7. Teaching methodology for the construction of autonomy, creativity and self esteem

For good or for bad, when we undertake the task of educating, the effects of our action spread on all the aspects of child development. When we teach, along with the specific contents of the areas, we are teaching to learn in a certain way, which implies creating in the child an awareness of their condition as subject of knowledge, as epistemological subjects.

If the educator is adjusted to a specific program, and he uses a transmission form of work to carry out the teaching-learning process, the child will learn that his possibility to grow intellectually, of knowing all that he wants to know, depend completely on his teacher, because he doesn't have anything to contribute, but "to exercise his will" paying attention to what the educator tells him and to follow to the letter his indications on the procedure that he has to carry out, the same as all his classmates, to achieve success. He will learn, about all the things that he is not able to create, invent, propose, investigate, in short, of being the main character of something as personal and intimate as the cognitive relationship with the physical and human world. This determines the form of assuming oneself and, ultimately, the affective valuation regarding one's own person.

On the other hand, the educator will measure his professional success in the measure that he has obtained uniformity in the achievement of the planned cognitive objectives in all of the children. Beyond the contents that some children may have achieved in their intellectual learning that, generally speaking is not uniform, since each child has his own time and rhythm to learn, what children do learn, and all at the same time, is that they cannot be the builders of their own learning that they are not able to contribute ideas and to develop them according to their own creative capacities, that the truly important thing is what the adults say, and that their desires to appropriate this world that they want to know, their innate curiosity, their restlessness, will have to wait – at the risk of disappearing forever - to the decision of an adult who knows what, how and when they should approach the topics that have pedagogic importance.

For the teacher that follows a stable, systematic programming carefully organized in didactic units, there is no time to stops to listen the children and to know what they have to say on what interests them, or their ideas on how to methodologically approach those contents, because that "takes time away" from the development of the curriculum that has to completed.

This maybe sounds like a somewhat extreme interpretation of the situation that one lives in the classrooms. However, it perhaps happens in the sense that not all the teachers that follow the dynamics of a program in didactic units neglect the interests of their students, and there are those who try to incorporate them and combine them with the requirements of the program. But we outline it in a polarized way to highlight the differences among a pedagogic conception centered in the creative process, and another that privileges the transmission of contents, without stopping to consider that as in any reality, nothing is black or white, but that there is a range of shades between both postures.

We do this consideration with the purpose of stressing the fundamental importance of the pedagogic relationship, understood as the thematic, methodological and relation aspects for the development of the child's personality. In a work titled "Piaget in the classroom" that was published for the first time in the year 1981, several authors deal with, through investigations and theoretical and methodological proposals, the correspondence among the concepts of Piaget's theory and the pedagogic action in the classroom. In chapter 12 of this book, one of the authors, Eleanor Duckworth, refers to the capacity that the children possess to create brilliant ideas, to the conditions that the teacher should offer so that this is possible and to the capacity of the educator to value them as such. She comments that all the educators are aware of the progresses that the children make in their first two years of life, and he wonders for what reason that capacity to generate "brilliant ideas" that the child has, based on the child's curiosity and on his insatiable desire to learn all that he does not know, disappears in the later years. Maybe part of the answer, the author says, has to do with the scarce importance that the educators assign to the actions of the children, product of their indefatigable curiosity, their questions, their way of relating and finding answers characteristic to their restlessness. Many times we take these questions as trivial or banal, because we are too busy in giving priority to the contents that we should cover, and the authentic demands of the children distract us from the preset class plan. Therefore, they fall a lot of first class materials falls in a broken sack that could be worked on following the course of the boy's genuine queries, approaching, many aspects linked to the topic of their interest. This implies, of course, a change in the educational system. It is a conception of the act of teaching and of learning that sinks its roots in a focus that it is not new, but has been around for many decades, since Piaget and Wallon, from genetic epistemology, and Freinet, from pedagogy - to only name some representative authors -, who talked about the mechanism through which the human being consented to knowledge and the way in which pedagogy could put into practice these discoveries. However, although these concepts are accepted officially by the institutions in charge of Education, and by educators in general, the practice takes charge, in many cases of discrediting them. There is an apparent incongruity between what we think and what we do, or also, a difference between what we understand and the true meaning of those contributions.

In any case, it is good to be aware of this situation and to review, at the light of personal reflection, our educational practice in terms of our own references and those that can give us other experiences in the field of the education.

Pedagogy of respect and discovery

The fundamental purpose of early childhood education is, in our opinion, to offer the children all the possibilities that are within our reach so that they can observe the world, think about it, question, investigate and respond to the questions that disturb them emotionally and cognitively. The educator's function, as it has been said so many times, it is to facilitate that process, being placed "behind and before the child. Behind, to observe and learn what are his interests, and before, to be able to guide him in his searches and solutions. To guide doesn't mean to offer the correct answers, but to place oneself in the child's place, in his way of thinking, to be able to answer the questions that promote his cognitive mechanisms, to anticipate the consequences of his reasonings, to use his intuition that is mainly a type of very important thinking in these ages, and to risk answers without being afraid of making a mistake. Somebody said that intellectual work is an exercise of questioning one's own convictions. What happens many times is that we privilege and value positively the correct answers more than the uncertainty, the doubts and the errors, this is why the child gets used to depend on the opinion of the educator in terms of true or false answers, acquiring the habit of mechanically repeating the answers and devaluating his own intellectual and affective efforts in the act of knowing.

The way that we propose learning from the methodological point of view, has decisive consequences in the construction of the global personality of the one who learns, since it is not the same thing to train the child from these early ages for "to play" with thoughts and ideas, in the same way that he does it when he uses material objects than to accustom him to the sterile dependence of the adult to solve his problems, be them of whatever order they are. There are many habits and dexterities that we think about developing in education, but one of the most important is maybe the development of autonomy and creativity. An autonomous person has the possibility to be creative, and that awareness of knowing how to solve difficulties of any order with relative independence, - since absolute independence doesn't exist in human relationships - grants him a feeling of appreciation and self esteem that benefits his way of feeling towards the others, laying down the bases for good coexistence.

Many of the problems of aggressiveness and violence that frequently happen in the educational settings, have as their last cause, a feeling of low affective valuation that takes children and youth to form groups of criminal nature, where they are recognized by their irrational and arbitrary capacity to damage others, using the power of the body as their only instrument to show off. We don't want at all to point to the school as responsible for this social phenomenon, because the etiology of this illness that grows every day obeys to multiple factors, of internal and external order that exceed the limits of the school institution. But as educators we have a gigantic task to carry out in the field of educational prevention, since we deal with human beings that are in the beginning of their life, and education should deploy all its power to assure them, whenever it is possible, a good quality of life inside a limit of ethical and moral values that promote positive coexistence. The way to educate is not an element of little value in this sense. Educators can help to build, from very early, the conscience of commitment and belonging in the act of learning, promoting the construction of autonomy and the exercise of creativity. This constructive way to focus learning embraces all the areas of formation, not only those referred to the intellectual contents. The children don't learn how to be good or bad because we tell them, but rather their personality is built based on a system of values that they incorporate through an intimate experience, discovering and differentiating the causes, the manifestations and the consequences of their inadequate behavior in a reasoned way, with the adult's intervention as mediator, as facilitator of that learning.

Our task, lastly, should not consist of providing the best solutions to the conflicts that are generated in the dynamics of interpersonal relationships, but teaching to learn the best way to negotiate them, in favor of the general wellbeing. This is not achieved with punishment or with the demands of the norm imposed from the outside, but through a slow and consequent work that promotes the child's reflection for the construction of an ethics of human relationships based on the respect for oneself and toward the others.