What is my real work?

As I mention at the beginning of this blog, one of the reasons I have started to write about my work is to call into question the assumptions about the work that I do, and to advocate for it's value.  I often feel an incongruence between my understanding of what is happening in my room, and what others might see from looking in.  For example, when I tell people that my concentration was (in part) Women's Studies I am often met with confusion. "You're going to teach toddlers about feminism?" 


This question is the underpinning of what I believe to be a set of assumptions about education that have led us astray.  The assumption that teaching means passing down pieces of information, not working together to understand the world around us.  That "feminism" (or anti-racism, or peace and concepts of justice) is somehow taught and not lived, and that what we do in the classroom is limited to that particular space.  I think that people also often assume that what looks like play is just that, play.  But I ask you to consider what is really happening in a "simple" play scenario. 

A glimpse into the classroom:

Several children have gathered around a sensory table filled with magnetic wands and several metal pieces.  Two of the children are holding the wands, and watching as they attract the pieces of metal.  One of the children looks up and says, "wow this sticks to everything."

A glimpse into my mind:
This child has just formed a "schema" or an idea about how something works.  Magnetic wands stick to "everything" because "everything" in the bin is metal.  What will happen if I introduce another non-magnetic material?


The next day...
I have added some wooden pieces into the bin along with the metal pieces from the day before.  When the children arrive the same child goes over to the sensory table.  She picks up the wand and starts attracting the metal pieces.  When she gets to one of the wooden pieces and it doesn't stick I point it out. "Hey!  I remember yesterday, you said that that wand stuck to everything.  What happened?  Why isn't it sticking?" The child considers this for a moment and then begins to walk around the room trying to stick the wand to other things she finds.  


So what:
The reason that this is interesting to me is not so much for the answer to the question "why isn't it sticking?" or even of the eventual discovery of the fact that metal sticks to magnets and wood doesn't.  What is important to me here is the internal conflict between what happened yesterday (when the wand stuck to "everything") and the experience that has just occurred (it only sticks to some things).  What I am interested in is how this child makes sense of new information, how she processes what she experiences given what she thinks she knows (or her previous understanding of the world based on her prior experiences).  Does she choose to embrace this new information, or reject it as incorrect or inconceivable? 


In one of my sociology courses (also part of my concentration) we learned about how prejudice forms.  Someone has an experience with a person, and it leads them to have an idea about that type of person (someone with glasses, someone in a wheelchair, someone with AIDS, a white person, a person of color, someone of a particular religion etc.) This seems clear.  What was interesting to me (and relevant to my work) is the way the brain then responds when someone with the same characteristics acts in a different way.  We learned that there are two general ways for the brain to respond to this new information.  The first is to recreate your schema (this wand sticks to everything...) and accept that you may have only had a partial understanding of that person (oh no, wait, it only sticks to some things... i must not have had a complete picture of how this wand works, or all of it's properties) which may lead you to a desire to find out more about them (what else will this wand stick to?) and gain a more complete understanding of the world (ah! It sticks to metal, but not wood...) Alternatively, some people's brains are more predisposed to create what are called "outliers" to help explain this inconsistency.  When this happens they continue to hold their original belief about the person, believing that the new behavior is an exception rather than an indicator that they have an incomplete knowledge, and they are not led to try to learn anything else.


As I indicated in the parentheses, I believe that there is a direct correlation between challenging children to re-think their schemas, and developing the type of brain that is not only okay with inconsistency, but utilizes it as an opportunity to gain a more complete understanding of the world, and the people in it.  I believe that my work doesn't just help children understand the properties of materials and how they interact with one another, or that one plus one is two, but that my real work is to help children develop brains that are not beholden to binary systems (which I believe are so frequently not the reality) and to become people who use internal conflict to become better citizens in the world by seeking to understand, not shut out what they don't yet know.