rooted in growth: letters from a young teacher

The Hunger Games continue

2011-04-25T18:27:00.000-07:00

The last time I wrote about my middle schoolers' favorite trilogy The Hunger Games, we were writing reading journal entries together about it. This was my way of modeling with them what reading journal entries should look and sound like. This was a fine idea, but soon after, once I started reading the first book, myself, I was inspired to write my own journal entries to them, so they could see what kind of thinking happens as you move through a book, not just after you've finished.

These entries have been a real hit, and I think some of them have particularly enjoyed playing the more experienced reader as they read all my thoughts, observations, feelings and predictions. Here are some snippets:

Chapters 1-3
I'm finding myself trying to make sense of the world of this book. We don't find out until Chapter 3 that it is futuristic: Panem apparently rose out of the "ruins of North America", and it seems that it stretches across the whole continent, because the Capitol is where the Rockies used to be (West) and District 12, where Katniss lives, is where Appalachia used to be (East). But it sounds like things aren't terribly different, because District 12 is known for coal mining, just like Appalachia is known for mining today.

Student 1: I am going to have to disagree with you ... I think that it looks very different. My mental image is more everything seems a little more old-fashioned. Do you imagine District 12 to be very big? At first, I thought it was pretty small, but it's sort of hard to imagine how big a place is in a book because the author really only gives you a few places that the character goes. For example, Katniss goes to the town square, the mayor's house, Gale's house, the bread shop, and the Victors' village. Do you like Katniss?

Chapters 4-6
I'm trying to make sense of Katniss' protection of herself and distrust of so many others. Her obvious suspicion of her mother stands in such sharp contrast to her fond memories of her father, who taught her how to hunt. On p. 52, Katniss recalls that she was named after a plant that her father once pointed out to her in the forest. "I heard my father's voice joking, 'As long as you can find yourself, you'll never starve.'" I wonder if this line will have some figurative significance later on, because of the double meaning of "finding yourself."

Student 2: What seems amazing to me is that Katniss seems to have so many troubles, doubts and confusion about herself. Obviously (following stereotypical plot lines), the main character is supposed to be admirable, and I suppose she is, but she doesn't seem that way. I think a good story would support that uncertainty and eventually mend it through the course of it. I am anxious to see if, by the end, Katniss is more self-confident and solid, if she eventually comes to match her physical stance, emotionally.

Chapters 11-16
I've figured out one thing that is so successful about Collins' writing style - the end of every chapter brings some comment or event that presents something new and exciting to the story. Like at the end of Chapter 12: "It would be hard to miss the wall of fire descending on me." At this point, I'm realizing that I could just skip to the end of each chapter to see how the plot develops.
Chapters 17-25
Before reading these chapters fully, I skimmed to the end of each of them. And remarkable, I'm able to get a good picture of how the story progresses without feeling like I've missed too many important details.

Student 3: I understand your findings of those little "cliffhangers" that always seemed to be there in the first book. I hate to say it, but I think that book was the best for that technique. I have noticed that I have relentless bashed The Hunger Games in my letters. Some of these things were about the character, and about the lack of action [in the third book]. So I wonder, what exactly makes me want to read it? Maybe the pressure to find out what happens in the end, or just to see if it gets better. "Better" to me might be more action or someone dying to spice it up a little. Or to see the Capitol do something crazy. But this "better" is different for everyone.

What I notice as I continue to read their journals is that their entries are not necessarily changing according to what I've written in my own entries. But I do find their responses to my entries, and to my questions to their entries, to be ever more genuine, and not so much the kind of automatic writing students can fall into the habit of producing. Here I was, trying to figure out how to teach them how to write about their reading, when all I had to do was do what I wanted them to do, first.

Fading through the story

2011-04-20T18:58:00.000-07:00

My students are well on their way, learning and practicing their stories for class performances at lunch next week. Parallel to work in small Story Circles of four students each, we've had some all-class workshop time, exploring one's own body as a material for developing one's story for performance.

Some background, though: Reggio Emilia pedagogy utilizes a variety of artistic materials to encourage children to express and describe their ideas. This approach is grounded in the idea that children speak in a hundred languages, and the materials allow for more diverse expression, and deeper learning for both student and teacher.

So, being accustomed to artistic materials, I asked the children: What if you didn't have materials to work with, but instead, used your body as a material to make your story your own?

You could act out your story. The movement of your body could help you think of words that would be good.

I sort of agree, but acting is really different than movement. Acting is saying lines. While I am telling the story I would do the thing, the movement that goes with the story.

If your story has two perspectives you could go from one to the other. Like, Max and the beasts in my story, Where the Wild Things Are. You can switch off between perspectives.
How is your body going to help you do that?
It could help explain how they move. How they’re different from each other, and not the same.

I know that names put a color in my mind, so maybe you could put a movement with a name. You could think about what movement comes to your mind about a character, and then move like that character.

From there, we went to the workshop, exploring the perspective of familiar characters from stories I had told, as well as the characters of their stories. They went from the extreme of despair to the extreme of wonder as they walked, as a merchant, through the bitter cold up to a magnificent, magical castle. They went from being that merchant as he beheld the ugliest beast one could imagine to becoming that beast, and walking through the classroom as he would walk. They contemplated how the characters of their stories stand, walk, gesture, and express their thoughts on their face...

How was it? What did they learn?

It felt good. Just closing my eyes and imagining it, how the Beast looked and how he walked. It created a really good mental image in my mind. And I was able to act it out really well. I had a lot of space, so I could do whatever I needed to do. With materials, it’s different, because you can’t really change the way they look or move.

I think body motions really enhance the mental images for people.

It felt kind of strange to be transferring into those creatures. It was kind of fun to act out what the different creatures looked like, and maybe see what the merchant would look like, because I was also watching other people.

It felt like you were fading through the story, from one part of the story to the next.

As we gear up for our performances for each other next week, I gradually sense that these storytellers are actively making their stories their own. We talked about this early on - how necessary it is to learn a story, and then let go of the "original", so that one can develop one's own interpretation of the story. As they gather these experiences, I wonder what they are finding: How does a storyteller make a story their own? What materials are at hand and the most useful?

The Girl Who Fell From the Sky

2011-04-15T19:18:00.000-07:00

This isn't an easy thing to write about. I read this book recently, and wondered whether it would be meaningful to my middle schoolers. I wasn't sure if they could take the graphic detail of a tragic accident scene, until they were telling me about all the details of The Hunger Games. I thought, if they can take children fighting each other to the death in futuristic societies, they can take a little horror from the real world.

Well ... it's not quite that simple. Having not taught this age group before, I was still piecing together the whole picture of what literature to bring in for them, and how, exactly, to read a book - there are multiple ways, of course - when considering it for a classroom setting.

I handed the book off to an eighth-grader, who reported back to me that she really enjoyed it, but wouldn't recommend it to just anyone in her class. She suggested I create a shelf of "mature reading", which would require parents' permission to read.

Simultaneously, a parent (who also happens to be a teacher) wondered to me whether she was being too overprotective in thinking that this book was not appropriate for middle school. I shared some of my thinking behind bringing the book in, and then went to consult with the student I mentioned above. That night, the parent emailed me with a more lengthy description of her thoughts and experiences with the book (which she had read).

I appreciated and learned a great deal from her approach to conversation with me. Never did I feel accused, never did she assert assumptions, never did I feel shamed for my decision. In fact, I noticed that, instead of directing the matter to me, directly, she reflected on her own assumptions first: Am I being too overprotective? That approach opened up the opportunity for me to reflect on my own assumptions, in return: Am I not being protective enough?

Our correspondence was not lengthy, but just enough for me to feel that I have a clearer picture of choosing literature for middle schoolers to read. Still not complete, but important gaps have been filled, and my questions for further pondering continue.

And yet, I feel like this experience was not primarily a lesson in choosing literature for students. It was, first and foremost, a lesson in living in community. As teachers, we play a role in our communities, but not to the exclusion of others' expertise. We look to parents for the understanding that only they can offer, the pieces of the bigger picture that only they can fill. And when we do, we must always be mindful of our assumptions, question ourselves before questioning others, and remember always to support each other in the valuable roles we have in our community together.

How are mental images built?

2011-04-10T12:56:00.000-07:00

I have started a unit on storytelling with our 2nd/3rd grade class, and we are already off on a roll. For myself, I am very interested in how the children can help me understand what difference telling a story makes from reading it - what the difference in experience is, and means for them. However, I know they will have questions of their own...

To begin our focus, I told the story of Beauty and the Beast, and asked the children to consider what stood out to them the most about the experience of hearing that story. They worked with drawing, writing, painting and watercolor to give voice to that response. What resulted was a beautiful array of images from the story. Many of them talked about the mental images they had of the story, a term they have used before in reading and writing. These images ranged, but a good chunk of them depicted either the Beast or the scene where Beauty's father first comes across the Beast's castle.

At first, I was a bit frustrated, because I thought they were responding too much to the story, and not enough to the experience. However, a conversation with a colleague made clear to me that the mental images were the most significant part of the experience. If I want to know more about the experience they were having, I must allow them to name the part of the experience they know, and then dive deeper into that.

So, our next step was to consider: How are mental images built? How do we make them in our minds, and what's happening for us as listeners as these mental images from a story come to us?

Here are some of the ideas different children expressed:

There are two ways - how the teller who tells the story describes what’s happening. If they actually say I walked into summer and all the leaves were this color, then it really gives a detailed image. It also depends on the person who’s making the actual mental image, because they need to listen to the person telling the story, otherwise they don’t get it.

For me, mental images could be called portable art, because, I mean, if you look around, you can always see something, and that’s an image, really. And I guess when you hear something that triggers it, but you don’t see anything that’s related to it, then you have to use your mind and the words kind of give it detail. You need to not use your hands, but use your mind, and use it in a different way than controlling your hands like in a painting or drawing or coloring, but in another way, to do it itself.

I think it’s millions of little shapes in your brain. When you hear something, your eyes may have seen it on TV or something, or they can just make it up. If they saw it, it’s easier to make the image, because they’ve already seen it, and already have a clear image of what it is. So I think it’s millions of little shapes coming together to fit into this one image.

Well, I think when you hear a word, for example, chicken pox, you think: What do chicken pox look like? And your mind thinks. Your mind is a separate being, but who does a lot of the thinking. You and your mind together - you’re the one who has to hear it, and then your mind helps you think about it.

As I read over these theories, I remember how complex the human brain is. My favorite part about the conversation I got to have with these students was that we were talking about something that brain scientists can't completely explain! The students were researching with me by reflecting on their experiences and noticing things about their own thinking.

Where to now?

Our next step, after studying our experience of listening to a story, is to move towards identifying a story we want to tell. I don't want to do anything with these thoughts on mental images quite yet, until the children move into the process of practicing how to make those same mental images possible for their audience. I wonder what else they will have to say then? How will mental images of the stories they tell help them make their stories their own??

Updates soon ...

What made you think that?

2011-04-07T21:29:00.000-07:00

I got my first reading journal entries from my middle-schoolers this week. What a joy to read! Insightful thoughts and strong opinions, everything one would expect from well-read teenagers. Except, of course, any iota of evidence to back up their opinions.

As a result, our question of the day today was: What made you think that? I emphasized to them that for every opinion they offer, they must back it up, especially if they are trying to persuade someone who has not read the book to do so (or dissuade, as the case may be). How else are they going to know what you're talking about?

So, I put out a challenge to them: We would write a journal entry collaboratively about a book they had all read. The choice: The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins, which I, conveniently have not read. ("What?!" they gasped, and one of them immediately took a copy from the library shelf and shoved it into my hands. I guess I'll have to now.)

"Where do we start?" I asked.

"The Hunger Games is amazing!" sounded one student, exuberantly.
"It’s fascinating because it’s in the future," said another.
And then another, and another, and another. But - the golden question - what made you say that? Back and forth, they opined, and I challenged. It was the most fun I've had with teenagers in a long while. Here is the result of just five minutes:

The Hunger Games was amazing! It’s fascinating because it’s in the future. Technology has progressed, but we (humanity) are socially digressing. The Capitol is a totalitarian government at the center of 13 districts. It has initiated the “Hunger Games”, where children aged 12-18 fight each other to the death. Everyone must watch as a reminder that the Capitol is all-powerful. Also, the Capitol is keeping the districts in poverty by keeping resources for themselves. Despite these horrific conditions, technology has advanced to the point that animals are genetically engineered and surgeries are available to dye skin color. The irony of this situation is that despite this technology, common people in the districts cannot access it and are struggling too much to survive to even think about it.

We will continue next week. I'll keep you posted.

Karen Gallas, Imagination and Literacy

2011-04-01T22:55:00.000-07:00

This book is officially changing my educator's mind. And I'm not even finished. There will be more parts to this as I continue reading.

Karen Gallas is a teacher-researcher from Massachusetts who has written several books that float around the Charter colleagueship here. Several other teachers suggested I read it, so here I go. I now see why they were so encouraging.

For now, what a first read of this book has offered me is a completely new understanding of the vastness of the terms IMAGINATION and LITERACY. I realized I had gotten trapped in our common understanding of these terms, having forgotten how far-reaching they are, and completely losing sight of how fundamental they both are to ALL learning.

I will be very unprecise in my citations, simply because it's more important to me to flesh out my ideas, which I'm sure will blend with hers, and I'll lose track of the boundary. For now, allow me to get these ideas out, then on my second reading, I can provide a little bit more careful reflection.

First, IMAGINATION. Forming images in the mind. Is this not the fundamental essence of thought? I hold my glass of milk over an open floor and think of letting go. What will happen? I have a theory it will fall and milk will spill everywhere. How do I know? Most likely, I have seen it happen before. I've seen enough things fall and spill in my life, that just the sight of a glass of milk over an open floor triggers the image of what will happen if I let go. So it is that we can take what we know and create images of what is as of yet unknown to us, what has not yet happened, but could.

Second, LITERACY. Reading and writing, decoding and encoding. Is it only words and letters? Sounds and symbols. Gallas finally settles on "world-making", as she considers the many facets of literacy. Because literacy consists not only of words, but of discourse and vocabulary, which vary from discipline to discipline. Scientific literacy, for example, requires different learning than Spanish literacy. Each discipline step into is like a world of its own, with its own insider language. As we learn this language, and become literate in this discipline, we are making the world of that discipline a part of us and the way we see the world.

All of a sudden, the title Imagination and Literacy takes on a whole new meaning for me. Whereas I would have perhaps previously thought "Creativity and Language Arts", I now think "Images and Worlds in the Making", "Imagining and Internalizing", and "Imagining the World and Being in it" ...

The purpose of the book is to examine the role of imagination in early literacy. Already I am seeing so many connections to a project on storytelling I am planning, and I am sure I will have more write along those lines soon.

For now, how would you flesh out the concepts of IMAGINATION and LITERACY? What do they mean to you?

This book is not a story

2011-03-17T20:38:00.000-07:00

Things got rolling today with my middle school group. With the memory of To Kill a Mockingbird fresh in our minds from yesterday, I wanted to begin thinking about reading comprehension by thinking about how we make sense of any kind of story we're presented with, no matter the medium.

But, to start: my favorite provocation. I picked up a copy of Mockingbird and asked them: Is this a story?

Yes, they said, unanimously.
What if I told you I don't think it is?
Confusion. Outcry. Disgust on their faces.

Excellent.

Well, it's a novel, they said. It's fiction. It's a book, with pages and a cover.
Is a book a story? I asked.
No, it could be a dictionary.
A book is a physical thing, and the story is inside it. In the words and the pictures.
The story is more like thoughts or ideas. It's mental. It's what's being told, it's not the physical thing, the physical book.
And a book is different from a story because you can tell the story in a movie or in a picture.
You're thinking of different media through which we can communicate stories. But what is the story you're communicating? What is the story?
It's a series of events.
It's stuff that happens to people. Someone can imagine it, like in The BFG, or it can be something that really happened, like World War II.
Where does a story live? When I open up this book and read it, do I get the exact story Harper Lee had in mind for me to read?
Yes. No. Sort of. Everybody has a different interpretation of a story.
But it's still the same story. It's written down in the book! A story doesn't change just by reading it. You can read a story, or depict it in a picture, but it's still the same story. It's not a different interpretation. For example, Mockingbird was a book, and then it was depicted on stage. But it was still the same story.
So, you're saying you can depict a story without interpreting it?
Yes.
And depicting a story is simply recalling a series of events that happened.
Yes.
Is a series of events still a story if no one ever tells anyone about it?
Yes.

Unfortunately, I didn't have my audio recorder with me, so I am going off of some furious notes I was taking plus recollection. Regardless, some really rich questions from this discussion, and I am particularly intrigued by the two that came up at the end:
- Can you depict a story without interpreting it?
- Is a series of events still a story if no one is there to tell it?

I stopped them to transition to the next topic - how we understand the stories we read. It was imperative, though, to maintain my position: this book contains no story. Because, you see, if the story was part of the book, we wouldn't be able to access it. What is in the book? Symbols. Words. Code. It's just a code that someone translated their ideas into, for someone else to find. When that someone else comes along - that would be us, readers - the idea is constructed based on the code, albeit within the context of someone else's brain. Still, it is the human that is required to make any sense of it at all - without it, the code bears no meaning.

So, readers, that's what we do. We decode. We construct the ideas others have left in translation for us and hope that we might do them justice by understanding. How do we understand? That's called comprehension. How do we comprehend? We use a host of strategies to access the meaning of the many levels of the texts we read. Many of them are automatic to us at this point, but by making ourselves more aware of the strategies we use, the better we can use them, and the more likely we are to learn further strategies. The more strategies we practice, the more we comprehend. The more we comprehend, the better we understand. The more we understand, the more we can begin to feel a part of something bigger than just ourselves and think about who we are.

That’s why we read.

"In charge" and "in control"

2011-03-03T23:40:00.000-08:00

Today I am recalling something a colleague shared with us at the Charter before leaving the school for retirement. She left us with a challenge, I suppose you could call it, to work always toward an ideal classroom, in which "the teachers are in charge, but the students are in control of their learning." Not only would this take a significant load of a teachers' shoulders, but it would allow children more ownership of their learning, and be more actively involved in how their learning develops.

It's been nice these last few days to be doing some substitute work within the Charter, but in different classrooms than I'm usually in. I've been with the younger students in the preschool and pre-Kindergarten, which are a bit more loosely scheduled during the day. Play seems to have absolute rule, and it is always refreshing to watch them play for such extended spans of time.

In the back of my mind, I am reflecting on the project work I've observed recently, especially on the relationship between playfulness in project work and its extension into formal instruction. And I'm wondering about that oh so delicate balance between the two - when do teachers "take charge" and when do they let the children "take control"? I'm still making sense of that as I look around and prepare for some own mini-lessons and units of my own coming up.

For now, one thing makes a whole lot of sense: If students are to take more ownership of their learning, they must be given the opportunity to know themselves as learners, to follow their own choices, observe its consequences, and make meaning of everything they do. As Alfie Kohn says, "Children don't learn how to make decisions by following directions."

As I watch young children in their play, and think about the positive energy going into the project work in the older classroom, I have an immense amount of trust in walking that fine line between "in charge" and "in control". And that trust is helping me trust myself.

Project work

2011-02-28T23:20:00.000-08:00

Project work is but one aspect of teaching at the Charter, and yet, at some point of the year, it appears to take over everything else. At least that's what's happening in our 2nd/3rd grade class.

At the beginning of the year, teachers are engaging the children in a variety of experiences, often directly related to the natural world and/or artistic materials and/or community issues ... it's very open-ended, it seems. At some point, teachers begin to identify potentials for project work and continue homing in on a topic by providing experiences and provocations that directly respond to children's observations of prior experiences. It is very much in the spirit of the "ball toss" metaphor that Reggio offers - teachers and students collaborate in the emergence of curriculum.

In our classroom, it is all about BUGS. Bugs are everywhere - dead ones, live ones, small ones, bugs with wings, bugs with shed skin, bugs with more legs than one can count, bugs that lay eggs, bugs that hatch from those eggs, bugs from home, bugs from the school meadow, bugs that other classes bring to us ... BUGS!

In response to a lot of dramatic play around bugs, the teacher of the class decided to engage the children in a game of writing a play about their bugs. One morning, out of nowhere, there appeared a green box on her desk, titled: "How to Make a Play". We were stunned! It was as if the game was made just for the class.

It was, of course. As the teacher began to explain the game to the children, I was remembering our conversation earlier about what parameters to put on the game to make sure it had enough structure and enough provocation for creativity.

Slowly, but surely, I am seeing what this ball toss implies for the teacher... I am seeing how playful, open-ended, and almost celebratory this project work time is, and yet, how deeply it reaches into children's thinking:

If there were no bugs, the earth might not survive.

Don't step on bugs, because they're living creatures like you. We're both living creatures.

Bugs are us, we are bugs - What we do to the bugs affects us, too.

To contract this open-ended session, the teacher went on, after the game (which was part of "Project Work" on the schedule) to begin Reading with a mini-lesson on inferences, based on a folktale about a bug. A few days later, in the midst of a poetry unit in Writing, a poem about stink bugs emerges on the easel. Project work is everywhere!

What did John Muir say? Something along the lines of: Tug on anything, and you will find it is connected to everything else. So, also, is the network of learning.

Changing Educational Paradigms

2011-02-17T13:29:00.000-08:00

Ken Robinson: Changing Educational Paradigms
Animation by RSA Animate

This is one of those videos / lectures that you need to listen to more than once. You need to listen to it twice, three times, four times, maybe even five times before you really comprehend what the speaker is trying to get across to you. This is the kind of talk that goes much further than "a good idea" and reaches much deeper than "oh, that's just what I would say." At least for me, watching Ken Robinson's TED talk on Changing Educational Paradigms - for the fifth time, now - shook something inside me so hard, that something I hadn't really noticed for a long time came out.

This talk is about changing educational paradigms, which means changing our ideas about why and how we learn, and, therefore, why and how we teach. It traces the origins of our current educational system to intellectual and economic eras that are long-gone and, while a significant part of our history, in great need of updating to today's realities.

