The city of little children
Abstract
How do the children of preschool age perceive the city? That was the question put through an empirical research, designed as a pedagogical procedure in a nursery school in the Victoria's neighborhood. Our aim was to observe how children reconstruct, in the school environment, their pre-existing spatial experiences so that the city begins to emerge as a whole, the elements that structure it begin to be identified, the features, functions and relationships of their sites begin to be recognized. We asked them to describe such experiences in successive steps and by various expressive means. Their descriptions became more accurate and richer as the class itself was being built as a microcosm. They discovered the city, discovering themselves as a member of a group with which they share urban experience as a narrative experience. The school reveals to children the distance, the perspective and the scale of the urban space. The assumption that children are heading for the city motivated by their need to make connections through it can be used in pre-school education in order to give children an early view of the city, not only as a space but also as a socialization condition.
Article Details
- Section
- THEMATIC FIELD ΙΙ & ΙΙΙ The multimodal intersection of urban and educational spaces & The city as a learning environment
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