edouard sequin

Discipline, liberty
and
pedagogy
towards social and cultural independence
through the regulation of activity and attention
in a Montessori classroom
Susan Feez
University of New England
1
Discipline and liberty tend to be thought of as mutually exclusive in the domain of
pedagogy. Disciplined children learning discipline knowledge, conventional wisdom
suggests, cannot simultaneously be children free to engage in spontaneous activity
following their own interests. That’s probably the one thing the back-to-basics
traditionalists and the constructivist, progressive educators would agree on.
Liberty and Discipline
… discipline is very closely connected with freedom and
action. It is generally thought that discipline and freedom
are opposed to each other. The child has taught us, that
they represent the two faces of the same coin, two faces of
the same action. […]
If there is no freedom there is no discipline;
if there is no discipline there is no freedom.
Thus freedom and discipline are the same thing […]
If adults arrive at discipline and freedom in this fashion a
great social problem will be solved.
Maria Montessori (India, 1939)
2
Liberty and discipline, however, were considered by Dr Maria Montessori (1998
[1939], p. 41) to be inseparable; you can’t have one without the other, and this idea is
embodied in the pedagogy she devised a century ago.
Montessori (1946, p. 12) surrounded children with ‘things to handle which in
themselves convey steps in culture’ because she observed that children have ‘natural
aptitudes to easy acquisition of culture’. Designing objects to convey culture to
children became her life’s work. Her legacy is a systematic and interrelated array of
objects and graded exercises, covering all educational disciplines for children from
infancy to the age of twelve years. This system, largely unaltered, continues to be used
today in thousands of schools around the world.
In Montessori classrooms children interact with the sets of objects, using precise
movement and exact language to achieve specific purposes. The configuration of
objects, movement and language can be thought of as multimodal ensembles of
learning resources. Through their interaction with the Montessori ensembles, children
learn both everyday and educational knowledge.
The emphasis on liberty indicates that Montessori’s pedagogy has its origin in the
Enlightenment, but the equal emphasis on discipline suggests its origin does not lie in
the well-known Enlightenment tradition which begins with Rousseau’s famous story
of the education of a fictional boy called Émile.
Metalanguage
Semiotic Mediation:
a transdisciplinary view (Hasan)
o Developmental psychology (Vygotsky
(Vygotsky))
o Sociology of education (Bernstein
(Bernstein))
o Social semiotics (Halliday
(Halliday))
3
The metalanguage I’ll be using to explore the socio-cultural evolution of Montessori
pedagogy, and the use of the Montessori objects, is drawn from three disciplines:
developmental psychology, following Vygotsky, sociology of education, following
Bernstein, and social semiotics following Halliday.
The unifying theme is Hasan’s transdisciplinary explanation of semiotic mediation,
which brings together ‘the natural and the social’ in the process of human
development (Hasan 2005 [1995], p. 107).
3
Developmental
psychology(Vygotsky)
o genetic accounts of human
development across different spans of
time (phylogenesis, socio-cultural
genesis, ontogenesis, microgenesis)
o scientific concepts
4
Development is modelled by Vygotsky as a process of adaption. The means of adaptation are
(1) tools for interacting with and mastering the natural environment through practical action,
and (2) signs for interacting with others in the social environment and for mastering oneself
through meaning. In Vygotsky’s genetic account of development, changes in mediation mark
critical steps or turning points.
In phylogenesis, the domain of evolutionary time, the critical developmental step is the use of
physical tools by primates to change their external physical world
In socio-cultural genesis, historical time, the critical step is the use of signs by humans to
master their behaviour, ie psychological tools to change their internal psychological world.
In ontogenesis, the span of one life time, the critical step is the interweaving in childhood of
two strands of development, the elementary biological strand and higher, cultural strand.
There are a number of transitional forms between the elementary and higher functions’,
transitions relating to the development of symbolic activity, from speech, to the use of signals
and finally signs (Vygotsky and Luria 1994 [1930], p. 148). This developing symbolic activity
frees the consciousness from the spatial and temporal limits of the immediate environment.
The term microgenesis is not used by Vygotsky, but it has been coined by scholars modelling
development within the timeframe of minutes or hours, in order to look closely, to use
Vygotsky’s words, at the ‘process in flight’.
This is the domain relevant to a child’s use of the Montessori ensembles of objects, movement
and language. I have interpreted these ensembles as a type of semiotic mediation which sparks
critical steps or turning points in the development of everyday and educational knowledge at
the level of microgenesis.
4
Sociology of education
(Bernstein)
o categories of knowledge
(everyday/educational)
o recontextualisation of knowledge as
pedagogic discourse
o visible and invisible pedagogies
5
Bernstein’s sociology of pedagogy, in Hasan’s words foregrounds ‘the dialectic
of the social and the semiotic’ (Hasan 2005a, p. 33).
Most relevant to today’s talk about Montessori pedagogy is Bernstein’s
metalanguage for talking about categories of knowledge, the recontextualisation
of fields of knowledge as pedagogic discourse, in both its regulative and
instructional aspects, and the distinction between visible and invisible
pedagogies.
