BY MARA KRECHEVSKY
The world of early childhood education is filled with unhelpful dichotomies. For example,
You are either talking about the group or the individual.
Learning is either teacher- or child-directed.
You are either supporting project-based learning or basic skills.
It’s either the learning process or the product that matters.
Teaching and learning are either cognitive or emotional endeavors
These dichotomies are not necessary, though many people may assume they are. Many school mission statements separate academic excellence and the ability to contribute to a democratic society into two distinct sets of expectations. Yet learning is an ongoing activity that begins at birth and continues over a lifetime. Current rhetoric about the importance of collaborative learning notwithstanding, most schools in the U.S. (and other individualist cultures) emphasize individual progress and achievement. In early childhood, a common curricular sequence begins with “all about me,” and then branches out to consider the family, classroom, school, and larger communities. In many ways, this sequence makes sense. Yet what would it mean to see the relationship between individual and group as mutually constitutive, so that from the very beginning of formal education, individual learning occurs with the world or community in mind?
Could schools become places where children are both supported in developing knowledge, skills, and understanding, and feel like they are contributing to something larger than themselves? When children and adults learn from and with each other, they become capable of understanding and accomplishing more than they would as individuals. In this view, children both advance their own knowledge and understanding and contribute to a more shared and public body of knowledge. They also learn how to learn from and with others—how to listen, how to build on and modify ideas, and how to negotiate disparate viewpoints.
Ron Berger of EL Education
The Good Starts Project is interested in supporting teachers of young children in creating communities of learners in their classrooms that embrace we as well as me. According to educator Ron Berger, schools make a mistake in thinking that children are necessarily oriented toward “me” or “we.” How do young children see themselves in relation to others? How do preschool and other early childhood settings shape adults’ and children’s perceptions of the relationship between the individual and the group? What do the cultural and political contexts contribute to the mix? We would like to help schools, from the very beginning, support the creation of communities of learners who see themselves as both independent and interdependent learners and members of a community.
We suspect there are at least four dimensions of the problem space:
1. What view of the child informs and shapes child-rearing and schooling?
Adult beliefs about children’s capacities shape how they interact with them. At one extreme, children are considered empty vessels to be filled with knowledge. Others see children as powerful, competent protagonists with the capacity and motivation to learn and understand the world around them. Jin Li, our colleague at Brown University, suggests that many individualist cultures tend to view the self as a stable entity with fixed attributes, whereas more collectivist cultures tend to see the self as relational and connected to others—in a constant process of becoming. (There is a saying, “In the West, if children don’t do well, they give up; in the East, they double their effort.”) If we see children as capable, strong, resourceful, and able and eager to learn from and with others, our approach to teaching and learning will reflect those beliefs and shape children’s sense of self and other.
2. What do children, teachers, families, and other stakeholders think learning looks like?
Is learning considered a private and individual activity, with children seen as independent discoverers and constructors of their own meanings, or a social and communicative act? In individualist cultures, educators often take an inherently group setting—school—and try to individualize it. Each child works on an individual product. Yet the types of activities, available materials, and time frame are often the same for all children. There is no collective goal, yet all individuals in the group are working[2] on the same things. Our PZ colleague, David Perkins, says learning is a consequence of thinking. If we also believe that thinking and learning are fundamentally social endeavors, children need the opportunity to build understanding, solve problems, and make meaning together.
3. What do children, teachers, families, and other stakeholders believe is the purpose of schooling?
Some months ago an educator who was starting a public charter school in Hawai’i told me that in her school, you would never hear the term “child-centered.” People might say “child-led” or “child-directed,” but not child-centered. To her and her colleagues, the center of education was not the child, but the land, the earth, and all living things. “Child-centered” is a common value in progressive education, particularly in early childhood. Yet the term is steeped in the Western culture of individualism, consumption, and capitalism. “Child-centered” implies education that is focused on the individual. What might an alternative look like?
In a civics and arts collaboration with the Columbus Museum of Art, teachers asked their students, “Why do you go to school?” Not a single student talked about the role of school in society. One high school student responded, “If the pandemic has taught me anything, it’s that school is not about education, but about government-sponsored babysitting.” This points to a need to better understand children’s beliefs about school and why societies (as well as individuals) might need schools.
4. What is the role of the teacher?
Loris Malaguzzi, founder of the Reggio Emilia approach to education
Many people continue to see teachers as deliverers—and children as receivers—of knowledge (the teachers teach and the children learn). In many US classrooms, teachers tell children what to do. Courtney Cazden, among others, has observed that group discussions in classrooms often look like a wheel in which the comments of children on the outer rim are directed toward the teacher at the center of the wheel, who then responds back to the individual child. Opportunities for children to learn from and with each other are scarce. Conflict is typically something to be avoided or resolved quickly.[3] However a different conception of the teacher’s role is possible. In the words of Loris Malaguzzi, the founder of the Reggio Emilia approach to early childhood education, “The aim of teaching is not to produce learning, but to produce the conditions for learning” (and we would add “…for learning from and with others).”
It is time to challenge the idea that in focusing on the group as a context for learning, the individual somehow gets lost; rather, the group helps individuals find their identity in a more nuanced and multifaceted way. There is no need to choose between the two, just an ongoing need to design and revisit the balance of individual and group learning. From the first days of school (and earlier!), it behooves us to remember that learning is an expressive and communicative act where knowledge and culture are both created and transmitted.
The Good Starts Project is generously funded by the Saul Zaentz Charitable Foundation.
I’d like to thank Carin Aquiline, Wendy Fischman, Howard Gardner, and Yvonne Liu-Constant for their valuable comments on an earlier draft.
[1] “Your child’s education is not an individual pursuit.” This is a statement kindergarten teacher Melissa Tonachel used to share with parents at child-teacher-parent conferences.
[2] Note that getting work done is not necessarily the same thing as learning.
[3] One exception is the Opal School, a public charter school in Portland, OR, that was recently closed due to the pandemic. At Opal, conflict was embraced. Children engaged in playful inquiry with many low-stakes opportunities to explore ideas, make mistakes, and take risks (see, e.g., Do-Over, Making Friends with Conflict, and Snapping Ideas Together).