This morning I visited a school in central London, as part of my role as a teacher educator. I visit my new History teachers to work with their mentors, to meet their colleagues, to watch them at work in their classrooms, and to support their development. The news these days fills me with sadness, but this visit made me hopeful.
The pupils in the lesson included some young people who give their teachers gifts. I don’t mean apples. These pupils ask interesting questions, express surprise and curiosity, and are eager to learn. I am hopeful our new teacher is ready to accept their gifts now and will listen to them. He already cares about all his pupils and knows when some are lost and need help.
The mentor is very busy and is sharing her teacher development work with a colleague. There was concern I might not approve. But both the mentor and her younger colleague have shared their expertise with tremendous kindness and persistence. I am hopeful that their expertise has launched the career of a new teacher, and goodness knows we need them. He is beginning to think like a teacher. He stayed calm as his laptop froze, and used the whiteboard like a pro. It is the mentor that created this safe place for him to learn, and to keep going even if the tech goes wrong. This makes me hopeful for the profession.
And I met a senior colleague in the school too. We worked together for years in the past. She brings hope and joy to everything she does, despite everything: austerity, bring taken for granted… I am hopeful that she is going to find new paths to leadership in 2024. Having done so much to support the development of other teachers, it is her turn now.
In a film shared today, Professor Arthur Chapman has argued that -when done well- history education can take you ‘out of the narrow confines of your own time and place and introduce you to lives lived differently’. This is what the lesson I saw today tried to do. It is more important than ever, in world full of misunderstanding, that history teachers are supported well in learning to teach.
Here Jane Harrison adds her own story about how she became a folk dance musician.
Back in February, Mark Elvins wrote a lovely piece about how he became a dancer and caller. This made me smile and reminisce as Mark’s folk dancing upbringing was so very similar to mine – being born into a dancing and dance teaching family (both Scottish and English) with all the books on the shelves and was a great description of the English folk dancing scene when I was growing up. I tend to think that I have always danced but I also picked up the fiddle at an early age and so took a rather different path.
So somewhat belatedly, I add my blog twopenny worth to tell how I came to be lucky to be one of the musicians playing for the Summer Dance week at Halsway. I have to add at this point, that Halsway Manor is one of my most favourite places – it is such a lovely historic building in a beautiful location nestled as it is in the Quantock Hills and there is nothing like sitting on your bedroom windowsill looking out over the maypole or sitting on a bench in the sunshine outside the front door and hearing music drifting across from different corners.
Thanks to my sister, I started learning the violin age 7 and much more enjoyed playing tunes from the fiddlers’ tunebook than anything my violin teacher threw at me. Age 13 I started joining in with the bands at the local folk dances (most often just a piano and fiddle, don’t knock it, they were encouraging, accomplished and it was live music). I then had a similar folk holiday age 15 to Mark. My father sadly passed away early that year and my mother bravely booked the pair of us onto an English folk dance summer school at Burton Manor.
Burton Manor (sadly now closed) was similar to Halsway, a beautiful historic building, formerly the home of the Gladstones looking out over the Dee estuary on the Wirral, which had held folk courses for many years. This one was run by stalwarts of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, Ethyl Anderson and musician, teacher, dance and music creator extraordinaire Pat Shaw. The musicians were accordionist, Denis Smith (notable for his appearance with Westminster Morris in the St Trinian’s film) and fiddler/violinist Jim Coleman. I say violinist, because of my memory of the soaring music Jim produced. I was hooked.
Cutting a long story short, there followed a number of Scottish/Shetland fiddle summer schools, learning irish fiddle at night school while at university and playing for dances when home for the weekends with local band, Spring Heeled Jack. In 1987, through playing in sessions at Eastbourne Folk Festival I met Judith Cooper and Ali Messer and they asked me to join them to play in their band, Alterations for Sidmouth Folk Festival the following year. Would I?!
