This year, for the first time, I decided to study squirrels. David, our student teacher, was interested in studying an animal. I made the choice to study squirrels. We’d already begun studying trees, and had a collection of acorns. Examining the acorns with magnifying glasses, the children had noticed tooth marks. It was an easy leap from trees to squirrels.
What lends itself to study? With young children, the environment provides a wealth of topics: the children themselves and their families; the physical and social environment of the school; the neighborhood of the school, street signs, shops, banks, fire stations, restaurants. Children are also curious about physical aspects of the environment: weather, weeds that grow in sidewalk cracks, shadows, ice and snow in the winter. Young children are incessant investigators, particularly about real things in the world. Teachers do not need to wait for questions to arise, but can initiate studies. We can find and display resources—real objects, books, photos—that will pique interest, if the subject is inherently engaging. When a study begins with something that is already part of the children’s world, their involvement can be immediate. One year when I taught first grade, the cardboard Halloween skeletons that appeared in late October sparked an interest in bones that resulted in weeks of study of human and animal bones.
Children invest certain topics with meanings that resonate for them at a certain age. When the first-graders studied bones, it was a natural extension of their interest in their bodies. Young children will talk endlessly about their injuries and show them off with enthusiasm. Blood fascinates them. “Did it bleed?” they’ll ask when someone describes a fall. “Did you get stitches?” What is at issue for them is not only their safety but their identity. When their bodies’ borders are breached, will everything stay safely inside? What is inside? Similarly, four- and five-year-olds’ fascination with dinosaurs often revolves around issues of aggression and defense: what can one dinosaur do to another, and how can the other dinosaur protect or defend itself? These questions arise at a period in their lives when young children are finding themselves less closely supervised by adults, as they play in the schoolyard at recess, or in a park playground. What is allowed? What should I do if someone pushes me? When is it OK to push back? Will I be able to defend myself? The issues of right and wrong that parents might bring up are set aside in the child’s search for safety and autonomy, and dinosaurs are certainly creatures untroubled by moral qualms.
My choice of squirrels as a topic was based both on their being very much part of our environment and on my knowledge that five-year-olds enjoy observing animals, particularly animal movement. I’ve always had class animals—rabbits, guinea pigs, snakes, turtles—and have noticed, over the years, that children’s most frequent comments are about the animals’ movements.
In deciding to study squirrels, I was also influenced by what I know about how five-year-olds learn. My years spent in their company, as well as my reading of educators Jean Piaget, Susan Isaacs, and John Dewey, have made clear to me that young children learn best through concrete experiences. They learn through their bodies and their senses: they look closely at things, poke at them, smell them, and shake them to see what sounds they produce. Is a topic one that lends itself to the provision of concrete experiences? In the case of a squirrel study, we could easily plan activities that involved children’s firsthand observations. The children would also bring to the study a knowledge of squirrels acquired from previous observations of their environment.
After we noticed the tooth marks on the acorns, I brought in books about squirrels. I planned our first trip, to the sidewalk right outside the school building, where there is a row of oak trees. We would look for evidence of squirrel activity and see what we could collect.
Investigations
Today we took them out to collect acorns. Found acorns, noted “bird poop,” and found some kind of berry. Back in the classroom, when the children drew what they’d found, they were totally absorbed. Each of them had a plastic box for their finds. We made the mistake (we’d planned this, but it was a bad idea) of letting them use crayons, but many of them didn’t, and the pencil drawings are the best. Most of them got the idea of really looking.
In the first weeks of school, the children had made “science drawings.” It was something I actively encouraged, providing paper and pencils. The children drew the things on the science table: seashells, starfish, rocks, sea glass, birds’ nests. Some children had drawn the class rabbit, noticing, for example, the length of his body when he was lying down. Magnifying glasses had been set out on the science table, and we talked at meeting about how to focus them. Their drawings were date-stamped. I would ask them what they’d noticed about the object, and I’d write down what they said. At class meetings, children would show the others their science drawings, as well as the objects, and say whatever they wanted to about what they’d done. Other children could ask questions. Afterward, the drawings were put up on the wall next to the science table. The drawings began to form a class resource, a library of images. I took photographs of each child holding his or her drawing and the object drawn, and these photographs were put up on the wall too, next to the drawings.
From the beginning of the year, I was introducing children to a protocol. I was saying, implicitly, this kind of drawing is different from other drawing; you are doing something different. Drawing was being used as a tool for the children to learn about, to investigate, some phenomenon. When they draw an object from life, children notice more: the swirl in a shell or the jagged edge of a nut. Drawing something makes them feel proprietary; it gives them a sense of ownership of the object or process observed. The use of drawing as a tool of investigation is natural for young children; in the classroom, their purpose can become more conscious. It should be added that sometimes children will attempt to trace an object rather than drawing from observation, or will say they “can’t” draw it. This may occur either when they have not had a lot of experience with the free use of drawing materials (for example, if they have only had the use of coloring books, or have had limited access to blank paper, crayons, and markers), or when they have experience but have become self-conscious about their representational abilities (for example, if older siblings have made fun of their drawings). I have found that learned inhibitions about drawing can be overcome if a teacher actively helps a child look at an object to be drawn (e.g., asking, “What do you notice about it? Do you see any lines on it? How do the lines move?”).
