early years education

I was invited to speak at TEDxBrum, Birmingham, UK where I shared my passion and thoughts about what happens when we value and take seriously children’s own curiosity and enquiry and turn our schools into environments that generate, foster and make visible children’s enquiry. You can see the video uploaded to You Tube here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVsGJluJz5I

In the 20 years I have been working with young children and families, I have noticed, and come to believe that:

Children are born with the desire to learn. That is why they generally come out screaming “I’m here!” Have you ever not seen a baby want to put everything to its mouth to find more about it? They are born to learn, we could say they already have 9 months of learning by the time they are born. Children are born innately curious about the world around them

Very young babies are motivated to engage in social communication from the beginning. Children are born wanting to connect, to feel a sense of belonging, to feel connected to the world they find themselves inhabiting. Colwyn Trevarthern (Edinburgh University) has the most wonderful research footage of hours old babies just doing that. Children are sociable and seek connection with others

Children are born with the intent to make sense of their experience of the world and to interpret and explain (represent) their ideas about the world by themselves and in relation with others. They crawl and make discoveries, reach out, hold and grasp, they notice their actions, the actions of others and ask why over and over. Children are makers and expressers of meaning, in doing so the create ideas of their own

But there is something, that for some children steals these dispositions they have inside of them. It’s called education or rather the quality of an education that desensitises children to the world and the stuff of the world. Ken Robinson speaks a lot about this, how creativity is stifled, killed off with the result of anaesthesia and dullness to the patterns that connect (Bateson).

When children become disconnected from the learning experience it is because they feel no connection with what they are doing, they don’t feel able or wanting to participate, and hence there is no motivation, no engagement. What they are taught no longer makes sense, there is nothing meaningful about it.

What tends to happen when children seem unmotivated and disengaged is that we blame the child, and put in strategies and interventions that focus on improving behaviour, or that trick the child by making something quite dull and boring be shiny and fun instead. I tell you what – talking through a dull subject with children is still dull even if you have a puppet on your shoulder throwing glitter about!

What if we instead of deciding what children should learn we listen instead to their ideas? I think we have much to learn from children about approaches to understanding and seeing and thinking about the world differently. They might just be the answer to our adult problems of ‘getting stuck’ and continuing in directions that continue to damage the ecological systems of the world or that keep those in situations of poverty. You know, we might just save an awful lot of money doing so too rather than inventing programs that teach children resilience, motivation, curiosity. Now there is an idea!

This is Ash, she is 3 years old and lives in Wolverhampton, UK She has something to say about ideas.

“Ideas come from my imagination and stay in your head. They can come back and back and back. Ideas do come out of your head but you never run out of your imaginations…not even a single bit. Ideas look like a brain, they are really useful so you know what to think about. Your imagination is really good because you can think about things fast. Ideas will really protect your brain and they live in your head…They don’t eat anything because they’re just ideas…they’re happy…you never lose your ideas.”

I find this incredible, don’t you?

When I was asked to this TEDx talk I decided to ask teachers and families at schools I have worked with to ask their children about their ideas about the world. I have been truly humbled by the response and honoured to share some of them here with you here in the live talk and the video now available on You Tube.

Loris Malaguzzi, Teacher, Founder and First Director of the Infant-Toddler Centres and Pre-Schools of Reggio Emilia, Italy reminds us all that:

“Ideas fly, bounce around, accumulate, rise up, fall apart and spread until one of them takes a decisive hold flies higher and conquers the entire group.”

What I see, and interpret in these examples I share is the ability of children to think big. If we have children thinking about big ideas, then why do we in schools teach them little ones. Do we think the children are stupid? We need to let their ideas rise up.

Thankfully there are so many great teachers out there and fantastic schools doing the kind of work that creates the conditions for creativity and for the expression of ideas and theories, that evolves greater capacity for critical thinking and enquiry. But we need more…

I am passionate about the world of early childhood education and in how we can all help develop our places of education as amiable places for young children that has as its approach to teaching and learning the value of listening to children, of valuing their ideas.

There is a very real danger I am aware of the global pressures and trends to standardise education, a one size fits all, a curriculum of facts and figures to be fed to children, to be digested and regurgitated when asked. It is of course easily measurable but it creates a normalising effect that denies children the kind of education that enables democratic thought and action. The kind of thinking that enables children to do things for themselves.

So, what can we do to make our education system shift from the paradigm of consuming pre-packaged knowledge to one that considers the child as capable of thinking and expressing their own ideas. Maybe each of us can think about how we must:

Listen to children, to come to know their potential

Generate the right kind of educational environments that foster ideas to accumulate, bounce around and rise up

Share what is possible, to make visible the competencies of children so that others may listen to.

