Ed Week: "Diversity and Progressive Education"

[Gloria Pipkin <gpipkin@I-1.NET>]

December 4, 2002

Diversity and Progressive Education

By Mara Krechevsky, Ben Mardell, and Steve Seidel
Education Week

How Italian preschools are proving Dewey's American detractors wrong.

Ever since Arthur Bestor and Rudolf Flesch wrote their famous attacks on
progressive education in the early 1950s, blasting this form of education
has been a blood sport for certain education critics. Regrettably, most of
the criticisms have been directed at the excesses and perversions of
progressive education and, of course, it is always easy to caricature or
lampoon any approach. Critics have seldom scrutinized the core ideas of
progressive education-for example, the need to construct one's
understanding, the focus on the validity of each child's experience, the
importance of a supportive community and work in a group, and preparation
for life in a democratic society beyond school. Nor have they critiqued the
best current instantiations of progressive schools, such as the New York
City- and Boston-based schools founded by Deborah Meier.

Lately, a new argument that minority and low- income children are not well
served by progressive schools has been added to the stock of standard
critiques. A recent case in point is Chester E. Finn Jr.'s comments in The
Boston Globe (March 24, 2002) attacking the Municipal Infant-Toddler Centers
and Preschools of Reggio Emilia, Italy. Said Mr. Finn: "I don't think this
is an approach that will work well for disadvantaged and minority kids.
We've got many studies that show these child- centered, progressive methods,
when they work, work well for middle- and upper- middle-class kids. But they
work least well for disadvantaged kids, for whom school is the main source
of structure." In fact, the 34 municipal preschools in Reggio Emilia stand
as a powerful disconfirmation of the former assistant U.S. secretary of
education's assertions.

For the past five years, we have been engaged in a research collaboration
with Reggio educators and American teachers to investigate the power of the
group as a learning environment and of documentation as a way for
all-students, teachers, parents, administrators, and the community-to see
how and what children are learning. In evaluating critiques such as Mr.
Finn's, one should take a closer look at these remarkable Italian schools.
They demonstrate the continuing power and genius of progressive ideas and
give lie to those who reflexively want to bury them. In these schools, one
can see at work each of the key precepts of progressive education. Moreover,
these ideas work precisely with the kinds of populations about which Mr.
Finn expresses skepticism.

At first viewing, observers in the Reggio schools and centers are struck by
the richness of children's products and creations-from the details on a
person's face sculpted out of clay, to the working fountains in an outdoor
amusement park for birds. Through careful attention to and documentation of
children's ideas and work, teachers create a stimulating environment that
encourages children to express themselves in a range of media, projects, and
activities. Children work with clay, wire, paint, ink, collage, paper, and
metal; they experiment with light and shadow using light tables, overhead
projectors, and shadow screens; they explore music and sound using a variety
of instruments and recycled objects.
Strategically placed tape recorders document their activity, along with
teachers who are never without notebooks close by. The children's individual
and collective products and projects reflect their understanding of
different domains, such as science (where rain comes from, how a fax machine
works), emotions (how to express feelings of happiness, anxiety, and
anticipation in different media), and the environment (the nature of crowds,
cities, or fields of poppies).

While many of these projects and products are visually stunning, they
reflect more than skill in art. The children's work reveals emerging
understandings of different content areas as well as their abilities to
express themselves, work with others, and their understandings of how
notations function. Rather than focus only on preliteracy or numeracy
skills, or push the later curriculum of the elementary years downward,
Reggio teachers stimulate children's serious cognitive engagement in making
discoveries, solving problems, and creating notations-an approach with
significant payoffs for later learning in school and beyond.

Moreover, counter to Chester Finn's implications, the Reggio (and many other
progressive) approaches are anything but unstructured. He and other critics
seem to equate structure with discipline, order, and a narrow conception of
interaction in the classroom. But meaningful structure entails much more
than a teacher in the front of a room lecturing children sitting quietly at
their desks. It is the entire construction of the environment and experience
for learners.

In Reggio, structure is built into the careful choice of a focus of study,
and identification of starting points that connect both to children's
experience and imagination and to central ideas about a topic. It also
entails careful preparation of the physical environment, including the
selection of materials and how they are presented to children. Finally, the
learning experience is structured by the systematic documentation of
children's learning and the thought teachers give to the design and timing
of appropriate interventions, often with an eye toward deepening children's
understanding of an idea and sustaining their engagement and desire to learn
more.

Indeed, the structures in the Reggio schools have struck many observers as
far more complex and thoughtful than those found in most American preschools
(or universities, for that matter).

