Facilitating Students’ Choice, Voice, and Ownership During Remote Learning in Early Years

Posted on January 23, 2021 Updated on January 23, 2021

Teaching remotely is indeed challenging but teaching the early years students remotely is another level of challenge. As play and direct interaction are essential for them to discover new things and express themselves, operating on screen everyday could be a big limitation for their learning processes. However, we as teachers believe that playing and learning can happen everywhere and anytime. The student’s authentic expressions and ideas are our tools to design the learning which facilitates their agency.

Our previous unit was “How We Express Ourselves”.  During normal school days we used a variety of  role play, performance, and art workshops. It was rich and full of interactions. Creating and presenting happened everywhere. As this year we have a different situation, we endeavored to design the learning without restricting the students’ opportunities to choose and drive their own learning. One of the successful stories was the “Jungle Boogie” performance. 

It started with gathering students’ interest in art and discovering the theme they were interested in. Dancing and role play were the most popular choices of all. The theme was chosen by exposing students to different dances and songs and voting for the most interesting one. Jungle Boogie came out as the winner. From there, we allowed students to choose which animal or role they wanted to be or play and supported this by sending materials to them in their Home Learning Package to create their personalized costumes.

The most memorable and special thing about this experience was witnessing students’ persistence and enthusiasm in creating their costumes from zero while they were developing their skills as well. They began to cut independently, to draw independently and even to color independently with their sense of ownership giving  them the eagerness to design and to finish the costume. They had their voice heard every time they wanted to share their personalized costume design. They put different forms of patterns, colors, or even shapes. 

Not only did they prepare their own costume but students also learned how to prepare the performance itself. They created the stage, the invitation for the audience, the poster and also the audience’s tickets. By doing that, students learned transdisciplinary skills and grew their knowledge. They wrote numbers on the ticket and  they learned how to share information on their poster through pictures and symbols. They learned how to measure whilst making their costumes. Last but not least, they learned how to express themselves through art.

Distance is only one thing that challenges us to think outside our comfort zone. By having this experience, we believe that play and learning should not be limited by anything if we allow the students the freedom to share their voice, choice and ownership of their learning. 

Children are magical, they make all things possible. Enjoy the ride!

Julia Ika Pratiwi (juliapratiwi@sekolahciputra.sch.id)
Playgroup Team Leader and Playgroup B Teacher