Cooperative relationships amongst children
What does it mean for a small group of children to work and play together? Within our carefully crafted spaces, our centres are designed for both the child as an individual, and the children as a group. These environments nurture the child as an individual while also allowing the child to realise the potential of cooperative relationships with others.
Our classrooms help the child notice that they are in a world of multiples and that other children can be discovered through the negotiation of ideas and cooperative relationships. Expanding from interactions based purely on feelings and friendships, Bear Park centres help children discover the satisfying notion of exchanging ideas with others, and thereby, transforming their environment.
“When one child makes a suggestion or a proposal, the others accept it more willingly than if it had come up from an adult. Many of them learn the relativity of their own point of view and how to represent their ideas in a delicate way.”
– Loris Malguzzi, The Hundred Languages of Children
Through careful interpretations, children experience continuous growth and learning by drawing connections among things and carefully interpreting them to better construe the world.
And so, within this “great transformative laboratory”, children have the great privilege to discover how they can transform their environment through the exchange of ideas and cooperative relationships.
