Emergent Curriculum Podcast 052223

Hello everyone, welcome to Fireside Chats on the Young Minds. My name is Alexandra Dutton, I'm the program director of Old Firehouse School in Lafayette and my co-host today is Danielle Roach, the program director of Old Firehouse School in Middle Valley. Today we're going to talk with our guest speaker, Darcy Campbell, about emergent curriculum and project work and the Reggio Emilia approach. For anyone needing a brief intro into what Reggio Emilia is, it's an approach that began after World War II and it is an approach that is emergent, meaning that the ideas of how the curriculum looks come from the children, they emerge from their play, their questions, their ideas, and it's project-based in that those ideas are studied for a long period of time. Learning in this way encourages children to think creatively and stay engaged in their own learning. It develops a way of thinking that encourages listening, taking others' perspectives and being able to think creatively. Old Firehouse School is a Reggio Emilia-inspired school and Cal Hollow School in San Francisco is where Darcy Campbell is an executive director and it also is a Reggio Emilia-inspired school. I'm really excited to have Darcy Campbell back with us doing her second podcast with us. She did one on creativity a few years ago and she's back to talk with us today about emergent curriculum and project work. And Darcy, just some background, has been at Cal Hollow School in San Francisco since 2002. She was teaching at San Francisco State University for, what was it, 17 years, is that what you said, Darcy? Yes. And she consults with families, with schools, and has frequently been our favorite guest speaker at our staff development days because she shares so much passion and knowledge about emergent curriculum and the Reggio Emilia approach specifically. So, welcome, Darcy, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me. Tell us a little bit about why you chose to use emergent curriculum at your school. Yeah, sure. Well, I have been drinking from that cup of emergent inquiry-based learning for many, many years. And so, I don't think I know what not teaching this way looks like anymore. But why do we have a school rooted in emergent curriculum and motivated and inspired by the pedagogy and philosophy of Reggio Emilia? In all honesty, as an activist, activism, as a daily act of advocacy for this age, and to be grandiose about it as a way to change the world, I feel that it's important as educators, particularly now when life is moving so fast and so much uncertainty, and there's so many new things, you know, being invented that we actually spend time, money, energy, and research on thinking deeply about what it means to be in the presence of children. I do it because in the foundation of inquiry-based or emergent curriculum is critical thinking. And our world needs, we need to be helping to promote a world where critical thinking is at the root of everything we do. I think within emergent curriculum, questioning, noticing, wondering, creating are all part of that. And I feel like as an educator, I have a responsibility to uphold the rights of the next citizens, you know, the people, they are citizens now, but they are entering into the world later. And I have, as an early childhood educator, this responsibility. And that's why I run a school that is emergent curriculum-based school, or we call it inquiry-based. But it's the same, same animal, basically. I remember one of the things you said to me, a long time ago of our staff days, you said it's the hardest way to teach, but the best way to teach. And that's just a phrase I have borrowed from you for many, many years. Why do you say it like that? Like it's the hardest way, but the best way? Well, I think we weren't taught, very few of us were actually taught to teach this way. We were taught to fill up the empty vessel. We were taught to give lessons on how to be in the world. We were taught a very top-down way of teaching. And so I think a lot of teaching emergent or inquiry-based curriculum is to undo the way we were taught, to start seeing that children are protagonists of their own learning, to think like, oh, gosh, I have to not necessarily design for my, well, you are designing for your end result, but I am designing for now, and I don't, or in two minutes from now, and I don't know what that's going to look like. So what can I base it on? And we actually have to design curriculum based on the questions that children have about the world and meaning-making and the questions we have about children's meaning-making and the world. That's a very different starting place to being an educator. You're not saying, what are the answers? You're saying, what are the questions? And it's sort of this going and flipping everything upside down and then saying, okay, now let's teach from what we don't know. And that's an interesting way to teach, I think, and it's harder. It's also harder because you're planning for, you actually, in emergent curriculum, you have to plan for 900 possibilities, of which you will probably only use four in that day. So you're planning, oh, the children are interested in the ladybugs, you know, I need to cover all these developmental domains, but I need to see what their interests are, what are their questions. So I don't know if their questions are going to be about the ladybug family or if the questions are going to be