Like a growing number of American educators, the Reggio teachers think of
themselves as researchers. Their practice focuses on close observation,
documentation, hypothesis testing, and reflection. They are constantly
analyzing every aspect of children's experiences-what motivates them, how
they interact, how deep or superficial their understanding is, and where
various projects are headed.

Documentation of children's learning lies at the heart of this process.
Through documentation, teachers have the opportunity to revisit,
individually and collectively, the events and activities they have planned
and carried out. It allows them to deepen their understanding of children's
strengths and interests, the learning process, different media and domains
of knowledge, and their own actions and pedagogical decisions.

This emphasis on documenting and understanding children's learning processes
as a way to inform curricular and pedagogical decisions plays a key role in
contributing to the superior quality of Reggio children's projects and
processes. It allows teachers to foster children's learning from the inside,
based on children's own thoughts, rather than imposing it from the outside.

American educators who have studied the Reggio approach report a significant
difference in their understanding of children's learning and interests when
they systematically record and reflect on the children's words and actions,
rather than depend on memory alone. Curricular experiences last longer and
take on new meanings when children are given the opportunity to revisit and
build on what they have done.

There is a great deal of evidence to suggest that Reggio ideas and practices
are in line with best practices recommended by experts on emerging
understandings of learning, such as Jerome Bruner, Lauren Resnick, Ann
Brown, Marlene Scardamalia, Howard Gardner, and John Bransford, to name a
few. The reports of such organizations as the National Academy of Sciences,
the National Research Council, and the National Association for the
Education of Young Children support the nurturance of broader forms of
learning, and detail the limitations of direct instruction without the
opportunity for exploration, reflection, and the construction of knowledge
through active intellectual experimentation and questioning. The fact that
the Reggio approach has attracted interest all over the world, often at the
highest levels of government, suggests that resistance in the United States
may reflect our own parochialism. The reports of such organizations as the
National Academy of Sciences, the National Research Council, and the
National Association for the Education of Young Children support the
nurturance of broader forms of learning, and detail the limitations of
direct instruction without the opportunity for exploration, reflection, and
the construction of knowledge through active intellectual experimentation
and questioning. The fact that the Reggio approach has attracted interest
all over the world, often at the highest levels of government, suggests that
resistance in the United States may reflect our own parochialism.

And here we come to the heart of the matter: the claim that progressive
education is incompatible with serving a diverse population. In point of
fact, the Reggio schools themselves serve children from all socioeconomic
and educational backgrounds. Children with disabilities receive first
priority for admission and are fully mainstreamed into the classroom,
following Italian law. The Reggio schools also are beginning to serve an
increasingly diverse ethnic population, with the influx into the country of
immigrant children from North and West Africa.

Moreover, the Reggio model has been used successfully with children all
around the world, not merely among the wealthy. In almost all of our own 50
states, educators (including many teachers in Head Start programs) have
demonstrated significant interest in learning from the Reggio schools. Many
public and private schools in Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and Iceland that
welcome children from every social class form part of a Nordic network of
Reggio-inspired practice. And in Albania, thanks to a Soros Foundation
project, a number of these schools have been opened after war and its flood
of refugees left that country in a devastated condition. Interest has also
come from places such as Israel, the Palestinian territory, China, Korea,
Slovenia, India, and Senegal, with many visits to Reggio Emilia and frequent
requests for consulting.
Carla Rinaldi, the former director of the Reggio schools, characterizes the
Reggio approach as democratic: "It can welcome children from all ethnic
groups, cultures, and social classes," she says, "simply because it is
founded on the child who is everywhere strong, powerful, and competent ...
if the adults can look at him without too many prejudices and with values
that can help them to look at 'that' child."

If the goal of education is simply to raise scores on the current crop of
standardized tests, then teachers should spend their time training children
on the tests, and we would have no need for research.

But as researchers, we want to explore what is possible-in terms of the
extraordinary capacities of children, the potentials of serious teachers,
and the needs for an educated and engaged citizenry.

To ignore the example of Reggio is to ignore what is arguably the most
powerful experiment in early-childhood education of the last 50 years. It is
because Reggio expands our view of the possible that it is so important. The
question is whether we are committed enough to the educational experiences
of children from diverse socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds to create
learning environments that support and develop their full potential. And
that, as Ms. Rinaldi suggests, is the essence of education in a democratic
society.

Mara Krechevsky, Ben Mardell, and Steve Seidel are researchers on the Making
Learning Visible Project at Project Zero in Harvard University's graduate
school of education, Cambridge, Mass.

© 2002 Editorial Projects in Education Vol. 22, number 14, page 36,38
http://edweek.org/ew/ew_printstory.cfm?slug=14krechevsky.h22

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