Meg Winters, I also met through the band and we continued to play for festivals and gigs, in my case only every few months when distance and family permitted, until we decided to call it a day in 2004. One of the wonderful things about music, is the friends you meet along the way and these three are some of my best.
Meanwhile, I often played with other bands, probably more often for Scottish dancing than English – being competent at sight reading being a useful talent as Scottish bands romp through music. It also so helps the music to be a dancer. Over the years though I had been playing less and less as the family grew but taking early retirement in 2010 allowed me to dust off my fiddle. I left work at the end of March and went straight to Halsway for the Easter Weekend to help record a CD to raise funds for the Manor. A good way to start my ‘non-working’ life.
In 2013, Meg was asked by Halsway to put together a team to run a mini-festival to fill a slot in the November diary and asked myself and Heather Bexon to form a band with her. I had never had my own band, apart from grouping a few friends for PTA dos, and was never the compiler of music or the main leader. Here, I would still not be leader but we had to develop into a cohesive band and build a core repertoire from scratch in a few months. We didn’t even have a band name but had to expand our repertoire rapidly the next year as Meg’n’Mor went to take on Whitby Folk Week. Every day’s a school day.
It is my own local community group (my local not as in mine) that I spend most time playing with and has continued to help develop my music education on so many fronts. In 2010, with more time to be able to play, I heard that a folk orchestra was being formed locally under the aegis of Alan Bell’s NW Folkus network. This was being run by Jenny Shotliffe who had previously run a youth band project my step-daughter attended.
After some years gelling as a group and declaring UDI from Folkus, the lovely group that is Chorley Cakes Folk developed consisting of 20 to 25 members playing a variety of instruments, with a bit of song and step-dancing on the side. Originally Chorley Cakes were a performance band, playing tunes along with songs and stories but came the day when they said, “why don’t we play for ceilidhs?” With a little of Mark’s feelings that dance should be presented professionally and memories of horror ceilidhs of my past, I was worried but realised that we would need to work on our dance tunes. Building what we had into dance sets and borrowing from many sources (with apologies to Meg’n’Mor and Alterations) we worked up a core set. I learned to use music software and brush off my very rusty music theory and beg many favours to get chords for all our tunes and put together our first tunebook.
The story however comes back full-circle back to Mark becoming a caller. Chorley Cakes’ two callers were no longer available after lockdown and Jenny and I decided to pick up the mantle! I have helped teach my local Scottish dance group for quite a few years but had never called to a live audience and only had a limited supply of dances in my card index. Jenny and I acknowledge that after a fairly steep-learning curve we have done more calling than we ever thought we would.
It has been wonderful seeing the band develop and good fun to play for a dance with a ten to fifteen piece band. And apart from our first gig after lockdown where all the audience wanted to do was catch up with friends they hadn’t seen for over a year, our audiences have been willing to dance and to learn with great enjoyment. The best part was deciding just six months ago to run our own ceilidh club, with songs and dance spots filling the gaps between dances. It’s a sharing, learning community and one of my highlights was when Southport Swords got two sets up to learn one of their own sword dances.
I’ve enjoyed the challenge of finding dances beyond the ‘bog-standard’ but also found that many times the simple dances danced well are just as fun. We’ve tackled some period dances from Playford onwards and I am working up to contra but I always have and even more so now have to admire the skills of callers like Mark. I know my preferred place is in the band!
Have you been working with a new History teacher this year? Maybe a student teacher or Early Career Teacher (ECT)?
Perhaps they have reached a point where they can create a good classroom climate (with you still in the background, anyway) and their planning and resources have improved too.
You have included them in the instructional coaching opportunities offered by your school. They know a lot about cognitive overload (TM) and cold calling.
But what the new teacher had planned, what their university or SCITT tutor might have hoped for, the historical thinking you know this class can reach for, seemed imminent… but then the bell rang.
In the US, researchers such as Mary Kennedy have called this the problem of enactment. The core practices movement has sought answers to the questions posed by teacher educators and mentors working with new teachers who are struggling to enact powerful learning strategies.
