I read in another teacher's blog recently that students perceive school as a place of danger, with their foremost academic goal being to escape danger as effectively as possible. I don't believe this to be an extreme position-a superficial glance at any middle schooler's views on the academic experience will confirm it. The idea of learning at school being a painful process is so deeply ingrained in our world view, there is little effort made by either parents or teachers to correct it. I would argue that accepting that children and teenagers are naturally resistant to learning is far more dangerous than we think and is helping create the dumbed down, anti-academic society we live in. It's particularly interesting how schools destroy children's natural love of reading, creating or listening to stories. Stories are so integral a part of the human experience-to learn through them should be the most human of acts. Yet, literacy and language classes are reduced to reward charts and stickers, book reports and dictionary definitions, robbing children of the opportunity to lose themselves in the joy of a good book. By second grade, books are another source of danger in school-some would say the biggest source. I've been studying the Reggio Emilia approach and there are some principles within it which are helpful in understanding how children learn and what can be done to create a positive, literacy-rich learning culture.
1) Children can construct their own meaning and are driven by their own interests to do so. Schools and homes often have separate spaces for toys and books. According to this principle, books should be associated with play, the true "work" of childhood. For older children, this can be applied in the form of interest-driven displays or shelves. For example, a child who is taking interest in dinosaurs could have a shelf with dinosaur toys, puzzles and books. For younger children, this means following their lead at storytime or when they are looking at books. The parent or teacher may want to talk about how Green Eggs and Ham is about saying yes to trying green food, but perhaps the child's imagination is engaged by a specific picture in the book instead. Literature is the door to many worlds and shouldn't be another way to enforce one-dimensional interpretation of information.
2) Children are natural communicators. The idea that children question and adults answer is damaging to both teachers and learners. When learning is viewed as a two-way process and the child is engaged with respect, he learns it is safe to be curious about the world. If the act of writing is guided from above, with a teacher assigning work that is not relevant to the child, it will become a chore. The culture can be changed if writing serves a purpose that children can understand. Writing something that has relevance-lists, labels, cards, game rules, treasure maps-is a way to demonstrate the usefulness of language while allowing for flexibility. Tracing "cat" nine times on a worksheet is a way to make writing a nuisance.
3) The environment is a child's teacher. Not all children will have the benefit of seeing parents incorporate reading into their lives. The learning environment is a way to promote a literacy rich culture. Role play areas can include books, diaries and newspapers. Toys and puzzles with letters and words, signs and labels, games which incorporate reading and writing, will all emphasize the importance of literacy.
4) Children have many "languages": spoken word, dance, pretend, drawing, building. All these languages can be engaged when encouraging literacy, whether it is through teenagers staging their own play or kindergarteners making the shapes of the ABC in a dance class.
5) Learning is its own reward. Incorporating traditional rewards systems for teaching language and literacy negates this idea. Giving a child a gold star for every 20 books he reads will indoctrinate him into the shortcut culture of our schools early in the game and rob him of the joy of reading. Conversely, some schools will punish children who don't read with black stars or red slips, once again emphasizing that reading is something you do because you are asked to do it. However, as a teacher I know it's not always easy meeting curriculum goals when students don't cooperate. Teachers need to be open to going the extra mile and following student interests when assigning literacy related work. If the high school syllabus calls for reading War and Peace, there are many ways to engage a classroom in lively discussion about its themes, whether it is through debate, theatre or first-person essays. If the primary school syllabus calls for every child reading for 20 minutes a day, incorporate stories into playtime, make books available and follow children's interests.
A world in which people read and write is a healthier world-few parents or teachers would contest that. What we need to do is re-evaluate why this is the case and change our own and children's attitudes to literacy in schools. There is no such thing as a child who naturally hates books, but there are many, many children who will never learn to love them because they perceive them as pitfalls that will land them in trouble with authority. It's time our schools learned dissociate themselves with danger.
1) Children can construct their own meaning and are driven by their own interests to do so. Schools and homes often have separate spaces for toys and books. According to this principle, books should be associated with play, the true "work" of childhood. For older children, this can be applied in the form of interest-driven displays or shelves. For example, a child who is taking interest in dinosaurs could have a shelf with dinosaur toys, puzzles and books. For younger children, this means following their lead at storytime or when they are looking at books. The parent or teacher may want to talk about how Green Eggs and Ham is about saying yes to trying green food, but perhaps the child's imagination is engaged by a specific picture in the book instead. Literature is the door to many worlds and shouldn't be another way to enforce one-dimensional interpretation of information.
2) Children are natural communicators. The idea that children question and adults answer is damaging to both teachers and learners. When learning is viewed as a two-way process and the child is engaged with respect, he learns it is safe to be curious about the world. If the act of writing is guided from above, with a teacher assigning work that is not relevant to the child, it will become a chore. The culture can be changed if writing serves a purpose that children can understand. Writing something that has relevance-lists, labels, cards, game rules, treasure maps-is a way to demonstrate the usefulness of language while allowing for flexibility. Tracing "cat" nine times on a worksheet is a way to make writing a nuisance.
3) The environment is a child's teacher. Not all children will have the benefit of seeing parents incorporate reading into their lives. The learning environment is a way to promote a literacy rich culture. Role play areas can include books, diaries and newspapers. Toys and puzzles with letters and words, signs and labels, games which incorporate reading and writing, will all emphasize the importance of literacy.
4) Children have many "languages": spoken word, dance, pretend, drawing, building. All these languages can be engaged when encouraging literacy, whether it is through teenagers staging their own play or kindergarteners making the shapes of the ABC in a dance class.
5) Learning is its own reward. Incorporating traditional rewards systems for teaching language and literacy negates this idea. Giving a child a gold star for every 20 books he reads will indoctrinate him into the shortcut culture of our schools early in the game and rob him of the joy of reading. Conversely, some schools will punish children who don't read with black stars or red slips, once again emphasizing that reading is something you do because you are asked to do it. However, as a teacher I know it's not always easy meeting curriculum goals when students don't cooperate. Teachers need to be open to going the extra mile and following student interests when assigning literacy related work. If the high school syllabus calls for reading War and Peace, there are many ways to engage a classroom in lively discussion about its themes, whether it is through debate, theatre or first-person essays. If the primary school syllabus calls for every child reading for 20 minutes a day, incorporate stories into playtime, make books available and follow children's interests.
A world in which people read and write is a healthier world-few parents or teachers would contest that. What we need to do is re-evaluate why this is the case and change our own and children's attitudes to literacy in schools. There is no such thing as a child who naturally hates books, but there are many, many children who will never learn to love them because they perceive them as pitfalls that will land them in trouble with authority. It's time our schools learned dissociate themselves with danger.
No comments:
Post a Comment