View a Sample Chapter - National Council of Teachers of English

The driving force behind children’s curiosities and inquiries in the curriculumwas familiar to us from Dewey (1938), who advocates for the child as anactive constructor of his or her own knowledge through experience. We hadread Katz and Chard’s (2000) work on the project approach and had experiencedthe curricular power of children’s projects in our own classrooms. Our literacyeducation background included Short and Harste’s (1996) Creating Classroomsfor Authors and Inquirers in which the notion of inquiry is applied and integratedwith the work of learning to read and write. Our conversations included thinkingabout literacy as a project itself, an intense, self-motivated investigation oflearning to read and write.RelationshipsFinally, our Reggio influences led us to allow ourselves to revalue relationshipsas underlying all learning. Like many teachers of young children, we werealready won over by the importance of our relationships with children, parents,and families and of children’s relationships with one another. The socioculturalviews of Vygotsky (1978) influenced our thinking about the essential relationalquality of all learning, particularly literacy learning. The idea of scaffolding suggeststhat all learning happens when a more able other mediates the learningthrough language and through the use of materials. This common idea gainedeven more credence as we viewed it from our Reggio lens. In addition, manyof us were familiar with Donna Skolnick’s (2000) work, which outlines a set ofrelationships that teachers might consider when planning for literacy learning:teacher to curriculum, child to curriculum, teacher to child, and child to child.All of this led us to consider relationships as the first and foremost concern ofteaching, and so the promotion and facilitation of children’s relationships withus, with one another, and with materials in the environment became critical.And Then There Was WorkshopWorking within this set of beliefs, we were introduced to the workshop approachto literacy (Calkins, 1994; Ray & Cleveland, 2004). After learning the structuresand tone of workshop teaching, we set up our classrooms so that the supportsfor workshop were ever present, through the availability of beautiful and justrightbooks, a variety of small teacher-constructed blank books, and a wealth ofmaterial for drawing and writing. We began our workshop teaching with thesimple and predictable structures suggested by Calkins:6 D Judith T. Lysaker