The Bases of Montessori Pedagogy as a Facilitating factor for Child Development in Burkina Faso and Spain

Abstract

<p style="text-align: justify;">Education faces barriers all over the world, which sometimes makes it difficult to look after children’s rights and their individual development. Hence, society is clamoring for new practices, and different approaches are emerging, Montessori among them. Despite the fact that this approach was developed to attend to the poor strata, nowadays it is basically promoted by elitist sectors, though it can be perfectly applied as an education system for all children, regardless of their socio-economic and cultural backgrounds. This study analyzes the bases of Montessori pedagogy in a school from a low-to-middle-income country (LMIC), Burkina Faso, and another school in a high-income country (HIC), Spain. The study takes into account children, family, school environment and teacher training all of which contribute to children’s development.</p>

Active Inference Goes to School. The Importance of Active Learning in the Age of Large Language Models

“…In this way, the children not only develop ownership of their learning space, modified through their own intervention, but also of their own knowledge, meaningful because constructed through their own free exploration (e.g., Lillard, 2017). Empirical studies have found that Montessori-schooled children (compared to traditionally-schooled) seem to perform better across a range of measures (e.g., Lillard et al, 2017;Lillard & Else-Quest, 2006;Lillard, 2019;Denervaud et al, 2019;Catherine et al, 2020;Damangeon et al, 2023;Duval et al, 2023;Randolph et al, 2023) and that Montessori schools displayed smaller disparity in performance between children from low and high income, and from diverse cultural backgrounds (Lillard et al, 2017;Macià-Gual & Domingo-Peñafiel, 2021;Courtier et al, 2021). Adopting the AIF, the relative success of the MM can be explained primarily by focusing on the importance of exploration, curiosity, and playful behaviour in learning.…”