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 our 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 we want to say, and to pronounce it in a way that others can understand what the word is supposed to refer to, then we might understand how complex this process of “finding words” can be. And when one is so young that this is his first and only language, he really does not have any other choice than to use all of his 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 from the life of my two years old friend.

He and I were watching fishes in an aquarium at my home. The boy turned to me and said a word. I understood that he addressed me with intentions to share something … may be he asked 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 from 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. In L. Bresler. International Handbook of Research in Arts Education, Dordrecht, Springer

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

A young photographer’s point of view

When we observe children we can not do anything else but to suggest and assume – we can never know for sure what they think or for instance what they find interesting in their surroundings. Careful documentation of our observations can get us closer to knowing a bit more about the children, and “pedagogical documentation” (the way its has been practiced in the early childhood institutions in Reggio Emilia in Italy) can even take us to the level of self-reflection - necessary if we want to improve out pedagogical practice…
But what happens when children themselves make documentations? When we give them a camera they might probably act according to their understanding of the task (What are we supposed to do?) or they might imitate what they observed adult’s usually do with a camera. But they would probably also extent the task by their imagination, intuition and play.

The images shown here are made by a three years old girl. The selection of these five is made from a large number of images with different motives. I have chosen portraits because the most of the pictures showed people. Does this tells us what the girl believed people usually take pictures of – or can her choice of motives tell us about her relationship to the people she photographed? (The most of the portraits showed her mother :)

I find it interesting that there is a lot of action in the portraits: they are everything but boring - there is always something happening: the point of view is seldom neutral (of course limited by the size of her body); sometimes her fingers cover the part of the lance and the horizontal lines are not quite horizontal (because her hands are not steady); the compositions have diagonal lines … as if she knew how much action can be achieved by such lines..!

PS. All of the pictures people, including the photographer, have approved the use of the photos in this blog.