Perceiving, labelling and knowing: Mediating educational meanings through multimodal dialogue in Montessori early years classrooms

This chapter reports on a study that investigated how a three-stage multimodal dialogic pedagogy first described by Montessori in 1909 is applied in present day high-fidelity Montessori classrooms. This three-part lesson is a multimodal dialogic routine through which young children learn to perceive and label phenomena in ways that lead them incrementally into the domains of educational knowledge. The study comprised analysis of recordings of two qualified and experienced Montessori teachers, one a preschool teacher and one a teacher of a multigrade (Years, 1, 2, 3) class, both of whom apply this pedagogy in a suburban Montessori school in Australia. The analysis compares the application of this century old approach to 21st century understandings of dialogic pedagogy and provides insights into how teachers apply and adapt the original lesson blueprint in 21st century Montessori settings.