The Arts and Community

This week we are with our grandchildren in Boston helping out while their mother and father go to work and the children’s schools are not yet in full swing. We are looking forward to this time to be with them for two full weeks of adventures! A few weeks ago we posted some images in gratitude for trips, hikes, family and friends, gardens in our backyard and views of the sea and lakes after long upward climbs.  Now, as summer comes regrettably to an close, we continue to reflect on the many blessings of this bountiful and beautiful season.

In this post, we want to take a moment to think about the importance of friends gathering and celebrating the arts.  One of our friends, Anni Mackay, owns two galleries in two different small Vermont towns, both called Big Town Gallery.  We enjoyed splendid occasions this summer orchestrated by Anni and Big Town Gallery…several openings, and dinners, and celebrations of books and cooking.  It is inspiring the way Anni reaches out to her communities and creates occasions to honor the arts, to present beautiful food and the chance to mingle and talk with other community members and friends in a setting surrounded by the best of what human beings create.

One evening, Anni suggested that we gather for a dinner after an art opening in her tiny rectangle of open ground behind one of the galleries.  Anni has created a magical place there, where you can peek up to see the stars while surrounded by buildings, where there are long narrow picnic tables and benches and twinkling lights.  All guest brought contributions…smoked chicken, spinach and strawberry salad, bread for the French bakery next door, fruit pies.  We enjoyed a most delicious and celebratory meal.  No one wanted the evening to end.

The arts bring communities together and provide us with sustenance and inspiration.  We can follow Anni's lead in schools where we celebrate beautiful student work that contributes to the health and vibrancy of communities everywhere.  We can make schools centers of culture, innovation, beauty and connection.

Thank you, Anni, for all that you do to inspire and uplift everyone around you with the work of artists who see what is possible and strive to make it visible…and for envisioning and creating a generative, generous and beautiful world.

Summer Gratefulness in Images

We are grateful for a summer full of adventure and beauty in travel and close to home. Here are some images from the bounty around our house in Vermont, from some trips and hikes we have taken and one from a drawing class we took together in July. We feel fortunate to be surrounded by the colors of summer, mountains, water, friends and family. We wish you all beauty and the ease of light and warmth as we live the last few weeks of August.

Naturskolan: Sustainability and Education in Sweden

The Swedish are advanced in their resolve, their thinking and their actions around sustainability in all of its manifestations... from wind power, to eco hotels, to organic produce, to sustainability and nature education offices and programs as a part of every school district in Sweden.  According to current research Sweden is the most sustainable country in the world.

We were lucky enough to spend a day with Anders Kjellsson in Lund, Sweden visiting with his colleagues in their Naturskolan offices, and touring three schools where they work. Anders is a close friend and colleague of our colleague, Sharon Danks, author of Asphalt to Ecosystems: Design Ideas for Schoolyard Transformation.  From Anders, we learned that every every school district in the country works closely with an office like theirs to develop relevant, meaningful programs that emphasize learning outdoors, growing and harvesting, seed to table, adventure education, science studies, green school yards and sustainability theory and practice.

Anders picked us up at the train station on his bike and we walked together to the first school, right in the city center, an elementary school where we met with teachers who showed us the gardens, ponds, insect hotels and the bee hives maintained by students. Then, we shared a delicious lunch with the whole staff of the Lund Naturskolan office exchanging ideas about programs and curricula, the work that they do and the work that we do.

After lunch and sharing, we visited an after school program that will forever be a standard for us when we think of eco-education, engaged, delighted children, and life lived to the fullest out of doors.  When we arrived it was pouring rain while a large, happy group of elementary students were enjoying an afternoon snack of organic strawberries picked nearby, a cake that they had made with flour they had ground, served by a group of girls still in their bee protection suits from working the hives.  They were all crowded together at outside picnic tables under a long arbor covered in vines and protected from the rain.  Some images are forever etched in our memory. This one is of them.

We then toured the campus of this extraordinary for us, (and not so unusual in Sweden), after school program.

A conference brochure of the 2016 International School Grounds Conference introduces Sankt Hansgården this way:

This is a youth centre with a unique architecture and a fantastic biodiverse forest garden. It is both a good place to produce food and the most imaginative playground possible. A key word here is respect; respect for the individual needs for plants, animals, environment and each other.

We found buildings with green roofs, extensive gardens, a barn with goats and rabbits, cared for by children in tall rubber boots, a clay studio, a forgery...We met Lennart Pranter, a builder, designer, carpenter and engineer who has designed and built all the buildings on this campus alongside the students who attend.  Sharon hopes to bring Lennart to San Fransisco for a project there.  Stay tuned for that.

Our third visit was to a preschool called Vinden meaning wind in Swedish.  We toured the grounds where small children have invented countless structures that have been consructed with the assistance of teachers and parents out of simple materials.  There are paths and low shrub woodlands and places to explore and be secluded.  There is a fire pit where Anders says they have a fire almost every day.  This place feels wild and wonderful, inventive and high spirited, a children's world where there are no limits to imagination.

