miércoles, 23 de enero de 2013

Boulder Journey School


eggio Emilia Educators and David and Frances Hawkins At this juncture, a contextual digression is necessary. Educators in Reggio Emilia and educators around the world who are inspired by the educational philosophy and pedagogy of the schools in Reggio Emilia, including educators at Boulder Journey School, hold an image of children as curious, competent, and capable—children who are able to co-construct knowledge through their relationships with others, both children and adults, and through their relationships with their environment. The image of a competent child exists in tandem with an image of a competent teacher, who supports, encourages, deepens, and extends the child’s physical and social research (Rinaldi, 2006). Many of the ideas inherent in what is named “The Reggio Emilia Approach to Early Childhood Education,” including the images of capable children and educators, draw inspiration from the work of both classic and contemporary philosophers, including David Hawkins. Loris Malaguzzi (1998), architect of the philosophy and pedagogy of the schools in Reggio Emilia, cites Hawkins’ writing as among the most influential. Hawkins visited Reggio Emilia on two occasions—in 1990 for the first international conference and in 1992, with Frances Hawkins, to visit the schools. Lella Gandini (2008) writes of the relationship between Hawkins and Malaguzzi as a meeting of two minds who held a shared vision of children. David Hawkins, whose areas of expertise spanned myriad domains—including the physical, social, and political sciences; mathematics; philosophy; and economics—and Frances Hawkins, early childhood teacher, author, and consultant, proffered their vast knowledge and experience to educators not only in Italy and the United States but also in England, New Zealand, Nigeria, Kenya, and Uganda. The notion of the capacity of children and their teachers to learn and to teach is woven through a plethora of projects they inspired, nurtured, and brought to fruition. Returning to the tension surrounding making a mess as contrasted to messing about, David Hawkins (2002), in his seminal essay “Messing about in Science,” speaks of this phase of learning as a time devoted to unguided exploratory work, during which children “construct, test, probe, and experiment without superimposed questions or instructions” (p. 68). Inherent in that idea is that the teacher carefully prepares the environment, offering the children materials and equipment with which to engage. The teacher’s preparation of the environment is based on her knowledge of the children’s backgrounds and interests, combined with an understanding of children’s learning, motivation, and development. This structure, based on the teacher’s knowledge and understanding, which Hawkins deems “of the utmost importance” (p. 69), defines messing about in contrast to making a mess. Note—“Intention” is the differentiator. Children who are making a mess may indeed be joyful, but the experience lacks intention beyond mess making. Children who are messing about may also be joyful, but they bring intentionality to the experience, an experience of meaning making. The teacher recognizes the children’s intentions and contributes her own intentions to the preparation of the learning environment. Messing about is also differentiated from making a mess: as the children engage in explorations and investigations, the teacher’s role is to closely observe, document, revisit, and interpret the work of the children, together with families, colleagues, and the children themselves. The process of studying children’s thinking and learning through observation, documentation, and interpretation is foundational to the work in Reggio Emilia and has been translated within the Boulder Journey School context. Malaguzzi (1998) writes, “Stand aside for a while and leave room for learning, observe carefully what children do, and then, if you have understood well, perhaps teaching will be different from before” (p. 82). Hawkins (2000) provides a more pragmatic example that further defines the teacher’s role as described by Malaguzzi. In the essay titled “What It Means to Teach,” Hawkins refers to a film from Cornell University in which a series of kindergarten children spontaneously come to a table to play with an equal-arm balance and a large number of washers and other weights. He notes that in watching the film, one begins to recognize in oneself the ability to read the levels and specialized interests represented by the children—assuming that one is personally familiar with the large variety of balance situations that are possible and with some of the underlying ideas surrounding the study of balance. What one finds oneself doing is building what Hawkins calls a map of each child’s mind and of the trajectory of each child’s life. This map of the mind is fragmentary, fallible, and always subject to correction. As the teacher-observer, one begins thinking about how to steady, extend, and deepen the engagement that the child has begun. We have learned from the educators in Reggio Emilia that the process of observation, documentation, and interpretation is subjective. The teacher—in the most advantageous situations along with colleagues and families—makes choices about what to observe and how she will gather her observations as documentation. Further, she bases her observations, documentations, and interpretations on her hypotheses and theories about children’s meaning making, which will, through the process, be refuted or confirmed. This requires that the teacher become aware of her own evolving knowledge and its structure. The teacher’s meta-cognition—her awareness of her knowing and her awareness of her knowing about her knowing—not only supports the child’s meta-cognition but also serves as a means of continuous and permanent professional development (Rinaldi, 2006; D. Dumont, personal communication, April 3, 2010). The learning-teaching relationship among the children and their teacher is reciprocal—while the children are learning about the physical and social world, the teacher is learning about the children’s processes of learning. This supports the children’s learning about their world and so forth. The teacher offers her learning about children’s learning processes to the teaching-learning relationship. However, Hawkins (1997) discusses another aspect of the teacher’s offering that is critical and, thus, must be seriously considered in a second seminal essay titled “I, Thou, and It”: