Tech Company Offers Guide with Montessori Principles

“It makes no sense not to teach how to use technology.”

Please introduce yourselves to our readers. First of all, thank you very much for this opportunity. We are UdiGitalEdu and Waterpark Montessori International (WMI). 

UdiGitalEdu is a research group of the University of Girona. We do applied research, working directly with teachers and schools. We investigate how technologies can transform the ways of teaching and learning. We understand technology as a powerful tool that children can use to express themselves. Children can create things using technology, but using technology and their hands to make things happen on and off the screen. Technology does not replace but complements and enhances the use of paintbrushes and manipulative materials.

Waterpark Montessori International (WMI) is a Montessori teacher training college based in Europe. We have been training Montessori teachers since 1995, primarily in Norway, but we have several smaller international centers. Our founder, Clare Healy Walls, ran a Montessori school in Ireland before being invited to Oslo to start a Montessori teacher training. We have been running the training ever since.

What is your professional background and how did you come to Montessori? UdigitalEdu came to Montessori through Spanish mathematician Maria Antònia Canals (1930-2022). Canals was a distinguished Professor of Mathematics Education at the University of Girona, teacher of teachers, and a Montessori authority. Her lifelong commitment was to kindle a love for mathematics in children, and she spent her whole life designing materials to teach and learn mathematics in a more experiential and tangible way. The UdiGitalEdu team was lucky enough to learn directly from Maria Antònia for 10 years.

Then, in 2018 we participated in a European SEDIN project, where we met WMI. And there began a great professional relationship between the two organisations. 

Where is the team based? UdiGitalEdu is based in Girona, and we have always focused on multicultural schools working locally and internationally. Locally we work especially in Salt, through the Tekhné Chair, a joint initiative between the University of Girona and the city council of Salt. Salt is a municipality of 31,000 inhabitants with a great diversity, which represents at the same time a great cultural richness and a challenge because many of these children come from vulnerable communities.

Internationally, we have learned a lot from working with schools in South India, especially from Shanti Bhavan and Parikrma Humanity Foundation.

WMI has our main center in Oslo, Norway, with additional locations in Sweden, France, Malta, Kenya and South Africa. 

How did MonTech come about? MonTech came about naturally at the end of the SEDIN project. In this project, we created links between UdiGitalEdu and WMI, and then we decided to explore in a practical way the question: If Maria Montessori were alive today, how would she use technology in the classroom, with children and teachers, without betraying the principles of her methodology?

Forming the consortium was easy, we were encouraged and helped by Action Synergy from Greece, which was the coordinator of SEDIN, and we counted on Center for Creative Training in Bulgaria, and Eloris in Greece, who were already involved in SEDIN, and we also invited the Montessori Palau school from Girona-Spain, and Liceul Technologic Constantin Ianculescu in Carcea-Romania, and Zaffiria in Italy.

Who do you serve? The aim of the MonTech project has been to foster social inclusion and equity in multicultural schools across Europe through highly innovative and engaging activities based on a new approach that blends the Montessori method with cutting-edge Maker Education learning experiences. Project partners in each country have helped identify the needs of their schools, children, and teachers. The target groups and their needs are similar in the consortium countries but with some differences. In Bulgaria and Romania, the needs are related to the Roma minority pupils, in Spain and Italy with pupils from migrant families, and in Greece are linked to refugees.

In MonTech we have designed a new approach starting from a well-tested traditional method (Montessori) and added EdTech methodologies (Maker Education and Creative Computing) with the double objective of adapting Montessori to the context of multicultural schools (schools with a significant number of children with refugee/migrant/minority background) and updating it with modern but affordable digital tools/methods for schools with few economic resources.

Tell us about presenting at the 2023 Scratch conference. Scratch has become the world’s largest coding community for kids. In 2022, Scratch reached more than 100 million registered users. Scratch is a coding language with a simple visual interface that allows young people to create digital stories, games, and animations. To be able to present our project at the Scratch conference and to be named by Mitch Resnick himself as one of the relevant contributions of the conference was very satisfying for us. 

In the conference we presented the project, emphasizing the guidebook we created for the project, how it is structured and why, and showing examples that represent different ways of learning. We also explained the school implementations and shared feedback from participating teachers and children.

What have you/ your team learned along the way? From the very beginning, we focused, as Maria Montessori did when she started, on the most vulnerable children, and that is why we have schools all over Europe looking for the collaboration of multicultural schools that serve vulnerable children. We also focused on using creative technologies as a means of expression, and that children can use them to create things. Our world today is digital, technology is everywhere. It makes no sense not to teach how to use technology. Maria Montessori believed that music literacy was an element of culture that children ought to learn. She wanted us to teach all children to read music. Music performance should not be just for talented people and artists. Music belongs to us all and should be used as a creative medium (Healy Walls, 2008). Today, in the 21st century, we see clear parallels in the argument that Maria Montessori defended at that time with regard to music, with today’s technology and coding. This new language is not only designed for children who want to be engineers, but rather a skill that all children deserve to learn.

Throughout the project, working with many teachers from different schools, we have seen that many times the new technologies become a barrier, something that teachers interpret as difficult to use, or they think children already spend too much time on screens. They are partly right. In this project we have worked to demonstrate that technology is used to create (not to consume) and that some things happen outside the screen (unplugged activities) somethings inside (plugged), and activities with a low floor (really easy to use), and wide walls (offering different interest to the children like music, stories, drawing,…), while others have a high ceiling (children can create complex projects). With the  MonTech project, we have tried to offer different ways to adapt to various learning styles and provide tools for teachers to apply them effectively in the classroom.

Let us give you some examples. Stories captivate children because they trigger the imagination. Stories are an integral part of the Montessori approach for elementary children. Imagine learning to program from a tale, dancing as if you were a robot, discussing about natural and artificial intelligence, or playing with a fortune-teller? Readers can find all of this in the MonTech Guide resulting from the project.  

What came first–the MonTech Guide or the teachers’ course?  How else have your offerings evolved First came the guide. In fact, in the first year we listened to a few teachers (circle of trust) and wrote the guide as a collaborative work between the Montessori experts and the experts in creative technologies. Then we trained 35 trainers and gave them five months to implement some of what they learned in their classrooms. We reconvened in person to listen to these teachers and refined the guide based on their feedback. This is the second version that have have made public and translated into the languages of the consortium. In the end, the guide met with interest outside the consortium and has been translated into a total of 10 languages.

The training courses for teachers were another main output of the project. In the framework of these courses, which have different editions in the partner countries, a total of 695 teachers were trained. The training courses were face-to-face and online. In addition to the national training sessions, an online international training session was organized in English with the participation of teachers from all the partner countries, plus countries that were not part of the project consortium. This Online Open Asynchronous Training Course, with video lectures, examples, and support materials to train teachers in the MonTech approach, remains open and is an important tool for dissemination and contributes to the sustainability of the project.

What is next for MonTech? Fortunately for us, the project has been extended in the form of a new EU Erasmus+ project, the ACADIMIA project. It is designed to exploit the results of 10 other previous EU projects that showed good results and MonTech is one of them.  The ACADIMIA project focuses on teacher training (pre- and post-service) and especially on multicultural schools (in our context, the most complex schools). The project involves 12 organizations from 10 European countries: Action Synergy is the coordinator, and WMI and UdiGitalEdu are on board.