Verbundenheit

"Connectivity" –– what we learn in one subject area should connect us with what we learned in others. Freidrich Froebel used the German term "verbundenheit" which has been translated as conscious connection or "connectedness." The following is from my book Making Classic Toys that Teach. https://amzn.to/4kPsV85

"The Third Principle: Connectedness

Froebel’s third principle was "connectedness." While one could focus attention on facts and things in isolation, those facts and things are also deeply connected through myriad means; the child, too, should learn to see himself or herself as a part of the larger unbound world. As outlined by Froebel in The Education of Man, “Education should be one connected whole, and should advance with an orderly and continuous growth—as orderly, continuous and natural as the growth of a plant.”

One things that Froebel did not mention directly is where the connections should be made. There is a risk of creating contrived rather than discovered connections, when the teacher creates the connectiveness or connectedness and lays it before the child, rather than allowing children to discover connections on their own. So connectedness should take place within the child, in relation to his or her own experience, not be purposely laid out as one more fact to be taken in that was laid out and arranged by teachers. Just as the artificial boundaries between fields of study make school studies artificial, artifice used to stitch fields of study back into an integrated whole, sustain a disconnection between the child and the real world.

One of the points that I try to make is that learning must surprise, and thereby touch upon the sense of personal discovery that brings us to a state of educational preparedness in the form of physical, emotional an intellectual alert. A case in point is a shape that Froebel called "the doll," that was left for the child to discover on his or her own through play with Gift number 2.

Throughout the literature by and about the teaching of Froebel's kindergarten, the doll receives no further mention or illustration, as it was to be deliberately left for the child to discover without the form of interference in learning we often call "instruction."

So the question must arise for each of us, "how do we make learning as natural for others and ourselves as the opening of petals on a flower?" We do it though a process in which the student is allowed to make the connection between all things.