Overturning the Rules
and Creating Amiable Classrooms

Click here to download PDF version of this article.

Carol Anne Wien

Illustrations by Sylvie Kantorovitz

We were playing outside after a rainy day, and there was a huge mud puddle the size of a large table and of course a rule about no playing in the mud—children get dirty. The children played around the perimeter of the puddle, digging with shovels and throwing rocks in and watching them splash. Then some started tapping their toes in the water. We thought, “Well that’s OK, they’re wearing boots.” Then they were up to their ankles in water. We were really hesitant but thought, “What’s the big deal? It’s only mud.” But then we were anxious: “They are going to be really dirty, what will the parents say?” Before we knew it, they were jumping off the bench into the mud puddle, tumbling over each other. They were covered in mud. We were all standing back, kind of white-knuckling it and thinking, “Oh, should we let them?” We decided yes, and went to get the camera.

How did the staff of three child care centers transform their work lives from continuous policing and correction of young children to a pedagogy in which they and the children participate together in constructing richly lived events? How were they able to let children engage in such wild activities as playing in a fresh mud puddle? Their experience shows that, contrary to common sense, aggression, accidents, and the stress of constantly enforcing rules are all reduced and transformed when many rules are eliminated by staff in a collaborative process.

The process of reexamining and then removing multiple rules for children’s behavior permitted fuller participation in the life of the centers and led to an overall transformation of power relationships: both teachers and children gained more power to affect what happened in the programs. While reexamining the rules was not the only thoughtful process undertaken by the teachers, it seemed to be especially powerful in opening up practice toward more expansive living. Simultaneously, teachers reexamined the physical environments (organization of time and space) and the ways these contributed to a stressful atmosphere that generated aggression. As Karyn Callaghan comments, “The whole question of letting go of power just flies in the face of [established] practice.”

This article was originally published in Young Children in January 2004. See the second issue of Teaching Young Children for the version adapted for preschool teachers.

 

2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9

<< Back to Articles Online