Just as language imposes order and centres of relevance on an otherwise
undifferentiated mass of potential thought and experience, in Bernstein’s
model, pedagogy imposes order and centres of relevance on the otherwise
undifferentiated mass of potential knowledge. Language has grammar to
organise meaning into structures which can then be given reality in an
expression form and pedagogy activates a system of principles through which
knowledge is given reality in learning contexts. Today I want to draw attention
to the system of principles which underpin Montessori pedagogy.
5
Social semiotics (Halliday)
o language based theory of learning
o text as unit of analysis (logogenesis)
o grammatics
6
Social semiotics in Hasan’s words offers an analytical framework
which goes ‘beyond action into interaction’ (Hasan 2005b, p. 146),
enabling a close investigation of the mediating work of signs.
Of most value to an exploration of Montessori pedagogy are first,
Halliday’s language based theory of learning as a means of
reinforcing and developing Vygotsky’s account of ontogenesis,
second, the identification of text as the unit of analysis, combined
with an expansive social semiotic metalanguage which can be used
to describe the meaning relations within the multimodal
configuration of objects, movement and language found in the
ensembles of learning resources used in Montessori classrooms.
The limits of time will mean only a brief glimpse into examples of
the social semiotic analysis of the Montessori ensembles will be
possible today.
6
Discipline in the Montessori tradition
Discipline in the Montessori tradition encompasses both
regulation and knowledge.
o regulation
ordering activity in the shared social space in which
learning takes place
o knowledge
ordering what is to be learned, using knowledge
structures as shared instruments of perception
7
Recontextualising both everyday and educational knowledge for learners in ways that
capture attention and build concentration is the central concern of Montessori
pedagogy. To achieve this, the pedagogy foregrounds disciplinarity, both as it relates
to the learners themselves and to the instructional content. Even if the learners are very
young, two and three years old, more emphasis is placed on discipline in Montessori
settings than the more familiar early childhood emphasis on creativity, imagination
and play. This may sound grim for little kids, but proponents of the Montessori
approach argue that, in fact, discipline interlocked with liberty enhances learners’
capacity for playful, imaginative and creative interaction with their environment.
Today I want to talk about the less visible Enlightenment tradition from which
Montessori pedagogy is derived, a tradition with its origin in the work of educators
trying to help real children overcome very real developmental challenges.
7
prepared environment
society in embryo
o distinctive materials
(aesthetics+interest)
o freedom of choice
o blocks of
unscheduled time
o freedom to work
indoors or outdoors
o 3 year age span
8
First, I’m going to show you some clips from a video about Montessori pedagogy; the video is
called Maria Montessori: Her life and legacy. It was prepared by Dr Annette Haines, who is a
member of the Association Montessori Internationale pedagogical committee, based in
Amsterdam (Haines 2004).
[It is not possible to incorporate video clips into the pdf version of this presentation.
Incomplete excerpts from the video can be seen on the following website:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2A3-z0qdCw ]
In these clips you’ll see footage of well-established Montessori schools in the United States
and hear the voice of Annette Haines. Dr Haines’s commentary exemplifies discourse used
within the community of Montessori practitioners today, a discourse handed down in an oral
tradition.
I would like to emphasise that these are exemplary classrooms and edited footage. There are,
obviously, among the many thousands of Montessori schools worldwide huge variations in
classroom resources, teacher expertise and quality control. Some schools are better than others
and Montessori teachers, like teachers everywhere, have better days than others. As important
as variations in instances of Montessori practice are, today I would like to focus on the
potential of this approach so we can consider some broader implications for teaching and
learning in general.
Each video clip draws your attention to key features of the Montessori tradition.
Giving children opportunities build discipline in both the sense of self-regulation and
knowledge, requires, in the Montessori tradition, a specially prepared environment,
characterised by distinctive materials, choice, time and three year age range to enable the
evolution of a mini-community.
8
sensory foundation of the intellect
o ordering sensory
impressions
(contrast, grade)
o language
o abstract
(portable)
knowledge
o observation
judgement
comparison
9
The development of the intellect has its origin in the ordering, categorising and
cataloguing of sensory experience, ‘fixed’ by language.
9
mathematics and language
o concrete
abstract/symbolic
o manipulative/
interactive
o precise/exact
o challenging
10
Educational (discipline) knowledge has its origin in ordered sensory experience, which
makes way for abstract, symbolic expression.
10
liberty and discipline
o grace and courtesy
o freedoms (liberty)
- movement
- work
- time
- companions
o limits (discipline)
- physical space
- knowledge structure
(designed into materials)
- demands of social group
- lack of knowledge
o judgement
independence
Willpower is built up by the routines of life itself,
by the little decisions of daily living (Haines 2004)
11
The will power which underwrites the development of both liberty and discipline has
its origin in daily social life.
Following this video clip is a short clip from the same vidoe of a Montessori
classroom prepared for children aged from six to twelve years.
11
Maria Montessori (1870-1952)
12
In the 1890s, in Rome, Maria Montessori trained first in mathematics and the physical sciences, then in the
biological sciences as part of her medical degree. Later she studied, researched and practised in the fields of
paediatrics, psychiatry and orthophrenics, or defectology, as Vygotsky called this field. As a young doctor
Montessori came face to face with much human suffering in turn of the century Italy, particularly among
women and children living in poverty, and the ‘defective’ children in the orthophrenic institute she directed.
