A SIGNATURE PEDAGOGY
Article by Thea Oberholzer
Implementing a Creative Approach to Sensory Development in the Preschool Classroom and the Impact of Fun in Learning
Hellen Keller learned her first word, ‘water’, through sensory exploration (Montessori, 1914; Keller, 2000). Freud noted in Project for a Scientific Psychology (1950 [1895] cited in Rosenfeld, 2012, p.4) that a baby’s first introduction to the world is through his senses at his mother’s breast.
David Rosenfeld (2012) helped an autistic child discover the meaning of words through his senses.
Piaget considered the sensory-motor period (Goswami, 2001; Feldman, 2004; Else, 2014) as the first developmental play stage (from birth until around the age of two). Similarly, we commence our academic year by introducing preschool learners – most of them barely two years of age – to the world of foreign language acquisition through a sensory camp (see figure 1).
Our Preschool Program, in a private bilingual kindergarten with an affluent clientele, is set in an Asian country. The culture essentially dictates that the more affluent the parent, the more influential the school is in terms of skills development.
Nannies and teachers are often the primary caregivers and, in our urbanized tropical context, these children are brought up indoors for the main, under artificial light and in controlled play-spaces.
Our teaching methodologies are not traditional and are more in line with alternative approaches, some to a lesser or greater extent, such as Reggio Emilia (Thornton and Brunton, 2009, 2014; Lewin-Benham, 2010; Edwards, Gandini and Forman, 2012; Krechevsky, Mardell, Rivard and Wilson, 2013), Montessori (1914, 2010, 2016) and Gardner’s (1993, 2008) perceptions.
The term ‘signature pedagogies’ is accredited to Shulman (2005, p.52) as “characteristic forms of teaching and learning” in different professions. Csikszentmihalyi (Lewin-Benham, 2010, p.ix) surmises that the discoveries made over the last century, on how children learn, “have rarely been integrated into education”.
Sternberg (2015) categorically agrees and Wilson (1999), Robinson (2009) and Kotler (2014) found that their gifted subjects often disregarded their formal schooling.
Schulman (2005, p.57) warns that the habits formed by signature pedagogies can also be a source of “pedagogical inertia” and he argues for learning from other signature pedagogies to improve one’s specific field.
This is a persuasive argument for adopting alternative approaches when teaching young learners, which is in itself a unique developmental phase and should therefore, in essence, be treated as a signature pedagogy within education, having a provocative multisensory milieu as one of its distinguishing features (Miller, Robertson, Hudson and Shimi, 2012). Erikson (1993) links the hallmarks of a culture to the education of its young and, as creative thinking is considered the key to the future (Gardner, 2008; Robinson, 2009, Florida, 2012), what is the status quo of creativity in learning?