What is so significant about this talk for me is that it reminds me there is still a piece of that old paradigm inside me. Watching RSAnimate's superb illustration of the ideas Ken Robinson presents, I remember instances of that paradigm in action from my own schooling experience. I remember how academic knowledge was what made me smart, and how learning was divided into separate disciplines with separate departments of teachers. I remember the expectation that I would get good grades, so that I could go to a good college, so that I could ... what, exactly?

This is not to say that I regret my education - I was extremely lucky to have insightful teachers and supportive parents. I enjoyed my classes, because I enjoyed learning, just by itself, so it was no great struggle for me to get the good grades I wanted. And I went to a good college because I wanted to explore the academic community further, to meet scholars, and, perhaps, become one, myself. But it has taken this long - 10 years after graduating from my schooling - to realize that the journey of my education was never for the sake of my "achievement" - that is, an external evaluation of my learning - but for the sake of my learning as I would evaluate it.

Even in the midst of my internship at the Charter, I can feel a heartbeat of that old paradigm, asking me what I'm going to have to show for myself at the end of this, and whether I'm really doing what's expected. The biggest gift the Charter community has offered me is a kind of Get Out of Jail Free card, which allows me not to think as much about those questions, and more about the deeper questions that drive my learning forward. By staying true to myself as a learner, I will naturally come to whatever it is I'll have to show for myself at the end, because it will have come from me, and it will mean something to me.

It is no easy task to battle this old paradigm within me. It's actually pretty painful to think that I might very well have to kill it at some point: kill it, bury it, mourn it, and then - and only then - truly and completely embark into a new paradigm. But how do I kill something that is a part of who I am, and that is a part of my story? That is what is so painful for me, so painful about any paradigm shift. No wonder such shifts have rarely passed without bloodshed. And don't think there aren't real and formidable tensions in the world of education between paradigms.

I just never thought there could be such violence inside myself at the same time.

Currere mappa?

2011-02-08T21:39:00.000-08:00

As I continue thinking about curriculum mapping (CM) this week, I'm wondering about the analogies and metaphors used to define and explore CM, what do the etymologies of the words "curriculum" and "map" offer to our understanding of the concept of curriculum mapping?

Whenever I want to get inside the meaning of a word, I always go back to its origins. Often, the richest metaphors of meaning come from the words, from which today's language is originally derived. So, here we go.

From www.etymonline.com:

CURRICULUM
from Modern Latin transferred use of classical Latin curriculum "a running, course, career" (also "a fast chariot, racing car"), from currere "to run, move quickly" (same origins as current)

MAP
shortening of Middle English mapemounde "map of the world" (late 14c.), from Medieval Latin mappa mundi "map of the world," first element from Latin mappa "napkin, cloth" (on which maps were drawn). The verb map is first attested 1580s; "to put (something) on the map".

It's fascinating to consider these two etymologies, especially when one considers them together. When people think of curriculum, yes, we think of a course, but a course of study. The idea of a race course, reminds me of the time crunch so many teachers feel when trying to fit a course of study into a 9-month school year. But it also makes me wonder if we can understand a fast-moving course of study as the journey that we take as a classroom community, no matter what the content. I feel like we forget that it's not the content of curriculum that is moving through the year - we are. We're the ones moving through the experiences of life, constructing an understanding of the world as we interact with each other, with text, and with our observations. This is, indeed, a fast-moving process, hard to capture in the moment, and yet, perhaps the very essence of our schooling experience.

How fitting, then, that map comes from the cloth, on which our geographical understanding of the world was recorded and depicted. The first maps were not constructed with the purpose of determining what course of travel was to be taken, but to record the courses of discovery that had already been taken. Lewis and Clark, for example, mapped their route and their surroundings as they went, because they had no idea what the Louisiana Territory held. I wonder if teachers can consider themselves in a similar position: instead of mapping a route through known territory, mapping what they notice and encounter in places they haven't been before.

Combined, the origins of curriculum mapping might be currere mappa. To run on a cloth. Hmm, not entirely satisfying. But what if we thought of it as a clue to humans' early cognizance of representing one's journey to the world? What if "running on a cloth" meant reflecting on our journey by abstractly - symbolically - watching ourselves run the course of our lives in a way that allows us to make sense of where we're running to, where we're running from, and what surroundings we interact with in the process? All of this seems to support the idea that curriculum mapping is not the mapping of a journey-to-be, but of a journey as it continues to unfold, day by day, experience by experience.

Curriculum mapping: Responses

2011-02-07T23:00:00.000-08:00

Curriculum mapping (CM) is, as you see in my last post, a very complex process of thinking and communicating. Between comparisons to tool belts and medical meetings, it also varies greatly in interpretation once implemented. So I have to ask myself at this point - what do I think of it? What do my colleagues at the Charter think? What does CM really mean for the practice of teaching?

Let me start, perhaps, with the analogies. The first one in Getting Results compares CM to a tool belt that the teacher wears, armed with the hammer of content that nails in the necessary standards with drilling questions and screwdrivers that (how?) turn content into knowledge. I have to be upfront and say I'm not at all enamored by this comparison. To me, this image only maintains traditional notions of knowledge as external from students' bodies and minds, and of curriculum as an objective on the part of the teacher to get as much knowledge from the outside into the students. Apparently with drills and screwdrivers. That sounds worse than the dentist to me.

Jacobs' comparison to medical care is a bit more intriguing to me. (I have two parents in health care who always wonder at how, of the four children between them, none has come close to going into health care. I've realized over time that, as an educator, I may have come the closest.) In schools, as in the world of medicine, "decisions must be made among the actual people who are going to attend to the patient's [student's] needs." She present CM as a hub for cumulative decision making among teachers, demanding a reorganization of teacher meetings around what students need to successfully navigate and reach each benchmark along the way to fulfilling learning standards. I can go further with this analogy, but am left wondering: I can see how such demands of CM can help re-focus teachers on the fact that they teach children before curriculum, but I don't see how CM is making it possible for the day-to-day curriculum to serve and engage the children more directly in their learning.

I think this is a crucial break point between the Charter and other public schools, as far as I can tell. CM may help teachers re-think what and how they are teaching, but it seems to be primarily a tool for a learning community of teachers, not for collaborative learning among teachers and their students.

When we met today at the Charter with Louise to discuss our impressions of CM, our own analogies emerged, gradually wrapping closer and closer around an examination of what purpose maps have in the context of a classroom.

I feel the need to check in with myself about how project questions are evolving. I'm looking for some kind of binder, for example, or some way of organizing how a project evolves.

But the map is not there to prevent us from getting lost. Getting lost is an important part of the process.

Maybe it's not getting lost, but being alive and creative and immersed in what's going on in the classroom.

But I feel the need for something that helps name what you're doing, so that you're understanding it as you're living it.

If we think of it like hiking, the map is the thing we use to keep from getting lost, but when you have that third thing - the magic of emergent curriculum in the moment - you feel you can take the risk of the path that is not on the map.

But there are two kinds of "lost" - there's getting lost in wonder and challenge, and there's also an unproductive lost.

Within this analogy, I began wondering whether mapping is an activity in which we plan curriculum from a preconceived guide - like planning a hiking route according to a map of the area - or as the process of making the map for a piece of uncharted terrain. The question is, then, who is making the map?

As the session continued, I began to realize that the greatest challenge CM faces us with at the Charter is that it is an idea that was conceptualized in a paradigm - the paradigm - that we are trying to move away from. However, in this challenge lies its greatest potential: as one of my colleagues commented:

I feel like, in the work that we are doing, because we represent a paradigm shift in our fundamental ideas about education, we are mapping in this new paradigm, moving from the concept of external knowledge to internal knowledge - once we shift our concept of knowledge, we shift everything else, including planning, assessment, etc. We have to bring people all the way there, including ourselves.

I left our day together with Louise re-grounded, to continue the analogy, in the terrain I find myself on here at the Charter. I have to believe that, because we are mapping within a new paradigm, we are, indeed, the map-makers of our curricula; indeed, we are re-imagining what curriculum can be. Yet, even though I would never have imagined taking on such a task, I know I am not alone. All of us here are making our maps - sometimes with each other, mostly with our students, and always in a communal sense of adventure across the school.

Finally, I wonder if we didn't begin to uncover one of the secrets of this new paradigm today. My colleague above described "moving form the concept of external knowledge to internal knowledge", which relates back to my lack of satisfaction with the analogy of the tool belt. If we choose to take on curriculum mapping in an educational paradigm, in which knowledge comes first from within the individual, and grows through experience with the world and exchange in community, then our first lesson seems to be this: Not only are we the map-makers, notating our observations of unknown ground, we - with our students - are imagining the terrain into being to begin with.

Curriculum mapping: What is it?

2011-02-07T19:32:00.000-08:00

Today's opening professional development with Louise on curriculum mapping was so rich, but I realize it will take a two separate posts to explain it all! So I'm starting with what I've learned - albeit, in a very quick inquiry - about the concept of curriculum mapping (CM).

After our conversation today, I noticed a book on the library shelf on CM: Getting Results with Curriculum Mapping (2004), edited by Heidi Hayes Jacobs. Jacobs, I believe, wrote the first definitive work on CM, called Mapping the Big Picture (1997), and is now the Director of Curriculum 21, a company that teaches, coaches, and supports schools and districts in implementing curriculum mapping.

After a brief read of the book, and some Internet research, the impression I get is that CM is a re-imagining of the purpose of state standards and benchmarks for learning. Currently, teachers look at what students are expected to know of their specialty, and derive their curriculum accordingly - either in grade-level teams, department-based teams, or as individuals. CM seems to prod teachers to think more collaboratively about the standards as a trajectory of learning rather than a fragmented series of topics to learn. As a result, they can better understand how their specialty (grade level and/or subject) fits into the larger arc of a student's journey acquiring necessary skills and knowledge.

The “work” of CM is layered. Teachers must first identify as a collective learning community, across grade levels and subject departments. They must come to consensus within their specialties as to what requires consistency and what requires flexibility in each subject area. As a result of this deliberation, schools and districts achieve an “essential” map, a skeleton, perhaps, for the curriculum of each grade level and subject area to be built upon.

CM yields no finished product, but rather, an established culture of communication among teachers. With the help of technology, teachers enter their broad plans for a year’s worth of curriculum into a database, which can be accessed by all other teachers involved. Categories of information on each unit include:
Essential Questions: overarching questions that guide instruction and provide connections to big ideas beyond the classroom
Content: broad topic of study, including major subcategories and underlying concepts
Skills: required for mastery of big ideas, including demonstration of knowledge and generally critical skills
Assessments: evidence of understanding of big ideas, usually based in product or performance, with flexibility for varying expressions of understanding
Activities: support the learning of skills
Resources: print materials, field trips, audio/visual media, and teacher resources

Once units are entered into the database, the information they provide becomes fluid, accessible to everyone. At this point, rather than continuing making curriculum decisions by grade level or department team, teachers can meet in “vertical” (in groups of K-2 teachers, for example) and “cross-disciplinary” teams to look at student performance data and determine how the curriculum can be adjusted to better meet their needs. And that is the real crux of CM: the point of curriculum is to ensure that the needs of students are met in the trajectory of their K-12 education. When Jacobs writes about the imaginary student present at each teacher meeting, meant to keep conversation focused on the students, I remember a colleague of mine who continually reminded me, “We don’t teach curriculum, we teach students.” Though it takes an immense amount of work to implement CM, Jacobs considers it a necessary adjustment to the current paradigm of curriculum planning and decision-making.

Getting Results consists of several chapters by varying educators and administrators who report on how CM has been implemented in their schools, and what they have found in the process. Each examines CM from a different perspective: a whole school district, an independent school, the principal's role, necessary technology, etc. Jacobs writes a few chapters, herself, providing some synthesis and overarching ideas and questions involved in the process of institutionalizing CM.

Two interesting analogies caught my eye in this book. The first compared CM to a tool belt, complete with the following one-to-one comparison (p.11):
... [C]urriculum mapping is like a tool belt because it contains or holds information about what a teacher really teaches:
The belt is the calendar that organizes the tools
The belt buckle allows for adjustable pacing through the school year
The content hammers in the standards - the nails
The mapping tool drills in essential questions for authentic probing and learning
The pliers (skills) hold the content, standards, and assessments together
The screwdriver turns content into knowledge
The measuring tape can be used to assess student buildings (products)

The other analogy is offered by Jacobs in the last chapter of the book (p.131):
If a patient is admitted to the hospital for surgery, who among the professionals should meet to give the best possible care? Who should meet to work toward ultimate recovery and health? The best interest of the patient is served when the surgeon works with the chain of care - from the internal medicine physician, to the receiving nurse, to the anesthesiologist... In short, decisions must be made among the actual people who are going to attend to the patient’s needs.
So must teachers organize themselves when making curriculum decisions: not around subject area or grade level, but around the students they teach. This suggestion reminds me of my work in schools in Germany, where students are organized into classes, based in one classroom, while teachers roam from one classroom to another to do their teaching. Each teacher still has his/her specialty, but is responsible, for example, for teaching that subject in classes 10a, 7b, and 5c. (Numbers correspond to grade level, the letters to sections) I’m not entirely aware if German teachers meet together to make curriculum decisions, but I can imagine that such a school set-up would make such decision-making, as Jacobs is suggesting, possible.

She continues her analogy: One place where there is no opportunity to for thoughtful planning and preparation is the emergency room, where medical personnel know almost nothing about the prior record or experience of each arriving patient. There is an urgent, anxious tone to the set of decisions that must be made quickly without benefit of a strong understanding of the patient’s experience. Sometimes it seems as if we give an emergency room education, because we have so little good information about our learners.

What I hear Jacobs saying is that we are currently so focused on the crisis of education, we’ve become too focused on the content we are teaching, and lost sight of the students. I might argue that this has long been the case, how public education was designed from the beginning. But more of my response in later posts. I found a very helpful video on YouTube of an interview with Jacobs that continues with this analogy further: click here to view. She presents a hypothetical situation, in which she imagines a student’s history of learning traveling with her the way a patient’s medical history travels. No matter where that patient is being cared for, his caregivers can access the most important information about his allergies, past surgeries, medications, etc. Likewise, teachers could also have access to the curriculum each of their students has already experienced, including big ideas and critical skills, so that they can properly build on prior learning.

Finally, I’ll briefly summarize with a third analogy, taken from the name of curriculum mapping, itself. Curriculum comes from the Latin for “course”, as in a path to walk. In this way, curriculum mapping intends for teachers to create a map to help them guide students across the terrain of their learning. Because students are being held accountable to the same standards of learning, it is important that teachers come to a consensus about important benchmarks along the way (benchmarks also being a term commonly used in the language of educational standards). Each student may walk their own path and build their own collection of experiences in their education, but teachers must work together to assure that each path hits the necessary benchmarks, so that all students end their K-12 journey with an equitable collection of valuable learning experiences.

Other useful links:
Heidi Hayes Jacobs on Critical Transformations
Curriculum mapping overview (Powerpoint)

Open House

2011-02-07T18:47:00.000-08:00

This week is Open House at the Charter School. This means that upwards of 100 teachers will be with us for part of the week, observing classes, learning about Reggio Emilia and inquiry-based learning, and exchanging their reflections on their own work with each other. While certainly stressful on the Charter teachers and students, it is sure to be an invaluable opportunity to come together in community with fellow colleagues who are chewing on the same questions I am, perhaps.

It also means Louise Cadwell is with us, leading workshops and lecturing on Reggio Emilia, curriculum mapping, and incorporating "21st century skills", as she calls them, into today's teaching and learning. She is the recent founder of Cadwell Collaborative, a consulting service for educators and schools interested in implementing curricula that support 21st century skills, including sustainability education. She’s also well-known within the Reggio community for two books based on her work in the original Reggio Emilia schools: Bringing Reggio Emilia Home and Bringing Learning to Life.

I'm looking forward to blogging about the week as it progresses. It will take a number of posts, I’m sure to sort out all of my experiences, reflections, and studies.

Music Explore

2011-01-19T22:24:00.000-08:00

Most of my students know me as a storyteller, a passion I’ve made no secret of. But this passion came about partially because the children kept asking for them. Stories are so innate to human communication, I wonder how I could be a teacher without recognizing myself as a storyteller?! Another fundamental genre, you might call it, of human expression, culture, and creativity, is music.

My mother says I was singing before I learned to talk. Throughout my school years, I studied four instruments, and that doesn't include the instruments I played for fun and experimentation, or the creative endeavors I've taken on as an adult. An entire corner of my small studio apartment is devoted to displaying and storing a variety of instruments, and believe me, they do not get dusty.

So why have I not brought this passion into the classroom? When this question struck me, my gut reaction was: It never seemed to fit. Whether in a curriculum-based classroom or not, there was rarely an overt opportunity for it. When I thought about this question further, within the context of emergent curriculum, where I'm beginning to make my pedagogical home, I realized that I'm focused on the passions, interests, and curiosities children bring with them into the community. So focused, in fact, that I forget what passions I, as the teacher, bring to the community. Children bring so much joy and excitement about what they experience outside the classroom, and we wish to honor that experience as part of their learning - why not honor our experience outside the classroom as part of our teaching?

So, in came the instruments last week: guitar, banjo, tamborine, bodhran, and washboard.

At first, everyone was hands on. Ulee and Bilal couldn’t seem to keep their hands on an instrument for a few seconds before being taken with another instrument next to it. Ulee started by strumming the banjo, still in the case, Bilal played the bodhran (pronounced “BOH-run”, a kind of Irish drum), Kerrick and Tessa examined the guitar, and each instrument was passed around for everyone to explore.

There were also plenty of observations and wonderings to be made by the children. The banjo held the greatest intrigue. Charlie said, “It looks like they started out wanting to make a drum, but then they changed their minds and wanted to make a guitar instead.” Others wondered what the material was on the banjo that looked like the head of a drum.

Ulee: It looks like hard plastic.
Bilal: Or maybe really thick paper.
Manuel: I think it’s cow bones that were made hollow. Or just hollow-sounding plastic.
Kelsey: It looks like a drum I have at home. It’s made out of animal skin.

Eventually, I picked up my guitar and started playing and singing a song, inviting everyone to play with me on another instrument. Kelsey played her flute: “I was playing all sorts of notes on my flute, but then I stuck to two notes, because I knew they sounded good with what you were playing.” Manuel tried different strokes on the head and the rim of the bodhran. Charlie tried playing the bodhran and the tamborine at the same time.

Everyone got a chance to play all the instruments they wanted. The guitar and banjo were certainly the most popular, and elicited the most observations and reflections.

Kerrick: We don’t usually interact with instruments.
Isaac: Can I strum the guitar with a block? What does that sound like?
Charlie: Look, you can play a guitar and a drum on the banjo at the same time! (strum - hit - strum - hit)
Manuel: I love how you can change the song [chords], ‘cause I really love this one (strums). I’m so excited, because I love music. It feels like I’m in a real band, like The Beatles. I’m pretty much a Beatle, you know, because my mom says I look like them.
Tessa: I’ve never really played a guitar or a banjo. I wish I had one of my own.

Kerrick expressed curiosity about the pins at the end of the neck of the guitar. He turned them and found that it changed the notes of the strings, making them higher or lower.’’

And so has the curiosity, wonder, and experimentation continued several days now. Being so close to my last day at this school, a more in-depth investigation is - unfortunately - not possible. However, it was entirely worth it to me to begin thinking about how a teacher’s interest can be provocation enough to invite children’s curiosities and wonderings. It reminded me to consider my own everyday experiences outside the classroom as equally as valuable to the classroom environment as those of the children. Just as I am teacher everywhere - in and outside the classroom - so am I the entire individual I am, everywhere, in the world, and in the classroom

What is a story? Part 2

2011-01-13T16:32:00.000-08:00

Remember the story about Anansi, and about Nyame, the Sky God who gave him all the stories of the world? I wrote last November about some students ideas of what, exactly, Nyame gave to Anansi when he passed on all those stories. There was talk of bubbles full of pictures, shelves of books, and white stuff like from the brain of Professor Slughorn (from Harry Potter), just to name a few.

Today I was at a local elementary school telling stories, and of course, couldn't resist asking the question again. What do you think Nyame actually gave Anansi? Here are a few ideas from today:

He told him all the stories, because he couldn't give them to him.

Books.

You can't do imagination - it's nothing, so I think he gave him books.

He told him t he stories and Anansi brought them down in his mind to his friends.

Nyame gave Anansi books from his house. I don't know what kind of house ... oh, I know! The library!

It's always fascinating to me, when I ask this question, to see who leans more toward the idea of books versus the idea of telling the stories or transferring knowledge of them from one mind to the next. It makes me wonder where these connections - this schema for stories - comes from. From print-centered literacy curriculum? From our print-based culture of communication? From different learning styles (aural, visual, etc)?

I think about what stories are all the time - I'm a storyteller, after all - but I'm still stuck with this challenge of offering such a concrete definition or picture of it. It's like asking me what air looks like. I breathe it everyday, it is so crucial to my very existence, and downright miraculous ... and yet, so elusive in the concreteness of our perception of the world.

Where do your ideas come from?

2010-12-04T12:21:00.000-08:00

Avery: Manuel, where do your ideas come from?
Manuel: From my imagination. In my brain. Like pictures in my mind.
Avery: Where do the pictures come from?
Manuel: From the TVs in my brain.
Avery: Where did the TVs come from?
Manuel: From the mechanical people in my mind. They build the TVs in my mind. And the airplanes.
Avery: What are the airplanes for?
Manuel: They fly out of my brain to get more ideas.

What is a story?

2010-11-15T23:14:00.000-08:00

There is a story of how Anansi (a well-known trickster figure in West African stories) brought all the stories of the world down to earth. There are several versions published, the most famous of which is probably "A Story, A Story" by Gail E. Haley. I tell a version based on how the story is recorded in a book called "Family of Earth and Sky", edited by John Elder and Hertha D. Wong.

