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Becoming a Group: More than a Collection of Individuals
May 4, 2023
No one can whistle a symphony. It takes a whole orchestra to play it.
-H. E Luccock (1885-1960), professor at Yale Divinity School
-H. E Luccock (1885-1960), professor at Yale Divinity School
In Pursuing Bad Guys, Donna King explains how following and supporting the children’s poignant interest in ‘bad guys’ ultimately sparked a revelation about community:
At [our school], …the well-being and development of the individual is our primary focus, and each individual’s sense of belonging and whole-hearted participation in the community is our primary goal. That’s why, for instance, each child chooses a sign—a visual symbol—that becomes a key part of their identity as a member of the Children First community, one which will be theirs forever; no sign is ever used twice...
[Our mentor] Pam [Oken-Wright] understands that the individual child sits at the center of our mission, our imaginations, and our hearts. But she is saying, “Look, each of those individual kids needs to be part of a group with a coherent identity, a shared vocabulary, and a collective purpose.” Listening, I have an “aha” moment:
“Pam, maybe you’re telling us that we need to think of the Group as our 13th Child, one that deserves the same attention and respect that we give the other 12.”
She says, “Exactly.”
And over time, as the Bad Guy Research unfolds, we see that Pam is right. The Group develops through collaboration and communication, and collaboration and communication require shared language; so, the deeper and more precise the shared understanding of terms, the better the shared work. The more we speak of ourselves as a Group of Bad Guy Researchers, and the more we work on developing a shared vocabulary about Bad Guys, the stronger the Group becomes—and ultimately, then, the Group has more to offer each of the 12 children who make it up.
What a powerful and grounding piece of guidance this was—a “call to action” that would shape much of what we did with children over the next few weeks.
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Comments (2)
Displaying All 2 CommentsCarousel Preschool
Long Beach, California , United States
Thank you for those beautiful words explaining the individual child belongs to the classroom group. Group time in the classroom was a critical moment when the children and I gathered. Sometimes we gathered twice a day or several times a day. We gathered to share stories and what we did over the weekend to read or sing or to do a silky dance and laugh. There were profound moments, too; a classmate friend needed someone to play with, and the group came together to solve the issue, and then there were moments one child would sit in a yoga pose and breath, and the children would all join, including me. Those were moments when we were sitting listening, our being human, and our connectedness.
University of Phoenix/ Red Rocks Community College
Denver, Colorado, 80222, Colorado, United States
I am glad to see the issue of the individual v. group being addressed. It's a very complex, dynamic, and important issue, especially for children. As someone who "married outside of my race" (group), married someone who married outside of her race, and raised four children whose group - multiracial children - is generally not even recognized in much of the US, especially in ECE and schools, I am extremely sensitive to this issue. It's critically important to examine this issue in this age of identity, where not only do we have clear racial, ethnic, gender and sexual identity groups, but each of these groups has their own "self-appointed" police. People are accused of not being "Black enough", not being "Hispanic enough", and so on (I actually had colleague claim that I was not British enough!). People who marry outside of their race are openly accused of being disloyal to their race (group). Much harm has been done in society and history by people sacrificing individual responsibility for group allegiance. Even in our current discussion of racial and ethnic identity, the literature uses the term "social" identity (group belonging), but not does not include individual identity (see William Cross). Group belonging can be extremely powerful -- and not always in a good way. How we develop individual children who can resist group pressure is a critically important discussion!
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