IERG Summer Training: Day Two

Imaginative Education Summer Training

Vancouver, British Columbia

DAY TWO

Ok. We have the back story, we have the new idea ... now what? Application! If only it were that easy ...

Today was a day mostly of trying to transfer our knowledge of IE into real applications for the classroom. We began this a bit yesterday with several games and small group work, focused either on getting our heads around IE concepts or getting our heads into our curricula. Both kinds were quite helpful for me.

Today was a bit more difficult, as I was really trying to stick my head in my teaching field - emergent curriculum - to see what I saw in the context of IE. First, a few preliminary thoughts ...

- Egan introduces and describes the cognitive tools of each kind of understanding as to be expected of children as they grow and continue to observe and interact with their surroundings. In the midst of all of our hypothetical work today (What activity would you do to bring Jokes and Humor into a unit on eels in the 5th grade?), I found myself reaching for this idea: in the classroom, cognitive tools are the children's first, and the teachers' second. I am drawn to and can make sense of any subject matter for myself, but, in the emergent classroom, I'm more interested in what sense the children are making of it.

- Thus, when I was sticking my head back into the image and experience of an emergent curriculum classroom, what I found was I was observing students' reactions, behaviors, and engagement with questions like: "What cognitive tools are at work here?" ... "What binary opposites is this student feeling the tension between in their experience with this material?" ... "What heroic quality is that student drawn to in that content?" ...

We had been asked to bring with us a topic from our curriculum that we were interested in fleshing out with the IE frameworks. Coming from emergent curriculum, this put me in a slight conundrum, of course. We don't have curricula to work with at the beginning of the year. As the name suggests, a curriculum emerges from the several provocations, reactions, and interactions that occur in one classroom, from each of which will emerge, of course, a slightly different curriculum. So, I chose to think back to an interest that arose among my students when I was in the thick of the K-3 summer program last year. It was not hard to remember ...

TRICKSTERS

I didn't particularly like Trickster stories, mind you, but I must have told the one that I did know, and about 10 kids were all over it, maybe 5 really into it, and one asked me to tell a Trickster story every single day. So, I went to back in my mind to remember and try to imagine what was drawing them to those stories. Some more thoughts ...

- First, with an age range of K-3, it was most likely - if not, definitely - the case that the children were drawn to the stories for different reasons. For example, I remember a conversation I had with several students about what the difference is between a good trick and bad trick. One Kindergartner piped up with no hesitation: "A good trick is when you don't get caught, and a bad trick is when you do." A 3rd grader protested, providing the more nuanced observation: "A good trick is when you're working for good, and a bad trick is when you're working for bad, when you want something bad to happen, versus something good."

- Further, I'd suspect that even in the case of each age group, say K-1 and 2-3, each child within that group was processing those stories using a different constellation of cognitive tools. I remember one particular boy, the one who asked me to tell a Trickster story every single day ... was the one student with the most behavioral - specifically aggressive - difficulties. He had just finished 1st grade, I believe, and also very aural, re-telling stories in exactly the tone and rhythm, in which I had spoken. Even if children his age were feeling the tension of the Trickster figure between good and bad, the significance and meaning of "good" and "bad" to him was, I suspect, vastly different than to other children.

So, stay with me, with my head stuck back into the emergent curriculum classroom, looking around with the spectacles of IE ...