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The Gazebo School Park Early Childhood Program
Introduction
Esalen's childcare program for children of parents taking a seminar is currently undergoing restructuring. Through June 30, 2008, Esalen will offer childcare during workshop hours in the afternoon, evenings, and on weekends. Details about the new structure of childcare after June 30th will be available soon. If you are interested in having your child participate in our program, please call the Farmhouse at 831-667-3026 or e-mail us at gazebo@esalen.org for more details.
Inspired while visiting a two hundred year old farmhouse in Appletreewick, England, Janet Lederman created the Gazebo School Park at the Esalen Institute. Begun in 1977, the school is situated on one acre in Big Sur, California and offers a year-round program for children ages 1-6, and also other support services such as: Student teacher internship, Continuing Education for teachers, weekend and week-long workshops for children of seminarians, health care, etc. The Gazebo School Park "is designed with the educational goal of maximizing the full use of the child's growing body, unfolding intelligence, and soaring imagination. By maximizing each child's unique learning style and pace and using the environment with its demands and differences as major tools, the child learns in his/her earliest years: self confidence, self-esteem, and self- discipline in the most basic form." (The Play's The Thing, Janet Lederman, 1991). The Gazebo is an environmentally-centered philosophy that includes developmentally appropriate practices and attempts to base the development of it's philosophy on care and concern for the whole child and the well-being of the environment. Environmental Ethics are at the core of the curriculum. Learning about the self and others are primary skills developed in an environment filled with opportunities to become bonded with nature. We have reintroduced time for exploring, investigating, testing, sorting, evaluating, assimilating, learning what the world is all about, its ups and downs, expanding awareness and relatedness. There are daily jobs to be done: cleaning the corral, grooming and feeding the animals, tending to the greenhouse and the gardens, and ordering indoor structures. The emerging curriculum is always honored. For the most part, children are free to choose and change activities as they wish. The members of the staff work as a family. Each individual brings a special expertise, talent, and uniqueness maintaining the equilibrium of the emotional and psychological ambiance providing a model for one of the basic postulates of Gestalt and Gazebo: The appreciation of differences. By creating a family system, the members relate freely with one another, getting together and apart, agreeing and differing, living and loving in a shared farmhouse. Our teachers are respectful, sensitive, and caring. Some skills like a sense of humor, and joy as well as patience, are needed to be a Gazebo teacher. They are present to insure success and a feeling of accomplishment which are very important for a child during early stages of development. They are able to perceive the whole child and how his or her parts come together generating an integrated being. The Gazebo Learning Project is proud to announce the results of our Essay Contest: "How is Gazebo Changing Your World?" The Essay Contest Winner is Sarah Onion who will receive massages generously donated by Robin Costanza and Paul Moraca and brunch for two with the Gazebo staff. Read her winning essay and several of the other entries below. Honorable Mention goes to Camille Macris who will receive a Big Sur Coastline photograph generously donated by Daniel Bianchetta. Honorable Mention also goes to Laurie Talarico who will receive a massage generously donated by Nora Matten. Thank you for all your entries. We plan to use your insightful works to seek support for the next phase of Gazebo development. We continue to welcome letters of support from those who believe in Gazebo. Thank you for sharing the vision. How Is Gazebo Changing Your World?
