How can you incorporate some of the ideas

Reference no: EM133321351

What, if anything, in the reading challenged thinking - provoked new learning for you one quote from the article ?
How can you incorporate some of the ideas, thinking, approaches found in the readings in early childhood education curriculum and pedagogy?

Towards a pedagogy of listening

From 'The construction of the educational project' by Carlina Rinaldi ( forthcoming a):

The teacher is not removed from her role as an adult, but instead revises it in an attempt to become a co-creator, rather than merely a transmitter, of knowledge and culture. As teachers we have to carry out this role in the full awareness of our vulnerability, and this means accepting doubts and mistakes as well as allowing for surprise and creation . . .

If we believe that children possess their own theories, interpreta- tions, and questions, and are protagonists in the knowledge-building processes, then the most important verbs in educational practice are no longer 'to talk', 'to explain' or 'to transmit'. . . but 'to listen'. Listening means being open to others and what they have to say, listening to the hundred (and more) languages, with all our senses . . . Listening legitimizes the other person, because communication is one of the fundamental means of giving form to thought. The com- municative act that takes place through listening produces meanings and reciprocal modifications that enrich all the participants in this type of exchange.

The task of the teacher is to create a context in which children's curiosity, theories and research are legitimated and listened to, a context in which children feel comfortable and confident, motivated and respected in their existential and cognitive paths and processes.

In this chapter we explore in more detail the concepts, images and practices of what we have termed a 'pedagogy of listening', an approach to pedagogy that is inscribed with the ethics of an encounter. The term 'pedagogy of listening' is not original. It comes from Reggio Emilia, and we shall make frequent reference in this chapter to the

Dahlberg, G., & Moss, P. (2004). Ethics and politics in early childhood education. Retrieved from https://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from ryerson on 2018-11-11 09:22:51.

98 Towards a pedagogy of listening

pedagogical ideas and practices of this Italian city, including how they understand 'listening' - which has much in common with Readings's discussion of 'listening to thought'. We end on the subject of thought, when we open up to the ideas of Gilles Deleuze who, we believe, may provide important new directions for pedagogical work, but who shares an ethical perspective that foregrounds the importance of otherness.

Listening and radical dialogue

In what way does 'thought' shift our understanding of learning and education? Thought starts from the child (or the adult) and her or his experience of the world. It assumes that we are all constantly engaged in searching for meaning, which we do by developing ideas or theories - thought - that are provisional and re-worked in relations with others and through processes of testing, reflection and further thought. Carlina Rinaldi, a former pedagogical director of the municipal preschools in Reggio and now pedagogical consultant to Reggio Children, describes the process of thought in these terms in explaining the pedagogical work in Reggio:

[One of the] first questions we should ask ourselves as teachers and educators is this: 'How can we help children find the meaning of what they do, what they encounter, what they experience? And how can we do this for ourselves? . . .

[The search for meaning is] a difficult task especially for chil- dren who nowadays have so many references in their daily lives: their family experience, television, the social places they frequent in addition to family and school. It is a task that involves making connections, giving meaning to these events, to these fragments that are gathered over the course of many and different experiences . . .

For adults and children alike, understanding means being able to develop an interpretive 'theory', a narration that gives meaning to the events and things of the world. These theories are provi- sional, offering a satisfactory explanation that can be continuously re-worked . . . It has to please us and convince us, to be useful and able to satisfy our intellectual, affective, and aesthetic needs . . . Our theories need to be listened to by others. Expressing our theories to others makes it possible to transform a world which is not intrins- ically ours into something shared. Sharing theories is a response to uncertainty.

(Rinaldi, 2001b: 79-80)

Dahlberg, G., & Moss, P. (2004). Ethics and politics in early childhood education. Retrieved from https://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from ryerson on 2018-11-11 09:22:51.

Towards a pedagogy of listening 99

Listening to thought is about being able to hear the ideas and the- ories of the Other, and to treat them seriously and with respect, neither ignoring them nor dismissing them for not providing the right answer. But what is listening? Listening plays a critical role in the pedagogical work of Reggio Emilia. This has led the preschool workers to concep- tualise in some detail what they mean when they speak of 'listening' - unlike more technical discourses that are very widespread today which take 'listening' as a given, an unproblematic and taken-for-granted term involving unmediated transmission from mouth to ear, brain to brain, and focus their attention on the most effective methods for trans- mission. But in Reggio, listening is understood to be a complex and multi-faceted concept. It is an active relationship that is dialogic and interpretive. It involves many forms of communication, invoking Malaguzzi's famous expression, 'the hundred languages of children'. And it is saturated and mediated by values and emotions.

Here is Rinaldi again, defining her understanding of the term 'listen- ing' from the perspective of Reggio Emilia:

Listening as sensitivity to the patterns that connect, to that which connects us to others; abandoning ourselves to the conviction that our understanding and our own being are but small parts of a broader, more integrated knowledge that holds the universe together.

