Teacher Liu Yuting made ink effects for the children.
Teacher Xiao Yan took the children to play zipline.
Yangtze River Daily reporter Peng Nian photographed
□ Liu Jia, reporter of The Yangtze River Daily, and zeng ying and li jing of correspondents
Is it a waste of talent for master's degree students to enter kindergartens as "child kings"? The Yangtze River Daily reporter learned from the interview that in recent years, many of the new teachers recruited in Wuhan kindergartens are master's degree students. According to the Wuhan Municipal Education Bureau, as of 2020, there are nearly 200 master's degree students among the 29,000 full-time kindergarten teachers and kindergarten directors in the city. Half of the new kindergarten teachers in Jianghan District in September this year have master's degrees.
The reporter interviewed several master's preschool teachers in recent days and found that preschool education is far more complex and profound than the average person understands, and it needs the addition and guidance of professional talents. These teachers have a passion for early childhood education, bringing newer and more advanced concepts to kindergartens, and also bringing the habits of thinking, researching and learning to educational practice.
■ Preschool education is more than just "looking at children"
In 2012, Liu Xiaohui graduated from graduate school and passed the teacher qualification certificate examination and was assigned to bailing kindergarten in Jianghan District. "At that time, the lark kindergarten was in the old park, in an alley where no car could drive in, and the kindergarten was also small, with only 4 classes in total." Liu Xiaohui said that she was the kindergarten's first new teacher in 15 years, and she was very "frustrated" when she first arrived, feeling too different from her ideals.
Liu Xiaohui likes children and has patience, and when she graduated from high school, she wrote down her dream in the classmates' directory - to be a kindergarten teacher. She studied teachers' English in college and chose Yunnan Normal University to major in preschool education.
"Children here need professional preschool education even more." Looking at the children in the Lark Kindergarten, Liu Xiaohui decided to stay. She told reporters that preschool education is not just about "looking at children", but also requires professional knowledge and the ability to explore innovation.
Liu Xiaohui introduced that the preschool education major has preschool education, preschool children's development science, preschool child care, preschool special children's education, kindergarten curriculum, preschool children's language teaching, preschool children's health education, preschool children's art education and other courses, and there are more detailed research branches in each field.
The habit of doing research developed during his graduate school years has been maintained by Liu Xiaohui and used in practice. For a period of time, the class attendance rate is not high, Liu Xiaohui will follow the phenomenon to find the source, take the attendance sheet to compare and analyze, found that in addition to taking personal leave, the child is sick and takes more leave, and then look for the root cause of the illness, and finds that the child is prone to cold if the air conditioning control is not good during the nap time. Therefore, she repeatedly accurately turned the air conditioner on and off time, so that the child was not cold, not hot, and reduced the number of times the child was sick and took leave.
Her research project "Practical Research on Folk Games in Kindergartens" developed the Bailing Kindergarten Game Garden Curriculum, allowing children to have hundreds of games to play in small spaces. She and her preschool education peers in Jianghan District have worked together to develop the "Interactive Manual for Kindergarten Cultivation Education Home", which has been implemented and used in the whole district.
Today, Liu Xiaohui is an assistant teacher and researcher in the Jianghan District Education Bureau. In 2019, she set up a personal studio to lead 13 preschool teachers in Jianghan District to grow together. She asked the members of the studio to apply for their own projects within three years and held monthly book sharing sessions. "The problems are not unprovoked, they are all aimed at solving the confusion in practice." Liu Xiaohui said.
■ Master of Fine Arts uses creative ink to take children to feel the beauty
On the morning of November 5th, Liu Yuting, a teacher at Tongmeng Kindergarten, led the children to play with creative ink painting. Together, they observed how a drop of ink falling into the cup slowly unfolded, adding leaves to the ink bamboo forest with clay, and experiencing the beauty and joy of art in the black and white world.
Becoming a preschool teacher, Liu Yuting's profession "spans" a little far. She is a bachelor of art design, majoring in fashion design, and majored in art design at Hubei Academy of Fine Arts. "For a few years, the fashion design field needed more than 'designers' but 'board players', which was far from my idea of doing design." Liu Yuting thought that when she was a child, the art class in the school would be "occupied" by the main class, and the art education was relatively weak. If you want to change this situation, you must start with enlightenment. So, after graduating from graduate school in 2015, she chose to enter kindergarten and become an art teacher.
As soon as she entered the kindergarten, Liu Yuting was confused: the original kindergarten was not divided into subjects like primary schools, there was no special art teacher, and each teacher was "all-round". In order to quickly adapt to the role of kindergarten teacher, she bought an electronic piano, and every day when she came home, she had to practice the piano for a while and learn a finger game.
