Recently I gave a talk to the wonderful teachers and child care givers who showed for the regular Thursday Night Meeting of the Early Childhood Resource Center, sponsored by the Connecticut Children’s Museum, here in New Haven, Connecticut. The name of the talk was “Talking WIth Children: Helping Them Become the Wonderful Beings They Already Are.” If you are interested in what else is on their schedule. of programming send them an email at creatingkids@snet.net
http://www.childrensbuilding.org/
Thank you for coming to my workshop how we talk to children. It was really inspiring for me to talk with all of you about how we use language with children in our classrooms and in our homes. I hope you can continue to explore these ideas on your own and with your colleagues. Begin and continue to talk about and reflect on how you, we, talk to and with children. Here is a summary of what we went over!
How we greet and acknowledge one another provides a window onto how we perceive each other and our relationships with one another. So good morning! Good afternoon. Good evening. Or if you are reading this right before bed, good night.
Language is the central, fundamental tool we have in working with children and helping them grow, develop and learn. Here are some of the basic ideas that can help you think about how you can use language in working with children.
There are four main things we, as teachers and caretakers, do with language when we talk to children.
1) We use language to make connections and relationships with the child. We use language to show the child that they are loved, appreciated, recognized, heard, safe, and free.
2) We use language to help children learn about the world and their possible place in it.
3) We use language to direct, control, shape, and order children in ways that we deem desirable.
4) We use language to help the child move from being the object of other people’s words, to being a liberated subject who can name the world and speak for themselves.
Sociolinguists, people who study how people use language in everyday life, describe four basic purposes of language ( remember that in reality, in practice, these four different uses of language are mixed together):
Self-expression: using language to express your basic needs, likes and dislikes, what you see, what experience is like for you, what the world is like, questions, fears, dreams and desires
Give every child opportunities, invitations, and supports to express who they are, what they are going through, and what they think, feel and see.
( Listen to “Express Yourself” by The Charles Wright Band and think about how you find ways to express yourself in your daily life, and how you support the self-expression of your students and children and help them find their own unique voices)
Communication: using language to listen, speak, read, write, converse, dialogue, order, promise, threaten, declare, encourage, entice, respond to, reject, accept, acknowledge, reckon with, understand each other.
Give children opportunities, invitations and supports to communicate with one another and adults, share their thoughts and feelings, have conversations, talk and listen, argue, debate, bicker, comfort, console, witness, follow directions, give directions, joke, question, live in the house of language(s) together, support and figure things out together.
Representation: using language to show, explain and represent the world, ourselves and each other. This is about all the ways we talk about the world, and explore what is interesting, true, possible, desirable, and meaningful in our lives.
Give children opportunities, invitations, and supports to learn language, print literacy and other sign systems, and use language to learn about everything in the world: where they live, who they are, the animals, plants, earth, history, technology, literature, community, culture, the stars, invisible space aliens, unicorns, komodo dragons, and everything else known and unknown!
What do you want to learn about today? What mini-inquiry projects do you want to pursue? How can you help the children under your care explore what they are interested in, learn about the world, and become passionate life long learners committed to growth, awakening and understanding?
Control: using language to shape, order, control, force, seduce, advertise, direct, discipline, punish, delimit and define. Whenever we tell children what to do, and also more subtly, when we demand certain beliefs and understandings about the world, we are using language to shape, control, discipline, and define
Adults are responsible for the well being of the children under their care, and this involves caring for the child’s safety, freedom, the satisfaction of the child’s basic needs, and the protection of the child’s basic human rights. Adults are often warranted in directing children and telling them what to do for the child’s welfare and wellbeing, and for the welfare and wellbeing of the people around them. Directions, commands and expectations need to be communicated clearly and with love and compassion. Parents, teachers and adults should always examine how their own narcissistic, neurotic and sadistic desires ( and those of the society they are a part of ) infect and deform their interactions with children. Parents, caretakers and teachers need to look at the long view, in that they are responsible for supporting each child in the movement from being the objects of the words and understandings of the adult world, to interdependent subjects who can self-determine the course of their lives. Adults need to find a balance between how they use language to control children and give children good, orderly direction, and how they use language to to liberate children and help them become critical and creative thinkers who can make their own choices and decisions.
Watch this famous clip from the movie Cool Hand Luke where the warden of the prison says to one of the prisoners he is punishing, “what we have here is a failure to communicate.”
Eight basic things we do with language everyday with our children
1) We make connections and build relationships with students
2) We give orders, make demands, and tell kids what to do
3) We express ourselves
4) We have conversations
5) We ask questions and catch student questions
6) We describe and explain things
7) We are silly, have fun, and take pleasure in using language.
8) We tell stories ( sing songs, share poems)
Here is a worksheet to think about how we use language in these eight different ways everyday.
1: We make connections and build relationships with children, using language to help children feel welcome, included, heard, seen, and a part of the family, class, school, and community. We use language to establish, maintain, and cultivate different social relationships, to recognize and acknowledge each other, give “put ups” and “put downs,” encouragements and slights, and create “us” and “them”.
Pointed questions: How do you (we) recognize and acknowledge children with language? How do you (we) alienate them and put them down? How do we inclusive language when talking with children, and how do we participate in the child’s creation of “us” and “”them.” What are the opportunities and challenges?
2) We give orders, make demands, and tell kids what to do, using language to lead, inspire, organize, shepherd, direct, order, boss around, subjugate and control.