Here in the UK, the Core Content and Early Career Frameworks have tried to address the problem of enactment by itemising not only what new teachers need to know, but also what they need to learn how to do. Both of these frameworks insist that the research upon which they are based support the essential knowledge and practices needed for beginning teachers.
But as a History mentor, you might be wondering how this can be true. You know that the use of recent scholarship to support curriculum development, the practical theorising supported by Teaching History, the Historical Association and the Schools History Project, have all helped you to design great enquiry questions. Enquiry questions aren’t in the CCF or ECF. But they are the bread and butter of a good history lesson sequence. Addressing a good enquiry question is likely to involve class discussion. We might call this a core practice in history teaching. But orchestrating an ambitious whole class discussion is challenging for an expert. And it is even more challenging to work out how to help a new colleague to conduct the orchestra.
So where CAN you hear about how to support your new History teacher with core practices in the History classroom? The answer is HTEN, the History Teacher Education Network. And specifically on Thursday 20th April we have an evening presentation from Dr Abby Reisman, from the University of Pennsylvania.
The session is provocatively named Cognitive Science and History. Abby is a teacher educator and researcher who has published work in journals such as Cognition and Instruction. You may also be familiar with her contribution to Reading Like a Historian at the University of Stanford. But what the session will really be about is supporting deeper historical learning in classrooms, through teacher education.
It turns out that if we want, for example, whole-class discussions in History, (and we should), then we need to find out why our new teachers struggle with them, and what they struggle with. Spoiler: it isn’t just wait time (though this matters too). It is all about creating a disciplinary discussion, see figure 1 above. You can read more here in a paper that explains the issues with great clarity and analyses classroom examples of talk facilitated by new teachers, bringing theory to life. The article even expresses the frustration we feel as we support our new teachers, when the breakthrough seems so close, and yet so far: ‘students were poised to enter the historical problem space—to discuss the competing interpretations and develop a more complex and contextualised understanding of the tensions leading to the Cold War. Unfortunately, before they could delve into these disparate interpretations, the bell rang.’
And now surely you want to hear Abby in person? Find out more and join HTEN!
To book visit the Halsway Manor webpage. The caller and dance teacher is Mark Elvins.
More about the musicians in the next post!
Mark Elvins tells the story of how he became a dancer and a caller.
My parents met though dancing, so I grew up in home where dancing happened regularly and was frequently the subject of conversation. On the shelves was all the printed material that was available; Sharp’s country dance books, the CDMs and one or two other odd bits.
As a boy I got dragged along to dances but never quite got the bug. However, when I was 15 the family went away on a folk holiday on the Isle of Wight where there were other families and I really started to understand and enjoy dancing. This of course coincided with an interest in the opposite sex, and indeed I met most of my girlfriends and my wife through dancing.
In those days folk dancing was a much more mainstream activity than it has become now and most towns in our area had their own folk dance clubs. These clubs would run weekly club evenings and Saturday night dances, so every Saturday night there would be a dance on within a forty-minute drive. And, of course, Cecil Sharp House had a dance on Saturday and often Friday and Sundays too! Generally, these dances had much larger attendances than we see today, and the audience were more every local – you didn’t have to travel far for a dance. Admittedly we found over time that some were more fun than others. The programs of dances were also much more mixed, although there have always been Playford balls and American evenings. Most dances would contain a mix of Playford, traditional, contra and even some square dances. The polarisation of an evening into ceilidh, contra or English (Playford style) had not occured. Neither had contra evolved into its zesty form although some dances such as Devils Dream were always danced with high energy levels.
The local folk dance club had started out as an evening class (part of the local tech) and, when the fees were hiked, the members decided to become an independent club. My father became chairman, and when the leader moved away at relatively short notice, he had to step up and start calling himself. He vowed that the club should never be short of a caller again, so cajoled other dancers to also take a turn behind the mic. So, at the age of 16, I too had a go! Another local club ran a series of callers’ workshops which Dad and I attended and my calling career had started!