I've always enjoyed telling this story, and have told it many times. However, I will never tell this story the same way again after one of my students, Isaac, asked a question at the end.

Briefly, in the story I tell, Anansi appeals to the Sky God, who originally had all the stories, who tells him he needs to bring him three animals. Anansi goes and manages to trick them all into being caught, takes them up to the Sky God ...

The Sky God was astounded to see that Anansi had, indeed, fulfilled all of the tasks he had assigned. With a heavy heart, the Sky God gave Anansi all the stories of the world. Anansi took them back down to earth to share with all the animals and people. And last I heard, he is still telling them today.
Isaac: So what did the Sky God give him anyway? Like, books or something?

I caught myself beginning to answer, though I didn't know what I thought at the time. Better to bite my lip and ask my favorite question: "What do you think?"

Ted: "If it were a story about a tiger it would be a tiger that goes in a book."
Tessa: "I think it's like little circles with whatever it's about inside. Like if it was a story about butterflies, it would be a bubble with butterflies inside."
Bobby: "It's like in Harry Potter. This guy, Professor Slughorn has a wand and he put it up to his head and pulls a memory out. It's white stuff. So I think it would be white like that. ... See, Dumbledore had a memory in a jar, but it was a fake memory. Well, not a fake memory, but there was something wrong with it, so Slughorn pulled out his memory - the right memory - and put it in a jar for Harry Potter."
Isaac: "But what would it look like if a GOD gave you a story? I think he just started throwing books at him his sack."
Manuel: "It's probably like this piece of paper with stories on them. You look at them for a long time until you can tell the story without looking at the pictures and worlds. Like, it's a piece of paper with words on it. And pictures from the story."
Kerrick: "Maybe they're ghost-like because they were given by a god. Like, invisible, or see-through. He could still see the words because they're darker, but the paper would be invisible."
Charlie: "I don't think they looked like anything. He just made it so that Anansi could tell the stories."

I was blown away by these responses, I felt the breath taken right out of me. Beneath all of these thoughts, there raged the deeper question of what a story really is.

I took advantage of other telling opportunities and gathered the following ideas from other children:
"I think the Sky God took all the stories from where he kept them, like on a bookshelf in his bedroom, and gave them to Anansi."
"I think he just told Anansi all the stories."
In one case, I mentioned: "One girl I know said she thought they were bubbles with pictures from the story inside."
Response: "Oh yeah! And then they pop and come out. When he wants to tell a story, he pulls out the bubble and pops it open and the story pops out!"

The same group of kids from above continued along these lines when I told another story, "The Uwabami", a trickster tale from Japan, when Manuel noted: "At the library, I found a story like that, but it was a little different.
Isaac: "How would you know what the real story is?"
Avery: "What do you think?"
Isaac: Well, just ask the person who wrote it.
Kerrick: But they're probably not alive.
Iver: There is no real story. There's more than one and they're all good.
Charlie: Yeah. Everyone tells it differently.
Bobby: Yeah, you can hear it, you can change it, then pass it on.
Manuel: When a person dies, the person finds it [the story] and changes, and it gets changed and changed and changed until it's so changed that no one can change it anymore.
Avery: Is there a "real" story that we can find somewhere?
Kelsey: Not exactly. There is an original story ... no, there really isn't, because even storytellers tell stories different every time.
Manuel: There was probably a real story far far away and people thought he was a great storyteller and put the story where he lived.
Avery: But let's say we want to find the real story of "The Uwabami". The original. What would we do to find that out?
Kerrick: Maybe the thinking of it was probably a snake. When the author thought of the Uwabami, he thought it should be a snake.
Isaac: We could go to Japan and ask the villagers who the author is.
Tessa: Who is the author?
Avery: Good question. Who wrote that story, or told it first?
Several: You?

I share all of these comments as the stuff I am chewing on as I consider the question of what a story really is. I recall a remarkable woman I met in Germany, a renowned choir leader who went to some high organization in the world of church music, held a hymnal in front of them and said, "There are no hymns in this hymnal." Very controversial, but she stood her ground, arguing that a hymn is not a hymn until it is song, given voice by humans, and heard by humans, in community with each other.

I wonder if the same could not be said for stories?

IS THIS A STORY?

Now, this is a particularly ironic question to ask considering the title. But consider any storybook. Is a book a story? When I recall the choir leader's notion of what constitutes a hymn, I feel I have no choice but to say, No. The book itself is not the story, but that which is read and heard by people.

And yet, the story communicated in this book is quite different than other versions of that same story. So, it seems the representation of the story does matter, as there are several possible ways to depict the same story.

And yet again, I recall an idea - a claim, really - that Kieran Egan shared this past summer (at a summer course in Imaginative Education). It is, at least, my memory that he warned against the belief in our current print-based, information-driven culture that knowledge exists on the paper, or worse, "in the file" or "on my phone." (I have had several friends refer to their iPhones as "my second brain"). The alphabet is merely a code, he said, but the knowledge it represents can only be grasped by the human brain who deconstructs an idea into code and the human brain(s) who reconstructs it from code. Of course, the original idea exists in the mind of one human, and none can tell what idea will exist in the minds of others when communicated to them. "You hear it, you can change it, and you pass it on..."

As might be obvious, I am leaning toward the position that a book is not a story. But I don't want to resolve myself to a definitive decision in either direction. I am excited to continue to share my favorite story listeners' ideas with others and to ask the questions that arise from recalling them (of which there are many I've not included!).

There are also, of course, other print media to consider besides books. But the question remains the same.

What is a story?

Not a Box

2010-11-04T22:04:00.000-07:00

I am really cherishing the opportunity to continue building my relationship with the Raindrop community. After subbing for Emily for a week, and now for Brad for a week and two days, I feel a real connection with each of the children and continue to enjoy each and every one of them.

Yesterday, as some of us were looking for a book to read, I came upon this one, “Not a Box”, by Antoinette Portis. It is a gem of a book, about all the things that a box can become. The dedication says it all, really: “To children everywhere sitting in cardboard boxes.”

When I finish reading or telling a story, I often like to ask the children an open question. I’m not looking for any particular answers, just getting a sense of the kids’ thoughts on what happened in the story or on how it relates to their own lives.

This book lends itself well to such open questions. The pages alternate between a picture of the bunny as an adult would see it - sitting in a box, standing on a box, wearing a box, etc. - and a corresponding picture of what the bunny understands the box to be - a race car, a mountain, a robot costume, etc. Accompanying each picture is text that refers to the voice of either the adult or the bunny.

Why are you sitting in a box? It’s not a box.

After reading the book through the first time, I decided to go back to the first set of pages to talk about them a little.

Avery: It sounds like someone is asking her, “Why are you sitting a box?” And she says “It’s not a box.” What is it to her?
Kevin: A race car.
Avery: On this first page, it really looks like it’s just a box, but on this next page, I can see how she sees in her mind that it’s a race car. I wonder why she thinks it looks like a race car? Let’s look at the first page again. Why does she think it’s a race car?
[Silence.]

We went through the rest of the book, noting how the bunny thinks of the box differently depending on how she is positioned in relation to it. Kevin and Jessie were especially eager to share how well they remembered what each box was going to become on the next page. I asked a few times, “What else to could the box be in this picture?”, focusing on the plain, black and white depictions of the bunny. No answers. Hmm.

After reading the book a second time, we were sitting near the fabric basket. I said, “It’s fun to pretend that the materials we play with can be something else. Like the fabric. Just like the box, it’s not fabric, it’s … what else could it be?”

No answer. Kevin and Eden picked up the fabric to consider it.

Perhaps too soon, I said, “I wonder what this fabric could be. I know! It’s not fabric, it’s a snake!” With that, I shaped a piece of fabric into a long snake-like figure. I had hoped this would get their imaginations going, so I asked, “What else could it be?”

Kevin: “It’s a snake!” [started to play with it, holding it at one end]
Avery: What do you think, Isla? What else could the fabric be?
Jasmine: Snake!
Avery: Duzan, what are you going to make the fabric be?
Eden: A snake!

Hmm. Not exactly the kind of game I had thought this would be. Until I remembered that children this age are still very much learners through mimicry, not fully understanding something someone has said until they say it themselves. We see this every day as one child says something, and all the others say it back, as if echoing to show the first child that s/he’s been heard.

I realized at this point that I was far too invested in what I was looking for, and not open enough to what the children were telling me. I was looking, of course, for their sense of the abstract, their understanding of how a box can be imagined to be so very many things - indeed, how anything can be anything else, if we put our minds and imaginations to it.

But, why was I looking for them to tell me about it? I saw them thinking abstractly every day!

At the playdough table, Eden comments to Theo, “I’m making a pancake.” Theo replies: “I’m making a pancake, too. No, I’m making a pizza.” Together, on the big chair, several children fly together on an airplane to Alaska.
Jasmine shows Adam a “bee” on the lamp stand. And blocks! How many times have I watched blocks become castles, cars, storefronts, houses?! And yes ... (as pictured here) even as potties.

The point is, contrary to what a lot of courses and texts on child development like to say, children ARE abstract thinkers, from the very beginning. They use everyday objects to represent other objects and ideas all the time - it is the very basis of their play. What I have marveled at these past few weeks is that, while the children seamlessly play with abstract notions all day, the moment I try to probe their thinking about their play, it’s as if they have no idea what they’re doing. It’s as if Jean Piaget - who introduced the whole notion that children think concretely before they think abstractly - swoops down at precisely that moment to magically prevent me from unlocking the secret.

What is that secret? The only sense I can make from these observations is that, while children are, as I said, already abstract thinkers at a young age (in this case, 2-3 years old), what fails them is consciousness about their thinking: they lack metacognition. They can understand that a black piece of fabric with sparkles put over their head turns them into a spider web, but they don’t understand how they can understand that. Metacognition - thinking about our thinking - is what enables us to separate concrete from abstract thinking in the first place. It also helps us make sense of both concrete and abstract meanings in the world around us - in literature and film, in advertisements, in the behaviors of those around us, and of complete strangers, and so on.

When does this consciousness arise? I’m not sure, to tell the truth. But I do know that children are not only abstract thinkers, but keen observers, as well. The more we, as adults and teachers, can model our thinking out loud, the more they will pick up on this marvelous, dynamic, and outright fascinating process we call human thinking.

I know it’s not a box. But what is it to you?

Charter, here I come!

2010-09-16T22:17:00.000-07:00

I've begun my year's internship at a charter school (which I'll simply call "Charter") that practices inquiry-based learning and is inspired by the pedagogical ideas of Reggio Emilia, Italy. This internship will offer me the chance to observe and immerse myself in a school community that is the closest thing I have found to what I might call my "pedagogical home", so I begin with much enthusiasm and anticipation for learning.

These first few days have been mostly for observation, getting a sense of the routines, and simply getting my bearings for the work of my internship. I'm taking such pleasure in getting to know the different class communities, the kids as individuals, and the professional community of the teachers and staff.

More to come as the year unfolds!

Anatomy of the first day of pre-school

2010-09-09T20:31:00.000-07:00

This past week was the start to the school year at a German-immersion pre-school I substitute for. I was lucky enough to be there the first few days and remembering the rite of passage that beginning preschool truly is. Allow me to guide you through Day 1, focusing the camera on one particular boy, who I will call Jake.

Scene 1: 9:35a.m. Daddy has just left. Jake is inconsolable, his body rigid, laying face down on the floor, crying to the point of shrieking. A teacher approaches him to rub his back. He kicks her away.

Scene 2: 9:40a.m. Having observed that nothing has changed, the teacher returns and takes Jake into her lab, despite his protests. He continues to cry, but seems to appreciate the comfort.

Scene 3: 9:50a.m. The teacher comes to me: "Your turn?" Jake is not crying anymore, but is still visibly upset. He buries his head in my shoulder, crying "Daddy Daddy Daddy Daddy..." continuously, breaking only the breathe. I make a bee-line to the train table.

Scene 4: 10:00a.m. The train table. Two other boys are playing there already. At first, Jake has no interest. I stay with him on my lap, talking to the other boys and laying out tracks with them. Jake quiets and watches for about thirty seconds. I pick up another piece of the train track and ask, "Jake, where do you think this train track should go?" He eyes me, and he eyes the track and he eyes the table with the larger track being built. Without saying anything, he takes the track from me, walks to the other side of the table, and places it down on the table. He comes back to the bucket, and I ask, "Do you want to add another one? Pick one out of the basket." And we're off.

Scene 5: 10:30a.m. Jake is still at the train table. I have checked in on him about every 5 minutes or so, and each time, I am more confident: Today is the first day of preschool. And we're ok.

Two-year-old woodpeckers

2010-08-30T18:35:00.000-07:00

Whenever I substitute in the two-year-old classroom, I know that I will get to observe another animal in action. Each day, the children decide to play a different animal, with the same children playing the mamas, and the same children playing the babies. Today: woodpeckers.

"These are gonna be good eggs to hatch."

"Can I get buried? Put some more on me."

"She's hatching!"

"The egg cracked - boom, boom - and I hatched! Crack! Boom!"

The mama and baby woodpeckers fly around the classroom.

The remarkable thing to observe during this play was that they went through the same process over and over: burying the babies into their eggs, letting them hatch, then flying around the classroom, and back to the next to put the babies back in their eggs.

You see this often in children's play: a pattern or routine repeated over and over until it borders on ritual. This makes sense when I recall what I've read of Kieran Egan and learned at the Imaginative Education Workshop this past summer. He considers this phase of life (2-6 years old) comparable to how humans were thinking when they were dominantly an oral language culture - having developed language, but not yet the abstract symbols of writing. During this stage, one of the cognitive tools children are using (says Egan) are patterns and rhythms. Other cognitive tools of this stage are binary opposites (good/evil, etc), metaphor and image-making, mystery, and dramatics.

When I watch the kids engaging in this kind of play, and think about what they are thinking, underneath it all, I wonder if this is the time of life when we are captured by the essence of things: what makes woodpeckers woodpeckers, what makes the world what it is, and what makes each of us who we are.

Dam.

2010-08-27T17:04:00.000-07:00

It's amazing how topics of interest surface in conversation.

There I was, sitting with a student who was playing with Legos when another student came by and picked up a Lego parrot, colored red with green and yellow paint on the wings. She showed it to me, and was telling me a little about it.

"It reminds me of a story," I said, "About a woman in Belize who was trying to protect those parrots from a dam that was being built." (True story. Excellent book by Bruce Barcott, Seattle journalist, called "The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw" - don't let the title deter you)

"Tell us! Tell us!" they said, so I explained a little more ... until I realized that none of them really knew what a dam was and I sure as heck couldn't explain it well enough. But why would you bend over backwards explaining things? Why not make them think a little?

"Think of this," I said, "Think of a long river that doesn't have a lot of water in it, and people want to make a pool to swim in somewhere along the river. How do they stop the water so it collects into a pool, instead of continuing to flow?" The ideas poured out: "Rocks!" "Your hands." (Like at our local beach Golden Gardens) "A wall." [And my favorite:] "A train!" ... So we looked on the Internet to find pictures of dams that had been built in the United States, as well as the beavers who first started the practice.

The next day was a trip to a local park. During free play, I noted that if I poured water down the walkway, it would be kind of like a river. "I wonder if we could practice making a dam here." I started collecting leaves and little rocks and sticks to start the dam, and pretty soon a good four or five kids were helping, so I stepped back. It covered the width of the entire walkway by the end, and I filled up our water jug at the fountain. "Ready?" Down went the water.

The experiment went ... alright. The water did begin to pool a little, but eventually worked its way through, giving the kids the feeling that it had failed. I tried to explain that it's ok for a little water to go through - the question is: did it pool enough at the top? Still no. Hmm.

I could have let it go there and waited to see if any more questions emerged from the kids' thoughts. I could have thought about dams more abstractly, of the science and mathematical thinking at the root of it, and let provocation ideas come from that.

But no. I was a stubborn teacher who got fixated on making a dam.

And that is how I found myself the next day trying to facilitate a dam in the dirt outside the school building, moving kids around so they didn't step on it and controlling who got the spray bottles when and directed each step of the process. No experimentation. No open questions. No exploration. Dam.

Yet, how illustrative it is of a teacher's tendencies in teaching a concept. Instead of digging deeper into the concept to find what there is to explore, we try to teach a concept by illustrating how it is supposed to work, or how we know it work. This is a good illustration of how the concept has been applied in today's world, but it doesn't allow for students to experiment and explore how that concept can be applied to tomorrow's challenges. And that's what education needs to be, and what teaching needs to allow a lot more room for.

With a little distance from it all now, I realize that sometimes what I consider my greatest asset as a teacher can also quickly become my greatest vice: my own sense of wonder and curiosity about the world. At some point this week, I let the student in me overwhelm my role as the observant, patient educator who knows when to change a classroom environment with provocating objects and materials, and when to stand back and let her students engage with that environment. And that is the greatest disappointment of all: I was not the teacher I strive and know myself to be. Dam dam dam.

Story making

2010-08-06T21:04:00.000-07:00

While drawing with a four-year-old girl I'll call Nikki, she commented on how much she liked a bird I drew. I thanked and said I think she would make a great hero in a story. "What kind of story do you think she could be in?" Through our ensuing conversation, the following story emerged:

Once upon a time, there were three princesses. They were walking in the forest one day, when they got stuck in the mud. Then a mama bird came and she grabbed one of the legs and pulled it out with her beak! She did it for all of them so they could all walk again. Then, they all turned into baby birds and the mommy bird brought them food. Yummy worms!

There was a bad guy who got stuck in the mud. Mama Bird pulled out his leg and ate his leg up. Because he was bad to her. He hit her.

Then the three princesses went back to the castle and became princesses again.

Nikki draws and writes her story. The mama bird's nest is pictured on the left, the three princesses and a smaller nest on the right. The little blue bird on the right-hand picture is the bird I drew. She asked me to cut it out and then she taped it onto the nest she had drawn.

I marvel, again and again, at the human capacity to make stories of anything: a picture, an image in our minds, a feeling, an experience. People say, "Even four-year-olds can do it!" but I find that so diminuitive. Because really, four-year-olds are some of the best story makers I've ever met, far better than I could ever imagine myself to be as an adult.

I'm making all these observations while concurrently reading several books about storytelling, story making, and how inherent narrative is to how our brains function. I'm working on a few posts that relate to each of these books, so stay tuned!

Family Storytelling, Week 2

2010-07-20T20:10:00.000-07:00

Family Storytelling continues ... This week, we saw a few of the same kids from last week, and a whole gaggle of new folks.

We started by remembering the story of Coyote's Whiskers from last week, with the help of the drawings each of the kids made. It was such a joy to hear those who knew the story take over the role of storyteller as they related the tale to those who hadn't heard it.

Then came the new story of the week, a tale from Africa, made popular in this country by Pete Seeger and his banjo:

ABIYOYO

Now, as you can see, there is a book for this story, unlike Coyote's Whiskers. As you will see, though, this did not hinder the children's image-making once they set to their drawing.

But first, the telling! It is a wonderful story-song, in that the teller can fade in between singing and telling pretty easily, and the music provides a lovely backdrop anytime in the story. I'm working on a recording of the story, complete with illustrations by the kids, which I'll share here soon, but the gist of the story is as follows: a village throws out a magician and his ukulele-playing son for making too much magic in the town, only to be saved by them when a large giant threatens to eat up everyone and their animals. The little boy placates the giant with a pleasant little song about him: "Abiyoyo ... Abiyoyo ... Abiyoyo ..." The giant begins to dance faster and faster until he falls to the ground and the boy's father makes him disappear.

My favorite part of the day was when the story was over, and I started asking questions that the story didn't answer: What do you think Abiyoyo looked like? What kind of village do you see in your mind? What were the father and his son wearing? A flurry of voices answered all of my questions and more before everyone took their images to paper, along with a few I shared in the story.

The artists get to work - One holds up a finished product proudly: Abiyoyo's hand! "He's so big, only his hand fits on the paper!"

And now, the rest of the gallery:

Stay tuned for a "story video", in which I lay a slide show of this and more children's art over an audio recording of the story of Abiyoyo.

Family Storytelling Party!

2010-07-13T16:16:00.000-07:00

I am so very excited to be involved with Atlantic Street Center, thinking about programs and projects to collaborate on together. Our pilot project this summer is a Family Storytelling Party, the first of which was held today (you can join us next week!). Here are some photos from the very successful event!

The premise: Supporting general literacy skills in communities of recent immigrants, whose children attend local elementary schools

The Very Hungry Caterpillar with a sock puppet that eats through one apple, two pears, three plums, four strawberries, five oranges ... goodness gracious!

Three little mice creep up, one by one, on Coyote in "Coyote's Whiskers".

ART TIME! Taking the images in our minds of "Coyote's Whiskers" and putting them to paper.

It was inspiring to see everyone's different images. One girl (upper right photo) even made a kind of storyboard for it. It looks like we'll be able to make a picture book of them as a way of remembering the story for next time.

I've enjoyed the stimulation this project has provided my thinking about connecting storytelling with literacy development. Though storytelling and literacy are two different things (oral v. written/printed word), there are so many ways they can support each other, and can support children together. This project has been a great way to understand that better through my experiences and the reactions of the kids.

We've got some things to think over for next week, but all in all, it was a success. We will see what next week brings! Hope you can come!!

IERG Summer Training: Day Three

2010-06-30T19:58:00.000-07:00

Imaginative Education Summer Training

Vancouver, British Columbia

DAY THREE
Learning in Depth

And now for something completely different ... perhaps. On Day Three of this training, we veered into a different idea for curricular implication entirely. While Imaginative Education offers frameworks for planning class lessons and units on topics of every field, Learning in Depth (LiD) is a proposal for what might be considered enriched learning time for students as individuals. Here the proposal, from the LiD website:

Learning in Depth is a program in which each child is given, during the first week of schooling, a particular topic to learn about through her or his whole school career, in addition to the usual curriculum. Topics might include such things as apples, ships, the circus, cats, the solar system, etc. Students will meet regularly with their supervising teachers, who will give guidance, suggestions, and help as students build personal portfolios on their topics. The aim is that each child, by the end of her or his schooling, will have built genuine expertise about that topic. The expectation is that this process will transform for most children their relationship to, and understanding of the nature of, knowledge. It should transform for each child the experience of schooling.