She was quick to realise that the long term solutions to these problems were social rather than medical. She
campaigned for improvements in housing, sanitation, hygiene, ante-natal and post-natal care and the rights of
women and children in general. Education became the treatment of choice for her ‘defectives’, and she
succeeded in educating many to the point where they could pass the public exams. Very quickly she became
famous, lecturing and campaigning throughout Europe.
Montessori was a positivist scientist by training and the social science she turned to first to help her solve the
social problems she observed around her was anthropology. Anthropology, as it was studied in Italy at the
time, used physiological measurements as the means for studying human variation. Ironically, a leading figure
in this field, drawing on body measurement data, had earlier tried to prevent Montessori from enrolling in
medicine, because it was ‘against nature’ for a woman to undertake such study. To override this opposition,
Maria Montessori, so the apocryphal story goes, appealed to the Pope, perhaps realising that the only way to
trump science is with religion. On the completion of her medical degree she graduated at the top of her class.
The positivist Italian anthropologists of the era used their measurements to come up with complex indices and
ratios to identify and compare human types, for example, criminal types, the typology of Northern versus
Southern Italians etc. The worrying direction in which this was heading is obvious from our standpoint in
history, but many working in the field at the time held great hope that the data they were collecting, and the
science they were developing, would help them mitigate, even prevent, social problems. When Montessori
reviewed the physiological data relating to the criminal type, however, her medical training told her that these
measurements were not innate characteristics of fixed human types but were largely the result of poverty,
hunger and ill health.
liberty as activity
liberty is activity. […]
If discipline is founded upon liberty,
the discipline itself must necessarily be active.
Maria Montessori (Rome, 1909)
13
Montessori merged her expertise in special education with her work in anthropology and
began to lecture in a field she called ‘pedagogical anthropology’. In an era of increasing
specialisation Montessori’s aim was to develop a science of pedagogy, with the human child
as her object of study. Her link with positivist anthropology, however, was propelling her
towards a crisis, the same crisis which two decades later Vygotsky (1986 [1934], pp. 13-15)
would describe, with reference to the field of psychology, as being marked by ‘incongruity’
between the data and the theories which emerged to fit the data.
When Montessori (1964 [1909/1912], pp. 14-15) finally rejected positivism, she cited the way
body measurements were used to create desks and benches designed to force children to sit
still in class, to become, in her words, ‘like butterflies mounted on pins’. ‘[W]ith such material
as this’ she argued, ‘the experimental scientist can do nothing’. Observing immobile children
to collect pedagogic data was equivalent in her mind to observing mounted butterflies to
collect entomological data. For this reason, Montessori (1964 [1909/1912], p. 28) changed her
object of study to the ‘spontaneous manifestations of the child’s nature’. This of course
foreshadows the way Vygotsky would later address the crisis he perceived in psychology by
using ‘ socially laden activity’ as the focus of his experiments.
While Montessori certainly aimed to make schools far more humane than was common at the
time, her reasons for insisting children should be given the freedom to engage in spontaneous
activity were, thus, methodological, rather than an expression of the tradition associated with
Rousseau.
In 1907, the year Saussure delivered his lectures in Geneva, Maria Montessori opened her first
school in Rome at the request of authorities who wanted to corral street children running wild
and destroying buildings. In a few months the children became self-disciplined, had learned
everyday activities such as washing, dressing, cleaning up, and had even begun to learn
educational knowledge, such as writing, reading and mathematics, yet they were completely
free. As a result of this experiment, duplicated in other schools, Montessori became an
international household name.
13
Étienne Bonnot de Condillac (1715-1780)
liberty through signs
o visitor to Pereira’s school for the
deaf
o disciple of John Locke:
‘understanding’/consciousness
not innate but learnt through
experience via senses
(empiricism)
o modelled development of
consciousness in terms of
relations between sensory
impressions, language, thought
and knowledge (sensationalism)
14
Montessori achieved this apparent miracle by returning to the Enlightenment tradition which
had been the source of her inspiration when teaching ‘defective’ children. This was the
tradition, not of Rousseau, but of a contemporary, and we are told, a dinner companion of
Rousseau, Diderot and the other philosophes in Paris at the time. He was an Abbé, Étienne
Bonnot de Condillac. One of the major concerns of the group of philosophers to which
Condillac belonged was the question of what it meant to be human and what the process of
becoming human involved.
Clues to the answers to these questions, they believed, were found in a Parisian school where
deaf mutes at that time were successfully taught to speak by a teacher called Jacob Pereira.
Because deaf mutes had no language, they were considered to be less than human. Pereira’s
method was interactive and sensory-based. He is said to have, ‘practically made his pupils
hear through the skin, and utter exactly what they so heard’. He also used grammar categories
to teach what he called the force of different words, or as we might say, their function in
meaning-making. His students became very prominent in Parisian society and letters. To
contemporary observers, including Condillac, Rousseau and Diderot, teaching deaf mutes to
speak gave them their humanity.
