“emphasizing collaboration among teachers as the starting point of all learning and development for adults and children, many practices (at the level of physical environment, curriculum, and work with parents) intended to carefully and thoughtfully introduce each new child and family to the school community and to allow relationships among and between adults and children to grow and flourish, many customary curricular activities that bridge children to their near community (neighborhood, city, and surrounding countryside) as well as bringing the community into the schools and fostering the public’s interest in and commitment to the schools, the project approach, involving long-term, open-ended investigations, usually conducted by small work groups of children, and many and extensive uses of documentation to create public memories and a sense of belonging within each classroom group and school, and to provoke and enrich learning about project work among children, parents, and teachers.
The principle of an education based on relationship refers to more than simply the process or social context required for education, however. The principle also has to do with the content of education, to what children want to learn and what teachers should be teaching in school. In Reggio, learning is essentially about constructing more and new connections between ideas–making knowledge richer, deeper, broader and more reflective of the complexities in the worlds of reality and imagination available to the children. The premise is that even young children desire contact with big, important ideas, not small, segmented bits of knowledge considered suitable for “young” minds:
[Our goal is always] to put everything together, to try to widen the power of our intelligence through the possibilities of relationship… . Children start to understand when they start to put things into relationship. And the joy of children is to put together things which are apparently far away!… And the more difficult is the situation–the more problems the children have put to themselves–then the more relationships they can make, the more their curiosity will grow, and the more questions they will continue to ask. (Malaguzzi, National Learning Center, Wash., D.C., June, 1993)
Education as relationship is an idea with sufficient scope to point us toward the theory we want and need. It is capable of addressing and explaining a wide range of observations and processes and has comprehensive application to practical situations and problems. It refers simultaneously to both the social and intellectual dimensions of the teaching and learning process; as well as to both the beginnings (necessary preconditions) and the ends (goals) of education. Relationships among people and ideas are where education starts, what it is about, and what it is for.
education as socialization or cultural transmission (the “blank slate,” or “empty vessel” image), was thoroughly despised by Malaguzzi for its mechanistic (social engineering) implications.
the vision of the active, construc-tivist child and the role of cognitive conflict and disequili-brium in powering cognitive growth are parts of the assumption structure and belief systems of many or most American early childhood educators; likewise, these principles (though not the linear view of development)were deeply internalized by Malaguzzi.
An effective school connects people, to create community. An effective school connects the curriculum, to create coherence. An effective school connects classrooms and resources, to enrich the learning climate. And an effective school connects learning to life, to build character. — L.M.
Dewey’s ideas are carried in the intellectual chromosomes of every American educator and his works continue to be revisited and reinterpreted every generation. And yet, despite all the discussion, creating community is very difficult to achieve in practice in American schools-given that many children, not to mention teachers, are highly mobile and transient, and moreover, many of the organizational elements in schools work toward increased fragmentation and segmentation of knowledge and social relations.
moral community
community of inquiry
community of learners
responsive (or civic) community
It has long been an accepted belief by the American public that the schools must and should prepare students for future citizenship in a participatory democracy. Further, what this preparation consists of has also been widely understood: Students must be prepared to become informed and active voters, who seek and then use their best knowledge to make informed and educated choices and decisions. Education for democracy, then, traditionally has been concerned with preparing individuals to become autonomous, self-regulated, and informed decision-makers. But is this really enough? That is the question raised by Etzioni, Putnam, and Fukuyama
The key to this community is the establishment of a sociomoral atmosphere based on respect
The sociomoral atmosphere is the entire network of interpersonal relations that make up a child’s experience of school. This experience includes the child’s relationship with the teacher, with other children, with academics, and with rules (DeVries & Zan, 1994, p. 7).
In the moral community, an atmosphere of cooperation prevails. The teacher seeks to optimize interaction among and between the teacher and children, and to maximize the group’s opportunities to confront problems with constructive activity. Many events of the classroom day can be structured so at to make them moments for cooperation. Particularly fruitful opportunities include grouptime, guidance and discipline situations, conflict resolution, decision-making, rule-making, voting, and engaging in open-ended discussions of social and moral problems, either hypothetical or actual (Edwards, 1986). The teacher takes as the curriculum the social life of the classroom and aims to make the classroom a democratic, just community (Kohlberg and Lickona, 1987). “The resulting sociomoral atmosphere is one of vitality and energy invested in the experience of being together” (p. 53), where social relationships are characterized by relative equality and by the reciprocity conducive to decentering and perspective-taking.
the classroom and school are nested inside a graduated series of circles–the communities of neighborhood, city, region, country, and world, that together provide the moral maps, connections, and supports without which what goes on in the classroom and school becomes, precisely, meaning-less.
social-constructivist.