You best believe that last part resonates with me. If we could all be so lucky as to experience a transformation in our relationship to knowing, learning, and schooling ... !!

To clarify, the proposal is to introduce an opportunity for students to become experts on a particular topic by having them research it from Kindergarten through 12th grade. Nothing like this has ever been done before, so it's hard to say what the results will be. However, as Egan says in his book on the proposal (in press): "Because there is no data about its results, we can't implement it, and if we can't implement it, there will be not data. This seems a bit Catch-22-ish. ... This view would, of course, have prevented every educational innovation in history from getting off the ground."

Most of the morning was spent on introducing the proposal, anticipating objections and responses, and examining the criteria for such topics. At the moment, the major criterion is that topics need to be complex, varied, and multi-dimensional in the following ways:

- Sufficient breadth, sufficient depth (e.g. apples, ants, the wheel, etc.)
- Connections within ourselves: cultural ties as well as emotional and imaginative ties
- Not concerned with material that will lead to depression or violence (e.g. weapons)
- Not too technical
- Not too general nor particular ("animals" is too general, "tigers" is too specific > "cats" will do)
- Must provide an equivalently rich experience for all

In small groups, we discussed additional criteria. One prevalent theme that came up was the cultural slant of topics. It was clear from the list that Egan's team has already generated that the ideas for topics had come from a Western mind. Does this mean they will be culturally offensive? Not necessarily, though "sacred buildings" might be objected to, for example. Egan is certainly always open to new topics, and I would be very curious what topics are generated from non-Western minds. But the criterion of "no cultural offenses" was discussed as a clarifier to the criterion that already addresses culture.

I had an additional idea later that the topics should not be abstract concepts (as some of the suggestions Egan has received have been): love, for example, or loyalty, courage, etc. It seems they need to be concrete, observable, researchable topics with materials that students can interact with. Obviously, such abstract concepts can and "should" be found and examined through the study of concrete topics, as all of learning has both concrete and abstract meaning. But that's just my take.

We were lucky to have some teachers from Corbett School District, that have implemented both an IE curriculum model, and the LiD proposal into their schools. They shared some portfolios and stories of their students, largely praising its many consequences. Interestingly, the most positive of these consequences were largely unexpected by Egan and his team behind the proposal; for example, several teachers mentioned the social networking among students that has really bloomed as they identify connections between each other's topics and even encourage each other by bringing in valuable information sources, materials, etc., that relate to each other's topics. Friendships are even being forged through topic connections, as one teacher reported.

While I was pleasantly surprised by this outcome, I had to kick myself for being surprised at all. Of course! In a graduate course on Socialization, the big message we all got from the research we looked at is that children are primarily socialized by their peers, with parents, teachers, and other adults trailing far behind. Why shouldn't they, then, look to their peers to further their independent learning?

Social networking is certainly an active niche of research at the moment, one that I am not entirely familiar with at the moment. However, it was inspiring to think of what this kind of proposal could allow to observe in the classroom: how children learn when left to their own devices. What sources do they seek? What questions do they pose? What kinds of understanding do they express in these actions?

What insights would answers to these questions offer on the validity of Egan's theory of cognitive tools and kinds of understanding? Or any other ideas about how children learn, for that matter? I can just hear Kieran Egan saying: "Well that's a great question. Why don't you write a dissertation on that?" Who knows? Maybe I will do just that ...

IERG Summer Training: Day Two, More thoughts ...

2010-06-30T07:41:00.000-07:00

Imaginative Education Summer Training

Vancouver, British Columbia

DAY TWO
More thoughts ...

After yesterday's exercises and thoughts on responding to my students' interest in Tricksters, I fell asleep thinking a bit deeper on what IE generally brings to the emergent curriculum; in other words, how IE could be used in the emergent curriculum without getting in the way of what emergent curriculum is all about. Here's what I've got, as I begin what I'm sure will be a longer thinking process:

What I find the cognitive tools useful for in the emergent curriculum is for getting at the deeper draw children feel to particular materials, topics, phenomena of the world. As I worked with the frameworks, I struggled to find answers to the questions posed to help me design a lesson on a topic. The tipping point came when I began to answer those questions with questions to ask students, themselves.

As I remembered my time talking to my students about Tricksters, I imagined myself asking questions derived from the cognitive tools of both Mythic and Romantic kinds of understanding:

(from Mythic...)
Forming images: Imagine you woke up one day, went in the bathroom to brush your teeth, looked in the mirror, and - gasp! - you had become a trickster! What would you look like? How is your face and body different from when you were a kid? What else is different about you? ...
Pattern, rhyme, rhythm: What do you notice about Tricksters across all the stories we’ve heard and read? Within a story, what does it sound like when the Trickster walks, speaks, laughs ... ? (What is the music / song of a Trickster?)
Metaphor: What do Tricksters remind you of in your life? In other stories?
Mystery, Puzzles: What makes a good trick / Trickster “good”? What makes a bad trick / Trickster “bad”? Can a good trick end up badly? A bad trick well?
Joking and humor: Go ahead. Make up your own story about a silly Trickster!
(Games and Drama: This is where I just sit back and observe, asking myself questions about how and where Tricksters emerge from dramatic play and from the stories they tell. Games that might introduce trickery in a safe environment include card games like Poker and Go Fish, or board games like chess.)

(from Romantic...)
Humanizing meaning / Personification: What makes a Trickster a Trickster? You’re walking down the street, and - boom! - you see a Trickster? How do you recognize him/her?
Revolt and Idealism: Is a Trickster a good guy or gal to have around this community? What’s the effect of their presence.
Literate Eye / Graphic organizers: What if there were a secret Trickster Clubhouse? As a member, you’re given a special medallion to wear around your neck to show your membership. What does it look like? (Also, transfer knowledge of oral stories to picture and storybooks of those stories. Or, create your own Trickster book from images generated by provocation questions.)
Collections and Sets: How many Trickster characters are there in the world?
Extremes and Limits: What are the limits of trickery? When can a good trick go bad? What is the most outrageous trick you have heard of or can think of?
(Change of context and Role play: Again, this is my opportunity to observe where and how students are taking these ideas into other aspects of classroom life and learning. Change of context lends itself well to inspiring such transfer into the materials, as well.)

I’ve conveniently avoided the central features of both kinds of understanding - binary opposites and heroic features. I’ve done this partially because they are both, perhaps, the most difficult, abstract aspects of a topic. However, they are also the central pieces of what drives intrigue for a topic. But that’s precisely what I would be looking for when I ask students questions like the ones I mentioned. So, I’ve also purposely avoided those central features because I can’t know them until I understand more about my students’ experience of that topic. And that is beginning of how emergent curriculum may inform IE. Working through all those prescriptive formats is just another form of "lesson planning" that privileges teachers' conceptions of a topic over those of the students. Children are such eager learners and sense-makers of the world around them, and, I would bet, could unearth and express the use of Egan's cognitive tools on their own.

Remember, for example, that those binary opposites and heroic features will differ between individual students. Even if they are understanding Tricksters with the same cognitive tools, that understanding differs according to their experience of the Trickster in their lives. I mentioned the one boy who was a behavioral challenge; his entire demeanor changed whenever we were talking about Tricksters and their stories. What was up with that? What drew him into stories about Trickster behavior that might have provided insight into his own behavior? Perhaps, if I had asked more questions derived from the cognitive tools dominant in his thinking at that point in his life, I’d have a better idea.

In one of our sessions, Kieran tried to guide our frameworking with the comment, "Because we know so much about our topic, we forget to feel about it." He was trying to get us to remember what is emotionally engaging and, perhaps, emotionally at stake, in the topics of the curriculum. I understand the value of such a comment for a teacher planning out the day, the lesson, the unit ... by why exclude the students from that process? Why exclude those who know best how to feel about what we learn?

How can emergent curriculum and Imaginative Education inform each other? This has been my first stab. No doubt, more thoughts will result once I actually return to the classroom (rather than simply imagine myself into it), as well as I continue to learn more about both approaches. I keep thinking of myself at the base to two very large beanstalks. I’m not sure why, but rather than feeling I need to choose to climb up one beanstalk or the other, I feel called to climb them both by pulling them together into a double-helix, hanging on to both stalks as I go.

IERG Summer Training: Day Two

2010-06-29T19:54:00.000-07:00

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 ...

IERG Summer Training: Day One, Part Two

2010-06-28T19:57:00.000-07:00

Imaginative Education Summer Training

Vancouver, British Columbia

DAY ONE
Part Two

So ... the juice! What are these "kinds of understandings" Egan is talking about? In an attempt to be more concise than my last post, here are the basics:

Building on the notion of recapitulationist theories, children acquire cognitive tools, with which they make sense of the world, in a similar sequence to that which humans, as a species, have acquired. Egan presents language as the primary medium, through these tools are represented and communicated. If we work, then, from the development of human language, we get the following stages (and what they become as "kinds of understanding"):

Pre-linguistic (Somatic)
Oral language (Mythic)
Written language (Romantic)
Thinking about language theoretically (Philosophic)
Turning language over on itself reflexively (Ironic)

Zoom in on any one of these stages and we find the cognitive tools involved with making sense of the world through each of these kinds of understanding:

Pre-linguistic (Somatic understanding): without oral symbols to communicate, we rely entirely on our bodies and sensory capacities to understand the world around us, including the use of
- Bodily senses
- Emotional responses and attachments
- Humor and expectations
- Musicality, rhythm, pattern
- Gesture and communication
- Intentionality

Oral language (Mythic understanding): with both bodily and oral symbols, with which to communicate, our experiences of the body inform our language of understanding with
- Story
- Metaphor
- Abstract binary opposites (and mediations thereof)
- Rhyme, rhythm, pattern
- Jokes and humor
- Powerful images
- Dramatic play

Written language (Romantic understanding): with the development of visual symbols, so is our understanding of the world shaped by them - not just the alphabet, but numbers, symbols, tables, maps, and other visual organizers - as well as by the effects they have on human culture, including
- Heroic narrative
- Humanizing meaning
- Revolt and idealism
- The literate eye / graphic organizers
- Collections and sets
- Extremes and limits
- Role play

Thinking about language theoretically (Philosophic understanding): with increased practice and skill in the use of oral and written language, we can begin to deconstruct the meanings these arbitrary symbols have come to have in our word, which may be confirmed and/or challenged through
- Meta-narrative of theory
- Analysis and synthesis
- Search for authority, truth, evidence
- Alternative theories
- Anomalies, ironies, ambiguities
- Bringing ideas to life in one's own life

I must admit, we have not gotten greatly into turning language over on itself reflexively (Ironic understanding) in our discussions as of yet, because it is not a stage even high school students have not yet obtained, so I'm not as confident reporting on that. However, where Philosophic understanding falls short ("All generalizations are false" are the opening words of Egan's chapter on the last stage), there Ironic understanding takes up the reins, as learners begin to turn their knowledge over on itself and examine knowledge as a subject, itself.

What to make of all of this? Quite frankly, I don't know. Not yet, at least. If you've made it this far, I congratulate you and appreciate your persistence. I'm so full of thoughts and still making sense of this all for myself, it's hard to think critically about it and respond properly. Just because I can summarize this all does not at all mean I understand it. Really, it would be best for me just to go and erase all I've written up to this point and start anew ... in a classroom ... with students ... and a topic, say, "eels" ... oh dear.

IERG Summer Training: Day One, Part One

2010-06-28T19:04:00.000-07:00

Imaginative Education Summer Training

Vancouver, British Columbia

DAY ONE

After the keynote talk last night, now we are into full-day course work. I've realized that I'm a bit of an odd man out, though certainly not the only one. I do not belong to the two dominant groups of educators from schools that are actively working to implement Imaginative Education in their schools. One cohort has a year already behind them, so they make up most of Level 2, while the other is just starting, like myself, so we are considered Level 1.

So, for us in Level 1, today was all about introductions, information, and intention. What is the point of Imaginative Education? What does it consist of? What are the fundamental theories? Well, I'll do my best to tell you, so far as I understand it ...

First of all, the underlying theory of Imaginative Education is best read in Kieran Egan's The Educated Mind. Looking back on his earlier work, I can see how it has built up to a book like this. It's quite comprehensive, something to sink your teeth into, but not so complicated and involved that you're going to lose your teeth entirely over it.

The introductory chapter, "Three Old Ideas and a New One", provides the premise: Three dominant paradigms of educational thought are sort of duking it out in the current education system, making only for conflicted and confused educators, unsure what the real purpose of education is. These three ideas include the two purposes I mentioned in my post yesterday - socialization and academics - plus the more newly developed purpose of education to stimulate children's development. As I re-read this introductory chapter last night, I realized that these ideas represent the three waves of educational paradigm shifting in Western human history.

Before Western and Eastern worlds, there was just one human world, and in this world, education served one purpose alone: socialization, and, we might add, survival. Oral cultures used both apprenticeship models of teaching and stories to acculturate their youth into the customs, values, and beliefs of their cultural community, as well as their individual roles in it. We see this purpose today in moves toward democratic education, as well as in the "basics" of reading and mathematics deemed crucial to functioning as an adult in our society.

Fast forward to Plato. Now, Plato is not the first philosopher of Greek society (Socrates being his most significant predecessor), but I'm going to dare to say that he was the first philosopher responsible for a conception that would become Western society (the Enlightenment being its birthing, perhaps). His work, The Republic revolutionized education by suggesting that education was meant not as a service to society, but to the advancement of the individual mind. From Plato we have the Academy, and from the Academy, of course, academics: the "core curriculum", as it is called, of areas of study deemed necessary to study in the course of one's life. (Seeing as his heroic, exemplary "philosopher-kings" would have to undergo up to 50 years of education, it was a societal role reserved for the elite, capable few. Today, this is called tracking. Thank you, Plato. Really.)

Fast forward again to the 19th century, when Jean-Jacques Rousseau begins his masterpiece Émile with the observation that we "are always looking for the man in the child, without considering what he is before he becomes a man." Boom! If Plato is responsible for the conception of the Western world, then Rousseau's mental DNA contributed greatly to the birth of child development. With 20th century scholars Jean Piaget and John Dewey added into the mix, we have, in today's world, the developmental purpose of education: to stimulate children's psychological development in the grasping of advanced mental concepts, ideas, and theories of mind. We cannot expect children to add and subtract numbers, they say, before we allow them to experience the concept of number to begin with. Piaget, especially, is well-known for his series of "tasks" that children of a certain age cannot complete, due to their developmental stage. Besides the fact that this serves to utterly humiliate the actual capabilities of children, it helps us understand that children's ideas and knowledge of the world develops as they grow, much the way human ideas have developed throughout history.

Ok. Now what? A new theory? A new idea? No and yes. Or yes and no. I'm not sure what Egan is suggesting is so much a "new" theory as a new idea regarding the relation these three theories have to each other in the educational world. Which you might, of course, call a theory.

His premise: these three theories are inherently incompatible with each other; not that they are inherently incorrect, but that they cannot be compromised when pooled together conceptually. One always prevails above the others, and each has served as the dominant educational paradigm of the recent past of educational thought. In other words, if these theories make up the points of a triangle, they pull and pull on their respective ends, trying to make their point the top of an isosceles formation, rather than reach towards each other in equilateral formation.

If we want to re-conceive education as fulfilling all three purposes simultaneously, while keeping it free of conflicting paradigms for instruction, then we must re-conceive our notion of these purposes. Socialization reaches beyond the society; Academics reach beyond knowledge; and psychological development reaches beyond the brain. When each of these ideas reaches beyond their perceived boundaries, they do, indeed, connect with each other. Where? Egan calls them "kinds of understanding".

He begins with Russian educational psychologist and thinker Vygotsky, "He argued that we make sense of the world by use of mediating intellectual tools that in turn profoundly influence the kind of sense we make." (Egan, p. 29) In other words, as the child interacts with its environment, s/he picks up on the ways the world is represented, observed, and made sense of by others, and eventually comes to adapt these tools already in use. "So the mind is not an isolable thing like the brain inside its skull; it extends into and is constituted of its socio-cultural surroundings, and its kinds of understanding are products of the intellectual tools forged and used in those surroundings." (p. 30)

Surroundings ... children learn to socialize themselves by grasping onto these cognitive tools, as they observe and interact with them in their surroundings. Kinds of understanding ... require different kinds of knowledge, but this knowledge is not the determinant factor of one's understanding of the world. Intellectual tools ... children move through stages of life, in which they more readily grasp certain tools before others, the journey of which is, by itself, a process of development. None of the original ideas is refuted in Egan's new idea, but they are observed through a different lens that seems to allow them to cooperate better with each other.

And this is all just back story! I haven't even gotten to the juice! I'll keep you on edge, just a bit, while I compose the next post.

IERG Summer Training: Hello, Vancouver!

2010-06-27T21:56:00.000-07:00

Imaginative Education Summer Training
Vancouver, British Columbia

I know, I know ... I've just gotten my Master's, what on earth am I doing traipsing off to this education symposium in Portland and that training course in Vancouver ... ?! The eternal student within just can't help it, I suppose.

Here I am, making a switch now from thinking in terms of "emergent curriculum", "the pedagogy of listening", and "child as protagonist" - to - "cognitive tools", "binary oppositions" and "learning in depth". It may seem like a violent swing - and it is, in certain ways - but one of the precise reasons I am here is because I get the impression Reggio Emilia and Imaginative Education share several fundamental philosophies, especially regarding the image of the child. However, as their vocabularies imply, the practices that have emerged from each are quite different.

Part of this has to do with how each is choosing to respond to the traditional curriculum. IE is making far more of an effort to work with the system of established standards and curricula, not nearly as concerned with WHAT students are learning as with HOW students are learning content. Reggio is very concerned with WHAT students are learning and HOW, so out goes the traditional curriculum with the bathwater and: What happens when we redesign the school from the children upwards? (That is, building a curriculum from the interests they express, in one of several forms.)

Is there some middle ground? I don't know. That's kind of why I'm here. And already, the analyst in me is having a hey-day, let me tell you!

Here is my first predicament: Tonight, Kieran Egan opened with a lecture on "Dividing the School in Two", making the point that, since the very conception of modern Western schooling, the socializing and academic purposes of education have constantly been confused with each other. I agree. Think about it: Why do we study Social Studies? Are we primarily learning to be good, democratic citizens? Or are we studying the philosophy of human communities? (How's that for a S.S. topic, Dad?) Put in other words, do we go to school to become acculturated to our society, or for the academic benefit of our individual minds?

Both, you'd probably say. Both, says the school system. Both, as depicts a several-years-old Venn diagram I drew in my journal once of the overlapping services I perceived inherent to my position as teacher (service to society / service to students).

Both ... but how can education serve one purpose without slighting the other?

So, we brainstormed: What if we separated the socializing from the academic activities and experiences of schooling? What would that kind of structure look like? Would it be divided into morning and afternoon session? Separate "Soc" and "Ac" schools, as Kieran suggested? How do we go about re-thinking schools for this separation.

And here is where I get stuck. I'm not sure I like the idea of this kind of separation. Yes, they can begin to smother each other if we don't keep track of them, but won't an increased awareness among teachers suffice? Why the need to separate?

Let me confess: I'm an American. I went to a good old American Master's program, which means I'm well versed in our favorite American pedagogue John Dewey. And John Dewey is all about mediating the dichotomies. One extreme or the other is not the answer, it is within the tension between the two that we exist, in every realm of human existence. So it is with education: the opposing forces we often feel at odds with each other in schooling each provide essential pieces to the puzzle, and it is through their interaction that dynamic education emerges.

Kieran disagrees. When you let them interact with each other, everyone gets lost as to the point of the current activity at hand, students and teachers alike.

The other question rising inside of (the emergent curriculum thinker inside of) me in opposition to this idea is: Where are the students in this conversation? Perhaps they are not able to make the separation of social from academic aspects of the curriculum. Perhaps it is not that the social and academic are mixed, but that they are not properly acknowledged and balanced in the everyday classroom that things are so muddled.

I can't say I'm convinced either way, to tell you the truth. And, by this point, I feel I'm just trying to write my way into some profound thought that will surely not come tonight. But perhaps I can put it out to you - whoever has made it, reading this far - and invite your ideas and comments. Surely they are not as tired as mine ...

Self and Storytelling

2010-06-25T18:49:00.000-07:00

That's a vague title. I'm having trouble determining what the most fitting title for this entry would be. Let me just tell you the story ...

Now that it is summer, I am back substituting at the Reggio Emilia-based school I taught at last summer. Today I was in the toddler classroom with mostly two-year-olds. As I am wont to do, on occasion, over afternoon snack, I told the story of Coyote's Whiskers, about three little mice to sneak into Coyote's den, one after the other, and steal a whisker to take back to their mouse village. By the time the third mouse is up, Coyote has caught on and pretends to sleep ... that is, until the third mouse arrives, when he raises his head, howls loudly, and then proceeds to chase the mice out his den and up a Douglas fir tree, where all the mice can still be found today, hiding in the Douglas fir cones. That's the short of it, anyway.

Not thirty seconds after I was finished with the story, Peter burst out with the following narrative:

"Once, when I was in the woods, I saw a coyote and I sneaked up on him and stole his whiskers, and then he gave a big "RAR!" but then I put him in a cage!"

Hmm. What to make of that? His enthusiasm took me more by surprise than the changed ending. I didn't have time to think of much else at that point, as Nathan chimed in with his own narrative:

"Can I tell you a story? I was in the woods once, and I went in the door and stole Coyote's whiskers, and he went "RAR!" but then I put him, I put him in jail!"

Before I knew it, Peter and Nathan were going at it in a kind of narrative duel, back and forth, each trying to out-do the other's ending.

