Sightlines Initiative: Values and Characteristics for Developing Environments of Enquiry

This page outlines some of the values and characteristics, the tools and understandings that Sightlines have developed for creating environments where young children’s natural sense of enquiry is allowed to thrive, and where that enquiry can help them to learn and discover.

[This article is reproduced from Refocus Journal 6 (Winter 2008) with permission]

This page is part of a resource collection: Tuning in to children’s musicality - nurturing children’s ideas

Values & principles

• Education is the creative process of exchange, relationship and understanding of oneself, others and the world.

• Things, people and experiences ... The educative environment looks for skills to be in relationship and explore relationship. Dialogue is of absolute importance in its everyday practice.

• The awareness of constant possibility is a quality not a limitation. Knowledge is always open to change.
• ‘Listening and exchange’ is the dominant idea in pedagogical practice, and in the learners’ experience. The practice of listening, with evaluation and synthesis, enables educators to interpret children’s competencies and questions, and to construct with them suitable learning experiences.

Images & understandings

• Children are rich in curiosity and competence and potential. They are innately sociable and seek exchanges.
• The desire and predisposition to be curious, to enquire, to make hypotheses, to interpret and make sense of our experiences, to be in relationship, are basic human characteristics.
• Our learning spaces need to be imbued with the characteristics of curiosity and sociability.

Qualities & tools

• Time - space - attention: the three basic tools, creating the foundation of the educative experience. They are the responsibility of educators in collaboration with children and their families.
• Dialogue is a tool as well as a value. Regular and detailed reflection processes are vital in the co-construction of sociable learning journeys.
• Pedagogical documentation is a vital tool in making learning visible for educators, children and families.
• The schoolspace needs to be a studio for exploration, examination and exchange. It can be a place where we bring the tools of all our senses to the business of learning, across all the perceptual modes and expressive languages.