The Lifelike Pedagogy

The school, as it is today, doesn’t motivate the students, teachers, directors and not even the parents. It follows a certain model that doesn’t create interest for the knowledge and doesn’t encourage innovation. The classes are previously planned without the participation of the students and sometimes even without the participation of the teacher. With classes this way, the result is limited.

In order to change this disinterest, we should give the student the freedom of choice, through which an interest for education is created, allowing the children to learn more and better.

Using freedom of choice and search for happiness as its basis, the Lifelike Pedagogy developed itself to allow life to enter the classrooms through all the possible ways.

Connecting the school to the world, the students are taught via the experience of real problems and real enterprises. We are talking about the students being free to create and to discover by themselves what they need to learn in order to achieve their goals.

 

 

 

What teachers (and parents) should do

How to deal with the student in a way to gift him with the characteristics that will be the foundations of his success in the future?

Think as a child. What are your interests? The child needs to laugh, to dream, to fool around, to test the adults, to construct, to deconstruct, to investigate… The child needs all this and also the respect from parents and teachers for his feelings and actions.

They are complete and complex human beings, with as many feelings as an adult. Even tough for us some situations might seem irrelevant and silly, for them they are very important.  To respect the childhood is fundamental. This respect isn’t about giving the answers to the children or to make simple tasks for them. It is about being patient with their limits, encouraging their developments, their search for answers and even the search for their own questions.

The child can be and must be the active agent of the learning process. So that this is possible, it is necessary that the child has the power to choose, to ask, to answer,  to evaluate, to correct, to try again, and to learn.

 

 

 

The methodology step-by-step and the lifelike projects

A lot has been written, talked and invented about teaching via projects. We can see projects being used from small initiatives that get the whole school involved on a special date until bolder schools which have decided to use this technique as a base for every pedagogical decision in the school environment.

So that students can be present with heart and soul in the classroom, it is necessary, before anything else, that the projects arouse the motivations of the students and bring along some meanig with it. The child needs to want to learn and to understand why the activity is being done.

If the students are pushed by their own desires, they acquire motivation when faced by problems, needs and curiosities, and they construct by themselves the knowledge needed to solve them.

How to put into practice an education like this? The term “Lifelike pedagogy”, used to name this methodology, comes from the fact that, through it, we allow life to enter the classroom so that students can experience real problems and situations and develop their knowledge with them. Each Lifelike Project follows a sequence of steps with defined objectives.

Step 1 – Choosing the theme – Different from what many may think, the theme to be studied will bring along varied subjects. That is why it can be chosen by the children. This choice happens after the kids are exposed to many materials that introduces them to an entire new world bigger than their universe. In contact with this new world, the children suggest the themes that called their attention and that they would like to learn about. With a list of these themes in hand, each child defends his own idea in a debate. Children have revealed themselves to be open-minded to change their choices in case any other suggestion interests them more than their own. After this defense, they vote for the new project.

Step 2 – Exploring the theme – For the purpose of acquiring a minimal repertory about the theme, the children prepare the map of the project, which is a register of all their questions and hypothesis about the theme. This map serves as a list of tasks for the initial researches: they must find ways to answer their own questions. After acquiring enough knowledge about the subject being studied, children are ready to decide what they want to do with this project.

Step 3 – Enterprise – This is the phase during which the project really happens. The conclusion activity is the final objective of the project, and, for being complex, it will claim from the students a series of activities and experiments to achieve it. The children have decided their objective and they are opened to develop the necessary activities to get where they want. With the help from the teacher, they analyze the paths to be taken and the planning of their activities. The situations are not created by the teacher: they are genuine needs of the project that create the opportunities of studying a wide variety of subjects. The end of the project is when the conclusion activity is finished.

 

 

 

Project Fish

For me, this was one of the most important lifelike projects of the class. The children voted to study “fish,” and something that startled us was the class' unanimity. The students justified their choice by explaining that they consider these creatures to be one of the nicest, which made them more attractive to research and find out more.

Once the theme was defined, we started to work on the project’s map. Together we listed several questions and hypotheses, always from the children’s perception. The curiosity they had regarding fish was clear by the things they said and in each new question or research they proposed in this stage of the project.

Then, the group was offered different types of materials. Among them all, the most used were technical/specific magazines about fishing and books that dealt with animals and general knowledge.
At the same time, with their parents' help, the children looked for and brought to school several pieces of information regarding characteristics, habits and physical aspect’ of the fish, such as habitat, feeding habits, body coverage etc.

One of the questions on the map that was most intriguing to them was regarding the body of the fish. Children at that age still need and are most interested on concrete aspects, and nothing could solve this question better than having an actual fish in the classroom. And that’s what we did: we brought a fish direct from the street market to the school, and, with it within their reach, the children could observe it, touch it and analyze it.

Based on this, they extracted several pieces of information: they felt the fish’s texture, they found out that those were scales and they could see that it was different from other animals, which had hair or feathers. Also, the children wanted to know how the fish can breath under water, and they saw that, instead of a nose, fish have gills.

Each day and after each step, the group put in more effort. It was very funny, contagious and gratifying to see them working as a team in the classroom and asking for their relatives’ and friends’ help in order to have our goals complied with in the best way possible.

One of the high points of this project was the election of the final project: the purchase of a fish tank, so that they could have a real fish, and keep it as the class’ mascot.

As this decision was being made, we talked at length and used several other voting processes so that we could democratically decide regarding the final project, such as the color, the breed, the gender and the size of the fish, amongst other aspects.

The class chose a red fish. Thus, one of the preliminary research activities in this phase was to find out which fresh water fish are red. The size would also be an important factor to be observed, as the chosen fish would have to fit in a fish tank of acceptable dimensions for the space available at school. Here we used mathematical concepts in order to calculate the size of a fish tank that would fit the space we had.

