Kindergarten: A Teacher, Her Students, and a Year of Learning

by Diamond, Julie

  The responsibility for creating friendly and open relationships lies with teachers and schools. Parents’ sense of involvement—the feeling that the school is theirs—is an amorphous thing, but it can be planned for, in particular, by making the border between home and school more porous than it usually is.

  In my school, kindergarten parents bring children to the classroom during the first part of the year. The practice eases children’s transition from home to school and also provides a time and space in which parents’ presence in classrooms is not just tolerated but welcomed. The relaxed atmosphere allows me to get to know parents in a way that would otherwise be impossible. As parents stop by to look at something, they become more comfortable in the classroom. A parent can let me know about something going on in the child’s life, and if necessary, we can schedule a meeting.

  The informality of exchange fostered by morning drop-off establishes a background of trust and an assumption of common purposes that inform all subsequent meetings. Equally important, the parents get to know each other and to know the other children in the class. The social network that parents create is a resource for them, for me, and for the school. Morning drop-off engenders a commitment to the school that goes beyond parents’ concern for their own child.

  In Reggio Emilia, the physical border between home and school—the entryways and hallways where parents and teachers naturally meet—is designed to sustain exchanges between parents and school. Photographs of children at work, exhibits of work and dictated text in these areas invite parents immediately into the life of the school. These are not commercial photos but images of their own children, and the words are their children’s actual words. By sharing this work, schools reveal the learning that occurs when teaching is based on children’s authentic purposes. Documentation thus demonstrates children’s capacities, helps parents see the schools’ valuing of those capacities, and underscores the school’s commitment to parents’ knowledge of their children’s efforts.

  Teachers can highlight children’s work in other ways. The notices that I send home to parents are written and illustrated by children. These display an originality totally missing from computer-generated graphics. These notices serve legitimate purposes, but also display, to the children as well as their parents, the children’s conceptual abilities and expressive flair. Curriculum projects can serve similar functions. When the children mailed valentines to distant relatives, their learning was communicated by the cards and by the messages and addresses that the children wrote (at the same time that children’s learning was motivated by the meaningfulness of these activities). Weekly newsletters can document work: teachers can include drawings and transcripts of discussions. Class performances and exhibitions of work also communicate educational values when these showcase children’s authentic efforts and decisions.

  Families can also be unique educational resources for children’s exploration and understanding of the world. In initiating a study of the post office with her first-grade class, my colleague Linda Kasarjian asks parents to ask their friends and family members to mail postcards to the class; the cards lead to a variety of curricular experiences. Thus, the diversity of families’ social relationships is at the heart of the study. Also, when parents participate in the classroom as volunteers, their contributions can make curriculum more real.

  These strong links between schools and families make the school environment more democratic. In Reggio schools, and in American alternative schools, the school’s curriculum—thought of most broadly—is democracy; the school’s day-to-day functioning is based on principles of participation by individuals involved with the institution and the community outside it.15 I don’t mean that schools should be parent-run, but that teachers and educators generally should see their work, in part, as the sketching out of understandings about children’s learning and the development of educational meanings.16 One consequence is the broadening of parent’s commitment to children’s education. Currently, parents often view children’s educational success narrowly, in terms of grades and scores, and their anxious pressure can have deleterious effects. Alyssa, for example, who had attended a preschool that was inappropriately academic in orientation, had few social skills and was resistant to learning: she can read, and write her name in beautifully formed lower-case letters, but grabs and pushes when she has a problem with someone. “I don’t like books,” she tells me.

  What do we want for our children? When educators enlist parents in proposing answers, they open up the process to a range of possibilities. One Chinese New Year, the mother of one of the children visited the classroom. Newly arrived from China, speaking almost no English, she showed the children how to draw Chinese characters. As the children used ink and brush to write their new year’s greetings, their knowledge of the world and of each other increased exponentially. The children’s gain was also mine: in welcoming that parent to my room, I enlarged the meaning of education and shared responsibility for it.

