Intersubjectivity, Interpretation and Improvisation

I’ve got a mail (form Norm Denzin) confirming that my submission to the The Sixth International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry has been accepted. The congress will take place in Urbana-Campaign, Illinois, USA May 26-29. 2010… So I still have some time to prepare the presentation.

Here is the abstract that has been sent, with title: Intersubjectivity, Interpretation and Improvisation: How Three-Year-Old Students Challenge Researchers’ Competence

A PhD study of children’s meaning making during explorative play with sculpturing materials conducted by an art teacher/practitioner-researcher in a Norwegian early childhood center. The form of inquiry was inspired by A/R/Tography (Irwin 2004), involving video-recording of own activity with children. Children’s highly imaginative and multimodal forms of communication have challenged the researcher’s ability to create immediate and appropriate responses to the children’s creative verbal and non-verbal contributions. If we respect young children, value their way of living and want them to become self-confident individuals, research methods in early childhood education must respond to their expressive ways of democratic participation.



"Walking a log": I was hoping that he would sit on it, but the boy rather wanted to take it for a walk.

What did we do to make the boy happy?

This is what we did to help the boy in the book who kept crying (see the blog form November 24th ): What I did was to scan some pages form the book “Pekeboka mi” by Kari Grossmann, print them and paste on cardboard. The drawings were later cut form each other so that they could be moved and played with: the doll could be placed in the baby carriage on the same page… Or it could drive a car, as my little friend suggested!

Another thing I did was to digitally manipulate the drawing of the crying boy (I was waiting with tension to hear what Kari Grossmann would say about “spoiling” her work): I changed the boys crying face by opening his eyes and closing his mouth, washed the blood and put a plaster on his knee. And I waited to see what my friend would do…

What he did was first to cover the crying boy with the more satisfied duplicate. But then he tried some other ways to solve the problem: pated the crying boy, placed a plaster on his knee and even gave him some pears to help him forget his pain! I assume that all of his solutions were rooted in his own experience. This means that he knew perfectly well why his mother gave him a piece of chocolate the moment before she left the house…

Reading the book also initiated some new experiences. There were some drawings of fruits and vegetables. The first time we red the book together, my little friend suggested that the image on an anion represented an apple – so I went to the kitchen and fetched an anion to compare with the painted image. This was a week ago and he of course remembered that, and he remembered the anion’s taste. But what about a potato? It also had to be examined…

But the boy in the book kept crying!

My little friend, 2 years and 2 months old, chose a book he wanted to read. His mother and I set by his side. It was a picture book where illustrations on each page covered the same theme: play ground, domestic animals, birthday party etc. When reading the symbols on the pages showing food, the young reader pretended that he took the tiny spoon (the drawing of a spoon) between his fingers and brought it to his mouth: “Mmm… good” he said. Than his little hand carefully approached the egg (again: a drawing of an egg), picked it up and when he was just about to feed me, he warned me: “Egg – hot!” He seemed so sure that these drawings were symbols and not the real things, that he even made jokes about that. He was creating stories about the drown items and interacting with them: pushing the cars, lifting spoons, eating blueberries, bringing socks…

There were pages illustrating a visit to a doctor … and a boy in tears … with blood on his knee… The young reader seemed at first surprised, and then his face and body got more and more said while he was observing the drawing. It looked like the painted boy’s pain was slowly transmitted to the young reader’s body. The sad look on his face spoke of deep, deep empathy for the boy in the book.

I got uncomfortable (Was there any age limit for this book?) and tried desperately to find a way to realise my young friend from his (imagined) pain, while he was thinking - trying to find out how to help the boy in the book. Here is what he came up with: He banded over the book with his mouth almost on the page, and started shouting “Mammy! Mammy! Mammy!”. From the colour of his voice we understood that it was not his own mother he was calling, but the boy’s absent (not-illustrated) mother. The reader’s real mother was sitting beside him and understood what she was to do: She “jumped on her fingers” and ran to the boy with the bloody knee, wiped the blood, kissed him, held him in her arms … But the blood was still painted red…

The young reader, the same one who minutes ago made jokes about car symbols crashing into each other, suddenly had forgotten that the sad boy in the book wasn’t real. His mother and I hurried to go further in the book and read about something more present, but he kept finding the page again and again to see if the boy was still crying… And he was…

I was amazed by the enormous empathy of the two-year-old – he seemed to identify himself with the drawing, and suddenly could'n pretend any longer.

This happened yesterday, and I still feel like I should do something to make it up for him… - for the both of the boys! I think I will have to meet them soon again and bring with me some scissors, textiles, small plasters, glue…? We’ll see…

Here is the information about the book:
Grossmann, Kari (1999). Pekeboka mi. Oslo: Gyldendal Norske Forlag

Teaching Visual Art: How and Why?

