Curriculum: Educational Philosophy

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Developmental Interaction Approach
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The Main Principles of the Developmental Interaction Approach to Learning in the School for Children and Its Relationship to Curriculum

This particular theoretical framework as developed and written by Barbara Biber and Edna Shapiro and recently revised by Nancy Nager and Edna Shapiro, of the Graduate School faculty, is the basis for much of our work with children. As the faculty develops curriculum, these guiding principles are followed:

1. Development involves shifts in the way a person organizes experience and copes with the world, generally moving from simpler to more complex, from single to multiple and integrated ways of responding.

2. Individuals function within a range of possibilities; their development cannot be fixed on a straight line or plane of growth. Earlier ways of organizing experiences become integrated into more advanced systems. People can function at the highest possible level and can use less mature ways appropriately.

3. Developmental progress involves a mix of stability and instability. Educators seek to find the balance between helping a child consolidate new understandings while offering challenges to promote growth.

4. Children's natural curiosity about themselves and the world around them is the motivating force for their learning and their ability to create meaning. This desire to engage actively with the environment- to make contact, to have an impact and to make sense of experience- is built into human beings. As children grow, they add more ways of interacting with the world. Generally, the progression is from more physical, body-centered ways of responding, to more conceptual, symbolic ways.

5. The child's sense of self is constructed from experiences in the physical and social world. This knowledge of self is based on repeated awareness and testing of these interactions.

6. Growth and maturation involve conflict from within the self and with others. Conflict is necessary for development. How conflicts are resolved depend on the interactions among the unique nature of the child, the significant people in the child's life, and the demands of the culture.

Development unfolds at different times for different children. Since it does, however, occur on a continuum, teachers choose topics that they know from research and practice will engage and challenge children in a particular range of development. First, they decide what the organizing concepts, or big ideas, are, and then they design experiences that will lead children to make discoveries about those ideas. As the curriculum unfolds, it is common for children to bring questions and contributions to the class that the teacher recognizes are important. An individual student, a small group, or the whole class may lead the experience in a new direction. In this way, accumulated knowledge from the past and present is constantly being examined and reconstructed with fresh ideas and inquiries in a collaboration among the teacher, faculty from the School for Children and Graduate School, parents, and students.