about what ladybugs eat or how to keep them safe and protected because they seem to not be on our bush anymore, you know, our plants. I don't know what their questions are. So I'm going to actually have to plan for all of those entry points, every single one of them. But in that next day, I'm probably only going to do four of them. And how then do I meet every single developmental domain at the same time and know each child at the same time? So I do think it is hardest and I see schools not spend enough time and energy in those questions. And so they really are just longer scene schools. They're just doing the longer scene. They're not actually doing an inquiry or a study or research with the children. And I think that's seductive and easier. It's so much easier to run a theme-based school. Hi, we're studying dinosaurs for a month. OK, let's hit all the developmental domains. Done. Let's study apples because it's fall. Done. We can do this. Teachers are amazing. We can write, you know, a lesson plan in 20 seconds, but can we design for what we don't know? Harder way to teach. Build off what you said, Darcy. Entering as a teacher, too, is so intimidating because most of us grew up and I think often people still do. There are right answers and there are wrong answers. And this way of teaching, there are infinite possibilities, which allows for a lot of creativity, which is really wonderful, but can be really intimidating going into it as a parent. I'm sure not really understanding. There's not a specific outline of the curriculum and what's going to happen. But I think especially as a teacher, once you enter in and you just take the risk of let's see where this goes, it opens up your possibilities of ideas and being able to share with families. These are all the different ways that the kids have come up to problem solve this idea or to think creatively through this event just allows for so many more options than even maybe you had thought of as a teacher, allowing for the 900 possibilities that may have happened. We probably came up with 1002 options that allows you to pick from, which is so wonderful and interesting and allows you to grow both as a teacher and with the kids. Yeah, and I think we use the phrase in our curriculum design called creating a plan of possibilities. And when we plan for possibilities, we are making space for children to be those protagonists of their own learning. You know, we are saying, oh, something's going to come from you and I'm going to need to think about that. That reciprocity in learning and the gift we give children and then it's like I've made space for you to enter into this learning place and I'm going to be informed and transformed by our interaction as opposed to, I'm not going to change. I'm not going to do anything differently. I made a lesson plan. You know, we're now saying, I actually am going to have to think fast and think on my feet because I need to slow down your learning so that I can help scaffold it, but I need to speed up how I give back the information for you to mess with, you know, and I think it's a really complex way, but I love that thinking of teaching as creating plans of possibilities. And we then commit, of course, as you know, Danielle, you know, we have to commit. We have to do something. We have to get some learning happening here. It is, yes, definitely the more complex, I guess I probably should amend my quote, Alex, to more like, you know, it's the more complex way to teach, but the best way to teach and the best way to learn. And what you just said about, I will be informed and transformed by this process is so, it's just such a wonderful feeling as a teacher too, that you're not just giving knowledge to the children, you're also learning so much about how they think, how they get to their different ideas, where their ideas come from, how they learn and grow. And it is, it's really transformative too, because it's so, it's so unique to every child. It's going to be unique to a particular group. And I frequently learn so many more things. And something that I tell families a lot when they tour with me is our curriculum allows us to go often beyond what we adults think is what kids can do and can learn. And like you said, we have a plan for possibilities, but so frequently the really good teachers who are learning to trust this process and be open to what children can do and can create are able to go much further than what we as adults would have thought is possible. Absolutely. I think another branch of this too, that is the reason why Old Firehouse School and Cal Hall use this style is because these are really important skills that we value. So like thinking creatively, taking others' perspectives, cooperation in a group setting, these are all values and skills we want the kids to walk away with. So I think that's another important part of why we do it, why we keep it alive in our schools. Yeah. One thing that Dorothy has said at Open Houses before is, she talks about how the world is changing so fast and knowledge and how we get knowledge before, like I remember having a set of Encyclopedia Britannica and now it's just, why would anybody have those things? You can just Google everything. But with the creation of AI and whatever, there's so many ways that our world is going to be so different in 10 years, in 20 years. And so we can't teach children the same way that we were taught because our world when we were young