acolyte

I want to tell you about this famous early childhood education system I keep hinting at. It originates in this very town, and any description of it must necessarily contain quite specific jargon--this combination makes it highly googleable. And I don't really want a lot of traffic from people looking for information sites, because I don't want to get dooced. On the other hand, it is this pedagogy that is the reason I decided to stay for a year, despite the shitty winters and the expensive rent and the 90210-style social claustrophobia (my students always answer 'true' to the statement 'I live in a big city', and it makes me want to cry). Now that I have finally scored a teaching gig in a pre-school that follows this approach, I want to try and explain it.

The schools here get hundreds of visitors every year. There are schools modeled on them in Sydney and California and I don't know where else. My workplace employs a pedagogista (I use the Italian term because there isn't an English one) to help us dovetail our English language classes with this approach. I didn't know anything about this when I took the job, but I actually like this philosophy of education very much. I've only done a little reading on it so far, but here are a few basic principles:

Children are learning constantly. They assimilate new information at a great rate. Even as infants, they are always forming connections between what they already know and what is new to them. For this reason, it is beneficial to allow children to return to the same subject many times and explore it from different perspectives. They are encouraged to put forward their own propositions about a subject, rather than being immediately fed the 'right' answers about things.

Children communicate in a 'hundred languages', including speech, touch, the gaze, visual art, movement and music. A good educator will spend years developing the skill of listening to children.

Learning proceeds not according to a pre-determined syllabus but in a series of projects. Educators reflect on the children's past projects, think about where their learning might go next, and formulate a new project. They give as much weight as possible to the children's interests. A project might be on 'music', 'horses', 'texture' or any number of topics. It will last for months and will involve exploration of the subject through as many possible modes of expression.

One of the founders put it like this:

"We oppose any prophetic pedagogy which knows everything before it happens, which teaches children that every day is the same, that there are no surprises, and teaches adults that all they have to do is repeat that which they were not able to learn."

So that's the theory 101. What does that mean in reality? Well, I can think of a few things that wouldn't have happened if I'd gone to a Reggio school.

In kindergarten, we were each given copies of a reader (what the hell kind of word is that? Like the book, the knowing machine, is forcing your lax, passive brain through some edifying and vaguely horrific formative process. Like the book is reading you). Anyway. We sat in a circle, and we took turns to read a page aloud. This book had a single word, the same word ('Look!') on every page. I felt like our intelligence was being insulted, so I complained. My teacher called me a smarty pants and locked me in the stationery cupboard to think about my attitude.

In first grade I spent every lunchtime for half a year in detention. We were given 'art projects' (ahem) which were essentially colouring-in exercises. Not only were we all given the same picture to colour in, but the teacher put up an example picture with all the colours pre-allocated. We had to follow the colour scheme, or we got detention. We had to make the crayon colours bright and opaque, which involved pressing so hard on the paper that our six-year-old wrists got tired, or we got detention. The tedium of this exercise ensured that I would fail to do it 'properly', so I spent my lunch hours doing it over again. I didn't mind too much--it was normal. One day the cleaner came in to empty the bins and saw us all (I remember there was always a few of us in there. I wonder that the teacher didn't value her lunch breaks more.).
'Aren't they good kids, working away like that.'
'No,' my teacher corrected him, 'they're naughty children. That's why they're here.'

Now, I was the most insufferably compliant little swot that ever breathed, so I can only imagine what it was like for the kids with some capacity for independent thought.

Here is what happens in a school like the one I've started teaching in. Say, to take a well-documented example, the current project is 'horses'. The kids have drawn horses, made clay horses and I don't know what else. They decide they really want to make their horses move. They think maybe if they make photocopies of their clay horses, this will make them move. The teacher doesn't tell them it won't work, she just helps them set up the clay models on the photocopier and stands back. The kids discover this won't work, but they decide the answer still lies with technology, so they get the atelierista (art facilitator, I guess is the expression) to help them scan their drawings into the computer, then they turn their drawings into animations.

If you want to see the animations, they're the little things across the top of this webpage, I think. In fact, go there and look at the other drawings from kids in these schools. It was seeing these images for the first time that really won me over to this approach. They don't look like the thin, scratchy, tentative affairs you get when you tell a kid to draw a cloud (and oh look, here is a 'proper' picture of a cloud for the kids to attempt to copy and feel inferior to) and then take the paper and pens away after five minutes because that's the time alloted to the activity in the lesson plan. When a child in one of these schools draws a cloud, you know they are really thinking about the cloudness of a cloud. They are really trying to get at some sort of deeper understanding, because they know their efforts to do so will be respected. You think I am talking nonsense, I know, but go and look at the drawings.

There is a mountain of specialist jargon built up around this pedagogy. It reminds me of looking back over my second year sociology essays, and not being able to understand a word of them. I submersed myself in that language, babbled ecstatically in it for a year, and then left it behind and forgot it all. Is this more of the same? Like any small group who feels that they guard a special knowledge of the world, we converts encounter the delphic oracle problem--are we visionaries, or are we merely wrapped up in a collective hallucination? But I go into the classroom with the kids, I observe their capacity for enquiry, the richness of their artistic expression, and most of all their dignity, and I can only say that whatever these school are doing, it works.