It is with great pleasure that we write this inaugural post for our newly established blog, “Progressive Philosophy and Pedagogy: A Blog for Progressive Educators”. Designed to support the development of school communities that promote a better future society for today’s children, this online publication aims to further the worldwide progressive education movement by creating a collective thinkspace for progressive educators. Characterized by community, collaboration, diverse perspectives, social justice, the thoughtful exchange of ideas, inquiry, reflection, and informed action--this electronic publication will function as a cyber-commons of sorts. It is a place where progressive philosophers and practitioners, from across the globe, can connect through community and inquiry as they work together to carry out the movement’s important commitment to the intersection of democracy and education.
Aloha Mai Kākou,
O Jessica Ruth Sobocinski koʻu inoa. O Portage, Indiana mai au. Noho au ma Paʻauilo Mauka, Moku o Keawe. ʻO Robert Sobocinski ke kāne. ʻO Shawn Cunningham ka wahine. Noho pū lāua a hānau maila ʻo Jessica Sobocinski he wahine.
My name is Jessica Ruth Sobocinski and I am from Portage, IN, currently living in Paʻauilo on Hawaiʻi Island. I was born in 1991 to Robert Jerome Sobocinski and Shawn Lynn Cunningham, two young college students from White, working class families.
Niente Senza Gioia (Nothing Without Joy!) - Loris Malaguzzi
This is one of my favorite quotes from Loris Malaguzzi, principal founder of the Reggio Emilia schools in Reggio Emilia, Italy. The quote resonates with me at the progressive school where I am lucky enough to have been teaching and learning for the past 14 years. The school is Hanahauʻoli School, which translates to “joyous work.” “Aha!” I cried when I found this quote - it’s meant to be!
In the previous blog I shared how I honed in on the following problem of practice while teaching handwriting (or letter formation) within my early elementary classroom: The handwriting program I was providing was not very effective for teaching letter formation to the children who needed it most. I noticed this problem most when children were engaged in independent practice, using worksheets and workbooks that were intended to reinforce skills and habits that I had taught through a variety of other letter formation activities in my classroom (see Part 1 of this blog series). This was a problem I had seen before, within my first grade classroom at a different independent progressive school. However, during my semester teaching in a K-1 classroom at Hanahau‘oli School, I honed in on these specific observations:
Teaching is an incredibly complex and dynamic endeavor. Teachers must navigate a complicated web of critical relationships on a daily basis and work together to guide learners through a changing landscape that includes aspects of multiple fields of knowledge. A teacher’s work is influenced by small and large–personal and societal–shifts in the outside world that inevitably make their way into the classroom, sometimes explicitly, other times on the soles of their students’ shoes. Teaching is both an art and a messy science, one that cannot be realistically limited to a single variable.
The Hanahau‘oli Teacher Collaborative is a two-week institute for educators that focuses on interdisciplinary curriculum design for the purpose of engaging youth in meaningful learning. It is led by progressive educator and former Hanahau‘oli Head of School, Dr. Robert Peters. Held on campus, participants have the opportunity to engage in foundational seminars, learn from practicing teachers, observe interdisciplinary lessons and units in action, experience interdisciplinary strategies and resources, collaborate with other educators, design interdisciplinary units of their own, and receive individual coaching as they implement curriculum and reflect on their practice.
Ma ka hana ka ‘ike.
By doing one learns.
My middle school experience was a lousy one. I attended a combination of four different schools in three years. My attendance was sporadic, and when I was at school, I was primarily focused on being accepted by my peers, not anything academic. I constantly wondered what people thought of me and I craved their validation and approval. I also worried about life at home. I worried whether my family would be intact when I got there because homelife was a daily race for the bare essentials. At both home and school, I had very little support academically, socially, or emotionally. Life was a struggle. I was definitely in need of more aloha.
