George Forman grew up in Monroe, Louisiana, received his doctorate in developmental psychology at the University of Alabama, worked with Howard Gardner at Project Zero, and then moved to Amherst, Massachusetts, where he is currently Emeritus Professor at the University of Massachusetts and the President of Videatives, Inc. He has also been involved with programs in Reggio Emilia, Italy.
His interest in video began in Buffalo, New York working with Irv Siegel. “We had these huge reel-to-reel tape machines” and made hours and hours of videotapes of children and, “I began to see small nuances of behavior that I might never have seen if we hadn’t had the video, and I began to realize how powerful it was.”
The new insights and information that I have gained from the podcast is that when Mr. Forman was doing his dissertation at the University of Alabama, the learning theory was very much evolved. Pidaget was just beginning, but his dissertation was discrimination learning where you have to child chose one or two things. Most of the research back than were these haves that the child was doing and it wasn't rewarding because he would watch children on the playground and he didn't understand why they would get delighted at this. Mr. Forman think that Pidaget got interesting in play, so he contracted it with a local group that he could go serve children and he saw this little boy, but this wasn't a epiphany for him. He was walking across the backyard (2 years old) dragging with him this large log (fireplace log) and then he got distracted and then he rested it on its end so that it was vertical and he let it go of the log, then he turned around and he noticed the log was standing and the light on his face. Mr. Forman said, there's something going on here and why wouldn't he be so surprised. Well you know, then Mr. Forman begin to think about the log not fallen, so he begin to think about that kind of knowledge when a child sees something is not something else and he begin to realize that the ideal that it was standing is far of a verb, part of an approach of the world. He think that was a message from Pidaget that we should think more of children's learning the world of action events as oppose to nouns. He think that the little boy really got him to thinking about the power of seeing the world in terms of how things change or don't change as oppose to what things are. It is true in preschool education somewhat because of the influence of Montessori that we thought the mission of early education was to help children name things even in a more refine way, not just red and blue, but red and pink and fusion and the discriminate of how how things look. Pidaget's message was to talk about how things changed, how they become pink if they are red, what do you have to add red to make it pink. This whole ideal of features and events and verbs, he think begin with that one little realization what the little boy was doing was seeing that log as an action, it was standing as oppose to it was just a tower. If you listen to preschool teachers talk a lot of times, they ask children what do we name this, what is this, is this a circle or square, but Mr. Forman think the thing that has kinda guided his writing and his thinking about early education and the curriculum is to help children understand how to change things from one state to another, so that's kinda of my how to go to you in a nutshell. He think, one thing that he would like to mention is another sort of change, not a fundamental change, but a change in strategy is when he started going to Northern Italy Reggio and he saw how they were taking mini media play and drawing and wiring and puppies movement using and helping children think about their thinking, it wasn't simple music, it was kinda a symbolization that helped children see their thinking making thinking visible and that was very helpful. When Mr. Forman ran the school constructive play and would do the setups and have proclamation and help children solve problems at a higher level, but he think what Reggio did was that they showed that even fantasies could be a way to help children reflect on their thinking. Mr. Forman been sort of focused on the physical environment and Reggio helped him to see the power of narrative and discourse as a way to understand what it is that you don't understand.
The new insights and information that I have gained from the Harvard website is that in a distinct effort to build an integrated international approach which includes child survival, health, and development in the earliest years of life, the Center on the Developing Child has launched the Global Children's Initiative as the highlight of its global child health and development agenda. The Global Children's Initiative looks forward to moving ahead with the Center's core mission globally by implementing a compelling research, public engagement leadership development agenda in child health and development that is grounded in science and engages researchers, public leaders, practitioners, and student from a wide range of institutions around the world. The Center acknowledges the important contributions made to the development of the Global Children's Initiative by the Mother Child Education Foundation (ACEV) of Turkey, which served as the Funding Partner for the initial planning of the Center's global agenda. The Center and ACEV continue to share a strong belief in the power of science to inform global early childhood development and appreciate the complementary experiences each organization offers to support children and families around the world.
As part of its Global Children's Initiative, the Center launched Nucleo Ciencia Pela Infancia, its first major programmatic effort outside the United States. In collaboration with local experts, this project aims to use the science of child health and development to guide stronger policies and larger investments to benefit young children and their families in Brazil.
The Zambian Early Childhood Development Project (ZECDP) was launched in 2009, a collaborative effort to measure the effects of an ongoing anti-malaria initiative on children's development in Zambia. In order to measure the full impact of the anti-malaria campaign on Zambia's human capital development, the ZECDP created a new comprehensive instrument for assessing children's physical, socio-emotional, and cognitive development before and throughout their schooling careers, the first assessment tool of its kind in Zambia.
The additional information about issues of equity and excellence that I acquired from my international sources is that other countries are not as fortunate as the United Stated to have technology that can detect things early on. I see where other countries struggle on a daily basis from a variety of things such as clothes, diseases, education, jobs, poverty, water, etc.; whereas the United States take those things for granted.
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