is completely different than the world they currently live in and the world that they will live in. And so it's not just about teaching facts and figures anymore. It's more teaching about creativity and how to explain or how to approach problems, how to think, how to connect with other people, how to listen to one another. And that those are much more important skills for children to learn because we really don't know what kind of world they're going to have when they grow up, but they will always need those skills. They will need to collaborate. They will need to understand the perspective of other people. And that is such an important part of how inquiry-based learning and emergent curriculum looks. Yeah, I completely agree. I think the other gift of emerging curriculum, inquiry-based, is children come to know themselves as learners and get to know what strategies, you know, first I need to notice it, then I need to wonder, and now I have questions about it. What materials do I need to represent my ideas? What entry points am I going to enter into to think about this? By the time a little person has gone either from two to five or even before in an inquiry-based or emergent curriculum, they actually have a lot of skills to bring strategic planning skills, you know, like, and they aren't afraid of not knowing, so they can come into a situation, go into any school that they don't even have, you know, it's nothing like an inquiry-based school, and they're not afraid of learning and afraid of not having the right answers or not knowing because they haven't been in that suit before. They now, they're like, okay, bring it on, this is something I don't know how to do. That's okay, because I'm going to notice it, I'm going to wonder about it, I'm going to try and think about the tools, I'm going to think about the questions I need to ask, and who do I need to ask, and start to understand how to analyze and synthesize data, so you can take an inquiry-based, emergent curriculum-based kid and go plunk and plunk them down in the most formal traditional settings, and they're still like, okay, how do we think about this? We do a disservice by taking a very rigid approach, a traditional approach to teaching and learning, and this is, I guess, something I'd love to impress upon parents, it's like, when you have boxed children in so much, and then you expect them to go into these other boxes, and that looks exactly like this preschool box is now going to look like the other box, and I taught at the college level, as you mentioned, for 17 years, I get these kids who are just starting at college, and there's some out-of-the-box thinking required, they can't do it, can I just press a button, can I Google it, you know, it's like, I miss the days of the encyclopedia, where you had to work hard to figure out, or you sat and stared because all these words you never heard of in your life, as opposed to plugging into, like, emergent curriculum is getting children those critical thinking skills, that ability to analyze and synthesize data, and the lifelong love of learning, because everything is a learning moment in an emergent, every single, walking to the bathroom is a learning moment, walking by my office is a learning moment, walking into an experience, a context, everything is a learning moment, and I think that schools think that there's a hierarchy, like, some learning is more important than others, and then we miss all this wonderful stuff in between, you know, the messes, the knots, the fun, the joy, the problems, you know, wanting children to be problem, not just problem solvers, that's cool and great, but problem seekers, because they're excited about them, like, oh, yeah, bring it on, we don't know how to build a spaceship, but that's okay, we can do it, and the agency and industry, I think, is also that I would love for parents and teachers to understand that those are some of the gifts we give, right? Well, and I think that really segues nicely into my next question for you, which is, how do you get families and teachers to understand the value of this? Because I think for a lot of families, it seems really attractive, but it's not a way, and again, most of us grew up learning, so what are some ways to help families understand the value of this kind of approach, and how do you talk with your families and your school about it? Yeah, sure. So, let's break that down to three kind of concepts, proof, evidence, window in and out of your work. I remember hearing Amelia Gambetti for the first time in person, it was 1996, 94, and someone in the group questioned, you know, how do we convince parents that this is, or how, I feel like my parents don't believe me, and they don't understand the importance, and she said in this very thick, wonderful Italian accent, if the parents don't believe you, it is your fault. And I was like, shocked, like, and the room just like went dead silent, and I thought, you know what, though? She's absolutely right. And this person burst into tears, she was like, who asked the question, I felt so bad for her, too. But I thought, oh, my God, she's right. She hit on something so important. And I'm a parent, and so are you, you know, yeah, I want to know why you're doing what you're doing. I want to know what you're doing. And I want to know why it's important. And when we don't do that, when we don't say, let me show you how children learn with an inquiry based learning, let me