Bringing more than a century of practice to writing pedagogy in the early years

Abstract

In Montessori early years classrooms around the world the teaching of writing draws on a pedagogy that can lay claim to more than a century of practice. In the early 20th century Maria Montessori analysed the process of learning to write for the benefit of street children too young to be at school but who nevertheless showed interest in writing. In response to this interest Montessori designed a repertoire of lessons and activities that offered the children two separate but parallel developmental pathways: one mechanical and one intellectual. The mechanical pathway had two elements: learning how to hold and control a pencil, and (for alphabetic writing) learning to distinguish individual sounds in the stream of spoken language and to match the sounds with graphic signs. The intellectual pathway also had two elements: learning to use graphic signs to (re)compose the sounds of the language into words, and learning to organise words into written discourse. When the children engaged with Montessori's lessons and activities, they appeared to be teaching themselves to write. Because this same pedagogy is still in use today, it provides a rare opportunity to investigate an enduring educational practice through which children for more than a hundred years and in more than a hundred countries have become writers.