Generally, I would call a couple of dances each week at our local club. Then another local club asked me to do a guest evening which was exciting and nerve wracking in equal measures and a huge step up.
All of this was done to recorded music; vinyl, with even the odd old 78s. When I did the odd dance at a folk holiday and worked with a live band it was a revelation that you could control the tempo and had to tell them when to stop!
I also went out and called barn dances for local organisations; scouts, PTAs, weddings, etc, which taught my to be an entertainer not just a technical caller. It also helped with my student finances.
I called my first Saturday night folk dance in June 82, and around that time joined forces with a new young band “Tarragon”, who appeared at Sidmouth in 1982 with me as their resident callr. Although the band were relatively inexperienced, for me it went really well. The following year I called my first evening at Cecil sharp House. By ’94 I was calling regular guest evenings for other folk dance clubs, doing a number of Saturday night dances, including my first LBC, and appeared at Sidmouth festival, calling in my own right. In ’87 I did my first Litchfield Festival, first residential weekend (Avon Tyrell), and the following year Chippenham. Over the next few years this pattern of dances and festivals continued, calling once or twice most weeks, including some festivals and days of dance which sadly no longer exist.
Looking back, dancers and other callers, were on the whole, very tolerant and supportive of this young up-start, and it all happened very quickly, bearing in mind the lead time for many dances is 12 – 18 months. I was also, at the time, the first of my generation to have taken the leap into calling (Joe Hodgson and Colin Hume being that bit older).
In 2002 (I then had 3 young children), something had to give, and other than the odd local village barn dance and occasional local club night, I called very little until 2009. However, as the kids got older, they realized that if Dad was calling there was a night out for them to be had, and they became keen for me to once again pick up the mic.
It was interesting to see what had happened in that time out: audiences had become older, and their numbers smaller, which meant that bands also had to contract to fit the budget. Two and three-piece bands had become the norm. Equality had also made an impact and I was at first surprised to be asked to dance by ladies. The Sidmouth festival had also had a major meltdown and was (as far as social dance was concerned) a shadow of its former self.
From March 2020 we had another break, this time enforced by the Covid pandemic. I tried to do my bit with virtual dances, but as a caller, hated the lack of significant interaction. I have to say that the joy of going back to real face to face dancing and calling in November 21, when we did our annual zesty contra weekend, was immense.
When I first started calling, the repertoire of available dances was relatively small, and I am sure that some of the most experienced callers knew most of them by heart. So, in order to keep an interesting programme, I started writing a few of my own. When a significant event came along it was a good excuse to put together a new sequence of figures, to give a new, unique, interesting flow or interaction with the other dancers. Over the years the number of these stacked up, (currently over a hundred), so I published them in a series of three books, under the “In With Both Feet” title. I need to gather up the next tranche for a fourth book, but so much is now on the internet this may not be necessary.
These days I don’t call as much as I used to, (sadly some dance clubs have not survived Covid). When I do call or dance it is mainly contra. I love the energy of both the dance and music and the audiences that tend to frequent these dances. That said, I love calling mixed dances where I can interpose traditional with Playford and then slip in a singing square and patter call. I find it is actually less work to do a mixed dance, because a program of varied dances, some with their own tunes, is easier to remember.
I strongly believe that folk dancing needs to be presented professionally and attractively, in order to compete on Friday/Saturday evenings with the local restaurant, theatre or even Netflix. I believe dances should be danced not plodded and get frustrated with dancers who don’t. I also believe that we should be using our energies to promote what good fun folk dancing can be and not wasting them infighting about political issues. I am not a fan of gender free calling both as a dancer and caller, as I think dances can be explained more quickly and clearly using the terms ladies and men. This gives me scope to call more complicated dances, with less teaching time. That being said, I am very happy for anybody to dance any role! I enjoy improvising in the dance and encourage others to do the same – provided of course that it doesn’t spoil the enjoyment of others.
