APPLY STEAM CLASSROOMS TO EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION - THE CONCEPT OF ‘REVERSE EDUCATION’

If early childhood education is supposed to develop a child’s skills and adapt him or her to the world, STEAM classrooms should be part of that process.

Since children are natural observers, they can begin to learn about the world around them via STEAM education, based on solid scientific principles. They also don’t have any pre-conceived notions about the world, and can therefore begin to grasp all types of phenomena in the world without introducing any type of prejudice. Even if they don’t understand the ‘why’ or ‘how’ they can use it as a reference point in their future education. True education is not accumulating facts about the world, true education is making relevant connections about different phenomena in the world.

In my opinion, authentic Montessori principles and STEAM classrooms can be naturally connected. Montessori education classifies exercises into four different areas: practical life, sensorial, language and mathematics. Practical life exercises relate to the things we do every day to maintain a living, such as pouring liquids, dusting, washing hands, cutting, table setting and the like. The skills children develop with these exercises are immediately applicable to life. If a child is unfocused, practical life exercises are used to develop that focus. The second category, sensorial exercises, are based around the five senses. The child’s experiences with these exercises are highly personal, and difficult to quantify in a meaningful way. They lead children to develop their own creativity.

The third and fourth categories, language and math exercises, are more abstract, even when objects are used to teach these abstract principles (as it is applied in Montessori). Language education is limited to the child’s experience about the world; it cannot speak about phenomena it doesn’t recognize; therefore language education is dependent on the development of knowledge about the world. Math is the most abstract, and the connection with the ‘real world’ is the most indirect, even though in Montessori math is taught using objects.

This is where STEAM education can come in; it can help with the more abstract exercises, above and beyond the practical life exercises which have an obvious connection with the ‘real world’, it can connect both language and math with that ‘real world’. They can begin to learn that phenomena in the world around them can be expressed in a series of numbers, for example. To illustrate, a child that’s walking very slowly; another fast, and yet another very fast. These different modes of walking can be expressed in differing rhythms which can be associated with numbers. With these types of exercises they can begin to understand that everything can be modeled with numbers.

STEAM classrooms can help children to understand the ‘real world’ using abstracts, materializing the world using abstract concepts. Implementing STEAM education on top of a Montessori foundation might be a revolutionary change in the education of children. STEAM perfectly aligns with naturally born curious small brains…

I like to call this educational process ‘reverse teaching’, as it uses natural curiosity, creates a demand to learn on the part of the child, a guidance to have them find out and understand. Even if they initially don’t understand a concept deeply and completely, they keep the core of it as a meaningful experience forever. And aren’t we the product of our experiences?