishment will deter both the miscreant and others from repeating the wrongdoing. This latter belief is held on to despite evidence to the contrary. Sanctions and the threat of sanctions are rarely sufficient to deter further wrongdoing – a fact about which much more will be said.

Restorative practitioners bring a different set of questions to bear on any situation of conflict or wrongdoing:

• What’s happened?
• Who has been affected or harmed?
• How can everyone who has been affected be involved in repairing the harm and finding a way forward?

The first question - What’s happened? looks deceptively similar to the first, traditional, question. However its intention is very different. When a restorative practitioner asks a person to explain what happened they appreciate that this is only one person’s perspective, and that they will get a different answer from everyone they ask – and that this is inevitable, normal and interesting. They appreciate that there is no ‘one truth’ about an event, but many truths – and it is the discrepancies in perception about an event that may have given rise to the problem in the first place. Thus a key quality of a restorative practitioner is curiosity, and they like to encourage that curiosity amongst everyone they interact with.

The second question - Who has been affected or harmed? recognises that when something has gone wrong people will have been affected or even harmed (as in – distressed, hurt, upset, angered) and that whatever else happens there will be the need for some kind of repair. Many working and domestic environments remain unpleasant because conflicts have not been resolved and relationships that have been damaged are left in tatters. Curiously people’s needs are very similar whether they have been personally harmed by conflict or wrongdoing or whether they themselves have been responsible for causing harm (either inadvertently or on purpose.)

The third question - How can everyone who has been affected be involved in repairing the harm and finding a way forward? contains the key to what is different and radical about a restorative approach . It comprises two challenging paradigm shifts for some people – letting go the need for sanctions and letting go the need to be in control and impose solutions.

Many people equate justice having been done with the administering of a punishment, and in schools and residential child care contexts a similar expectation prevails, or is believed to prevail. The logic is that if somebody does a bad thing then a bad thing needs to be done to them. In a sense this is the ‘eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth’ philosophy, but of course this lesson taught to children by adults can lead to behaviours in youth settings and in the community that mimic this approach, which is based on revenge. A restorative approach, coupled with interpersonal conflict resolution training, can offer an alternative that may influence the way young people deal with conflicts in later life.

A restorative response, with its focus not on blame, punishment and alienation but on repair and re-connection, encourages a wrongdoer to take responsibility for the harm they have caused, and gives them an opportunity to repair the harm. Empathy is developed, accountability is encouraged and the outcome can help both wronged and wrongdoer feel better about themselves and the other person. (This section is adapted from Chapter 2 of Just Care.)

Why are Restorative Justice Approaches particularly pertinent to residential child care?

Statistics show that young people in Residential Child Care are disproportionately represented in the criminal justice arena (DfES 2006; NACRO 2003a; NACRO 2003b). This situation has arisen not necessarily because children in care are more likely to offend but because the disruptive behaviours of the children have resulted in a call from staff to the police, often followed by an arrest and a caution or final warning (NACRO 2003a). Probably neither the staff concerned , nor the police involved, would wish for such an outcome. However, without training in alternative strategies staff often turn to the police in desperation, whilst the police themselves, because of crime recording protocols and targets, feel obliged to deal with the incident as a crime.

Using a restorative approach instead can divert children in care from the criminal justice system by ensuring that the incident is dealt with by staff in such a way that both wrongdoer and those affected reach a mutually agreed way forward without recourse to the police (Willmott 2007).

However whilst restorative justice in its formal sense can and does make a contribution in care settings, it is in its less formal aspects, described as ‘restorative approaches’, that it can have most impact and address many of the issues and challenges currently facing the residential child care sector.

In residential care settings staff who were initially trained in the restorative conferencing model swiftly discovered that the more formal process was less useful than they had first hoped because most of the incidents they needed to address flared up quickly and needed immediate attention. More often than not there was no clear-cut case of ‘offender’ and ‘victim’ but simply two people in conflict, each blaming the other. They therefore began to request training in a range of less formal processes which were nevertheless informed by the philosophy of restorative justice. Their experiences using these processes has gradually led to a realisation that the approach required a cultural shift in the way staff and young people interact on a day to day basis and that the benefits of using such an approach could go far beyond the narrow remit of reducing potentially offending behaviour.

One particular concept that is gaining ground in residential settings is that of ‘social pedagogy’ and it is be argued that day to day restorative practice provides a framework for care staff to operationalise socially pedagogic principles, especially in challenging situations. (This section is adapted from Chapter 1 of Just Care.)

Could you tell us a little about your organisation Transforming Conflict?

I founded Transforming Conflict in 1994 for the reasons I explained earlier. In the early days, I was the only trainer and consultant, but over time I have built up a superb team with backgrounds in education, social work, youth offending teams, and residential care who share the training with me.

Having developed a reputation for being one of the lead training organisations in the UK, we are now also known as the National Centre for Restorative Approaches in Youth Settings. We offer training, consultancy and support in a variety of youth settings for people seeking to enhance their skills in building a sense of community, fostering a spirit of inclusion and dealing creatively with challenging situations.

Our work is underpinned by the philosophy of Restorative Justice, which stresses the importance of relationships above rules and the value of dialogue in healing the damage done to relationships by inappropriate behavior.

We have experience of running courses for teaching staff, learning support staff, lunchtime controllers, parents and students, educational psychologists, pupil support teams, residential care staff, senior management teams, governors, social workers, police officers, youth justice and other local authority personnel. We work in primary, secondary and EBD and PRU school settings and run both public and bespoke in-house courses.

In recent months there has been increasing interest in developing joined–up approaches across all multi-agency teams in a single local authority and we are at the forefront of these developments working with teams to look at how they can integrate restorative ways of working not only with their client groups but also amongst their own teams.

What are you currently reading?

I am beginning the research for my new book about restorative classrooms – exploring the links between pedagogy and classroom management so I’m afraid my current reading is all work-based.

I am very excited by my friend and colleague Richard Hendry’s new book – Building and Restoring Respectful Relationships in Schools and also by an amazing book called Positive Discipline by Jane Nelsen et al. which really turns the whole notion of manipulating children’s behaviour using rewards and punishments on its head. However, I do plan to take a break at the end of August and looking forward to reading something totally escapist like The Angel's Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon.

(c) Jessica Kingsley Publishers 2010

This article was first published in the Jessica Kingsley Publishers Social Work Newsletter in August 2009

Possibly related articles:

• Just Care: Restorative Justice Approaches to Working With Children in Public Care [Book Review], by Charles Mpofu, Metapsychology Online Reviews, Volume 14, Issue 43, October 26 2010
• Acclaimed restorative justice programme to come to England and Wales, By Neil Puffett, Children & Young People Now, October 25, 2010
• Restorative justice [ Evan Davis talks to criminologist Christopher Stone and film-maker Roger Graef about how Restorative Justice might help victims], BBC Radio 4, September 25, 2010