Philosophy
Since the mission of the UT Early Learning Center is a multi-faceted one—embracing university students, young children, and the community—our philosophy must be equally encompassing. Therefore, we consider the following statements as the guide and focus of our experiences with all children and adults.
We believe that children and adults are:
- Capable, competent, rich and powerful in ideas and abilities
- Both uniquely individual and yet similar to others, in thinking and development
- Active organizers of experience and thoughts
- Interested in learning primarily though meaningful human relationships
- Constantly constructing and re-constructing their own theories and understandings of how the world works
Our overall goals focus our efforts on providing learning opportunities that can enable the individual to work towards developing the competencies needed to function successfully and meaningfully in a changing world.
We aim to help children and adults:
- Trust, respect and invest emotionally in meaningful personal relationships
- Acquire and use effective and satisfying problem-finding and problem-solving skills and strategies
- Be curious about the natural and social world and derive skill and pleasure from learning, exploring and developing ideas, theories and competencies
- Understand and organize information about their physical, social and intellectual environment
- Develop abilities and interests in representing their ideas in many varied and complex ways, through the use of many media (languages)
- Develop the ability to act and think independently with assurance and confidence in their ideas, convictions, abilities and strengths
- Develop effective means of self-regulation and control, which will enable them to learn, think and act with feelings of self-worth and self-confidence within a complex social and intellectual world
- Skillfully communicate ideas and feelings
We hope to achieve these goals by:
- Providing children and adults with open-ended, process oriented activities and investigations that value play as the preferred medium of learning for young children
- Providing adequate amounts of time for exploration, skill building and thinking
- Having an intellectually complex and rigorous curriculum filled with possibilities
- Using a wide variety of quality materials designed to promote active exploration and challenges
- Expecting learners to direct and construct their own learning with the assistance of perceptive, reassuring and responsive teachers