Sculpturing Words

The Final Evidence

2012-01-28T03:00:00.000-08:00

On January 27th I finally received written evidence that my dissertation has been successful conducted. A formal ceremony was carried out at The Oslo School of Architecture and Design, with director in a long, black gown, music and speeches. Three former PhD students (one was absent) and about 60 master degree students that successfully finished their studies in 2011, received their diplomas.

The photographers have been Mona-Lisa Angell (the photo of me) and Lise Swensen (the photo of Målfrid Irene Hagen, me, Kjetil Nordby and director Karl Otto Ellefsen).

Among Books

2012-01-22T14:49:00.000-08:00

The library at Vestfold University College approximately once a month welcomes students, teachers and other personnel to take a seat among the books and listen to a talk. Last week it was my turn. To present my PhD-study, I prepared a short introduction for those who had not heard about the study, and planned to focus on something different from what I earlier presented to my colleagues and students. My choice was to present the “Model of Negotiating Grasp”, discuss children’s competences and raise some questions about teachers’ responsibilities in providing conditions for children’s negotiation of meaning.

The concept “Negotiating Grasp” was constructed during my study. It draws connections between physical grasping with hands (and other parts of body) and mental (or rather body-minded) grasping, and connects embodiment and cognition similarly to Efland’s (2004) concept “imaginative cognition”. The “Model og Negotiating Grasp” is developed in my theses (Fredriksen, 2011). It is a kind of framework which helped me analyse processes of young children’s meaning negotiations, and which, according to my PhD-committee, also could be helpful for other teacher and educational researchers.

The last part of the library talk was related a sentence from Eisner’s (Eisner, 2002) book “The Arts and the Creation of Mind” where he says that teachers can, by choosing materials and tools, provide conditions for certain learning processes, but cannot decide what will be learned. If we consider that new understandings are negotiated between children, teachers, materials and tools (and not transmitted in “traditional way”), providing suitable physical conditions, materials, books, music etc. becomes one of the most important tasks of a teacher. Another important task if we want children (or learners of any age) to participate in their own knowledge negotiation, would be to truly believe that learners are capable of contributing with their experiences. It is first when we are open-minded that curricula can be given new life (as in “curricula-as-lived” (Irwin & Chalmers, 2007)) along with the processes of negotiation.

The thesis “Negotiating Grasp” can be down-loaded at http://brage.bibsys.no/aho/handle/URN:NBN:no-bibsys_brage_25972

References:
Efland, A. D. (2004) Art education as imaginative cognition. In E. W. Eisner & M. D. Day (Eds.), Handbook of research and policy in art education (pp. 751-773). Mahwah: National Art Education Association / Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Eisner, E. W. (2002) The arts and the creation of mind. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Fredriksen, B. C. (2011). Negotiating grasp: Embodied experience with three-dimensional materials and the negotiation of meaning in early childhood education. 50, The Oslo School of Architecture and Design, Oslo.
Irwin, R. L., & Chalmers, F. G. (2007) Experiencing visual and visualizing experience. In L. Bresler (Ed.), International handbook of research in arts education (pp. 179-193). Dordrecht: Springer.

The Present Moment

2011-12-23T14:38:00.000-08:00

Few days ago I observed fingers of a young girl: they were tirelessly moving, touching, puling, rotating or squeezing everything they came in contact with. Accompanying the fingers, her eyes and ears were attuned to the same sources of interest, and even though some of the 34 people around her could have interrupted her, she remained engaged in the same small details that had captured her attention. Her attention, activities, thoughts and senses seemed to be merging in the moments of experiencing, as Dewey (2005 [1934]) suggests experiences always are: compact “packages”of merging feelings, thoughts and senses. The girl was truly present in her own experiencing – totally engaged in the present moments as if nothing else existed.

Stern (2004) says that life is always lived in the present moment. It cannot be different. Unable to release ourselves from the constant flow of time (except in dreams and some other extraordinary events) we are unable to get back to exactly the same place in time; contexts are always new. Each moment is unique and unrepeatable. Each experience is unique, but only when we dare to live it… in the unique, present moment.

The images (still and in motion) are captured from exactly the same place, on days with no wind - amazing how the leaves were falling all by themselves. The fourth time I intended to take a photo, the trees were gone…

References:
Dewey, J. (2005 [1934]). Art as experience. New York: Berkley Publishing Group.
Stern, D. N. (2004). The present moment in psychotherapy and everyday life. New York, London: W.W. Norton & Company.

For my Colleagues (only?)

2011-12-10T10:28:00.000-08:00

On December 1st I had honour to present my PhD-study to my closest colleagues who teach diverse disciplines at early childhood education programs at my university college (Vestfold University College). The presentation was based on the trial lecture (held on November 1st) where I was asked to comment on the on-going national revision of the early childhood teacher education.

The preparation for the trial lecture led to an understanding that the process of the revision is influenced by two parallel processes: making the early childhood education better adjusted to the early childhood practice, and the process of internationalizing Norwegian higher education. But this was not all: the important insight was that these two processes build on quite opposite ideologies. The largest problem though, the way I see it, is not that the two ideologies are impossible to unite, but that the people responsible for the revision do not seem to be aware of the ideologies! This ignorance has already led to number of conflicts, misunderstandings and tensions… and I cannot see any hope for “better” (whatever “better” or “higher quality” might mean) early childhood teacher education if the ideologies are not discussed!

Many of colleagues who listened to the presentation on December 1st seem to share my opinion that the insight about the opposing ideologies is important and should be discussed more. I am thankful for their support and I truly hope that teacher educators and leaders at Vestfold University College will find time for discussions before the new, national education program is to be implemented in our institution.

