Estimated reading time: 1 minute, 13 seconds

The Hundred Languages (Reggio) Approach

Estimated reading time: 1 minute, 13 seconds

Alex Fink just shared this awesome poem with me, and i just fell in love. I’m quoting almost half of it here because it’s soooo awesome. I’m giving a workshop in 2 days on authentic learning and this fits there, too. Need to check which parts to use đŸ™‚ prob the ones i put in bold.

The part i removed is about how children have a hundred languages, but…

The school and the culture
Separate the head from the body.
They tell the child;
To think without hands
To do without head
To listen and not to speak
To understand without joy
To love and to marvel
Only at Easter and Christmas
They tell the child:
To discover the world already there
And of the hundred
They steal ninety-nine.
They tell the child:
That work and play
Reality and fantasy
Science and imagination
Sky and earth
Reason and dream
Are things
That do not belong together

And thus they tell the child
That the hundred is not there
The child says: NO WAY the hundred is there–

Full poem here

The ideas remind me a bit of what bell hooks says about treating students/teachers in holistic ways, that we have souls that need to be nurtured.

This poem is a reminder as a teacher not to divorce ppl from the rest of themselves, and as a parent to make sure i nurture all these dimensions of my child in the (highly likely) situation that schooling suppresses them.

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