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The work of the Kindergarten teacher involves many dimensions of
understanding. The environment we create in the Kindergarten, the content
of the programme and our day-to-day responses to the children, all of these
reflect our perceptions of childhood. In our schools we are also concerned with
the dimension of awareness – being alert with all our senses operating, which
seems such a vital part of childhood. What then is our approach to creating a
Kindergarten programme?
To me the first thumb rule seems to be that we must preserve what chidren
do instinctively. Inherent in this is the acceptance of the wisdom that children
have the capacity to evolve their own tools of learning. This becomes selfevident
when we focus on the fact that nobody teaches a child to walk or to talk.
Current research seems to endorse this perspective too, and I will return to this
later.
So if children are doing whatever they instinctively do, then what are we
doing with them as teachers? Clearly our focus must shift from active ‘doing’ to
active ‘observation’.
Observation of children of this age group (4 to 5 years) yields the following
kinds of understanding:
- They are imaginative.
- They are intensely curious.
- They do things for the joy of doing them – there does not seem to be the
same kind of sense of purpose to a task that we experience as adults.
- They learn by imitation.
- The fear of failure, by and large, does not exist, unlike in the case of older
people.
- They are largely ‘feeling’ people, rather than ‘thinking, reasoning’ beings.
- They do not make a distinction between work and play.
- They grow rapidly – physically and cognitively.
Whereas none of the above are new observations, these characteristics
have deep implications for both the teacher’s attitude to the child and the activities
planned. Since attitudes are harder to pin down, let me first describe the activities
that are planned for young children in the Kindergarten programme at The School,
Chennai.
Our Kindergarten programme reflects our concern for allowing children
to do what they do naturally. It provides the space and time for children to potter
around and explore. This may take the form of ‘nature time’, or opportunities
for browsing in the library corner and playing with materials of their choice
(both Kindergarten and Montessori). Part of the daily routine of the children is
unstructured play time, with children choosing just about anything, including
the sandpit, or the doll’s house – a large enough house for children to take roles
and play out situations (and perhaps put unresolved issues to rest). Their intense
desire to imitate and help is utilised in participative duties in the Kindergarten
and what we call ‘daily life activities’. They listen daily to stories narrated or read
out, and also learn to sing a variety of songs everyday.
The only two areas where we have felt there is room for active intervention
are the development of ‘physical coordination’ and ‘cognitive skills’. Both of
these are fairly tangible and concrete ‘brain-based’ areas. Games and equipment
help in developing small and large muscle coordination. We also introduce
themes in our Kindergarten classes such as ‘Myself’, ‘Birds’ and ‘Trees’, to
integrate art activities, conversations, show-and-tell (a place for the children’s
initiative) and various cognitive activities.
Coming now to the teachers’ attitudes and responses, this is indeed a vital
area of concern, for the children of this age group unconsciously absorb cues
from us. Perhaps it is best to pose questions rather than attempt to put down
guidelines that are answers:
- How can we preserve the natural sense of initiative and non-conformity in
a child?
- How do we help children remain the ‘feeling’ people that they are, while
teaching them to reason, think and speak?
- How can we retain the spirit of play that is the child and not make heavy
weather of work and learning?
I think such questions will have greater meaning if we can appreciate the
manner in which the child evolves its own ‘tools of learning’. We may begin by
reflecting on what constitutes learning for this age group. Three factors come to
mind. They are:
- symbolic or metaphoric transfer
- lateral or creative thinking
- workmanship
Dr. Joseph Chilton Pearce, who has done extensive research on child
development, clearly indicates that the ability of the brain to deal with symbols
could be the basis of all learning. In other words, the content of all learning is
comprised of symbology. The number ‘1’ is the symbol of the quantum ‘one’,
the letter ‘H’ is the symbol of the sound ‘ha’, and language itself consists of
symbolic representations of objects and emotions.