Closer to Malaguzzi’s vision of education as relationship is David Kennedy’s (1994a, 1994b, 1995, in press) discussion of the community of inquiry. The term, “community of inquiry,” was first used by the American pragmatic philosopher, Charles Saunders Pierce. Matthew Lipman (1991) is known for defining this concept for our era, in a synthesis of elements of the thought of Pierce, Dewey, Paul Schilder, Josiah Royce, G. H. Mead, Justus Buchler, and Lev Vygotsky (Kennedy, 1995). The community of inquiry is conceptualized as participatory, transactional, and transformative–based on interaction, dialogue, and collaboration among meaning-makers. In Kennedy’s writings are many fascinating texts showing the kind of high level philosophic discussions that can take place among teachers and very young children. Such discussions, however, do not fully compose or create the community of inquiry. The discussions cannot exist without a supportive classroom context: They are part of life in a transformed classroom or school community– conceived to be a total departure from traditional schooling with its rigid hierarchies, one-way environments, lockstep curricula, and insensitivity to individual differences. At the same time, the community of inquiry is not sufficient by itself to create such a transformed community; inquiry is only one dimension of the larger work of community-building which must take place across all domains of school life
In the inquiring classroom, teachers engage in many forms of co-action with children-observing, modeling, nurturing, interpreting, facilitating, and provoking. The glue that holds this community together and directs it forward is self-critical practice–inquiry with and by children. The children and adults together achieve moments of intersubjectivity based on five kinds of sharing of meanings–what Kennedy calls the communities of gesture, language, mind, emotions, and interests
The sharing of meanings through gesture and language create a community of mind. The sharing of mind is not merely intellectual but involves an emotional dimension; the children experience a joining of feeling, in the sense of a transformation felt by the group members as a sense of wholeness with others, beauty and harmony, and mutual affinity. The individual does not disappear or recede, however, but rather seeks to count and be heard, to make a difference, and to achieve influence and recognition in the group through dialogue and negotiation and a (at least partial) sharing of interests and goals–what Italians call becoming a “protagonist.”
As Kennedy (1994a) says:
The individual cannot know reality adequately; therefore inquiry must be a communal venture… the whole has an emergent character that transcends any individual
What Kennedy finds most important about the Reggio Emilia approach is its collaborative vision of participating adults who jointly co-construct over time a common image of teaching and learning, and who realize that no current construction is ever final. The community of inquiry is certainly a more expansive community than the moral classroom is terms of the relationships that constitute it and in its much more open-ended and spiralling approach to time:
A growing body of research on teacher planning and teacher thinking suggests that experienced teachers do not proceed in a linear fashion when planning for teaching. Instead, they plan in ways that are significantly more recursive and cyclical, more learner-centered, and structured around larger chunks of content and time than those of the single lesson. (Cochran-Smith, 1995, p. 495).
The community of inquiry, then, goes beyond the moral community in being something always ongoing, open-ended, greater than the sum of its parts, “a horizon of meaning larger than any of our individual perspectives.
****the school both reproduces and transforms, in an emergent, equilibrative balance. Where reproduction alone predominates, there is stagnation and mediocrity; where innovation alone predominates, there is chaos. Kennedy asks: What balance does Reggio Emilia represent?****
transformation of participation
learning occurs whenever people participate in shared endeavors with others, with all participants playing active but often asymmetrical roles. In different models of schooling, however, children play different roles in the process of learning and as a result learn different ways to relate to what they have learned as well as to the community in which this learning is important, through their varying participation in the process of learning.
In instruction based on a participation theory (community of learners instruction), students learn the information as they collaborate with other children and with adults in carrying out activities with purposes connected explicitly with the history and current practices of the community. (Rogoff, 1994, p. 2).