Combining what he observed at the school with his interpretation of John Locke’s empiricism,
Condillac argued that the senses are the doorways to the human mind, but movement through
the doorway of sensory experience to the functions of the mind can only be achieved by using
signs. This is because signs free humans from dependence on immediate sensory and temporal
experience and give them control of their mental functions. The use of signs, according to
Condillac, develops and refines attention and memory, and makes it possible to reorganise
remembered experience in imaginative ways. Thus, the liberty of Condillac is the liberty
endowed by the intentional use of socially-shared signs, an idea which is missing in the liberty
Rousseau allows Émile.
14
knowledge structures as systems
(Condillac)
Condillac)
a single principle successfully
expanded
15
Condillac was also interested in systems, including bodies of knowledge. He described ‘a
body of knowledge’ as a system with ‘mutually dependent parts, derived from a single
principle successfully expanded’ (quoted in Knight 1968, p. 52). Such a system involves the
data of empirical experience being organised and explained in conventional ways using
language.
The key to education for Condillac was gaining the learner’s attention, in playful ways
adapted to the child’s level of development, then using signs in shared, social settings to
control the child’s attention. The child’s experience is mediated through the senses and
expressed as signs. Condillac applied his ideas in a curriculum he designed for the grandson of
Louis XV, the Prince of Parma, to whom he was tutor for many years from the time the child
was very young.
In 1914 a contemporary and influential critic of Montessori, Boyd (1914, p. 45) noted, with
great disapproval, that ‘Condillac attributed the whole of man’s ideas to social intercourse, ...’,
and, for this reason, he argued, it was Rousseau who should be used as inspiration for new
education in the twentieth century.
Rousseau’s child, however, is left alone to make his choices in isolation based on his own
impulsive response to experience. The child’s development is shaped by ‘sentiment’
(emotion), from within.
For Condillac liberty is a function of social interaction and social conventions, represented in
language, conventions which emerge from the distinctions made in the contexts of every day
life. Thus, the development of Condillac’s child is shaped by social life, from outside.
Condillac’s view of human development inspired the work of the two educators who would
had the strongest influence on Maria Montessori, the nineteenth century doctors Jean Itard and
Edouard Séguin.
15
Jean-Marc Gaspard Itard (1735-1838)
sensory mediation
o teacher of Victor, the wild boy of
Averyon
o identified Victor’s low level of
functioning as the result of ‘cultural
loss
o playful activity involving repetition
and imitation:
natural life  social life  intellectual
life
16
Jean Itard is famous as the teacher of Victor, the wild boy of Aveyron, a boy abandoned in a
forest at about the age of four and found at about age twelve. Itard was a young doctor who
rejected the assessment of others that Victor was organically impaired. He argued that the
child suffered from ‘cultural loss’ and that education could redress this loss.
When found, the child displayed limited abilities related to elementary functions, including
movement, perception and attention. He could not, for example, distinguish hot from cold. He
did respond to the sound of a walnut cracked behind him, this sound meant food, but not to the
sound of pistol, which had no meaning for him.
Using Condillac’s ideas, Itard prepared an environment that would meet the child’s wants,
needs and interests and encourage him to develop new ones. Itard wrote: ‘Whenever his wants
are concerned, his attention, his memory, and his intelligence seemed to raise him above
himself’, an early foreshadowing of Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development extending
beyond a learner’s present level of functioning. Itard prepared Victor’s environment, in Harlan
Lane’s words, by ‘fabricating things, sights, and sounds to serve as vehicles of instruction’
(Lane 1976, p. 95).
First, Itard worked to awaken the child’s senses, playfully using activities of daily life which
he said ‘lead the mind to a habit of attention, by exposing the senses to the reception of the
most lively impressions’ (Itard 1972 [1801], p. 106). Itard used sensory means to turn the
child’s attention to differences in the environment, differences salient to the child’s needs and
wants, and therefore meaningful to the child. Through sensory mediation Itard expanded the
range of meaningful differences to differences which were also salient and significant to those
who shared the child’s social context. He progressively drew attention to finer and finer
contrasts, comparisons and distinctions eg from the contrast between the sounds of a drum and
a bell to the distinctions between different phonemes.
sensory mediation
o sensory mediation: a first step towards
mediation through signs (following
Condillac)
Was Victor’s potential limited because during critical periods
the appropriate social context was missing?
17
The sensory mediation of experience, based on contrasting sensory perceptions in a closely-shared
social context, opened up a pathway for Victor which led to the mediation of experience through signs.
In this way Victor’s free and spontaneous activity was channelled towards the intentional control of
attention, memory and imagination gained through sign-use. As signs took over, Victor let go the
sensory cues.
Without external order Victor became distressed and disoriented, so Itard drew outlines to help the child
order the objects in his room on hooks. Itard later used the same technique to teach Victor geometric
shapes and the letters of the alphabet. Then he devised a series of activities based on grammar
categories to teach Victor to read and write.
The outlines Itard drew for the objects Victor wanted to put in order were a memory aid which Victor
was able to use once the number of objects became too many to order from memory. The grammatical
categories Itard used to build Victor’s repertoire of signs are analogous, at a higher level of abstraction,
to the outlines beside the hooks. In other words, grammatical categories were used by Itard as semantic
outlines which could function as a type of memory aid to assist with the ordering of meaning.
