EDUCATION
Activity leads to learning
AMUKTA MAHAPATRA
A child needs to interact with the world around to build intellectual capacity, and personality.
The child is born with a potential but how much is realised depends on the experiences offered to her by society.
The ‘done it’ smile: Motor and psychological energies have to go together.
With learning through activity being currently discussed within the education community; with almost all the government elementary schools in Tamil Nadu following what has been named the Activity Based Learning (ABL) programme; and with the National Curriculum Framework brought out by NCERT (National Council for Education Research and Training) focusing on constructivism as a base for pedagogy in the classroom, it is time to explore what these actually mean in the context of the child and its learning.
What is clear, intuitively, to most educators and parents is that every movement is not an activity; that all activities do not necessarily lead to learning; and not every kind of ‘learning’ contributes to the construction of the child’s cognitive and affective world. So when does a movement become an activity that leads to learning that helps to build the child’s personality? Let us explore.
Need for interaction
Why can’t a child do what he is told and be quiet? Why can’t a kitten be still for a while without moving and meowing? Why do children keep ‘fidgeting’ all the time? Why do children need to do an activity for them to truly learn? Why can’t they sit behind the desk through the day as is the practice even in most of the so-called best schools of today? Why do we need all kinds of activities for children to acquire concepts?
In the last 100 years or so, educationists, psychologists, behaviour scientists have discovered (what was intrinsically understood by many tribal and agrarian societies) that we actually learn only when we act, when we engage with something, when we interact. This is the reason why serious attempts are made to make even for computer and TV programmes as interactive as possible. The learner needs to act, interact and thereby construct his own backpack of learning. For learning to happen, the child cannot merely listen, receive, repeat and copy what is said or readThe child may, in the process, pick up information, acquire some knowledge and find out some things for himself. But acquire concepts that are his or her own? Unlikely that this would happen as a normal practice in a school, as the recent study, the results of which were published in India Today showed. The report indicated that, in reproduction skills, the private schools did do better but in correlating, conceptual understanding or application, there was not much of a difference between the government and the private schools. Basic principles and ideas were not part of the child’s mental construct.
Learning for any child or adult implies that there is assimilation that leads to some change. The child, by interacting with the world around her, builds her intellectual capacities, her emotional and social persona and her personality. The child is born with a potential but how much is realised depends on the experiences offered to her by society, the most critical elements of it being the family and the school. If one asks a child to sit quietly for five hours a day, during the most crucial years of his life, he will surely be a diminished, diminutive dwarf, not actualising his full potential.
The value of movement is not merely to learn, to acquire knowledge but it is the basis for the child to construct his or her personhood. Movement takes place not only when a child does something external but also when s/he sees or thinks or reasons or understands. Don’t we nod, make gestures, change facial expressions, speak when we share, learn or discover something? Did Archimedes continue having a bath calmly when he made a discovery? Can one be still, when elated? Cannot a person who has completed a task successfully be immediately identified? This idea of linking movement and action to learning is a key to unlock the secret of the child’s development. If the child has to be given a means to develop, it has to be offered in such a way that the child can and must move. It is not enough for the child to see and hear. Movement cannot be replaced by anything else at the same level of intensity. If a person is deprived of one of the senses, another sense may take over and become the dominant one. For example for a blind person, the sense of hearing or touch may become more heightened. But for movement there is no other substitute.
Creative movement
Even so, all forms of movement may not be considered to be educational. Just jumping around, however beneficial it may be for the child who spends many hours within the four walls of the home or school that has become the man-made environment of today, does not make it a learning activity, leave alone a developmental one. The value of movement for education depends on the purpose behind it. Any movement, to be considered educational should help to build the personality, give the child new powers or strengthen existing ones, but not leave the child where he was earlier. This does not imply that every time a child moves there has to be a serious purpose behind it. You may have seen a one or two-year-old child, who, even with a piece of thread, how absorbed they can get and when they are done, their expression or smile. A movement that unites the motor and psychological forces of the child, a “synthetic”, creative movement focuses the intelligence on the purpose behind the movement and not on the movement itself. For this synthesised movement to be effective there needs to be an effort – a “stretching of the mind” – not too difficult that it makes the objective out of reach and not too easy either.
It is important that the motor and the psychological energies go together. But often in schools we see children put in situations where ‘thought without movement’ (class work) is offered and then ‘movement without thought’ (a break, PT) are given as a compensation. This, Dr Montessori said is like “hopping on one foot and then on the other”, which creates an artificial dichotomy. And more so, we can’t go too far, can we? Why not use both legs and walk naturally and continue for longer periods? Then there would be no fatigue from an assumed mind-tiring class or a rest required from a mindless exercise session. Games, sports, eurhythmics, dance would be better options, where there is analysis within, along with a corresponding external activity. But one cannot live by these alone.
For movement and thought to be synchronised for the young child; for the head, heart and hand to work together; these experiences need to be built into the daily practice and life at home or school. They cannot be special classes taken once or twice a week, or even daily, after a full day of doing things disjointedly.
Movement needs to be also chosen by the learner, to make it a part of her personality. When a child does activities according to her volition and not because somebody (however many good intentions they may have) has instructed her to do so, then her whole ego is active and the personality functions as a unit. Her actions will follow the rhythm of her own life. This can then be considered as an activity, a task, a work, where all the faculties of the child act in unison, enabling another layer to be drawn into the personality.
The writer is the Director of SchoolScape-Centre for Educators
Date:11/01/2009 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/thehindu/mag/2009/01/11/stories/2009011150180500.htm