What role should tests play in progressive pedagogy? It depends on what one means by “test.” Let’s say a “test” is a qualitative assessment, a judgment that teachers, students, and sometimes parents construct together. Then, assessments should be commonplace and central in progressive education. For example, a blog post here this April described the Hanahau‘oli “three-way conference,” where each student shares and discusses their portfolio with their teacher and caregiver (Makaiau & Galdeira, 2022). Such an assessment is entirely consistent with progressive aims, by helping to develop student initiative, positioning the three parties in a cooperative triangle, and orienting all parties toward development from existing assets (Peters, 2019).
I was born and raised on the island of Kauaʻi, in the Puna district, in Kapaʻa. I grew up working on a farm in the narrow green valley at the foot of Makaleha, with Kapaʻa stream running through it. This is where I spent hours working, and avoiding working, catching opu and trapping prawns, digging fence post holes and dehorning goats, tending chickens before, during, and after the slaughter. I learned to surf at Kealia, and I fished each weekend at a place we called Bluffs. My entire childhood was surrounded by cane fields and the ever present sounds and smells of the sugar industry, ash falling on my arms regularly.
Progressive education is guided by the idea that we must actively prepare children for participation in a diverse democracy. In this blog I want to lend my expertise as a school librarian to share how I translate this progressive philosophy into practice. I want to speak to the powerful role that culturally responsive and sustaining children’s literature can play in helping educators achieve this goal. Responsible for building and maintaining school and classroom libraries, I’ll share how I carefully consider book selections that provide children with tools for developing empathy and potential frameworks for thinking about, assessing, and accepting (or challenging) the world around them. I’ll explain how I consider books that will both allow children to step into another’s experience and provide them with a mirror that reflects their own experiences back at them.
I was in 7th grade when I first bled through my pants at school; I was mortified. My Science teacher (bless Mrs. Marchani) kept a bunch of sweaters on the back of her classroom door, and as I discovered, they weren’t just for the unpredictable weather. As it turned out, she kept this pile of outerwear stocked for middle school menstruators like me. She helped me tie one of her sweaters around my waist, so that I could go about my day of learning. I will never forget that kindness. Suddenly, whenever I saw those sweaters on the hips of other girls, I tried to give knowing eye-contact solidarity. Twenty-some years later, I’m the one in charge of the 7th grade classroom.
There are a number of characteristics that help to define a progressive educator’s approach to assessment. This includes an overall philosophy of education that values intellectual curiosity, initiative, independence, collaboration, and evidence of growth over time, and a pedagogy for measuring student learning in accordance with these values. Assessment is differentiated, allowing children many ways to demonstrate what has been learned. Individual learners are responsible for learning and are taught how to set goals, define evidence of goal achievement and reflect about progress. Students’ skill development (e.g. in math, language arts, inquiry, etc.) is reported on a continuum with descriptors to show what children are able to do at various points in time.
A junior kindergartener celebrates her 5th birthday with a gift to her school library. She presents her gift–the picture book Little Green Donkey (Allepuz, 2020)--and her first public booktalk to her learning community at Hanahau‘oli School.
My name is Emma.
I’m in JK [Junior Kindergarten].
And this is my birthday book, [reading/looking at the cover] Little Green Donkey.
The story is about–the donkey likes to eat grass, but he ate too much, and he becomes green.
And his mommy told him to eat other things.
My favorite part of the book is
I want to know what love is.
For some, this line is the title of a cheesy, power ballad from the 1980s by the band Foreigner. For me, the phrase and the song represent a simple, direct desire to understand one of the fundamental aspects of being human, love. I am interested in love songs. I am curious about their universality across almost every culture as a genre. Even if you are not one of the 493 million+ people who have listened to I Want to Know What Love Is on Spotify, it’s pretty difficult to argue against the importance of love. Certainly, when one lacks love, the pain of its absence can make life incredibly difficult. Alternately, if one loves something and has fun doing it, it’s a lot easier to do that thing…and, often, that love and fun we experience causes us to want to continue doing whatever it is.