This is how I have illustrated the ideologies:

	Ideology behind Norwegian early childhood education	Ideology behind the international educational trends
	Embodied, pre-verbal competences	Knowledge as verbal-language-based
	Holistic, unity, embodied metaphor	Traditional, divided disciplines
	Complexity and contextualized understanding	Structure, generalizing and dis-contextualized testing
	Prolonged engagement, explorative play	Efficiency and economizing
	Self-motivation for learning	Knowledge externally defined
	Building identity on respect and will to contribute to others	Exclusion and focus on incompetence
	Imaginative cognition	Memorizing
	Quality of life – here and now	Quality related to international competition

Spaces for Emerging Questions

2011-11-27T13:11:00.000-08:00

My visual art students are these days struggling to formulate research questions for the first time. They complain that they’ve been working for hours and still don’t have proper questions. My experience is that formulating a question can take weeks and months of reformulating, reading, reflecting, and possibly the most important: discussing with others - Discussions with colleagues with similar interests is, at least, what I find the most important for my emerging questions.
Last week I spent three days with my colleagues – our little community of knowledge with common interest in research on the importance of physical space and materiality in early childhood education. Our three-day-stay at a SPA hotel in Strømstad (Sweden, just on the other side of Oslo fjord) basically consisted of spending time in our rooms and writing, but we frequently met for short discussions and meals. All of us had a well-defined task to write an article for the same journal (Education Inquiry), and it was never difficult to find something to talk about. The conversations about one of the articles were always relevant for the other articles; When someone wondered about something, she/he was usually not alone; When some questions were posed, new questions aroused and engaged the participants in lively discussions.

Informal discussions during the meals contributed to further development of friendly atmosphere, mutual trust and confidence, and created spaces where any kind of question could be posed; Where any kind of question could be born from the synergies of disciplines, interests, knowledge, experiences - and the mutual, inter-subjective engagement.

Crossing to the Other Side

2011-11-06T04:09:00.000-08:00

I have for long been wondering how it would feel to get on the other side of the dissertation day – the other side seemed so distant that I found it difficult to imagine. However, the crossing itself reminded me of barefoot crossing of a mountain stream coming straight from a Norwegian glaciers: the chilliness of the first step took my breath away, the slippery stones threatened my balance, and the strong stream kept reminding me that one doubtful move could result in disappearing under the frozen lake just a few meters away.

The beginning of my trial lecture made me dizzy as if a strong stream tried to pull me down. I got scared when my vision became double, but tried to concentrate on my breathing while I was talking. Somehow I came to understand that I had to ignore the cold feet and with self-confidence quickly choose where to step in the direction I had envisioned. And after a while I could neither feel my feet nor the stream – at least I did not have to struggle against it. By the time the trial lecture was approved and the committee members had started to ask questions, I had already acquired enough self-confidence that their questions did not seem threatening, but challenging in a positive way. The stream metaphor suddenly changed its character… Instead of puling me down, the conversations fell more like mutual balancing of steps, like in an Argentinian tango: the dancers have to feel the weight and direction of the other one’s body in order to adjust own moves in the improvising activity of dancing.

I am grateful to the committee members prof. Michael Parsons, Marte Gulliksen and prof. Halina Dunin-Woyseth who had read my thesis so carefully and with their interesting questions made it possible for me to negotiate new meanings during the questioning session. I thank my family, friends and colleagues who were wonderful audience and made 01.11.11 to a fantastic, unforgettable day!

Preparing for the Trial (-lecture)

2011-10-29T12:54:00.000-07:00

The last ten day have been spent in preparing for the dissertation on November 1st. The theme for my trial lecture was received on October 18th – quite interesting theme, but also challenging and highly relevant. The committee has asked me to compare my findings to some phenomenon of the on-going national revision of the Early Childhood Teacher Education. This is the theme:

"The model of Negotiating Grasp as basis for a discussion of the distinction in the new Framework plan for early childhood teacher education (Forskrift om rammeplan for BA barnehagelærerutdanning) between the knowledge areas 'Children's development, play and learning' and 'Art, culture and creativity.' "

Here are some relevant links to web pages of The Oslo School of Architecture and Design, where the dissertation is taking place:
http://www.aho.no/no/AHO/Aktuelt/Kalender/2011/Disputas-Biljana-C-Fredriksen/
http://www.aho.no/no/FoU/Publikasjoner/Avhandlinger/Sammendrag-PhD/Biljana-Culibrk-Fredriksen/
http://www.aho.no/Global/Dokumenter/Nyhetsvedlegg/program_disputas_BCF.pdf

My Sand Castle

2011-10-16T06:33:00.000-07:00

It was the 4th of October and, for a few days, I had been expecting a mail from my dissertation committee. My step-son kept reminding me that a negative evaluation could still have some positive consequences and that I should think about them in order to prepare for the committee’s decision. The wise 13-year old was trying to prevent a large disappointment.

Instead of sitting and waiting at the internet café in Villarcayo, close to Nela village where my step-son, my son and a few friends were staying (the kids had one week off from school), we went to visit a place called San Vincent in Northern Spain. When we arrive to the beach, the sight was overwhelming; I’ve heard it was a nice place, but I did not expect to experience such a wonderful sight; The banded blue horizon reminded me that the Earth was round, and that it continued to spin around and around.

While I was walking across the beach I enjoyed every moment; This day was finally my summer holiday – even though it was October, I did not have any real summer while I was rushing to finish my thesis. This was the little brake I was wishing for, for so many days… a cloud-free day before a storm…

My dissertation was built like a sand castle: I was carefully arranging each sand grain, adding water and pressing the flextible material with my hands. I imagined that the castle would stand up as a solid construction, but I still wanted the traces from my hands to remin visible - and the castle to appear as trustworthily vulnerable product of thousands of choices I had to take.

On the way back to Nela I checked my e-mail in Villarcayo: The response was positive! My sand castle did survive the storm… and the committee had understood that the “castle-builder” (they did not call me that) had “invested much of both her mind and heart in the inquiry”.

In a few days I will be receiving a theme to prepare for the trial lecture to be held on November the 1st. Today, Sunday 16th, I am enjoying another relaxing day – I think I deserve it...

