by Evelyn Onyekonwu (IMS ‘22)
Asaba, Nigeria
“The journey of my staff, learning to use the technology of scientific education, has been a huge task of expanding beyond my own personality expectations.”
Beginning with a new male staff teacher at my school, I first watched him follow a conventional pattern of too much adult personality with the children. So, using the imagination-previsioning (IP) technique, I imagined him as a child and myself as the guide/observer of his learning with the instructional material.
Having all the IP in my head, I asked him to get some material of his choice and sit with the children and work. I then applied the protocol well-being of the total environment to see if all the children were working well with the materials on their own. Scanning the environment, I could see they all knew what to do because they had experienced many sensorial lessons I had given before by using the technology of scientific education.
However, since the new teacher was unsettled with the sound letter cards he was using, I practiced the technique patient waiting, until I finally managed to get eye contact and applied the technique proximity to move closer to him. Then, I used the safe word “watch” to show him what to do with the material. And, using the technique cooperative touching, I guided his hand to demonstrate how to combine the sound letter cards together, using the three letters c, u, and p. When he finally realized how to make the word “up”, he set about using other letters to make other phonetic words in the same way I had demonstrated.
The journey of my staff, learning to use the technology of scientific education, has been a huge task of expanding beyond my own personality expectations. But with my experience of this teacher transforming from convention to scientific teaching, I learned how to guide other teachers to change at a fundamental level as well. Now, this teacher is no longer attached to robotic teaching of an academic curriculum, but rather recognizing how the child learns naturally through his own inner guidance for working with the self-teaching instructional materials.
My journey of developing a less adult personality involvement in our learning environment is still a gradual process. But, I hope to share more scenarios of success like this in using the technology as we progress along the path of creating the “true natural “reality with children.