Variation och invarians i Maria Montessoris sinnestränande materiel

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to analyse the Montessori pedagogy with the objective to theoretically describe and explain the Montessori pedagogical method. The aim has been to find an answer to what still makes the Montessori pedagogy, after more than one hundred years, successfully spread to schools all over the world. Using older and newer theory formations, primarily a number of variation theoretical concepts, empirical data of small children using Montessori material were analysed. The study show that nothing will come from nothing. Maria Montessori was a child of her time, and not alone in her aspirations. She made use of many of the current events and ideas, and transformed them into her own. The pedagogical methods that Montessori developed, when she met intellectually challenged, under stimulated children in the hospital, came about at a time when measures for these children were discussed from a medical and educational perspective. Later, when the education in the regular school was debated throughout society, she turned to these children to develop the methods that she had been inspired to by the two doctors Jean Itard and Edouard Séguin. The common characteristics of their method were variation and invariance, a method that they in turn were inspired to use by Jacob Rodriguez Pereira. The result shows that Montessori too made a system of variation and invari-ance in the training with the sensorial material, which also shows that the method Montessori used for sensorial education can also be appreciated within the scope of variation theory. The Montessori pedagogy is based on a carefully thought-out principle on learning that also proves to be built in to the sensorial material. This is not an antiquated and vague theory but processed though and practices that corresponds with current science. The materials one can literally touch, allows the theory and method to live on relatively unchanged over time and space.