Sweden Presentation to the NSW parents 5/7/14
in attendance:
Lenny and Elaine Naftalin
Laura Hubber
Paige Greenspan
Barabara Polland and Tamy Cohen
Andy Powell
Amanda O’Keefe
Corey Lewin
Karen Koh and her sister Kristin
Nicole Rotondo
Sean Maher
Doug Shemer
Steph Altman
Maya Tauber
Ted Skillman
Cindy Nelsen, Roleen Heimann, Kristin Sherman presenting
Notes taken by Amanda O’Keefe, Laura Hubber, and Kristin Sherman
Harold Gothson: “School should be a place where you can change your mind.”
“You have to change your mind… It’s not about what I think, it’s not about what We think. To take the other Persons viewpoint, this is how we learn.”
Roleen: The Swedish are looking at how they’ve been influenced by the Reggio Approach, but what does it look like here? It looks different from everyone because the struggle for us is we always want to learn something and apply it on Monday morning. We have to have a discourse that is uncomfortable. We can embrace our own identity while reaching outside of the Reggio influence for quality education while still inspired by Reggio Emilia.
Kristin: Our NSW identity is about relationship. Through this legacy we can bring the image of the competent child to the wider community for making change in the quality of children’s education.
Cindy: The more you bring your own knowledge to your own community the more you can shape the way that children are viewed in society.
Roleen: As a school, as a collaborative (New School West, First Presbyterian, Branches Atelier, The Growing Place, Evergreen Community School) we want to bring more support to preschool and elementary school teachers outside of our collaborative and outside of the Reggio influence.
Takeaway: We want to make our learning visible. The schools were more functional and documentation was hidden. Not on display for parents or other educators to see.
Kristin: We met Gunilla Dahlberg, author of a chapter in The Hundred Languages of Children and a book on documentation as well as many others. She presented on the philosophical ideoligies behind considering aesthetics in education: love, beauty, energy. She spoke about capturing the moments in between: about becoming, through learning. This offers “goosebumps” she said. She went on to explain that “When you are in proximity of learning, you are in a pre personal stage of excitement that exhibits in goosebumps. If your cell has been effected by goosebumps you gave passion and power and that causes you to act. – to effect and be effected. Malaguzzi, the founder of the Reggio Approach, often quoted Spinoza, an 18th century philosopher, who promoted that this trigger is the moment before emotion. We don’t know how a body will react or how a person will learn. We have to be sensitive to this, these goosebumps. In a time when we are experiencing more and more testing of children, we have to remain sensitive to these goosebumps. When we label children ‘in need’ or ‘at risk’ we diminsh the richness of each child. We have to question the role of the teacher. Where we used to trust, now we test. It is important to look at quailty of education, but how we look at it needs reassessment.
Kristin: At NSW we are now questioning if DRDP that we are using in parent teacher conferences are the most effective way of evaluating our work of the children. We use them only to try to show parents that the child is ready for transition to kindergarten by state standards. We use them to ease the parent’s mistrust of the transition to the new environment. But, we wonder if we are coming from the right perspective. We would love to dialogue with parents about this further.
The Swedish have a Pedagogical Institute that is connected to The Stockholm University and the Reggio Emilia Institutet. The teachers marveled at the teacher training there. The teachers are given one year to train with a pedagogista and from there, they can drop in forever and learn more.
Cindy: 26 small schools feed into this Institute.
Roleen: The 5 school collaborative has been seen as exclusionary. We study together, have retreats together and have kept the core group small in order to move more deeply together. How do we open it up? The collaborative dream would be to have a center similar to the Pedagogical Institute and also be able to share with elementary schools. This institute in Sweden also has 3 mentors who can go into the school and help teachers within their context and pave a way to implement the approach.
Kristin: Karin Hultman did her doctoral thesis on “Feminist and Gender in contemporary Swedish Preschool Pedagogy” She was a delightful and engaging speaker in spite of that title. Karin Hultman is a professor at the Stockholm University. She is a poststructuralist feminist and did her Doctorate on Feminism and Gender. She shared with us Sweden’s history with gender studies. In the 1990s, the Swedish preschools thought they did ‘pretty well’ with gender. They turned their lens on themselves and found that, in fact, they treated girls and boys differently. Due to this discovery, they engaged in what they called compensatory pedagogy: making up for what is not given to boys or girls.
The premise of compensatory pedagogy was that each child only has access to 50% of the world as defined by their gender. To combat this, they divided the children into girl and boy groups and exposed them to areas and ideas that were determined the ‘opposite’ gender. Karin reflected that this put the emphasis for change on the children. That this somehow would create a perfect person with a perfect childhood. This is impossible because there is no one answer for all of us. If we really value that we are each unique and a rare combination of masculinities and femininities rather than simply ‘boys’ or ‘girls’ narrowly defined by our cultures, then we have to put the emphasis of change on the teachers.
