Beautiful posts Bath! ...going on from what you said, the role of the teacher is the facilitator in Reggio Emilia, essentially we are a resource for the child. There are no time constraints in this approach to learning. Documenting the child's learning and experience in Reggio allows for the documenting of their learning journey. Where, in time, a child (and parent/teacher/community) will be able to clearly see the evolution of their thoughts, experiences, learning (where there is no need for children with different abilities to be compared to one another).
The history behind the Reggio Emilia approach (just have a google) is a very touching, driven one which may help readers to understand why things are done this way.
I'm a middle school teacher ( or was, haven't taught since 2007!), anyway... being a facilitator is a big aspect of the pedagogy of middle schooling, however the reality is very different! Many middle schools are merely middle schools in name only and don't take on the pedagogy. But like Bath said with the Reggio Emilia ideas, the idea is to give them the tools and the materials to find the answers themselves rather than have them rote-learn the facts and figures - learning the how to of learning really, which is more important in the long run, especially given we don't really know what their world will be like. A big thing I used to do was brainstorming a concept - so, in the example of trees, I'd write tree in the middle of the board, and then get the kids to come up with words to describe it, rather than describe it or show them how I would draw a tree.
Its true about the hierarchy of subjects - maths and english are considered more 'valuable' than other subjects, with the arts coming bottom, but its not just schools that put this value on them - its what the commercial world wants, and as with other things, the commercial world gets to dictate this. That's not to say that the commercial world isn't changing - skills that they want now are different to what they would have wanted 30 years ago, for example problem solving or the ability to work autonomously would have been unheard of in most job descriptions 30 years ago, whereas now its a prerequisite for many positions.
Reply With Quote
Bookmarks