Re: affectivity in education

Robert Bahruth (rbahruth who-is-at claven.idbsu.edu)
Fri, 20 Feb 1998 10:04:37 +0100

I think it is interesting to see how Maria Montessori addressed emotions
very early on in setting up the gestalt for learning in her schools.
Instead of making the teacher the policing official, the students are given
succinct strategies which they should attempt to employ before seeking
resolution from an adult. Also, when the last resort does become going to
an adult, the children are encouraged and enabled to put into words their
feelings about what went wrong. I hear comments from very young children
in the Montessori school I visit frequently, some as young as 3 years old,
saying "He hurt my feelings" and "They are not including me in their
activity" and "They are using the materials in an inappropriate manner." I
think this early stage-setting for dealing with emotions is further
demonstration of the disposition of Maria Montessori to "assume
intelligence" from the children. When I compare this with the way cliques
are allowed to form and how emotions are often mishandled in many of the
public school settings I visit, often in line with the authoritarian
pedagogy, I see the teacher either ignores or admonishes, but rarely works
to problematize or provide effective strategies for resolution.
I used to refer to addressing the human environment as postponing the
curriculum, but now I see it is in fact a way of expediting the curriculum.
It seems the technicist approach to education is often driven by inanimate
objects such as the clock and the curriculum. Also, content is prioritized
over the emotional well-being of learners and the human environment of the
classroom. Could it be that we actually de-skill learners from addressing
their emotions constructively? This may be accomplished more from what is
left out of the curriculum than from what is included. The more I
interrogate curricular issues, the more I see how oppressive a curriculum
can be for teachers who are literalists and attempt the Herculean task of
covering the fragmented list of skills one by one across a school year.
Any teacher knows you can hardly get to all of it and it is even less
likely to be developmentally appropriate for all at any one time. What
kinds of emotional outbreaks might this practice prompt? It is one of
the reasons why I dislike the term "discipline problem" because
semantically it places the blame on the victim, while simultaneously
relieving the teacher of any obligation to critically examine any
pedagogical flaws which may have prompted the student's response. I prefer
the term "resistence" since it begs the question, "Resisting what?"
>From another angle, I suggest the work of Shirley Steinberg at Adelphi
University who has written on Kinderculture and the effects, often
devastating, of popular culture on children. It returns me to the
curricular inquiry issue, since we spend so much time on superficial
curricular content, what some have called "spliting morphemes" when so many
other influences, often violent, are taking their toll on children's
emotional lives, but these influences are often ignored and absent from the
curriculum. Why not problematize these influences from television and
Hollywood with the children, instead of ignoring the fact that children may
be more influenced by the spheres of popular culture than by anything
happening in school? The saddest part of all of this is that children are
often left to their own resources in digesting popular culture and it often
happens acritically at the gut level. I think we can do better. roberto