Babies question the curriculum: multiple languages in nursery school

Abstract

The day-to-day activities in early childhood education demonstrate that the proposed curriculum, specifically in early childhood, is based on and follows three recurrent modalities. All the three modalities reveal an adult-centered pedagogy inspired by formal education, in which babies and small children are not recognized as active and interactive linguistic beings in their early social learning in and with their environment. Their capacity to learn and acquire meanings by getting gradually involved in a set of relationships and processes that represet a system of sense is overlooked. The role of the teacher, as a co-producer of curriculum, becomes effective in creating an educational environment and interacting with the children and their families, facilitating experiences in different languages and in the social and cultural activities of each community. Babies, with their human capacity to interact, question these curriculum models and demonstrate in their day-to-day actions the intersection between playfulness and cognition in different languages: the conciliation between imagination and reasoning, between body and thought, movement and world, in their bodily processes of learning to operate languages and narratives.