Listening as a metaphor for having the openness and sensitivity to listen and be listened to - listening not just with our ears, but with all our senses . . .

Listening to the hundred, the thousand languages, symbols and codes we use to express ourselves and communicate . . .

Listening as time, the time of listening, a time that is outside chronological time . . . [I]nterior listening, listening to ourselves, as a pause, a suspension, as an element that generates listening to others but, in turn, is generated by the listening that others give us...

Listening is emotion, it is generated by and stimulates emotions, including curiosity, desire, doubt, interest . . .

Listening as welcoming and being open to differences, recognising the importance of the other's point of view and interpretation . . .

Listening as an active verb that involves interpretation, giving meaning to the message and value to those who offer it . . .

Listening that does not produce answers but formulates ques- tions; listening that is generated by doubt, by uncertainty, which is

Dahlberg, G., & Moss, P. (2004). Ethics and politics in early childhood education. Retrieved from https://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from ryerson on 2018-11-11 09:22:51.

100

Towards a pedagogy of listening

not insecurity but, on the contrary, the security that every truth is such only if we are aware of its limits and its possible falsification . . . Listening is not easy. It requires a deep awareness, and at the same time a suspension of our judgements, and above all our preju- dices; it requires openness to change. It demands that we have clearly in mind the value of the unknown and that we are able to overcome the sense of emptiness and precariousness that we

experience whenever our certainties are questioned . . .
Listening as the premise for any learning relationship - learning that is determined by the 'learning subject' and takes shape in his

or her mind through action and reflection . . .
Listening, therefore, as a 'listening context' where one learns to

listen and narrate, where individuals feel legitimated to represent their theories and offer their interpretations of a particular question. (ibid.: 80-81)

Here we see many of the themes we discussed earlier: welcoming the Other; a dialogic relationship; learning as a creative process rather than transmission; living and working with uncertainty; being open to difference; respecting, not grasping the Other. To listen means being open to the Other, recognising the Other as different and trying to listen to the Other from his or her own position and experience and not treating the Other as the same. It means listening to thought - the ideas and theories, questions and answers of children - and struggling to make meaning from what is said, without preconceived ideas of what is correct or valid or appropriate. 'Good' listening distinguishes dialogue between human beings, which expresses and constitutes a relationship to a concrete Other, from monologue, which seeks to transmit a body of knowledge and through so doing make the Other into the Same.

In particular Reggio's concept of a 'pedagogy of listening', and its practice, foregrounds the idea of respecting otherness. Respect for an absolute Other means a respect that must precede grasping: the child speaks and is doing, and we have to take what the child says and does seriously. A 'pedagogy of listening' exemplifies Readings's reference to pedagogy as listening to thought and what cannot easily be heard, rather than the production of the autonomous subject or objective know- ledge. It gives life to Blanchot's contention, referred to so approvingly by Readings, that the condition of pedagogical practice is an infinite attention to the other. Yet at the same time as recognising the singu- larity of each member of the preschool - child or adult - the 'pedagogy of listening' emphasises relationships, 'social bonds', and the importance

Dahlberg, G., & Moss, P. (2004). Ethics and politics in early childhood education. Retrieved from https://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from ryerson on 2018-11-11 09:22:51.

Towards a pedagogy of listening 101

of being in a community for creating and re-creating theories (many, diverse and provisional) as part of a continuous process of learning that involves theorising, dialogue, reflection and negotiation.

In a 'real' listening to the child, in a welcoming and an encounter, then, something incalculable comes on the scene. What children say surprises us, and helps us to interrupt predetermined meanings and totalising practices, totalising practices such as the concepts and classi- fications of developmental psychology which give us as teachers or researchers possibilities to possess and 'comprehend' the child. Doing this one realises that what the child has got to say has often been excluded, marginalised, ignored or just been seen as something cute or funny. Listening can make us both surprised and shocked as we find out how rich and intelligent children's thoughts are.

Listening is highly interactive, or intersubjective to use Readings's term. Indeed, a pedagogy of listening has a strong commitment to radical dialogue that does not resolve into a monologue, a monologue where the teacher claims to know and speak or explicate for the other, the child. It is a move away from monologic transmission - as well as from the idea of just paying attention to determining the conditions for the child's reception of the teacher's transmission, which is so common on the school agenda today, e.g. to assess if the child is response-ready and response-able. This is the common 'sender and receiver' model of communication, with the child seen as a container to be filled while for the teacher it makes no difference to whom he or she is talking as the child's thoughts and meaning making are not allowed to interrupt the teacher's.

