[ Researchers and Educators ]

Maria Montessori [1870-1952] was born in Italy and was the first woman in her country to obtain a medical degree. It was while she was doing fieldwork, attending to children, that she fell in love with the subject of human development and started investigating how learning took place in childhood. The basic idea of her pedagogical work is the need for a suitable environment for children to have independence and autonomy and to be able to really live and learn in groups.

In 1906, Maria Montessori opened the Casa dei Bambini, in Rome - in Portuguese, “Casa das Crianças”, and in English, ”The House of Children”. It was in that house that she explored two of her main ideas: learning through senses and learning through movement. 

Montessori stated that the way to a child’s intellect goes through their hands because it is through movement and touching that children explore and decode the world around them. 

She noticed that children preferred practical activities and dedicated more attention to materials which they could interact with — assembling, fitting in and molding — rather than toys. The Montessori Method moves from concrete to abstract. 

It is based on the idea that boys and girls learn better from experiencing exploration and discovery firsthand. In order to make this process as rich as possible, the Italian educator developed the learning materials that constitute one of the most widely known aspects of her work. They are simple but very attractive materials, specially designed to stimulate reasoning. There are materials designed to assist all kinds of learning, from the decimal system to language structure.

According to the Association Montessori Internacionale, the following elements are essential to a Montessori school: an organized and attractive environment containing learning materials and everyday utensils;          classes with multiple different age groups; a teacher who plays the role of guide and only intervenes when necessary; multisensory materials  which allow “hands-on learning”; having plenty of time to allow students to dedicate themselves to subjects of their own interest; and flexibility for students to choose the place where they want to work and who they want to work with (if they want to work in groups).

John Dewey [1859-1952] was a philosopher and pioneer in American education in the twentieth century. His research and writings have had a profound influence on the modern school system. He defended that education should be more about learning by doing and less about memorizing. Dewey played an essential role in progressive education. In Brazil, he inspired the New School movement, led by Anisio Teixeira, when he considered practical activities and democracy as important ingredients of education.

Dewey began his career as a professor at the University of Michigan in 1884, and in 1889, he took up the position of Head of the Department of Philosophy, besides being a founding member of the Schoolmasters Club of Michigan.  

During that period he was invited to join the newly founded University of Chicago, where he proposed the creation of a new department of Pedagogy that could host an experimental school where he would be able to put his ideas into practice. Thus, a little after he had arrived in Chicago, Dewey helped to establish the famous laboratory school known as “The Dewey School”. 

The premise of this institution was to apply and test innovations to the educational proposals, to develop its psychological and pedagogical hypotheses, putting aside the premise of passivity and discipline which the students were subjected to in the existing school system.         

John Dewey’s philosophy of education seeks to put learning back in its natural place in life, where the objective of education is not to shape the student according to preconceived models, but to guide them and create the conditions for them to solve problems by themselves and to learn from their experiences. One of his major goals is to teach the whole child. What matters is growth - not only physical, but also emotional and intellectual.  

In Dewey’s view, the learning experience is reflexive and results in new knowledge. Reflection and action cannot be separated! Dewey believed that to achieve success in the learning process, all that was needed was a group interacting and exchanging ideas, feelings and experiences about practical day-to-day situations. The basic idea is that students learn better by doing tasks associated with the contents taught. Creative arts and crafts were given prominence, and children started being encouraged to experiment and think for themselves.

These are some of the fundamental principles in John Dewey’s theory: the  learner needs to be in real experiential learning situations in which they have to deal with a problem to be solved and an activity that arouses interest so that they can develop their ability to think and act in a given situation and have the chance to test all their ideas. 

Seymour Papert [1928-2016] was born in Pretoria, South Africa. He was a world-renowned mathematician, a pioneer in artificial intelligence (AI) and educational computing, and a professor at the MIT Media Lab. 

A visionary, in the sixties he already defended the idea of one laptop per child. He was one of the first to acknowledge the transformative dimension that technology has in our society, a dimension capable of changing the way people think, work, enjoy themselves, and learn. 

At the time, Papert's theories sounded like science fiction. Between 1967 and 1968, he developed a type of programming language totally  aimed at education, Logo©. However, the pedagogical community only started incorporating Papert's ideas in the eighties, when he published his book "Mindstorms: Children, Computers and Powerful Ideas12”, in which he shows ways of using those machines in teaching. He believed that children should use computers as tools for learning, to enhance creativity and curiosity, and to concretize computational thinking.             

Mitchel Resnick [1956] is a celebrated professor at MIT - Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Holding a B.A in physics from Princeton University, an M.S. degree and a Ph.D. degree in computer science from MIT, he has also worked as a science-technology journalist and has authored several books. Resnick says that in 1999 he attended a conference in which researchers debated the issue of the greatest inventions in the past one thousand years. Some answered that it was the light bulb; others said it was the airplane, the computer, the Internet, and the printer. Resnick answered: Kindergarten.

To Resnik, the teaching approach created by German pedagogue  Friedrich Froebel in 1837 is perfect for the needs of the 21st Century - and for students of all ages. The way children learn in kindergarten fascinated him so much that it became the great inspiration for his work. It is no coincidence that “Lifelong Kindergarten13" is the title of his latest book and also the name of his research group. Resnick believes so much that all learning stages should be like kindergarten that everything he does as a professor at the MIT Media Lab points towards that. Developer of Scratch©, a computer programming language that has introduced thousands of children into the universe of coding, Resnick is Director of a research group at MIT called Lifelong Kindergarten, in which he develops technologies to stimulate creativity among students. But what does he mean by all this? In kindergarten, children learn in a playful, collaborative manner and grow up as creative thinkers. All this is done through games and interactions which lead children to learn a lot of things at the same time in a freer, more open and more autonomous way.