What a beautiful vision and hopeful place to be right now.  We feel gratified and grateful to have had these experiences and to be able to share them in some small way with you.  Go here to see a lovely, short video and learn a little more about eco school yards in Sweden and beyond. If you have an interest in the International School Ground Alliance, go to this site.  Their next international conference is in September in Berlin.  Probably, you could still go.  We are planning to attend one in 2020 in Scotland! Something to look forward to. In the meantime, we plan to use what we have learned to inspire our current work with schools.

Beyond Quality and Gunilla Dalhberg

When Ashley and I were in Stockholm a few weeks ago we were lucky enough to have a lovely dinner with Gunilla Dalhberg.  Gunilla is author with Peter Moss and Alan Pence of Beyond Quality in Early Childhood Education and Care. The second edition was published in 2007.  This book is ground breaking and seminal in the literature about early childhood education theory and the work from Reggio Emilia in early childhood education.  The book is theoretical and dense.  It is inspiring and transformational based on questions such as ...Who is the child? And what is education for? 

We have know about Gunilla ever since we began our journey with Reggio Emilia in 1991-92.  Stockholm is the first place in Europe where the exhibit from the schools of Reggio traveled, then entitled, When the Eye Jumps Over the Wall. The Reggio Emilia Institute, (which Ashley wrote about last week), was founded in the fall of 1992, just after our family had left Italy to return home to the U.S.  The institute is still going strong and has influenced the high level of early childhood education in Sweden ever since.

What are the major take-aways from this book? In the New Zealand Journal of Teachers’ Work, Volume 5, Issue 1, 03-12, 2008, Gunilla and Peter Moss summarize their most salient points.

The language of quality can be summed up as ending in a statement of fact: “it speaks of universal expert- derived norms and of criteria for measuring the achievement of these norms, quality being a measurement (often expressed as a number) of the extent to which services or practices conform to these norms” (Dahlberg, Moss & Pence, 2007, p. viii)

Beyond Quality explores another language of evaluation, meaning making, recognising that there may well be many others. Meaning making, by contrast, speaks of “evaluation as a democratic process of interpretation, a process that involves making practice visible and thus subject to reflection, dialogue and argumentation, leading to a judgement of value, contextualised and provisional because it is always subject to contestation” (p. ix).

Meaning making is evaluation as a participatory process of interpretation and judgement, made within a recognised context and in relation to certain critical questions: for example, what is our image of the child? what do we want for our children? what is education and care? It values subjectivity (or rather, ‘rigorous subjectivity’ (Lather 1991), uncertainty, provisionality, contextuality, dialogue and democracy. It assumes a participant who makes – in relation with others - a contextualised, subjective and rigorous judgement of value. It foregrounds, therefore, democratic political practice, the exercise of collective deliberation.

Meaning making employs particular methods, suited to its democratic political practice, in particular pedagogical documentation, a tool for participatory evaluation. Pedagogical documentation has its origins in the innovative and, today, world-famous municipal early childhood services in the Northern Italian city of Reggio Emilia (orded notes, the work produced by children, photographs or videos, the possibilities are numerous.) Then it requires a collective and democratic process of interpretation, critique and evaluation, involving dialogue and argumentation, listening and reflection, from which understandings are deepened and judgements co-constructed.

Its origins owe much to Loris Malaguzzi, one of the twentieth century’s great pedagogical thinkers and practitioners and the first director of Reggio’s municipal early childhood services. Documentation represents an extraordinary tool for dialogue, for exchange, for sharing. For Malaguzzi, it means the possibility to discuss and dialogue “ ‘everything with everyone’ (teachers, auxiliary staff, cooks, families, administrators and citizens)...[S]haring opinions by means of documentation presupposes being able to discuss real, concrete things – not just theories or words, about which it is possible to reach easy and naïve agreement” (Hoyuelos, 2004, p. 7).

This concreteness of pedagogical documentation is critical. Measures of ‘quality’ involve looking for what has been predefined, discarding what does not figure in the template; it involves the decontextualised application of abstract criteria, reducing the complexity and concreteness of environment and practice to scores or boxes to tick; it strives for agreement and the elimination of different perspectives; it assumes the autonomous and objective (adult) observer. Above all, ‘quality’ offers consumers information about a product, for ‘quality’ is a language of evaluation suited to a particular understanding of early childhood (or other) services: as suppliers of commodities on the market to parent consumers.

The current expansion of early childhood education and care provides, potentially, many benefits and possibilities for children, parents and wider society, and expansion brings with it major risks, not least of which is increasing regulation and normalisation, what Nikolas Rose (1999) terms ‘governing the soul’.

If these risks are to be reduced and the potential benefits realised, societies need to put technical and managerial practice in its place, as subservient to democratic political and ethical practice, and to open themselves to diversity and experimentation.

As Ashley wrote about also last week, we are in dialogue with the Permanent Fund, an ambitious project to provide early childhood education for all of Vermont's young children  by 2025.  We have high hopes that the examples and deep thinking from Sweden can be an inspiration and a guide for this innovative, ground breaking work taking place in our home state.