After sticking to it, Liu Yuting became more and more aware of the value of preschool education. The characteristics of Tongmeng Kindergarten is the development of traditional culture, Liu Yuting combined her art expertise in the class to create an ink art workshop, with cotton, branches, sand and other materials and ink combined to design a variety of games, so that children can experience what "beauty" is in play. In the ink workshop, children can graffiti on white cloth with ink, and then cut the cloth into various shapes to make a personalized costume to "wear" on the body.
There was a kid in the class who was very introverted and didn't know how to get along with the kids. Every day when painting, Liu Yuting would talk to him for a while and ask him what he was painting. Slowly, the child learned to express himself through paintings, release himself, and play with his friends.
"It makes sense for my work to see children change and grow and help them become better versions of themselves." Liu Yuting said, "I have found my own value, and I have worked harder and harder in the past few years. ”
■ They want to be "educators" in preschool education
Xiao Yan is a teacher at Liuduqiao Kindergarten in Jianghan District, and is a male. Some parents joke that male kindergarten teachers are compared to "giant pandas", and there are even fewer male kindergarten teachers with master's degrees like Xiao Ran.
Xiao Ran studied popular vocal singing and choreography at the Wuhan Conservatory of Music, and after graduating from college, he said that he found the meaning of life - great people are children who are not lost, and he wants to be with children. He was admitted to Hubei Normal University as a graduate student majoring in preschool education, and after graduation, he became a preschool teacher as he wished.
When he was in graduate school, Xiao Ran's research focused on the development of children's movements, and he was familiar with the characteristics of each stage of children's motor development. When children are outdoors, he likes to carefully observe their behavior and performance next to them, and then design some corresponding games to let the children grow up in independent games. "I have read a lot of books in preschool education, and I will observe and think before taking action, and I will not blindly interfere with children's behavior. Believing in children is my starting point. Xiao Ran said.
"Believe in children" is also a sentence that Ma Xuhong constantly mentions. Ma Xuhong, who has a baby's face and round glasses, majored in preschool education as an undergraduate and graduate student, and in September this year, she entered the Shengshi Hongmiao Kindergarten.
Ma Xuhong once wrote a kindergarten game process as a case. In the beginning, two or three children play the role of police officer and thief, learning about the concept of different roles in the process of "catching the thief". As they played, more and more children joined in, creating more characters of their own, trying out their own props to enrich a little game. "The whole time, I, as a teacher, didn't bother, I just offered some help when they needed it and encouraged them to realize their ideas." Ma Xuhong said that without in-depth theoretical study, she may not be able to "believe in children" so firmly.
Ms. Ma said she interned in a kindergarten for three months in her junior year. Although she had learned many methods, she suddenly felt that she could not control the situation in the face of a large group of children. She realized that preschool education is a major that requires solid theory and practice, so after graduating from college, she chose to go to graduate school. During her graduate school years, she studied how to use drama for early childhood education. To complete her thesis, she spent an entire semester in a kindergarten, playing drama games and observing how her children grew.
"Preschool education has developed rapidly in recent years, knowledge and theories are constantly updated, and more people with learning and research ability and innovative spirit are needed to join." Ma Xuhong said that when a kindergarten teacher looks simple, it is difficult to do a good job, and she hopes that she can become an "educator" in preschool education in the future.
■ I hope that more high-quality talents will enter kindergartens
The entry of highly educated talents into the preschool education industry is a normal and gratifying phenomenon in the eyes of Professor Cai Yingqi, deputy dean of the School of Education of Central China Normal University and leader of the preschool education professional discipline. She said that preschool education is an organic part of basic education, is the cause of cultivating people, is the "cause of roots", and the physical, psychological, cognitive and other aspects of childhood development have a deep impact on the future of life.
She explained that although the knowledge learned by children aged 0 to 6 is superficial, the physical and mental development rate is much faster than that of adults, which means that the stability of young children is weaker, so the professional requirements for teachers are higher, and teachers need to have stronger observation, communication, environment creation and other abilities.
"It is not a waste of talent for a master's degree or even a doctor to be a kindergarten teacher, on the contrary, the proportion of such high-level teachers is still too small." Cai Yingqi introduced that at present, China's preschool education teachers take the specialty as the starting point, and the proportion of masters and doctors is relatively low. In Central China Normal University, about 30 people graduate from preschool education every year, most of whom go to teach in secondary and higher vocational schools. "I hope that the society's inherent impression of kindergarten teachers can slowly change, and more and more high-quality talents will join the frontline of kindergartens."
Source: Yangtze River Daily