Tecnologia En Preescolares

On the wave of creativity: Children, expressive languages and technology

AUTHOR: Giovanni Piazza
TITLE: On the wave of creativity: Children, expressive languages and technology
SOURCE: International Journal of Education through Art 3 no2 103-21 S 2007
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ABSTRACT
This paper discusses four key principles of the Reggio Emilia approach. The first concerns the multiple possibilities children possess for forms of communication. The second concerns the connections between different languages (disciplines) that are the basis for learning and understanding. The third focuses on creativity as processrather than product. The fourth explores the ways individual and group knowledge processes are developed for children, teachers and parents through research based aesthetic activity.
Keywords Education Reggio Emilia process interaction creativity poetics
Children communicate with the world around them in many ways. They are curious about it and explore it. As they learn to communicate, sothey establish relationships and can express their needs.
Children's ability to communicate in diverse ways and learn from experience and social interaction is important for their development. The view that they can construct their own identity contrasts with the common conception in primary schools of children as empty containers waiting to be filled with prefigured knowledge. In actualfact, from birth they possess structures for interpreting reality and constantly weave interactive relationships into communication and learning, using expressive languages. The creative, expressive forms children employ enable adults to establish contact with the worlds they fashion from everyday experience.
I want to clarify what I mean by learning from experience and social interaction'.Formal schooling has tended to rely on transmitting formal knowledge through memorizing, instead of supporting the independent learning strategies all children engage in either alone or in groups. Knowledge based solely on memory becomes progressively more ephemeral, leaving no trace of the human processes of construction and identity transformation. It disappears if not consolidated through theexperience of using language.
Educators can support the role that expressive/artistic languages play in aesthetic learning by refining children's communication skills so that they can share their thoughts more effectively and gain more experience, knowledge and joy. Albert Szent-Györgyi,(FN1) one of the many scientists who studied in the famous Budapest lycées at the end of 1894, stressed theimportance of connecting the school curriculum to everyday experience. It should be possible to stimulate learners to work out rules and principles for themselves in their daily encounters, rather than teach them by rote.
Reggio's educational vision is research based. Children investigate not only their surrounding worlds but also the meaning of life as it emerges from their own experience.Conceiving and constructing experience through the use of artistic languages helps them to explore and deduce meaning and often results in creative and poetic ways of perceiving reality. The projects Reggio Emilia educators have documented and analysed and have provided insights into children's strong desire to transmit their skills and knowledge in interdisciplinary forms. Moreover, they are able toperceive similarities and differences between forms and to connect different languages.
Reggio educators assume that children are born wanting to combine communication codes as they interact with the world, and that it is this that enables them to structure experience continuously into individual knowledge forms. Operating from a socio-constructivist perspective, the educators act as careful...