When you walk into any early learning environment, you will see tables beautifully created to provoke children's curiosity and wonderment or play spaces that offer materials that inspire spontaneity and creativity, but how do educators define or deconstruct the learning from the experience?
Over the years I have had many robust conversations with educators, who have found this aspect of their work challenging. Usually this is about unpacking the idea of children doing and children learning, defining what learning is happening in the context of the experience. Learning can look and feel very different for every educator, which can be contributed to their level of knowledge, individual preferences or biases and their own childhood experiences. This can also be said of the individuality of the child, who have their own idea of what they will be learning, as not all children will have the same intention as you might have.
When educators become invested in an idea, they may have a fixed plan for how the experience will happen or evolve. When children's ideas differ from our own, we may become frustrated and try and re-direct the children to conform. In other words focusing on the activity, and not the children, which interferes with children's learning and sense of agency.
I often talk to educators about the times I would create an experience with a pre-determined learning intention, however always seemed disappointed that children would not follow my way of thinking and go off on their own tangent, however with time I learnt that children should be seen as the instigators of their own learning whatever that might be or whenever that could be.
Recently I invited a group of children to spent time at my desk, giving them a small piece of clay to make whatever they wished. Throughout the day the children came up with several ideas and shared their voices on what they would like to make, whether it be Bunjil the eagle, cakes, flags or snails, I realised that much of what they made was taken from their own ideas or some of the learning they had previously been interested in. However, one child really took on her own learning, making Indigenous cookies, using the mathematical concepts of sorting, patterning, trial and error and size. I watched closely as she made cookies with small intents in the middle to fit the size of the paper. She ensured that the clay she had was enough to fit on to the paper, spending around 20 minutes to make the cookies fit, she then sprinkled glitter over them. This experience emphasised that each child brought their own learning intention to my desk, and if I had decided on the learning intention, such as how to pinch and roll clay, then children's individuality would have been silenced.
Every setting needs educators who innovate and are creative, but the experience itself should never interfere with the focus of children's ideas and their individual ways of engaging. Some of the most powerful and pleasurable experiences occur in everyday opportunities, for example playing with mud, looking up at the sky, eating, separating from a loved one or comforting a friend. Experiences are vehicles for learning, development and wellbeing, not ends in themselves. This is not to say that educators must slavishly follow children's interests and never initiate, Creative educators introduce, experiment and initiate as well as respond, however wise educators always consider children's reaction and act on them. The cookies were a topic of conversation, which initiated our learning of bush tucker and possum skins. The complexity of our work with children, brings with it a level of listening and an understanding of when to talk or introduce new learning, but we are all cloaked with our own perceptions of what learning looks like for a child. Its about being brave in our work and being mindful that we too are all still learning.