Artistic Process as Pedagogical Text

2011-09-25T01:19:00.000-07:00

The day I delivered the thesis (August 1st), I was back on the same teaching job I had before the PhD-study – however teaching is never the same. My main teaching responsibilities this fall are related to two groups of students: the one in a group of 18 undergraduate art and crafts students, the other is a group of 19 master degree students studying “pedagogical texts”. One might immediately wonder: What is a pedagogical text? Am I not an A&C teacher and how does my teaching relate to pedagogical texts? These questions are more than relevant at the point when both my students and I are searching for appropriate definitions of pedagogical text that can appropriately include arts-based approach to education.

In the broad definition of “text”, as used by the researchers at Vestfold University College, a pedagogical texts is any kind of physical object that can be used in a pedagogical purpose. This, of course, includes text books, but also art materials, costumes used in drama education, or accordion used in music education. But what about a dance floor and the classroom space – are they also “pedagogical text” - or are they rather pedagogical contexts? Could anything used by a teacher in pedagogical purpose become a pedagogical text – disregarding what the pedagogical goals are? For instance, if the purpose of education is to stimulate students’ imagination, could a fairy-tale as well as a non-figurative sculpture, become a pedagogical text?

Meeting the two groups of my students, I bring with me my experiences and unanswered questions from one group to another; The group of A&C students have been exploring three-dimensional materials and reflecting about their experiences from the creative work. Many found it difficult to assign words to their aesthetic choices and intuitive actions. To inspire their future work with research on own creative work, artist-researcher Grete Refsum was invited to present her artistic processes.

Listening to Grete Refsum I was thinking about how fantastic piece of pedagogical text her presentation was: It was a pedagogical text that seemed to have helped her structure her thoughts, past ideas, feeling and experiences in order to present them. On the other hand, her presentation was a well-functioning pedagogical text addressing the students and meeting them at the point they needed examples of well documented creative processes.

Grete presented her work with 17 pictures (part of the same art work) in chronological order: from the invitation to exhibit, exploration of the specific room shape and function, choices of the themes, materials, techniques, shapes, lines, compositions and so on. While she was talking and showing images, I got more aware of the complexity of her creative process – in fact I could identify at least four different processes that seemed to exist simultaneously, and interweave:
1. The process of studying the space, the physical contexts where her art would be exhibited; She seemed to have audience on her mind while she was planning.
2. The process of background research that supported her thematic choice of combining Western religion (Christianity) and Eastern (Kina) ideology and culture. This research would lead to her choices of symbols, materials, forms;
3. The process of exploring materials, techniques and practical possibilities of composing with the specific material combinations;
4. And the process of her traveling and collecting personal experiences one might think of as separated from her art, but in fact essential for it.

When I view Grete’s lecture as a pedagogical text, I wonder where did such pedagogical text start and end; The lecture would not be possible if she had not for years worked on her art project, if she did not experience, reflect, take choices… Additionally, the pedagogical goals developed during her and mine discussion before the lecture about what the students needed. At this point, when the students got an assignment to verbalize their experiences and seemed to struggle with it, Grete’s lecture hopefully meet them at the right moment where they had experienced some challenge, but still not become too frustrated. Grete’s lecture could possibly help them to extent the zone of their proximal development, instead of giving up. This is up to them to evaluate: What do you say, my students?

Relevant link: International Association for Research on Texbooks and Educational Media (IARTEM)

Attuning Tools, Materials and Muscles

2011-08-28T04:41:00.000-07:00

An incredible project of reconstructing a Viking ship is taking place in Tønsberg at the moment (see http://www.osebergvikingskip.no/eng/) and is expected to take another autumn, winter and spring. The original ship called Oseberg, made by Vikings around the year 820, and later berried in Tønsberg area, is today exhibited at the Viking museum in Oslo.

The same ship has been reconstructed before, but this time not only the ship is being copied, but the entire process of building it. The building process is shaped by knowledge about Vikings’ tools and techniques; knowledge about wood’s diverse qualities, as well as how it might have been affected by climate during the centuries of growing; knowledge about the ship’s lines, curves, joints, surface; hydrodynamic, waterproof and other qualities, and much more. In short, the reconstruction of the full size replica is a huge multidisciplinary project that calls on complex combinations of knowledge and expertise. Additionally, local knowledge is constantly being produces in here-and-now situations where physical work challenges craft-men and volunteers to master the tools and approach the materials (wood, iron or wool) in contextually appropriate manners. This means that they have to pay close attention to the exact qualities of the wood piece they have in hand, they have to adjust their movements according to the material, tool and muscles in their bodies… and to accomplish some kind of harmony between embodied knowledge, reflection and imagination in order to solve emerging problems - for instance: how to change axe’s angles when cutting across a 70 cm thick oak.

I am telling this from my personal experience. Usually I use saw to cut wood, but Vikings did not have saws. Cutting wood "the Viking-way" seemed easy when we were shown how to do it; doing it oneself was a quite different experience – I am sure it was also different experience for each of us (my three 13 years old companions and me) who volunteered that day.

I experienced how important it was to keep changing the angle of the blade in order to make a “V”-like shape (or rather “U”-shape, as learned through experience) through the wood; I experienced how loose I should hold around the handle in order to prevent hurting my wrists; which back muscles to engage; in which position to drop the axe; how to slide my hands along the handle in order to control to blade’s direction; how to find the right rhythm to provide the best efficiency, and so on… Each of the boys seemed to explore their own cutting technique, for instance banding and straitening knees in order to canalise power from feet up to the axe’s blade. They generally gave the most they had, claiming that they were not tired, but the following days, I’ve heard, the experience left some noticeable traces in their bodies – nothing permanent, but something to help them remember.

If cutting with an axe was our daily occupation, as it was for many Vikings, we would have to listen to our bodies much better – we would have to learn how to attune the bodies, tools and materials as perfectly as possibly. We would have to learn much, much more…

Objects' Affordances

2011-08-19T13:58:00.000-07:00

With wide number of qualities, objects around us afford us with different possibilities. Some objects are designed to function in specific ways (like chairs or cars), while natural objects and materials do not have any pre-assigned meanings – it is up to each of us to interpret possibilities embedded in their forms.