So in this childhood period, when the brain is growing rapidly, if pathways
and connections of symbolic transference are not clearly established, there is
little chance of its happening later in life. We could take this capacity for symbolic
transference one step further to the capacity for creative or lateral thinking. Such
thinking involves finding solutions to questions or problems that are not linear,
which do not always follow a known path of logic. For example, after learning to
add single-digit numbers, when we learn to add two-digit numbers, this is a clear
case of a learnt algorithm being stretched further. However, in problem-solving
situations, known algorithms and patterns may not come up with a solution. For
instance, each time an unfamiliar word problem in mathematics is to be solved,
linear logic will not help in deciding which operator to use and in what sequence.
How is the brain to make the leap, to create new pathways, rather than move
along known pathways?
Viewing the situation anew through metaphoric or symbolic linkages seems
to be a crucial step in freeing the brain from the straitjacket of linear thinking.
And there seems to be a clear link between the brain’s ability to learn symbolically
i.e. through ‘symbolic or metaphoric transference’, and the child’s play.
Dr. Pearce gives the example of a child playing with a spool of thread. The spool
becomes a car, a road roller, a tractor, or just about any object that the child’s
imagination dictates. A child who is able to play these endless, apparently
‘meaningless’ games is actually tutoring its brain in symbolic thinking. The facility
of letting one symbol represent many things gives a flexibility to the thinking
process that could be the basis of creative thinking. A child with a rich inner 14
world or a lively imagination is actually developing the power to leap into the
unknown.
The key question that arises here is: ‘When children evolve their own
tools of learning through their play, do we as teachers understand and honour
what is taking place?’ For instance, how many of us feel that a child playing
endlessly with a piece of string or a pile of mud is, among other things, actually
teaching himself how to learn? Do we acknowledge this fact, that play is the
child’s greatest tool for self-expression, socialization as well as cognitive learning?
As teachers of young children, these are questions we need to be especially
awake to.
We may now ask: ‘What is the importance of ‘sensorial learning’ and ‘alert
awareness’ in the learning process?’ This is an area often talked about in our
schools, and even discussed with older students. But with an age group where
conversation and dialogue are not available as a tool of inquiry, we may need to
take a cue from Krishnamurti’s truly challenging statements that there is in fact
an ‘inward looking’, that one can ‘look without the word’. We have only some
broad clues in navigating this territory with young children. Among these the
following could be noted:
- Very young children often seem alert and alive to sensory perceptions, and
we would do well to recognize that state. Maybe in the very recognition is,
for the Kindergarten teacher, the most rewarding part of being there – the
experiencing, even if fleetingly, of that state.
- Planning activities that involve two senses simultaneously seems to be one
way of fostering ‘sensorial learning’. Our own imagination would be
stretched in attempting to do this.
- The full expression of a sense of order in the child is sometimes inhibited
by the clamour for external order. Sometimes the need for such clamour
comes simply from wrong timing or from pitching children into situations
for which they are not developmentally ready. For example, with young
children, group conversations are often laborious efforts. The brain appears
to be ready for orderly group activity only by age seven. So it may be a futile
exercise to create situations for group conversations and then clamour for
order and silence.
In conclusion, I feel that we need to be sharply aware of our own perceptions
of childhood. My own idea of childhood changed drastically when I worked
with a group of street and working children. I found that that the youngest child
in the programme had left home because she felt home was an unhappy place,
what with her father drinking regularly and frequent nasty quarrels. She had the
wisdom to decide that the environment she was living in was not conducive to
her well-being, felt strong enough to walk out of it and felt capable enough of
surviving in the ‘ big, bad world’ by herself. And she was but a 5-year-old!
Often it seems that we underestimate the spirit of independence and initiative
that little children are capable of. Our design of activities and more importantly
our interaction with them rarely reflects this understanding of them. It seems
easier to think of them as ‘sweet, innocent and mouldable’. To hold together
both, this sense of intiative as well as the vulnerability of the child seems to be
the tremendous challenge for the Kindergarten teacher.
Excerpt from Snow-Flakes
...This is the poem of the air,
Slowly in silent syllables recorded;
This is the secret of despair,
Long in its cloudy bosom hoarded,
Now whispered and revealed
To wood and field.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow |
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