“To educate is to imbue what we do with meaning at every moment ” — Paulo Freire. This statement by the educator Paulo Freire makes a lot of sense as part of the teaching/learning approach we use at our school. After all, at be. Living, we believe that education is about building a unique path for learning, experiences and ways of looking at the world with each child.
Constructivism is therefore a theoretical framework that guides our educational practices. It’s an investigation reference point for teaching, as explained by our Elementary School Pedagogical Coordinator Gabriela Fernandes:
“Constructivism is not a methodology. It doesn’t have a set format. It’s a theoretical reference that guides our perspective as educators while observing how each child learns, helping us understand that each of them learns in a different way. And it provides the basis for us to tread our own unique educational paths.”
Gabriela says constructivism emphasizes that teaching must be meaningful for those who are learning. “We need to look at the educational process in the same way the child perceives it. It has to have meaning, it has to make sense to her.”
Under this approach, the idea is that the school not be limited to teaching only such things as addition or subtraction for example, but that it provides children with the opportunity to learn to do things, in other words learning the concepts – but also the best attitudes to have while doing so. “A child is in the world and in school to learn to be a social being. Everything we do at the school is based on this idea: that we are educating a social being who must learn to relate to the knowledge and content that the school provides.”
The teacher is a key element in this regard. He assumes the role of researcher who joins a new group every year, for which he must develop a new perspective and curriculum. “In an educational approach guided by constructivism, the teacher takes part in an authorial process. He looks at the curriculum and thinks, how will this curriculum best serve this group of kids? How are these kids going to find a way to learn what’s in this curriculum?”
Here at be. Living we also provide the elements that we understand to be fundamental to any learning process while using constructivism as a theoretical framework. “For example, we do evaluations with children from the third year of elementary school. We understand that evaluations are a tool that still guides the entire educational process in Brazil. So we do teach them how to do evaluations. They learn to experience evaluative processes and relate to them as learning self-regulation tools,” says the coordinator.
We make use of educational materials, but our projects are the great flagship with our teaching/learning approach. “Projects are what guide our school and curriculum. Educational materials provide an aid to carry out the projects in the best possible way. It’s a challenge because it increases the amount of work so much, but we understand that this is our path, as does our community. Teachers use this material as a support to better meet the group’s needs, keeping in mind the children’s prior knowledge and then outlining the learning objectives for that year and class”.
With this strategy, the educator focuses on close observation, stimulation and mediation of individual and group processes, creating significant learning situations that awaken and keep every child’s curiosity and enthusiasm alive.