Pointed questions: How do you (we) lead, direct,shepard and give good orderly direction to children using language? How do you (we) use language to control, discipline and punish children? When do you find yourself yelling at children? When do you feel that your children our “out of control” ? What are the opportunities and challenges?
3: We express ourselves, using language for self expression, developing an individual voice, identity, and sense of self.
Pointed questions: How do you (we) support children in expressing themselves and how do you (we) shut them down? How do you (we) support each child develop their own unique voice? How do you (we) homogenize and tame student voices? What are the opportunities and challenge?
4: We have conversations, using language for conversation, dialogue, exploring the world, learning about ourselves and each other in relationship to the world, building relationships and community, and communicating our needs, demands and desires.
Pointed questions: How do you (we) support children in developing the ability to have conversations, to speak, listen and exchange ideas, and speak from and listen with the heart? How do you (we) manipulate conversations and seduce children through persuasion and advertising to meet your (our) own limited demands and desires? What are the opportunities and challenges?
5: We ask questions and catch student questions, using language to learn, invite discovery, play, inquiry, investigation, and creativity.
Pointed questions: How do you (we) support children in asking questions and using language to learn and explore the world? What sorts of invitations and provocations do you (we) use to spark and scaffold each child’s imagination and desire to learn? How do you (we) help children become critical, creative thinkers and free spirits? In what ways do you (we) prevent inquiry and investigation? What are the “secrets” that you (we) protect from inquiry and the child’s questions? How do you censor and block student inquiry and questions? What are the opportunities and challenges?
6: We describe and explain things, using language to represent the world and explain everything in it. This is where teachers ( and students) use language to describe things, represent things, and explain things. Crucial to this understanding of how we use language is to not mistake “the map” for the reality of thing. There is always a tension, and a gap, between the words we use to describe the world and the world itself. That being said, there are better and worse “word maps” of the world.
Pointed questions: How do you (we) support children in representing the world and their experiences of the world? Instead of “covering” a pre-scripted curriculum, how do you (we) help children uncover and discover the world with language and other sign systems like art, music, dance, building, and play? How do you (we) shut down children’s engagement with the difficult problems of the world? How are you (we) committed to certain maps of the world that create “regimes of truth” that frustrate and block the child’s curiosity and willingness to see, experience and represent the world in different ways? What are the opportunities and challenges?
7:) We are silly, have fun, and take pleasure in using language, using language to sing for the sheer delight and pleasure of it: sounds, rhymes, silliness, beauty, poetry, songs, chants, jokes, riddles, call and response, burbling and gurgling, rapping, joking, teasing
Pointed questions: How do you (we) help children delight in the pleasures of language? How do you (we) frolic, loafe, and meander in the garden of language with our children? How do you (we) steer children away from being mean and obnoxious with language? How do you (we) make language and language learning a dreary, ugly and tedious business? How do you ( we) participate in using language in hurtful, mean ways? What are the opportunities and challenges?
8) We tell stories, using language to tell stories that connect the magical thinking of the children with the rational, formal thinking of adults, the conscious and the unconscious mind, to give a wholistic sense of what the world is about, what is true and what is not true, what is possible and what is not possible, what is desirable and what is not desirable, how we live our lives, and how we live might live our lives otherwise.
What kinds of stories do you (we) want to tell to children? How do these stories mesh or conflict with the dominant stories and narratives of our society? What dominant stories in our culture are the most hurtful to our children? What are the gaps and biases of the stories that we tell at home and at school? What makes a story captivating and compelling? What areas of children’s literature do you (we) want to explore and make a part of your (our) repertoire as a storytelling teacher? What stories do you (we) want highlight and uplift? What important stories have not yet been told? What are the opportunities and challenges?
Each one of these ways of using language has tremendous implications for how we construct the emergent literacy curriculum in our classrooms ( or deconstruct the curriculum we are required to “cover” in our classrooms!). Each one of these ways of using language informs and shapes our self understanding, the kinds of relationships we have with one another, the kinds of families, schools and communities we create, cultivate, build and destroy. Dig into this stuff because while language and culture condition, shape and inform who we are, we, in turn, shape, inform and transform language and culture.
Remember language is the single most important tool, and it’s really a tool kit, a comprehensive technology, for working with children and helping them become the wonderful beings they already are. We use language as a mirror, a lamp, a window, a map, a rope, a hammer, a brush, a sign, among so many other ways that we use language to make and reveal meaning. Whether you are a parent, caretaker, or teacher, talk to other people, talk to each other, reflect for yourself, about how you use language in these different ways with children. What works and what doesn’t work? What counts as working? Where do you want to grow, change, learn and do things differently?
Remember to include children in this project of investigation, play and discovery. Remember the “Hundred Languages of Childhood.” We don’t have all the answers. It behooves us to enlist our children in the task of figuring out what’s going on and what we want to do about it! “I see babies cry/ I watch them grow/ They’ll learn much more/ than I’ll ever know.” Listening to the children, listening to one another, is the ultimate foundation for hope, transformation and self overcoming.
We live in a house of language, a school of language, a community of language, built by others that came before us, and in the midst of a thousand “language games” that we continue to transform and reconstruct to create happier homes, schools and communities, for ourselves, our children, our neighbors, newcomers and strangers. I hope you find some of this material helpful in working with children. Happy teachers change the world!
In love and struggle,
Charlie Malone
wiseearthchildren.com