In the Core Content Framework it is claimed that the ‘Learn that…’ statements are deliberately the same as the ‘Learn that…’ statements in the ECF because the full entitlement – across both initial teacher training and early career development – for new entrants to the profession is underpinned by the evidence of what makes great teaching.’
But what if these statements are, in some cases, problematic? What if they are not supported by subject specific cognitive science?
Here is an example.
Where prior knowledge is weak, pupils are more likely to develop misconceptions, particularly if new ideas are introduced too quickly.
The statement argues that misconceptions develop more easily where prior knowledge is weak. Common sense, yes? I expect that you, dear reader, can easily think of an example.
It might seem logical to assume that where prior knowledge is very good, misconceptions are less likely to develop. To avoid misconceptions build prior knowledge. But what if is this not always true in the history classroom?
I think the research of cognitive scientist Sam Wineburg suggests that this apparently sensible ‘Learn that’ statement is problematic.
Why?
Wineburg conducted a study of school students who had demonstrated that they were ‘the cream of the crop’ in terms of their substantive knowledge, as shown in AP tests, (Wineburg, 2018). They were given tasks to complete over 30 months. One of these tasks was to study the proclamation of ‘Discovery day’ by President Harrison published in the New York Times in 1892. Wineburg writes about a student who successfully ‘marshaled background knowledge about Columbus and used it to challenge the image of the ”Discoverer”, (Wineburg, 2018: 85). Job done, right?
Wineburg then surveyed teachers in receipt of a three year Teaching American History Grant, about the student responses. So now we have knowledgeable teachers assessing the work of a knowledgeable student. Like him, they focused on 1492, not 1892. They have knowledge but they also have misconceptions about the purpose and nature of the document they studied.
Finally, Wineburg showed the proclamation to some History PhD students, and they focused on 1892 instead. What they saw was ‘The shameless appeal to superheroes in order to get votes in urban centers’ (Wineburg, 2018: 87). Wineburg goes on to argue: ‘To a historian, critical thinking isn’t just collecting facts in order to pass judgement. It’s about determining what questions to ask in order to generate new knowledge’, Wineburg 2018: 88).
Why didn’t the school students see that the document was about 1892 not 1492? It wasn’t due to a lack of knowledge about immigration and elections in 1892. In an article for Teaching History, Wineburg explores the psychology underpinning the focus on 1492: ‘But knowledge possessed does not mean knowledge deployed. When most people look at this document it is not knowledge of immigration trends that gets ‘activated.’ (Wineburg, 2007). For most people, as soon as they see Columbus in the proclamation, all they know and have thought about Columbus comes to dominate. Wineburg acknowledges that ‘No one reading this article can escape the inborn features of the human mind. We could scarcely read and comprehend these words were we not aided by lightning bolts of activation that reduce cognitive load and pave the way toward meaning. But speed bears a dark side. We seize upon the vivid at the expense of the probative…’.
But surely we cannot expect school aged students to think like historians? Wineburg argues that they can learn to think historically, and they must. He says that: ‘By painstakingly specifying what they did not know, historians positioned themselves not only to judge. They positioned themselves to learn.’ (Wineburg 2007). Don’t we want pupils to learn as well?
Fortunately, as well as the work of Wineburg, researchers have shown us ways in which we can plan for learning of this kind, in research conducted with school-aged pupils. One example is the beginning of the Principles into Practice chapter in How Students Learn, 2005 by Ashby, Lee and Shemilt. It is no accident that the lesson sequence in this research project involved students asking questions and identifying what they did not know. The research of Catherine McCrory for her PhD has led her to the conclusion that we rob pupils of powerful learning opportunities if we fail to tell the difference between times when, as teachers, we can give information and ‘check got’, and times where knowledge has to be arrived by reasoning.
So where are we now? Subject specific cognitive science in History, for example in the Netherlands by van Drie and van Boxtel and colleagues, suggests that for historical reasoning to develop we need to do more than secure and deepen substantive knowledge. A paper on retrieval practice by Agarwal focused on social studies is interesting too. If we test for factual knowledge, we get more factual knowledge; we do not necessarily get higher order thinking.
