A Pandemic of Acceptance

This morning, on my drive in to work, I was listening to the radio.  I heard a story about enrollment at West Point, specifically female enrollment.  There is a push to enroll more women at the Academy.  There seems to be an argument about whether the previous enrollment of less than 16% women was a goal or a ceiling.  I don't know, but I got to thinking about diversity at West Point.  Apparently they are striving to enroll more cadets of color too.  Purportedly, West Point culture has to change a lot of it is going to be a welcoming place for women and people of color to matriculate.  What if West Point does change and becomes as diverse as the general population?  What if the Academy culture alters to accommodate and include everyone?  What of the results, of the West Point graduates themselves?  What will the generals and colonels of the future be like?  What decisions will they make?  What will the prospects for military engagement be?  Suddenly, I could see a pandemic of acceptance, tolerance and a general rise in social skills sweeping the globe.  Wow!  Would we be as likely to wage war if we were all on speaking terms?  You know where I'm going with this, don't you?  For an early childhood teacher, it is all about the social skills.  Getting along means tolerating differences, and even celebrating them.  Because we are all wonderfully different.

So project-based learning is terrific.  There is no denying it.  When you are teaching, longer term projects that emerge from a group's collective interest can be super rewarding to support.  Watching inquiry push forward into new territory is amazing, as kids sort of lean forward together, anticipating a new discovery around the next bend.  Time and again, here at Dodge Nature Preschool, we see great ideas flame up and then fan into a bonfire of excitement and long-burning learning.  At the Preschool, we have some special success stories that we tell, to each other and to our professional colleagues far and wide:  the time "Owl Fever" struck the afternoon class and then the entire Preschool, the interest in shadow play that carried us through an entire year, an obsession with mixing and stocking colors to match everything we encountered outside, a deliciously dangerous attraction to snakes which lead one class into new territory...These stories, the way we document the exciting projects that unfold, come to inform our mission, the way we teach and how we prepare for a new school year at Dodge each fall.  They are important stories to tell and keep telling and they lead teachers to anticipate and look for signs of new projects developing.

New ideas emerge, like mushrooms popping out of the ground, and many become veins of inquiry that we follow for as long as we can.  This fall, actual fungus emerged everywhere, in great number and variety.  Kids noticed mushrooms and we noticed that they noticed and soon things snowballed and we were cataloging mushrooms, hunting for more, making books and spoor prints, cooking Puffballs (even trying to roast them like marshmallows!), drawing pictures and telling stories.  All because of a seasonal phenomena that got noticed.  Who knows how far this mushroom thing will go-- we are still in the developing stages of this project (the snow will likely put an end to it eventually), and kids don't know each other all that well yet, although jockeying for space to view small fungi is helping.

No, those aren't marshmallows...

To my mind, this knowing each other seems to be integral to the greatest kind of project-based learning.  The most rewarding class-wide projects seem to emerge and then to take hold in late winter and then they carry us right into spring.  Why?

I have a hunch that these later projects end up being more rewarding and go farther because the children and teachers know each other much better by mid-year.  The beauty of a mixed-age classroom is that we often have a coterie of children returning to a classroom each year, and they carry with them a special kind of consciousness.  The returners know the "drill," they've had experience with routines and habits, and they also know something else:  they know that people collaborate together in the classroom.  Maybe they haven't actually participated in collaboration previously--maybe they were too young and enjoyed solitary of parallel play--but, still, they've seen collaboration happen, they know it exists, that it is a practice here at Dodge, and in life.

Experience tells me that collaboration follows social development, of course, and social development leads to an ability to collaborate-- to observe and act on, react to and build on what your peers are doing.  As a whole, the classroom community generally solidifies after the turn of the New Year.  Kids not only know each other by name and sight, they know particular things about each other; they expect and anticipate things of each other; they look forward to social interaction with peers.  This is the trajectory of development we want to see.  I think early childhood teachers value this social and emotional development more than anything else, because it means that the child is learning how to be a person, and a person in a community.  These are life skills we're talking about.  And without these life skills:  suppressing your own desires and impulses in order to get along, sharing, seeing the value of sharing, interacting, and finding the joy in interaction, mastering your emotions enough to hang with your peers successfully--these skills get us through middle childhood, adolescence and adult hood.  These are skills that get us jobs and help us keep them.  And the beauty of social and emotional success is that it prepares you to learn more about the world around you and to acquire knowledge in the years to come.

This morning, a mom took me aside and told me that her child was expressing worry about friends.  "He wants to have friends.  He's worried he doesn't have any."  The worried child is three.  I said, "Terrific!  That's what we want to hear or see, an interest in peers!"  As a child develops, we look for his or her interest in other people, that awareness of society, to appear.  When we know a child is interested in the people around him, we know he's on his way to joining society.  Playing alone, or next to peers is perfectly normal in early childhood, but as a child moves through early childhood, we look for, and usually find the interest in peers emerging, like a mushroom after the rain!