What is especially interesting from our point of view is that Rogoff’s description of the transformation of participation provides her theory of community with an idea of how relationships can begin, or better yet, continue beginning, at the same time as they are evolving and emerging
Kennedy and Lipman’s “community of inquiry,” at least is emergent–it goes forward in time, and provides a process (“the inquiry project”) by which the community collectively progresses. But the “community of learners,” at last, most fully grapples with the realities of change over time by providing a way to think about the fact that the membership of the community continually rolls over and changes as old members (children and their parents) leave and new members come in, and that this transformation of participation is where education starts and what it is for. “Development as the aim of education” takes on a new meaning that is less individualistic than in Piagetian constructivist theories.
As we know, Malaguzzi never saw the developing child as an ideally autonomous learner, but rather saw education as a necessarily communal activity and symphony of subjectivities involving children and adults. He saw long-term and meaningful relationships between and among children, teachers, and parents as the necessary precondition for the flowering of communication, co-action, and reciprocity. Assuming the benefits of the prevailing Italian practice of keeping together teachers and children for a three-year cycle, he rationalized this practice by saying it makes possible the greatest density, richness, and complexity of communications, negotiations, and collaborative problem-solving. The three years spent together allow the group to construct a history of relationship and a sharing of culture that creates the sense of community and guarantees the quality of life and well-being for children as part of families. The goals of intensifying interaction and enhancing community lead teachers to systematically enact many events and activities that successfully introduce new children and families, provide mentoring for inexperienced teachers, heighten sharing and continuity of memories and expectations by means of documentation, and create drama and climax in times of transition and culmination. In general, all periods of beginning and ending are treated as times of great delicacy and given special forms of attention which prolong their duration, embed them into rituals and symbolisms, and render them communal rather than individual experiences. Times of beginning, transition, and ending are addressed with care and respect, and subjected to layering, intensification, and multiplication of collective experience.
Works most quoted and influential in this public discussion include The Spirit of Community: Rights, Responsibilities, and the Communitarian Agenda, by sociologist, Amitai Etzioni (1993); Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (and “Bowling Alone,” 1995), by political scientist, Robert Putnam (1993); and Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity by social scientist, Francis Fukuyama (1995).
The thesis of Etzioni is that, in order to restore and revive American society and to protect the moral, social, and political environments, the citizenry needs to find a better balance between claims to rights, on the one hand, and the assumption of responsibilities, on the other. Generally accepted obligations and responsibilities to others and to the common good have tended to recede, as ideas about individual rights and entitlements have tended to expand, to penetrate everyday discourse, and to become the preferred currency of discourse whenever a person or group wishes to justify a claim to resources or privileges. Both the right and left sides of the political spectrum share the blame for this evolutionary trend, insofar as both sides tend to believe that the community is coercive, that government (“Big Brother”) should be distrusted, and that the greater good is best served if only individuals are left free to pursue their own choices, rational self-interests, rights, and identities. In 1990, Etzioni called together a group of fifteen ethicists, social philosophers, and social scientists to Washington, D.C., to found a critical group called the Communitarians; in January, 1991, they published their first statement in the form of a quarterly publication called The Responsive Community: Rights and Responsibilities, which has strongly influenced President Bill Clinton, among others.
The Responsive Community: Rights and Responsibilities,
For a variety of reasons, life is easier in a community blessed with a substantial stock of social capital. In the first place, networks of civic engagement foster sturdy norms of generalized reciprocity and encourage the emergence of social trust. Such networks facilitate coordination and communication, amplify reputations, and thus allow dilemmas of collective action to be resolved. When economic and political negotiation is embedded in dense networks of social interaction, incentives for opportunism are reduced. At the same time, networkds of civic engagement embody past success at collaboration, which can serve as a cultural template for future collaboration. Finally, dense networks of interaction probably broaden the participants’ sense of self, developing the “I” into a “we,” or (in the language of rational-choice theorists) enhancing the participants’ “taste” for collective benefits. (Robert Putnam)
If the institutions of democracy and capitalism are to work properly, they must coexist with certain premodern cultural habits that ensure their proper functioning. Law, contract, and economic rationality provide a necessary but not sufficient basis for both the stability and prosperity of postindustrial societies; they must as well be leavened with reciprocity, moral obligation, duty towards community, and trust, which are based in habit rather than rational calculation. (Fukuyama)
In thinking about how to create and sustain an emergent learning community where both children and adults enter into dialogue and collaboration, we need to think about the time of relationships (or “time in relationships”) in more extended and extensive, particularized and contextualized, cyclical and open-ended ways; and do what we can to increase the stability, continuity over time, and multifacedness of children’s friendships and attachments
mark forshee 