Early Learning Curriculum in the Preschool Years
Introduction
Early childhood learning is the foundation for lifelong learning, and the basis for individual, social, economic, and environmental well-being (BC Ministry of Education, 2008). The learning and interactions with the classmates and instructor, along with a field observation, give me the opportunity to engage in new ways of thinking and have contributed to my deeper understanding towards preschool education.
Early childhood learning is the foundation for lifelong learning, and the basis for individual, social, economic, and environmental well-being ------ BC Ministry of Education, 2008
The purpose of this inquiry article is to share my reflections gained from recent learnings and experiences on how early childhood educators can support young children. Specifically, this article relates to my own experiences and elaborates my humble opinions on four overlapping themes: the image of the child, learning environment, children’s play and preschool educators’ evolving roles.
Image of the Child
The founder of the Reggio Emilia Approach Loris Malaguzzi (1994) believes that the image of the child is the point where all teaching and learning begin. As one of the primary underlying principles of the Reggio Emilia approach, it views children as strong, capable, competent, and full of potential (Fraser, 2002) individuals.
People’s culture, knowledge, language, personal history, and aspirations for the future are embedded in their image of the child. Revisiting my childhood memory and reflecting on the interactions with my three-year-old niece in China, I would like to compare a child to a galaxy - full of energy, possibility and uncertainty, waiting to be discovered. I believe that each child is born with a lot of possibilities (Carla, 2012) and has tremendous potential. In other words, young children, as individuals with complex identities, have multiple capabilities and diverse potential.
However, educators should be aware of the fact that children differ in their aptitudes and capabilities, and that not all children can receive the equal opportunities to develop their potential. Therefore, schools, educators, communities and parents need to provide children with differentiated instructions and suitable social and natural environment which can help them develop their potential fully in a meaningful way.
Early Learning Environment
The Reggio Emilia approach identifies three educators in the classroom: the teacher, the child, and the environment (Fraser, 2002). In educational discourses, the word “environment” usually refers to the physical environment, inside and outside (Callaghan, 2013). By seeing the environment as an educator, as the Reggio Emilia approach does, we can begin to notice how the surroundings contribute to children’s learning (Strong-Wilson & Ellis, 2007).
Children learn holistically. Their physical, emotional, linguistic, intellectual and social learning occur simultaneously and are closely interrelated. As children grow and learn, they ask questions, explore, and make discoveries about new experiences, people, places and things in their environment - a setting that encourages creativity, motivation, cooperation and persistence. As the “third teacher” (BC Ministry of Education, 2008, p. 11; Fraser, 2002), the child’s learning environment should be meaningful and flexible to support their holistic learning style. Therefore, teachers should think carefully about their own values and how they affect the decisions they make about the arrangement of the classroom environment (Fraser, 2002, p. 53) and the plan of curricula. However, Berry Mayall (2000) points out that our perception of children’s need comes from adult perspectives - contextualized and structured by adults’ social and economic goals in specific societies. In order to include our children’s voices, values, perspectives, and interests in the early childhood classroom, educators need to shift their ways of understanding and always ask and children what they want and think. During play scenarios, children provide teachers with a window into their thoughts and perceptions and help adults see the world from their perspectives.
One example that Fraser (2002) shares in her book leaves me a deep impression. The teachers in the classroom notice that a group of children are particularly interested in the story of The Three Little Pigs (p. 61), so they encourage and support the children to build houses for the characters. This gives me implications on how to inspire and support children’s learning process. The teachers should be observant and supportive of children’s ideas and interests, engage children in co-constructing the curriculum actively, and involve them in building the environment. In this way, children become engaged in the designing of the environment, and the classroom environment becomes more conducive to children’s learning and development.
A well-designed learning environment can foster positive peer relationships, create active interactions between teachers and children, and provide opportunities for educators to support children to become good citizens in this multicultural society. Fraser shares some examples of children participating in multicultural activities in her book, such as painting the dragon (p. 66) and writing Chinese calligraphy (p. 65). They indicate that the learning environment created by educators is also influential to the children in building their basic values towards multiculturalism, ethnicity, gender, equity and equality.
My observation in a Canadian preschool daycare center deepens my understanding of the early childhood education environment in three facets: (1) The environment invites investigation, lingering, conversation and collaboration; (2) the aesthetic design of the environment enables children’s voice to be heard; (3) risk-taking environment enables the children to discover and develop their capabilities. A majority of the children in this center are immigrants. The preschool teachers in this center value diversity and inclusiveness as well as the opportunity to enrich each children’s life through collaborative relationships with other children and their families from all circumstances. Thus, the children who are educated in such environment hold an open and positive attitude towards diverse materials and events.
The Importance of Play
The play is vital to young children’s daily lives. It promotes their physical, intellectual and social development. While children are having fun in the play, they also develop new knowledge, skills and deepen the understanding of the environment (Wood, 2009). Wood states that the affordances of play are situated in how the play environment is planned, the materials and resources that are made available, and the children’s investment of existing knowledge, expertise and skills.
Socializing is an important part of the play. Interacting with their peers and instructors in playing activities enables children to develop peer relationships and participate in societal norms, culture and values. Through collaborative play, children can build relationships, combine ideas, develop oral narratives, and learn to take the perspective of others. These are the key elements of social competence, creative thinking, imagination and literacy (p. 21).