Gazebo first changed my world when I was 19. Gazebo convinced me, when I was searching for direction, that education was the way to go. It allowed me to integrate my love and affinity for young children with my need to actively contribute goodness to the world, and my love of intellectual and philosophical challenge with my need to be active socially and physically. My mother, in her wisdom, saw an educator in me and encouraged me to attend a college that had an education department. I could not see myself teaching in an elementary school, and went to Kenyon College instead. At Kenyon I found Gazebo, and followed a different path as an educator. (Gazebo School Park at Kenyon College is a program that serves mostly faculty, and is the midwestern model of Gazebo at Esalen.) In the early days I remember leaving Gazebo in Ohio, and making my way back to my dorm room, or the dining hall, and feeling absolutely on fire with inspiration and ideas. I went on to graduate school at Pacific Oaks, a school with a strong focus on anti-bias curriculum, and wrote a Master's Thesis on Environmental Education and Young Children. Obviously, Gazebo would not have appealed to me so much if it did not so directly reflect my own values and experiences as a child. Do we always want for others what worked so well for ourselves? Or is it more "all we really ever teach is our own style" (Janet Letterman). Madaline L'Engle writes "So I know, with a sense of responsibility that hits me with a cold fist in the pit of my stomach, that what I am is going to make more difference to my own children and those I talk to and teach than anything I tell them" (A Circle of Quiet, 1972). I grew up outside, mostly, and it wasn't all tearing through the woods with a gang of neighborhood children, though there was some of that. I spent a lot of time outside reading. So a school for children that is outside fit exactly with who I am. I love the underlying assumption: what children most need in their early years is the world itself. They need to figure out how it all works—balance and gravity, cycles of birth and death, weather patterns, and how they relate to all of these things. The environment allows children to be scientists, alchemists, and creators, and all with real materials, in the real world. I love the realness of Gazebo. The environment alone is a fantastic teacher, but it takes a good human teacher to know how to scaffold a child's experience in the environment. By scaffold, I mean that the teacher has to know when to step in and instruct, or offer an idea that might take the child to the next cognitive level of understanding and experience, and also when to step back and let the child figure it out on their own. This idea is based on the concept that children all learn in their own space and time, and in their own way, in their own unique developmental framework. I learned this skill at Gazebo. The hard part is learning to trust the child and their ability to learn on their own. I think it is the instinct of the adult to rush in and provide answers and enlightenment, names and dates and "the right way". I know that this was (and sometimes still is) my instinct. At Gazebo I learned how to step back and observe, and how to accept and appreciate times when children didn't do what I thought they should do. This skill creeps into the rest of my life as well, into my other relationships and relations with the world. How is Gazebo important to Esalen — a mother's perspective Last summer, I spent vacation on the Normandy coast, with three other mothers (two English, and one American), and six kids age 1 to 4. It was a battlefield, fortunately only during day time hours. After the first couple of days the kids settled down and we could actually enjoy ourselves. The English moms were quite taken with my 4-year old son's "well adjusted behavior:" he ate whatever we had for dinner; did not throw tantrums; made friends with a 2-year old, shared toys, and took the protective role of an older sibling with her. Same summer, in Poland this time, my friends and family were terrified upon seeing pictures of my son running happily with his girlfriend, both naked and covered in mud from top to bottom. They watched with horror how he could get completely dirty within minutes of playing outside, and couldn't understand why I let him take off his shoes in the park. Not to mention eating raw green beans. I told them my son went to Gazebo. Gazebo is a peculiar place. It is actually called Gazebo School Park, which, for me the foreigner, is rather an adequate description: something between a park and a school, with the emphasis on the park part. The place's physical boundaries are marked by weathered hay bails from the driveway side, and various bushes, poison oak included, from other sides. In my 14 years at Esalen, I've heard of one child, age 2, escaping Gazebo, and of none that got the poison oak. I remember from my childhood, kids bragging about their great escapes during preschool years. Preschools they all hated and had really nasty stories about. What I learned at Esalen was that kids obviously do not need secure gates and high walls to stay in one place for 7 hours a day. If they are not bored they stay. My son has been in Gazebo since he was 9 months old, and now he is 5. There was not one day that he did not want to go. Just the opposite—he loves it. A kid in Gazebo loves exactly the same principal that applies to Esalen in general: you can do whatever you want, with all behavior permitted but physical violence. So kids use this peculiar freedom to the extreme: they run around covered in mud (how many other preschools have mud centers?), they make compost (yes, with their hands many a time). They eat lunch sitting on the grass, mostly with their hands (it simply does not happen in Poland—you don't eat with your hands). They can argue for hours with their friend about a toy, and no teacher will interfere. They may as well cry for hours, and nobody will try to stop them, but nobody will deny their experience either. They have a chance of experiencing the full spectrum of emotions: from despair to delight. They learn how to express and deal with anger at the appropriate age, so they don't have to do it later and can do better things instead. In the meantime, on the other side of the creek, adults in workshops and open seats are doing the same thing: (finally) dealing with their anger, developing compassion for others as well as themselves, an