Multimodality in the Montessori Classroom

Abstract

At the end of the first decade of the 20th century, just before many of the promises and possibilities of the new century were extinguished by the First World War, an educator, even more surprisingly a woman, became one of the first international celebrities of the emerging technological age. This educator was Dr Maria Montessori, an Italian medical practitioner and academic, who achieved fame by designing a pedagogy that not only eliminated rewards and punishment but also gave young children the freedom to choose their own work and to work at their own pace. The first Montessori learning environment was established in 1907 in a housing project in Rome in order to contain a group of small children who had been running wild and damaging buildings.