As was true when the children shared artwork, the sharing of the science drawings added to the knowledge of the class as a whole and reinforced the idea that knowledge exists in a social context. Children’s thinking, in the form of drawings, was made public. Last, photos documented the work of observation. Drawings and photos together create a record of the development of children’s observational abilities. The records can be part of a science journal, or can be put in a file for students to look back on later in the year or for teachers to share with parents.
In using drawing as a tool of investigation, I was influenced by the approach of the municipal preschools in Reggio Emilia, Italy. I was first introduced to the work there when I’d seen an exhibition of photographs and children’s work called the Hundred Languages of Children over a decade ago. I’d been struck by the quality of the work, the careful observation, sophistication, directness, and clarity, as well as the sense of joy that the drawings expressed. What had produced this level of work?
In Reggio Emilia preschools, children investigate the world around them, using paint, clay, paper, natural objects, and the manipulation of light and shadow to organize their knowledge. They explore various themes with the active collaboration of adults who document the work and help define the projects. Each school has an atelier in which children work in small groups with an artist-teacher. Teacher collaboration is an integral element, as is the schools’ integration in the community. Reggio methods are rooted in the city’s social and political values, and developed over several d
ecades.
I saw that the approach shared philosophic roots with the progressive pedagogy in which I’d been trained, but I also knew I couldn’t remotely duplicate the schools’ physical and social environment. I could incorporate individual elements, however: I could use drawing as a way for children to gain knowledge, particularly knowledge about the natural world. I could use discussion, photographic documentation, children’s dictated words, and displays to continually make their insights public. I could ensure that their aesthetic sensibility was given a central place when I planned. I have found that the example of Reggio Emilia has produced a gradual shift in my understanding of the teacher’s role. I have grown more and more to see teaching as the job of understanding children’s thinking.
Questions and Answers
Max insists that babies don’t open their eyes at birth. It isn’t this particular belief that interests me right now, though I should think about that, but the quality of his persistence, his certainty, despite the fact that we’d looked at a photo in one of the baby books, a newborn with its eyes open. The next day, Max repeated it: newborn babies can’t open their eyes. I see it as a fact about him, this sticking to what he believes, a holding on despite evidence, a need to shift slowly, to struggle to integrate new information; it’s something important about Max.
Looking back at this journal entry, I see what I missed. I notice now what Max noticed, what he insisted we recognize. He had concluded—from our study of squirrels and his own knowledge of rabbits (from his perusal of books in the rabbit book basket)—that the eyes of these small mammals are shut at birth. If people are mammals too, he may have reasoned, shouldn’t our eyes be shut at birth? What mattered, for the class as a whole as well as for Max, was not that he was wrong but that he’d had a powerful insight: newborn mammals are similar in certain ways. How are newborn mammals alike and how are they different? What might explain the differences? These are productive questions, which I didn’t think of. The underlying question for me was whether my focus on Max’s wrongness prevented me from following his thinking process.
The teacher’s conception of the teaching role is at the center of everything that happens or doesn’t happen in a classroom. We bring to teaching who we are, I remember Dorothy Cohen saying. Dorothy was my advisor at Bank Street College. She was also the author of The Learning Child, a work that summarizes child development in the preschool and elementary years and examines the implications for educational and parenting practices.1 My good fortune in having had her as advisor was something that became more apparent the longer I taught. She was tough and uncompromising, smart, and extremely knowledgeable about children and teaching. Observing me as I student-taught, she told me, “You don’t trust them.” I puzzled over that remark, and it took me decades to see what she meant.
Trust in kids is not easy to practice. For both new and experienced teachers, it’s hard to avoid being didactic, hard to leave children the room to theorize. We love knowing, we love telling. We go into teaching in order to teach, and in a deep way we believe that teaching is telling. We focus on what we know and what children don’t know.
