When education startup AltSchool expanded to Brooklyn, it turned to Mara Pauker to build it from the ground up. The 2007 UVM alumna had already launched a progressive pre-school in New York City and was becoming known as an education innovator.
Despite having an established core curriculum, AltSchool – started in 2014 by a former Google executive – allowed Pauker to infuse some of her own pedagogical theories and practices – ones she learned while student teaching at UVM’s Campus Children’s School as an early childhood preK-3 major.
“The early education program is where I understood that school did not have to be designed and delivered in the traditional way, but rather it could be a place of inquiry, joy and wonder,” says Pauker. “The UVM Children’s School taught me to have profound respect for children, to listen to their words, to consider their points of view and to partner with them in their learning journey. The groundwork laid for me in my coursework and at the school paved the way for my future.”
Pauker is part of a growing number of alumni applying what they learned at the Campus Children’s School to their current positions in childcare centers, elementary schools and other educational settings. Many of them were at the UVM Alumni House recently for the school’s 80th anniversary celebration that included speakers, events and a retrospective exhibit, “Looking Back, Moving Forward: UVM Campus Children’s School 1937–2017.”
The exhibit offered a rich history of the school since its founding in 1937 by Sara Holbrook, a clinical psychologist and education professor, in a storefront on Cherry Street. Bertha Terrill, a pioneer in the home economics movement and UVM’s first female faculty member, secured funding to bring the school to Terrill Hall in the 1950s. It was moved to its current location in the Living & Learning Center in the 1970s.
Holbrook’s insistence that the school serve as a learning laboratory for undergraduates placed it among the first on-campus children’s schools in the nation that served both children and education majors. “The idea that classrooms are laboratories has always been paramount to the mission of the school,” says interim school director Barbara Burrington, who served as head teacher and lecturer from 1994-2007. “Sara Holbrook wrote a letter to the dean emphasizing that direct observation of children is important to becoming a skilled teacher, and that thread has been consistent at the children’s center and in our teacher education program throughout the 80 years.”
The school, which has helped raise more than 2,200 children over eight decades, remains the first lab placement for EDEC (birth to 3rd grade) and ECSP (early childhood special education) majors, who spend upwards of 20 hours a week at the school. Lab partnerships have been expanded to include physical therapy students conducting pediatric clinical observations; communications science majors studying speech and language acquisition; music students examining the link between literacy and music; and physical education majors.
Inspired by “the world’s best” preschool
Historically, the children’s school has drawn guidance from philosophers Jean Piaget, Lev Vygotsky, Uri Bronfenbrenner and 1879 UVM graduate John Dewey. Its social constructivist perspective places value on children’s abilities and desires to participate in meaningful inquiry. The original four-fold mission of the school has remained intact: provide high quality early education and care for the children of UVM faculty and staff; serve as a practicum site and laboratory for students in early childhood teacher programs; be a research resource for faculty; and serve as a demonstration site for early education research offering professional development opportunities for early childhood educators across the region.
A key decision was made in 1990 to transform the school into a full-time childcare center for children ages six weeks to five years old. Burrington, Dee Smith, current pedagogical director of the school and head teacher and lecturer from 1990-2015, and Jeanne Goldhaber, associate professor emerita in early childhood education, traveled to Reggio Emilia, Italy to study municipal preschools and infant toddler centers that were being hailed as the best in the world in a Newsweek Magazine article.
“We were in for a complete shock when we went over there,” says Smith. “The intentionality, beauty, seriousness, attention to detail, aesthetics and the way they listened to children was just so impressive. They didn’t have a set philosophy, but rather a set of values that were very clear and a way of enacting them that I had definitely never seen before. It took a long time to develop something that was relevant to our own culture and context, but I feel like at this point it’s our model. We’re well known around the country as being at the forefront of infant-toddler training and for the kinds of investigations we’ve done with children.”
Driving the fledgling program was the idea that children are active researchers capable of constructing knowledge worth pursuing. “We were interested in their questions and theories,” says Goldhaber, who collaborated with undergraduates, program faculty and the Campus Children’s School teachers to develop a shared and deeper understanding of the Reggio approach between 1990 and 2014. “We might wonder why children are so compelled to learn everything about certain topics, like dinosaurs for example. We would ask what it is about dinosaurs that the child is trying to figure out. Is it about power, size, how time evolves? People aren’t typically listening to the big questions children are asking. We try to hear their questions and then offer them experiences or provocations to further or challenge their questions or theories.”
Observation-driven curriculum
The unique educational approach involved observation and documentation to understand how children comprehend the world, which in turn, drove curriculum. Consequently, various forms of media such as clay, paint, blocks, baking materials and other open-ended objects were the preferred learning tools. “Historically, American education has viewed children in terms of what they can’t do, and their future potential,” says Dale Goldhaber, associate professor emeritus and school director from 1991-2009. “We respected kids by listening and looking at what they could do right then, rather than arbitrarily deciding next week to do a unit on farm animals when there isn’t a kid in the room who could care less about cows.”
In many ways, this approach to developing curriculum benefitted the teachers, faculty and education majors as much as the children. In 1998, the Preschool-Infant Investigation was launched after a new teacher innocently asked if preschool children were allowed to visit the baby room. The next year was spent documenting the interactions between the preschool children and babies and vice versa, which generated new research and “forever changed the culture of our school in ways we could never have anticipated,” according to Burrington.
The Campus Investigation in 2000 took children out of the classroom and onto campus and Church Street to interact with college students, local residents, business owners and even dogs. Teachers also started taking children to Centennial Woods, where they seemed to thrive outside in nature. In 2009, the school began working with local sculptor Jerry Geier who also had an exhibit at the Arthouse Gallery featuring slit drums that he built. The children banged on the drums of course, but also helped sculpt heads for the drums, which still reside on the school’s playground.
Despite all of the advancements over the past 80 years, Jeanne Goldhaber says the original goal of sending education majors into the world with a “deep love and abiding respect for children” has remained. “We want our students to be able to teach children how to be critical thinkers and look at them as full of wonder and curiosity,” she says.
“I feel very fortunate that I found my way to that program as a college student,” says Nicole Mandeville ’08, owner of the Burlington Forest Preschool. “If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have such a strong sense of what it means to be a teacher of young children and the importance of both children and teachers being able to follow their interests. Though I’ve branched off a bit to focus more heavily on children’s experience with the natural world, my philosophy and approach to teaching is quite similar to that of the children’s school.”
Source: UVM News