What the heck?! What a powerful insight into the minds of these two-year-olds! The only sense I can make of it is that they are in that phase, in which everything is experienced through the perspective of their own self, and only their own self. If they relate to the mice of the story, they become a mouse, they become the agent of the story.

Wow. I'm still trying to sort out other possible meanings to make of this. Perhaps it is simply what it is, and I should just let it be that (we/I have an awful tendency to overdue the potential analysis of children's behavior). But it was a story I simply had to share.

Opal Summer Symposium, Day Three

2010-06-19T21:21:00.000-07:00

2010 Summer Symposium
Portland Children's Museum
home to Opal Museum School and Opal Charter School

"Nurturing Habits of Heart and Mind"

DAY THREE
I get to play!

Saturday is traditionally the day of the symposium when teachers get to "play" with the materials that students get to work with every day. It is, by far, the favorite. And no wonder - how often do teachers get to be students?! (The fun kind, I mean...)

It was today that I realized a bit more about what draws me to this school, and why I feel so comfortable in this environment. Today, as I sat, again, in front of the materials, remembering how I felt the first time I was here a year ago, I felt the student inside me experience such satisfaction, I'd no idea how long it had been since I'd been in touch with her. Working on my Master's, I'd been a very good student on the outside, going to classes, writing my papers, wrestling with ideas and considering the future ... which is all good and well ... but I realized I'd lost touch with myself as a student on the inside, in the last crazy and stressful months of thesis writing and graduation preparation. So, it is to her - my inner student - that I dedicate this day of my life, and will let the photos speak for themselves ...

Teachers work with different materials in different classrooms: clay, watercolor, wire, fabric ...

Opal Summer Symposium, Day Two

2010-06-18T21:02:00.000-07:00

2010 Summer Symposium
Portland Children's Museum
home to Opal Museum School and Opal Charter School

"Nurturing Habits of Heart and Mind"

DAY TWO

Another round of inspiring speakers, including further thoughts on the purpose of documentation. Especially resonant were the comments of Patricia Hunter McGrath, a well-known atelierista in the Reggio community. She spoke of documentation "as a way of listening to children that projects their voices to the whole world", and of artistic materials as "the text of early childhood education". What would happen, she demanded, if we designed a school for listening? What would it look like? What would it sounds like? I enjoyed the exercise of imagining such a school in my mind ...

For now, though, we can look to what other folks are doing. To keep moving with this idea of documentation, I continued to document, myself, the different kinds of documentation I found at Opal.

This is a poster on Community Building in the preschool classroom. Beneath the title at the top, it begins with the questions of the theme: What is a community? What does a strong community look like and sound like? What agreements would you like to make for our community?
A description follows of how teachers spoke with children and invited their voices (in the language of several artistic media) into conversation about community. The blue panel on the right features the transcription from a conversation with the kids. Below, there is some of their artwork, as well.

These panels are on a longer, more detailed theme: "Investigating the big idea of transformation." Here, not just examples of the children's work are included, but photos of the children in action are included, as well. What was that about children as researchers? Researchers, indeed!

In the K-1 classroom, a big theme that emerged this year was caring. Below are several documentations of the class' on-going learning process and experiences around that topic.

What does caring look like? Students created individual artistic representations, then worked together to create the collaborative mural below:

Here, the site of growing tadpoles. Questions anticipate their coming transformation: "What will the frogs be looking for in their new habitat? What will they need to survive?" Learning to care for other living creatures sometimes helps us think about caring for our own kind ...

How do we design a classroom, a school, a community, that values this kind of listening?

This afternoon's talk on the foundational principles of Reggio Emilia helped me with this question, as I began to think of ...

Child as protagonist
Child as collaborator
Child as communicator

Teacher as partner, nurturer, guide
Teacher as researcher, engaging children as researchers
Environment as teacher

Parent as partner in education
Documentation as communication
Organization as foundational

What does this kind of school look like in your mind? In your community? In these times?

Such fascinating questions to be ruminating on, such food for thought, and for the passion I have for this work ...

Opal Summer Symposium, Day One

2010-06-17T20:23:00.000-07:00

2010 Summer Symposium
Portland Children's Museum
home to Opal Museum School and Opal Charter School

"Nurturing Habits of Heart and Mind"

DAY ONE

Whenever I arrive somewhere, I always have to take a moment to walk around and take it all in. That's how I found the following exhibit put up by another Reggio-inspired school (a preschool) from California. It documents an on-going theme of the environment that has become a part of life in that school, in many ways. Documentation is one of the foundations of Reggio Emilia pedagogy, and can take many forms, as this exhibit exemplified.

Documentation: An integral element of the Reggio Emilia approach. Instead of prescribing a curriculum of lessons before school begins, teachers allow curricular themes to emerge from children's play, questions, and observations. As a result, more time can be put into documenting that process, and presenting it for students to see and remember, for parents to hear more of their children's learning, and for the general public to celebrate in the journey of learning.

An interactive felt board of poetry and photos. Part of the documentation shown above.

There were also poems written by the students, art work they had created to publicize their concerns about public littering, and other gems of children's lives that teachers had the privilege to observe and share.

Opal classrooms are similarly full of a variety of kinds of documentation of students' learning. As students get older, they can start to help make their own documentation, such as the family history story books below.

Children are authors, whose works are displayed in various classroom locations.

Sometimes, children's work just speaks for itself, like the following collaborative project:

Part of the culminating 5th grade project: a design for the new Opal playground.

There were several speakers today who spoke of the school as a place of research ... of children as collaborative researcher ... of learning as developing habits of the heart and the mind ... of dialogue as a conversation with a center, not sides (attributed to Meg Wheatley) ... and of teacher language as determinant of students' ability to grow their thoughts. It is humbling to be among these thinkers, these reflective practitioners. But it also feels familiar, comfortable. I feel like I've found my crowd.

Opal Summer Symposium, here I come!

2010-06-16T20:49:00.000-07:00

2010 Summer Symposium at
Portland Children's Museum
home of Opal Museum School and Opal Charter School

From my journal:

It's been a year since I first discovered this place for myself, and I'm taking this moment to ponder, again, why I feel so drawn here ... what continues to bring me back?

Is it the concept and pedagogy of emergent curriculum? - This exciting pedagogical idea, new on my radar, that resonates deeply with my sense of self and style as an educator?? ... Is it the community I observe at work here? - This community of conscientious, passionate, intellectual thinkers, who call themselves teacher-researchers?? ... Is it the values and philosophies I see embodied in their practice and scholarship?

I am sure it is all of these things. But today, I am remembering one moment on one day, one year ago. It was my first visit to Opal, my first real encounter with the Reggio Emilia pedagogical approach. We were all invited to "play" with several materials provided in each of the different classrooms. As I sat down at a table in front of a large fern frond, with an empty page in front of me, watercolors to my left, and a brush to my right, I remembered what it was to be a student.

How often do teachers take the time and care to remember that?! And how did I feel there, as a student at Opal?

I felt capable.
I felt a trust in me.
I felt creative and challenged and, yet, calm in it all.
But most of all,
I felt welcome,
invited,
celebrated.

Philosophically, pedagogically, socially ... yes, I am intrigued, I am drawn back to this place and these people, once again. But it is that first moment as a student in this school that I carry with me when I leave, and that always brings me back.

So, here I am again. Hello, Opal!

Last day of school ...

2010-06-16T19:30:00.000-07:00

What do you get at the drawing table on the last day of the preschool year?

"I'm drawing a green bee ... with purple hair!" - Georgia

Our insect unit was about a month ago, I wonder where this came from in the depths of her three-year-old memory. Interesting: after this picture, she left to play with other children, then returned later. Why draw just one bee, when you can draw ...

"Look at all your bees!" I said.
"Yes," she said. "Papa Bee [left], Mama Bee [right], and Baby Bee [above]."
She can imagine a green bee with purple hair, yet the very real structures of her life come through as well ... always a balance of the abstract and the concrete ...

The bee theme continues: Tommy is splotching all over his paper with a black marker. "What are you doing?" asks Kevin. "I'm making bee footprints," responds Tommy, without breaking a mote of concentration.

Kevin goes with it: "Are you gonna draw the honey, Tommy?" Tommy grabs a yellow marker and begins drawing with it. "Yeah," he says, "right there." "And the flower?" Kevin continues, "And the honey in it?" Tommy continues drawing without once looking at Kevin.

It is amazing to me the zone children seem to get into when they are engaging in art. It is such an informal, yet very involved and intentional act. As we see above, it seems to be a platform where children are expressing, sorting out, making sense of what they have learned. But they are not in their own little worlds, as we might imagine the more eccentric artists of the world. Though they mostly stick to their own canvases, there is an interplay of questions and ideas, out of which a certain theme - in this case, bees - emerges. As the teacher, who is trying harder to listen than to talk, it is my chance to observe how each student is processing this theme. Georgia seems to be taking bees over into her known world, while Kevin is making the rounds on his current scaffolding of bee knowledge, though it is clear there is still room for it to develop (honey is not found in the flowers, the bees extract nectar and make honey from it in their hives). And who knows what Tommy is thinking, whether he set out to make bee footprints, or if his vicinity to and awareness of Georgia's bee family helped him give meaning to what he was doing.

It is good to know that, even on the last day of school, the children are still learning. They will continue to do so, every day, every picture, every thought ... that is indeed, good to know.

Master of Education

2010-06-12T21:28:00.000-07:00

Yup. That's me. Woot!

"The End. And then ..."

2010-06-09T19:54:00.000-07:00

David, I have found this year, is quite the storyteller:

"I'm drawing me and my sister and my mommy and my daddy. The whole family. This is my daddy on the mountain when he was falling down. There's a bad guy, but my sister beat the bad guy..."

David is drawing and telling simultaneously, and it's hard to tell whether the drawing is inspiring his telling, or the other way around. Whichever it is, David makes no pauses.

"Then there was a dragon. He had large eyes, teeth, big head, long legs. [No drawing.] He scared that bad guy away. [Draws multiple images of the same picture: four blue people on the far left.]"

Teacher: Who are those other people?
David: A bad guy.
Teacher: Four bad guys?!
David: No, that one's running away. He got so small he lost his face. The End.

With this explanation, I gain a new perspective on David's artistic representation of his story. The four blue figures on the far left are all the same person. "He got so small he lost his face." ... !!! ... I don't know why that resonates so deeply with me, I suppose it is simply a small look into the language of children that is so primitive, yet expresses the truth of the matter so much better.

"Then there was trouble again. [Begins to draw over original family characters, filling them in with solid colors red and black.] A robot ... toy robot ... my robot. We lived happily ever after. The End. And then there was big trouble again. [Draws in original character of himself with blue.] I got blue on my face and my brains and my legs, too. The End."

And then, just as quickly and as rashly as he had told his story, he was done. "Done!" he chimed, "Can I hang it up?"

Of course, David. Of course!

June 10 Performance: "When are you gonna grow up?!"

2010-06-03T09:19:00.001-07:00

I'm honored to be the Seattle Storytellers Guild's featured storyteller at their monthly series "Tales for a Thursday Evening". Here's the skinny:

My favorite stories are the ones that show you how to be an adult without letting go of the child within. Come hear about some of my journey to adulthood as I share some personal stories and some favorite tales to tell. I spent most of the past year working behind the scenes on publicity for the Guild, while writing my master's thesis on storytellers at the University of Washington, so I'm excited to step up on stage.

Free. Refreshments provided.

Thursday, June 10, 7:00pm
Haller Lake Community Club
12579 Densmore Ave N., Seattle, 98113

For more information:
www.seattlestorytelling.org
www.hallerlake.info

Folklife Festival Storytelling

2010-05-31T09:52:00.000-07:00

Come one, come all, and gather yourself around this fire
For I have some tales to spin
To frighten, to comfort, to excite, and to inspire...

Four solid days of Folklife ... wow, that's a lot of activity. The Folklife Festival is a Memorial Day Weekend tradition in Seattle, and each year, it seems to get better. This was where I first came across the Seattle Storytellers Guild: at the Monday story swap, I believe it was. Who would have thought that two years later, I'd be featured in the Saturday night Ghost Stories Showcase ... their most attended event!

The two stories I prepared actually were not about ghosts, per se, so I started off with the classic tune of "Ghost Riders in the Sky", which everyone sang along with...

An old cowpoke went riding out one dark and windy day Upon a ridge he rested as he went along his way When all at once a mighty herd of red eyed cows he saw A-plowing through the ragged sky and up the cloudy draw Yippee-yi-yay! Yippee-yi-yo! Ghost riders in the sky!

Then I transitioned into "The one you don't see coming", a tale from West Africa that I learned from the very first storyteller I ever met, a guy named Ralph...

There is a village deep in the jungles of West Africa
where the old warriors gather at night around the campfire
and tell stories about The One You Don't See Coming.
A fickle and cunning prey it is,
for not only can you not see it coming,
you cannot smell it
you cannot hear it!
Indeed, you cannot catch The One You Don't See Coming,
because it always catches you first!

Finally, I closed it out with "The Uwabami", a Japanese story from Cathy Spagnoli's collection of Asian Trickster Tales. The uwabami is an evil trickster python that gets tricked, himself, by a small schoolboy on his way home to nurse his mother back to health ...

Kusaku had to think quickly.
"How do you know I am a human? I could be like you
- a trickster -
in human form.
Indeed, I am the great trickster Fox!"

It was a fabulous evening, and I enjoyed hearing the other tellers of the showcase: the Baltuck-Garrard Family Tellers, Anne Rutherford, and Robert Rubinstein. No wonder folks keep coming back to this event.

Thanks to Christen for the photos!
(I always forget to ask someone to take some)

Crayons make crayons

2010-05-25T10:33:00.000-07:00

While going through my collection of craft ideas, I came across the idea of melting used crayons down in a muffin tin and then letting them harden into new crayons. I thought: What a great way to use what we already have in the classroom and jazz it up into something "new". (I'm all about how minimalist true joy can be ...)

So, here's what it looked like:

Sorting out paperless crayons into color groups
(Don't worry, I have more plans for those crayon wrappers...)

Hammering down each set of crayons into little pieces

Combining crayon bits in different color combinations

Warming the crayons to melting point in our toaster oven ... pretty gooey!
As I held each child to see the process, I asked them what they saw happening. "It's melting!" they said. "Melting? What's that?!" I asked. They have, as yet, been hard pressed to explain what melting means, except for one, who said, "It's like the crayons start to flow over each other."

Once cooled, unwrapping our new crayons

And ... COLOR!!

This activity has been a huge hit, though I've noticed you need to do it with just four or five kids at a time. Otherwise, everyone is waiting a looooong time for their turn to hammer and pick out their crayon colors. Plus, with some potential hazards (hammer and toaster oven), too many kids means too many opportunities to be distracted, and that is never a risk I'm willing to take. Four kids worked really well, and now, every day, a new set of preschoolers make something new out of something old and get all excited all over again ...

Transportation week

2010-05-18T10:54:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I get worried that, no matter how hard I try, I'm never giving my students enough of a chance to be as creative as they most possibly can. ... Until I watch them work, of course, and I realize that "creative" is their default setting. Even when given a pattern to build a picture from, the ideas that go into their personal creations take them their own way.

David: I made my bus pink and orange. It's going into town. [Starts walking around the classroom, pretending his bus is driving.] Uh oh! Now he's getting a ticket!

Kevin: Look, it's going uphill. It's a roto-tiller that cuts grass.

Tully finished her bus and immediately folded it into a paper airplane.

I left school after this activity and thought again about my increasing interest in emergent curriculum. It seems that, even when presented with what could be seen as a prescribed craft, children infuse their work with their own background knowledge and creativity. That is so re-assuring. And, it makes me wonder if it's a lesson for all of us in the diversity of learning experiences that are inherent in each "lesson" we try to teach, each "activity" we facilitate.

Of course, we can create and facilitate activities for kids with an objective in mind, e.g. they're supposed to make a bus out of construction paper pieces. For three-year-olds, it's a worthy task, especially when we've been reading books about buses and talking about transportation all this week. It's good for us teachers to know they've made the transfer of knowledge and can create the image of a bus on their own.

At the same time, though, when we hold too closely to our objectives, what do we - the teachers - learn from the children, other than that they can create a bus or not? I introduced the activity by showing an example of a bus I had made, so we could talk about the parts of a bus. But then, when the kids went to work, I stepped back and observed more than I spoke, to see where they went with their idea of what a bus is.

As the examples above show, each child both approached and left the activity having made different meanings of it, and having scaffolded their image of a bus into a different set of prior knowledge, experiences and interests. David changed the color of his bus from yellow to pink and orange, and gave it motion by walking around the room with it in his hands. Then, he made a story out of it by pretending it was going to get a ticket. Roughly speaking, I could see that he was applying his prior knowledge of the fact that if vehicles like buses drive too fast, they get a ticket. I can't tell whether he's experienced that first-hand, or if he's observed it while driving with his parents, but I can tell he's had some experience with that concept.

Kevin, I know, is really into plants and gardens and the tools that go with it. I'm not at all surprised that he imagines his bus like a rototiller, let alone that he even knows what a rototiller is. He was trying to fit the idea of a bus into his general interest in gardening, and the closest thing that a bus resembles within the context of garden is, of course, a rototiller. What intrigued me more, though, was the fact that he turned it on its side, and tried to put the second wheel on the opposite side of the first wheel, rather than next to it, as if he was trying to make it three-dimensional. THAT was fascinating.

Finally, Tully, if you haven't guessed already, has been sucked into the paper airplane craze that started our transportation unit. Anything she makes with paper, she eventually starts to fold into a paper airplane, no matter what it is, or is supposed to be. I'm not worried. By the time next Monday comes around, the craze will be past. For now, I'm celebrating with her.

Stories on the spot ...

2010-03-24T09:23:00.000-07:00

The following anecdotes are notes I've taken the past few weeks as I've observed my preschoolers at play. With all the literature I'm still reading on how the brain naturally creates stories to explain things, I thought I'd see what examples I could find in real life. It didn't take long ...

David pulls Thomas the Train out of the train bucket and starts driving it on the wooden train tracks.
"Here's little Thomas. Number 1!"
Thomas is clearly too small for the tracks. Suddenly, David flies him off the tracks onto a blue section of the train table.
"Now he's swimming in the pool!"

(David observed a change in his play environment, and changed the action of his toy to fit that change logically.)

Two boys are in a tent. It's unclear whether they mean to exclude Charlie or not. Charlie looks around and picks up two cardboard building blocks, lifts them up over his head, and starts to hit them against the top of the tent.
"It's a stunder storm!" he cries.
The two boys come out of the tent with dinosaur toys.
"We must fight the storm!" and they and Charlie fight by flying their respective toys around in the air. No one is actually hit. The two boys recede again to the tent. Charlie remains outside.
"Drip, drop, drippety drop! It's gonna rain ..."

(Charlie created a purpose for his toys that allowed him to interact with the other children. They responded as David did, adjusting their play to a real change in their environment, so that the new element fit into the story of their previous play.)

Laura is using a dolphin stamp to decorate a piece of paper. She stamps two dolphins so they overlap each other.
"Look!" she says, "Two dolphins ran into each other!"
(She noticed something different, a break in her previous pattern, and then made up an imaginary story to explain how it happened.)
"Wow," I say, "That's interesting. How do you think that happened?"
"They were just swimming along," she starts, "and weren't watching where they were going! That's what happened in my movie at home 'The Day of the Fliers'."
(She extrapolated on the story by applying previous knowledge of / experience with another story to her reasoning in this story. If two dolphins run into each other, she can assume that it happened for similar reasons as she saw elsewhere.)
She continues to stamp the dolphins so they overlap with each other.

Now, I'll fully admit that my brain is full of stories, story-making, and storytelling thoughts these days, so that I, too, am engaging my brain's natural story-making activity to make sense of what observe. However, I hope you begin to see how just about everything a child says in play, every reaction they have to their environment, is an act of this story- and sense-making process. I am privileged to observe this activity every day I am in my preschool. They remind me that it is a process that continues into adulthood. Though, sadly, with as much valuable experience as we gain, our imaginative capacities for believing that a train can swim in a swimming pool or that dinosaurs can fight a "stunder storm" drastically decrease.

KSER Membership Drive

2010-03-14T17:55:00.000-07:00

Oh, let's hope I remember everyone's name!

Top L to R: Kathy, Mary, Eva, Fern, me! (Avery), Willy

Bottom L to R: Naomi, Aarene, Rob, Jim

Welcome to the KSER 90.7FM membership drive, where Global Griot - the Sunday morning storytelling show - hosted a party of all live storytelling this morning. What a fabulous experience to take part in, and what wonderful connections we all made with each other!

We were all appreciative of Global Griot's hosts Aarene, Jim, and Mary, and to the station manager, Bruce, who were so welcoming, with kind words, nourishing treats (ever heard of Cackleberry Casserole?), and hot coffee. There was a lot of talk regarding future collaborations between the Seattle Storytellers Guild and KSER, which I hope will come to fruition soon.

There were so many stories told, from Fern's Irish tale of The Grain of Fionn mac Cumhaill (also known as Finn MacCool), to a Jack tale from Kathy; from Naomi's The Jazzy Bears (take-off on Goldilocks) to Eva's mysterious "Suspect". I was glad that both Rob and I told personal stories, too, because people forget so easily that crafting a story from your own life is just as much the challenge and delight as is developing folktales or other kinds of stories. There are so very many kinds of stories to tell, and it was wonderful to see them all represented by the different tellers present.

I was most inspired by the sense of community that was instantly created in that volunteer room, just outside the on-air booth. Bruce didn't really know what he was in for when he welcomed us and asked us, "What stories will you be reading?" "Um," we answered, hesitantly, "We don't read stories, we tell them. That's why we're called storytellers." Sure enough, after the first few of us had told, he piped up: "Oh, you know, I tell stories, too, about my daughters..." and next thing you knew, he was on the air, telling stories, himself. Ah yes, homo narrans, we are all storytellers ...

A peek into the studio from the volunteer room. Bruce, at the mic, is the station manager, and Maggie, in the green, is an Irish harpist and storyteller who opened up the show for us, but had to leave before the group photo was taken.