Qualities of an object can remind us of something else, thus, as well-behaving adults we would seldom wear a bucket. To be able to see possibilities in objects that already have preserved pre-assigned functions one needs to release imagination – and have self-confidence.

Some objects, textures or shapes remind us of something we’ve earlier experienced. See for instance how 13-year old William found similarities between a round shape of a branch and a glass: He grasped the possibility in the material, imagined its possible function and carved a glass-holder. See also how he used old pants to make back-support on the chair he designed and crafted by himself.

Intersubjectivity of Grief

2011-08-13T02:17:00.000-07:00

Intersubjectivity is an ability to “attune” to others, to communicate without words. Stern (2003) says that intersubjectivity develops from the earliest interactions between an infant and an adult when they share attention, intentions and emotional conditions. This means that babies can communicate long before they can talk – but it can also mean that ability to intersubjectively connect with others is integrated in each of us, though we might not be aware of it.

During my interactions with 3-5 years old children it became so obvious for me how intuitive and embodied communication between us was, and how easily young children sensed my feelings and attitudes.

After the terror on July 22nd, people in Norway started to gather in different ways, with and without flowers, candles and torches. Such gatherings were different from any other contexts we’ve experienced. I wonder how we knew how to behave in appropriate ways?

Once about 300 of us gathered in a theatre, we could observe a woman, hand in hand with a young man, entering the stage. When they stopped, she spoke to us while he remained silent - with grief on his face. They walked again towards a table with candles. We could now imagine what was going to happen, still none conducted us to rise simultaneously n the moment the candles were lightened; None told us to stand there in complete silence - but we all did. There were no prescriptions to follow – it was amazing how we attuned to each other’s movements, invisible gestures, breath, gaze… as if we were fishes in a stream. I don’t know how fishes do it, but I experienced intensive attention of all of my senses – I felt like a huge satellite dish antenna seeking to capture some signs from the surroundings, and my actions emerged from the inside before I had time to reflect about them - I was not thinking through verbal means of thinking, but through my body.

I guess we are all able to “match other people’s moods and emotions because of our ability to ‘read’ the form, the vitality, and the intensity of their movements” (Herskind, 2008, p. 280). However, when emotions are strong and shared, when the participants are attentive and the reason for their gathering exactly the urge to share with each other’s, our apparently hidden intersubjective abilities can surprise us with their intensity.

Herskind, M. (2008). Movement analysis and identification of learning processes. In T. Schilhab, M. Juelskjær & T. Moser (Eds.), Leraning bodies (pp. 269-283). Copenhagen: Danmarks Pædagogiske Universitetsforlag.
Stern, D. N. (2003). Spebarnets intersubjective verden [The Interpersonal World of the Infant] (Ø. Randers-Pehrson, Trans.). Oslo: Gyldendah Akademisk.

The images show a sea of flowers in Oslo and a gathering of 10 000 people in Tønsberg.

The Point of No Return

2011-08-03T12:12:00.000-07:00

The thesis was finished on Sunday morning, the last day of my three-year long full-time study. It was printed late in the evening, copied five times on Monday morning and personally delivered to my advisor Martina Keitsch in Oslo in the noon. I suppose that three of the examples are on their way to committee members: Marte Gulliksen, Michael Parsons and Halina Dunin-Woyseth. How it goes from here, is not up to me any longer…

The thesis has been titled “Negotiating Grasp: Embodied Experience with Three-dimensional Materials and the Negotiation of Meaning in Early Childhood Education”. An article based on the thesis has been published in the digital journal FORMakademisk. The article presents a few examples of children’s interactions with 3D-materials and suggests that children’s creative ideas come from interactions between their past and present experiences.

Meeting the Audience

2011-07-11T13:53:00.000-07:00

Who are you and why would you want to read my blog?

I can only imagine what could hold you attention on these lines, and can only try to satisfy your expectations. Thus, you are not one single person with unified needs… and I also have my wishes, agendas and power to choose which words to serve you. We, a writer and a reader, find ourselves in apparently simple relationship where you can click me away whenever you find the blog boring, annoying or uninteresting. On the other hand, this dialog is complex because I really need to connect with you (in my imagination) in order to write at all.

I attended InSEA’s 33rd world congress in Budapest June 27th to 30th. Listening to many presenters made me wonder how they imagined their audience when they prepared their talks: Who were the people at the conference? What could they find worth listening? Preparing my own (18 minutes’) talk I was concerned with how to be short enough, but still say enough that the audience would understand.

The presentation I found the most engaging, perfectly planned and carried out, was made by Sara Calcagnini from Leonardo DaVinci - National Museum of Science and Technology, in Milano. She spoke about symbiotic relationship between art and science.

Sara’s presentation started with relevant (and short enough) introduction including a self-ironic comment about her Italian English: she said this in a funny way, but saying that she was willing to humiliate herself for the sake of the message she wanted to share also had an strong, serious effect. With her honest and friendly appearance she quickly established contact with her audience and treated us with prudence and respect (at least this is what I experienced).

Sara was completely engaged in her talk, believing with her whole body that she had something important to say. The images can give impression of her rapid movements addressing the audience and how her body language undeniably expressed her wish to motive us. Constantly providing with new insights, her talk had escalating dramaturgy, finally culminating with a call for help. And her call touched me. I felt connected. I was her audience - she moved me and motivated me.

While I was thinking: “what a fantastic talk; what I fantastic person”, the first comment she received from the audience shocked me! The comment's irrelevance spoke of ignorance toward the important issues Sara addressed in her talk; She spoke about holistic understanding of our world and responsibility of global citizens. Don’t audience also have responsibility to contribute in constructive ways? Or remain silent…

I feel responsible that I did not stand up and give her my support. I am trying to convince myself that the majority of the audience felt like I did – but I don’t know. Was it possible that many of us did not grasp her powerfull message?!

I keep thinking about how important response from my audience is for me, both after a talk is over, but also before, and most of all while I am moving in front of them, trying to catch their eyes and looking for signs of acknowledgement, respect and interest.

