Making Your Environment "The Third Teacher"

Making Your Environment "The Third Teacher"

"In order to act as an educator for the child, the environment has to be flexible: it must undergo frequent modification by the children and the teachers in order to remain up-to-date and responsive to their needs to be protagonists in constructing their knowledge." Lella Gandini

The Italian Schools of Reggio Emilia are acclaimed for the stunning environments their educators have created, and they provoke us to recognize the instructive power of an environment. This is not a new concept, but in their schools we see vibrant examples of learning environments that dazzle our senses, invite curiosity and discovery, and most importantly, foster strong, respectful relationships. Reggio educators seem to have a different notion about the role of the environment in educating children, for unlike the typical United States early childhood classroom, their walls aren't covered with alphabet letters, calendars, and job charts. Nor do you find commercially produced bulletin board displays, labels on every shelf and surface, or rules posted. What could they be thinking?

In the name of early education, homogenization and institutionalization are sprouting up everywhere in early childhood programs across the United

States. Our programs have been developing what author and Harvard educator Tony Wagner calls "a culture of compliance" aimed at regulations, not dreams for children and ourselves. For instance, teachers in a Head Start Program told me they were dinged "out of compliance" because they had a replica of the solar system hanging from the ceiling, not at the children's eye level. A child care teacher described how the children's enthusiasm for using the block area to create "the tallest building in the world" quickly waned when her director arrived with a reminder of the rule not to build higher than their shoulders. These and many other stories tell me that we are not working with the idea Gandini suggests above, creating flexible environments that are responsive to the need for children and teachers to construct knowledge together. If we want our environments to be teachers in this way, it's time we do some careful reexamination to see how our standards and rating scales have begun to limit our thinking, and how commercial and political interests are shaping more and more of what we do.

In my opinion, if we are to embrace the idea of the environment as a significant educator in our early childhood programs, we must expand our thinking beyond the notion of room arrangements and rating scales. We must ask ourselves what values we want to communicate through our environments and how we want children to experience their time in our programs. Walk down the halls and into the classrooms of your program. What does this environment "teach" those who are in it? How is it shaping the identity of those who spend long days there?

When Deb Curtis and I were writing Designs for Living and Learning we found ourselves in a dilemma. We were eager to share photos of the inspiring environments we had begun encountering and working with programs to shape. But, we feared people might just flip through the pages looking for "decorating" ideas and bypass the text explaining the underlying concepts and principles the photos represented. Indeed, we have continued to invent training strategies to engage teachers in constructing their understanding of the environment as the third teacher in their room.

Strategy: Bring words to life

Depending on their learning style, people take different paths to bring words to life for their everyday teaching practice. I like to find inspiring quotes and have teachers pair them with their own visual images or ideas about how these words might be reflected in an actual environment. For instance, offer a selection of provocative quotes about environments, such as the following, and have your staff choose one to either draw a representation of what it means to them, or create a collage of magazine pictures.