During a lecture given to early childhood practitioners I was asked a question: “What does “self-expression” actually mean?” While answering, I kept thinking if I will ever be able to explain that to those who can not recall an experience of own creative expression…

May be a child’s expression and creativity are difficult to explain to adults because there is a difference between a child’s and an adult’s creativity (Runco, 2006)? While creativity of adult’s often leads to some product, children’s creativity does not, but rather “takes the form of imaginative play, self-expression, or new understanding of the world” (Runco 2006, p.121). Children gradually socialize into the norms of the environments they take part in. If the environments don’t appreciate creativity and self-expression, the children might learn to forget what creativity is. And such development would be so unfortunate because creativity is, among other things, a source of “intrinsic motivation, openness, curiosity and autonomy” (Runco 2006, p.127).

What Ola Nordmann (an average Norwegian) thinks about visual art education is probably a result of his own experience from education in this subject. The Norwegian early childhood education, for children 0-5, carries the name “kindergarten” symbolizing Froebel’s ideas of children’s natural growth through play and spontaneous expressions (Flanagan, 2006). But surprisingly, visual art activities are traditionally organized as teacher-centered, or “product-centered”, activities where the main goal is sadly often to produce something (especially around Easter end Christmas). Liora Bresler (1994) calls such teaching orientation “imitative” because the students are expected to copy the model their teacher has provided.

The notion of children’s garden fits well with a teacher who sees a child as a growing flower. Teachers with such “complementary” orientation (Bresler, 1994) don’t want to interfere in the children’s growth, but by such attitude they will unfortunately fail support and challenge. One can find teachers with such orientation in Norwegian early childhood centres, and some of them think that they teach the same way “pedagogista” teach in Reggio Emilia’s early childhood centres.

My understanding of educational philosophy in Reggio Emilia, is that is more like the third orientation Liora Bresler’s specifies: “expansive” teacher orientation. This kind of teaching involves “complex procedure drawing on the communication of sophisticated adult’s knowledge while respecting the child’s current experience and interpretations” (Bresler 1994, p.101). Such teacher style is called “expansive” because it incorporates “a variety of intelligences and modes of thinking” (Bresler 1994, p.90) and “promotes the cognitive and cultural aspects of aesthetic learning” (Bresler 1994, p.101).
In their article “Experiencing the visual and visualizing the experience” Rita L. Irwin and F. Greame Chalmers discuss different ways to understand curriculum in visual arts – even going so fare to present the curriculum as “complicated conversation” (Irwin & Chalmers, 2007) (inspired by Piner 2004). The notion of complicated conversation refers to the process of intersubjective meaning making that takes place when a visual art teacher challenge students reflection, and support experimentation, creativity and critical thinking.

I believe that visual art curricula in early childhood, has to emerge from children’s interests and teacher’s deep believe in the importance of arts in children’s lives. Angela Eckhoff refers to Elington 2003 when she writes that a teacher should be “responsible for engaging and motivating children to participate in an arts-based dialog” (Eckhoff, 2008, p.464). Because such dialogs are of intersubjective nature, the teacher’s competence will have strong influence on the child’s experience and construction of meaning. According to Martin Buber idea of dialogic education: “Dialogue requires real listening as well as real talking (…). Responces are not preoriented or predetermined and the teacher’s reaction to the leraner’s contribution cannot be prepared beforehand” (Flanagen 2006). And with the youngest students are involved, one has to have on mind that “complicated conversations” will be highly multimodal!

References:
Bresler, L. (1994). Imitative, Complementary, and Expansive: Three Roles of Visual Arts Curricula. Studies in Art Education, A Journal of Issue and Research, 35(2), 90-104.

Eckhoff, A. (2008). The Importance og Art Viewing Experiences in Early Childhood Visual Arts: The Exploration of a Master Art Teacher's Strategies for Meaningful Early Arts Experience. Early Childhood Education Journal, 35, 463-472.

Flanagan, F. M. (2006). The greatest educators ever. London: Continuum.

Irwin, R. L., & Chalmers, F. G. (2007). Experiencing Visual and Visualizing Experience. In L. Bresler (Ed.), International Handbook og Research in Arts Education. Dordrecht: Springer.

Runco, M. A. (2006). The Development of Children's Creativity. In B. Spodek & O. N. Saracho (Eds.), Handbook of research on the education of young children (pp. 121-131). Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Can children's imagination infect their teachers?

A short text that presents the main points form my presentation on Imaginative Education conference in Vancouver, has be written by Jon Olav Skålid and published on Forskning.no

Pedagogical documentation in “Hide and seek”

How often do you change you point of view in “looking at” yourself or at a text you are writing? (I’ve just realized that I am switching approximately each 22nd second between being myself, being a three-years-old, and being a reader). We can never know how other people see us because we can’t really take their position, but we can imagine… if we find it worth our imagination… The incident I’ll tell you about made me wonder when and how we people develop our ability to take position of others and imagine ourselves as seen from the outside.