We should not forget our audience, but they should also know how much they mean…

Prolonged Engagement

2011-06-26T10:13:00.000-07:00

Many of us are effective and productive, and we believe that we get more from life when we rush. When we hurry around we probably do get to see more glimpses of different places and people – and that’s fine, but are we able to experience the qualities of the moments as we live them (not only count them)?

I was thinking about life and what Stern (2004) says about present moment: that life is always lived in present here-and-now moment; that life is a constant flow of single moments – each of them experienced here-and-now. And each of them influencing future experiences and understandings – that is: if we are able of experiencing the moments we live.

I was thinking about art appreciation and what Armstrong (2000) says about prolonged engagement. There is always much more beyond the first glimpse of something.

I was thinking about research methods and how Bresler (2006) compares Armstrong’s perceptual contemplation to qualitative research: She says that we need to take the time we need to truly connect with what we are studying. Lingering caress is about achieving prolonged engagement with a studied phenomenon in order to grasp deeper understanding of it (Bresler, 2006). And even more, we can experience mutual absorption into the phenomenon we are studying (Bresler, 2006). It is through true engagement that our experiences can become lived, and that we can become to know something through our bodies.

Through prolonged presence inside a context, of for example interaction with children, we can happen to take part in production of “slow knowledge” (Clark 2010). Though, what happens between people is seldom experienced as slow or simple, but rather as complex systems where “multiple parts continuously and fluidly influence one another” (Thelen and Smith, 1994, p. 331) – that is exactly why it takes time to study processes, of for instance children’s meaning negotiation in order to grasp them holistically and contextually.

The images show Liora Bresler at Munch museum in Oslo http://www.munch.museum.no/?id=&mid=&lang=en . The second image has been manipulated to illustrate mutual absorption between Liora and Munch.

Armstrong, J. (2000). The intimate philosophy of art. London: Allen Lane The Pinguin Press.
Bresler, L. (2006). Toward connectedness: aesthetically based research. Studies in Art Education: A Journal of Issues and Research in Art Education, 48(1), 52-69.
Clark, A. (2010). Young children as protagonists and the role of participatory visual methods in engaging multiple perspectives. American Journal of Community Psychology, 46, 115-123.
Stern, D. N. (2004). The present moment in present moment in psychotherapy and everyday life. New York, London: W.W. Norton & Company.
Thelen, E. & Smith, L. B. (1994). A dynamic systems approach to the development of cognition and action. Cambridge: MIT Press

Moving the Bricks Around

2011-06-07T02:23:00.000-07:00

I’ve got the feed-back on the thesis draft from my co-advisor (Liv Gjems) and reader (Ellen Marie Sæthre-McGuirk) – and you can imagine how I use my hours these days? Fortunately, I do not have to re-write too much or add some large parts, but rather take some bricks away, move them around and glue them better together. I also need to file the edges and smoothen out the surfaces, though my friend Nicola, with her native-English-competence, will be most responsible for the polishing.

The plan is to send Nicola the thesis before June 25-th and get it back from her around the middle of July; Then fix the lay-out and deliver the thesis around August the 1-st. The fact is that my time as PhD-student is over after the summer and I have to go back to teaching at Vestfold University College. But even if the study is over, I will still continue to blog on this page … possibly even more often… I already know about some interesting tasks waiting for me, but somehow I always hope that I will have more time after I am finished with what I am doing right now - Don’t you? Though, there is usually nothing wrong with being optimistic :)

ECEC-research and Policymaking

2011-05-27T04:58:00.001-07:00

May 18-th to 20-th, Norwegian Ministry of Education arranged the conference "Nordic Early Childhood Education and Care – Effects and Challenges - Research, Practice and Policy-making" in Oslo, providing arena for researchers and policymakers from Nordic countries to meet. The conference was opened by the Norwegian Minister of Education Kristin Halvorsen who presented the government’s intentions to invest in research in early childhood education and build closer relations between research and improvement of ECEC quality.

As one of the parallel presentations, my talk “Researching children’s embodied ways of learning” focused on children’s competences that are integrated in their embodiment – competences to sense, experience, wonder, explore and discover what objects (in this case 3D-materials and people) mean to them. The presented study was qualitative and the results were presenting through descriptions and absence of tables and numeric correlations.

I must admit that I was nervous during the preparation for the conference: I knew that my research results did not fit into the current discourse where verbal language learning is privileged, and I had a feeling that qualitative approach was not so welcomed. However, during the conference I learned that many different forms of separating quantitative and qualitative research were represented among the 70 politicians and researchers present at the conference; Some assumed that difference between quantitative and qualitative approach were defined by the methods used (for example, that interviewing is always about qualitative research) and others seemed to assume that the main difference is in the presentation of the results.

My own understanding, influenced by Robert Stake and Liora Bresler, is that what separates quantitative and qualitative inquiry is how we view the truth. This is an epistemological question foundational for how we see the world: If I believe that many different answers to the same questionare possible, in addition to my own answers – which certainly derives from my own advocacies and subjectivities - I would be curious about possible answers given by others; I would be aware of that my and their answers would be like pieces of puzzle that can complement one another; I would be aware that I do not know everything and that I am in some sense also wrong. On the other side, if I believe that there is only one right answer, and I own it, I might come in position to use this knowledge to gain power, to predict causal relations and to deny the complexity and contextuality of the “produced knowledge”; I might also overlook the certainty (not possibility!) that I am, in some ways, also wrong.

Listening to the presentations of causal explanations and economic efficiency in production of human’s academic skills (from birth to age 40) felt like a heavy stone in my stomach. What about ECEC quality the way the children’s themselves experience it? I do not think that three-year-olds care about how much they are going to earn by the age of 35 – but rather care about meaningfulness of their experiences, joyful play (which certainly includes learning), about being respected, belonging, being able to contribute…

However, if young children’s voices would ever be able to influence policy making, it is desperately needed that we, who wish to promote their experiences, make an effort to speak the type of languages that policymakes can understand ... though I fear that this will demand some kinds of compromising our integrity as qualitative researchers.

