Early childcare can be a ballet or a train wreck.
A ballet is excruciatingly care-ful work that comes off as effortless, as gravity defied .
In a train wreck, the energy is hurtling about the room distructively. Some children are walking wounded, and others are passionatly
at war. All are casualties when the teacher loses control.
So what should a teacher be?
A stagedirecter ,interior-designer, psychologist, nutricianist, nurse, mother, script-writer, and therapist, all working with flexibility so
her improv. cast of children will become a community that cares for each other, and become more real and alive for themselves,
too. It is a ballet of awarenesses.
The teacher as enviornmental designer, and listener is the Reggio Emilia approach. (School as machine for learning.) With the
prepared enviornment, the teacher teacher places 'beautiful things" within their reach, monitors their conversation, and gives inspired
guidance at the right times. Persistance and development is harvested from the flux of childhood. The children are active and
curious. The teacher can track their development and scaffold ( model) a new concept or technique for them by breaking it into
small parts. Then children can use the technique or concept, one they would not have come up with by themselves, in an ongoing
project.
Scafolding can also help with emotional problems, by giving a child techniques for self regulation, so that an excitable child might be
taught to calm herself down with a sequential routine. The teacher models a way of being in the world cognitively, kinetically
socially, and emotionally.
Vygotsky introduced the concept of scaffolding, used in Reggio Emilia, as a cultural tool given to children as Froebel gave his
wooden blocks or colored spheres: as a develomenal stimulus at the appropriate time.
Froebel thought that the teacher should do the Platonic work of awakening the language of forms in children.
( To see a world in a grain of sand
Heaven in a wild flower
hold infinity the palm in your
And Eternity in an hour)
Vygotsky wanted to hand children competance within their own society. Nothing mystical. But in the Reggio Emilia it verges on the
transcendent. Aesthetics and logic unified as in Froebel, both being ways to get to the same place.
These are models for a teacher, Vygotsky, Reggio Emilia. I think that it is as impossibile for a student to project herself as a teacher as it is for a shild to imagine what being in school is really like.
In my three-time experience of observing classes, a good teacher seems to be not only versed in how children think and feel but a singer, actor, storyteller, dancer and charasmatic dynamo all round!
But teaching uses our particular talents too. This essay will be finished when I do my practice project with actual children. And when I observe a less kinetically gifted teacher.
