Throughout my journeys as a teacher I have witnessed and participated in multiple learning environments where students express difficulty in and apathy about learning. My exposures to these observable disconnects have primarily occurred within the middle and high school grades. So when I entered the world of early childhood learning and witnessed joyful learning, new questions about learning emerged for me. What makes the difference in these different learning environments? Reflecting on my work as a teacher, I began to question the roles that teachers and students have in cultivating joyful energetic learning and how and why that changes over time. How do educators explain or talk about the educational maturation process and its relationship to reduced enthusiasm about learning?

 

I experienced a moment of clarity during a viewing of a video from Reggio Emilia. Twenty minutes into the video, I became aware that these students were given more time and support to engage with the topic and materials of their study than I was accustomed to seeing. Why and how did these teachers guide their students in these enthusiastic pursuits of learning? Should this guidance be limited to early childhood environments that do not submit to the standardized assessment activities that plague competitive education? What could elementary, middle, and high school settings and teachers learn from these early childhood attitudes and practices? As I reflect on my learning from the children in these videos, I believe that three critical elements of educational experiences emerge: listening, responsibility, and time.

 

Part of the process of adjusting my responses to these elements requires an understanding of my own educational history. Prior to graduate school, I had only experienced learning and teaching from a transmission model. Even as I participated as a teacher using the transmission model, I secretly resisted the structured, always quiet, and orderly classrooms of my peers. While I was content to push the boundaries of structure, I was unsure of how to proceed in meaningful ways. My exposure to Critical Theory in graduate school began to chip away at my comfort with transmitting knowledge and produced a discomfort that actually encouraged me to think and talk about learning as engagement and through multiple ways of making meaning. So the next several years of my teaching witnessed greater sensitivity to the diverse needs of my students and my role in assisting them to become enthusiastic life-long learners. What I understood as well during this time was that I felt very alone in my pursuits. Conversations with my peers made it clear that my personal transformation was difficult for them to accept without their own moments of clarity. For that reason I see this research as instrumental in presenting actual moments of unrehearsed, random scenes of children and adults responding to learning environments as opportunities for educators to question their individual relationships and responses to listening, responsibility, and time within their own learning environments.

 

During my observations, I witnessed teachers listening attentively to children as they expressed interest, confusion, and delight about anything that happened within and without school. This close listening became the resource for projects, field trips, and play for teachers and children alike. This close communication became a means that teachers used to demonstrate their trust in the students' abilities to be thoughtfully engaged in their own learning.

 

From this close listening emerged another difficult question that educators confront and debate. Who is responsible for learning—the teacher, the student, or both? In this early childhood setting, there were shared learning responsibilities. Trusting students to be interested in their own learning and creating the conditions through close listening, the teachers created a learning space where authenticity, excitement, and energy were part of students making meaning for themselves.

 

My observations would be incomplete without addressing the element of time. Educators discuss how the lack of time affects or constrains educational work. In a mad dash to accommodate the pressures of standardized tests, education in the minds of many teachers and students has become a thing to get through not an experience to build upon. In this time sensitive environment, older students experience the segmentation of subject matter into classes without understanding that all knowledge is connected. Part of the school structure that limits learning experiences to minutes in classrooms, facilitates the segmented thinking about knowing. What are the results on the macro level of knowing when educational interests are discussed as the micro level of minutes? While teachers may be able to think at the macro level, I wonder how students interpret time and knowledge. How does the presence of computer language, technology, and speed change or frustrate the way educators should or could talk about deep engaged knowing? How would learning change if more time for deep engagement were options for students of all learning levels? What do the children in these videos teach me about time and learning?

 

I believe that teaching possibilities occur when a prepared person negotiates the learning space between the transition model and the learner-centered model. The presence of meaningful structure and attentive listening makes this possible. Many educators express distress and restrictive thinking about the elements of listening, responsibility, and time, and I believe these attitudes inhibit the learning process. Questioning our individual thinking and responses to listening, responsibilities, and time may offer places to experience transformative thinking about our roles and work as educators. How do we infuse childlike inquisitive energy into the learning process of all students and maybe even ourselves? The discomfort or resistance that one feels to these video displays of learning may offer moments of clarity for teachers of all ages.

 

Deborah Anderson

researcher