In order to answer these questions and to choose the proper fish, the children decided to visit a pet shop. In order to do that, we needed to request the parents’ authorization and also money for the transportation. The use of written language was worked with them while creating the note requesting authorization, and oral communication was developed when the students needed to get in touch with the driver who would drive them to the shop.

There, the students talked to the person in charge, who indicated to them which fish they could buy that was red and male, characteristics that they had already voted upon. The students could also list the items they would have to buy and their prices. Thus, we could calculate how much money would be necessary for the purchase. Through this activity, we worked mathematical concepts and language skills, when we listed the name of materials, their prices and calculated the total amount.

When we went back to school, interactions between the students in the classroom were impressive, based essentially on discussions about how to get the necessary amount to buy the fish tank and the mascot.

Regarding this, the students found a solution to their problems through cooking, and as suggested by one of the children in the class, they decided to make jelly to sell.

First of all, we had to make a test to see how many portions we would be able to make with a recipe of jelly, so that we could calculate how many we would have to sell. For that, we used concrete mathematics: by using small materials that represented the prices we discovered on our field trip, we calculated how much jelly we would have to sell for the amount of R$ 1.00.

Then, the children organized the sale. This activity excited the whole class, including the teacher and school employees due to the great satisfaction of seeing the success of our children's enterprise: parents requested more jelly and they had to organize a second day of sales, resulting in double the amount they needed.

Due to the higher amount generated, we were able to buy two fish of different colors, instead of only one, a larger fish tank and all the items listed that would be necessary to maintain these fish.

The time arrived to assemble the tank. The dedication and excitement of the students during the preparation and the assembly not only surprised us: it left us all emotional. Particularly speaking, I confess that it was one of the nicest activities, with the most gratifying results I have experienced so far. The sparkle in the children’s eyes left no doubt that they were enchanted with the activities.

As a teacher, it was a great pleasure to see the evolution of those children, so small in size, but at the same time, so developed and, at many times, so mature for their age!
Even the shiest children evolved a lot in the art of communicating, via the need to use the telephone, letter, e-mail and even fax when we needed to research fish, the prices and necessary materials, besides asking for their parents and the principal office’s authorization

Here I need to highlight the invaluable cooperation from all parents. Their intense participation, with concrete actions, and mainly by the support they gave their children, was very important for the excellent result we achieved.

Through this project, we were able to try, in a very clear manner, the ideals of the lifelike ideology: to not think only in the immediate formation and development of purely academic activities, but to also to work towards impacting, directly or indirectly, the preparation of these children for a more sustained action in the future.

Important values could be seen in these activities, such as the class' self-knowledge while a team, and of each student as a member of a team, developing a strong sense of collaboration and team work which will be key for their professional future.

Objectively speaking, the class experienced important additional knowledge, among them the reflection regarding the different styles of communication, after all they had very clear objectives to reach, either in the sale of their jelly or while researching prices and materials. They also developed the exercise and the understanding of different forms of leadership and responsibilities of taking decisions as a group, learning to respect the diversity of opinions and differences. The children showed great maturity, when they managed to decide together issues such as choosing which fish to buy.

Personally, I was very satisfied with the objectives that the class reached with this project, the aspect of school formation and also under the point of view of developing personal and interpersonal skills, the improvement in the dynamic of the group/class and the creative and innovative intervention of each one of the students.

Juliana Leite
Teacher – Pre-School

 

 

 

The lifelike teacher

In the lifelike proposal, we break a great taboo: the one that says that there is no education without previous plan. The teacher that works according to this pedagogy must enter the classroom only with a remote idea about what to do based on the conclusion activity decided by the students. However, the teacher must have in mind that the paths may change in case any student has a new idea that the others decide to follow.

So that education can happen this way, the teacher must have clearly all the pedagogical objectives at the tip of the tongue and, whenever he gets a chance, develop and deepen them with the children.

It is necessary that the teacher trusts life and realizes that the human knowledge emerges from basic needs and it is present in most of the obstacles he’ll face with the children in order to achieve the conclusion of the project.

 

 

 

Entrepreneurism, needs and opportunities

Entrepreneurs are those who accomplish great achievements and create the needed scenery to conquer their objectives, creating opportunities,   raising funds, articulating and overcoming themselves. The benefits of a person with an entrepreneur’s profile aren’t limited to the professional sphere, they include benefits for life as a whole.

Inside our lifelike proposal, the entrepreneurism is, at the same time, method and discipline. The lifelike project is a planned enterprise, developed and constructed by the children.

This enterprise creates needs that are, actually, opportunities for the educational process that must be used by the teacher so that children can learn. Via these enterprises, an important door is opened so that the contents, required or not by MEC, can enter the classroom and compose the education.

 

 

 

About the author

Marcelo Rodrigues was a curious and alert boy. He walked and talked before his first year and soon showed a great will to explore the environments, opening the doors of the lowest cupboards, what demanded a great attention and energy from his parents.

Still young, he administrated his own lab at the back of his yard, where he produced  great amount of colorful liquids, carefully stored in shampoo pots.  At this same stage of his childhood, he developed a study about ants, building by himself an anthill in an empty aquarium, where he would feed the ants with quite overstatement while he observed the development of the tunnels and rooms built by these small and interesting animals.

Together with his best friend, he took away the calmness of the neighborhood by exploring, uninvited, the roofs, gardens and yards of the nearby houses, discovering interesting things about his neighbors’ lives.
And that’s how Marcelo grew up, always curious about what surrounded him, no matter if it was the habits of his neighbors or the ants in the yard.
His constant attempt to understand the world since his childhood became the basis for his great ideas and conclusions about life that persisted until his adult life.