Inspired by Sweden

Louise and I just returned from a marvelous trip to Sweden where, in addition to sailing a good stretch of the west coast and bumping around Stockholm, we visited Harold Gothson and his wife, Eva, at their beautifully restored farmhouse on the island of Oland on the southeast coast. And herein lies a story I’d like to tell, for it informs the work we need to do here in the U.S.A. Harold is a long time friend. We first met in Reggio Emilia, Italy in 1994 and he visited us in St. Louis for one of our conferences in 2001. He has been an extraordinary organizing FORCE in Swedish early childhood education. Over the past 30 years, beginning in 1987, he and his colleagues, including Anna Barsoti, Gunilla Dahlberg, and Per Bernemyr, developed a comprehensive system for professional development in the Swedish early childhood schools.

Their thinking was initiated when they hosted the first exhibition from Reggio Emilia in 1981. Their research began in earnest with study tours to Reggio Emilia and hosting a second exhibition from Reggio in 1986. In addition to their reading and seminar discussions they developed a close relationship with Loris Malaguzzi and Vea Vecchi in Reggio.

In 1990, Harold was appointed by the Swedish government as the Project Leader of Leadership Organization in Early Childhood Education with 10 Swedish communities. In 1992 Anna, Gunilla and he formed The Reggio Emilia Institute, a cooperative, not for profit, organization focused on developing early childhood education inspired by the municipal schools for early childhood in Reggio Emilia. In 1993, Loris Malaguzzi participated in the formal opening of their office in Stockholm.

Their work evolved to encompass two main arms in action: The Stockholm Project and The Reggio Emilia Institute.

The Stockholm Project included seven early childhood schools selected in Stockholm. Each school agreed to five tenets:

1. to focus their study on Reggio Emilia

2. to operate as a group by consensus

3. to intentionally diversify their student enrollment by race and economic capacity

4. to focus their reflective teaching practice on documentation

5. to always be engaged in study at the university

Over the ensuing years the schools’ study included readings, study tours to Reggio (one a year, each with as many as 300 participants), and many hours of sharing documentation. Harold played a major role in keeping the organization of meetings on track. Anna and Gunilla (and others) were a constant source of research ideas. The Stockholm Project schools became essential models for other Swedish schools.

The Reggio Emilia Institute became the research and sort public forum arm. Harold was the leader and chair. Gunilla and Anna (and others) shared their research with both The Stockholm Project and with a growing network of early childhood educators around Sweden. They organized meetings with leading officials in almost all the big cities and many towns. They gave presentations open to the public in all those towns and cities. They hosted Friday-Saturday study seminars. Through those efforts the network strengthened and grew.

In 1995 Harold was given an additional appointment, as consultant to the Stockholm District that includes elementary education.

Over the years, as the network grew, their understanding deepened, and their work became even more sophisticated (several schools were built or renovated with design principles inspired by the school architecture in Reggio), more of the planning of the monthly meetings was coordinated by groups of participants (not just Harold, Anna and Gunilla). Because of this level of development, in 2000, the original five members of the Reggio Emilia Institute decided to expand their cooperative membership to 25.

With the expanded membership came an increased need for more organization. They added a managing director. They selected consultants from within the participating schools. Today there are over 75 school directors, pedagogistas, teachers and atelieristas who serve as part-time consultants to other schools around Sweden. They continue to add to the membership by invitation.

In 2005 they designed a course for 25 pedagogistas. By 2018, over 600 pedagogistas will have taken the course. They have published several books that tell and illustrate the stories of many projects in the schools (unfortunately for us anglophiles, they’re all in Swedish). In 2014, they began a course for atelieristas. Their annual summer institute continues to be attended by hundreds of teachers. They continue to lead two study tours per year to Reggio Emilia.

In 2014, they focused research on sustainability and initiated a series of talks, seminars and social media networks to deepen their understanding of how these issues essential to our times can be integrated into curriculum.

Knowing this history outlined above is necessary to understand what one sees when one visits early childhood centers in Sweden, as Louise and I did in Lund, Vasteras, and Kalmar. Each one was of the highest quality we’ve ever seen (including in Reggio).  And, as Gunilla espouses in her excellent book, Beyond Quality in Early Childhood Education and Care, these extraordinary educators are addressing education on a much more profound level than just giving high quality care and developing skills. They understand that at its most essential level, the environments they design and the projects they evolve are the vehicles for creating community; community that is just, fair, inclusive, democratic, with rights for all, including the youngest.

And here's a fact that substantiates their audacious goal, beyond quality. Sweden is a nation of 10 million. Over the past five years they have welcomed 250,000 refugees from Syria.

As you can tell from this blog, Louise and I came home re-energized about the work that we do with schools. It’s a little scary to declare this at our age, but we now know that we need to engage in a whole different level of organization; one that generates networks of professionals committed to this work. Fortunately, we’ve just been invited to help in one, The Permanent Fund for Vermont’s Children. Their stated mission: Ensure that ALL Vermont children and families have access to high-quality, affordable early care and education by 2025. View a curriculum guide for early childhood education in Sweden here.

Carry on sisters and brothers.