| THE
Vol. 18, No. 1 Winter 1993
Reinventing Montessori
Edilorial Reinventing Montessori:
Perils and Possibilities
by David… |
| WHAT IS NAMTA?
The North American Montessori Teachers' Associa-
tion provides a medium of study, interpretation, and… |
| THE NAMTA JOURNAL
VOL. 18, No. 1 • WINTER 1993
REINVENTING MONTESSORI
e
In affiliation with the Association Montessori… |
| REINVENTING MONTESSORI
~
EDITOR/Al REINVENTING MONTESSORI: PERILS AND POSSIBILITIES
by David Kahn… |
| The NAMTA Journal • Vol. 18, No. 1 • Winter 1993 |
| EDITORIAL
REINVENTING MONTESSORI:
PERILS AND POSSIBILITIES
by David Kahn
To what degree is the fundamental test of… |
| and refinement of the Montessori materials over time and in the persona
implicit in the sentiment of Montessori's writing… |
| educationalese all have a purpose. But in my estimation they represent
exercises in minutiae-the kind of minutiae that… |
| elementary and adolescent planes. The reflective discussions about the
human faculties of abstraction and imagination-all this… |
| stand and build our Montessori foundations on which the next generation will
build theirs by adhering to the essentials while… |
| EDITORIAL
ON THE PRESERVATION OF
MONTESSORI IDEAS
by Tim Duax
I have heard it asked, don't Montessori trainers adhere… |
| approach? Look at the history of the psychoanalytic movement as an analogy
to that of the Montessori movement.
Sigmund Freud… |
| = |
| PARTI
PHILOSOPHICAL AND
RESEARCH FOUNDATIONS
Montessori pedagogy is grounded in a philosophical
outlook which borrows from… |
| Australian Aboriginal Art
10
The NAMTA Journal • Vol. 18, No. 1 • Winter 1993 |
| LITERACY AND THE
ORAL FOUNDATIONS OF EDUCATION
by Kieran Egan
Drawing upon scholarship in the classics and in anthropology,… |
| encoding and decoding "skills" and must en-
compass significant features of rationality (Olsen,
1977, 1986… |
| (Levi-Strauss, 1962). Literacy is a set of strategies that are not only utilitarian,
but also bon a penser.
One purpose of… |
| what Ong ( 1982) has called "second orality." The electronic media are its most
energetic promoters, but… |
| achievements. Educated Victorians were more familiar with long-ago battles
on the windy plains of Troy, the wooden horse, and… |
| The story of the rediscovery of the Homeric methods of composition is
itself an epic of scholarly ingenuity. In the 1920s,… |
| These metrically arranged units of sound, then, accumulated line by line
in the Homeric poems to repeat the heroic story. The… |
| poetic culture that preceded them. In particular, they highlight Plato's reasons
for wishing to exclude poets from his… |
| to sleep, in the market or the field, are constantly repeated pieces of the great
myths or epic poems of oral cultures.… |
| would wish to replicate all aspects of this phenomenon in our schools, it seems
important to understand the nature of their… |
| In particular, their myths, and the range of techniques used to transmit them,
differ significantly.
It is inevitably… |
| The people he observed had a highly developed set of techniques for
learning and remembering, and their apparent incapacity… |
| a charge of emotional identification that greatly enhanced social cohesion and
control.
Myth stories also, of course, have… |
| to create particular emotional effects and fix particular meanings. The shaping
of sound finds one outlet in poetry and… |
| attempts to pinpoint the causes and character of this sense of participation in
nature display a conviction that, despite… |
| store knowledge largely in narrative concerned with interacting human or
quasi-human figures" (1977, p. 112), there… |
| distinction between subjective states and the properties of the cosmos" (Levi-
Strauss, 1969, p. 240).
Oral cultures… |
| used to achieve this end is the assertion of continual rebirth-rebeginning as
the first beginning. We preserve a vague shadow… |
| against change and innovation serve stability, order, and intellectual security.
One's familiar territory is… |
| favoured the increase in scope of critical activity, and hence of rationality,
scepticism, and logic" (Goody, 1977, p… |
| indeed the "savage" mind "does not bind itself down, as our thought does, to
avoiding… |
| to a cultural environment shaped by centuries of elaboration of the thinking
techniques made possible by literacy. Second, it… |
| Those techniques used in oral cultures to shape sound into more memo-
rable fonns we find also to be prominent in children… |
| Rhyme, metaphor, and stories
are, of course, found in adult cul-
tures as well. This in no way under-
mines their… |
| cultures throughout the world can yield a better understanding of orality and
that an understanding of orality can help us… |
| children's transition from orality to literacy as unqualified progress, we were
to view it as a trade-off made for… |
| simulate, while we still have no idea how to simulate these sophisticated and
complex "poetic" operations.… |
| one, with distinctive forms of thought and understanding. They must prepare
children for particular kinds of scientific… |
| meaningful, and educationally valuable than the typical content of the social
studies curriculum. Such a presentation of… |
| Another capacity that tends _to be very largely ignored in present curricula
is the sense of humor. The early stimulation and… |
| If we see the educational task as
simply to put literacy in place, we
risk undermining the very founda-
tions on which a… |
| features of orality that are bon a penser. Their ability to think and learn is, in
general, sophisticated, but structured… |
| its implications for cross-cultural studies. In S. Modgil & C.
