Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Beginning with the image of the child
Loris Malaguzzi the founder of the Reggio Emilia schools in Italy speaks to our image of the child. Perhaps we need to begin with our image of the child before we answer the question of "how do we make learning authentic?." In the article On the wave of creativity: Children, expressive languages and technnology Giovanni shares the idea that "operating from a socio-constructivist perspective, the educators act as careful observers and co-authors of children’s experience. Before any educational activities take place, they discuss and develop ideas that have arisen with children in class. In this context, lesson planning takes the form of arguing an individual point of view, examining the views of others and sharing and comparing individual and group hypotheses about how knowledge emerges and how best to make use of exchanges between children about what they know. Diverse forms of communication interact in this dynamic, stimulating and releasing creativity in individuals and the group.
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This is a truly inspirational article -- thanks for sharing!
ReplyDeleteOne quote from the article that really spoke to me: "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"...ahh...the passive role of the child in their own learing. To me, this is the greatest tragedy of education (especially at the high school level). Students are too often removed from the decision making process that they have been conditioned to expect the 'spoon to feed them'.
The article also states, "our tasks is to construct educational situations that we propose to the children in the morning". I love this idea of 'proposing', of setting up a situation, of posing a question and allowing the learning to take place from that point. The construction of the educational situation, of course, is the key. Making it authentic and applicable to the student is the greatest challenge.
I really enjoyed this article too.
ReplyDeleteI do have some thoughts about a couple of the messages in it.
In discussing the meeting between the adult and child, Malaguzzi says, "you never come in an isolated way; you always come with a piece of the world attached to you."
While I absolutely agree with this idea, I found the word choice in the next sentence somewhat disturbing. He goes on to add that "the meetings that we have are always contaminated with the experiences that we bring with us".
I think those meetings we have can also be "enriched" with the experiences we bring with us.
I remind myself that this article was translated from Italian to English by three individuals. Perhaps something was "Lost in Translation?"
I loved his metaphor of the world of childhood education as being the beautiful, fascinating, green, and full of hopes forest; one in which we have to forge our own paths.
Sadly, this metaphor can't be fully applied to childhood experiences with the "world wide web".
To prepare for that world, adults and teachers should be assisting children in creating safe paths, ahead of time, so the children only ever find that "beautiful forest on line".
sometimes in the Reggio articles the information has been translated from Italian as the word choice might not be what we would have used in english. Just a thought.
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