Forts!

Welcome to Summer 2009!

It didn't take long on our first trip to the park for several students to find a large Western red cedar with the perfect trunk to support a fort. Eddie was the most fervent seeker of sticks, and Tina, Bert, and Frankie joined him. No stick - including whole branches! - was too small for the strength of thie muscles or imaginations.

Frankie: I helped get it together in that tree. It was easy putting the big branches up.

Bert: But you didn't weave them through. I put pinecones for decoration. I was the bark peeler. I liked putting the pine cones on and peeling on the bark.

@very: Could someone live in it, you think?

Frankie: Yes, me! I could go "Bam!" [knock it down] - make it again - "Bam!" - make it again ...

Bert: No me. It doesn't have as much carpeting and it doesn't have candles. Could we have a sleepover in that fort?

Frankie: Maybe we could make s'mores!

Building forts is a memory that most adults carry with them from their own childhoods, myself included. Watching the creation of such a structure of architectural balance, of protection and provision, and of collaborative production, some themes that pervade such an activity come to the forefront of my thoughts.

What is it about building our own shelter in the wilderness that so entices us? We live in homes that are positively lavish compared to the accomplishments of the first humans, yet children relish in the return to such primitive activity. What is it within us that draws us back to that? I remember when I was my students' age, I wanted to found a Back-to-Nature club that would live in homemade forts, live off of foraged food, and wear clothes made out of leaves. Looking back on it now, I wonder if it all isn't a certain expression of autonomy, a common theme throughout childhood.

But why in the wilderness? I've noticed students make forts out of anything - mats, pillows, cardboard ... but never were so many kids involved in fort-making as today at the park with natural materials.

Richard Louv's book Last Child in the Woods puts forth a theory that the majority of children today are suffering from nature deficit disorder - that is, they are deprived of sufficient contact with nature. He builds his assertion on E.O. Wilson's theory of biophilia: that all humans are innately intrigued, attracted to, and wired to enjoy interacting with the natural world. Perhaps part of the expression of our autonomy is linked to how we use our surroundings - the natural world being the most pur - to become self-sufficient. Maybe our desire to interact with nature runs parallel to our search for autonomy, as it represents the "bigger world" we are increasingly longing to function within independently. Evolutionar psychology would suggest that we are, indeed, innately drawn to play activities as children that give us the practice needed to survive and protect ourselves as responsible adults, a progression observed in our distant animal relatives.

I would venture to believe that there is a little bit of all of these ideas embedded in the phenomenon of forts. There is a wonder and mystery to the natural world that draws us in, and I think that children are a bit more in tune with what miracles occur within it every day. There is also an immense sense of satisfaction in the completion of a project that entailed investment, organization, labor, and detail.

We all learn, in many ways, to build walls of protection around ourselves. These walls are physical, social, psychological, and provide us with the structure and scaffolding of our lives. At this phase of early to middle childhood, I see in each of these children that inner Tarzan in all of us that needs to come out, beat his chest, and feel part of the jungle.

Dear Ian ...

We had a very interesting afternoon together today! It started out not so great for you, but I think we both enjoyed each other in the end. I'll tell you what I remember and you can see if it's the same as what you remember.

It started with an accident. Oh no! We were up at the park and needed to come back to school to change your clothes. I knew you weren't happy about leaving, but that you would also be miserable if you stayed in your dirty clothes. So, I walked back with you.

When we arrived back at school, everyone was napping, and you were very quiet with me as we made our way to the bathroom. We changed your clothes and got you all cleaned up and then went into our classroom to wait for the others to return.

But, oh no, again! I had to go into one of the preschool rooms to help with naptime, and our class still wan'st back yet. I wondered whether you'd be able to stay quiet enough not to wake anyone up. You have so much energy and creativity, and I notice, you especially like to use your body in big ways to get rid of that energy. And yet ... you suggested to me: "I can bring my picture with pencils in with me and draw."

So, that's just what we did. Ian, you were so quiet and focused on your drawing, and for such a long time. I watched you for a long time. You had your head bent over very close to where you were drawing. I could tell you were drawing along to the story that was emerging in your mind.

Before we knew it, our class was back, and one of the other teachers came to pick you up, while I stayed in the nap room. I was sad to see you go! When I got back to the classroom, you told me more about the picture you made:

"It's a pinecone. But I made it a live pinecone. It has antennas. It has eight antennas! Here's his brain ... he doesn't know where his brain went because pinecones don't have brains."

What a fascinating story! I am curious to learn more about this character of the pinecone with eight antennae and a missing brain. How did he lose it? Will he ever find it? What happens when his brain goes missing? I can't wait to hear more soon ...