Montessori, building on the work of Itard’s student Séguin, elaborated and extended both the sensory
matching of shapes to outlines and the use of grammatical categories in the teaching of reading.
While Victor made extraordinary developmental steps under Itard’s tutelage, he never gained control of
language and other social conventions to the extent considered normal for a child of his age. Itard
reasoned that during his time in the forest the child had passed through critical developmental periods
isolated from society, and therefore, was unable to exploit the developmental opportunities these
periods provided. The child could never completely make up for the resulting ‘cultural loss’. Maria
Montessori elaborated Itard’s conclusions into a key concept in her teaching methodology, the concept
of the ‘sensitive period’, periods of heightened sensitivity and interest during which small children are
able to make social and cultural advances, for example, learning language, unconsciously and with
relative ease. After these periods have passed, the individual must acquire the same ability consciously,
with greater difficulty and less perfectly, for example, the learning of second language in adulthood.
Sensitive periods are used in Montessori pedagogy as a guide for teachers when matching activities to a
child’s potential. Vygotsky (1986 [1934], p. 189) cites Montessori’s concept of the sensitive period as
the starting point for his more theoretically developed description of the zone of proximal development.
Itard’s account of Victor’s education, it could be argued, might provide more valuable reading in
teacher training courses than the ubiquitous story of the imaginary Émile.
Edouard Séguin (1812-1880)
physiological pedagogy
o collaborated with Itard
o developed a sensory-based
method to cure the social
isolation and ‘intellectual
deafness’ of children with
developmental delay
o ‘contrast is power’
o senses can be artificially
augmented through physical
and semiotic means
18
Late in his life Itard collaborated with Edouard Séguin, who elaborated Itard’s ideas to create schools
for educating children who in those days were labelled ‘idiots’.
The first step in Seguin’s method was to design materials and games the children could use to compare
differences between sensory perceptions, to polarise their attention, first in terms of contrast and second
in terms of similarity. He called the many games he designed a ‘language of action’, a sensory gateway
to abstract meaning-making.
For example, using active games in the footsteps of Itard, Séguin introduced the children in his care to
grammatical categories they could use as semantic outlines, memory aids to support first steps in
reading. These activities became the prototype of the Montessori grammar-based reading lessons.
Most of all Séguin considered that teaching ‘idiot’ children involved training the will as a means of
leading the children towards social life.
“From collecting the sparse powers of muscles and nerves disconnected by the absence of will, he
wrote, to the gathering of the faculties in the act of thinking, our progress has been a constant ascension
on the steps leading from isolation to sociability” Séguin (1971 [1866], p. 209).
Séguin (1971 [1866], pp. 198-200) described the foundation principle underpinning his pedagogy in the
following way.:
... the law of evolution of the function of the senses ending in intellectual faculty [in which]
[p]erception producing simple notion, faculty producing ideas more and more complex and abstract, are
the extreme terms of the chain ...
Seguin was an instrument maker, and believed that the senses can be artificially augmented through
physical and semiotic means to overcome biological, spatial and temporal limits. While, for example,
spectacles, telescopes and microscopes extend the capacity of the visual sense beyond the limits of
impairment or the immediate visual field, mathematics, navigation and measurement are instruments
which mediate and extend perception using the culture’s semiotic systems.
18
Séguin’
Séguin’s keystone
o training of the will:
- collaborative activity
- control of movement and the mind
o ensembles of learning resources
- multimodal
- redundant
19
It was Séguin’s method that Montessori had used so successfully in the 1890s to teach
‘deficient’ children at the orthophrenic institute in Rome. In 1907 when she applied the same
method to the education of street children, she was amazed by what unfolded.
Séguin’s approach, and Montessori’s interpretation, were judged by Montessori’s
contemporaries working in the tradition of Rousseau, including followers of Dewey, as
atomistic and lacking in creative and intellectual freedom. Within a couple of decades,
however, Vygotsky (1993 [1932], p. 218), wrote of the ‘the profound intuition of Segen’s ...
that the source of idiocy is solitude’. Vygotsky (1993 [1932], p. 218) continued:
“The developmental path for a severely retarded child lies through collaborative activity, the
social help of another human being, who from the first is his mind, his will, his activities. This
proposition also corresponds entirely with the normal path of development for a child.”
The ‘keystone’ in Séguin’s approach, as identified by Vygotsky (1993 [1935], p. 220), is ‘free
will’. Like all higher functions, Vygotsky argues, if free will ‘is impossible on the level of
individual development, it becomes possible on the level of social development’.
To teach educational knowledge, Séguin combined concrete objects which embodied the
knowledge to be taught, with a naming lesson, so the meanings were represented in multiple
ways. The effect is to present the child with redundant expressions of the same meaning in
ensembles of learning resources. Redundancy is a indexical feature of Montessori pedagogy
inherited from Séguin.
“This juxtaposition or even identification of the three, four, or five forms of things, i.e., their
name written, printed, and pronounced, their images printed and carved, and their own selves
in substance, such are the forcible instruments by which the first ideas may be forced through
the senses into the mind” (Séguin 1971 [1866]).
