Redefining Roles
We need to define the role of the adult, not as a transmitter but as a creator of relationships — relationships not only between people but also between things, between thoughts, with the environ- ment. It’s like we need to create a typical New York City traffic jam in the school.
We teachers must see ourselves as researchers, able to think, and to produce a true curriculum, a curriculum produced from all of the children.
What we so often do is impose adult time on children’s time and this negates children being able to work with their own resources.
When we in Reggio say children have 100 languages, we mean more than the 100 languages of children, we also mean the 100 languages of adults, of teachers. The teacher must have the capacity for many differ- ent roles. The teacher has to be the author of a play, someone who thinks ahead of time. Teachers also need to be the main actors in the play, the protago- nists. The teacher must forget all the lines he knew before and invent the ones he doesn’t remember. Teachers also have to take the role of the prompter, the one who gives the cues to the actors. Teachers need to be set designers who create the environment in which activities take place. At the same time, the teacher needs to be the audience who applauds.
The teacher has many different roles and she needs to be in many places and do many different things and use many languages. Sometimes the teacher will find himself without words, without anything to say; and at times this is fortunate for the child, because then the teacher will have to invent new words.