Press Releases |
||
|
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE DATE: 04 May 2005 SUBJECT: Nothing Without Joy: Two Good Hope Faculty Attend International Training
Veteran Good Hope PreK and Kindergarten Early Childhood Learning Specialists, Lin Thomas and Charlene McGowan, received advanced training in Miami, Florida on the principles of the Reggio Emilia approach to education, voted by Newsweek magazine as one of the ten best schools in the world. Reggio Emilia founded this experientially-based learning technique on the knowledge that all children are rich in communicative abilities from birth. Because the young child is a reader, a constructor, and is able to enter into relationships right from the beginning of life, early childhood education requires greater emphasis. "You can't build a building starting from the 6th floor," Director of Reggio Emilia, Sergio Spaggiari says of our reluctance to invest in early childhood education. "Instead of filling up the ir heads, we need to make certain they know how to use the heads they've got, for a child is not an empty container." The Reggio Emilia approach provides a structured educational process that actively involves the child, their parents, and their teachers in developing the child's innate "disposition to learning" by building on their current understanding and opening them to that which they are on the threshold of understanding. Working with other children, their environment, including classrooms, playgrounds, and the larger world around them, children learn more naturally in a hands-on, child-centered approach that allows their natural passion for learning to unfold. "At its essence," Ms. McGowan said, "it is an approach to early childhood learning that maintains a child's natural enthusiasm and curiosity when they enter more formal classes a little later on in their schooling. Enthusiasm for learning is part of every child's essential nature, and Reggio Emilia is one of the techniques we use at Good Hope East and West to encourage that essential nature. Their motto, Nothing Without Joy, is at the very core of this approach to learning." The more concrete features of this approach to early childhood learning include small group collaborative learning; continuity over the time of child-child and teacher-child relations; a focus on problem solving and long-term projects involving mastery of many symbolic media; fostering the connections between home, school, and the wider community; and awareness and appreciation of one's own and shared cultural heritage. Along with these organizational features, Reggio Emilia teachers worldwide collaborate via the internet by engaging in a meaningful exchange of ideas and philosophical observations about early learning, thus insuring that every child, no matter where in the world, retains his or her essential enthusiasm for learning. |
||
