Fiona Rowlands: ‘We’re all lifelong learners’
Fiona Rowlands: “I realized I could impact more people by teaching future educators than I could by working with children.” Photo by Tom Peacock
For Fiona Rowlands, a part-time instructor in Concordia’s Department of Education, childhood was a gift.
“I was given a lot of freedom, and had a lot of fun,” she says. “Both my parents really taught my sister and I to believe that we could do anything if we put our minds to it.”
Intent on helping young children enjoy some of the same experiences she had, Rowlands earned both her bachelor’s degree and her master’s in Child Studies from Concordia.
And all the while, she was learning on the job.
“I was working in daycare, and then I was the director of a daycare. Then I shadowed children with special needs. I also worked in Germany teaching pre-school for a while. So I was doing different things, always related to children.”
When Rowlands was offered a teaching position in Vanier College's Early Childhood Education program, offered through its Continuing Education Centre, she was hesitant to accept it at first. “But then I realized that I could impact more people by teaching future educators than I could by working with children.”
Today, she teaches courses at Vanier and at Concordia. She also spends three mornings a week as the head teacher at the observational nursery on the fifth floor of the J.W. McConnell Building (LB).
“It’s a fun project,” Rowlands says of the nursery, which is both a laboratory for education students, and a school for children between the ages of three and five. “The department has given me a lot of latitude to incorporate my own personal philosophy.”
Her approach to teaching centres on the importance of free play and movement. “I’m passionate about learning through play,” she says.
Rowlands believes that it’s essential to accommodate students with different learning styles, particularly those who are better at acquiring information when they’re active.
“We're very big on kids moving, on kids making free choices within certain parameters,” she says. “I think a lot of children that fall through the cracks — especially boys, who are more tactile and need to move. Even in daycare, these are the kids that are being put in time out and being punished. And they’re being punished just because they’re kids.”
At Concordia, Rowlands teaches a course called “Exploring Movement with Children” to undergraduates enrolled in the Early Childhood and Elementary Education program. She says the mere existence of the class points to changing attitudes towards how kids are taught.
“The school systems are starting to realize that maybe there’s a problem,” she says. “In the class, we talk a lot about how to incorporate movement. We also talk about the gender differences, and how to deal with children who are hyperactive or who have attention deficit disorder.”
A committed environmentalist, Rowlands incorporates the natural world into her work at the observational nursery. This term, she’s involving the children in a worm-composting program.
“We can’t expect kids to protect nature if they don’t understand it, and they’re not connected with it,” she says.
Rowlands is happy to pass on her knowledge, but she insists the benefits flow both ways. “We’re all lifelong learners.”
She singles out a recent incident at the nursery, when an education student asked the youngsters if they wanted to play with the worms.
“One of the kids replied, ‘We don't play with the worms. We feed the worms and we take care of them, but we don't play with them,’” Rowlands says.
“They teach us, and we teach them.”
Read about other part-time instructors in the Faculty of Arts and Science