so on. As a result of exposure to Gazebo, kids learn self confidence. They rapidly develop imagination and become very creative. They can express emotions. They know compassion as they see the younger ones going through the same stages as they went through themselves (in Gazebo, there is no division between age groups). They become sensitive human beings. Isn't it the dream of any person that have entered Esalen? Some kids stay at Gazebo for a weekend only, and they still leave, together with their seminarian parents, enriched in a undeniable experience of themselves. Gazebo, like Esalen, offers the chance to experience the beautiful wildness of life. Where else can you run naked covered in mud, and not feel ashamed by it? Gazebo is not just a preschool subsidized by Esalen. Gazebo is Esalen. Especially in the days when people can take workshops in many growth centers, there is (in Ohio, as far as I know) only one other Gazebo, based on and crediting Esalen. Gazebo is still, after 30 years, a cutting edge. Hopefully Esalen can use it. How Has Gazebo Changed My Life, My Perspective, Family, Friends and Community? Gazebo has had an amazingly positive impact on my life, family, friends and community from quite a young age. Although I did not attend Gazebo as a youngster I was blessed with a great group of friends who did. Their strong, free, expressive spirits were contagious. They opened up a world of imagination, wonder and unlimited possibilities to me. I remember one day in particular when we were playing on the Gazebo boat. It was my first experience on a boat and we imagined the many places this boat could take us. We went to Europe that day. It was so much fun! I eventually did go to Europe by myself when I was nineteen, although I travelled by air rather than by sea, I feel like the inspiration for that first trip abroad began that day on that boat. I also remember thinking those many years ago that if I ever had children I would want them to attend Gazebo. Well, it so happens that about thirty or so years after that magical trip on the Gazebo boat my husband Corin and I were gifted with a beautiful Son named Jaden who attends Gazebo. Jaden is two and a half now and he absolutely loves Gazebo. The dedicated staff is great at allowing the children freedom and expression through the Gazebo philosophy. Jaden has gained a great deal of confidence and independence since he began attending. The social and peer interaction is critical for Jaden and other children who live in such isolated circumstances. It is also so important to myself and other parents in this area to have available and affordable child care. This allows parents the alone time and/or work time they need to ensure their personal quality of life I would like to stress, though, that Gazebo is not just childcare, it's so much more. I have friends that drive over 40 miles one way so that their child can attend Gazebo. We all feel so grateful and lucky to have such a special program and magical place available for our children and us. We have all created new, and possibly lasting, friendships and bonds through Gazebo. I am still close friends with many of those from the boat that day even though some of them have "sailed" to various corners of the globe. The connection lives on, and I believe is contagious. In closing, I would like to thank Esalen for developing and sharing this fantastic program, the staff for their love, compassion and incredible patience and of course the children for their endless imagination. Over the years the Gazebo has been the highlight of our many trips to Esalen. The talented staff at the Gazebo has made a deep and meaningful contribution to my children, and our family. Both of my daughters, Dominique and Michaela, have thrived in the nurturing environment of the Gazebo and have learned important life lessons. Our entire famly feels that the Gazebo is the "soul of Esalen." We have been moved to tears by the dedication of the entire Gazebo staff. Two years ago we made a donation in honor of Neil and the staff at the Gazebo because we were so moved by their commitment to all of the children. Gazebo is an important part of the Esalen experience. It gives me great comfort to know that places like the Gazebo exist in a world that is often stressful for us and for our children. The sun nestling through the trees, the fragrance of the sea breeze floating in the air, the speaking pacific ocean waves awaken the morning souls to embrace what Gazebo has to offer each and everyone of us. Gazebo, a place that allows to taste the pleasure of childhood at its optimum. A place that nature at its best, in harmonious with all creation, for everyone to harvest the marvel of the universe, to learn to co-habit with each other, as it was intended. What Gazebo offers is the stimulation to the senses, refreshes the mind, balances the irony of nature, as we all watch the children bond with the earth through laughter and happiness. A school that has been engineered in an unique setting providing serenity, environmental consciousness, non-judgmental experiences, culinary food can be nothing else but a modal sight for the world to see and experience, modern approach to ancient living. Gazebo, is a place that can tantalize every teacher's appetite to advocate for young children environmental education. It is a place that empowers teacher's to bring such experiences into their own settings. Gazebo has certainly strengthen my desire to bring nature and nurture to the environment I am working in. Gazebo, is a place of significant as its roots based on respecting and balancing nature has awakened me to analyze what young children deserve in the rapid world of "Twin Towers" and "Google". A meaning making place that maintains intellectual possibility and emotional connections where children are able to develop to the fullest. Every time I have visited Gazebo, I have brought back abundant memories and experiences that I cherish and try to amulet in the outside environment at my school. I have seen the delight and awe experiences the children, in having nature in your school backyard instead of metal representation of what play is. My wish for Gazebo is continue to growth and receive a high caliber early childhood education by continue to learn the growing changes of the world and balancing the bond with nature. From :P.Helton my poem of experience as a Gazebo Kid: The smells:
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