Dr. Johanna Filp-Hanke, School of Education

 

Cordillera de Los Andes

My background

Publications

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In my life I have been exposed to the challenges of bilingualism and multiculturalism because I was born in Austria and arrived with my parents in Chile at two years of age. I had to integrate the German cultural background of my home with the Chilean culture. Because my parents had decided that they would preserve their culture of origin, I studied in the German School and my social and cultural life took place on the island of the "German colony". This went on until I entered University, where I discovered an exciting and wonderful world, beyond the "island".

On the German island I learned about the "Magic flute", Goethe, Durrenmatt. At Christmas it was filled the spirits of cinnamon and clove and 'Silent night". I rejected the racial prejudice against Chilean people and I found it difficult to identify with my German roots in the face of the crimes committed by the Nazi regime against the Jewish people.
Outside this island, in the country and at the University I reveled in Latin American Literature, Julio Cortazar, Neruda .....and let my wings fly with Violeta Parra and Victor Jara. 

As an adult, in 1968, I had the opportunity to live and study in Canada, where I learned what it means to be "nobody" in a new country. This had all the advantages of the freedom anonymity grants you, as well as the disadvantages of loneliness and indifference. I also was fortunate to study in California at the beginning of the seventies, a time in which we thought that social change was possible on a short term notice. Experience would show us that human beings and society are more complex than we suspected.

In 1974 I returned to Chile, with a recently acquired M.A. in Educational Psychology from the University of British Columbia, Canada. I worked at a center dedicated to educational innovations to improve the education for low income groups, the Center for Research and Development of Education (CIDE). At that time, during the military dictatorship, low income groups had been persecuted badly and we developed programs to help people to rebuild their support networks and to create spaces in which cultural and educational development took place. I worked in the "Parents and Children Project", a program aimed at empowering low income families to provide a nurturing environment for their children. Paulo Freire's developments with regards to adult education drew attention to the power dimension present in the educational interaction, and to the cultural dimension of education. We thus created learning settings so that the families felt validated and regained confidence in their own perceptions and in their own experience as parents and persons. The educational approach was experiential , building on the daily experiences of families and their children. The child development component emphasized the importance of social interactions between the children and significant adults in their environment and was mostly guided by Piaget. It was important that adults could perceive the intentionality of their interactions in relation to the development of their children.

In 1978 I studied teacher-pupil interactions in grade one classrooms in schools in different income sectors, in order to try and understand which were the processes that might contribute to success or failure of children from low income groups. At that time, (l980) the thinking in Chile was influenced by Coleman's results, and school failure in low income sectors was attributed to structural factors. School factors were not considered to be important. However, we found that teachers behaved differently in schools in low income sectors as compared to middle income sectors. In general in poor sectors we observed less "time on task" than in middle income sectors, and the daily experience of the children was not valued or taken as a stepping stone on which to base new learning.

In 1982 we designed a workshop for in-service preschool and grade one teachers, to help them "see" what they were doing in the classroom, and analyze the distance between their pedagogical ideal and their practice. This approach was stimulated by the observations that teachers had an idealized perception of their work in the classroom, and that they needed to learn to "see" what they were doing, so that they could choose their course of action in their classroom. Inspired by the educational innovations of "popular education" (non-formal education in low income communities, designed on the basis of Freire's framework) we designed simulation games, so that teachers could experience some of the processes that occur in the class room, and analyze their outcome. These games involved the participation of the group and allowed teachers to get in touch with the feelings and consequences of given pedagogical choices. Some of the principles with guided the teacher training workshop were the following:

- educational change requires a change in teachers thinking and acting, the starting point is making teachers' beliefs about children, learning and education explicit;

- one of the blocks to educational change is the isolation of the pedagogical work in the classroom; thus teacher training has to break down this isolation and build support networks for teachers;

- educational change takes place over long periods of time, in the dialogue between theory and practice.

In 1984 I had the opportunity to enter the Doctoral Program at the Albert Ludwig University in Freiburg, Germany, and I took the opportunity to obtain my Ph.D. in Educational Psychology. My dissertation was an empirical study on the effect of preschool education on success in grade one elementary school, and on the impact of the teacher-student interaction on student learning in different socioeconomic groups. In the seminars I took I studied George Herbert Mead, because I was interested in understanding the social processes involved in the construction of meaning. I also studied qualitative methods of research in the social sciences.

When I returned to Chile I obtained a grant to conduct an ethnographic study on the lives of preschool children in urban low-income neighborhoods in Santiago. The results were published in a small book for teachers, in order to show them the everyday lives of children in low income neighborhoods.

Shortly after that, in l989, Chile entered a hopeful political moment, and it seemed possible to return to democracy through elections. I was invited to participate in a group to formulate the educational policies for the "transition" period, and was able to put three central themes on the agenda: The problems of equity in education, the high failure rates in the first years of primary education and the lack of coordination between preschool and elementary education. Luck would have it that the military regime was replaced by a democratic one, and the Swedish government made a considerable contribution to the country, which allowed us to design a project to improve education in the 10% poorest and lowest achieving schools in Chile.

In addition, at CIDE we were able to obtain a grant from the Bernard van Leer Foundation (Holland) to design a program aimed at creating collaborative links between the family and the school, and between preschool and grade one teachers to improve learning and self-esteem of the children. One of the themes was the introduction of children into literacy, from preschool until grade two. The educational methodology followed the guidelines of the "project pedagogy". This program is now being implemented at a national level through a contract with the Ministry of Education and the National Educational Television Network.

I came to Sonoma State University in1996, joining the faculty of the School of Education. I have taught Foundations for Multicultural Education (very suitable for my background), Explorations in Teaching for future teachers, Child Development, the Masters Thesis or Project Seminar, Curriculum Development in Preschool and Kindergarten, School and Society, and Child Development. I particularly enjoy supervising student teachers in the field; that is where the real life is, where children grow and learn and where theory and practice come together.

I am a member of the Early Childhood Education program, in the Department of Literacy and Elementary Education. I also collaborate with the Human Development Major, where I am one of the advisors. My recent scholarly interest is to better understand the needs of newcomer children and ways to support their transition to schools in the U.S.

April, 2009.