Dear Ben ...

I wasn't sure how to write a documentation on a particular interaction with one student - as I was writing the story, I kept wanting to just write a letter. So, I did.

Dear Ben,

Today was such an exciting day with you. I was delighted by the enthusiasm you bring to your thinking – it never seems to cease to explore unending possibility!

We spent most of our afternoon together on our field trip to the bus stop. On our way out, you asked me how many dimensions we were going to use to sketch our bus stop. Two? Three? Four? “Four dimensions?” I asked. “What would that be like?”

“It would be like measuring translucently,” you said, “like measuring it inside. Like, you could say, measure a solid … kind of like a skeleton with skin on!”

I don’t know what the answer is, but I hope you also found it more important that you asked the question than that we couldn’t come up with a satisfying answer. What have you been thinking about it since today? Did you go home and look it up or ask someone?

At the bus stop, we took measurements of the different panels we are going to paint this summer. Not only did you want to know the length and the height of each panel, you wanted to use this information to figure out the area of each panel and the volume of the whole bus stop! I don’t know if you’ve been learning about these ideas at school, but I could tell you were thinking and connecting something you had already learned to something you were experiencing. Alex, this is one of the most important things about learning! As a teacher, I have learned that all people (not just kids) learn best when there is as much opportunity for thinking as there is for experience. Actually, as a student at the university right now, I’ve been reading a lot about the idea that our thoughts and our experiences are so intertwined, they are almost the same thing! What would you say to that?!

Back at Hilltop, your fervor continued. It was intriguing to learn from you how schools teach multiplication now. When I was in school, we learned it a bit differently. Your boxes looked very complicated to me, but we did end up with the same answers, didn’t we!

Well, not at first, of course. I made a mistake on our first calculation of the area of the base of the bus stop – do you remember? And then, on our next calculation, when we multiplied the area of the base by the height of the bus stop, you made a mistake! This was the perfect illustration of another important belief I have as a teacher – we can learn as much from you kids as you can learn from us!

Thank you, Ben, for reminding me today how much fun learning and thinking is. Do not lose your enthusiasm, and NEVER stop asking your questions.

Wear your helmet!

Lesson learned:
My mother always told me to wear my helmet, and now I know why I do! Had a bit of a wipe out on my bike today with some gnarly scrapes and bruises to show for it. Without my helmet, though, I would certainly not be sitting here a few hours after the fact, writing about; rather, I'd most likely still be in the Emergency Room!

Yay for helmets!

Don't forget yours!

Public art !

As the summer approaches, I've been working with my kids at the Children's Center on preparations for participating in the Seattle Metro Bus Shelter Mural Program. For more info, check out http://transit.metrokc.gov/prog/sheltermural/shelter_mural.html
Briefly, we are compiling drawings to submit in an application to paint the panels of a local bus stop over the summer. The theme that emerged from initial drawings is "Washington Landscapes", including lighthouses, mountains, and everything between. Check 'em out!

From my official documentation:

I've informed them that we'll need to stick to our plan for the sake of time-sensitivity: it takes a month for our ideas to be approved by Seattle Metro, and then we have three months to complete our painting. So, here's what it will all entail:
1. May: Generate as many pictures as possible around a common theme to submit to Seattle Metro with our application. I hope to have the kids practice making a mural on a sheet of butcher paper to submit as well. There are a few bus stops local to Hilltop that I will take the kids interested to visit, so that we can decide which one we'd like to apply to decorate. We must include the name of the stop in our application.

2. June: Submit our application and wait for a response ... (can last up to one month)

3. July: By this point, we should have heard back from Seattle Metro and will be able to pick up our panels and paints (donated by Metro) so we can start painting! We will work on the panels in the studio at Hilltop - no painting directly at the bus stop.

4. July-August: Paint, paint, paint, so that we can return our panels and paints to Seattle Metro by the end of our summer program. It will take another month or so for Metro to apply a protective clear-coat and install our panels at our selected bus stop.

5. October: We'll take a field trip to check out our installed public art!

This could be us come the fall!

Stay tuned, more to come soon!

The power of storytelling with children

Telling stories with K-2 students at my children's center

Soon after I arrived back in Seattle, I began looking for jobs in education to supplement my studies, and conveniently fell right into a great children's center that functions as a full-day preschool and houses an after-school program from preschool "graduates" in Kindergarten through 4th grade. Little did I know how soon and how deeply I would become enveloped into this new community of practitioners of education, young and younger.