  Ourselves as Resources

  The arc of the year is the year with this class. Just as telling a story is what makes someone a writer, what he gets better at, knowing children—knowing a class, helping it become a class—is what being a teacher is.

  Adults are responsible for teaching children in the widest sense, for equipping them with the knowledge and competence we believe they’ll need. A sense of this responsibility is part of what drew me to teaching. There are educators who interpret this responsibility to mean that adults owe children only facts and skills. But when facts are taught in isolation, it is harder to see patterns. In addition, facts change: they occasionally change as facts, revealed as no longer true, and they often change in their value or in their position vis-à-vis other facts. Repetition is often needed in order for children to learn skills, but it helps when skills are learned in the context of goals that children recognize; when taught as rote skills, separate from any meaningful context, they are less easily transferred.17

  Our job as adults is to help children build relationships—to people and things in the world and to the act of knowing. This point of view assumes that children—and teachers—are active agents. For me, activism defines teaching and learning: much teaching consists of the search for students’ meaning. Malaguzzi’s words ring true: “The central act of adults . . . is to activate, especially indirectly, the meaning-making competencies of children as a basis of all learning.” 18

  Building relationships is what we do best as teachers: relationships with students, content, parents, colleagues. Relationships are a net that we produce, which in turn sustains us. We work with our personal resources—our listening, involvement, valuations, presence. The primary relationship, between teachers and students, is one of personal loyalty. When a relationship with a student is bad—when I feel at a loss with a student, unable to connect—I doubt my ability to teach.

  At these moments, which come often enough, I look around the classroom at the work layered on walls and surfaces: loops of patterned necklaces made from dyed and strung pasta shapes; a sewing project, little drawstring bags; drawings of sea creatures, a seahorse with its tail wrapped around seaweed; saved Lego constructions, including Michael’s with its label, SPAC SIP [space ship]—all the captured life of this group.

  None of these things existed before this class produced them. The originality of children’s representations, the uniqueness of the objects they produce, point to the creative nature of learning. For this reason—because learning is creative—imaginative processes such as dramatic play have a necessary role in the classroom; they introduce an infinity of possibilities, elements that are entirely individual. “There is that in learning which is immeasurable,” writes Patricia Carini; yet it’s visible, in the variety of work, work that’s truly children’s own.19 The room is a collage, mixing media, layering experience, creating new combinations; it provides a million versions of knowledge. “The classroom,” Karen Gallas says, “is like perishable art.” 20 I love it for being both s
olid and ephemeral.

  Our resources are our own capacities: Our capacity to observe, especially at moments when nothing seems to be going on. Our capacity to be surprised by something a child said or did or made. Our capacity to be puzzled, and to mine puzzlement, to see something that escaped us earlier. Our capacity to recognize whatever has deep personal meaning, for our students and also for ourselves (a colleague’s class study of birds). Not least, our capacity for friendship—our searching out sympathetic people, who provide the human environment we need. I began the school year, after all, walking to school with a friend. These are the steps that teachers can take immediately, right now; these resources—the capacities for observation, surprise, puzzlement, and connection—are always present. “Education in its widest sense,” Carlina Rinaldi says, is “a hope for human beings.” 21

  In recognizing what matters to children and to ourselves, we develop a culture of teaching. The more years we teach, the more we understand what the work entails; and the more complex, colorful, and detailed the culture becomes. In choosing to teach, year after year, we learn to teach; we gain conviction and we discover again and again who we are as teachers. Going through old photographs, I see themes: a bunch of children at a table, looking over each other’s shoulders at photographs of themselves—as I’m waiting to write down their comments. In another photo, Max squats alone at the rabbit’s cage, staring in, wearing on his head a pair of the doll’s pants like a jaunty cap, while in the background, Laurel and Francie stretch out on the rug, looking at a book. One photo has no children, just a long train of Unifix cubes set up on chairs. I remember the work on these trains: each day, starting fresh, the children had made the trains longer and longer until after several days the linked cubes circled the room a few feet off the floor, like one of those superfast trains. That absorption is what I aim for—that, and the quality of certain comments and questions, the questions that intrigue us, children and adults (“Is snow really real?”), and that we love considering together. These moments point to the classroom life that I want for the children I teach, that permits them to flourish, to take off in unexpected directions, to live fully as children.22 In considering children’s involvement—in listening to their talk, watching Max watch the rabbit—I’ve lived fully, as a teacher and as myself.

