There are hundreds of different images of the child. Each one of you has inside yourself an image of the child that directs you as you begin to relate to a child. This theory within you pushes you to behave in certain ways; it orients you as you talk to the child, listen to the child, observe the child. It is very difficult for you to act contrary to this internal image. For example, if your image is that boys and girls are very different from one another, you will behave differently in your interactions with each of them.
(Malaguzzi)
‘Why of the trace? What led us to the choice of this word? I have begun
to answer this question. But this question is such, and such the nature of
my answer, that the place of the one and of the other must constantly be
in movement. If words and concepts receive meaning only in sequences of
differences, one can justify one’s language, and one’s choice of terms, only
within a topic [an orientation in space] and an historical strategy. The
justification can therefore never be absolute and definitive. It corresponds
to a condition of forces and translates an historical calculation. Thus, over
and above those that I have already defined, a certain number of givens
belonging to the discourse of our time have progressively imposed this
choice upon me. The word trace must refer to itself to a certain number
of contemporary discourses whose force I intend to take into account. Not
that I accept them totally. But the word trace establishes the clearest connections
with them and thus permits me to dispense with certain developments
which have already demonstrated their effectiveness in those fields.
(Derrida)
The Web of Life is woven & the tender sinews of life created …
(William Blake)
The environment you construct around you and the children also reflects this image you have about the child. There’s a difference between the environment that you are able to build based on a preconceived image of the child and the environment that you can build that is based on the child you see in front of you — the relationship you build with the child, the games you play. An environment that grows out of your relationship with the child is unique and fluid.
(Malaguzzi)
To learn to live: a strange watchword. Who would learn? From
whom? To teach to live, but to whom? Will we ever know? Will
we ever know how to live and first of all what “to learn to live”
means? And why “finally”
By itself, out of context-but a context, always, remains open,
thus fallible and insufficient-this watchword forms an almost
unintelligible syntagm. Just how far can its idiom be translated
moreover?
(Derrida)
When you begin working with children in the morning, you must, as adults, pose questions about the children, such as: “When are these children really going to begin socializing?” And at the same time the children will pose questions to the adults: “When are the adults really going to begin socializing?” This is a dialogue that needs to be continual between the adults and the children. The adults ask questions from the world of adults to the children. The children will ask questions to the adults. The expectations that the children have of the adults and the adults have of the children are important. We must spend some time talking about these expectations.
(Malaguzzi)
To gratify senses unknown? trees, beasts and birds unknown;
Unknown, not unperciev’d, spread in the infinite microscope,
In places yet univisited by the voyager, and in worlds
Over another kind of seas, and in atmospheres unknown
(William Blake)
we must perforce consider first the myths of the Near and Middle East that underlie Christianity … the motive force that produces these configurations cannot be distinguished from the transconscious factor known as instinct.
(Jung)
The world came out of an egg. More precisely,
the living creator of the life of the world came out of an egg: the sun, then,
was at first carried in an eggshell. Which explains a number of Ammon Ra’s
characteristics: he is also a bird, a falcon (“I am the great falcon,
hatched from his egg”). But in his capacity as origin of everything,
Ammon-Ra is also the origin of the egg. He is designated sometimes as the
bird-sun born from the primal egg, sometimes as the originary bird, carrier
of the first egg
(Derrida)
I will arise, Explore these dens, & find that deep pulsation
(William Blake)
We can never think of the child in the abstract. When we think about a child, when we pull out a child to look at, that child is already tightly connected and linked to a certain reality of the world — she has relationships and experiences. We cannot separate this child from a particular reality.She brings these experiences, feelings, and relationships into school with her. And it is the same for you as adults. When you enter the school in the morning, you carry with you pieces of your life — your happiness, your sadness, your hopes, your pleasures, the stresses from your life. You never come in an isolated way; you always come with pieces of the world attached to you.
(Malaguzzi)
To live, by definition, is not something one learns. Not from oneself, it is not learned from life, taught by life. Only from the other and by death. In any case from the other at the edge of life. At the internal border or the external border, it is a heterodidactics between life and death.
(Derrida)
Of course, many things that happen in school can be seen ahead and planned beforehand. But many things that happen cannot be known ahead of time. Something will start to grow inside the child and suddenly what is happening in the school will move in that direction. Sometimes what happens starts inside the adults. School can never be always predictable. We need to be open to what takes place and able to change our plans and go with what might grow at that very moment both inside the child and inside ourselves.
(Malaguzzi)
When you are giddy, you see the world running circles round you. Obsessed with the idea of means and end, of work and purpose, you see me apparently functioning. In reality I only look. Whatever is done, is done on the stage. Joy and sorrow life and death, they all are real to the man in bondage; to me they are all in the show, as unreal as the show itself.I may perceive the world just like you, but you believe to be in it, while I see it as an iridescent drop in the vast expanse of consciousness.
(Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj)
Each one of us needs to be able to play with the things that are coming out of the world of children. Each one of us needs to have curiosity, and we need to be able to try something new based on the ideas that we collect from the children as they go along. Life has to be somewhat agitated and upset, a bit restless, somewhat unknown. As life flows with the thoughts of the children, we need to be open, we need to change our ideas; we need to be comfortable with the restless nature of life.
(Malaguzzi)
the infinitely small point of meaning which the languages barely brush … What can an infinitely small point of meaning be? What is the measure to evaluate it? The metaphor itself is at once the question and the answer.
(Derrida)
All of this changes the role of the teacher, a role that becomes much more difficult and complex. It also makes the world of the teacher more beautiful, something to become involved in.
(Malaguzzi)
Since these concepts are indispensable for unsettling the heritage to
which they belong, we should be even less prone to renounce them. Within
the closure, by an oblique and always perilous movement, constantly risking
falling back within what is being deconstructed, it is necessary to
surround the critical concepts with a careful and thorough discourse-to
mark the conditions, the medium, and the limits of their effectiveness and
to designate rigorously their intimate relationship to the machine whose
deconstruction they permit; and, in the same process, designate the crevice
through which the yet unnameable glimmer beyond the closure can be
glimpsed.
(Derrida)
keep silence
don’t rush to finish your poem
the finisher of the poem
the creator of the word
will begin to arrive
(Rumi)