Wonderful Snow

I am still waiting for snow and hoping for “white Christmas”! If you think that it’s too late for white Christmas, you might not know that some places in the world the first Christmas day is on the 7-th of January. And there is still a new years eve to celebrate (or rather at least two of them: one on 31-rst of December, and another on the 13-th of January). To cheer myself up, I found some two years old images, showing the amount of snow just outside of my house.

A chemist or physicist might say that snow is just one of water’s different modes (besides ice, fog, rain or hailstone) - that there is nothing really mystical about it. But for me a winter landscape can be magical… Being too rational one might not mention how this, apparently colourless, material glitters, reflects soft spectre of nuances and shades, and invites hands with its downy surface. Experiencing snow can involve all our senses, and “turn on” our imagination and playful attitude: sledging, skating, play with snowballs, making caves… and snow angles.

This clean white substance with its aesthetic values appeals to our feelings about the atmosphere. Wrapping everything in its soft coat, snow deforms geometric forms on ground, and through contrasting makes icicles seem even sharper. Sometimes the experience of winter landscape can fill one with feelings of harmony, when experienced on a windless day, other times it is all about dramatics. One of my colleagues is studying poetic and aesthetic sides of winter landscape atmospheres (http://labadinia.wordpress.com/).

I see snow as a fantastic three dimensional material for play. Even thought sometimes too old and crunchy, the snow is usually plastic, easy to shape, and best of all, it comes in large quanta. Since it always comes in the same colour, sculpturing in it demands more attention to the forms; Since colours have strong symbolic effect, being able to use colours can rob one for possibility to pay attention to details on form or surface (for example one can make a red ball and call it an apple, but without colour he will have to work much harder to define the form, so it wouldn’t look like a plum or a peach). I believe that one way of “pushing” my students in developing their creativity is letting them deal with limited number of “formal aesthetical effects”.

I believe that it is important that my students, experience lot of play and fun during their studying to be kindergarten teachers, in order to continue playing with their future 0-5 years old students. I’ve found some images from a lesson in arts and crafts couple of years ago, where the assignment was to play and sculpture in snow.

One of the student groups made a bear sculpture. Later one, they did some individual work, and one of the students (Kari Nustad) made a beautiful bear sculpture in clay. http://karinus.stud.hive.no/Forming/

Evolution of The Human Hand

I attended a research seminar on Research by Design at AHO (The Oslo School of Architecture and Design) on the 4-th of December. The theme itself was not so relevant for my research, but was for me personally. Sometimes during the presentations, I caught my thoughts on their way to somewhere… One can blame on my associations that from time to time spin off in the unknown directions... and take me with them.

Professor Michael Weinstock spoke about evolution, and professor Michael Hensel showed some beautiful extremely enlarged images of plants, and there I was thinking about children’s biological predispositions for learning. I was thinking about evolution of human kind: how the form of the human hand had made it possible to use tools, something that made us different from the most of other animals. Being able to handle physical object demanded more brain activity and advanced thinking. With being able to walk on two feet, two hands were free to use also during walking (this was important before hands free telephone accessories). This brought me further in thinking about importance of physical environment, and use (or misuse) of tools and other artefact in our learning. I see clearly now where this was going! My associations were taking me strait to my PhD-project: to children’s handling of physical three dimensional materials. I might have to look into evolutional studies of human beings to find explanations for “learning through hands”?

Research by Design - Learning by Doing

After being a teacher educator for some years, this Autumn I am a student learning to be a researcher: learning through listening and reflecting, reading and thinking aloud, writing…or blogging. Some of my colleagues will even be thinking through designing, researching through design and learning by doing.

The method of my project will not be research by design – but I hope to observe the leading characters of my study (kindergarten children) engaged in their design processes. Relationship between research and design has been a much discussed issue during the last months at the PhD-course. What does it mean when a research is done by, through, in or with design?

My opinion is that in research by design, the research and the design are two simultaneous processes that support each other, and feed into each other. Sometimes they merge and can not be separated, other times one (the researcher and the designer) has to choose a point of view, or rather which shoes to wear: the researcher’s or the designer’s.

Wearing three pears of shoes (as a designer, a teacher educator and a kindergarten researcher), in my transdisciplinary way of thinking, there are similarities between “research by design” and action research, as well as research by design and Pedagogical documentation - the way documentation has been used a as a method of development of pedagogical work in municipal kindergartens in Reggio Emilia. One changes modes back and forward from practice to research, learns, produces knowledge and solves practical problems in creative ways.

About the PhD-project Sculpturing Words

The PhD-project “Sculpturing Words” is about young children’s diverse language development during their creative play with three-dimensional materials. I believe that this kind of playful pedagogical context can develop in to a meaningful aesthetic learning process, if a teacher supports children’s multimodal ways of expression. This project is about teacher’s competence, and children’s verbal and aesthetic languages, but most of all about synergistic effects between different ways of expression and communication: literacy in the multimodal perspective. Through discourse analyses and action research, I aim to identify learning potentials in children’s aesthetic learning processes, and which kind of didactical competence this demands from a teacher.