In radical dialogue, based on listening, as a teacher you have to participate together with the child, entering a space together where both teacher and child are actively listening and trying to construct meaning out of the situation. Readings, in his discussion of the commun- ication between teacher and child (or, in his case, university student) finds inspiration in Bakhtin's dialogism, which is not simply the capacity for reversed or serial monologues, an exchange of roles which allows people to take turns as monologic senders. According to Bakhtin

the addressee's head is full of language so that the story of com- municative transmission cannot adequately describe what happens in linguistic interaction . . . Communication cannot be the transfer of a prefabricated meaning, since the meaning of words does not remain the same from one utterance - or more precisely one idiolect - to the next. What a sender says takes its place amid a crowd of

Dahlberg, G., & Moss, P. (2004). Ethics and politics in early childhood education. Retrieved from https://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from ryerson on 2018-11-11 09:22:51.

102 Towards a pedagogy of listening

idiolects in the listener, and their conversation acquires its sense in a discursive act of which neither is the master.

(Readings, 1996: 155-156)

Meaning making and knowledge construction occur in this relational activity, in a continuous process of formulation and reformulation, test- ing and negotiation. Learning, including the acquisition of 'objective knowledge', requires attention and the best friend of attention is interest (Liedman, 2001: 26). Through listening to thought and radical dialogue, the child's interest is aroused.

The child, the teacher and the school

Education based on the transfer of objective knowledge divides the world into two: the knowing and the ignorant, the mature and the unformed, the capable and the incapable (Rancière, 1991). The child, like women and people of colour, has been marginalised in the project of modernity. This has come to characterise the knowledge process itself in modernity, the process being understood as one of development and progress: a passage from infancy to adulthood, from dependency to emancipation, from lacking to maturity.

But this image of the child changes in a pedagogy of listening. The child is no longer understood as lacking or incomplete but, as they say in Reggio Emilia, intelligent: intelligent, that is, as a person capable of making meaning of the world from his or her own experiences, not as a person who scores more than so many points on an IQ test. Just how revolutionary this image of the child can be is vividly illus- trated in a book called Le Maître ignorant ('The Ignorant Schoolmaster'), written by the French philosopher Jacques Rancière (1991). The book tells the story of the French teacher Joseph Jacotot who, working in exile, discovered in 1818 a very unconventional method for learning, a method that caused consternation throughout the learned community of Europe. For Jacotot had found out in his own work that knowledge and explication were not actually necessary for teaching; instead, what was important was to start from the idea that all human beings are equally intelligent. With this as a starting-point he developed a philo- sophy and a method which he called 'intellectual emancipation', a method which allowed, for example, illiterate parents to teach their children how to read.

In relation to Jacotot's works, Rancière asks the question: What would happen if all education took as its starting-point the idea that all human

Dahlberg, G., & Moss, P. (2004). Ethics and politics in early childhood education. Retrieved from https://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from ryerson on 2018-11-11 09:22:51.

Towards a pedagogy of listening 103

beings are intelligent? What would it mean if one took such equality as a presupposition instead of as a goal, equality and parity as a practice and process instead of a reward situated in a remote future? As it is, rather than constructing equality the explanations of the teacher in the transfer process create inequality through a system of postponements; that is, a bit further on you will become competent but right now you are not. So rather than eliminating inability, transmission of knowledge creates it - for to do this is a way to tell the other that she or he does not know. It again expresses a division of the world into two parts or rather two intelligences: one superior, which understands things through reason; the other inferior. The intelligent teacher decides when the act of learning will begin and, having thrown a veil of ignorance over everything that is to be learned, appoints himself or herself to the task of lifting it. Until the teacher came along, the unintelligent child has been groping blindly, figuring out riddles; but now the child will learn.

Learning, we would argue, is most likely to happen when we start with listening to thought and the image of an intelligent child. From a different perspective, the same idea is expressed by van Glasersfeld (1991), a prominent researcher in the field of conceptual analysis, cybernetics and epistemology. He argues that the most successful learn- ing starts from taking whatever the child produces as a manifestation of something that makes sense to the child in the context of that child's present construction of her or his experiential world. A teacher who wants to challenge the child's concept must begin, therefore, by con- structing a viable model of that particular child's ways and means of organising experience.

The image of the child and teacher are connected. A lacking child requires a teacher who is the privileged voice of authority. But an intelligent, meaning making child calls for someone else. To extend intelligence to the child is not about replacing the teacher with the child, which is sometimes implied in extreme reactions to transmission pedagogy. It is not a case of inverting the traditional hierarchy, so that to be educated the child needs only to affirm what she or he already is. It does not mean the teacher should be just a passive listener, a mere sounding-board off which the child bounces thoughts and theories.

