Observatory on Family and Creative Education

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The mind of a three-year-old lasts a hundred years.

— Japanese proverb

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To keep the spirit of childhood within oneself throughout life means to preserve the curiosity to know and the joy of wanting to communicate.

— Bruno Munari

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Welcome and support.

This is the first Observatory to emerge within the Association—first chronologically and first also in intent—because once, long ago, we were all children.

 

The Observatory focuses on rediscovering the child’s inner space: listening to their stories, fantasies, emotions, and movements; playing with perspectives; and finding meeting points, exchanges, and mutual learning between child and adult. Its aim is to reduce the gap between what we have forgotten (and wish to remember) and what we have become.

 

We share here an important contribution from Chiara Guidi, theatre director, actress, and singer, reflecting on theatre and early childhood education, and on the power of imagination:

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“This illiterate power recalls Bruno Munari’s methodological approach, which avoids writing in order to enter a synoptic territory—a kind of knowledge that the child acquires, through objects, to understand the world. Munari observed children closely and noticed how they enter images with their whole bodies. They dive into the void that the image creates to host them. The same happens with objects. Without order or sequence. The object withdraws, and into it falls the child; the child expands, and into them enters the object. Multiple dives. Many at once, without any apparent logic, because the meaning of what happens will be the fruit of experience, which always comes after, not before. One cannot reason while diving. For a child, seeing an image is a tangible experience—without an immediate use. And while they enter that image, the image also enters them. For pure pleasure. And it settles at the bottom.” — Chiara Guidi

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Conferences and Information Meetings:

• Divergent thinking, convergent thinking, lateral thinking

• The relationship between divergence and creativity; between creativity and diversity; between diversity and happiness

• Play, the improbable, the fantastic, the possible

• The adult as a model or ideal of behaviour

• The child as a model or ideal of transformation

• Parenting, adoption, and foster care

• School integration, social inclusion, and intercultural education

• Childhood anorexia

• Autism

• ADHD – Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder

• Sleep disorders

• Dyslexia and speech disorders