Teachers of the Whole Child can lure young intellects out from behind childish imaginations. (HINT: We use the academic subjects as our bait.)
Youngsters can be motivated intellectually when we align the subject matter they are studying to material from their own inner lives.
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We Want Progressive Pedagogy Back in the Curriculum
Teachers of the Whole Child study the physical, emotional, and cognitive domains where young intelligences are known to dwell. Educate the Whole Child embraces an inside-out, CHILD-CENTERED approach to teaching and learning.
We endorse the pedagogy of Progressive Education– a movement based on the teachings of Socrates and Plato that have defined the purpose of Western Education since before Christ.
At the foundation of 2500 years of educational thinking in the West is the supposition that ALL KNOWLEDGE is SELF-KNOWLEDGE.
In 1989 The Business Council Roundtable launched thirty years of Corporate Education Reform. American Business interests switched out the Liberal Arts and Sciences curriculum designed to implement KNOW THYSELF to left-brained “Learning Standards” that do nothing but scream, GET A JOB.
The net outcome achieved by twenty-five years of Corporate Education Reform is that American students are losing their motivation to learn.
from The New Yorker
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Pedagogy Begins Within
“Align the subject matter that we are studying to material from the children’s inner lives.”
Consider how the Child and the World become fittingly aligned in Curriculum when we teach fourteen year olds about Rebellion.
Likewise, why do extinct dinosaurs attract such lively interest from currently evolving children?
For whatever they symbolize within the subconscious mind, Dinosaurs have been an intensely fascinating subject for young children ever since museums started displaying their fossilized remains in the 1870’s.
At a certain stage in their development, young children seem filled with amazement about Dinosaurs. The very existence of such real creatures on earth draws a sense of wonder from their spirit. Teachers of the Whole Child will nurture these emotions of AWE, just as we will provoke intellectual CURIOSITY.
Pedagogical Thinking reveals the interrelatedness between a child’s inner life and the academic content being encountered through Curriculum. By defining intrinsic connections between the learner and the subject, teachers of the Whole Child have more “hooks” to catch their students’ interests.
15 pedagogical questions to think about
Grades preK-3
- Is it coincidental that children become interested in pre-history, just as they master telling time?
- As children confront the fact of evolution— that life on earth is constantly changing, that the earth itself is constantly changing, that species change, that human beings are part of a Circle of Life— how does it make them feel inside?
- How can they satisfactorily articulate such a concept?
- How do children relate their experience of growing up inside their own human body as they behold the zoological evidence of past births, life spans and the deaths of so many other creatures who, like themselves, once existed inside an individual physical body as a member of a species?
- As children start grasping, emotionally, their own mortality, what does the connotation of extinction mean for them?
- As children lose their baby teeth, do they gain a personal relationship to the fossilized remains of dinosaur jaws?
- How might little kids, especially, show their empathy for those furry little mammals scurrying around on the forest floor at the feet of the dinosaurs?
- How do literary archetypes found in stories like Aesop’s The Lion and the Mouse— echo these mythological themes of evolution?
- How would a child describe the differences between the Brontosaurus (above, left) and the Brontosaurus (above, right)?
- What emotional impact does the term “skeletal remains” make upon the young imagination?
- When we ask a child to act out various types of dinosaurs— Allosaurus, Stegosaurs, Brontosaurus, Tyrannosaurus— what does embodying each creature do for the spirit of that youngster?
- How do children at different ages react to the conflict between predator and prey?
- What deep feelings get to be expressed in acting out each of those roles?
- What is the life- cycle of a typical predator? What is the life cycle of its prey?
- What numbers belong in a conversation about dinosaurs ex. quantitative measurements of size, weight, span of stride, food consumption, family members, life spans, speeds, quantitative impacts, numbers of years?
Let’s Act Out Dinosaurs!
An interactive TV Show and Drama Class will demonstrate Whole Child Pedagogy
Join us LIVE for a streaming premier that celebrates Black History Month
Let’s Act Out The DreamKeeper by Langston Hughes
Sunday, February 28, 1 PM EST