The naming lesson, called the three period lesson of Seguin, is still used in Montessori schools
throughout the world today.
19
Ensembles of developmental resources
• The term ensemble was used by Séguin (1971 [1866], p.
291) to describe the sets of educational resources
which became the prototypes for the Montessori
objects.
• The term ensemble is used by Butt (2004, pp. 227-228),
from a social semiotic perspective, to describe the
semiotic resources teachers use to help students
move from ‘local action towards human culture in
general’.
20
The ensembles of learning resources and instructional sequences of Séguin’s method,
elaborated in Montessori pedagogy, are located in the domain of microgenesis.
These ensembles embody, in multimodal form, the description by Butt (2004, p. 236) of the
teacher’s threefold task, that is, displacing ‘local representations’, disturbing what is perceived
to be self-evident and commonsense, and trying ‘to reconcile ... abstraction with common,
recognizable, experience’, a task which results in the ‘semantic complexity’ of pedagogic
discourse. In Montessori pedagogy this complexity finds its expression in the design of the
objects, the use of the objects and the accompanying language use.
A key element of the ensembles is the deliberate representation of concepts in a form which
captures students’ attention. This type of representation is identified by Butt (2004, p. 231) as
a critical abstraction, which can be ‘recontextualised in a number of intellectual contexts and
still retain its degree of fit’. In Butt’s account a critical abstraction represented verbally is
typically a definition, but, when more than one mode is used, as in Montessori ensembles, the
representation gains depth and power. Furthermore, a ‘cross-calibration’ of multiple modes of
representation, Butt (2004, p. 233) argues, increases the potential for insight.
A critical abstraction is described by Butt as having a two-way orientation:
- external: abstract concept naturalised as recognisable local/commonsense knowledge
- internal: commonsense knowledge ‘denaturalised’ to reveal ‘the conventional arrangements
which underpin our intellectual tools’
Semiotic modes available to teachers to design critical abstractions include ‘verbal, iconic,
numeric, indexical, kinaesthetic, geometric and musical’.
20
The Montessori Curriculum
Prepared Paths to Culture
Foundation (3 – 6 years)
Exercises of Practical Life
o the social and manual knowledge of the home and the
workshop recontextualised into routinised activity sequences
designed to develop conscious and voluntary control of
attention and movement (lessons in grace and courtesy and
practical life, extended into expressive knowledge of the
creative arts)
Exercises of the Senses
o everyday empirical knowledge recontextualised into sets of
objects which materialise this knowledge in the form of
hierarchical, taxonomic systems, foreshadowing the systematic
organisation of educational knowledge
21
Montessori pedagogy comprises an array of ensembles (objects, movement, language)
systematised into a web of detailed instructional pathways known as Prepared Paths
to Culture. These pathways are initiated by modelling to children everyday social,
manual and expressive skills, and lead to the mastery of systematic, hierarchicallyorganised academic knowledge. The pathways are materialised in the classroom
environment because each object, or set of objects, has a specified location on a shelf,
the physical location reflecting its location in the child’s progression through the
curriculum.
The pathways originate in activities designed for infants and culminate in activities
designed for twelve year old children. The web of pathways fans out into the various
disciplines of educational knowledge from the starting point of two foundation areas
of the Montessori curriculum located in the Children’s House environment for
preschool age children.
The progression from concrete experience to abstract principles is generalised across
all areas of the Montessori curriculum. Alongside this progression, control of the
regulative discourse of Montessori pedagogy is progressively handed over from
teacher to child as the child’s knowledge and self-mastery increases.
Everyday knowledge as preparation for interaction with educational knowledge.
21
Trivium
(linguistic knowledge)
Grammar (noun – verb)
Rhetoric (question – response)
Logic (meaning represented as geometry)
22
Condillac described ‘a body of knowledge’ as a system with ‘mutually dependent
parts, derived from a single principle successfully expanded’. Identifying and
embodying this single principle and then expanding it is the design principle at the
heart of Montessori’s approach to recontextualising knowledge for young children.
The organisation of knowledge in a Montessori classroom echoes the medieval
European distinction between linguistic knowledge (the Trivium) and abstract
knowledge of the physical world and mathematics (the Quadrivium). This organisation
is described by Bernstein (2000, pp. 8-9) as the source of a specific European
consciousness, a consciousness which pervades the discourse of Montessori pedagogy.
Vygotsky’s discussion of scientific, or academic, concepts has its foundation in the
same consciousness. Montessori considered knowledge of the Trivium and the
Quadrivium to be an inheritance, a patrimonio in Italian, in which all children were
entitled to share.
This slide reveals the single contrast, or principle, used as the basis of the Montessori
recontextualisation of the subjects which make up the Trivium.
Montessori seems to have inherited the Enlightenment view of geometry as the ideal
science. Is Geometry the ideal because it has the most hierarchical of knowledge
structures? In Montessori pedagogy geometry links the logic of Trivium with the
Quadrivium.
