Book Review: Flow to Learn
Author Carmen Viktoria Gamper
An educator’s insight to seeing your child. Innovative realities of a child-centered teacher recognizing children as the masters of their own lives. Gamper acknowledges that children learn best in their own natural state of spontaneity, outside the system generally taught by traditional education. Her initial revelations were interestingly founded on the child.
Upwards of her recognition that children know how to learn, she acknowledges that she has created a lot of terminology relating to her processes, including “flow companion”. This refers to the adult who supports the way children learn. She unfurls a predictable amount of teacher jargon in her first few chapters, expressing the dynamic that all children desire to learn through play, spontaneously, and without the boundaries, adults often place upon them (namely economics, gender, and other requirements).
Since the book is designed to be read “week-to-week” to increase the “flow” in my life as I educate children, I was faced immediately with a challenge to either read the book and offer my review then go back and read as recommended or just do the review. I opted to read the book for this review and move on from there.
I was elated to see that she had related teaching to parenting and recommended parents learn the flow to learn approach to teach and raise their children. Since I believe children should be raised and taught by their parents whenever possible, I usually encourage all parents to seek any information they can about doing both. Impressive — right off the start.
The weekly “flow lessons” included easy steps to achieve the ultimate system of encouraging children through play and light direction. I didn’t see the word discipleship mentioned, however, with other directives this could have been a strong leading directive as well as many others. I was particularly encouraged to see that Gamper likened the child to the parent in their course of “best results” and best practices, so parents can relate on another level besides learning.
Gamper suggested such things as anchoring learning and lessons with feelings and emotional security, self-selection and decision making by the child (a program I certainly would encourage parents to pursue), and operations that would allow child and parent to be comfortable and confident in their teaching and learning abilities. I think she may have missed an opportunity early on to encourage parents to “stay curious” with their children, but she did follow through later in the book with that encouragement. I believe overall, her efforts to motivate and encourage deeper relationships between parents and children were excellent recommendations.
Along with delaying some of the self-discipline recommendations, which could go either way — but I believe most children learn these things naturally as the process of obtaining results relevant to their actions is followed — create learning opportunities that build confidence.
There were several segments on continuing the process, relating to programs you could encourage your child to follow that would include on-going learning steps, and continuation of learning that would be helpful.
I would definitely recommend this book as a teaching tool for any family.
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5 Stars