Abstract
Title Variation and invariance in Maria Montessori’s sensory training
materials
Language: Swedish with an English summary
Keywords: Montessori, Montessori pedagogy, sensorial education, variation
theory, variation, invariance, learning
ISBN: 978-91-7346-729-2
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 invariance 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.