Like many educators there was a point where I used to believe that Reggio approach of teaching and learning was inspired, like the Montessori approach, by a person! So when I realised that Reggio is not a person but a place in Italy, I once again realised that the boundaries of how-much-I-don't-know, have been pushed further by yet another notch! :)
In the past few years, my interest in the Reggio philosophy has grown in leaps and bounds and influenced my beliefs about teaching and learning not only in the Early Childhood area but also my primary and secondary school teaching. As I get ready to go to Reggio and immerse in their teaching and learning culture, I am starting to revisit and reflect on my present understandings.
This morning I have come across yet another powerful reading of Loris Malaguzzi, founder of the Reggio approach. Many thoughts cross my mind as I read the article.
I reflect back on my beginning days as a teacher and parent. I used to pack the teaching days with learning activities and ensure that no time of the day was 'wasted'! As a mother, I used to try and create learning moments for my daughter at each point of the day! I would have paints and crafts or toys or books or music around her. But more often than not I would see her go and play with bottle caps and pots and pans and cardboard boxes and completely ignore my ideas for her! Due to health issues, I had to take a step back which turned out to be a great blessing for my daughter who then had much time to tinker around on her own and construct her own learning. I was fortunate that I got into the PYP early on and the more I looked at my own approach, the more I realised the depth of my ignorance of how children learn. My image of the child was built on my presumptions rather than my understanding.
Over the years the more I observe children, the more I realise that they have inbuilt mechanisms and behaviours for learning! They have the natural curiosity as well as ways to construct meaning. Infants, toddlers make meaning by repeating their actions again and again as they build connections and learnings. Some days ago, I played with a seven months old, who took a ball and flung it off my palm over and over again. She observed the way it rolled, followed it, communicated with her eyes that she wanted me to pick it up and repeated it. After having done this for a while, she picked up the ball, put it in her mouth (which is a way children learn to understand shapes, textures, tastes, temperature etc.); then she picked up a thin, long toy put it in her mouth again, then repeated the same with her ball, and continued till she decided that the long toy was an easier shape to get into the mouth. She was busy and naturally crawled towards the next area that she found interesting and would have probably continued to construct her learning ...
.... but we adults decided to intervene and upturned her whole toy box over! She was soon surrounded by many brightly coloured toys. It was an easy distraction from her personal experiment and kept her 'engaged'. However, engagement does not always directly translate to learning and our best intentions may actually not work the way we intend them to work. This is beautifully summed up by Malaguzzi - "Overactivity on the part of the adult is a risk factor. The adult does too much because he cares about the child; but this creates a passive role for the child in her own learning.".
He says "What we so often do is impose adult time on children’s time and this negates children being able to work with their own resources........... Those who have the image of the child as fragile, incomplete, weak, made of glass gain something from this belief only for themselves. We don’t need that as an image of children."
So what is our role as teachers and parents? "We need to define the role of the adult, not as a transmitter but as a creator of relationships — relationships not only between people but also between things, between thoughts, with the environment."
The continual learning for me is to think about the environment for learning and investing more time in observing. It is a way to respect children and their learning. Malaguzzi says, "When you learn to observe the child, when you have assimilated all that it means to observe the child, you learn many things that are not in books — educational or psychological. And when you have done this you will learn to have more diffidence and more distrust of rapid assessments, tests, judgments. The child wants to be observed, but she doesn’t want to be judged. Even when we do judge, things escape us, we do not see things, so we are not able to evaluate in a wide way."
In my role as an administrator it is my constant endeavour to think about building a school culture where the children, teachers and parents feel respected and secure, to play, to experiment and to explore, thereby constructing new relationships and learnings.
Looking forward to deeper understandings!
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