My conclusion is that we need teachers to understand how children learn in specific subjects like History. I think I have shown how this Learn That statement in particular circumstances may not be true. But I work at a university, so there is no problem, right? We can look at research underpinning the CCF and then look at History specific research as well.
If only there was no reason to worry. The market review suggests that the government wants quality ‘hard-wired’ into ITT and that they believe embedding the CCF will ensure this. Ofsted expect to see the CCF embedded into our curriculum. There is much in the CCF that is sensible and could already be found in many PGCE courses. But Wineburg cautions against monolithic narratives, arguing that they deplete ‘the moral courage to revise our beliefs in the face of new evidence. It ensures ultimately that tomorrow, we will think exactly as we thought yesterday- and the day before, and the day before that. Is that what we want for our students? (Wineburg, 2018: 78).
I have been reading Cognitive Architecture and Instructional Design: 20 Years Later, by Sweller, van Merrienboer and Pass, 2019. The article explains how Cognitive Load Theory (CLT) has generated a wealth of experiments, designed to improve instruction by testing in practice the effects that the theory predicts will occur. These are summarised by Stephen Tierney with elegant illustrations by Oliver Caviglioli, here.
One of the claims made about CLT is that it is the theory that new teachers most need to know about, and many expert teachers who can demonstrate its usefulness, such as Kate Jones, @87History have asked why it seemed to be missing in their teacher training. This is a very good question. The new ITT core framework, and Early Career Framework, reference CLT extensively. So is CLT useful for new teachers?
One of the key ideas in CLT is that we need knowledge with which to think, and to solve problems. This applies to teachers of course. One of the challenges for new teachers is that they have to acquire all kinds of knowledge very quickly, including pedagogical content knowledge, knowledge of schools systems, knowledge of children. But whilst acquiring these kinds of knowledge, they may not yet know what they need to know to make intelligent use of CLT.
I think that to make good use of CLT as a new teacher, you will need access to articles that illustrate the power of the theory in practice. From what I have read so far, these articles exist if you are learning to teach Mathematics or one of the sciences. I haven’t yet come across much for History, for example. This creates a yawning gap between theory and practice that (again as predicted by CLT), novices might struggle to cross.
Even if there are illustrations of the power of CLT in your subject or phase, as a new teacher it is often tempting to turn strategies into ‘activities’. We should not mock new teachers for this, but we should be sympathetic to the complexity of the professional work they are undertaking as a new teacher. Sometimes these activities then lack meaning and purpose, and this is not good for the children they teach.
Finally, there is opportunity cost. In the History teacher community, there is both a strong tradition of professional theorising developed over decades by the Historical Association, and schools of research into learning in History all over the world, that I think are accessible to new teachers. Some people, such as Arthur Chapman, connect these two sources of professional wisdom very powerfully. Alphonse the Camel anyone?
I have made it my mission to try to remember what it is like to start teaching. Every year, as I get to know a new History PGCE group, they enable me to retrieve some of the fear, joy, and confusion of my first few years in teaching. So whilst I salute the expert teachers on Twitter making good use of CLT, I am very sceptical about its value with new teachers.
This is a beautifully written and remarkable book. Naoki Higashida spent years enduring ‘wordlessness’, until he learned to communicate using an alphabet grid.
I mentioned the book in response to a thread started on Twitter by @nancygedge and began thinking some more about who might find the book useful, as well as beautiful.
Anyone who is learning to be a teacher could benefit by dipping into this book. It explains very powerfully the experience of someone who is not neurotypical. It is part of our work as teachers to understand how other people think, but it is a struggle with so many other other things to learn. Naoki spends much of his book thinking about how other people think, busting over and over the myth that people with autism cannot do this. In a chapter on inference, he thinks about how his mum responds when she hears the sound made by raindrops, as she rushes outside to get the washing in. His mental processes in reaction to the sound are so different. It made me think that those of us who consider ourselves neurotypicals really need to up our game.