About half way through the show I answered a call in the volunteer room (we were also taking pledges, by the way) from a young boy whose first words to me were: "Could you tell the three bears one?" - "You mean, Goldilocks and the Three Bears?" - "Yeah, that one." I later spoke to his grandmother, who said he comes over every Saturday night to stay the night get up Sunday to listen to Global Griot. ... !!! ... So, I asked around, "Who wants to tell Goldilocks and the Three Bears?" - "Someone will!" I was reassured, which I passed on to the boy before we hung up.

Well, then we were all a little stuck. How does that story start, anyway? There are three bears, they leave the house, but why? And then there's Goldilocks, prancing through the forest, but what is she doing? Piece by piece we put it all together and within 10 minutes, Kathy and Naomi were in the studio telling two different versions of the classic story.

Ah, the sweet sense of community! What very different journeys we all had taken to that little building in Everett WA; yet, how warm and welcoming all were toward one another, as if we'd known each other all our lives. Who knows? Maybe we have ... in a storyteller kind of way.

Dear Charlie ...

2010-03-01T18:19:00.000-08:00

Dear Charlie,

You amazed me today. Let me tell you the whole story.

We've been learning about all the German fairy tales this month, and today we spent a lot of time talking about Dornröschen, or Sleeping Beauty. After listening to the story at reading time, all you children went to the tables to decorate a picture of Sleeping Beauty's castle and cover it with the great bush of thorns that grew around it while she was sleeping.

Now, stories are stories, and everyone remembers them differently. One of my favorite things to do as a teacher is watch to see what my students take from the stories they hear, and how that comes out in their art work. Here's what you drew and glued on, and what you told me about it:

"There's the princess [black figure, above] trying to get the prince down. She needs a rope to get one [draws purple line down from black figure]. Here's the water all around. There are two flying pigs to guard the castle [drawn left of castle]. There's a key inside here [purple mark on rose in the castle entryway].

About green bush on the right (the great thorns that grew around Sleeping Beauty's castle):"That's the decoration. When you put strings on it, it looks all pretty. The decoration looks good."

Charlie, what a clear imagination you have! As you were telling me all about your drawing, you knew exactly what everything was, and when you wanted to tell me about something that was missing, you started drawing it as you told me about it.

I really enjoyed hearing what you added to the story, like I do hearing about everything you draw and think about. You have such an active mind, full of detail. Most kids do, and that's why I love taking the time to listen to you tell me about your pictures.

Thank you, Charlie. Hope you had a good time at school today, too.

"So, here's a sandbox [orange circle, bottom]. That's the Sonne [sun] and the Sonne dries up all the puddles. There's a frog [brown, lower left]. There's the chocolate stream and they put it in the wrapper. There are the muddy puddles in a drain that drains a lot of stuff. The Sonne is really hot - so hot, you have to eat ice cream." - Charlie, 4yr 2mo

Tcha Tee Man Wi Storytelling Festival

2010-02-22T11:03:00.000-08:00

http://www.tchateemanwistorytelling.com/

"I'm a storyteller ... I take the long way home."

Regi Carpenter, featured teller

How to express the state of my mind and heart and soul at the close of this - or any - storytelling festival?? Perhaps it is best to share simple snippets of thought, as recorded in my journal, with the highlights of the weekend.

Friday night concert - Regi Carpenter was new to my schema of storytelling performers. She was so theatrical, and truly brought so many aspects of ART into the idea of storytelling as a performance art: song, movement, imagery, cadence of voice ... She reminded me of what Anne had said last weekend, that storytellers really use all the body has to offer to practice their art, because that is all they have. Yet, what we have is enough.

Saturday morning workshop with Joel ben Izzy - He began with a story about traveling to Mexico with Green Mountain Coffee and visiting a coffee plant where the hostess was just as joyful as can be ... he honed in a minute on the holes in the roof of the house. They were tiny pricks, really, but enough to shed quarter-size circles of light onto the floor. "These little thing," he said, "are what let us into storytelling." I could not help but remember Dayton Edmonds' story of the Sky Blanket and think: those pricks in the ceiling, they are like the stars in the Sky Blanket that remind us of the world beyond. Perhaps, then, stories serve a dual purpose: like the stars of the Sky Blanket, they remind us of what lies beyond the world we live in; and like the pricks in the ceiling, they let the light of the world beyond in to shed just a quarter-size illumination on something that happens here, in this world.

Picnic lunch with Fern, fellow storyteller and (very newly so) my boyfriend - I re-read a chapter from David Sobol's The Storytellers' Journey, titled The Archetype of the Storyteller: "I will treat the archetype of the storyteller ... not as a transcendent category, but as a dynamic process." Sobol features three "totemic tales", as he calls them, that seem to reflect different aspects of recognizing oneself as a storyteller, complete with an identity and purpose within human culture. The archetype, though, he seems to say, is not the identity, itself, but the process of identification. In other words, the processing of an experience in search of meaning.

... Meaning-making! This is what we tell stories for, each and every one of us! Yet, the one who finds meaning in the personal experience of finding meaning in all experience for the sake of all people ... that is the storyteller. The archetypal practice of storytellers seems now to emerge in my mind: The conscious craft of making meaning out of all life experience on behalf of and for the whole of humanity.

24 hours in Portland

2010-02-15T10:23:00.000-08:00

Good old PDX. Just a train ride away from Seattle, yet I really do not visit as often as I should.

On this particular occasion, I was going to Portland for the express purpose of taking in as much of the storytelling scene there as I possibly could in 24 hours. You may think 24 hours is not a long time, but you don't know what I'm used to packing into 24 hours. Allow me to let you in on this adventure ...

I was so graciously hosted by storyteller friend and colleague Anne Rutherford, a fabulous teller I met last summer at a storytellers' retreat. She, like myself, is always eager to "talk story", which we proceeded to do almost the minute I put my backpack down in the guest room. I can still hear her saying at one point, coffee cup held mid-reach in the air, "You know, it's a privilege we have to sit with these stories ..."

Indeed, the life of a storyteller is paradoxically two-sided: we appear to most as performers, on stage, the entertainer at the center of everyone's attention; yet, like most entertainers, a vastly greater amount of time is put into the research, preparation, and practice. Like Anne says, first, we sit with the stories. We sit for a long time, and let them percolate through our brains and our hearts and our gut. And though we certainly think about effective presentation of a performance, we know better that the ultimate success of the performance is how it resonates with the audience and how those stories stay with listeners long after the telling. So, as we sit with these stories, we think: What resonates in that story on a basic human level? And that can take a while to recognize, let along prepare for presentation.

All this continued to flow through my mind as I watched local tellers from the Portland Storytellers Guild at their monthly performance showcase and appreciated the obvious care and conscientious preparation of each teller's segment. The last story of the evening was an old Welsh myth, I believe, told by a lovely woman named Conchetta. She ended the tale with a delightfully embedded appreciation of the tradition: "... Pay homage to the bards, for, had they not saved and told these stories, we would never have known of how Quill lost Rhiannon with the wit and generosity, and how Rhiannon won him back with her own ..."

The highlight of the weekend was a Unitarian Universalist service Sunday morning that featured a storytelling friend of Anne's, named Barbara, as the sermon-giver. Her story was titled "The truth about lies" and wove together several vignettes from different periods in her personal life. Each exposed a particular lie she had told, but with a delicate honesty that sought not redemption or forgiveness from others, but truth for herself.

"I don't think it's worth trying to be a truth-teller all our lives through," she said, "Lies are windows to the truth of what we fear most in the world. The best we can do is to know when we are telling lies and why."

It was an extremely moving story and event that left Anne and myself almost gasping for breath. As my afternoon train pulled out, I looked back on that city and on that weekend thinking:

Stories are lies, too, aren't they? They lie on purpose, either as fiction, or a folktale passed down many generations, or a crafted personal story ... yet not with the ill intention of deceit, but with the intention of - like Barbara - inspiring and discovering truth. This way of thinking about story helps me understand why some of my readings have described storytelling as a liminal experience, as a threshold. Stories, themselves, present a careful line between truth and imagination, the comfortable and the uncomfortable, the known and the unknown of ourselves and of the world. As storytellers, we walk that line, facilitating the process of each side informing the other not in discord, but in growth and development. Perhaps, then, that is the storyteller's craft: the weaving of dichotomous ideas together in a dance of tension that ultimately builds to cooperation. As the tension builds, truth and imagination, the comfortable and the uncomfortable, the known and unknown dance with each other, not against each other. By allowing these dichotomies to dance together, we find how embedded they are in each other; by allowing for two, we reach the wholeness of one.

Stories from the easel ...

2010-02-12T18:09:00.000-08:00

I'm making Fische [fish]. They're purple. That's the water. Now the blue water. Purple blue water. That's the water. Fische in the water!

- Georgia, 3yr 6mo

Painting 1 Painting 2

Painting 1: "This is an old engine. It doesn't have any names. It rides on the tracks to far away. It has real sparks because the wheels are going a little bit faster, so real sparks come out. These little sparks go out of the engine and squeeeeeze and then they'll come out of the wheels a little bit faster and that's why there are sparks!"

Painting 2: "This is another old engine. They're friends. IT's because the drivers ... there are two tables, and they have breakfast. But sometimes the sparks go, little tiny ones come out when it goes a little faster. This one goes faster than the other one."

- Kevin, 3yr 8mo

From fish to infinity

2010-02-01T15:35:00.001-08:00

Or, how Sesame Street saves us once again!

Please check out the NY Times column by Steven Strogatz examining concepts of math, from preschool on up. The column debuted today, and I thank my aspiring physics scholar of a cousin for sending me the tip! It all starts somewhere ...

Actually, what I found most intriguing in this debut column is the double-sided concept of abstract reality he addresses. Numbers allow us to deal with and engage with reality more efficiently, but, as he writes, "at a serious cost of abstraction." Yet, this very leap of abstraction leads us to the concept of, say, addition, which also helps us engage with reality more efficiently. Like most of the things I find cognitively magical, the powers of the abstract reality of numbers seems to function, in my thinking, like a double-helix: two seemingly opposite forces, bound together in relation with each other by the concrete connections we can observe, and thus forever influential on each other.

But don't let me put too many thoughts in your head. Read it for yourself!

Miracles that occur every day in preschool:

2010-01-20T22:49:00.000-08:00

... a small hand that pats your back while you read a book ...

... foam triangles that are waves one minute, and the next, they are airplanes ...

... salami that is so good, it makes your eyes roll back into your head ...

... trips to the bathroom that do not require a change of pants ...

... unabating laughter (usually due to unabating tickling) ...

... putting a princess dress on, and then deciding, "you know what? i think i just wanna be a little girl" ...

...

what miracles do you bear witness to on a daily basis??

The geography of story

2009-12-10T11:53:00.000-08:00

"Learning and teaching should not stand on opposite banks and just watch the river flow by; instead, they should embark together on a journey down the water."

Loris Magaluzzi, founder of Reggio Emilia pedagogy

and author of The hundred languages of children

I attended this professional development workshop at Opal School, a public charter school influenced and inspired by the Reggio Emilia pedagogy of Italy. I had attended their Summer Symposium in June 2009 and left extremely impressed with the general Opal approach to teaching and found that the Reggio Emilia inspiration resonated well with me. It was an invaluable opportunity to return again for this day-long workshop on the more focused topic of Story Workshop, an integral segment of a week at Opal.

We began in a brief whole group introductory session, then quickly dispersed into smaller groups to observe Story Workshop in different aged classrooms. I arrived at the Pre-K/K classroom just as they were gathering in a Good Morning Circle and going over the “Flow of the day”. The teacher, Laura, transitioned into Story Workshop by first remembering with the children “Things smart writers do”, as gathered on a poster with pictures and words, including:

Use words that grab attention
Put unexpected surprises in
Make audience want to know what happens next
Put dialogue into your stories (Make the characters talk)
Make your reader wonder

The children were asked if one would be willing to share their story from the last Story Workshop (SW). Kyle volunteered and was chosen to share. At his request, the teacher read his story out loud while he held up his painting that had informed the story. The students engaged well with the sharing, and offered questions, comments, and compliments at the close. “What happens in the next chapter?” someone asked. “I don’t know yet,” he replied, but you could tell he was thinking about it ...

Then, Laura invited all of the children to share their stories from the last SW in pairs, sharing “knee to knee and eye to eye”. My assumption was that this was an exercise to help the children get back into the mind space of SW and remember where they had left off. As I learned later, the goal of each SW session is not to complete an entire story, but simply to explore the possibilities of a story through the use of one of several art materials, such as clay, paint, found objects, blocks, etc. (See attached handout for more examples) Most likely, it takes several sessions before a child has achieved a full, rounded out story. For this reason, sharing with their peers about the last session helps children prepare to continue that creative process by reconstructing their prior thought process.

After this brief sharing, it was time to go to the materials to discover: “What will help tell your story today?” Several tables were already set up in what I now call, for myself, “Opal style”, because I have never seen such conscientious preparation as I’ve seen at Opal. You look at a table with a piece of paper on matting, pens, pencils, and simple, yet intriguing objects in the middle to observe (see above) in just such a way that you feel genuinely invited into the world of your own creativity.

In this particular session, the materials I remember as available to use were paint, found objects, cut-out paper shapes, blocks, and dramatic play. I sat myself in one corner and could not see the entirety of the classroom. What I did get to observe up close, though, was the paint table, where Kyle returned to continue the story he had told through his last painting.

Next to the table was an easel, which is where he wanted to work. There was already a piece of paper pinned on, so he set right to work, first with a thick Sharpie pen for a thick black outline. As in his last painting, he drew a dinosaur, beginning with the body, and ending with a very detailed image of the mouth. You could tell it was this part of the dragon that would play the biggest role in the story. Indeed, I looked away from his drawing at two other students at the paint table - it couldn’t have been more than 3 minutes - and when I looked back, I was stunned at the detail and simply sheer sophistication of his drawing. Sure enough, the dinosaur now had a person in its mouth!

“What’s your second chapter, Kyle?” came Nick’s voice from the paint table.

“You’ll see when I’m done,” replied Kyle, with no signs of disrupted thinking by the question.

“Ok,” said Nick, and the two continued.

I continued watching Kyle. It was obvious he was thinking, and thinking hard, because this wasn’t just a random act of creativity, this was creativity with a purpose. He reminded me: All creativity has a purpose that drives our thinking and processing and creating. How little attention we give to these moments of concentration, preferring the feeling of completion a finished product offers, as if it has more to say about the artist. A major theme of the day was beginning to take form in my mind: It is the process of creativity and imagination that provide the richest information about students’ thinking, not the product. Yet, the product is so much easier to take in and to display as proof of the process. Ah, but it does not capture the process. It captures “Look what I made!” but it does not capture the journey behind that declaration.

The bell rang, indicating it was sharing time again, this time about the story in students’ minds today. “The dinosaur ate me,” Kyle related to Nick, “but I tickled him and then I came out of his mouth. And then the baby dinosaur hatched. This is the dinosaur and that’s me and that’s the baby dinosaur. It’s coming out of its shell. Where’s your story, Nick?” ...

At the close of SW, Laura called the students together and - as if she could read my thoughts - said, “Even if you didn’t write a story today, you were working with something that will help you write a story tomorrow, maybe.”

* * *

Back as a whole group, we recalled what pleased us as observers of SW:

The children were surrounded by provocations, not just in materials, but in questions posted on the walls and tables
Materials were stored openly, allowing the children to access whatever they needed whenever they needed it. It was observed that children used this access appropriately and always put things back.
The teacher became invisible in SW - not in a bad way, but invisible like the cameras and notebooks they carried with them to document the children’s processes. Teachers sat near students, but did not engage them in conversation, allowing the children to do so if they desired.
There was a sense about the classrooms that everything has a story to tell, that you can find a story in any object or material. What an amazing sense of possibility to have permeate a learning environment!

We also raised some questions, including:

How are students introduced to SW at the beginning of the school year?
How do you address students using the same themes / characters / plot lines over and over again?
How do you address themes of violence?
How are the “basic skills” of reading and writing addressed and taught? Within or separate from SW?

To get any more into that discussion would entail too much for this summary, but suffice it to say it was clear that what we all enjoyed observing, the teacher enjoyed equally in practice; likewise, the questions we brought up are also questions that teachers work with in practice, as well. However, using those questions to inform their observations, it is also clear that they are addressing these questions proactively, and, in most cases, they gave comprehensive answers.

Finally, one of the pivotal conceivers and developers of SW, spoke in-depth about what’s going on in a SW session. The questions that guided the inquiry of teachers interested in developing SW were:

What does it mean to be literate?
How does literacy development help us make meaning in our lives?
What is the role of story in supporting literacy development?
How do the arts support story-making?

The fundamental belief teachers at Opal work with is the conception of the child as communicator. As teachers, we may be there to guide and share the journey of learning with our students, but we must be careful to remember that children have incredibly valuable things to say and share, themselves. What a gift that we may be the ones they choose to tell.

How are the arts and literacy connected and how can the arts support literacy development? It seems Opal teachers have found that the definitions of these two terms have long been conceptualized too narrowly. Indeed, I wonder often how narrowly we have come to conceive the entire traditional curriculum, and perhaps, even learning itself! (Though, perhaps this is simply the connection-maker coming out in me) What I appreciated most about my observation of SW was that I felt I finally had a concrete example of what that buzzword “holistic” really means in the context of education. The “basics” are not ignored, and neither is “structure” or “discipline”; they do, however, look different in a classroom that derives its curriculum primarily from observation and provocation of students. Likewise, the opportunities students have learn, such as in SW, provide just the amount of room they need to explore and expand their creativity in just the way each student needs.

For the purpose of this entry, I do not want to delve into a more detailed break-down of how SW is structured and facilitated, because I do not wish to undermine the immense efforts the Opal teacher team put into putting on this professional development workshop. I can only highly recommend that you check out Opal Charter School for yourself and inform yourself about upcoming workshops and symposiums.

In the end, Opal teachers have found that both the arts and literacy skills are fundamental media of discovering who we are, so that the connections between the two are endless! I can only agree and add my own long-standing intuition that endless possibilities exist when considering all fields and opportunities for learning. However, I have to leave it to the children to say it best. As one student said about using art materials in SW (as shared by a teacher): “Words are just black. [Painting] makes me think of more words because it brings out colors more than black and white.”

Master's Thesis Proposal

2009-12-08T10:15:00.000-08:00

Storytellers as educators: Inviting new voices into pedagogical and philosophical considerations of teaching

Researcher: Avery D. Hill
University of Washington

From a historical perspective, the origins of education can be traced back to the tradition of storytelling, which emerged within human culture as the first form of teaching. Thus, we might think of storytellers as the world’s first teachers. Today, teachers and storytellers may not be considered to have much in common, because they have evolved along different ideological directions into two distinct traditions. Yet, what remains of the original storyteller in the modern teaching profession? What can teachers learn from storytellers about teaching that they would not otherwise think about in the current world of education?
This study seeks to explore the following question: What insights into teaching and being a teacher are gained from today’s storytellers?
In the current literature on storytelling in education, much attention has been given to stories, their underlying meaning(s), and how and what can be learned from listening to them. However, we forget that stories are passed from one learner to the next by the tellers who tell them. This study seeks to feature those who tell stories and to acknowledge their ideas and reflections as educators, whose thoughts on teaching and being a teacher are relevant to contemporary educational discussion.
Due to the novelty of this topic of research, this study is strictly exploratory. Data will be collected from a small sample of participants (4-6) in one-on-one interviews, and then analyzed for content and theme. The goal of analysis is to identify patterns in participants’ responses, particular insights into teaching and the idea of being a teacher, and potentially rich considerations for further research.

Download the full-length (7-page) version of my proposal from my Teaching Portfolio.

Sharing part 2

2009-12-05T11:52:00.000-08:00

I am a genius. Not to get all full of myself, but, really, I feel like one today.

As I've mentioned in a past post, sharing is an unbelievably difficult concept to teach well, partially because it's so counter-intuitive to the 3-year-old brain, yet so drilled into our psyches that, by the time we're teaching it as adults, we're more apt to teach it as "something we just do", with no real exploration or explanation of what's going on.

I made my first attempt to approach this differently today:

There were three children playing with magnets, one of whom clearly was monopolizing the majority of them. When a fourth child joined and wanted some magnets, the monopolizer was not going to budge. I watched as the fourth child distressed a little, then turned to me for help.

First, I tried scaffolding the negotiation process of simply asking to play with materials, which is a regular practice on my part. "Tina doesn't know you want to play with the magnets until you ask her. Try it like this: 'Tina, could I play with some of those magnets?' " So, the child tries by actually vocalizing her want, but still to no avail. I encouraged her to point out to Tina that she has an awful lot of magnets, and she'd just like three of them for now. Still didn't work.

That was when the epiphany came. I jumped in: "Tina, I notice Amy here would like to join you at the magnet table, and there are four chairs, so she should be able to have some magnets to play with." I get a guilty look from Tina, who is clenching her magnets.

I could take them from her, I think to myself. I could tell her to share and be done with it. But I also want to give her some agency in the situation. As I wrote before, I don't want them to share because I tell them to, but rather because they choose to.

"As far as I can tell, Tina, it seems you really want to play with ALL of those magnets. Which I can understand. Magnets are great fun. At the same time, the materials in the classroom are for ALL students to play with. That's why we have to figure out different ways to share them, like right now with the magnets.

"I've got two ideas for sharing the magnets. Tell me what you think: Either, you can share the magnets, themselves, by giving some to Amy, and then you can play for as long as you want with the magnets and with each other; or, if you really don't want to give up any of those magnets, you can share the time you have with them. I'll set a timer for five minutes, and when five minutes is up, you'll have to give all those magnets to Amy to play with, and find another place to play.

"What do you think? Share the material or share the time? It's up to you."