The most fascinating aspect of this learning community is that it practices the "emergent" curriculum. That is, whereas I built my Five Senses Unit during my student teaching based on the curriculum standards of the State of Vermont - quite a hefty volume, to say the least - here at the children's center, the year begins with empty binders. Children play first, and teachers observe consistently and intentionally, looking for the clues that children's play offers as avenues into their thinking and patterns of interests. Once something is found to be of particular interest to the children, the teacher creates and/or designs a "provocation" for children to engage with - anything from a new material to play with, like colored sand or sea shells, to a topical exercise, as one classroom addressed recent difficulties in sharing legos. Continuously, teachers are developing their observations into "documentations": narratives that recall and begin to interpret children's experiences in the classroom. As the year moves on, documentations fill the empty binders, so that come the end of the year, the "curriculum" is a story of each classroom.

It is an exciting practice to engage in, myself! My first was on the use of stories as provocations with the students. I noticed I had quickly earned a reputation with my kiddos as "the one who tells good stories", so that I best have a new story to tell them everyday, or they'll be disappointed! This was my first clue that stories might serve as powerful thematic provocations - vehicles into discussion on any number of topics. I wish I could attach my first documentation here as a pdf-file, but I don't have that capacity with this blog. So, here's a taste of it:

I can’t think of a better way to begin getting to know the Big Kids and establishing positive relationships with them. My favorite part about telling stories is to watch to see what conversation comes out of them afterwards. What the stories mean to the kids means more to me than what the stories mean to me. That’s how I found out that David thinks of pride as “being really happy about something” and that Elissa would rather be the mouse that goes second to pluck a whisker from Coyote’s face when he’s sleeping than be the first. “It’s not as scary, but you’re still being brave,” she said.

Subsequent documentations have come out of the more lengthy conversation I had with David about pride, for example, and I'm working on one now that recalls the logical problem solving entailed in the story of a peasant who had to divide one goose among six members of the royal family!

Another selection from my initial documentation:

Stories used in teaching and curriculum in other schools have sometimes come under fire because parents feel that teachers are trying to indoctrinate their children with a particular ideology. This is an understandable position – stories are used for a variety of purposes and have differed outcomes. If there ever is a story that feels too uncomfortable – for a parent and/or a child – it is very important to me to address this concern. My pursuit in telling stories and talking about them is not to arrive at a final “moral of the story” for everyone to take home like a party favor; rather stories are like mirrors that offer us a reflection of ourselves, and it is up to us to decide what we want to see in them.

We shall see how they progress. More documentations to come!
(If you'd like to see the full documentations, just send me an email, I'll be happy to send you some as attachments!)

What is pedagogy, anyway?

Thanks to recent approval from my adviser, my Master's project study is now in motion! Taking a hobby I picked up in Germany, that turned into a passion during my time at IslandWood, I'm now able to go one step further with the topic of storytelling. Specifically, I will be extending on my IW independent study on Storytelling as Pedagogy to study and write about Storytellers as Pedagogues.

Howard Terpning's "The Storyteller"

What is a pedagogue, you ask? This is, as it turns out, a very good question - one that I found myself discussing with my housemate, a fellow grad student in Education. We found that this very common term - indeed, pedagogy is the very field we are studying - evoked different ideas in each of our minds. She equated pedagogues with teachers, and pedagogy with a method of teaching instruction. I - and this may be due to the immense amount of philosophy I'm reading for one of my classes - feel pedagogy goes beyond curriculum and instruction to examine underlying philosophical questions and ideas of our educational model. In other words, teaching instruction implies educational practice while pedagogy embodies educational philosophy.

However, I may very well stand corrected! Consulting the dictionary, we found a definition that read: "1. The function or work of a teacher; 2. The art or science of teaching." Looking at the etymology of the word, the first paedagogio was a slave that served as supervisor of the education of his master's children (I'll avoid any connections teachers today might make to that historical example ...). And yet, when one thinks of historical pedagogues, a mixture of psychologists, philosophers, and teachers comes to mind: Benjamin Bloom, John Dewey, Paolo Freire, and Maria Montessori to mention just a few examples from the 20th century.

And so, perhaps we might better think of pedagogy as the link between educational philosophy and practice - that is, the sum of ideas about teaching and learning that inform how teachers and schools facilitate learning in their classrooms [or comparable learning environments]. However, I still can't, with confidence, equate pedagogues with teachers and educators, simply because of my initial philosophical slant.

Let's get back to my study on storytellers. The question of pedagogues originated from a question of framework: do I want to frame the study as an understanding of storytellers as practitioners of a pedagogy or as thinkers about a pedagogy? They are, undoubtedly, both, and I may, in the end, be making more work for myself than necessary. But, hey, what's wrong with a little mental exercise now and then? Please weigh in with your comments!