Listening to Teach

Beyond Didactic Pedagogy

Leonard J. Waks, Leonard J. Waks

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781438458335
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Klassenführung

Winner of the 2016 Outstanding Book Award presented by the Society of Professors of Education What happens when teachers step back from didactic talk and begin to listen to their students? After decades of neglect, we are currently witnessing a surge of interest in this question. Listening to Teach features the leading voices in the recent discussion of listening in education. These contributors focus close attention on the key role of teachers as they move away from didactic talk and begin to devise innovative pedagogical strategies that encourage active listening by teachers and also cultivate active listening skills in learners. Twelve teaching approaches are explored, from Reggio Emilia's project method and Paulo Freire's pedagogy of the oppressed to experiential learning and philosophy for children. Each chapter offers a brief explanation of one of these approaches—its background, the problems it aims to resolve, the educators who have pioneered it, and its treatment of listening. The chapters conclude with ideas and suggestions drawn from these pedagogies that may be useful to classroom teachers.

Part I

Listening in Established Pedagogies

1

A Reggio Emilia-Inspired Pedagogy of Listening

Winifred Hunsburger

The Bishop Strachan School, Toronto, Canada

Introduction

This chapter investigates and critiques the pedagogy of listening embedded in the philosophy of the Reggio Emilia schools for early childhood education, in Northern Italy. It examines the philosophical and political underpinnings of this pedagogy and explores the multiple meanings and purposes of listening in Reggio Emilia philosophy and how they inform emergent curriculum, collaboration among teachers and children, and the practices of observation, documentation, and interpretation. The paper considers the implications for general classroom practice and the difficulties associated with enacting this listening pedagogy.

Reggio Philosophy

In order to understand the central role of listening in Reggio schools some historical background is helpful. These unique schools arose literally out of the rubble of World War II, in northern Italy. Six days after the close of the war, parents in the town of Villa Cella set out to build a school for their youngest children that would lead them away from the horrors and destruction of war toward a new, more humane understanding of the world. The school was built from bricks salvaged by the women of the village and financed by the sale of an abandoned tank, some trucks, and a few horses left behind by the retreating Germans. It was parents who invited teachers to collaborate with them both to build the school and imagine a new pedagogical foundation for it. Together, parents, teachers, and community members began the journey toward a new approach that has come to understand children, teachers, and parents as co-protagonists in the educational project (Malaguzzi, 1998, p. 58). Today, educators from around the world flock to the municipal schools in Reggio Emilia to see this philosophy in action and many are experimenting with a Reggio-inspired approach in early childhood, primary, and even junior-level classrooms.

Founding teacher Loris Malaguzzi explained that this approach to education sprang from a simple but ultimately liberating understanding: “things about children and for children are only learned from children” (Malaguzzi, 1998, p. 51). At the same time, children are understood as competent and powerful learners, capable of forming relations with the world. These notions have given rise to a complex, social constructivist philosophy of education that understands children as ever involved in efforts to make meaning of their world.

“Things about children and for children are only learned from children.”

— Loris Malaguzzi

If, as educators, we accept and understand children as competent, capable learners and believe that things about and for them are best learned from them, then listening to children becomes essential. How we listen will not only influence what we learn from them, but also holds the potential to help children understand themselves as competent and capable. When an adult is fully attentive and present, and listens from a place of curiosity, respect, and openness, children are more likely to understand that the adult believes that they have something interesting and important to say and recognize their own power as meaning-makers (Edwards, 1998). According to Reggio proponent and theorist, Carlina Rinaldi, such deep listening is the very premise for learning for children and adults alike (Rinaldi, 2006). But how is such a listening stance accomplished and what implications does it in turn hold for curriculum, teaching, and learning? What does a pedagogy of listening look like in a Reggio-inspired classroom? To develop this picture, it is necessary to delve a little deeper into Reggio philosophy.

Any attempt to summarize the complex philosophy of Reggio will undoubtedly fall short. To examine this philosophy more fully, please refer to the suggested reading list at the end of this chapter. However, to explore the Reggio pedagogy of listening, we will examine three principles of the Reggio approach: emergent curriculum, the Hundred Languages, and the image of the teacher.

Emergent Curriculum

Reggio philosophy holds that education must align with the natural development of children. As children are engaged in making meaning of their world, curriculum must emerge from this meaning-making: their interests, ponderings, questions, and theories.

Curriculum in Reggio Emilia-inspired programs arises, then, from the interests and “business” of children. Teachers identify areas for investigation by attending closely to the conversations and actions of children and responses to their environment. This is not simply listening for ideas but listening to follow or enter into children’s thinking and knowledge construction. Teachers listen for questions and answers, ponderings, and theories. They listen for the meaning children make of their world. As they do so teachers consider both how these interests might lead to rich investigations and how the children can be stimulated to develop and improve their ideas. This can lead to long-term “projects” involving young children in extensive exploration, problem solving and creative thinking.

Projects arising from children’s interests are frequently unanticipated. At first glance, children’s interests may seem unrelated to typical, prescribed curriculum expectations. For example, in a study of teachers working with a Reggio-inspired approach, a grade 1 teacher described how her students’ fascination with strings of Mardi Gras beads brought by a child to class developed into a rich, mathematical, and sociocultural investigation of the purposes, meaning, and creation of jewelry (Hunsburger, 2008).

As children are engaged in making meaning of their world, curriculum must emerge from this meaning-making: their interests, ponderings, questions, and theories.