tell the steps, let me prove in every year that I am holding myself accountable, let me give you windows in on my work, you know, your podcast is a window in on your work, Alex, and Danielle, you know, this is the way you're saying, come into this mess that we call our wonderful way of living the life of the school. And you're saying, let me give you a window or the roundtables that we do for parents or the group discussions and things like these are all saying, come see what we do. And when schools don't do that, they miss an opportunity for that, again, informed and transformed by parents' perspectives. Danielle, I know you as a teacher and as a new director, too, you have probably have a lot of insight into ways that you help parents get over the hurdle of not having this match. Yeah. So one of the things we do at Old Firehouse School is sharing through presentation. So as we move through project work, the teachers are recording and documenting, but they also sequence it into a documentary movie at the end to share the progress of how the project works through all the motions and the problem solving and finding more problems and all of that, which really helps the parents be able to see and feel how it really was, how the kids, what the things they said were, because especially as teachers, at the end of the day, when parents ask, how was their day? You can't remember all the things and all the wonderful, creative things that they did and said and communicate that. So showing it is a really beautiful way that we're able to give that back to the families and the kids can hold on to those memories to written documentation, whether it's newsletters or things you put up on the wall, it's a great way to share. And also sharing your mistakes as a teacher or director, right? People learn from each other's mistakes and how you overcame it. So I found sharing that with families like, oh, this is a problem I had and this is how we worked through it, makes it a really relatable way to communicate and get people to buy in. Yeah. Again, it's evidence. It's saying, let me show you, it's that window in that you're offering, come look, come see what we're doing, come see what we've created and are creating. And then adding rationale, I ask my teacher, you know, descriptions of process, teacher rationale and evidence, the artifacts and evidence of children's work and their thought process and, you know, how it has evolved. I think all of what you're talking about, those presentations are here, we call them round tables and they're in person as well, are just ways to say, you know, we are holding ourselves accountable. We believe in this. So let me show you, you know, and inviting then parents in to actually have conversations and to think about the same questions you're thinking about, like, how did they learn? What's going to motivate them? How can they solve this problem? Like then parents get to start being part of that. And I think that that's just a different way of teaching. Also, the benefits are huge when parents have a relationship to the school and to the learning. I think it's important for them to see the intentionality of how much teachers are thinking and describing or showing that process too. So whether it's teachers doing a presentation or hosting a roundtable discussion about it, it's important that families understand while it's emergent, it doesn't mean I just sit there and I hope something happens, that I'm wondering, I'm thinking, I'm asking questions and that we try things and we go in different directions. And that the families eventually, they do, they really get to value, wow, this is really interesting. And it changes, I think, a lot of the families' way of parenting or talking to their children and their ability to see how when you slow down, when you wait for children to talk and ask a question, that you can really help them parse that out a little bit, extend their thinking. And it just makes them more interested in learning and more interested in creating and talking and building and whatnot. I think the three of us obviously are, we love education. We love seeing how children think. And I feel like we've been able to help families too see the beauty of what that looks like. And what you're saying too about how as people get older and we're putting them in these boxes and then we're expecting them to be able to think out of the box, I see that too when I teach in some of my college courses and students having a really hard time thinking that way. And it's really sad to see it. And I'm so lucky that schools like this exist. And there are still, even if it's not necessarily the entire public school, there are different teachers in various settings that are still going to try to create that atmosphere of wonder and curiosity together. The way that this can kind of look for a child who's 11 years old, like this is just a story about my daughter, which happened a few months ago when she's in a school. And I'm really lucky it's a project-based elementary school, which I know there's not a bunch out there, but there are a few. And we were working on a math problem. And of course, the way that they're doing math now is very different than how I did math. And she was working on this division problem and was struggling. And she's like, I need help. And I said, OK. And I looked at it and I said, well, I could tell you the way I remember doing it, but I know it's different than how