Environments and Materials: Lesley University

I have been co-teaching a graduate class with Yvonne Liu-Constant at Lesley University since the end of February: Environment & Materials in Reggio Emilia Inspired Teaching and Learning.  

What a great opportunity to study, think and play with a group of highly motivated and interested teachers.  Our international group adds to our collective understanding of multiple experiences and perspectives.  We have students from China, Switzerland, Canada, Spain and Bermuda as well as students from all over the Boston area, other Massachusetts locations and Vermont.

One of our field experiences was on the grounds of the deCordova Museum and at Lincoln Nursery School where we explored rich and layered learning environments inside and outside.  Along with supplementary articles and book chapters, we have been reading Designs for Living and Learning by Deb Curtis and Margie Carter as our textbook.  This new edition, full of images and well organized categories, has supported our investigations.

Students have worked with photography, drawing and graphics, paper, wire and natural materials in different contexts and with a variety of provocations. They are each now working on a final project where they will reimagine and redesign a space within a learning environment based on all that we have been learning.

Lesley University has been a leader in the field of innovative and creative education for many years. Lesley just hosted a weeklong Creativity Forum offering workshops and lectures, many free and open to the public. One of the speakers was legendary choreographer, Twyla Tharp, who has a new book out, The Creative Habit: Learn it and Use it for Life.  I ordered it and can't wait to read it.

I attended Lesley many years ago as a graduate student and was able to design my own Masters program in Child Development and Arts Education and to spend my first year studying in England.  I will always be grateful for the open and encouraging structure of the Independent Study Program that launched my career.

Now, for 23 years, Lesley has offered a Reggio Institute.  This year, colleagues from the Opal School will speak along with Lella Gandini and I am thrilled to be able to attend. It is not too late to register.  If you are able to attend, we highly recommend it!  I am honored to now be an adjunct professor at Lesley and a Visiting Scholar.  What a joy to be part of their work in the world.

NAREA NYC

Attending the NAREA Winter Conference in New York City was such a gift! So many aspects of my life converged in one place and time.  Many people made an enormous effort to make this conference a success in this very busy city hub.  And, 700 people traveled a long way to be a part of it.  Seeing so many long time friends and colleagues in the big city which is slowly showing signs of spring, and staying with a dear friend, made this March one that I will long remember. It was such a celebration to see Vea Vecchi, Marina Mori, and Amelia Gambetti, lifelong friends and mentors, beginning in 1991-92, the year that we lived in Reggio Emilia and I worked and studied at the Diana School and La Villetta School.  It was wonderful also see and hear Claudia Giudici and Chiara Spaggiari.  I am holding onto the words and images offered by these Italian women in the beautiful and powerful stories of learning that they shared with us as I return to Boston on the train.  I will write reflections soon in a future blog post.

The NAREA Winter Conference coincided with the miraculous publishing of the second edition of In the Spirit of the Studio: Learning from the Atelier of Reggio Emilia.  I was privileged to stand next to co-editor and another friend and mentor, Lella Gandini, and Vea, to sign books, thanks to NAREA and to Karen Hewitt of Learning Materials Workshop.  We missed our other tireless authors and co-editors, Lynn Hill, who truly saved us all so many times, knitting together countless details and becoming our go to editor for any kind of problem, and Charles Schwall, the organizer of all the photographs and the keeper of quality.

Congratulations and a toast to...my three most esteemed co-editors and to all the contributor colleagues who wrote beautifully in strong voices about their important work: Pauline Baker, Barbara Burrington, Susan Harris MacKay, Carlina Rinaldi, Lori Geismar Ryan, and Vea Vecchi, and to Steve Seidel who wrote the wonderful new foreword and to Pam Bliss who designed the bright new cover.  And, last but not least, at Teachers College Press, thank you to Susan Liddicoat our editor, and Karl Nyberg our production editor.  Tanti Auguri a tutti!

And finally, and most importantly, thank you and congratulations to the members of the board, staff and volunteers of NAREA for all of the hard work that you do to manage and lead such a worthwhile and important organization and to host conferences that inspire us all.