In her book Talking Their Way into Science, the educator Karen Gallas has a different way of looking at what children don’t know. She sees their self-invented explanations as theories.2 Gallas was a classroom teacher in Brookline, Massachusetts, who took a detour to obtain a PhD, but unlike many with higher degrees, she went back into the classroom. Gallas documents and analyzes children’s talk, concluding that their “misconceptions . . . are the result of observation, imagination, and logic.” Her commitment to children’s theory making leads her to be concerned that teachers’ interruptions cause children to “believe that their ideas are always being judged.” 3 She proposes, “Rather than viewing misconceptions as cause for . . . intervention, we should carefully elicit them and work with the children to uncover the kinds of data upon which they have based their theories.” 4
David, our student teacher, worked to gain this point of view. David and I talked after he’d worked with a small group. Lila had said, Squirrels lay eggs. He’d asked, What makes you think that? So he was getting it. But I pushed him, asking, why do you think Lila might have thought that? He saw that she might have made an analogy to birds, extending her thinking, applying something she already knows—with the common element that they both live in trees. I’m thinking now—it’s proof that Lila is learning something new. This is proof also of what we can find out about children’s thinking . . . if we don’t correct, or dispense knowledge, but have ideas about where the discussion can go. Rather than asking ourselves what Lila was thinking, how much easier to rush in and correct: “Squirrels don’t lay eggs, they’re mammals!” If we step back, while remaining present, we allow children their excitement, the intensity of feeling, which feeds their identification with the stuff—squirrels, trees, ice and snow, whatever it is that has their attention. It’s this identification we aim for, and it’s made possible when we trust children’s learning.
The stance of being present but holding back requires our engagement, first of all with the children we teach, and second, with the content. We must feel connected to the subject, know about it, care about it, and want to learn more; we, too, must be curious. We must know and care about the subject, so that when we listen to children, we’ll know what to listen for. We’ll know what to ask, we’ll know where to head.
A Theory of Curriculum
Adam came up to me and asked, Are there really powers? Any question with “really” or “real” is automatically interesting. I wasn’t at all sure what he meant, and asked, Do you mean do people have powers? He seemed to mean powers that are inexplicable. The point is how interesting the questions are and how unexpectedly they bubble up. This year: Are skeletons real? Are dinosaurs real? Another year: Is snow really real?
These questions are useful; they provide information about children’s thinking. For example, four- and five-year-olds often ask about whether things are “real”: they have been told tales for a number of years, and some of these have come to be seen as untrue. The adult’s authority is no longer enough for them; they are slowly becoming skeptics as they learn to rely more and more on data they collect for themselves or pick up from friends. Curriculum can gather up the questions that have special resonance for children developmentally and in terms of their experiences. Those questions can spur them to extend their thinking and can generate discussions, experiments, research, and the drawing of conclusions.
The curricular approach of this squirrel study has been termed emergent curriculum. The difference between this approach and traditional methods is sharp. Teachers are often handed curriculum packets that they are expected to follow; these may be used year after year, with few changes. When teachers follow predetermined programs of instruction, the important connections are made by adults for children, and indeed, the classroom teacher’s involvement in decision making is minimal. I see curriculum differently: children define the content they are studying with the collaboration of the teachers. When this is the case, children’s energies, understandings, and actions determine various aspects of the study, directly affecting how meaningful the material is to them and how motivated they will be. Together, students and teacher pursue directions that the study might take, and create the forms of knowledge. This framework renders sterile the perennial debate over whether education should be child- or curriculum-centered; curriculum is neither solely child-centered nor teacher-directed. Curriculum is inherent in the relationship among children, teacher, and content.
Education is a process, linking children’s immediate interests with fully developed curricular content. This is how John Dewey defines the process in The Child and the Curriculum: there is, he argues, no “gap in kind . . . between the child’s experience and the various forms of subject-matter that make up the course of study.” 5 These two end points “define a single process.” 6 I picture a teacher as literally a bridge, standing with one foot in wha
t Dewey calls the “psychological reality” of children and the other foot planted in the “logical reality” of adult disciplines. The psychological reality encompasses the concrete world of children’s day-to-day and highly personal associations, concerns, and sensations, their unique and specific responses to any given content. What do children see, what do they notice? Years ago, a girl in my class was drawing at a table. She exclaimed—to anyone listening—“I’ve never drawn purple eyes before!” Between her perception and mine, there was all the difference in the world. Her statement can stand for all the observations that children make of details that are relevant to them but may be hidden from our unseeing adult eyes.
The logical reality refers to what adults know about any field of understanding, something generally seen as a systematized ordering of reality. (This seems a more apt description when applied to the sciences, math, and social sciences, and less apparent in relation to the arts; also, we know all subject matters to be socially constructed to an extent, and continually evolving.) In Dewey’s view, education is rooted in the child’s psychological reality but headed toward the logical reality of adult knowledge; the seeds of disciplines are implicit in children’s curiosity about and interactions with things in the world.
When teachers place children’s conceptualizing at the center of the educational process, they must actively seek educational meanings in children’s actions and products. Seeing teaching in this way doesn’t minimize the teacher’s role, either in planning or as children engage in work. It enlarges our role and makes it more complex. It is not enough for teachers to observe children’s potential, to merely watch children and encourage them; that is a kind of passivity, an abdication of the responsibility teachers owe children. The teacher must know when and how to step in; the teacher must actively help children see their work. This implies that teachers must not only notice learning, but must also notice when learning is not occuring.
Kindergarten: A Teacher, Her Students, and a Year of Learning Page 8