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Elinor Goldschmied (1910-2009)
Elinor Goldschmied (1910-2009)
The information for this page was collected from the following websites :
The information for this page was collected from the following websites :
Elinor Goldschmied is known for her work with the first phase of child development. She studied how children play and and how they learn. She developed two activities for the youngest children: the treasure basket for babies from 6 to 12 months old and the exploration of objects in relationship with each other, for children from 12-20 months, which is known as heuristic play.
She also studied how children being cared for outside of the family, or orphans without family, benefit from a privileged relationship with an adult who is a primary caregiver. She called this the Key Person approach, which advocates the forming of special relationships between the adult caregiver and the children she is responsible for in the childcare setting.
She was born in Glouchestershire, England in a Bourgeois family and grew up on a large estate playing freely in nature.
She lost her mother and her favorite brother when she was young.
Though she was drawn to theater arts in middle school years, this was not thought to be a proper profession for a woman, so after her high school years in Bristol, she decided to study education.
She studied to be a nursery teacher at the Froebel Institute.
Froebel (1782-1852) was a pedagogue who laid the foundation for modern education based on the recognition that children have unique needs and capabilities. He developed educational toys that allowed for free exploration and discovery. He began his work as an educator for secondary school but after working with little children realized, like many others who came after, that educational opportunity at the beginning of life leaves a great legacy in the life of the person. He recognized the importance of the activity of the child in learning and introduced the concept of the “free work” of the child, activity that comes naturally through exploration and games.
1937
She wins a scholarship to study at the Department of Mental Health at the London School of Economics and earns a diploma as a Psychiatric Social Worker. She meets her future husband, an Italian who is Jewish and who's family fled to London. In 1940 she begins her work in Mental Heath and is given the responsibility for 25 desperate children who are refugees from the war who are between the ages of 2 and 4. Their behavior was unmanageable as they expressed a rage through their behavior due to their traumatic experiences and the resulting lack of close and trusting relationships in their new life. All of the children were in one large group and followed the same daily schedule. She reorganized based on their need to have smaller groups and more individualized attention and she assigned two caregivers to each subgroup of children: the beginning of the idea of a key person. She saw great changes in their psychology only after a few weeks as they were already more at peace.
She continues her education at Cambridge and studies Early Childhood Development under the guide of Anna Freud, Susan Isaacs and Donald Winicott. In 1945 she opened a Public Childcare for the youngest children and during this period of her life she worked intensely with Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham who were working with destitute infants and toddlers orphaned due to the war and living in an orphanage.
1946
She moves to Italy with Guido and has a son, Marco. There she meets Elda Scarzella who, after the war, had opened a residential home for young pregnant underaged girls or mothers with small children where they could have their babies and live with them for the first 5 years. Elinor works with her, observing and studying the way children learn and play in their first three years. She creates a place to offer them things to play with, two stations at a low table where they could explore with sand or water and containers, filling and emptying the containers. She provided other materials for the children's play: collections of pebbles and rocks, collections of containers, pieces of wood, all of different dimensions... allowing for a rich exploration of form, dimension, and construction, which could be turned into endless inventions by the children.
1951
The post war project came to an end but the Village continued to serve women and children and Elinor continued to work with mothers who needed help because of their social or psychological problems. She began to give trainings for caregivers or educators, first financed by the American Friends Service Committee, and later by the Opera Nazionale Maternita' e Infanzia and the Provincial Agencies in Trieste, Milano and Torino.
1971
Public 0-3 childcare was initiated in Italy and Elinor began to work directly with the town governments. Her approach to training educators was based on the ideas of a child's activity in his development and the adult's observational practices. The years she worked at the Village she developed, like Maria Montessori and Adele Costa Gnocchi, the practice of understanding development directly through the observation of the activity of the children. She saw that children need to have materials to use, explore and discover. They needed the freedom to do with the materials exactly as their creative drive urge them to do. They needed to use their senses to come to know these things. She, again like Montessori, began with a population of disadvantaged children but saw the need to apply what she learned from these experiences to children in all childcare situations, where their true developmental needs were not always being met.
As the times changed and mothers more and more were part of the work force and less involved with the daily care of their children, she worked with UNESCO and John Bowlby on initiatives to confront the social problem of creating quality childcare opportunities for the ages of 0-3.
1954
Her first documentary film (Let me Play) was about the psychological development of the child. Five years of study and systematic observations followed where she studied concentration in the very young child at play, before he is able to walk. She developed the idea of the Treasures Basket to answer the need to have interesting objects to explore.
1959
She returns to England to dedicate herself to the mental health of the youngest children but continues to work in Italy, Spain and England training educators in 0-3. During this time she develops the second proposal for 0-3 for which she is known today, Heuristic Play, for children from 12-20 months.
From "I Don't Need Toys" - a video you can find on YouTube by Anita Hughes, a student of Elinor's
1. Infants do not need manufactured toys
2. The Treasure Basket provides the seated infant with a selection of household objects for mouthing and handling
3. Heuristic Play is self-motivated and purposeful. Pleasure is derived from effort and discovery
4. The adult provides a loving and non-interfering presence
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