Materials, Learning and Technology

If you have not seen the series on Story Workshop on youtube produced by Opal School of the Portland Children's Museum and The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, please stop right now and take 6 minutes to watch this one.   We are confident that viewing this short film will enrich the way that you imagine what is possible with materials, the school environment and learning. There are six videos in this series on Story Workshop and how this approach is inclusive, inspiring, socially constructive, beautiful and empowering.  You will find the whole series listed once you watch the first.  One of the most powerful pieces of the narration is:

I expect the environment to communicate what I believe about children.  They are all competent and capable.  They come to this work full of experiences and with stories worth telling. When given the time and tools to do so they will readily and eagerly take every opportunity to share those stories, those pieces of themselves.  They will do so because that is what we do as human beings from the moment we are born.  We share our stories to make sense of this world that we live in.

In our work, Ashley and I are often asked to help teachers rethink their environments and to help schools to redesign their spaces for learning.  This approach requires that we start with what we believe about children and learning, what we know about well-designed spaces and the well-being, focus, motivation and meaningful student and teacher work that they support.  In the municipal schools for young children of Reggio Emilia, aesthetics are understood as an underlying thread that holds everything together...our relationships, our interactions, our learning and our work.

This morning I found another link through a friend with another great resource on environments and materials linking it to children's use of technology...Thinking with Things.  They feature some inspiring videos of children working with materials, loose parts, recycled and natural materials.

There are so many resources out there in the world to support our work in these areas! Let us all keep sharing them as we discover them and as we design beautiful, well- stocked environments that reflect the best of what we believe and know about children and ourselves.

Materials

I am about to co-teach a course: Environments and Materials in Reggio Inspired Teaching and Learning at Lesley University and about to see the second edition of our book, In the Spirit of the Studio: Learning from the Atelier of Reggio Emilia come out next week... so, I have been thinking a lot about the whole idea of materials and what they mean to me and have come to mean to many with the perspective of the work in Reggio Emilia. A central thread in Reggio Emilia is aesthetics and the power of materials...paint, pens, pastels, clay, stones, shells, sand, earth, leaves....to hold meaning together, to prompt connections, stories, exchange, pleasure and wonder.  Playing with the stuff of the world... the pigments, the earth itself, the fibers and filaments, the graphite and charcoals...all of it of the earth and from the earth, gives us human beings the chance to make marks and make meaning in many forms.  This is never so clear as it is in Reggio Emilia, Italy in the municipal schools for young children.  What a wonder to live now and to take inspiration from Reggio Emilia as many of us do all around the world.

Vea Vecchi's book, Art and Creativity in Reggio Emilia is a must read for those of us who want to peek into the real world of aesthetics and learning as it has evolved in Reggio Emilia.  Margie Cooper's chapter in the newest and third edition of The Hundred Languages of Children, "Is Beauty a Way of Knowing?" synthesizes and interprets a talk by Vea Vecchi that is the foundation of much of the work in Reggio Emilia.  All of the publications from Reggio Emilia communicate in myriad  ways through many learning stories the power and pleasure that materials of all kinds hold for students and adults.

We have shared a list of basic materials in different contexts and for different reasons. We are now sharing it with the students in the Lesley course that begins this weekend.

We share it here to remind you what you might need and what you could look for.  The list is not complete by any means but it is a good start.  Have fun and never doubt that some good pens and some soft colored pencils in the hands of children, over time, will inspire and amaze you.

Suggested Materials

These are basic suggestions for ordering materials to use with children.  Several sets of colored pencils should last a class of 20 children a school year if they are treated well. You do not need to order a set for each child.  Soft, high quality colored pencils are a pleasure to use and produce results that do not compare to low quality, hard student sets of 12 pencils.  The same is true of other materials.

