Debi Keyte-Hartland

Loris Malaguzzi wrote a poem called The One Hundred Languages of Children, and a Hundred, Hundred More.  In it, he described his vision for how children learned through and in a hundred languages interweaving their ways of meaning-making and expressing their ideas about the world.  The poem explains how ‘school’ steals ninety-nine of these ways of learning; a metaphor, I think for underlining how certain modalities or languages of learning and expressing are perceived as more privileged than others.   It continues to say how ‘school’ also teaches how subjects and disciplines do not connect or belong together, but should instead be separated and isolated just as thinking processes such as the imagination and logic were not considered in relation to each other.

In this world of ‘school’ as perceived by Malaguzzi , I would imagine that assessment procedures take on a similar form of separating and privileging some subjects over others in which levels, grades and assessment bands could so easily become drivers of pedagogy and where the assessment procedures (providing evidence of assessments made) dominates what teachers do… sound familiar? Yikes! It certainly could lead to situations where educators know in their hearts it is wrong but they press on ahead under the pressure of the expectations. Where is the vitality of teaching and learning in this?

When educators really observe children to see how they learn rather than just match what they do to a list of previously defined outcomes then they see how they are interested in finding out (researching) about the world that they are a part of. Educators see how their children form working theories about this world and their relation to it and discover the ways in which they elaborate their knowledge by building upon those working theories and learning more. For example, they find their way into code systems, symbols and signs though multiple ways, through playing with the ideas of writing, through drawing in symbolic ways, by imitating older children or our own actions and behaviours, and their innate curiosity creates the researchful instinct that children have to begin to learn how to form letters and words because they desire to discover the many ways of communicating in meaningful contexts. 

Gunilla Dahlberg, of Stockholm University, said in a workshop about children’s learning that;

“Our starting point is that children are exploring the world and trying to create meaning. Being attentive to their creation of meaning creates desire, and when children have desire, they also learn other factual knowledge.”

Gunilla Dahlberg

Therefore educators must find a multitude of ways (our own hundred languages) to support these desires so that the processes of learning meets with the ways of how children, indeed all humans learn.   If children have a hundred languages (and more) then as teachers we must teach in a hundred languages (and more). We could call this a transdisciplinary approach to learning.

I understand transdisciplinary learning as something that crosses boundaries of subjects and invites methodologies of working together from different perspectives and points of view to create NEW conceptual ideas, ways of knowing, of being, that combine, integrate and move beyond the capabilities that a singular subject or point of view could offer.  It is a context of border crossing in which subjects, perspectives, and disciplines are built upon and within a rich, transcontextual milieu of relationships.  It is complex, it is a tangle of spaghetti, it is a knotted, nest of noodles. In dong so we can ask questions such as;

What is the role of the imagination when connected to logic?

How does creative thinking emerge in group contexts of learning?

How do we evaluate learning that is transdisciplinary in nature?

The 100 Languages of Children poem offers educators and leaders of education significant challenges in how we ‘see’ learning unfold as it is lived in the classroom and outside of it and in how we develop curriculum and pedagogy to support that lively learning. The danger lies in creating curriculum documents that aim to neatly sequence both the time of children and the content of what is to be learned into organised chunks that have little connection to how learning and development happens for young children. We cannot treat the early years the same as other periods of learning because for our youngest learners they are often developing experience of the world, its subjects and materials for the first time, and all doing it at different rates, times and in different ways. However, at the same time, we cannot be laissez-faire about it either. What it means is that we have to consider HOW (not just what) we construct and design curriculum that is attuned with our values of childhood and how young children learn and be able to articulate our decisions to others based in the evidence and outcomes of our practice for children. This is the work that needs to be done.