Arts Teaching Conference in Larvik

2011-05-10T00:09:00.000-07:00

The “Institute of arts, physical education and food” at Vestfold University College, arranged a conference about practical, aesthetic learning (PES: praktisk, estetisk, skapende) in Larvik on May 4-th and 5-th. As a member of the group responsible for preparing the conference, I was eager to experience the keynote presentations and parallel sessions, as well as curious if the conference composition and content would manage to engage the participants. The audience was interdisciplinary and came from Sweden, Denmark and Norway. This group of approximately 150 was a mixture of researchers in arts (music, drama, visual art and dance), teachers in schools and preschools, artists and other people interested in the arts and their value in education. Farris bad (the hotel where the most of participants stayed during the conference) also offered rich variety of embodied, aesthetic experiences.

The program included 3x30-minutes parallel sessions on both of the days. Apart from learning from each other the purpose of the conference was to build network and provide opportunities for people with common interests to meet. See the conference program. Hege Hansson leaded the program (both of us have embodied experience of standing on the main stage between the speakers).

Professor of philosophy Dorthe Jørgensen from University of Aarhus, was the first keynote speaker. Her presentation about “aesthetic thinking” made a brilliant introduction to the conference theme. Two preschool teachers (Veronika Lovise Wist and Anders Skog) presented their prize-winning projects with children, and the projects were commented by Grethe Bekkevold who was a member of the jury who selected the winner for the annual national prize. Tollef Thorsnes’ large three-dimensional installations in wood and flames made the specific ambient in the main conference room.

Professor Liora Bresler, from University of Illinois, was one of the keynote speakers. With her broad knowledge about the global position of the arts (she has for instance edited the “International handbook of research in arts education”, 2007), she spoke about the specific values of the arts and how they can contribute to education.

Hillevi Lenz Taguchi from Stockholm University, spoke about intra-active pedagogy and the importance of physical materials for children’s learning.

Merete Morken Andersen, writer and colleague from Vestfold University College, spoke about the process of creating as both an individual and collective process.

Donatella De Paoli, from Norwegian Business School (BI) approached the arts education from a unique angle addressing relations between arts teaching and society from an economist’s point of view. Turid Amundsen was responsible for practical arrangement long before the conference, and had responsibilities which often appear invisible if everything functions as it should. Geir Salvesen, the dean of the Faculty of Education at the Vestfold University College (and also a music teacher) opened and closed the conference… with hopes for continuing discussions and new possibilities to meet and promote the importance of the arts.

Expression or Communication?

2011-04-29T10:42:00.000-07:00

Some linguists told me that there is no “expression” - the purpose of everything we say is to communicate. I doubt: If I happened to scream when I got scared of something that was absolutely not dangerous, the sound could communicate my surprise and someone could come to see if I was OK. But the screaming sound could have been an immediate reaction (expression of surprising fear) and not a planned action to call for help, and it could be embarrassing if someone had heard it. What I want to say is that the scream was not intended to communicate but was an expression that urged from the inside. Such scream would be a kind of impulsive, intuitive, embodied expression, not planned to influence an addressee in specific way.

We can experience and interpret everything we hear, see, touch or smell – everything can communicate to us even if it was intended to communicate. And the other way around, what we do and how me move might be interpreted by others, however we sometimes do not have other intentions than to experience the sound of own voice or to re-experience a painting or a sculpture we are making. One might say that this also would be a form of communication between a person and the materials that are getting transformed in her/his hands. Such communication would be here-and-now-negotiation between the materials’ qualities and the person’s hand, voice, feelings, ideas…

A few days ago I observed a six year old girl. A was on the balcony and she did not see. She left her bicycle looking for something (possibly flowers) by the road, and started to sing. None was around – she was singing for herself. Then, she went back to her bicycle to ring the bell, making the music for her song. A year ago I experienced something similar when a video camera captured a five year old boy while he was alone in a room. He was hammering and the rhythm of the hammering sound seemed to remind him of a song he knew and he started to sing for himself: “I was made for loving you baby…”

We sometimes feel inner urge to jump, sing or cry. Young children often do what they feel, but they soon learn to supress our expressions as they socialize. I suppose the both of the children were singing exactly because none could hear them, and not with intention to communicate.
Yet in another occasion I observed a two year old boy; There was a party in the house and many saw that the fell and hit his cheek. Holding his hand over the wounded cheek, and not crying, he asked the people around where his mother was. They pointed and he followed the directions. When he few minutes later finally found his mother, he started to cry. His cry expressed that he was hurt, but it was also a form of communication he wanted to share only with his mother.

I do not have any answers about relations between communicating and expressing – but I keep wondering…

Supervisor Worth Gold

2011-04-12T02:06:00.000-07:00

I realized it was sunny yesterday. In the last months I’ve been intensively writing the thesis and did not pay attention that the spring has arrived. That’s wonderful: both that the spring is here, and that I can finally lift up my eyes from the screen. I’ve been working hard. Approximately each second week I sent a new chapter to my supervisor Martina Keitsch (see the photo), who read the text in a day and the second day we met to discuss the chapter. Can you imagine how fantastic it has been that she could give me the feed-back so quickly? Imagine if I had to wait for her feed-back for two weeks or a month – the writing process would have to take additional eight months of waiting…

I can understand that supervisors are busy people with many important tasks – but for a student whose work depends on getting feed-back, it is important that the student is placed close to the top of supervisor’s task list. This is important for the student to get the work done, but, above all, to feel that one’s work is worth something – that one should not give up! When the feed-back is also constructive and encouraging – as Martina’s has been, the supervisor’s support has immeasurable value: she deserves, at least, her own weight in gold :)

I cannot believe I am almost finished with writing the thesis before I send it to a “reader” (which is planned for next week). This is how the last phase of PhD study works at The Oslo School of Architecture and Design: A few months before the thesis is to be delivered, it is sent to an appointed reader, who in about a month gives her/his feed-back. Then it usually takes one to two months to rewrite the thesis. If one needs language editing (as I do since I write in English – my third language) that will probably take another month. And then, there is layout and making sure that references are properly written. This should be easy when one uses the software EndNote – but there are still so many details I would not be able to fix without the help of librarians Heidi K. Olsen and Kristin Østreholt. Thank you thousand times (as we say in Norwegian)!

