Dear Families,
Thought Without Words
Last weekend, while sitting in a theater, surrounded by children and parents, for a performance of the mask and prop based Mummenschanz troupe, which you may remember from your own childhood Sesame Street days, I was struck by the murmur of adult voices. At any children’s performance, there is always a natural buzz of exclamations and questions. But my ears perked in this particular theater, as I realized that the voices I was hearing were not children but primarily parents.
Mummenschanz is an entirely visual experience, and many of their performance pieces drift between representational and non-representational moments, leaving us eager to assemble enough visual information to give a name and a story to every tableau. For the adults in the audience, this drive to put words to every moment was nearly irresistible, even when the children themselves were content to just watch, wait, and experience the images and emotions conveyed through each new form and movement. As the performance continued, however, the audience gradually became quieter and more enrapt—the adults, with time, were able to let go of their words and immerse themselves in this other form of meaning and communication, something most of their children easily did from the moment the curtains parted.
In Reggio inspired classrooms, we often reference “the hundred languages of children,” as we consider materials that will provoke children’s thinking and reflect on the meaning of their work. This phrase—the hundred languages—reminds us that children think and communicate in many different ways and that when we view the full range of their expressive capacity with genuine curiosity and respect, we not only come to know each individual child better, but we also allow ourselves to become open to ways of viewing and understanding the world that spoken and written words alone cannot always fully convey. As adults, we need these reminders of the many forms of thought and expression, because when we leave childhood we transition into increasingly verbally driven environments, and in this process of growing up many of us lose the ability to experience the full range of meaning the world holds, limiting our understanding to that which words are sufficient to relay. We may experience moments of contact with the multiplicity of other languages when we are moved by a powerful piece of music or art or by an experience of catharsis that seems to extend farther or deeper than words can capture; we are left “speechless.” And yet young children live and make use of these non-verbal experiences of the world constantly.
Loris Malaguzzi, the conceptual mind behind the Reggio philosophy, said, “Children need the freedom to appreciate the infinite resources of their hands, their eyes, and their ears, the resources of forms, materials, sounds, and colors.” When we give equal value to all of these resources, we enter the world through the lens of the child. And when we wedge children’s experiences and expressions into our narrow verbal landscape by re-articulating every attempt at communication through words—when we constantly narrate, label, and describe—we risk slowly devaluing and limiting the many resources of thought that are naturally at their fingertips by insisting that everything be named.
Spoken language is of course a rich and necessary tool that is essential to foster as we raise children to be communicative and collaborative. It is also important, however, to give our children and ourselves opportunities to dwell in the possibility of meaning wherever it may grow. Artist and early childhood educator Barry Goldberg says, “The real importance of art in education is not a matter of creativity, or self-expression—nor for that matter does it have to do with developing an aesthetic appreciation of painting and sculpture or honing fine motor skills. Rather, it’s importance lies in the vital awareness that art is thinking, and that as the activity of making art disappears from a child’s life, a realm of thinking disappears with it.”
As our children build, paint, dance, or crunch through fallen leaves, we are invited to witness ways of thinking that are likely rare in our daily adult lives, but that drive each moment for them. And if we are lucky, we may even find the inspiration to join them in one of their hundred languages, and in so doing to experience the world through our own childhood eyes again, if only for a moment.
Shabbat shalom,
Alicia