  The class rabbit

  Photo by Julie Diamond

  NOTES

  Introduction

  1 Caroline Pratt, I Learn from Children (New York: Harper & Row, 1948), 9.

  2 George Dennison, The Lives of Children (New York: Random House, 1969).

  3 Materials produced by the Elementary Science Study of the Education Development Center (Newton, MA: McGraw-Hill, 1966–71) remain among the best curriculum materials available.

  4 Charles Dickens, Hard Times (London: Everyman’s Library, 1954), 1.

  5 Eleanor Duckworth, “A Reality to Which Each Belongs,” in Holding Values, ed. Brenda W. Engel with Anne C. Martin (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2005), 147.

  1. August: Beginning the Year

  1 Susan Isaacs, Intellectual Growth in Young Children (New York: Schocken Books, 1966), 17.

  2 Isaacs includes lists of materials and activities that invited the children to draw conclusions from explorations of the world around them. For example, after the children had noticed that wax had melted on the school’s hot-water pipes, they attempted to “melt other things in the same way—plasticine, chalk, wooden bricks, paper, scissors, etc.” Ibid., 285.

  3 Carlina Rinaldi, In Dialogue with Reggio Emilia (New York: Routledge, 2006), 207.

  4 Patricia Carini, On Value in Education (New York: City College Workshop Center, 1987), 30.

  5 Ibid., 31.

  6 Ibid., 31, her emphasis.

  2. Routines and Rituals: Making the Room Theirs

  1 Ruth Charney, Teaching Children to Care: Management in the Responsive Classroom (Pittsfield, MA: Northeast Foundation for Children, 2002), 27.

  2 Sylvia Ashton-Warner, Teacher (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986), 101.

  3 Hubert Dyasi, “Assessing ‘Imperfect’ Conceptions,” in Progressive Education for the 1990s, ed. Kathe Jervis and Carol Montag (New York: Teachers College Press, 1991), 101.

  4 John Dewey, Experience and Education (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997).

  5 Ibid., 58.

  6 Ibid., 54.

  7 Vivian Paley, White Teacher (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).

  8 Vivian Paley, Wally’s Stories: Conversations in the Kindergarten (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981).

  9 Vivian Paley, The Boy Who Would Be a Helicopter: The Uses of Storytelling in the Classroom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).

  10 Paley, Wally’s Stories, 21.

  11 Dewey, Experience and Education, 54.

  12 Ibid., 54.

  13 Susan Isaacs, Social Development in Young Children (New York: Schocken Books, 1972), 452.

  14 Isaacs, Intellectual Growth, 33.

  15 Ibid., 33.

  16 Ibid., 23.

  17 Ibid., 33.

  18 Charney, Teaching Children to Care, 234.

  19 Ibid., 366.

  20 Dewey, Experience and Education, 53.

  21 Isaacs, Intellectual Growth, 157.

  3. Collages: Making Art

  1 Randy Kennedy, “Guggenheim Study Suggests Arts Education Benefits Literacy Skills,” New York Times, July 27, 2006.

  2 Pieces of mat board, called offcuts, can often be obtained free from frame shops; they’re normally discarded, and are a valuable resource material for classrooms.