22
Quadrivium
(abstract, scientific knowledge)
Mathematics (base 10; the decimal system)
Geometry (solid-surface-line-point;
triangle-square- circle)
Music (rhythm-pitch)
Astronomy (all-nothing; star-planet; time-space)
expanded to
physics and chemistry (solid – liquid - gas)
geography (land – water - air)
biology (timeline of the evolution of life; animal-plant; vital
functions of living things)
history (timelines of humans and civilisations; fundamental
human needs [spiritual-material] across time and space)
23
On this slide can be seen the foundation contrast, or principle, on which is based the
Montessori recontextualisation of each of the subjects of the Quadrivium.
Interestingly, in the Montessori curriculum, Astronomy is expanded to encompass the
sciences and social sciences.
The child’s liberty in a Montessori classroom is not as an expression of unmediated
innate drives, but is the freedom gained by interacting, in developmentally appropriate
ways, with communally-shared socio-cultural meanings. This is achieved by providing
young children with objects they can use as external mediational means, objects which
capture and regulate attention.
I want to conclude with some illustrative examples of how this is done.
23
The Folding Cloths
an exercise of practical life
The parts of the folding
cloths
(shape, corners, colour,
texture, embroidered line)
A folding cloth dynamic ‘figure’
24
The folding cloths are a Montessori exercise of practical life. It comprises four square
cloths on which straight lines are embroidered. One cloth has one line parallel to two
sides of the cloth and bisecting the adjacent sides. A second cloth has one embroidered
diagonal. A third cloth has perpendicular lines bisecting the sides and intersecting in
the centre of the cloth. A fourth cloth has both diagonals embroidered onto the cloth.
The purpose of the exercise is to use embroidered lines as a guide to folding each
cloth.
Interpersonally the cloths, like all Montessori objects, can be thought of as an offer
inviting the child to act.
Experientially, a folding cloth and a hand movement combine dynamically into a
figure, a dynamic quantum of ‘experiential change’ (Halliday 2004, p. 169). The
elements of the figure are the cloths, the hands and the movement. The parts of the
folding cloth with one embroidered diagonal line are shown in the illustration.
During the folding exercises, the figures are tied together in a dynamic sequence, an
activity sequence, to use Martin’s term, each figure in the sequence derived from
taxonomies of ‘actions, people, places, things and qualities’ (Martin 1992, p. 292).
The activity sequence in the folding cloths ensemble concludes with a synoptic final
array of all the folded cloths, again typical of all Montessori ensembles. In the array
the folded cloths are transformed into static elements related on the basis of
comparative value (large, small) and class (rectangle, square, triangle).
These final synoptic arrays so characteristic of the conclusion of Montessori
ensembles can be thought of as entry-level knowledge systems.
24
Plane Geometry
folding cloths
from 2 ½ to 4
years
Geometry Cabinet
from 3 to 7 years
Geometry Sticks
from 7 to 9 years
25
The folding cloths, an exercise of practical life, represents a first step on a prepared
Montessori pathway way to culture. Further steps in this pathway are illustrated on the
slide, representing a developmental passage from concrete representation to abstract
knowledge from the ages of about two and a half years to nine years.
Children aged from about three to six work with the geometry cabinet, and
accompanying cards, an exercise of the senses. The cabinet comprises several drawers
in which a taxonomy of plane geometric shapes are materialised as wooden insets and
frames. During the exercises the children match insets to frames in increasingly
complex combinations. Later they match and grade the insets using increasingly
abstract representations on the cards. As they undertake the matching and grading
activities, children learn to name the shapes.
Once children have entered the early years of schooling, they are introduced to the box
of geometry sticks. Work with these sticks enables children to analyse , through
concrete manipulation of a series of precisely calibrated, colour-coded sticks, the
properties of plane shapes.
25
The Colour Tablets
an exercise of the senses
First period
Second period
Third period
This is red.
This is blue.
This is yellow
Give me the red (one).
Which one is blue?
(Can you) show me (which one is) the yellow
(one)?
Where is the red (one)?
Put the blue (one) back in the box.
(Can you) find the red one?
(Would you like to) find the yellow one?
What’s this?
Do you remember what this is?
Can you tell me what this is?
26
The Montessori exercises of the senses are designed as a culturally-relevant sensory
‘“alphabet” of the outer world’ for young children aged from about three to six. Once they
have learnt the ‘alphabet’, children are able to classify their experience using these categories.
That small children are interested in classifying their experience in accord with categories
used in the cultural context has been demonstrated by Painter (1999, p. 78).
In each set of graded objects, one sensory property, or quality, varies from object to object
while all the other properties remain constant. The variations are given labels using the three
period lesson of Seguin, a lesson which pivots on relational meanings
First period: name (indication)
Second period: recognise (collaboration)
Third period: reproduce (independence)
Note the potential for using the semantic feature [prefaced] in the second and third periods.