Not strong enough

2011-04-06T03:47:00.000-07:00

The last chapter of my thesis is written and I should be happy. However, the last chapters were hard to write, not so much because I was tired, but because I was sad, almost depressed by the results of my study. The new insights are hard to bare and I feel helpless: There are so many layers of misunderstanding and power that prevent children from being seen as competent.

Young children are promoted as competent in Norwegian “Framework plan for the content and tasks of kindergartens” (Ministry of Education and Research, 2006) and other government documents. However it is not clear what children’s competences are. In my study I have come to conclusion that their competences are in their embodiment – they are experts in sensing, experiencing holistically, taking explorative actions; They are experts learning thought their bodies! Materials in their environment offer them different types of resistance and young children (3 year old) and even the smallest type of resistance (something we adults don’t even notice) can initiate their motivation to solve problems, find solutions, discover how to contribute to others and discover personal knowledge. I have observed the pure moments of knowledge construction - “micro-discoveries”, as I called them. Young children are true experts of imagination which helps them connect their past and present experiences – the essence of creativity and learning!

One can now wonder: This is great news – Why should I be sad about it? The problem is that embodiment is so little acknowledged in today’s educational system. Verbal types of knowledge have much higher status and power that the embodied. What counts is the number of words three year olds can pronounce – and the embodied experience loses the battle. This really does not have to be a battle, but as long as the linguistic forms of knowledge have such a powerful influence of our understanding of quality in education, the embodied forms of knowledge will be supressed. How can we then be able to truly respected for their competences?!

I took responsibility to promote young children’s experiences and woices, and there is not so much I can do. There is so much power against the young children: both because they are young (and age has authority), because they are non-verbal (and verbal has authority), because they are “inherently artful” (Dissanayake, 2007) (and school arts do not have any power), because they are practical (and theoretical has power) … I feel helpless. Can a single PhD-study have any chance in convincing policy making that there is a large need to reconsider what quality of young children’s education is? They should consider the children’s point of view!

Young children have no political power, they are not strong enough and have no voice of their own. I have promised them to promote their competences, but I fear that I am not strong either. I hope they would forgive me… but by the time they would be able to understand, it will already be too late…

The image of the baby with large weights is from http://drippet.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/baby.jpeg

Dissanayake, E. (2007). In the beginning: Pleistocene and infant aesthetics and 21st-century education in the arts. In Bresler, L. (Ed.), International Handbook of Research in Arts Education. Dordrecht: Springer.
Ministry of Education and Research. (2006). Framework plan for the content and tasks of kindergartens.

Targeting at Quintain

2011-03-16T15:40:00.000-07:00

During the process of intensive writing of my thesis, I constantly think about guintain. Robert Stake (2006, 2010) taught me that in qualitative research one has to aim at a target which is not too narrow and not to broad – that is what quintain is about. If a researcher aims only to the centre of a target, then he/she probably already knows what is to be found (and might become narrow-sighted); On contrary, if a researcher aims in one direction, without delimiting the phenomenon he/she wants to understand, the study might become too complex and difficult to grasp. Quintain is just the right scope of a target.

I watch my son training with his bow. It is satisfying to hit the middle of the target, but it is also OK to hit the other colours. I learn from him. But while I am writing the thesis, I constantly have to remind myself what is in the central part and what is in the periphery, or even outside the board that holds the target: Children’s negotiation of meaning with 3D-materials’ affordances and resistance are in the middle of the quintain; Children’s embodied ways of interacting with their environments are also in the middle but stretch outside the centre; And children’s negotiation of meaning with their teachers’ and peers is like a transparent layer that covers the whole scope of my quintain and reaches far outside it. I have to firmly grasp my quintain in order not to get lost…

Stake, R. (2006). Multiple case study analysis. New York: The Guilford Press.
Stake, R. (2010). Qualitative research: studying how things work. New York: The Guilford Press.

Negotiating Grasp

2011-02-27T01:54:00.000-08:00

From Sculpturing Words to Negotiating Grasp – the focus of my study has gradually moved closer to embodied forms of interacting with and knowing our world; I am not saying that linguistic form of knowing is not embodied, but that it is only one of the ways humans acquire understanding of their world and themselves. We all had bodies before we could talk (Egan, 1997).
The new name for my thesis is Negotiating Grasp, with intention to illustrate the importance of physical interaction with materials. I suggest, as Parsons (2007), that thought is embodied.

Negotiating Grasp is an ambiguous construction where the word negotiating can be understood as both a verb and an adjective. The term I have constructed illustrates the conjunction between, on one side, a child’s physical action of exploring 3D-materials (like a hand grasp), and on the other, the child’s mental grasping of new understandings (through micro-discoveries). The word grasp refers therefore both to a physical and cognitive grasp. When the word negotiating is understood as an adjective, both types of grasp are active processes that a child can negotiate through and between. However, if the word negotiating is understood as a verb, the concept illustrates an activity where, besides a child and 3D-materials also others can be involved in, for example teachers and peers. The concept negotiating grasp is meant to cover all of the mentioned interpretations, with hope to illustrate the complex relation between physical experience, cognition and social influences.

I have written about children’s play with 3D-materials in the article: Meaning making, democratic participation and art in early childhood education: Can inspiring objects structure dynamic curricula? published in International Journal of Education through Art, 2010 Volume 6 Number 3: http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-issue,id=1945/

Another article has been accepted to be published on http://www.formakademisk.org/index.php/formakademisk
This article is based on the PhD study and is titled: When past and new experiences meet: Negotiating meaning with 3-D materials in early childhood education

Egan, K. (1997). The educated mind: how cognitive tools shape our understanding. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Parsons, M. (2007). Art and Metaphor, Body and Mind. In Bresler, L. (Ed.), International Handbook of Research in Arts education (pp. 533-542). Dordrecht: Springer.