you're learning it. So do you want me to give you the equation or the formula and we'll work from there and figure that out together? And she took a second and then said, no, I don't want you to do that for me because I want to understand why it works. And I was like, cool, I'll be here to support you emotionally. But that was so great for me. Like, oh, wow. Even as an 11-year-old who had this basis, obviously, at Old Firehouse School with inquiry based and project-based learning, she's still able to take that curiosity and not just get to the answer and be OK with the seeking of the problem rather than just the solving of the problem. I love that. So I thought that was wonderful. I love that, too, that why. I want to know why, which is so natural to children to want to know why. And often education can remove that thirst and it's not why, but how do I get the answer as opposed to why is it going this way? You know, why am I going to do it this way? Yeah, I love why. Which is how a lot of projects start, too, right? With a question or curiosity or an event or an observation. Danielle, can you talk briefly about the First Mommy Project? I don't know if Darcy's heard about this one, but it's just a perfect example of what emergent curriculum and inquiry-based learning can look like and can be. I think a very high level of thinking that we don't often anticipate from children. Yes, I had a group of four and five-year-olds who I had been with for about two and a half years at that point. And one of the girls in the group kept asking me, in her words, how did the first mommy got it alive? And I thought that was really interesting. And the first time I didn't think too much of it, but she kept asking. And so I said, well, let's bring it to the group. And we brought it to circle time. And everybody had a lot of ideas on how that would happen and what came first. And a lot of interesting ideas from different types of animals to maybe a school bus came out of the fog and delivered the first mommy. It also brought up other questions like what about a first daddy, which one of the girls in my group had a single mother. So from her perspective, you didn't need a first daddy. The first mommy knew karate, so she was good on her own. A lot of creative ideas. And it was a lot of sitting down and just talking about all these ideas. We did try and make it concrete in some ways by making some timelines. We made timelines of our lives. And then they made their own timelines of how they thought it happened. Because what I learned through this project for myself as a teacher, I was trying to have them all come up with an idea and agree together, which was just making our lives miserable because that was not going to happen. So I learned that they all had their own idea and they all wanted to present it how they thought this happened. And that's what we ended up doing. They presented what they thought the timeline was of how the first mommy came to be. So it was a really interesting project, probably very unique because this group was able just to sit down and talk for 30, 45 minutes sometimes. But a really interesting learning experience for both myself and the kids. And I think the parents, too. And it's been a really popular topic. Yeah, I think that's so interesting, too, because it's that's an example of children wanting to solve something, that eagerness to solve, but not doing it in the grown up way there. You are honoring their relationship to time in that moment. You know, you are honoring their relationship to trying to make meaning of the world. You are honoring their context of like, how does this work? You know, this doesn't make sense. There has to be a first somewhere. You know, I know because I can generalize there's firsts in other things. And now there must have been a first here, but I don't know how to tackle this. And so I'm sure in that you had all these ways that they could enter into thinking about that. Children are honored for also being philosophical and trying to make sense of the world by using their own construct of philosophy and how powerful that is that the children get to invent the world. Again, that phrase being protagonists of their own learning. They get to be the story creators, not the consumers of something, of somebody telling them the answer. And how do we answer as grown ups even answer that question? Possibly some story we were told in school or in religion or wherever, but now to make space for that, the unanswerable question to be answered by children and that they actually are powerful and amazing and can actually do that and go through the motions of scientific thinking. The results are going to be different. The answers are going to be different, but they're still going through the cycle of inquiry to get there. They're noticing, wondering, comparing, contrasting, hypothesizing, predicting, mapping. Oh, my gosh, you instantly in a mommy project have little researchers and scientists who are inventing the answer, not because somebody told them to do it. I mean, what an amazing project that must have been. Children then take those skills, that scientific process of thinking from that mommy project and enter all of that scientific thinking abilities into like you. It's hard to take those out of somebody once you find them. You know, it's really at school would have to work really hard to stop a child from thinking scientifically, you know, because it becomes so