The key to presenting students with a choice is being ok, as the teacher, with either choice you've presented. It doesn't help to give a child an option you don't really want them to choose. In this case, I was ok with letting Tina hog the magnets for a short amount of time. I figured it would be a lesson, in and of itself, both in time and in the sacrifice of not wanting to the share the material (you don't get to play with it as long).

Tina did, indeed, choose to share the time. Unfortunately, playtime was over three minutes later - oversight on my part :( - and though Amy happily moved on to find something else after the magnet situation, I was disappointed that I didn't get a chance to follow through with Tina. However, the moment of insight was enough to get my juices going in my brain, in anticipation of other such situations, surely just a day away ...

"Ich bin all done mit meins"

2009-12-03T11:50:00.000-08:00

One of the fascinating things about working at a language-immersion preschool is getting to observe my students negotiate two languages in their speaking. Whereas most students began the year speaking mostly English, we're now at the point of the year where they're starting to mix more, especially the children who have extra-curricular German connections (family, friends, etc). Here are some of my favorite quotes as of late:

"We decorated our Tannenbaum"

"I can das alleine machen"

[I can do it by myself]

"I need Hilfe"

"Schau mal! Ich bin Beauty!"

"Kann ich dir einen Hug geben?"

[Can I give you a hug?]

and, my personal favorite,

"Ich bin all done mit meins"

[I'm all done with mine]

For those kids with little background in the German language, the first words being incorporated are nouns (Tannenbaum=Christmas tree; Hilfe=help) and adjectives (alleine=alone, by myself). For those who come from bilingual homes, you can see here some more complicated grammatical structures that default to German grammar, but include English vocabulary.

I did study second language acquisition a bit in college, especially as I prepared to teach English abroad, but more informally, not in a formal course. I feel, though, that the richest knowledge I gained on the topic was from the very experience of being a second language learner, negotiating two languages in my brain, for myself. And I remember gradually moving from fitting German words into English grammar to using German grammar primarily, and substituting English words for the vocabulary I had not yet learned. Grammar is, obviously, more complicated than individual vocabulary, so it's an interesting shift to observe, both in oneself and in others.

I would venture to say that it is precisely the grammar the prevents us from picking up languages as quickly when we're older than when we're younger. By the time we are adults, so much of our thinking is rooted in the structure of our language that it is so uncomfortable to try to switch to a different structure of grammar. So, we start by putting individual elements into the structure we know, and work gradually ... oh so painfully, really ... to switch scaffolds. Some of us never do.

Kids are like sponges when they learn anything. When we think about language, they are still developing their own native language skills, so, as far as they're concerned, there's plenty of room for whatever there is to be learned. Some of our students are even learning three languages at 3 and 4 years old. What a gift! And what a fascinating process to take part in, to support, and to observe.

I will have to double-check some of my intuitions stated here with some of the literature, but my intuitions don't usually come from the far ends of some distant imaginative space in my head ...

Education as a moral endeavor part 2

2009-12-01T11:55:00.000-08:00

Remember my cast of characters?

The fall is turning to winter, and so I turn from my generous reading of these moving authors to inhabiting their perspective, so that they may generously read my own story. This is not the story I wrote at the beginning of the quarter. It was while reading our last book of the course, Bingham's Authority is relational that I heard his voice in my mind reminding me of a different story, a story still very much in progress, unfolding with every day I continue to live, learn, and grow as a teacher, student, and scholar.

He argues that educational authority is not a unidirectional force, but a dialogical process. The authority of a Speaker exists only through the authorization granted by the Listener, and both contribute to the shared process of interpreting something - he calls it "text", but it could be any kind of learning material, I think. This shared interpretation provides the foundation for relations of educational authority between Teacher and Student, so that, ultimately, what students learn from interpreted material is so embedded in the relation of interpretation that "When a person takes part in the relation of educational authority, it is the relation itself that educates. It is the relation, rather than some predetermined content." (p.63)

When I read this passage, like I said, I heard his voice in mind. Literally, it was a voice that whispered: See? This is why you are a storyteller.

What?! What does storytelling have to do with educational authority relations?

And so, with this whisper in my mind, telling me things I wanted to believe, but could not yet figure the logic of, I put the course texts aside - we had read them all at this point - and returned to thinking about what not only brought me to this course, but has brought me through all of my studies in Education. It became clear there was another story there, begging to be told and to be listened to, generously, by these authors:

When I was eight years old, I decided I wanted to become a teacher. As most children are wont to do on such a momentous occasion as deciding what they want to be when they grow up, I announced it to my mother. Her response was not exactly what I expected or hoped for: “Oh, Avery, no matter what profession you pursue, you will always be a teacher.” What was that supposed to mean?

So began my pondering on the characteristics and qualities that teachers of all kinds embody. It was then that I began to learn that being a teacher implies both a kind of practice and a certain essence. In my imaginary play, I imitated the practice of my elementary school teachers by standing at a chalkboard and explaining what I had written to my imaginary students. But what if that practice does not reflect the teacher I am? What if the essence of my being as a teacher implies another kind of practice? I realize now that my mother’s words were entirely prophetic, setting the stage for a lifelong journey: the path of discovering what it will mean, in my life, to be a teacher.

Somehow I found my way from one experience to the next, and some have questioned the logic of my choices. That is an entirely different story. The story I want to tell here is this: Despite the vast differences between these experiences, they have one aspect of my personal teaching style in common – that is, there is one way in which I have always been and still remain a teacher in every educative context. I am a storyteller.

In every “classroom” – from first period English to the Kindergarten rug to the outdoor Learning Tree – I have employed stories both traditional and modern to illustrate concepts, to teach vocabulary, and to engage my students in conversation with new ideas and with each other. Storytelling has become integral to my teaching style, and I would not consider myself a teacher if I were ever to eliminate the use of stories from my teaching.

At first glance, my journey of becoming a storyteller would most likely not qualify as a moral dilemma. When we think of moral dilemmas, we might think of a decision one is faced with, a decision of right and wrong: “What is the right thing to do?” we imagine asking ourselves, “Why would doing it a different way be wrong?” What’s more, something is humanly at stake in a moral dilemma – perhaps there is something to “win” or to “lose”.

Yet, storytelling is so embedded in my sense of self as a teacher, it feels immoral to me to deny this tradition a rightful place in our education system and in our academic conversations about teaching and learning. I find myself asking moral questions: Why does it feel wrong to me that the ideas and concepts of the storytelling tradition are often avoided in today’s classrooms and teacher education programs? Why do I find it such a loss that public education continues to condone this exclusion of storytelling, favoring, instead, purely information-based curricula and assessments? What is at stake in today’s classrooms if the exclusion of storytelling continues?

Let me clarify: I know why I like using stories in my teaching. I know that stories are excellent teaching tools for a variety of reasons that cognitive scientists, philosophers and theorists of education, not to mention various storytellers, themselves, have expressed. I know that the only thing I love more than sharing the experience of stories with students is sharing the experience of my students with the stories that I have come to consider fellow teachers, for they invite and inspire growth in students in a way that I would not have anticipated.

What I do not know is why this practice and tradition of storytelling has such a hold on me as an educator, and, for that matter, as a learner. I cannot clarify - in a way that satisfies me - the significance I feel storytelling has in meaningful, life-long learning. I know only that I cannot say I am a teacher if I do not simultaneously express that I am a storyteller. Though my discoveries of what being a teacher will mean in my life are far from over, I have clearly reached one significant benchmark: being a teacher, in my life, means being a storyteller.

The story sort of just flowed out of me like a river downstream. I doubted, at first, that it was really a story of morals. I ran it by Donna, though, and she gave the me thumbs up. Now, it's just a matter of figuring out more of what these whispers in my mind are saying when I inhabit the perspectives of the course authors. This will surely be quite the mental exercise. Stay tuned ...

A teachable moment

2009-11-20T11:48:00.000-08:00

Oh, this is going to be a great story!:

At our Sensory table today, we filled a tub with water to clean cranberries to make cranberry sauce. The children had great fun putting their hands in the water and feeling the cranberries between their fingers ... but the real magic came when all the cranberries were taken out and it was time to empty the tub.

Because the tub is so large, it sits on a stand and there is a plug at the bottom to empty the water from. As I did so, some children had stayed to watch the water go down. One noticed the shape of the water's movement as it went down the plug - it was exactly like water going down a drain, spiraling around.

Now, I see this phenomenon every day. I don't ask questions about it. Alas, I am no longer four years old. Luckily, I hang out with young children enough that they remind me how great it is to be so young and wide-eyed and wondering at the world. Because as everyone else went about cleaning up from the morning's activity, one boy - Bennett - tapped my leg and asked me: "What is the water doing there?"

"Oh," I responded, "It's spiraling and spinning down the plug."

"That's like my potty!"

"Yes, that's what water does anytime it goes from being in a really big container down into a really tiny hole."

"Why does it do that?"

[Ach! Killer! I *love* four-year-olds!]

"You know, Bennett, I don't think I could tell you why. I don't know."

[It's true. I don't know. But I don't want to just leave him with that. I want to follow this interest, keep it alive and fresh and active ...]

"...Wait, Bennett, I have an idea. Maybe we can figure it out."

I went to the kitchen area where everything was prepared for making cranberry sauce and made a bee line for the cinnamon container. I returned to the tub, the water still draining into a more manageable bucket, and let loose, sprinkling cinnamon all over the water's surface.

I didn't really know what was going to happen, but I knew it was just going to have to be amazing, if not because it was science at its purest, it was a four-year-old that inspired the idea. Sure enough, more children came over to watch the movement of the water in the entire tub, and to marvel at the phenomenon of how rapidly it began to move in circles as it approached the plug at one end. I was amazed: with the help of the cinnamon, it was remarkably easy to see the entire pattern of the water's movement.

"Why do you think the water makes that spiral down at the plug like that?" I asked.

Several children just kept watching, as if in a trance. I could tell Bennett was really trying to figure it out, make sense of it. "I don't know," he said, "I just don't know."

"That's okay," I said, "I don't know, either. But it's really cool, isn't it."

"Yeah. It's really really really REALLY COOL!" he bursted.

"Well, you'll just have to keep thinking about it, and I bet an idea will come to you."

"Yeah..."

What can I say? Another day in pre-school...

"Sharing, it's what good friends do..."

2009-11-20T11:46:00.000-08:00

... whatever I have, you can have some, too."

Anyone remember that song? A Sesame Street classic ... or maybe it was exclusive to the repertoire of my talking Big Bird...

I've been thinking a lot about sharing lately, because it is really a very loaded concept, and not an easy one for 2-, 3-, and 4-year-olds to grasp. I find it most difficult, however, to be the one who is trying to explain and teach sharing to these little ones.

At it's very core, sharing implies loss. That's what my students remind me of every day. When someone tells them "You need to share", what they hear is "You can't have that to yourself, you need to give it up." That is loss. So, now, you're the teacher: How do you teach that loss can be a "good" and rewarding thing? How do you explain that there are times when we submit ourselves to the experience of loss willingly, because that loss actually becomes an experience of gain, in another form than the original loss? That is some very twisted logic, when you get right down to it.

I am trying to start from the beginning: "You know, I can tell you're really enjoying playing with all those Legos, Francis, and I can see why! Remember, though, we're at school, and all the toys here are for all the children to play with. That's why we get to practice sharing a lot at school, so that everyone gets a chance to play with the toys they want..."

[Finders may be keepers, but the point of play and of a playful community such as the classroom can be is the connection we find and experience with others. Yet, though I would never call young children 'selfish', they do need to understand others primarily through themselves.]

"So, let's think, Francis: There are two ways I think would make for some pretty good sharing right now. We can share the material we have - like Legos - or we can share the time we have the material. What do you think? Can you share your Legos with your friends so you can all play at the same time? Or would you rather keep all the Legos for yourself now and then give them all to someone else when I come back in five minutes?..."

[This is the new piece of my thinking: I don't think it's a horrible thing to want something entirely for oneself for an amount of time. There are things we cannot divide up like Legos, so we divide up the time we have with them. Maybe this is an easier way to share for some children?]

Francis decided to share the Legos with the other children at the table. I have to admit, I was relieved. Perhaps I had come up with an alternative way of sharing, but I had not quite thought completely through how I was then going to teach the concept of time ... that will have to come up in another post soon ...

Is destruction an act of creativity?

2009-11-16T11:43:00.000-08:00

I want to give them the benefit of the doubt: there must be something more to holding something in one's hand and then, in sheer excitement, throw it all over the place; there must be a cognitive sense to building a tower of colored blocks for the sole purpose of kicking it down upon finishing.

Four boys have been the object of my reflection on this question - Is destruction an act of creativity? - because I just watch and wonder at them. I wonder at them partially because they are the complete opposite of what I ever was as a child. But what's more: they consistently push my perceptions and understanding of the purpose of childhood and - perhaps more importantly - the purpose of teachers.

Is this an energy to be reined in? Modified and conditioned? ... Or could it be understood? Could it even change the way I think about that child and/or that behavior?

This is where the complexities of being a teacher - with all the background expertise AND intuitive, on-the-spot insightfulness - take shape in my understanding of what teaching is all about. Maybe it's not about what I have to teach them, but about what they can teach me. How can I expect myself to be able to teach them effectively and appropriately if I am not willing to take responsibility for learning from them, first, what that will entail?

So, my eyes and ears are open as I watch these boys. We shall see what I find.

Draw and tell ...

2009-11-13T11:42:00.000-08:00

This is my ow-ee [red, center]. This is me [orange, right] I climbed the tree and hanged there and then I got the ow-ee. My mommy [purple circle, lower right] carried me down.
Timmy, age 3yrs 6mos

I put my hand here first [yellow, traced hand] and here are trees [green and blue] and this is my TV [yellow above hand] and the hand goes from tree to tree.
Thomas, age 3

This is my sister [lower left, behind scribbles]. Can you draw a dress for him? ... This is my mama [toward the left within scribbles]. Now I'm gonna draw my own head. This is me! [green circle toward right within scribbles]. I'm in the danger [starts scribbling green], and then my mom is in the danger [spreads scribbles toward left] and my sister's in the danger. My daddy's [red face] going to save all the family.
David, age 3

Kinetics part 2: Whose agenda is it anyway?

2009-11-04T11:41:00.000-08:00

Oi! Today came an instance, in which I became very very frustrated. With children. Believe it or not, that does not happen often. Time to deconstruct.

I can't say I felt well set up for success when one of my colleagues shoved a board game into my hands and said, "Here, play this with those four over there. They can't pay attention during storytime." Don't get me wrong - we all have our moments and our days - and this was a moment when I felt very disconnected from my colleague and her greater scope of intention. This is a very uncomfortable feeling for me, so I was not off to a good start.

There I sat, board game in hand - a game I'd never even heard of, by the way - with four squeamish children who would have never known the difference had I simply gotten up and left. Because that is slightly what I felt like doing at that moment.

Come on, I thought to myself, it's just a game. Something to pass the time for these kids while the others listen to a book. That was my second problem. I didn't agree with my colleague's decision to exclude these kids from the other activity.

Stop! I reminded myself: It is too easy to resign oneself to feelings of dissatisfaction toward the actions of others. If you have a problem with what a teacher has done, you be the teacher you would rather see. No use expecting others to live up to your standards if you aren't able to consistently do so, yourself.

Way to put myself in my place - my place being in the blue child-size chair, at the table, with the same four squeamish children.

We started playing the game. The children were supposed to take turns rolling two dice - one with a number, one with a color - and identifying the illustrated object (boat, car, shoe, ice cream, etc) in the corresponding square on the grid board. That whole taking turns thing lasted maybe half a turn, before they all were either grabbing for the dice or leaving the table completely to play somewhere else. This was not going well.

What made me think that? What wasn't going well? The children were not doing what I thought they should be doing, or, what I was instructed and expected to have them do. I am finding such phrases increasingly frustrating, because they are such strong indications of the top-down mentality that pervades schooling: the teacher tells students what to do, and students listen and behave. This is efficient, perhaps, but only when the teacher's agenda is taken into consideration. What would be the most efficient way to serve an agenda set by children?

Back to the board game: I begin rolling the dice myself and ask all the children if they can find the corresponding picture. The first one is a boat on the ocean. "Was ist das?" I ask, and two chime together, "Ein Boot!" "Genau! Das ist ein Boot!" I respond, and continue in German: "Let's make a boat with our hands and ride those waves in our boat: up and down, up and down, up and down..." Miraculously, everyone has joined in the action. We continue on our momentum, creating kinetic stories about tying our shoes, being a steaming kettle of water, and dressing ourselves appropriately for snow.

After 20 minutes, I am exhausted. It's the kind of exhausted feeling you get when you've just left your house on your bike and your first 20 minutes are all uphill. Steep uphill. And I'm not entirely sure I've just done a very good job, because the kids are still squeamish and I feel like I'm talking the entire time just to keep everyone together in our kinetic stories.

The other students finish their story and it's time for free play. My four students explode from the table off into different corners of the room. I go to the bathroom for five minutes, just to be with the silence. There is something wrong with this kind of teaching. This does not feel right. This does not feel like me. It feels like I'm holding on for dear life.

Game with children not as strong in German, and very active - blending of both PLUS getting over my agenda to serve children better

Anansi with a Halloween twist

2009-10-31T11:38:00.000-07:00

I told my first story in German today with our preschoolers. As I waited behind the wooden table I had set up on our blue rug, I watched the kids try to make sense of this new person at reading time (it's usually one of the other teachers, while I clean up after snack), and a new format of experiencing a story. Their eyes were big, and they hesitated at first, until they realized: Puppet Show! (sort of) Then there was hardly anything to keep them still, as they wriggled to find a place and kept sneaking up to look at the puppets behind the table. Can you really punish curiosity? All I could do was begin to satisfy it...

From behind the table came my right hand in a black glove: Anansi, the spider.

There once was a spider named Anansi. Anansi wanted only one thing in the world: to own all of the stories of the world! But at that time, they belonged to Nyame, the Sky God in the sun. So he spun his way all the way up to the sun to find him. When he asked to be given all the stories of the world, Nyame responded: "Hah! Do you think I will just give them to you? You must pay the price, Anansi! You must bring me three things: the fierce hornets of the forest, the great snake of the swamp, and the mighty tiger of the jungle. Then, and only then, will I grant you all the stories of the world!"

So, Anansi spun his way back down into the world and set about his tasks. He went to find the fierce hornets of the forest with a few things to help him: an empty gourd (pumpkin) and a big jug of water. He settled down close to where the hornets would come, and waited ... waited ... waited ... until - there they came! - the hornets came close. At this, Nyame started throwing the water from the jug up into the air, making the hornets all wet. "Hornets! Hornets!" he cried, "The rains are coming!" "Oh, Anansi, what shall we do? We hate the rain!" they called back. "Come into my gourd, where it is nice and dry," said Anansi. They did, and when they were all inside, Anansi closed up the opening with thick leaves. First task ... done!

Next, Anansi took a long bamboo stick with him into the swamp to find the great snake. When he found him, he made a bet: "I bet," said Anansi, "that you are not as long as my bamboo stick." "That tiny thing?" scoffed the snake. "Of course I'm longer." So he laid down next to the bamboo stick and streeeetched his head up toward one end and streeeetched his tail down toward the other. All the while, Anansi was weaving his silk around and around and around the body of the snake and the bamboo stick until the snake was entirely tied to the stick and couldn't move! Second task ... done!

Now, the third - surely the most difficult - task of all. Anansi crawled up into a tree and waited for the tiger to walk by. He waited ... waited ... waited ... until - there he came! - the tiger trotted by on his way home. Anansi followed him all the way back to his cave and watched exactly where the tiger slept ... (snore!) ... The next morning, when the tiger left his cave, Anansi set to work spinning a thick and strong web over the place where the tiger had slept. When the tiger returned that evening and laid down, he didn't see the web and laid down right on top of it. Anansi took the edges of the web, tied all the ends to each other, and had captured the tiger in his great, thick web. Third task ... done!

And so, Anansi spun his way back up to Nyame, this time with the hornets in the gourd, the snake on the bamboo stick, and the tiger in the web, and paid his price. Nyame was very surprised, but knew he must keep his promise. When Anansi spun his way back down to the earth again, he brought with him all the stories of the world, to tell to all the creatures of the earth. And do you know what? He is still telling them today.

(Adapted for German-language-learning preschoolers; I originally learned the story in Elder and Wong's (eds) Family of Earth and Sky)

It's the simple things ...

2009-10-30T11:36:00.000-07:00

I wish I had a video of my time with Michael today.

Do you know those Knex-type spheres, that collapse and expand to your heart's desire? Michael was struggling with it a little today, and upon helping him, I found myself uncontrollably adding sound effects. When we collapsed the globe, I made an "ooo" sound that went down in pitch, and then made the same "ooo" when we expanded it again, this time going up in pitch, sliding along with my voice. Michael's face lit up with surprise, as did mine, and we continued collapsing and expanding and "ooo"-ing for a good ten minutes.

This is when I remember: It truly is the simple things that bring us the most joy in life.

May there always be sunshine

2009-10-28T11:33:00.000-07:00

Oh, those two-year-olds ... I am so proud of them! Somehow, all of the energy they were putting into their detachment from their parents at the beginning of the day has now translated itself into the attachment that they can still feel, even when Mama isn't at school with them. Everything they make on a piece of paper - crayon drawings, paint blotters, gluing tissue paper - is "for my mommy".

It's getting to the point where I have moments when I look around, everyone is engaged, and I think: the only thing that needs my direct attention at the moment is my bladder! And that is just lovely (the fact that the kids are engaged, not the fact that I have waited too long)

In one of those very moments, I found myself recalling the prayer shared by a young Russian boy that somehow ended up a Raffi song:

May there always be sunshine
May there always be bread
May there always be Mama
May there always be me

Life just couldn't get any better than that, I think. I cringe to think of everything else I have asked for in my life. But: sunshine, bread, Mama (my fam), and me ... that is enough. It was enough then, and it still is.

Lass die Sonne weiter scheinen
Lass es Brot für alle geben
Lass die Mama immer da sein
Lass mich immer weiter leben

No, silly!

