Currambena Primary and Preschool

The dance of learning
AMUKTA MAHAPATRA
The process has to move to self-learning practices, with the teacher creating the right environment for each child to light up with his own energy. The last of a two-part article on the importance of activity-based learning.
At school: Help the child construct its own personality.
For any learning to become an intrinsic part of the child’s mental make-up, the child needs to be interested, involved and it has to be a proactive choosing. The question of choice, of spontaneity goes to the core of the pedagogy, where the child constructs her own personality, which nobody else can do for her. It may not be difficult to get a child do a set task or substitute the adult’s will for his/her own, but then, we are robbing the child of his most fundamental right – the right to construct his/her own unique personality.
If the child is continuously acted upon and acts according to the wishes of the adult, his or her own psychological activity may fade away under the stronger will of the adult. The child may, ignoring his own self, look around for direction from without, from external sources and authority figures. Gradually his self-hood may disappear altogether and abnormal developments will begin to appear. It is crucial to realise that the psychological future of the individual depends on whether as a child, he has been able to unite his motor, cognitive and affective powers – his actions, will and emotions – because a childhood, good or bad, lasts a lifetime.
Change the format
If it is required that all this is to happen for a child in school – move around as is normal for any animal or human being; interact with his fellow human beings and learn, which is again a natural process in any civilisation; act with the motor and mental forces in unison; be able to choose her work; make an effort and use his faculties to learn; create her own web of knowledge; build a conceptual structure; develop his personality – one cannot continue with the teacher at the head of the class and children sitting in rows, in a dictatorial, military or feudal format. Teacher-directed classes have to be examined for their efficacy and the learning process has to move to self-learning practices, with the teacher presenting, guiding, and creating the right learning environment for each child to light up with his own energy. The geography of the classroom has to change; so also the chemistry between the adult and the child, which requires a turnabout.
If the teacher is no longer orchestrating from the front, how would the children learn? One could imagine a teacher holding the reins of 30-40 horses. What would happen if she lets go? What would horses and foals do? They would only graze and caper about a bit. What will children do? Any functional group or collective has its own evolved ground rules and so also a class. The ground rules could be discussed with the whole community, teachers and the children. Young people too, appreciate knowing their boundaries and will, by and large, follow the norms, if they are shared in a positive way.
If the opportunity is offered within the classroom and school, children would continue with their life and will go about learning if we allow them to. One has to only give them the tools for learning, with the teacher being another source of learning and not the only one, as is usually the case in a conventional classroom.
Learning tools and materials that are planned systematically, that are generic and still have the flexibility for the teacher and the child to adapt are required, if one wants to move from a teacher-driven class to a learner- directed environment. For any pedagogy where one aims for the learner to become an independent learner, materials are required. Each material acts as a teacher and there will be as many ‘teachers’ as there are sets of material. The power and the burden arising from an assumption that all knowledge and resources are being embodied in the teacher will not come into play, giving an opportunity to the teacher, to work and interact with the children as a normal human being in the classroom.
Significant role
The learning materials are not picked up randomly like toys but are chosen or designed carefully. They play a significant role in the curriculum. Frequently one hears adults say that children like only to play. But for the child, what one considers patronisingly as play is work – where their faculties are being used continuously and constantly.
The teaching-learning materials, TLM as they are termed by the acronym-loving education community, require to be sequenced, which is also apparent to the child, so that s/he has the choice to go back and forth. The TLM needs to also have built into it, the possibility for the child to work with it repeatedly. It cannot be a one-off activity most of the time, like a crossword or a page to colour. The idea is for the child and the material to be friends, so that the concept embedded in the material gets transferred to the child, when he works with it.
For the child to establish a relationship with the material, or with the concept, or with the idea that he is learning, it has to be introduced in a way that allows a long term relationship to develop. It is not just for this lesson or for the coming exam or for the semester or even for the project alone. It has to be for life. As the child interacts with it, s/he discovers more and more aspects of this companion. For this long term friendship to happen, the concept or the material has to be presented so that the child is eager to grab, keen to make it his or her own. And then the child is set on a path of enquiry, of learning. Sometime during this journey, either at the introduction or more commonly as the child works with the idea individually or in a small group, a ‘point of contact’ is established between the material/concept/idea and the child. With this, the friendship deepens and the concept becomes one with the learner. It is very much a part of the tissues and the muscles and the whole physical and psychological system. It is not like as it happens in conventional teaching, where once you ‘learn’, it is over and you can and want to forget about it. It is learnt with the heart and not ‘by-heart’.
The point of contact is similar to dancing when at one juncture suddenly the music touches you and your movements then flow with the music. Or at times when you are cooking and your actions seem to have a rhythm of their own, or you are doing a presentation and you are in tune with the audience. Once this point of contact is established, one does not stop – isn’t it difficult to stop dancing when the music is in our hearts? The dance of learning is not over. But this is the time when a new journey begins – of exploring further, discovering, and understanding, ordering and creating anew. This is what one would look out for, where the child instead of being a ‘consumer’ becomes truly a constructor of his or her own person.
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