The challenge for the teacher is, as Carlina Rinaldi says at the start of this chapter, to 'create a context in which children's curiosity, the- ories and research are legitimated and listened to', a context in which children feel comfortable and confident, and at the same time, to be able to widen and extend children's horizons by creating complexity in the child's environment and by introducing new theories, concepts,

Dahlberg, G., & Moss, P. (2004). Ethics and politics in early childhood education. Retrieved from https://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from ryerson on 2018-11-11 09:22:51.

104 Towards a pedagogy of listening

languages and materials, as tools for children's theorising and meaning making. Loris Malaguzzi captured this idea of the teacher's complex role when he once said that Reggio needed 'a teacher who is sometimes the director, sometimes the set designer, sometimes the curtain and the backdrop, and sometimes the prompter . . . who is even the audience - the audience who watches, who sometimes claps, sometimes remains silent, full of emotion, who sometimes judges with scepticism, and other times applauds with enthusiasm' (Rinaldi, 2001b: 89).

Rather than simply implementing predefined tasks (whether they be labelled curriculum, programme or plan), transmitting disciplinary knowledge in the traditional way, teachers in the pedagogy of listening and the ethics of an encounter are 'authors of pedagogical paths and processes' (Rinaldi, forthcoming d). They keep their distance 'from an overriding sense of balance, from that which has already been decided, preconstituted or considered to be certain' (Rinaldi, forthcoming c). The teacher is an intellectually curious person who, like the child, is searching constantly for meaning, co-constructing knowledge as provi- sional theories and understandings: '[She] rejects a passive approach to knowledge and prefers to construct knowledge together with others rather than simply to "consume" it' (Rinaldi, forthcoming a). Her edu- cation should be broad-based and range over many areas, not just psychology and pedagogy: she is 'a cultured teacher, not only because she has a multi-disciplinary background but primarily because she pos- sesses the culture of research, of curiosity, of working in a group' (Rinaldi, 2001b: 88).

Above all, the teacher has to be welcoming to the Other. She recog- nises the importance of respecting and paying attention to singularity, to the radical heterogeneity of an individual and an event. She starts from an original affirmation, a welcoming of the Other and an open- ness to the difference of the Other, 'yes' to the Other, a 'yes' which for her is responsibility and engagement in a future to come. This means being able to let go of any absolute truths and totalising systems of knowing, for new knowledge can only be generated when we abandon the presumption that we possess incontrovertible truths (Rinaldi, 1998). She appreciates 'the impossibility of controlling, deciding or determin- ing a limit, the impossibility of situating, by means of criteria, norms or rules' (Derrida, 1999: 35).

This means seeing uncertainty and dissensus as possibilities not dangers, and an openness to being surprised and finding new meanings: 'as teachers, we have to carry out this role [as co-constructors] in the full awareness of our vulnerability, and this means accepting doubts

Dahlberg, G., & Moss, P. (2004). Ethics and politics in early childhood education. Retrieved from https://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from ryerson on 2018-11-11 09:22:51.

Towards a pedagogy of listening 105

and mistakes as well as allowing for surprise and curiosity, all of which are necessary for true acts of knowledge and creation' (Rinaldi, forthcoming a). Abandoning systems of classification does not mean ignoring enquiry about children and their learning. Rather it means a rigorous study - in Reggio, they would say researching - of the learning strategies of children, both individually and as a group, using pedagogical documentation (which we discuss below) as a means for reflection, analysis and creation of new and provisional knowledge, without being subjected to the governing effects of totalising systems of disciplinary knowledge with their predetermined concepts, norms and categories.

Finally, what does a pedagogy of listening mean for how we under- stand the preschool? We have already discussed, in Chapter 1, how these and other institutions for children can be understood in different ways, offering two examples: the preschool as 'children's service', a technology to achieve predetermined ends, and the preschool as 'chil- dren's space', a place of many possibilities. But in Reggio they have other understandings, or at least understandings that complement and elaborate the idea of 'children's space'. Understanding knowledge as constructed, and valuing the creation of new knowledge, the preschool can be conceptualised as a laboratory or a workshop of learning and knowledge: 'I now like to say [observes Carlina Rinaldi] that the whole school should be a great atelier [workshop], where doing, reflecting, action, sensory perception together with the virtual, and the local together with the global, can find their expression in a school that is now transformed into a great laboratory of research and reflection' (Rinaldi, forthcoming b). The preschool, too, can be viewed as a system of rela- tionships and communication involving children, teachers and parents. And through this system of relationships, the preschool can be under- stood as, first and foremost, a space or context for multiple listening (Rinaldi, 1998: 6). The space, therefore, is constructed not only by what possibilities can and do take place in it, but also by how these possibil- ities are conducted.

What does this mean in practice?

What happens in a pedagogy of listening? We have discussed what such pedagogy means for the child, the teacher and the preschool. But what does it mean for the way pedagogical work is actually practised? We consider two tools that are very important: project work and pedago- gical documentation.

Reference no: EM133321351

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