We recently held our annual "Curriculum Night" for new or interested families at the Preschool.  I always want families to hear and see how curriculum emerges at Dodge.  Of course, socializing constitutes the bulk of early childhood curriculum.  It is my belief that the natural world provides the best catalyst for development, whether social or cognitive, for young children.  The playing field out there is delightfully uneven, for all of us.  Nature is largely unstructured or managed by teachers, so teachers too are placed out there, alongside their students-- more shoulder to shoulder, rather than in front or above them.  Out there, we are all people in our element; we share it.  As I have written before, it is all too easy for us to forget that we are of nature, part of the planet, animals in a network of animals.  And out there, I argue, children, and groups of them, develop socially faster and easier.

We had a class that liked to play on a giant log.  We found this out after visiting the log log and environs through the fall.  First a few kids, the older, more skilled kids, climbed the log.  Younger or less skilled kids couldn't help but notice, because we were all out there playing together in close proximity.  The less experienced kids either began to attempt the log, or to engage in other things, like drawing in the dirt with sticks.  The dirt drawers, in turn, were noticed by the skilled log climbers, who, attracted to the notion of drawing with a stick, came over to try their hand at it.  Some of the older, more skilled kids wrote letters in the dirt with their sticks.  Younger kids noticed and tried to do the same.  Around and around these exchanges went, with all the attendant skills developing on the fly, simultaneously:  eye contact, language, turn-taking, impulse control, emotional regulation, motor control and ultimately lots of cognitive development too.  An experienced teacher, used to looking for clues to developmental readiness, could easily step in and support interaction-- pointing out connections, making invitations, modelling behavior, encouraging collaboration, suggesting challenges, providing tools and support...One child in that class hung off to the side right through the fall.  She could climb trees really well, though.  So she went off to one side and did that with a teacher.  Of course, other kids noticed and wanted to try.  We invited the tree girl to demonstrate her skills, to explain "how to do it."  At first she balked at this suggestion, but eventually, perhaps overcome with annoyance at watching the little guys failed attempts, she began to snap out directions, "Put your foot here!  No here! Then grab this.  Like this."  Gently, we asked her to be patient, appealling to her sense of self, "They want to learn how to do it s well as you do it.  You're an expert.  It would be great if you could help them out.  You're really good at this."  Reluctantly, she slowed down and stopped barking at her peers.  Then she went off and climbed tougher trees and began to show off.

Her young fans followed and the exchanges continued.  Eventually, on hikes, kids would stop at certain trees and wonder aloud, "Do you think she can climb it?"  This girl became known, right along with her peers. The log place became known too, and loved.  Then, with encouragement, kids mapped all their favorite places, where they had done favorite things together.  At year end, we had a class party, hiking to five different places, planting a kid-made flag and belting out a favorite song at each site for families hiking with us.  When we sang the Pirate Song, the entire class stood shoulder to shoulder, arms slung around each other's necks.  The Favorite Places Project is my favorite project of all time.  Friendship is the best project.

This year, the tree girl is hamming it up right and left, looking for opportunities to make connections and lead the pack.  Now the whole class knows how to roll logs and find interesting bugs, how to be a "werecat," how to follow a deer trail through the prairie, how to snort when you laugh, all because she showed them the way.  When kids are together outside, I have noticed that there is really no place to hide.  Okay.  So a kid can hide, but she really isn't allowed to unless we're playing a game.  And, while playing, a kid is either going to notice other kids, or get noticed.  Usually the child who removes herself physically during play in the field becomes an object of particular interest.  Children either think she is experiencing something they haven't yet experienced, or they want to draw her into their play in some way, or they point out her distance to peers or teachers.  Outside, with the group, there is no such thing as really disappearing.  Most often, somebody is going to get in a kid's business in some way.

I would say that inside, it is entirely possible to hide from your peers and retain a large measure of anonymity.  A child may "fly under the radar" in the classroom (not under teacher radar), if she continually chooses solo activities.  Think of puzzles, drawing, cutting-- anything that is a one woman show.  These activities are great and we want children to enjoy a balance of independent and collaborative exploration, but a kid can resort to these activities if she is for some reason reluctant to join in group play.  Social development and social risk-taking can take a lot longer to emerge in a child who plays solo inside a lot.  It's no stretch then to imagine that a classroom that starts each day outside together might just gel as a community faster.  They might just access the rewards of group activities and projects a little sooner too.

So project-based learning is terrific, but true collaboration, listening and responding to peers, teaching one another (rather than more didactic teacher-led, top down inquiry), seems to be born of lots of social practice and skill development.  Maybe Dodge graduates will be the ones to integrate West Point... playing with stick guns instead of gun guns?  This week I asked two children strenuously waving sticks what they were doing.  The new friends turned and smiled, "We're fighting the air.  We're having an Air War."  That's the kind of military intervention I can support.