We as teachers have to deconstruct how we are setting up our environments, our expectations of children, and even our language with each other and children.
Roleen: NSW has already caught ourselves in some language (addressing groups as ‘you guys’) and as our awareness grows, we are catching more and more moments we need to research to understand. We invite you into that research with us.
Kristin: We decided to have a research question over a two year period. We are in the beginning stages of observing ourselves through this lens and researching what we discover. We are monitoring our language, for example: The traditional mother’s day poem the children worked on this week. After it was compiled, we wondered at the singling out of ‘she’ and ‘mothers’. Are we contributing to the socially accepted ‘norm’ rather than seeing our community in all it’s diversity? Because, we KNOW that dads, gay men, nannies, grandparents, aunts and uncles and many other members of families nurture and are loved by children for these nurturing qualities. But, our questions to the children were: What do you love about your mother? Instead of discussing mothering, nurturing and how that feels and who contributes to that. It gets pretty ‘big’ when you put your mind to it. It disrupts a lot of ‘normal’ thinking. And, I think that’s the point – to disrupt the heteronormativity that dominates society.
Heteronormativity-I thought the Swedes made that term up in a slip up in translation from Swedish to English. Turns out, no. Heteronormativity is the dominant white, male, straight society we assume to be present at all times. I won’t go into too much detail now but here is how it effects the children. We know our community of parents are pretty hip. We know most of this is coming from media influences beyond your control. It’s in the adverstising, on the billboards, in the coffee table magazines, it’s everywhere. And so, are children ‘learning’ to perform as a girl or boy in order to fit an image?
Performance, as promoted by Butler, is a perception of who we are, not truly who we are. For example, I do not grow my hair long and wear makeup becuase I am a girl, I grow my hair long and wear makeup so that I am perceived as a girl. And, boys have not escaped this pseudo identity either. To some extend, we have mastered these performances and within mastery, there is submission. We have submitted to these performances. As adults, it would be incredibly hard to disconnect the performance from our actual identity, but with children, we have the opportunity to support their unique identity in these preschool years.
So, what is that research question we’re going to pursue for 2 years? The collaborative is going to study together under the umbrella of identity formation. We at NSW are looking at gender formation as a part of Identity. When we watch the children in the graduating class during free choice, we see a division of the sexes. We see very strong girls playing powerful roles through princesses that are ranked according to their accessories. We see boys bristling with guns and one upping each other with their powers of destruction. We ask ourselves if these are performances. If we were to focus our research on the strength of each individual identity, to document it, leave room to add to it, post it in the classroom and refer to it daily, would this effect how children exhibit power in their free time, or would the performance of ‘girl’ and ‘boy’ so supported in media and society remain the ‘easy role’? The one we all master, and therefore submit to?
NSW research question (will be refined)
In a 2 year study, how will the promotion of an identity based on personality strengths and skills, uncategorized by gender, exhibit in free time, power play?
More notes: After the Sweden Presentation the parents and teachers had much to discuss:
Roleen: 3-5 the early years are all about roles.
They have to play stuff out to figure out who they are. We need to let them, but we are getting more conscious about how we direct them. And even asking a hard question which is ‘are we directing them to places they don’t want to be?’
If it overtakes their life then we look at that, if the child can’t leave the character then they look at it.
Flat rules such as no media shirts haven’t worked in the past.
The hard part with media play is there is no exchange. The roles are static, they are set so it’s hard to get creative or inclusive or even personal with them.
Kristin: If there was no ‘Frozen’ instead of the children going home and saying ‘I didn’t get to be Elsa’ it would be ‘I didn’t get to be the mommy’. It’s about power roles.
Roleen: We can consider also turning off our media. You have to say “have you noticed that we’re not spening time together…?” Instead we get panic stricken and say “no tv.”
In the past after coming back from Italy, the Collaborative started Re-Discover inspired by The Remida Center in Italy. This provided open ended materials for schools. It is still in busines but we aren’t using the space as we intended. We need to ask ourselves “why?” Is it because the teachers are focusing their time on their work and not finding the right resources? The Collaborative might have needed a different business model to support the vision. Now the Collaborative is taking that experience into account as they look to create a Pedagogical Institute and how to make it work.
As we support the Collaborative, we also want to start more parent education – are you interested in a book club?
The Westside Collaborative is made up of these preschools:
Evergreen Community School
The Growing Place
Branches Atelier
The New School-West
First Presbyterian (they didn’t go to Sweden)
References:
Chasnoff, Cohen (1997) It’s Elementary: Talking about Gay Issues in Schools (Series of 4 youtube videos)
Davies, B. (2006) Subjectification: The Relevance of Butler’s analysis for Education
Hultman, K. (2104) The Reggio Emilia Institutet, Sweden (NSW audio recording)
Robinson, K. Diaz, C.J. (2005) Diversity and Difference in Early Childhood Education