Normalization: Time for Cultural Sensitivity Check?By Pamela AutreyWords change their meanings over time; often their etymologies clarify and deepen their meaning. Maria Montessori's choices of words to describe the phenomena she observed in children were products of a particular place and time. As we experience the paradigm shift into the information age and our technologies of communication change, so will our vocabulary change. Dr. Montessori used the term normalization to refer to the changes she saw in young children when they connected with their environments through concentration. Normalization is an unfortunate term. It carries the industrial baggage of the cult of efficiency that emerged at the dawn of the twentieth century. Dr. Montessori lived in a positivistic world and the language of science allowed her to name what had always been right under our noses. The first female to obtain a medical degree in Italy was anything but normal. What she described was the peace that is a by-product of two things: children reaching outside of themselves to something in the world around them and an environment that reaches back. Phenomenologists point out that whatever humans connect to in productive ways becomes an extension of themselves. John Dewey comes closer to describing this unity of child and environment with an organic vocabulary, but he lacked the reverence for children that is a keystone of Montessori' s work. Both were philosophers. Dewey believed philosophies of education were at the core of all philosophies because they are studies of how to have a world. Montessori understood that for children to have a world they had to reach out to it first with their hands and have the time and space to engage their minds. A normalized child is one who has a world. The surge in public Montessori programs in the 1970s came about because of desegregation. Some of these programs were very successful in drawing white students to traditionally all-black schools. Today, white students dwindle in our Montessori program in a southern city and our classrooms are predominantly black, from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. The history of Montessori education has been a special case and the public Montessori program is following suit. Many issues have emerged in public Montessori education but none as basic as normalization. The American model that has emerged in private schools is one in which pastoral discipline - based on modeling - is primary. One discipline model does not fit all classrooms. Because we are a fast food nation accustomed to quick fixes, many pre-service teachers are only interested in the how of education. Montessori educators often mistake pastoral discipline for a prime component of Montessori education. When they step into classrooms with children who are accustomed to direct discipline they are in for a rude awakening. Dr. Montessori was explicit in instructing future directresses to follow the lead of the child. Because we often are deaf to the why of Montessori education, we unfairly expect students to respond to our soft voices and aesthetic environments with recognition they do not have. If a child is accustomed to direct and instrumental discipline, a soft voice most often will not provoke the normalization we are looking for. Like teachers who graduate from mainstream education programs full of liberal exuberance, Montessori teachers also enter their first teaching experiences with visions of children working with quiet concentration in beautiful environments. Both are often full of recriminations and questions when the results are not what they thought they would be. I am not advocating disrespect or corporal discipline; I am advocating expansive thinking on the different ways not only discipline but also concentration can look. Teachers in our program were fortunate to travel to San Diego for the 2005 NCME Conference. I had not attended a conference for five years because I was working on my doctorate and so I had the benefit of time passage in which to note changes. At the last conference I had attended, one Montessori neophyte asked me if any Montessorians dressed professionally as she noted the casual attendees around her. I loved the Birkenstocks, patchwork skirts, and laid back comfort of what could have just as easily been a hippie reunion. This time everyone dressed professionally - I never saw anyone in jeans. I wondered if the movement of Montessori education into the public realm had corporatized its followers. Perhaps it is only that times have changed. What has not changed and needs to change is the lack of diversity - the conference attendees were predominantly white. My students and I live in a public school classroom that is noisy and active. Every morning, they burst in with pressing issues and interpersonal disputes. It is a small space and sometimes I think we will burst out of it. I have returned to practice with awe for Dr. Montessori's insights. The unanswered questions I carried out with me five years ago were answered during my doctoral journey, only to be replaced with new ones, but now I know it is not the how that is most important I have a working knowledge of the why. My fourth and fifth-graders - in order to have a world - need to own the classroom. Facilitation in my classroom is based on my willingness to give them that ownership. Their ownership of the classroom provides the time and space for normalization - a peace that is dynamic and creative and often noisy and contentious. I nostalgically recall my Montessori conversion experience and the purity I sought in practice. Twenty-three years later, with experience in both private and public Montessori programs and a Ph.D. in Curriculum Theory, purity means something different. In the spring issue, Cossentino and Whitescarver make the case for transplantation of Montessori's ideas and believe it is safer for Montessori education to remain on the margins of American education: Left largely alone to define and modify itself according to its own set of standards, American Montessorians have been able to manage a creative tension between transmutation and transplantation. It is a creative tension that marginalizes many of our working-class and poor students. It is a creative tension that has maintained a parochial and white institution. Purity in practice, for me, means following the leads of my students and Oh, what a wondrous journey it is. Normalization is part of the common wholeness of Montessori education and while it is peace that surpasses understanding, it has a range of appearances. Pamela Autrey, Ph.D. teaches at Belfair Montessori Magnet Elementary School in Baton Rouge, LA |
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