Anyone who is a parent of a child who is not neurotypical might like this book. There is a bitter sweet chapter where he tells the story of managing to say two words: ‘Carnation: buy’ when out shopping with his helper. ‘Giving flowers to my mum on Mother’s Day was a dream I’d been harbouring for years’.
Anyone who is a form tutor might find it useful to read a chapter from the book in form time. We can all understand his desire to buy a present for someone he loves. Perhaps we have more in common that we might have thought? I think this could be a useful topic for discussion. Listening to young people is also something we all need to do, as parents and as teachers.
I had a conversation with my daughter this week about kindness and fairness. I was inclined to argue that fairness usually has to come first, but she said I was wrong. I will leave the last word to Higashida here. This is the end of a chapter in which he speaks honestly of his obsessions and fixations and the stress they cause for those around him, (in this case a railway station, where he went back through a ticket barrier -initially inexplicably- to revisit a shop just to check where some merchandise decorated with a kitten character was on sale).
‘So: people with autism might talk and behave in peculiar-seeming ways… Please give us the benefit of the doubt and act on the assumption we are good people. If you suspect we are a lost cause, we pick on that. The value of a person shouldn’t be decided by the judgements of other people. Kindness brings out the best in us all.’
“You can’t consider it music until you feel yourself dancing to it.”[1]
Here Jane Harrison and Ali celebrate Pat Shaw’s musical background and legacy.
We are honoured to be playing for the Pat Shaw dance workshops and ball at Sidmouth in 2017 in what would have been his centenary year and wanted to share and celebrate the uniqueness of Pat’s music. We will be working with caller John Sweeney.
Pat Shaw composed a large number of enjoyable tunes, some written for his own dances; there are many more, for dancing and listening, in a variety of styles and often recognisably within a particular traditional idiom. Sometimes, our hearts sink when presented with new compositions for modern dances, wishing that maybe the dance composer had just chosen some good old reels or jigs. This is never the case with Pat’s music. What is remarkable is how he was able to create so many tunes that seamlessly match the dance and traditional style. We started thinking about what had influenced Pat when composing, and on the influences on our playing.
Being immersed in folk music and dancing from an early age gave Pat a life-long interest in traditional music – which he pursued after studying music at Cambridge. Both of us were similarly born with traditional music around us, starting dancing early thanks to our dancing families, with Ali’s father playing the accordion and Jane’s parents going on to follow Pat in collecting dance. This created for us an understanding of traditional dance music, the ‘metre and rhyme’, the 8-bar phrase, repeats, keys and rhythmic and modal variety.
Pat inherited his mother’s collection of published folk music, which he continued to add to over the years, developing an encyclopaedic folk-musical knowledge of the British Isles and far beyond. This must have helped when he first visited Shetland in the 1940s and found a strong culture of fiddle music, recognising some Scandinavian influences, with very little recorded or notated. In 1947 he returned to Shetland and started collecting, learning to play the accordion along the way so that he could join in the music to help as an icebreaker. From the renowned Unst fiddler, John Stickle, Pat noted some 92 tunes [2].
Shetland music has a strong rhythm and identity, which we love, and is great for many styles of folk dancing we were lucky encounter early on. Jane’s father met the Shetland fiddler and teacher, Tom Anderson on his dance collecting trips and took the family back for a holiday where they first heard the ‘Da 40 Fiddlers’. Aged 18, Jane went to study with ‘Tammy’, as he was known, at Stirling and later in Lerwick. Ali played with Blue Mountain Band, led by Rick Smith and Maggie Fletcher who had known Pat and visited Shetland`, adding several Shetland tunes to the repertoire. We made a very memorable joint trip to Shetland in 1988.
