Teachers or Pepilena Magna? Educating also means knowing how to see

In the world of Pepilandia there is a particular adult figure: the Pepilena Magna. She accompanies the youngest ones, offers direction, watches over the group, and keeps enough flexibility to leave room for movement, play, differences and individual timing.

In the book she is described through four particularly effective verbs: give shape, protect, accompany, wait. Four verbs that also belong to school.

The question the fairy tale raises has to do with the quality of educational presence: when does a teacher become, in a child's eyes, something like a Pepilena Magna?

Every educational environment has rules, timing, goals and responsibilities. Structure helps a child find their bearings and makes part of the day predictable.

The Pepilena Magna represents a form of authority able to organise while keeping alive what each child brings with them. Her presence offers a frame clear enough to hold the group and flexible enough to welcome different ways of learning, communicating and taking part.

This image speaks to contemporary pedagogy, which values the quality of the learning environment and the adult's ability to adjust their approach. The same task may call for different explanations, timing or tools. The goal stays shared; the path can take different shapes.

Educating therefore also comes to mean building conditions in which each child can approach learning with the right tools.

An important part of educational work has to do with interpreting behaviour.

A quiet child may be concentrating, tired, worried, or busy organising many stimuli at once. A sharp response may go with frustration, misunderstanding, overload or difficulty finding more precise words. An intense interest can become a resource for building new learning.

Visible behaviour therefore offers a first level of information. The adult's skill grows when observation, knowledge of the child, context and relationship are added to that level.

Developmental psychology uses the concept of mentalisation to describe the ability to consider the mental states that may accompany a behaviour. In education this disposition takes a very concrete form: staying curious about what a pupil is trying to communicate through words, body, silences, interests and reactions.

In Solomon J.'s journey, the theme of the adult gaze holds an important place. The fairy tale invites the reader to notice how much a child's experience can change when they meet someone able to read more than what appears on the surface.

How this happens belongs to the story.

Lev Vygotsky described development as a process deeply tied to relationship and mediation. The adult can offer tools, words, examples and support that allow the child to reach progressively more complex skills.

The Pepilena Magna represents this function well. Accompanying requires attention to distance. A skilled educational presence keeps searching for a measure suited to the situation.

Sometimes it means explaining. Sometimes it means showing. Sometimes it means asking a question. Sometimes it means allowing a few extra seconds. Waiting, in this sense, belongs fully to educational action.

School is organised through time. Lessons begin and end, activities follow a sequence, tests have a set length, curricula require continuity.

Within this structure, every child also brings their own cognitive and emotional time. Some learning emerges quickly. Other learning requires repetition, experience, security or a different way in. Trust, too, has its own personal timing. A child may need to know an adult for a long time before handing them an important question.

Waiting means recognising these processes while they are still taking shape. The book's Pepilena Magna gives shape, protects, accompanies and waits. The sequence of verbs suggests a present and active adult, able to recognise the value of what is still forming.

Children communicate through many codes: words, drawing, movement, play, metaphor, questions, silences, invention.

Loris Malaguzzi spoke of the 'hundred languages of children' to describe the many forms through which childhood thinks, knows and expresses experience.

The figure of the Pepilena Magna belongs to this same pedagogical sensibility. She observes the child through a plurality of languages and gives value also to what emerges through imagination and symbol.

In Solomon J. in the village of the Pepileni, this theme reaches one of its most delicate moments in the relationship between the imaginative world and school. The story keeps a question open until the end: can there be an adult able to recognise also what a child sees through the eyes of their own imagination?

The answer belongs to Solomon J.'s journey.

The distinction has less to do with a job title and more with the way one inhabits the educational relationship.

A Pepilena Magna offers structure and keeps watching. She knows the rules and can explain their purpose. She recognises the group and keeps attention for the individual. She accompanies the journey and leaves the child real room for initiative. She keeps learning while she teaches.

The fairy tale entrusts educational figures with a precise responsibility: to build a space in which the child can develop knowledge while keeping their own inner language.

Pepilandia turns this responsibility into a creature. To find out what happens when a Pepilena Magna truly steps into Solomon J.'s story, one has to meet her in the pages.

Anusha Bhama Gukhool is the author of Solomon J. in the village of the Pepileni.