With the reopening of the new school year, in an increasingly bleak
socio-political and economic context internationally, we risk losingsight of the healthy intention of instilling in children and young
people the importance of intellectual engagement that can facilitate the
construction of critical thinking and an alternative to the way of
perceiving what is happening and to resignation. Teachers, in
particular, should question the way in which the encounter with
knowledge is proposed in schools, given the growing alienation regarding
study and the desire for culture.
For many years, preschool has led the way in bringing the importance of
organizing spaces within schools into the debate on learning and
teaching, through theoretical research and experimentation. Criticism is
coming from many quarters that the practice of teaching different
subjects in the same way is still too widespread: you read a chapter or
listen to a lecture, memorize it, and then take a test or quiz to verify
how much each student remembers of that content. Imagine how different
it would be to approach geography as an exploration of space, an
observation of what's beyond the classroom, and the drawing and creation
of maps. Or to organize history as a collection of documents brought to
life through comparisons and dialogues, or even to approach literature
as a vital intertwining of the written and spoken word, brought to life
with readings aloud and plenty of drama.
In preschool, any free space becomes a theater, including the garden,
where children are free to invent and build scenarios with simple
materials, such as colored sheets, large cushions, cardboard boxes and
cartons, sheets of paper of all sizes, clothes pegs, stones, glass
balls...etc. Because the constructed scenario becomes the framework
within which children begin the game of "pretend," which is the true
theatrical game where everyone speaks and acts out their "part" of an
invented script.
There's a great deal of democracy in thinking that schools can be
equipped with open spaces, conceived as truly empty public spaces,
designed for meetings, exchanges, and conversations. This idea harks
back to the design of the Polis, conceived 2,700 years earlier by
sailors from Greece who landed in Sicily. When designing the new city
(near where the temples of Selinunte now stand), they chose not to build
anything in the center of that "polis," precisely for the purpose of
leaving an empty public space to be filled with discussions or
theatrical performances. Another thing children emphasize when they have
space is that "they argue less," another insight into how even personal
relationships can improve through large shared spaces, because we don't
experience a restriction on our imagination, but rather the ability to
let it "travel" alongside that of others.
In short, it could be said that differently organized spaces produce
different reactions, thoughts, and relationships. These changes can be
seen even in small modifications, such as moving the desks and, instead
of leaving them in a row, placing them next to each other to form a
rectangle, or removing the desks to leave a circle of chairs, or even
removing the chairs to arrange us to sit on the floor. Tullio De Mauro,
speaking of Mario Lodi, argued that "the most incisive lesson comes from
the account of his teaching: Mario enters a first-grade classroom on the
first day of school and proposes using the teacher's desk as an
excellent coop in which to raise chicks.
The teacher descends among the desks, arranges them in a circle, sits
down anywhere, and begins to speak. This is worth several volumes of
theoretical pedagogy." Comenius,(1) considered the forerunner of
Pedagogical Activism, was the first to argue, in the mid-1600s, that
"knowledge must necessarily begin through the senses, and only when this
observation of things has been made can words intervene to explain it
effectively."
Only a thought that restores the entire body to awareness can counteract
the tendency to believe that the entire world can be contained behind a
screen to be watched while sitting.
On the contrary, faced with the enormous amount of content available
online, we need our entire body and our senses even more, to practice
different expressive languages, and to encounter nature and the city,
treasuring non-virtual explorations and experiences.
From this perspective, let's reflect on what the demeaning experience
of Covid, which relegated us to screens to ensure we weren't infected,
has meant for all of us. But let's ask ourselves how much we are still
victims of this legacy, which has instead led our governments to
discover new forms of control and power, preventing us from restoring
the idea of school as a "great gathering place," a meeting place where
the thoughts and images of an individual are reflected in an image of
shared community, through the ability to explore and push ourselves
imaginatively beyond our usual horizons, to change our destiny by
seeking and affirming the humanity within us.
In my opinion, working in preschool should be experienced by all
teachers for a period of time, perhaps even by those who teach at
universities, because at that age, in their spontaneous way of playing,
children transform spaces and invent worlds that don't exist. They are
utopian, but imagining new possible worlds and prefiguring with
imagination what doesn't yet exist are truly human ways of relating to
nature and society.
We were born to tell stories, to create and nourish ourselves with
poetry, music, and theater, and all of this helps us make sense of the
world we live in.
Let's begin to transform the spaces of our schools with conviction,
knowing that the entire world needs to be revolutionized, but we can
only begin with the places we inhabit and with ourselves.
Notes:
1) John Amos Comenius
https://alternativalibertaria.fdca.it/
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A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
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