By listening to children, by generating the fertile conditions for their ideas to be born and grow and by sharing these with others we can change the paradigm of education to one that sees the creative, thinking child who is capable of ideas worth sharing.

Contexts of Dakar: Colour, Texture, Sights and Sounds

Materials and Contexts: Thoughts about materials, learning in the context of Senegal

I have blogged before about the nature of Intelligent Materials – the idea that materials have inherent qualities and are neither neutral or devoid of suggestion or empathy with certain kinds of ideas and ways of using them.

Here in Senegal, or rather the city of Dakar I am surrounded by its context of its materials. Streets are lined with construction materials of sand, steel wires, bricks of assorted shapes, textures and colours, the beach areas filled with traditional crafts of weaving of straw into roofing or fencing materials, stones , shells and rocks and shops filled with cloth and designs of patterns that hold cultural significance and history.

Nothing here is neutral and it is all part of the rich context of a changing and growing city. When school finishes at 1 pm, the streets become filled with children who traverse and play within these contexts, changing them again in their hands or with their thoughts as they play familiar games of football, hand clapping, singing and dancing as well as the ongoing exploration of the rock pools along the beach. Everything is is curious, even the idea vulture that has fallen from the sky is worthy of inspection and investigation.

Gregory Bateson reminds us of how:

“Without context, words and actions have no meaning at all.”

So how in a place such as Dakar can we begin to think about what materials, and in which ways they might be encountered with children and how and what they might express with and through them?

It is true that this is a city where some materials are precious. In the schools many materials we take for granted e.g. paper, pens, scissors, glue, paint and clay are simply not in abundance. There is a preciousness to them I have not experienced before. One thing I will take home is the idea of preciousness of our resources. To be honest I thought I had a good ethic on that, but that was until I came here and saw the women sat on the corners of the streets, selling the recycled paper and recycled/re-used materials collected on rubbish carts. In a city where there is rarely a rubbish pick up truck – you realise the scale of the problem of what to do with your waste. On the other side, there are materials in abundance here, construction sand, bricks, tiles, roofing materials, and straw. So you can see, the availability and context of materials is specific to geographic context too.

In schools, classrooms are under pressure to take in more an more children and with over 70 plus students per class you can see how hard that is to fund as well as to facilitate. Teachers have reported how they feel their classrooms are more theoretical rather than concretely or physically being able to ‘play with ideas’ and materials in context of investigation.

Which is why the work of ImaginNation Afrika is so important as they are leading the way in terms of showing what is possible within the context of Dakar to make learning engaging, to innovate pedagogical practices and work with materials that are simple, sustainable and manageable.

Today I have been working and in discussion with a team of facilitators about materials and children’s learning in the context of the Reggio Emilia Principles. We did not want to apply these principles to the ongoing work here, but rather found ourselves already within it – a shared dialogue between the Reggio Emilia context and that of Dakar.

We begin by considering these principles that I have re-written out here as questions:

How can we engage in a reciprocal relationship with the city with our materials and ways of working with children?

How can we give visibility to children’s learning processes of learning with and through materials?

How do we promote the rights of children to a quality of education that has at its heart a concept of generating contexts of creativity and critical thinking?

How do we uphold our belief in the idea of the rich and competent child in our places of work with and alongside of children, some of whom of within vulnerable contexts?

Sitting now reflecting on the day, and thinking earlier to a Facebook conversation about the debate between what is outcome based art and expressive art I am now left thinking about questions that help me to navigate in my thinking about children, creativity and materials.

Therefore I offer these questions as tools and compasses to guide us in our work that may help to stop us from getting lost or not knowing where to begin. They are questions that I think about often, when I feel unsure about how to proceed.

In thinking about materials that children are using, what do the children notice about the materials they handled? What were their approaches to finding out about the materials?

In which expressive or aesthetic ways did the children use the materials to represent or express an idea? And which qualities of expression were communicated?

In their discussions about materials, what themes emerged in how they described them and how they made connections between one material and other?

Reflecting on this session are there any other possibilities for looking again at the same material either in combination with other materials, or with other tools or lenses of looking? And what will enable the children to build upon the knowledge they are constructing together or to approach the cognitive knots in their learning experience?

I believe we are all born with creative capacities but suspect that these creative dispositions become diluted and lost when conditions for creativity are not met. In thinking about our choices of materials, our reasons for creating contexts of learning, of the qualities of those conditions and encounters we can help foster within ourselves a permanent state of research where we learn how to be better by children’s side.

early years education

Children as Ideas Makers: TEDx Talk

Materials and Contexts: Thoughts about materials, learning in the context of Dakar

early years education

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