12 Pillars - Self Empowerment
Empowerment is about guiding children in a way that encourages their belief in their own abilities and potential for positive growth. Throughout their lives children will need to rely on their inner strength and sense of self belief to meet and overcome challenges and difficulties. When we understand how to empower children we can help provide them with a strong foundation that will help them succeed in life.
As children make decisions and see the how the outcomes benefit themselves and others, it gives them the confidence in their own ability to make good decisions. It can also embolden them to try new things and persist in learning. Children learn that not all their choices have positive outcomes and thus helps them develop skills like problem solving and conflict resolution. It also helps children discover who they are understand their own talents, abilities, limitations, likes and dislikes.
Children as human beings, possess a hundred languages: a hundred ways of thinking, expressing, understanding, of encountering differences through ways of thinking that interconnect and weave together.
The hundred languages is a metaphor or symbol for the extraordinary potentials of children, their abilities and creative processes. As educators it is our responsibility to treasure and appreciate each child's verbal and non-verbal languages with equal dignity. Valuing children's voices and forms of expression is key to creating a space where we can empower children to be their true selves.
This approach is viewed is viewed as a living, changing, evolving process of learning and education as opposed to a teaching-learning method. Each child is someone who is filled with curiosity and has the potential to instinctively learn and understand their world in ways that are meaningful and empowering to them.