Peter Curtis
Peter Curtis is an educator in the public system in the ACT and has taught the early years through to high school. He has recently published, A Meeting of Minds, an imagined dialogue between Paulo Freire and Karl Marx.
Recent articles by Peter Curtis
22 December 2024
Maria Montessori: Feminist and educator
Born in 1870, the year of Italy’s nationhood, Maria Montessori was a social reformer. The general militarisation of life, the first great slaughter, the rise of Mussolini and the second slaughter, are only some of what she reacted and organised against. She believed her method - now universally known as the Montessori Method - would be instrumental in changing attitudes about education and for ways of being.
13 August 2024
If fonix doesn’t spell phonics, what does it spell?
As a beginning teacher in the year 2000, and the father of a young child, the question, ‘Do I use whole language or phonics?’ did not occur to me. Instinctively, it made sense that when attempting to pronounce a new word one had to know something of the connection to the sounds we make and the letter symbols we see. I was unaware then of the reading wars but I was aware that some educational psychologists were advocating that phonics and explicit teaching of the alphabet code inform early reading instruction.