Engaging in play is also a way for children to develop self-knowledge, self-awareness and dispositions for learning. The positive emotions associated with play are as important as the skills they build in creating a disposition that embraces learning (BC Ministry of Education, 2008, p. 12).
Preschool Educators’ New Roles in Curriculum Planning, Implementation and Evaluation
Wood points out that teachers play a strategic role in planning for play, engaging informed scaffolding interactions (p. 30), and assessing teaching and learning broadly and holistically.
The teacher’s role evolves from a curriculum planner to the co-constructor of knowledge (Fraser, 2002), which means that teachers need to reflect on their observation of children’s behaviors and conversations for the purpose of planning and adjusting teaching activates. It also indicates that being a reflective educator is one of the changes in teacher’s roles.
Since children’s involvement in the curriculum design makes the learning process multidimensional, teachers’ reflective ability has to play a key role in the whole process of implementing the emergent or negotiated curriculum. The emergent or negotiated curriculum’s planning, designing, documentation and discourse processes consist of a series of inquiries. In order to understand children’s understanding and even participate in their conversations, teachers take a negotiated learning approach and penetrate children’s experience further by asking questions, provoking them to further investigation.
Children are interrelated to the extended families and communities they grow up. Therefore, preschool educators should strive to establish meaningful and reciprocal relationships among school, family and community and involve valuable external resources in the preschool curriculum.
If preschool educators can include children’s extracurricular cultural knowledge in the learning environment, children will benefit much from it in the long term. One of the ideal ways for early childhood teachers to learn about young learners’ knowledge located in their homes and communities is to apply a qualitative approach – visiting and exploring the places if possible. This helps establish a fundamentally new, more symmetrical relationship with the parents and students (Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992). There are other indirect ways to learn about it, such as getting cultural information from people who have experience living in those communities. Furthermore, observing children’s learning behaviors and communicating with children’ parents seems to be the most practical way for educators to get an idea of children’s cultural background.
It is also worth noticing that preschool educators in a multicultural society can draw implications on how to strengthen home-school-community connections from Indigenous ways of knowing, being and learning (Ball, 2002). Additionally, involving parents, extended family members and people from the communities in the school collaborative projects is conducive to transmitting cultural knowledge and pride to young children. Children can gain knowledge from a vast number of people including the community Elders, knowledge keepers, formal and informal teachers, scholars, and oral story-tellers.
In terms of evaluating early childhood education, teachers should be observant and professional to tell the “underground” and unknowable nature (Carr, 2001, p. 95) of children’s development, and foresee the potentiality and possibilities for future learning. Carr (2001) believes that the narrative assessing approaches, such as Learning Stories approach, can acknowledge the unpredictability of development, contribute to the children’s learning dispositions, enhance the early childhood setting as a learning community, and reflect the learning better than performance indicators (p. 101). The stories reveal children’s dispositions, strengths, interests, socializing with peers and teachers, and interactions with objects in school. Through the Learning Stories approach, the complex aspects of children’s development are observed, documented, discussed, and future teaching actions are decided accordingly. The Reggio Emilia approach also proves that documentation can provide an opportunity to review and plan future experiences (Fraser, 2002). The assessment approaches, such as Learning Stories, narratives, documentation, portfolio, can benefit both the learners and educators.
Conclusion
The Reggio Emilia approach views children as strong, capable, competent, and full of potential individuals. Educators should create a meaningful learning environment and play to help young children explore their unlimited potential. Nowadays, teachers no longer retain total control over early education classrooms. Their significant roles are shifting to co-construct the meaningful learning environment, build reciprocal school-family-community relationships, and apply proper assessment approaches. When young children develop their capacity and dispositions, they learn through supportive relationships with their families, with other children and adults in their communities, and with their environments.
References
Ball, J. (2002). The challenge of creating an optimal learning environment in childcare: Cross-cultural perspectives. symposium on enhancing caregiver language facilitation in childcare settings. Toronto: Centre for Language and Literacy Research Network.
BC Ministry of Education. (2008). British Columbia Early learning framework. Retrieved from https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/education-training/early-learning/teach/early-learning-framework
Callaghan, K. (2013). The environment is a teacher Ontario Government. Retrieved from http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/childcare/ResearchBriefs.pdf
Carla, R. (2012). The competent child. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meuYauSzt7U
Carr, M. (2001). Assessment in early childhood settings: Learning stories. London: Paul Chapman.
Fraser, S. (2002). Authentic childhood: Experiencing Reggio Emilia in the classroom. Albany: Delmar Thomson Learning.
Malaguzzi, L. (1994). Your image of the child: Where teaching begins. Child Care Information Exchange, 52-52.
Mayall, B. (2000). The sociology of childhood in relation to children's rights. The International Journal of Children's Rights, 8(3), 243-259. 10.1163/15718180020494640
Moll, L. C., Amanti, C., Neff, D., & Gonzalez, N. (1992). Funds of knowledge for teaching: Using a qualitative approach to connect homes and classrooms. Theory into Practice, 31(2), 132-141. 10.1080/00405849209543534
Strong-Wilson, T., & Ellis, J. (2007). Children and place: Reggio emilia's environment as third teacher. Theory into Practice, 46(1), 40-47. 10.1080/00405840709336547
Wood, E. (2009). Developing a pedagogy of play. In A. Anning, J. Cullen, & M. Fleer (Ed.), Early childhood education: Society and culture (pp. 27-38). London, UK: Sage.
© Wenyi Gong 2018
Comentários