The teacher explained that she was initially resistant to the children’s apparent interest in the Mardi Gras beads. How could a study of such seemingly trivial objects lead to a project of any depth? But as the children continued to drape them over their structures in the block center, trade for them in the “grocery store,” and adorn each other with them she heard their powerful interest. When the children began to sneak jewelry into class from their collections at home and started to make paper bracelets for each other, she put aside her own fears that this might just be a shallow study of adornment and considered how she might challenge their interests and build on their fascination.

Inviting a parent who makes jewelry to visit the class and demonstrate how she created a piece soon led the students into an investigation of mathematical concepts of symmetry and patterning. Students began asking questions about different materials that jewelry could be made from and why people in different countries wore different types of jewelry. By putting aside her own preconceptions and listening deeply to discover the underlying interests of the children, the teacher worked with them to investigate jewelry from many perspectives and together they learned the utility of symmetry and patterning, the differences between jewelry made with organic versus inorganic materials, and discovered that jewelry could have purposes beyond simple adornment.

The Hundred Languages

Reggio philosophy holds that children develop and represent their understanding of the world through multiple modes, referred to as “the Hundred Languages.” Drawing, painting, sculpting, dramatic play, indeed any form symbolic expression are understood to be as valuable and important as written and spoken language for communicating and developing ideas. “Hundred Languages” is meant to convey the notion that children’s means of symbolically representing their understanding can and should be numerous. In Reggio-inspired classrooms teachers frequently ask children to show their ideas and theories by drawing pictures, creating three-dimensional sculptures, paintings, dramatic play, or musical pieces, and by writing or telling stories.

“Hundred Languages” is meant to convey the notion that children’s means of symbolically representing their understanding can and should be numerous.

A senior kindergarten class, for example, was engaged in a project about birds (Hunsburger, 2006). To stimulate their questions and provoke their thinking, the teacher brought an incubator to school to hatch duck eggs. The students were intrigued by the incubator. Classroom discussions about what the children thought was happening in the incubator and how eggs hatch, however, did not seem to be fruitful. Wanting to know more about the children’s understandings about the egg-hatching process, she offered them another “language” to share and develop their ideas. She asked the students to work with a small group of friends to draw their theories.

Each group’s drawing was different. In one drawing the children had provided play things such as balls and swings for the hatchlings. In another drawing the children had drawn a kind of cosmic egg-hatching machine in which some eggs hatched and the hatchlings proceeded to a penned space of green grass and trees while other eggs turned black and were shunted off to a dark box. In some drawings the children had seemingly divided their paper into distinct sections where each child worked on her own ideas, and where in other drawings children had apparently drawn onto each other’s work.

By offering another language and listening intently to it, the teacher was able to hear how some of the children held very anthropomorphic views of the hatchlings (offering play things), while others saw the egg-hatching process as a part of life and death. She could also hear how some children were able to share and build on their ideas with others, while some were developing their own ideas in isolation.

Listening in a Reggio context means being able to hear all languages, to understand all the meanings embedded in a range of representative modes.

The Image of the Teacher

In Reggio philosophy, the role of the teacher is not that of applying methods and strategies she has learned. Instead she is seen as “an author, together with others, of the pathways that will lead to the building of knowledge” (Cagliari, 2004, p. 2). The image of the teacher in Reggio is one of researcher and co-constructor of knowledge with the children. Teachers observe, document, reflect on, and interpret children’s conversations, questions, representations, and work. Teachers meet together to discuss their documentation and investigate possible meanings in children’s work in order to respond and challenge children to improve their growing knowledge. These practices are critical tools in the process of learning for children and teachers alike.

The teacher builds her own knowledge as she learns to understand the ways in which children build theirs. The teacher becomes, in effect, a researcher of children and a researcher of her own practice.

Essential to the role of teacher as researcher are the related practices of observation, documentation, and interpretation. These practices put listening at the heart of what a teacher does or as Cagliari explains, it is through these three practices that a pedagogy of listening is carried out (Cagliari, 2004).

Essential to the role of teacher as researcher are the related practices of observation, documentation, and interpretation. These practices put listening at the heart of what a teacher does.

Observation is not an isolated or periodic process, but a continuous one. Teachers observe children in all their contexts—in spontaneous play as well as in constructed learning situations. And while teachers may come to observation with a specific question or object in mind—to watch for social interactions, to listen for theory building, to note problem solving—they maintain an open receptivity to the situation at hand. The teacher does not passively stand outside of the experience under consideration but takes part as a participant observer.

Also important to observation are the tools the teacher uses. The perspective of the teacher when making observational notes will differ from that when she observes through the lens of a camera taking photos or videos and will have an impact on how and what she hears.

Documentation is the practice of capturing and sharing observations and is clearly dependent on the ways in which the teacher listened in the moment of observation. Documentation allows the teacher to come to the observation a second (or third) time and “re-listen” to the observation. It allows her to hear the observation again and focus more succinctly and finely. In addition, documentation may become a part of the project for the children, too. Documentation allows children to revisit their ideas, reexamine them, and reformulate their theories. Documentation assists them in understanding their own processes of knowledge creation.

Interpretation arises from the teacher’s careful and ongoing attention to her observations and documentation. It also arises from her discussions with colleagues. Interpretation is never understood as a final process, but as an ongoing and provisional one.

In the bird project mentioned earlier, the teacher is engaged in precisely these practices. She studies the drawings of the children as they are creating them and again after the drawings are complete. She notes her observations and questions and discusses these with a colleague as they observe the children’s work together. She arrives at provisional interpretations that guide her as she continues to construct the project with the children. Her research is carried out through an iterative process of observation, documentation, and interpretation. And it is through this process that she makes her listening apparent and part of her knowledge construction with the children.

Implications and Challenges for Classroom Practice

The pedagogy of listening embedded in Reggio philosophy has profound implications for ...