  3 George Szekely, Encouraging Creativity in Art Lessons (New York: Teachers College Press, 1988).

  4 Ibid., vii.

  4. Finding Curriculum: A Study of Squirrels

  1 Dorothy Cohen, The Learning Child (New York: Schocken Books, 1988).

  2 Karen Gallas, Talking Their Way into Science (New York: Teachers College Press, 1995).

  3 Ibid., 100.

  4 Ibid., 100.

  5 John Dewey, The Child and the Curriculum (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 11.

  6 Ibid., 11.

  7 Eleanor Duckworth, The Having of Wonderful Ideas and Other Essays on Teaching and Learning (New York: Teachers College Press, 2006)

  8 Ibid., 1.

  9 Ibid., xii.

  10 Ibid., 173–74.

  11 Quoted in “The Role of the Teacher,” in The Hundred Languages of Children: The Reggio Emilia Approach to Early Childhood Education, ed. Carolyn Edwards, Lella Gandini, and George Forman (Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing, 1993), 153.

  12 Gallas, Talking Their Way into Science, 102.

  13 See Vito Perrone, What Should We Make of Standards? (New York: Bank Street College of Education, 1999); Patricia F. Carini, On Value in Education (New York: City College Workshop Center, 1987); and Deborah Meier, The Power of Their Ideas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995).

  14 Maxine Greene writes, “Imagination may be the primary means of forming an understanding of what goes on under the heading of ‘reality.’ ” “Texts and Margins,” in Arts as Education, ed. Merryl Ruth Goldberg and Ann Phillips (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Educational Review, 1992), 5.

  15 A Standards-Based Scope and Sequence for Learning: A Teacher’s Framework for Standards-Based Planning (New York: Board of Education of the City of New York, 2000–2001).

  5. The Uses of Literacy: Constructing Knowledge

  1 Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (New York: Picador USA, 2000), 119.

  2 Mary Brown and Norman Precious, The Integrated Day in the Primary School (New York: Agathon Press, 1968), 59.

  3 Education Development Center, Insights: A Hands-on Inquiry Science Curriculum (Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt, 2004–8).

  4 Gwendolyn Brooks, in The Random House Book of Poetry for Children , selected by Jack Prelutsky (New York: Random House, 1983), 120.

  5 Certain books in a class library give evidence of their special relevance: by the en
d of the year, they are falling apart. These books may provide children, as individuals or as a class, with a vocabulary connected to their concerns. The books give teachers a language in which to address children’s feelings and behavior. An example is given in Lynne Strieb’s inspiring A (Philadelphia) Teacher’s Journal (Grand Forks, ND: Center for Teaching and Learning, University of North Dakota, 1985). Strieb was reading Alice Dalgliesh’s The Courage of Sarah Noble to her first-grade students. She had asked them about their fears: “Belinda has been afraid that her mother would not pick her up after school. . . . Later [she] was crying . . . and I said, ‘Remember Sarah Noble. Try to be like her and say to yourself, “Have courage, Belinda Creighton, have courage!” She liked that.’ ” (20).

  6 Leo Lionni, Between Worlds (New York: Knopf, 1997), 216.

  7 Ibid., 234.

  8 Board of Education of the City of New York, Early Childhood Education (New York: Board of Education, 1958–59), 51.

  9 Molly Brearley et al., The Teaching of Young Children (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 68.

  10 Lillian Weber, “Comments on Language by a Silent Child,” Urban Review 9, no. 3 (September 1976), 172.

  11 Ibid., 175.

  12 Ibid., 176.

  13 Ibid., 176.

  14 Ibid., 179.

  6. The Uses of Literacy: Reading and Writing

  1 Ashton-Warner, Teacher, 27.

  2 Paolo Freire, Politics of Education (South Hadley, MA: Bergin and Garvey, 1985), 59.

  3 Ashton-Warner, Teacher, 33.

  4 Courtney Cazden, Whole Language Plus: Essays on Literacy in the United States and New Zealand (New York: Teachers College Press, 1992), 13.