natural. And that's the gift that you gave them as a teacher is to be able to do those things. And I love that. To the relationships that those conversations created because they were able to connect over something different. So a lot of them made connections through play and artwork and things like that. And making these connections through ideas was really interesting because seeing kids that didn't normally play together, connect, would connect over specific ideas that I had no idea that they were there and that those two were so like minded in that way. So that was a really interesting part of it, too, as the adult in part of those conversations, seeing those connections happen. Yeah. Well, Darcy, to kind of end this, then we talk about gifts that we as teachers are giving to the children and allowing for this. But we also know that when they go to elementary school, it's not necessarily going to be this way. How do you feel that the children in our types of schools fare when they're in elementary school? Well, I hear about it from the elementary schools. But what I would say is our children in schools like ours are often talkers. They can articulate their ideas. They often have a higher or a deeper and more complex understanding of the written word and ways to communicate through mark making, through writing and documenting. Because children here, they're not just writing their name 17 times. They're writing. They have to make a sign for the mommy plan that they made or they have to map something or they have to take a survey to see what other people think. What I have seen in the kids who have gone on and the relationships I have with those that have stayed in touch with the school, strong mark making and graphic representational skills, very strong verbal skills, incredible collaboration skills. As you were mentioning earlier, Alex, they're able to think, oh, this is what I think. If I get shared perspective with somebody else, I'm actually going to be changed because of this information. I'll have new information as an interchange and exchange, not just here, fill me up with information. And I think critical thinking like these children who leave our schools, as I said, know how to analyze and synthesize data. They know how to be researchers and they fare very well. And like I said earlier, you can put them in any school. It doesn't have to be an inquiry-based school. I wish for the world that there were many more that were elementary project-based schools, but they do beautifully because they know how to think. One of my first graduating groups, the parent, her younger one was still with us. And when her daughter went to kindergarten, I was asking how she was doing. And she said, you know, her teacher talks about how much she loves Amy because Amy has new ideas for her. They'll do a thing. And she's like, you know what else we should do? We should do this. And her teacher loves it. And that she feels like she's really creating this energy around learning that the other children are learning from. And I was so proud. I'm like, oh, great. And another thing that I noticed about some of our children, and definitely not all of them, but we do have living in the areas that we live in that we teach in. I'm here in Lafayette. The public school system is really, really good. So most of our children end up going to the local public schools. But I discovered that a lot of the kids, when they were getting ready for high school, they actually chose independent schools or they tried public high school for a little bit. And then decided mid-high school career, which I find very strange, to switch and to go to a smaller school that I feel like was a lot more aligned with how they learned, how they wanted to continue learning. Now that they were almost adults, 15, 16, they have a lot of creativity and ideas. And they're learning who they are as people and kind of feeling like, you know what? Maybe not what I want to just stay here. I want to go somewhere where I'm challenged differently or allowed to learn differently. And I thought that was interesting, too, to hear that so many of my first graduating group ended up opting for independent schools later on. So I don't know. I felt like it was really amazing to hear that they all reconnected and went to the same independent school, but that there was something about how they were learning and how they wanted to seek a program that was going to support them, which I thought was really powerful. That maybe those lessons that I taught them when they were three and four stayed with them when they were older. And a thirst for that kind of learning. Yeah, definitely. Well, thank you so much, Darcy, for your time. And I can't wait to share this with all of our new teachers and anybody interested in entering the field, because this is such important information and so much to think about. Well, thank you for having me. And Danielle, nice to meet you and have this conversation. I could sit and talk to you for hours about our work. Thank you so much, both of you. Thanks, Darcy. Take care. We hope to see you in your new space soon. See you soon. Thank you for listening. And please remember to subscribe to our podcast on Apple Podcasts. You can also follow us on social media. We have Instagram account and Facebook account, TikTok account and Twitter. I hope this was informative for you. And thank you again for listening to Fireside Chat on the Young Minds.