Pat continued to collect tunes wherever he travelled, able to absorb the styles he collected into his own tunes. His dance tunes often follow the most normal 32 bar, 2As, 2Bs pattern but sometimes have a more varied 16 bar B part, as found in a quite a few Scottish and Shetland tunes, but he was not bound by this and his version of the traditional Three Sea Captains has 36 bars. He was adept as well at providing tunes in two different rhythms enhance the dance. He even wrote triple-time hornpipes (3/2) that have more generally been replaced by jigs or 4/4 hornpipes.
For his dances, Pat thoroughly researched the early printed versions, such as Playford, Wilson and Bray, producing and teaching his own interpretations (not always without controversy) and obviously appreciating their associated tunes, created some of his own that would not appear out of place in these early publications.
Pat’s influence though was greater than just the composing and collecting tunes. Jane found from her own parents’ dance collecting that the collecting process is not just one-way – Pat was always keen to disseminate what he collected but he also wanted to ‘plough back’ locally. Tom Anderson talking in 1977 [3], just before Pat died, describes how great an influence Pat was on music in Shetland from his accuracy in transcribing tunes, before he even had a tape recorder, to making his collection available. We were both to benefit.
Pat was also happy to write dances to existing traditional tunes, such as from songs or those for morris dance, and when given some small books of old Dutch tunes, he very quickly composed a number of dances, which were later published in his,’ New Wine in Old Bottles’. In the 1960s, Pat became involved with the Welsh Folk Dance Society, going on to research many dances and tunes as well as writing new tunes, such as Coleg y Brifysgol Abertawe (about and written for the University College of Swansea). More often though he would set his welsh dances to traditional tunes, such as Red House of Cardiff to the tune Tŷ coch Caerdydd or Waterfall Waltz to Caerdroea, and we may be playing some of these at Sidmouth.
Some of the most well known of Pat’s dances though result from his visit to America in the 1970s, which also have particularly memorable tunes in American reel or even rag-time style. Jane met Pat the year after he wrote Levi Jackson Rag and still has the original hand-written copy of his music.
For more years than we really care to remember we have played for dancing; English and Scottish country, American running set, squares and contra, as well as for morris, sword and step-dancing. Traditional players have influenced us in many ways, (Jane taking a night-school class in Irish fiddle no less). We both particularly enjoyed the playing of the three Northumbrian shepherds but occasionally we get to play with more recent musical influences, (once playing with the band Peeping Tom). Like Pat we are try to understand the ways in which traditional music and dance work together, to make the moves, the steps, and the patterns in the dance, meaningful, sociable, energetic, beautiful, fun, happy, and elegant, depending on the idiom of the dance. Hamish Henderson of the School of Scottish Studies, singer, collector and poet, said of Pat’s music: ‘they were mostly catchy tunes and lay as close in to their dances as the skin to the apple”. We are looking forward to Sidmouth, and to playing all Pat’s tunes ‘close in to their dances’. Please join us!
Postscript from Jane:
Pat’s letter to my mum, Joan Flett in February 1977, refers to a film by Ion Jamieson of dancing in the Scottish Borders around 1930 which my Mum donated to the School of Scottish Studies. Pat was there when was it was first shown in public in 1977. We hope to show some of the film at “Talk – The Collectors. The work of dance collectors Tom and Joan Flett”, Chris Metherell in discussion with Jane – The Arts Centre, Sidmouth, 9.30 Monday, 6th August.
A playlist you might like to listen to after reading:
Jeremy Morfey quoting Pat on the Pat Shaw Legacy Group ‘His most memorable quotation was that you could not consider it music until you could feel yourself dancing to it.’ http://www.patshaw.info/forums/topic/jeremy-morfey/
Pat Shuldham-Shaw’s influence on the Shetland fiddle scene.
02.16 – Track ID: 79819 – Original Tape ID: SA1977.013
Pat Shuldham-Shaw’s influence on the Shetland fiddle scene. Tom Anderson discusses the influence of traditional music collector Pat…
Contributors: Tom Anderson
Reporters: Tom Atkinson
Thanks to Jane Harrison for the photographs below.
in theory and in practice 