These are brands that we find reliable and good.  There are others that are also fine. Experiment and have fun.  It should not cost so much more in the end, and you, as a teacher or parent, will become more educated and refined in making choices. Remember that these are beginning basic suggestions and only suggestions.  We order most of our materials from Dick Blick: 800 828 4548, www.dickblick.com

 Drawing:

Fine line black pens: Permanent black Sharpie pens

Prismacolor colored pencil-set of 36 or more

Pentel fine markers-set of 24 or more

Drawing pencils in HB, 2B, and 4B (hard to soft)

Kneaded erasers

Painting:

Pelican Gouache-12 color set

Water color sets-16 color set

Dick Blick medium grade tempera (Order as many colors as you can afford           and then mix new colors. We use jelly jars to mix colors.)

Brushes:

Economy camel hair for tempera, sizes 4, 6, and 8

Assorted sizes of brushes for watercolor and gouache

Sponges for blotting

Papers:

Basic white drawing paper in 9x12, 12x18 for drawing, and 18x24 for tempera    painting

Textured grays, and off whites

Vellum for painting, marker, qouache and colored pencil

9x12 Biggie Junior watercolor pad

tissue assortments

foil assortments

origami paper

decorative collage paper

corrugated cardboard and other mat board scraps for collage and paper sculpture

Glue:

Elmers gel glue

Glue stick

Hot glue for heavy objects

Wire:

Twisteez colored wire

Aluminum, copper, brass, fine and medium gauge from local hardware stores

Beads, buttons, sequins, shells, yarns

Beautiful Stuff to collect with children and families:

Sequins

Unmarked envelops of all sizes

Stamps, wildlife and others

Unused postcards, cards and stationary

Beads

Buttons

Fasteners (paper clips, brass fasteners and grommets)

Hardware (rubber and metal washers, screws, nuts and bolts)

Clean rubber or plastic tubing, clear tubing

Snaps, zippers, eye hooks, thimbles

Cord, tassels, threads

Ribbon, lace

Lace

Interesting wooden pieces

Rubber stamps

Old keys and charms

Silk or dried flowers

Leather strips

Dowel rods

Plexiglas or mirror pieces

Springs

Doilies

Colored straws

Corks

Cellophanes

Twigs, acorns, seedpods, shells, dried leaves, flower petals

Sources:

Basements, junk drawers, garages, sewing boxes

Flea markets

Hardware stores

Craft supply stores

Gardens and woods

Party supply stores

IKEA

Craft supply stores

Beautiful Questions

Ashley and I just read an intriguing book, A More Beautiful Question, by Warren Berger. We first heard about this book through our work in inquiry-based learning with Oregon Episcopal School.  We have always been struck by the thoughtful and powerful questions that drive the work at Opal School of the Portland Children's Museum.  The images in this blog post are all from Opal. In his book, Berger quotes some staggering statistics.  On average, children between the ages of 3 and 5 ask  300 questions a day! And what happens? Then, they stop. Because of lots of reasons including this one: school and teachers are usually looking for answers from children not questions.

Berger's main message is that framing questions and wondering why? what if ?and how? are among the critical skills of our time.  We need to cultivate the natural curiosity and questioning disposition that children have in schools.

I always think of Pedagogical Consultant to Reggio Children, Carlina Rinaldi's, advice to parents.  When your child asks, "Why is there a moon?" Instead of giving her some kind of answer, ask her what she thinks and imagines.  What theories does she have? In this way, you start a wondering conversation with your child where you are investigating together and enjoying the pleasure of that search.  This is a good idea for teachers, too.  Children are full of theories if we ask them and wonder with them.  It is the search and the questions that are the most important part of life, not answers, that for the young child, may not stick or make sense in any case.

This is the heart of inquiry-based learning: learning that comes from real curiosity and a desire to uncover meaning and knowledge that can all hang together and last inside of us so that it changes our perspective and our way of understanding the world.

This is real learning, the kind we would like to see in schools.

Did you know that our brain does not really like answers? We much prefer puzzles and unsolved mysteries.  Just try to watch your brain sometime and you will see.

We highly recommend this book, especially Chapter Two, which is all about children and schools.  If you read it, tell us what you think and what new questions you have.

You can watch this trailer about the book to get a taste.