The semantic feature [prefaced], as Hasan (2004) has demonstrated, is a discursive practice of
groups of people with higher degrees of social and cultural autonomy. It represents an
‘invisible semiotic mediation’ through which children from these social groups achieve a
mental disposition orienting them favourably to school education. In related work, the
extensive use of the mental process remember in the prefacing of questions by mothers from
higher autonomy social groups asking about their children’s memories of real and storybook
events has been linked by Williams (2001) both to the role of memory in a young child’s
thinking, as identified by Vygotsky (1978, p. 50), and to the development of the discourse of
educational knowledge, or vertical discourse (Bernstein 2000). This type of semiotic
mediation appears not to be experienced so frequently in everyday contexts by children from
social groups with lower levels of social and cultural autonomy. The three period lesson of
Seguin, however, makes this practice available to all children in an accessible form in a welldefined context.
26
From external to internal
27
The three period lesson of Séguin can be considered from three perspectives:
- from indication via collaboration to independence.
- from pseudo concept to true concept (following Vygotsky)
- from signal to sign (following Hasan)
When the three period lesson is used with sensory and kinaesthetic representations of
educational knowledge, there is potential for powerful slippage between identifying and
attributive relations and back again as children adjust the meanings from ‘signals’ to label the
external world to true signs, or ‘symbols’ in an internalised meaning system. When a word is
used as a ‘signal’, its use is ‘concrete’ and ‘context-bound’, referring, in Hasan’s words, to
‘something that is physically present to the senses’ (Hasan 2005 [1992], p. 81). When a word
is used as a symbol, it signifies an internalised meaning, with the potential to refer to
phenomena beyond the immediate sensory field.
The noteworthy feature of Montessori pedagogy is that, wherever the child’s use of a meaning
such as red is located on the developmental pathway from context-dependent signal for a
physically present object to abstract, transportable attribute, the system of relational values
which gives the abstract meaning its value is also physically present in a synoptic, idealised
form, materialised in the array in which the object is located. Thus, the array of colour tablets
representing the primary colours renders the values red, blue and yellow as a system of
relations. When a child is given a word to signal one value in this materialised system, the
child engages with the system’s meaning potential and takes a step towards eventually
internalising the system as a whole, and with it the abstract values it carries.
The next series of slides offer a brief look at some ensembles for teaching educational
knowledge, in this case, grammar, knowledge used in Montessori pedagogy to teach reading.
27
Representing potential
Using abstractions to represent abstraction
Im Blau
Kandinsky, 1925
28
In the 1920s Montessori designed a series of grammar-based reading games to lead children
from the decoding of single, isolated, words to making meaning from extended , connected
text, or discourse. Children use the symbols on this slide to play the grammar games, called
by Montessori Functions of Words.
Each symbol represents a different grammatical category (nine parts of speech). These
symbols are first presented to children in 3D, each with a story woven around it to give it
value. The basic contrast is between the noun (black square-based pyramid representing
matter/stability/substantive) and the verb (red sphere representing the sun/energy/centrality).
The symbols can be combined to create sub-categories, for example, the black triangle with a
blue circle is used to represent abstract nouns (ie blue as in sky and the circle to recall the
verbs many of abstract nouns are derived from), and the red circle with a white triangle is used
to represent forms of the verb to be, and the work it does linking noun groups.
When each word in a text is labelled with a symbol, the grammatical patterns of the text (the
grammatical potential the text has emerged from) become visible in multimodal form above
the text (an instance of that potential). In summary, Montessori used geometry, an abstract
system, to represent in concrete, manipulable form abstract educational knowledge about
grammar.
Montessori developed this series of games during the 1920s, in the same decade as Kandinsky
was creating the painting (see slide) as part of his exploration of abstraction.
Montessori described her grammatics as ‘psico-grammar’, indicating that she believed that
these knowledge structures had the potential to change consciousness.
28
The Functions of Words
Grammatics as reading pedagogy
Photo: Montessori East, Bondi NSW (2006)
29
This slide shows a completed synoptic array at the conclusion of a dynamic and active
grammar game. This material is used by children in the age range from five to seven
years.
The games are active, sentence-building exercises, involving manipulable materials to
mediate interactive engagement with the wording of the child’s language.
29
Sentence Analysis
Exploring clauses
in simple, compound and complex sentences
30
From six to eight years children play games with manipulable materials in order to
analyse the structure of groups, phrases, clauses and sentences. The shapes and the
colour coding of these materials is an extension from that learnt during the Functions
of Words games.
30
Towards a science of pedagogy?
... if we showed them how to do something, this precision
itself seemed to hold their interest. To have a real purpose
to which the action was directed, this was the first
condition, but the exact way of doing it acted like a support
which rendered the child stable in his efforts, and therefore
brought him to make progress in his development. Order
and precision, we found, were keys to spontaneous work in
the school.
Maria Montessori 1949
31
With these words Montessori tells us that the key to regulating both activity and
attention is discipline, ie order, precision, exactness in purposeful movement and in
recontextualised knowledge structures.
In Montessori pedagogy discipline knowledge is as integral to the regulative discourse
of the classroom, as it is to the instructional discourse. Recontextualising the detail of
educational knowledge into a visible pedagogy in ways which attract children’s
interest and attention becomes part of the fabric of the regulative discourse.
Drawing on the tradition of Condillac, Montessori made an art form of
recontextualisation. The materialised abstractions she designed and integrated into
ensembles of developmental resources render discipline knowledge as a regulator of
attention, and of consciousness, in a very tangible way, in a way which children can
literally grasp.
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