2009-10-25T11:34:00.000-07:00

David [dressed in play armor]: I'm a knight!

Me: Sure looks like it.

David [pointing to dragon on armor]: That's a dragon!

Me: Really?

David: Yeah, it breathes fire.

Me: Ooh, like this? [I muster up my best dragon impression...]

David: No, silly! That's Sleeping Beauty!

(I think he thought I was snoring. I'll have to work on my dragon breath.)

Education as a moral endeavor

2009-10-23T11:54:00.000-07:00

Did I mention I'm an eternal student?

Alongside writing my thesis proposal this fall, while also working part-time as a pre-school teacher, I couldn't resist registering for "just one class" at the UW. I don't technically need any more classes to graduate, but it had been a great desire of mine to take a class from Donna Kerr, a professor I'd seen present her research-in-progress at the Faculty Research Symposium last spring. When I heard she was teaching Education as a Moral Endeavor, I registered immediately.

My favorite thing about this class has been the basic approach and format of it. It is, in some ways, a typical graduate level course, complete with course texts, upon which a final 12-page course paper shall be based. Pretty basic, right? Wrong. Donna's approach to all of her classes, I have gathered, is to make sure that students are able to both read the course texts "generously" - that is, to hear first what it is the authors have to say, before launching into analysis and criticism - but also to hear what the authors have to say about students' own concrete experiences.

Let me explain a little more: We began the course by composing a two-page story from our own lives. "Think of a time," she said, "when you experienced or observed something profoundly immoral, or something profoundly moral, that still has you in its grips, that just won't let you go. Start there." In other words, before we were to touch any course texts, we first conjured up a bit of what we were bringing to this class, and perhaps, something that was bringing us to this class. The following week, we shared our stories in table groups. And then: "Now, let's just put those stories to the side. We will come back to them, I promise. But now, it's time to put our own stories to the side and completely rid ourselves of - just for a bit - our perspective. As we approach these texts, it's time to read generously, to listen to these authors as if we were listening to our own inner voice speaking..."

It was an exercise reminiscent of my theater and storytelling experience: instead of reading a text like I was sitting across the coffee table from the author, I was to become the author, myself, and learn how to summarize and access the major points of their works by saying "I believe..." and "I assert..." How very new, and how very intriguing ...

Now, let me introduce my personal cast of characters:

Toni Morrison, A mercy

Vivian Gussin Paley, You can't say you can't play

Danielle S. Allen, Talking to strangers: Anxieties of citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education

Avishai Margalit, The decent society

Charles Bingham, Authority is relational: Rethinking educational empowerment

I invite you to peruse the previews Google books provides of these books by clicking on the links. It will let you a bit into the world of this course, not to mention into the worlds of each of these authors, each of which is more dynamic than the next.

This course, given Donna's background, leans heavily toward the philosophical corner of thinking about education. I feel right at home in this corner, and look forward to sharing more about it as the quarter progresses.

Field trips: the ultimate ECS

2009-10-20T11:31:00.000-07:00

I've been reading a book lately called "Brain Rules", by molecular biologist John Medina, who is miraculously finding a way to teach me about my brain, and the brains of my students.

... And about the all-powerful ECS - emotionally competent stimuli - that serves to keep the brain paying attention, as emotionally engaged as it is cognitively. The role of emotion in learning is no new idea - I've known for a long time, for example, that my mother was afraid of dogs for so long, without knowing why, until her parents told her she was bitten by one at age 1. Everybody has something like that, that usually catches them when they least suspect it. On his website www.brainrules.net, Medina has much more actual research.

So, why is it - as I suggest in my title - that field trips are the ultimate ECS? Because we went to a local pumpkin farm last week and the only thing I remember in any great detail is the feeling of my arm falling asleep because there were two fast asleep three-year-olds balanced on it. I could have stayed in that moment forever.

I reflected more, though, on Diana, another three-year-old who cried her whole way through the farm visit. It began when she arrived at school and realized we weren't leaving for the farm until after morning circle and snack - continued when we went to visit the animals first before gathering the pumpkins - and did not cease until we were back at school. Her mother was one of the chaperones, so she stuck by her side for the most part, dismissing it as "Well, you know, she just gets the idea in her head, and doesn't want to let go of it".

Another example is the firefighters' visit to the school today. They came in all their gear, a ladder truck, and even extended the ladder out as far as it could go, just for show. I greatly appreciated that the man who showed the kids the gear very carefully showed how he put it on, and crawled up to them on their level, instead of bearing down on them like a wooly mammoth. (When I thanked him later, he mentioned he has a Kindergartner at home, himself. Good learner.)

Regardless, most of the kids were absolutely astounded, and quickly incorporated firefighter characters into their free play later that afternoon. ... Except for one ... Kevin, at the sight of the firetruck, grew quiet, and preferred to look away from the firefighter in the suit. He also declined to climb up into the firetruck. I couldn't quite gather what it was that frightened him, or caused him to pause, but it was clear there was a much different emotion at work for him.

The reading of this emotional resonance has become a way for me, over time, to get to know my students from a more nuanced perspective. It has nothing to do with their capacity, their intelligence, their abilities or mistakes ... it has everything to do with the pure experience of life. Both Diana and Kevin showed distress at our activities, which, I suppose, could have been considered a 'bother', or maybe just 'too bad'. But I found myself wanting to look a little deeper, wanting to be able to read both situations better. Would it have helped me help them? I don't know. More importantly, I begin thinking about how to help (which is often how I think of my teaching - helping, that is) from the vantage point of the emotion of an experience, rather than the content of a lesson.

Not that the latter is not important! However, how can I expect my students to engage in any content learning if the context of that learning is not a positive stimulus to their emotions. In other words, can you take in any new content when you are in distress?

Back to field trips, briefly: We've been in school all fall. We see each other every day. But it took a field trip for me to see more of some students, and that was valuable seeing. It has left me wondering what will happen on the next field trip ...

When in distress, turn the wheel ...

2009-10-18T11:26:00.000-07:00

In a way, being back at school after my two-and-a-half-week trip to Germany is like having woken up from a dream. Was I really gone??

I am back in the swing of things, including the newly developed two-year-old program that my school has begun this year. It is absolutely amazing to me what a difference just six months to a year makes at this stage of childhood. Several of the kids are still struggling through the separation from Mama, which breaks your heart, yet also serves to remind that if we never learn - and trust - to say goodbye to Mama at age 2, we'll never have the confidence to become independent adults.

One of the ways I'm trying to support those who struggle more than the others is to ease them into the day with a ritual, of sorts: a book. It's not a story, in the sense you might be thinking. It's a good-sized cardboard book with a different theme of items on each page: Foods, Animals, Clothing, etc. The catch is, there are cut out circles in the book, whose edge sticks out the top of the book, so you can turn the wheel and change the picture that emerges. The goal is to turn the wheel until you find the picture that fits the theme, e.g. the butter in the kitchen, the piglet in the farm, and the sock with the pants, not some other combination thereof.

The children are learning how to turn the wheel, and there is certainly something about the anticipation of the picture that engages them enough to realize: "Hey, if I say bye to Mama, I get to discover this!" Well, they may not have reached that point yet, but I have noticed that the more familiar they become with it, the more they trust it and me.

My hope is that they will reach the point of not needing the book, but for now, I have to admit: I am enjoying this little morning ritual.

Clean up, clean up, everybody clean up ...

2009-10-17T11:37:00.000-07:00

"Alle Kinder räumen auf!" calls the teacher.

Laura mimics her tone, as if assuming the role of teacher, herself. "Alle Kinder räumen auf!" she cries, again and again, walking around to be sure that all the kids know: it's time to clean up.

"Du bist auch ein Kind," says the teacher, "You are also one of the kids. Don't shout, clean up!"

But what does it mean to clean up, anyway? Laura was just copying what her teacher does, instructing with words and then doing something different (not that what the teacher is doing isn't important, it's just not quite in line with what she is instructing the children to do).

It is painstakingly clear to me that some of our students - for one reason or the other - simply don't know yet what "cleaning up" means and entails. Luckily, I do not have to reinvent the wheel when I begin to think about how to address this, because I have a buddy, and his name is Lev Vygotsky, whose works demonstrate and philosophize on the power of what we know now as "scaffolding".

What a great word: scaffolding. You can just hear the metal bars clank into place when you say it. And in the classroom, you can already sense the guided discovery and practice that is taking place - instructive, but encouraging as much student agency as possible; teacher-led, but student-focused.

"Ok," I say to a group of boys sitting complacently around a strewn about pile of cardboard blocks, "I'm going to put away all the green blocks. What about you, Nathan? I know red is your favorite color, why don't you get the red blocks..."

"Yes, the red blocks!"

"I have the blue blocks!"

"Sounds good ..."

Together, we stack them all up in no time.

And now, onto the dress-up area ...

And now for something completely different ...

2009-10-15T11:53:00.000-07:00

... my Master's Thesis!

Yes, I am a woman of many identities - Teacher by day; Storyteller whenever and wherever the opportunity arises; Musician in stolen moments, and STUDENT ... always have been, always will be, for ever eternal ...

At the moment, being a student means pursuing a Master's in Education. I'm in the last stages, with "only" a thesis left to complete. Easier said than done. However, it is a fascinating process, and I wanted to be sure to take my time with it. It is serving several purposes: it's not just the fulfillment of a requirement of my program, but also an exercise in "real" research, similar to what I might pursue in a Ph.D. program sooner or later, as well as my first attempt at writing something not just for the grade, or even just for myself, but for possible publication. It is my personal goal that something - anything - that might come out of this thesis might be published in some shape or form. We shall see ...

What am I writing about? Well, as the eternal connection-maker that I am, I cannot help but recognize how ever more embedded my practice of teaching and my practice as a storyteller are in each other, and ask myself whether other storytellers have ever felt like teachers, too? How can storytellers be understood as educators? What insights can storytellers offer on what it means to be a teacher?

The origins of education can be traced back to the tradition of storytelling, which emerged within human culture as the first form of teaching. Thus, we might think of storytellers as the world’s first teachers. Today, storytellers continue to practice in the oral tradition of old, surely with as many developments as we've seen in the practice of teaching, yet observably grounded in something that reaches back - way back - to some common memory of human culture. In this was, I wanted to design a study that would explore what insights into teaching and being a teacher are gained from today’s storytellers.

Pending approval from the Human Subjects Department, I will interview 4 or 5 tellers in what is called an "exploratory" or "descriptive" study, which means that the questions I ask will be mainly open-ended. Later, in the process of analysis, I will take what I anticipate will be very different responses to those questions and attempt to identify patterns ... again, easier said than done.

Yet, I am eager and inquisitive, curious and intrigued, but more than anything: my ears and eyes are open and ready to find something amazing that won't necessarily make everything make sense, but will remind me why I am eager and curious, and that being so is something so natural and so integral to who I am and how I will continue to be in this world, regardless of whether I go on to pursue more academic study or not.

So! This fall, I have prepared my proposal and will submit it very very soon, along with an application to Human Subjects. Both are proving to require more reading and reflection already than I had anticipated. Especially in preparing the proposal, it has been hard to know when to stop reading and connecting ideas for a theoretical framework, and start writing them into a cohesive paper. There is a lot of back and forth to this process, and I find I am enjoying it. Most entertaining is, most certainly, my literature map of post-its on a wall:

What can I say? An external processor at her finest ...

More news on this process to come!

P.S. Perhaps stories are like stars...

2009-10-10T10:35:00.000-07:00

Perhaps stories are like stars, concrete clouds of gas and fire that do, indeed, exist - we see them with our own eyes and can prove their existence in scientific ways - yet exist in a time and place that we cannot access from our vantage point. We cannot touch the stars for they are both too far away and far too large and magnanimous to touch. Even less are we able to move them from where they are set in place. Yet, generations of humans have looked to the stars and attempted to use them to make sense of the word - to draw pictures in the sky that explain and recall who we are as a people. We do the same with stories: we return again and again to the fundamental themes of learning how to live, pointing to something that we know and experience every day, yet feels very far away when we try to grasp it between our fingers.

"Back to the roots"

2009-10-08T23:31:00.000-07:00

To take a quick hiatus from my life as a teacher, it's time to share another emerging passion of mine: my family tree!

As a storyteller, it is no wonder to me that I was sucked into the fascinating stories of my ancestors at such a young age, and have now - by two aunts - been tapped to continue to the record-keeping for both sides of my family. What has become a wonder to me is: Why me? Why, of all of us, am I so rapt with the stories that have survived, and the artifacts, and the photos ... ?? I can only assume that there is something within these treasures that will help me understand. So, I keep researching (thank you, ancestry.com), keep sorting those photos, and writing down the stories as I hear them.

This is the house my great-grandmother grew up in. The second floor windows have been added, and the straw roof restored in an extensive and fabulous renovation by the current owners.

While living in Germany, my aunt back in the States made a genealogical connection that sent me to a family reunion on the Bodensee (Lake Constance) to meet relatives I never knew I had. I was so inspired, I decided I had to do it again, and engaged in a search for another branch of the family. Through the very roundabout workings of snail mail, chance encounter, and email, I have come in contact with folks who - in this strange tradition - invited me to attend their family reunion over in the east of Germany.

Unfortunately, I had already left Germany when I received the invitation, but this year, I was able to cash in my airline miles and go "back to the roots", as the Germans are so fond of saying of us emigrants. I was accompanied these past weeks by my aunt and uncle, who oh-so-gladly chauffered us along the Autobahn in a rented Mercedes. We retraced the residences of my great-grandmother in the north, and of my great-grandfather in the east, where we met those descended from distant lines of my great-grandfather's line. It was quite a whirlwind, but, on my return, this is the story that remained (shared at our October story swap):

Why do we tell each other stories? What lies within a story that allows two people or two million people to feel more deeply connected to each other? Can we trust stories to be concrete enough to found new relationships, or to connect us to those we have never known?

I am a storyteller, yet I know all too well that the power of stories far exceeds anything the most wise teller could conceive of. I can only surrender myself to them, letting them tell themselves, thus completely negating the very identity I claim to have. Yet, without tellers, stories would not exist. And without stories, I don't think any of us would be where we are today.

Without stories, I would never have found myself in a most unspectacular courtyard, completely overwhelmed with how much it meant to me.

I was in Germany, in the small eastern town of Zeitz (pronounced Ts-eye-ts). It was no beauty of a town, with several abandoned buildings and an obviously struggling economy. This was the town my great-grandfather had left all those years ago to sail the seas as a merchant marine, and, eventually, to settle on a distant shore. One by one, he organized for each of his sisters and his parents to join him.

Almost a hundred years later, I stood in front of what used to the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Strasse 54, and contemplated the former abode of this family. It looked so normal, so typical for a German apartment house: a storefront on the ground floor, neatly stacked residential windows above, and two great iron doors on the far end of the front wall. Behind those doors, I knew there would be a courtyard, the real meeting place of the families that had lived there, the real personality of the place.

The iron doors were locked, and with only two names on the list of buzzers, the chances of gaining entrace were not good. Just at the moment when I was ready to step away, something caused me to lose my balance and lurch forward, leaning onto one of the great iron doors. It gave way.

It opened.

I stared at the wonder: an open door ... a door I had assumed would be locked.

I walked in, past the residential entrance, to the back courtyard. There was a greatly distressed brick wall to the right that indicated the property of the next apartment house over. The ground was paved asphalt, obviously catering to the cars that were meant to occupy the row of carports that extended to the building on the other side. Next to the carports, the outer wall of a brick building showed the outline of where a building used to stand next to it.

It was such an unspectacular sight. The 360-degree turn I felt obliged to take must have seemed an act of graciousness. There was really not a lot to look at. Yet I felt as if I could feel the entirety of the world beneath my feet, as the one great circle that it is ... just one circle, but a circle that was whole and complete.

We ate lunch at a nearby hotel restaurant on the Altmarkt - the old market place. As the exotic Americans, we were greeted with enthusiasm, treated to the house Federweisser wine, and we ate, drank, and spoke merrily. As we left that afternoon, I leafed through a book I had bought with historical photos of Zeitz, and came across a picture of the hotel restaurant from almost exactly the year of my great-grandfather's emigration. It occurred to me then that the family would have walked by that restaurant every time they went to the market. I don't know whether they ever ate or drank there - surely, they could not have afforded it. But I like to think they would have been as happy as we were - perhaps even proud - to know that we did eat there. That we are well. That we are who we are because of who they were: because of the lives they lived and the decisions they made.

Now, when I remember that courtyard, I wonder whether we seek the stories of our ancestors so as to know them better, or to know ourselves, and understand where we come from. All that held me there, still, in wonder, was a story. But it was because their story in that place that I not had a story in that place, too.

I never thought it possible ...

2009-09-10T11:24:00.000-07:00

When I left Germany after two years as an English assistant, a colleague mentioned to me that it would be a shame ("Schade") if I didn't go on to teach German, or use my German in my profession. At the time, I sort of agreed, but I was also fervently protective of my German as a personal treasure, of sorts. Why did I have to use German for my profession? Couldn't I just keep it for myself?

However, I was a bit disheartened by the slim prospects of blending my new interest in early education with my experience in German language and culture. I thought I would have to wait for an opportunity to work in Germany, again, before fulfilling both passions simultaneously. ... But! I was pleasantly surprised when I came upon - of all things - a German-immersion pre-school right in my neighborhood!

PLUS

EQUALS

This school is still very young, and growing. What has begun as a Preschool-Kindergarten program of about 40 students has grand plans to become a legitimate K-8 school, like other German American schools in the country. But for now, they are developing an official curriculum and establishing themselves in the German American community.

A dream come true?? That's what I'm here to find out!

How did this happen?!

2009-09-02T21:54:00.000-07:00

It is with a heavy heart that I have come to a decision to leave this lovely school I've substituted and taught at since February. I had the option to begin a new position in a different classroom at the same school, but in a perfect storming swirl of emotion, logistics, and a blustering wind that has left me facing a new direction, I've accepted - and now begun - a position at a different pre-school.

I have kept my own extensive journal of my time at this school, and find I still have not been able to write about this past - my last - week with the children, because it is hard to believe it. The soul always needs to time to catch up to the body, as they say.

There were many factors that played into my decision. They are not as important to me right now as the joys and thanks I will keep with me when I think about my time with my students.

As I've mentioned in my posts, this school practices the Reggio Emilia pedagogy. It has been such a gift to attend professional development workshops and read up on this unique approach to working with children. What I appreciate most about Reggio Emilia - and about the teachers I've worked with - is that both acknowledge the immense capacity of children to imagine, create, think critically, and reason about so much. There are many "child-centered" schools and pedagogies today, but I feel like Reggio Emilia is an approach that is truly derived from a nuanced understanding of the culture of childhood.

As I have engaged in more concentrated observation and documentation of my students' natural way of being, interacting, exploring, etc., I find that I have gotten to know these kids better than any other students I've had. I know them as individuals, as friends, as playmates, as Lego-ship-builders, as paper-airplane-makers, as dramatic-play-characters, as puzzle-masters, as storytellers, as artists, as imaginers of worlds I could never begin to conceive of ...

How could I leave this? I ask myself.

And yet I know: I am not leaving. I am moving forward. While I keep working away at my graduate studies, I want to be sure I get to experience as many schools as I can, to get a good picture of what is out there, and to continue exploring the most fundamental question of my journey: What does it mean in my life to be a teacher?

It is this question I am chasing...

Sound maps at Magnuson Park

2009-08-20T21:08:00.000-07:00

While at IslandWood, I learned a variety of exercises in listening to engage in in quiet places. My favorite was called a Sound Map, and I have carried it with me to engage myself in, as well as other students I've met along the way.

At my school now, we've been taking weekly field trips to Seattle parks all summer, at which I had already introduced some listening exercises. Who could ever imagine 15 boisterous K-3 students practically bouncing off the trees one minute, that the next they could be sitting in a wide circle with their eyes closed, counting all the different sounds they hear on their quiet fingers and their concentrated faces?!

... Which is why I felt, by this point in the summer, that they were ready for the Sound Map. And this is how I found myself with fifteen clipboards, sitting in the tall grasses of Magnuson Park with the kids ...

I struggle with the initiation of activities, because I don't like to detract from the kids' motivation to explore something by imposing my motivation to explore it in a way I prefer. However, when I sat down with my clippboard and pencil, and began drawing ... all it took was a question:

"Avery, what are you doing?"

"I'm beginning a sound map. Do you remember counting sounds at the Arboretum? This is like that, but instead of counting, I try to draw pictures of the sounds I hear and place them in a map around me..."

We were off.

I began the Sound Map by drawing myself in the middle of the paper. Then I asked, "What do we hear around us here?" As each child suggested something, I invited them to add a picture of it to my map. We began with birds and airplanes, which are easy enough to visualize for a picture. And then we came to the wind.

"How do you draw the wind?" someone asked.

"How do you draw the wind?" I reflected with them. There was no way I was going to make any suggestion whatsoever.

"I know!" declared a second-grade girl, "You could draw it like the pictures in the weather, with curves and stuff." She added the wind.

After our collaborative sound map was well on its way, I invited the kids to take their own clipboard and find a quiet spot to make their own sound map. If they didn't want to focus on sounds, they were welcome to draw a picture of something where they were sitting.

Once engaged, they were quick to focus their attention on the task they had chosen, and were able to decide when they were finished, and when they needed to continue. Some left their clipboards behind completely, and became engrossed in exploring the tall grasses.

I usually like to let children's drawings speak for themselves, but I just can't resist sharing: at the very bottom of this picture, the student drew "the wind rushing through the grasses"

This student opted to draw what he saw in his surroundings.

The "wind" appears here similarly to our collaborative sound map because it is by the same girl who thought of this particular representation of the wind.

What I most enjoy about this activity is that it allows me to get in touch with each student as an individual. There is no rubric, no expectations connected to this exercise - it is a way I get to know my students, just as they are. Their expression is invaluable to me, because it reminds me that, though we may all hear the same sounds and draw the same pictures, there are as many ways to show what we know as there are ways of knowing.