By Laura Benard, Teacher
Science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) are areas that young children are naturally drawn to. You don’t have to spend much time in the yards and classrooms of Bing Nursery School to observe children building structures, creating models, testing theories, conducting experiments, and using numeracy both overtly and subtly. These endeavors can be an independent pursuit or a collaborative activity, underscoring the fact that children are endlessly creative and curious. As an educator who is always eager to incorporate novel STEM activities and themes into the curriculum, I was thrilled to attend the Early Childhood STEM Conference (ECSTEM) in Pasadena, California, in early February. This conference, themed “STEM Trailblazers,” was co-hosted by the Children’s Center at Caltech and the Growing Place in Santa Monica and featured a wide range of speakers highlighting Montessori, Waldorf, Resources for Infant Educarers (RIE), and Reggio Emilia approaches.
The conference welcomed nearly 500 attendees and opened with an inspiring keynote address by Matt Karlsen and Susan Harris MacKay, directors for the Center for Playful Inquiry. Karlsen and MacKay began their talk by stressing the importance of schools that invite, expand, and sustain the creative mindsets of our youngest inventors. Our task, they said, as early childhood educators is to curate spaces that encourage exploration. Children are not bound by the same preconceptions and perceived rules as adults and are therefore primed to be out-of-the-box thinkers. By supporting and inspiring inventiveness in our early childhood classrooms, we are helping to create innovative, lifelong learners—the kinds of learners the world will need to solve its most challenging problems. “The imagination of adulthood,” said Karlsen, “is a reflection of the possibilities of childhood.” In addition to outlining ways to encourage inventiveness in our classrooms, Karlsen and MacKay emphasized the importance of supporting collaborative relationships. They shared insights from their experiences with children at the Portland Children’s Museum and Opal School to illustrate what these ideas look like in action, along with quotes from notable writers and researchers, including:
“The most productive tool for generating good ideas remains a circle of humans at a table, talking shop.” —Steven Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas Come From
“Our brains evolved to think with people: to teach them, to argue with them, to exchange stories with them. Human thought is exquisitely sensitive to context, and one of the most powerful contexts of all is the presence of other people. … We think best when we think socially.” —Annie Murphy Paul, science writer and author of The Extended Mind
These concepts and the ensuing discussions about social play and problem-solving immediately brought to mind the various shared spaces at Bing. Our classrooms and yards are peppered with innovative, collaborative spaces. From the myriad projects being created at design tables to the explorations of fluid dynamics at the water tables or in the sand area, from the elaborate feats of engineering created in the block areas to the engaging and often insightful conversations at the snack tables, STEM and social thinking are everywhere. The cooperation, negotiation, and serendipity that occurs in these spaces with open-ended materials and mixed-age children is a major part of what makes the learning environment at Bing so rich.
The keynote address was followed by a panel discussion comprising educators from the U.S. and Europe, followed by inspiring sessions such as “Scale and Structure: Balance and Stability with Toddlers,” “Play + Math: Serious Learning,” “Creating Opportunities for Building Number Sense,” and “Exploring The Synergy: Art, Math, and Science.”
The 15th Annual ECSTEM Conference will be held next year in Santa Monica, California, and will, no doubt, be another inspiring opportunity for professional development.