Fall of 1973, I walked into the new tribal school in Busby ready to teach music. Soon, I was discouraged. My students weren't listening or following my directions. They seemed resistant to learning. Worse, parents didn't seem to care about compliance; some actually seemed to value rebellion, offending my German ideals of child discipline. I shared my frustration with my trusted friend, a Cheyenne elder and grandfather of several of my students, and he turned my perceptions upside-down. The Cheyenne, he explained, enjoy seeing children physically active, not sitting down, holding still, being quiet. Adults pay attention to children, and children are expected to pay attention to adults. It builds respect. Children learn through games, dance, song, and stories--real life events. I didn't notice that resisting my demands for their attention showed strong heart, grit and courage. It took me a long time to see heart-learning as the foundation of education, not as a distraction or rebellion to be overcome.
Outstanding new scientific research into effective education for life supports ancient wisdom. Social and Emotional Learning (SEL, or CASEL) in Montana's current standards and teacher training has made amazing progress back to the foundations for early learning, but progress is difficult in changing toward better systems in Montana. Under current benchmarks and resultant disempowerment of child upbringing accountability to the child’s circle, the very reasons for writing the standards remain unfulfilled. Our achievement gap, and quality of family life measures, remain unchanged.
Many programs outside Montana get it better, like Circle of Security International, Escuela Nueva Foundation (their “learning circle” program”), and the “phonemenon-based” learning promoted it Finland. It’s time for Montana’s early childhood programs to allow at least one alternative parallel path to credentialing of family, school, and individual caregivers through programs like the Association for Child Development (ACD) or the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC). Many states have at least one now.
LifeWays North America is being used in one preschool in Montana, in Red Lodge. Here children and their parents/caregivers are empowered to teach and to learn. Instead of initiating instruction, teacher learns and designs structure and scaffolding to invite children’s collaboration across ages with the whole heart, hands, body, and mind. Cognitive engagement is often not verbally directed by the teacher. Children are engaged with real stuff, with each other and with the teacher verbally and non-verbally with age-old normal rhythms of quiet play, food preparation, story sharing, eating, cleanup, rest, celebration, with songs and circle time activities at transition points in each day and through the week. The child can fail and try again, and learn trust of the teacher to collaborate with others, go exploring with full release of the caregiver, and full confidence the caregiver will be there when needed. Instead of unnatural age stratification of children, focus of Lifeways pre-schools is for -birth to age 6 or 7, a cross-age rainbow in the school that easily builds social and emotional learning with a caregiver trained in one of these ways.
It reduces teacher preparation load because it empowers the child. If a child’s heart learning foundation is applied to teacher education, lesson planning will be more the child’s job in collaboration with others across ages and generations. Teachers have rewarding community connections in heritage practices of food, shelter, celebration, space, and spirituality to their learning circle. Worry of meeting academic outcomes is replaced by ways of learning proven more effective even academically in later school years.
A 7th grade math teacher Finland was asked, “what is an important measure of success in your students, since you don’t have standardized tests?” He replied, “I want to know if my students are having fun. The rest then is easy.” Fear-based external mandates by outsiders are counterproductive to restoring the ancient learning ways of life. Many educators trained now as evaluators can be trained in building bags and boxes of materials and practices that work with the old ways of handling heritage life ways. Our emphasis on benchmarks and evaluation schemata with lists to check-off to determine accountability has been undermining acquisition of the very skills the lists were meant to measure. Any process of accountability with the child and that child’s expanding learning circle from birth is the right accountability. Any process that undermines this circle’s agency to explore, learn, and evaluate, needs to be questioned. The standards themselves are more useful when applied and owned in the child’s circle of family and teacher.
Culturally Sustaining and Revitalizing Pedagogies (CSRP) can be found in workshop sessions offered by organizations like LifeWays North America, at the Lakota Waldorf School in Kyle, South Dakota, and the indigenous pedagogy research in Canada, reveal many good options. These and other organizations are practicing heart learning in schools and preschools with success. Heart learning can recover our Creator-intended learning systems and turn right-side-up our schooling and child rearing priorities here too. Join us in finding funding for an alternative learning program here.
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