Workshop : The Learning Environment Cathy Downes and Liz MacAulay

 How can the environment teach children?  What influence does the environment have on children’s learning behaviours?  What does the environment tell children about values and expectations of learning?  How can we ensure that we listen to children and support young children’s competencies in expressing their perspectives about the learning environment?

 Prohibitive or discouraging  Permissive and affording  Inviting and encouraging  Expansive, powerful and potentiating Claxton (2010)

 What might expansive, powerful and potentiating environments look like?  Discuss and jot down key words and/ or phrases which capture for you, the notion of an expansive, powerful and potentiating environment

 In an expansive learning environment staff plan and organise the space, resources, materials and activities in ways which creates an inviting and challenging environment for every child.  The aim is to provide an environment in which children are ready, willing and able to engage profitably in learning.  We can be more or less disposed to learning. Positive dispositions to learning can be supported and encouraged- or not! Adapted from Delaney (2011)

 What is clear is that early childhood centres and schools do change children’s learning orientations, for better or worse. (Claxton and Carr 2004)  The learning environment can steer children towards or away from developing the attributes of effective learners.

Look at your photographs and consider the following questions

 What does your environment tell children about values and expectations?  How can the environment influence, strengthen, broaden and enrich children’s learning behaviours and dispositions?  How does your environment ‘speak’ to children about what they can do, how and where they can do it and how they can work together?  What sort of messages and invitations are presented? Adapted from Delaney (2011)

 How can we ensure that we listen to children and support young children’s competencies in expressing their perspectives about the learning environment? Clark (2010)

 Observations  Photo books  Tours and map-making  Interviews Clark (2010)

‘ For Malaguzzi, the business of teachers and learners was to learn and relearn together. In this way children are not shaped by experience but shape it themselves.’ ‘The purpose of research that teachers do, either on their own or with colleagues, is to develop and use strategies that will be useful to children’s learning. They go from research into action or from action into research. It becomes a spiral process.’ Smidt (2013:24)