The question: “How can we be sure that others do not see us when we hide form them?” can be approached in many different ways: form mathematics - it is about distance and size of our body and objects we hide behind; chemistry - it is about opacity and transparency of the materials we hide behind; geography – it is about landscape and position of the Earth and the Sun (that angle of sunlight is dependent on); biology – it is about types and colors of vegetation, but also about the position human eyes are placed in the scull …etc. etc…

Actually, my intentions here were not to discuss this complex question, but rather to approached it form a young girl’s point of view! This is what I experienced when a 3-years-old girl invited me to play hide-and-seek:

The rules of the game were really simple: She told me where I should stand while she was hiding. And then she told med where I should hide. May be it didn’t matter for her that we kept finding each other quickly, but
I thought that she might feel more “successful” in this game if I didn’t find her at once. So I told her: “You know, I can see you when you hide behind that little tree.” And she said: “No you can’t!”

Then I remembered that I had a camera with me, and I said: “I can take a picture of you so you can see yourself the way I can see you” – and so I did. She could now see herself on the little camera screen. I pointed at the picture and commented: “See here: your pink jacket is visible on the both sides of the tree, and I could see your hands”.

There was a second of silence. She was looking at the screen and thinking. She probably discovered that her jacket was visible because it was open. She struggled with the zipper and pooled it all the way up. “Now you can try again” she said and hid behind the same tree. When she was in the right position (with her face behind the tree) she first stood with the arms hanging down – and then she remember that her hands were visible on the picture and harried to hide them behind her back. To make sure that I couldn’t see her this time, she closed her eyes really hard.

The same day during my observations on a playground, I took pictures of children who wanted to see how they looked like: they had asked their teacher to paint their faces (as princesses, rovers or lions) and didn’t have any mirror available outside the building. A digital camera seems to be a terrific tool for viewing oneself the way others see us … at least how they experience us visually.

Used this way the camera became a tool for pedagogical documentation because the pictures were immediately used to talk about. They were used as a part of multimodal communication, they initiated reflections and motivated problem solving. I hope that the example of “hide and seek” illustrates my point.

Facial expressions of symbol-using beings

Have you ever experienced how demanding it is to explain what you mean in a language you can’t speak? Speaking in your mother tongue seems so easy and is often taken for granted, but when we experience how difficult it can be to find a foreign word that matches what you want to say, and to pronounce it in a way that others can understand what the word is supposed to refer to, them we might understand how complex this process of “finding words” can be. And when you are so young that this is your first and only language, you really do not have any other choice than to use all of your competences and use them with creativity…

“What makes human action distinctive is the capacity of people not only to understand the world symbolically but also to understand themselves and others as symbolic and symbol-using beings” (Rock 2001). Let me explain this with a short story about my two years old friend.

We were watching fishes in an aquarium at my home. The boy turned to me and said a word. I understood that he was addressed me with intention to share something with … may be ask me something (he had an “asking expression” on his face), but I didn’t understand the word he had pronounced. The next second, he grabbed the plastic box with fish food and repeated the word “mise” (he was speaking Norwegian), but this time he pointed at the box with his tiny forefinger and looked strait into my eyes with his face close to mine. I guessed that he wanted to say “spise” (which means “eat”) and that his question was: “Can I feed the fishes?” But first after I had answered “Yes”, and big smile occurred on his face, I was sure that I had understood his a-half-word-question!

So, what actually happened here? The little boy used different forms of communication: words, body language, tone of voice and facial expression. He obviously understood that he and I were “symbol-using beings”! When one symbol didn’t function alone, he supported it with another: pointing to the physical food box - which again was a kind of symbol (food box was symbolizing the action of eating). Wasn’t that creative!? His motivation to solve the communication problems seems to lay in his desire to feed the fish.

What I find the most amazing is the way he understood that I didn’t understand his word! I believe that this is an evidence of his extreme ability to read facial expressions!

According to Ellen Dissanayake, humans have during evolution developed the ability to communicate through facial expressions in order to become enculturated in their social group, and survive – just imagine how helpless a fragile infant would be without care form its “pack”. Babies are born wanting specific kinds of interactions (Dissanayake 2007). And it is not the adults who teach them to respond but “rather infants teach us (…) they reward us so that we want to keep entertaining them” (Dissanayake 2007, p.788). It seems like my little friend has been doing a lot of successful teaching and entertaining – and has become an expert of body language. And now he uses this language competence in order to learn other languages.

Dissanayake, E. (2007). In the beginning: Pleistocene and infant aesthetics and 21st-century education in the arts. International Handbook of Research in Arts Education. L. Bresler. Dordrecht, Springer.

Rock, P. (2001). Symbolic Interactionism and Ethnography. Handbook of ethnography. P. Atkinson. London, Sage: XVIII, 507 s.