”They place their trust in us by sharing their ideas, engaging and asking questions – and to help open the brilliance of their minds is the greatest honor,” she says. “We have an amazing team at Mid-Pacific. And the heart of it all is the children.
Leslie Gleim
Preschool, Pedagogista
By Stacy Yuen
Leslie Gleim compares her job as a pedagogista to being like pepperoni.
“I’m a little bit of everything – just like pepperoni on a pizza,” she laughs. “I wear lots of hats to do my job. I’m fully immersed in the classroom, with teachers, students and parents – and walking around and listening to what’s going on.”
Gleim’s comparison to the zesty Italian sausage seems apt as the term “pedagogista” came from an Italian philosophy of early education called Reggio Emilia. The guiding principles of Reggio preschools are known worldwide as a progressive child-centered approach to learning. It was brought to Mid-Pacific in 2004 by Preschool and Elementary School Principal Edna Hussey.
Gleim’s interest in the Reggio approach is what brought her to Hawaii to work for Mid-Pacific.
“I presented on the Reggio approach in Hawaii in 2007 and returned to the sub-20 degree temperatures of Ohio where I was a preschool teacher for children with special rights (special needs),” explains Gleim. “I was a year away from retiring when I found out there was an opening at Mid-Pacific for a lead preschool teacher and pedagogista.”
In a phone conversation with Dr. Hussey, the two discovered they had actually met the previous year at a Reggio conference in Canada. Gleim, who for most of her life had called Portsmith, Ohio “home,” decided she was ready for a new challenge and chapter in her life and accepted the job.
Almost 15 years later, she still believes she has the best job in the world working with teachers, preschoolers and their families.
“The pedagogista’s job is to document the children’s learning processes, stories and natural environments,” she explains. We drive our curriculum by taking photos – sometimes 500 a day – and observing students’ engagement and conversation,” she explains. “There is no written curriculum so the children drive our curriculum every day.”
She considers each day a gift when working with children.
“They place their trust in us by sharing their ideas, engaging and asking questions – and to help open the brilliance of their minds is the greatest honor,” she says. “We have an amazing team at Mid-Pacific. And the heart of it all is the children.”
While photography is a crucial element of Gleim’s job, her interest in the artform has grown in a more personal direction since moving to Hawaii.
When away from the classroom, Gleim works on her own projects including work as an aerial photographer for a historical documentation capturing the past and most recent eruptions of Kilauea Volcano. Her work has garnered numerous national and international awards.