Modgil (Eds.), .lean Piaget: Consensus and controversy… |
| Goody, J. (1977). The domestica1ion of the savage mind. New York:
Cambridge University Press.
Goody, J. ( I 987). The… |
| Levi-Strauss, C. (1966). The savage mind. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Levi-Strauss, C. ( 1969). The raw and the… |
| ground. New York: Oxford University Press.
Opie, I., & Opie, P. (1985). The singing game. New York: Oxford
University… |
| 48
The NAMTA Journal • Vol. 18, No. I • Winter 1993 |
| THE SCIENCES AND THE HUMANITIES
by Ernan McMullin
In this lecture, Dr. McMullin describes the interdisciplinary and… |
| They bear on the human quite evidently, but as we look at a discipline like
macroeconomics, it hardly seems to fit easily into… |
| I want to go on now to the natural sciences, whose methods, whose scope,
and whose limitations have been relatively well-… |
| A second source of difficulty for the historian is that the documents we still
possess were written from a particular point of… |
| ... he showed me a picture
of the night sky taken with
the big telescope. There were
tens of thousands of stars
and… |
| development of life on the constantly changing surface of an earth where vast
rock plates are thrust up slowly as mountains… |
| In 1964, two cosmologists, Penzias and
Wilson, working with some microwave equip-
ment borrowed from Bell Laboratories, made… |
| ogy (covering all of cosmic time back to I 0·30 seconds) is almost over, and Act
Two (the attempt to elucidate what happened… |
| Mover, itself unmoved. This Mover he called God. Aristotle's God was not the
sort of being one would be inclined to… |
| could serve an apologetic function, if needed. Descartes' physics depended on
God's action at every turn. Boyle and… |
| to be fine-tuned with an incredible degree of precision in order to bring about
a universe in which complex life-forms could… |
| understand one, one has to understand the other. An advance in the understand-
ing of one is an advance in the understanding… |
| of common objects through which we daily find our way. And the theories that
shape our thinking about that strange place, as… |
| activity. By the early nineteenth century, when Dalton constructed a table of
chemical elements, Young and Fresnel developed a… |
| be helped to discover in it the traces of the same creative imagination that has
given us the other great works of the human… |
| THE DEVELOPMENT OF AUTONOMY IN
CHILDREN: AN EXAMINATION OF THE
MONTESSORI EDUCATIONAL MODEL
by Sharon Dubble Kendall, Ph.D… |
| Montessori views personal
autonomy as intercon-
nected with social respon-
sibility and the evolution of
human societies.… |
| Montessori views personal autonomy as interconnected with social re-
sponsibility and the evolution of human societies. The… |
| theories of Erikson, Piaget, and other constructivists, the central theme of this
new paradigm is the assumption that the… |
| elucidate those factors of the Montessori model which may affect the devel-
opment of autonomy among students.
Methods
The… |
| sample included only those third-year students who had a minimum of four
years' experience in a Montessori program. To… |
| elementary schools within the same geographic location to serve as a compari-
son group. This group was composed of third-… |
| .800, .841, and .894. A coefficient of reliability measurement of .60 or above
is generally considered to reflect an… |
| Each observation period required approximately two hours; at the comple-
tion of each session the observer tallied the checks… |
| Among Montessori
students, problem
solving behavior
was recorded a to-
tal of 111 times,
whereas among tra-
d i tiona I… |
| The Montessori group of students exhibited a much higher incidence of
independent activity as opposed to directed activity (95… |
| The same relationship held true when percentages were computed across
both samples for each activity subgroup. Jn examining… |
| groups based upon the total number of observations recorded for each group
(see Table 3).
By looking at the combined… |
| Figure 2
Comparison of Problem Solving Behavior Within Samples
73.3%
43.2%
24.3%
I
I 20.7%
18.8%
11.7%
■
13.3%
Ill… |
| the relative frequency of each behavior within each of the two sample groups
(see Table 4).
Although both groups demonstrated… |
| categories of behavior observed, the Montessori students showed a signifi-
cantly higher degree of those behaviors indicating… |
| personal autonomy. For example, the greater incidence of independent activ-
ity becomes a more significant indicator of… |
| The study supports
the findings of
Bruner, DeCharms,
and others that self-
motivation is part of
a complex process
In… |
| The analysis of behaviors characterizing autonomy in this study implies
the cyclical nature of its development, involving the… |
| Bruner, Jerome S. ( 1971 ). The relevance of education. New York,
NY: W.W. Norton & Company.
Chadwick, Bruce A; Bahr… |
| PART II
TEACHER DEVELOPMENT
AND GROWTH
As the Montessori teacher builds a lifetime of
commitment, guided professional… |
| Rita Schaefer
86
The NAMTA Journal • Vol. 18, No. I • Winter 1993 |
| ESTABLISHING A PERSONAL
TEACHER IDENTITY
by Rita Schaefer
In this speech presented at the Baltimore conference (October, /… |
| to examine, I will have fulfilled my purpose tonight. Appreciation of oneself
and commitment to continue the process of one… |
| the analogy of "dropped stitches" for potentialities that are missed. We could
say that human identity is a… |