In 1945, the Star Advertiser published a story about Hanahau’oli School during the “War Years.” A quote from the article stated:
The present emergency has made certain changes necessary in every school, but the principles upon which Hanahau’oli was founded remain the same today–emotional stability as a fundamental need; learning by doing; intelligent appraisal of facts rather than blind acceptance; assuring responsibility for the individual’s share in the future. To help children think straight and meet the present threatening world with sanity are Hanahau’oli’s great tasks today.
As a practitioner of p4c (philosophy for children) Hawai‘i, I love to explore the flow of (metaphorical) brackish waters. The intermingling of ideas from one world (my metaphorical wai) and the thoughts from another world (my metaphorical kai) oftentimes result in a creative intermingling that leads me to unexpected insights and new understandings. So it is that, on this quiet Sunday morning, the intersection of reading Hanahau‘oli Head of School Lia Woo’s posting in this blog (“Teachers as Scientists: Watching Life and Children Alertly”), a recent p4c inquiry that I shared with a remarkable group of children and youth, the many learnings that I have gained from Pono Shim, Miki Tomita, Hye Jung Kim Tano, & the rest of the Foundations of Aloha ‘ohana, and my colleague and friend Dr. Amber Makaiau’s patient encouragement, have inspired me to compose this posting.
In 2019, the Hanahau‘oli School Professional Development Center (PDC) was awarded a grant from the Samuel N. & Mary Castle Foundation to grow progressive approaches to early childhood place-based Science Technology Engineering Mathematics (STEM) education in the State of Hawaiʻi. Titled, Natural Scientists: Children in Charge, a portion of the funds for this project were dedicated to documenting and filming early childhood STEM education at Hanahau‘oli School. The films produced will be used to support professional teaching and learning at a Spring 2022 PDC workshop series, which will include 24 early childhood educators from across the state. Permanently housed on the PDC website, the films are also available as an open access resource illustrating examples of place-based approaches to progressive early childhood STEM education. View the films and accompanying curricular resources by clicking HERE.
John Goodlad is a giant in the history of the progressive education movement. He lived with strong moral convictions and had the incredible ability to turn his ideas into action. A devotee of John Dewey, Goodlad envisioned schools “where accomplished teachers could lead their peers, where students are not grouped by age, and where the ability to discuss and assess ideas matter more than test scores” (Woo, 2014). Author of the highly influential book, A Place Called School (1984), Goodlad documented the now classic eight-year study of 38 schools in 13 communities,
Hanahau’oli School celebrated 100 years of joyous work in the 2018-19 school year. At the time, the Board of Trustees called on Hanahau’oli Head of School Lia Woo to think about her vision for the school for the near term. Woo studied the school’s history and educational philosophies, and reflected on her own personal experience learning and growing at Hanahau‘oli as a student to identify timeless and universal themes. The themes helped to provide a framework for thinking about the current and future world and helped to lay the foundation for her vision moving forward.
In the previous blog we reflected on changes experienced by faculty and staff over the course of the pandemic, regarding how and why they gather together. In this entry we continue to explore the art of gathering in the context of progressive philosophy and pedagogy by celebrating an enduring hallmark of the progressive education movement--the schoolwide assembly. Progressive education pioneer Colonel Francis Wayland Parker was the first to experiment with whole school gatherings as a regular part of the weekly school schedule. He called them “Morning Exercises,” and they were primarily student-led.
In Remaking Gathering: Entering the Mess, Crossing the Thresholds, author Priya Parker shares about the “art of gathering.” She explains, “gathering matters because it is through each other that we figure out what we believe.” Given the number of ways human gatherings have changed over the course of the pandemic, she contends that the current moment has the potential to transform the ways we spend our time together – at work, at home, in our communities, and beyond. She elaborates, “this time of regathering”--as many transition from online large-group community meetings to in person events-- “offers a threshold we can decide to cross with imagination, purpose, and joy.” This message resonated with me as I recently joined Hanahau‘oli School faculty in our first in-person faculty meeting since March 2020.