From the age of five, Jordan Dingle was singled out for being considerably shorter than almost everybody else in his class. This simple fact was enough to define the rest of his school experience as “difficult”.
“I was a very keen sportsman,” explains Dingle, who is now in his third year of primary teaching, “but often, before I’d even started playing, [other children] would presume that I wouldn’t be very good because I was so much smaller…”
“That carried a lot of weight for me personally,” reveals Dingle. “I just wanted to get something out there that allowed people to empathise with that.”
That “something” has taken the form of a children’s picture book. Mirroring Dingle’s own experiences, Small Tricks is about Charlie the chimpanzee, whose jungle friends won’t play with him because of his diminutive height.
‘Maybe I am just too SMALL!’
Small Tricks was initially the result of a university project, in which Dingle had to produce a book with a learning outcome for children.
“[Exclusion] is a very common feature of children’s books, but I hadn’t heard of one about people being left out or underestimated because they were small,” he says. “It’s getting [children] to see exclusion from another angle.”
Following encouraging feedback from his pupils, colleagues and lecturers, Dingle embarked upon a journey to bring the book to life. In doing so, he sought out the help of former commercial artist and retired primary headteacher, Gordon Walker.
“I’m not an illustrator,” admits Walker, “[but] I was really sold on the story because I have seen how unkind children can be. Many do not realise the hurt and damage they cause when they exclude others from their games.”
With 50 years of experience in education between them, Dingle and Walker make a formidable team in the fight to promote inclusion in schools, an issue that has been on the agenda since Walker first started teaching in the seventies.
“Schools do an awful lot to try and make sure everybody is included,” says Dingle. “Children are very good at discussing tolerance, but they’re not always so good at practising it in their friendship groups, or linking it to themselves.” He hopes that children will empathise with Charlie enough to apply their learning to their own lives.
‘Being small doesn’t matter AT ALL!’
The story ends well for Charlie, who earns the respect of his jungle friends when he gets the chance to prove that his size has no bearing on his talents. But both Dingle and Walker are adamant that children shouldn’t need to prove themselves to their peers; they should be accepted for who they are. And this message seems to be getting through.
Following a live link-up with a school in Hull this year, Walker received letters from pupils who admitted that the book had made them think about how they treated other children. “Some children had gone back into the playground and tried to be proactive about including everybody,” he notes.
The same goes for Dingle’s experience of using the book in his own classroom: “Children get a lot out of reading it. [They] have been able to articulate their own playground problems very well.”
With small-scale success comes a huge hope for the future of the book. “We want to get it out to as many schools as possible,” says Walker.
But if nothing else, these teachers ought to be delighted that their passion project has already made small but significant steps in keeping the conversation about inclusion in schools alive. Perhaps even for fifty years to come.
The author, Jordan Dingle (@jordan_dingle,) is a teacher at Carclaze Community Primary School in St Austell, Cornwall. Gordon Walker, the illustrator, is a retired headteacher, who still does occasional supply teaching at a local school in St Austell.
To find out more about Small Tricks, contact Gordon Walker at gordon.walker@sky.com
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