Tikalalala and other first words

2011-02-08T04:51:00.000-08:00

In order to share something verbally, we need to share understanding of what words refer to. When children learn words, they first have to realize that a specific composition of sounds can represent something that can be experienced, and then they need to connect these two together.

Sometimes a child invents more complex connection – like when my little neighbour pointed at me and said “wuff-wuff” when I was passing his window the other day, and he couldn’t even see my dog. What he probably meant was: There is the woman who always walks with a dog. And he was right – he had probably never seen me without the dog!
Many years ago, when my son was eight months old, he was looking at my face intensively and then smashed his open hand into my cheek simultaneously saying “mama”. And I knew he had just discovered the connection…

The word “mama”, consisting of two easy-pronounced sounds seems to be quite similar in many languages, while some other words are pretty unique and have short lifetime. Tikalalala is one such word, invented by a little boy and known only to him. It was probably functional to some extent, but when the boy couldn’t find his Tikalalala, cried and cried, whole family was engaged in searching for the Tikalalala. I was myself one of the cousins that happened to be in the house. The search was not an easy task, because no one except for the boy knew what Tikalalala was, and he was young (I guess about three) and not able to explain.

Children sometimes invent words they need for some specific purpose or in order to express their experiences. In the case of Tikalalala, the word’s rhythmical repetition of sounds might actually remind of the rhythmical movement of the object it refers to, and the sound it makes – while it’s original word does not have. However, the “proper word” was difficult to pronounce in this specific language “kljucevi”; No wonder the boy had to invent a unique word that also could connect him to his dear experiences with cars and car driving.

Caballo

2011-01-29T01:21:00.000-08:00

Our mobile bodies move through the world collecting experiences from numberless variation of unique contexts. In the beginning, before we have had time to collect so many, maybe we have only four from meeting different cats, and many experiences from meeting the same horse. Here is how a six year old girl presents a horse – probably the Fjording she knows from her farm-preschool (Fjordings are strong and a bit round, and wear their mane strait up).

But what can one do when he desires to share an experience, but cannot draw nor have the right words to tell?

If a child’s learning of verbal language springs from her or his own experience – weather the experience is actual or imaginative, as Dewey suggested (Flanagan, 2006), then each of us have personal understanding of concepts – words are loaded with our feelings from the specific contexts where the concept was first conceived (Høigård, 2006). Here is how a two year old Spanish boy was constructing a new concept:
His “word” for a horse was not a set of sounds, but rather a short story that described his experience from meeting with a horse: He stretched his arm with open palm and said “pan, pan”. Then he made a “prprprprprpr…” sound by blowing between his lips, and simultaneously and quickly shaked his head.

To be able to understand his concept-under-construction one has to know that “pan” means bread, and to be able to imagine a little hand holding a piece of bread while bravely trying to stretch his tiny arm in order to keep his body as far as possible from the large horse mouth. The boy’s story described how he feed the horse and the sound and the head-shaking described what the horse did.
What a creative construction he initiated all by himself! And while he was telling people about the horse they often responded: “Sí! Caballo!” That is probably how he will learn to compress his embodied experiences in a few letters…

Flanagan, F. M. (2006). The greatest educators ever. London: Continuum.
Høigård, A. (2006). Barns språkutvikling: muntlig og skriftlig. Oslo: Universitetsforl.

Just busy with writing…

2011-01-17T14:21:00.000-08:00

I haven't forgotten about this blog, but will have less time to publish on it this spring. This is (hopefully) the last spring of my PhD study, and I will from August 1-st be back on my job at the Vestfold University College. That means that I have to finish writing my thesis already in April, in order to send it to a reader, have time to re-write, edit and polish the language and have it delivered by the end of the summer.

The intensive writing started a few weeks ago in a little village in Northern Spain – in the peaceful surroundings I managed to produce almost one chapter a week (of course not form the scratch). And my friend Nicola was there, always ready to discuss my writing, help with the English and invite to walk, or a riding trip with her horses.

I am very happy with my new advisor Dr. Martina Keitsch – I’ve just sent her my second chapter, and the third should be on its way in a couple of weeks. I am also glad for the feed-backs I’ve received on my two articles (one sent to FORMakademisk, the other to A-Techne) … it is just that they need some revision and that also takes time… So, don’t worry if I don’t write on this blog as often as I should … I am probably writing something else…

Here are some pictures from my office, second floor over the garage. (The sawing machine is close, but not so much in use lately :( My dog Zorro sometimes keeps me company, and plays with empty water bottles.

Jump with care!

2010-12-22T11:09:00.000-08:00

All our sense organs are part of the same body. The body carries them around and allows them to experience spaces from different places and in motion. Although the senses are located in the body, they can reach far out, forming a transparent sphere that merges with the physical environment outside the body’s topological form.

“Intimacy” is an art exhibition where visitors are allowed to experience sculpture and installation form the inside – where all our senses are welcomed. Instead of “Do not touch!” the signs say “This art object is fragile – handle with care”. We are invited to experience the softness, porosity, smells, elasticity and infinity of the large, abstract art objects created by Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto.

Moving through, sinking in, and sliding over the artworks make the multisensory experience rich and strong. The exhibition is full of surprises for example when – one experience that something looks very different than it feels. However, some surprises are difficult to explain! One of my the strongest experiences form the exhibition was when I faced an art work which filled a large room, but was mostly invisible for me – just for me! That was somehow scary. When I had some time to reflect about the feeling, I realized that the large horizontal, two-dimensional part of the art work was placed exactly in the same height as my eyes. That was why I could see only the forms above and under the horizontal line in front of my eyes.

A number of research projects in Norway deal with children’s experience of space in early childhood education. One of the projects is located at my school - Vestfold University College: The research project about ECEC space and materiality http://barnehagerom.wordpress.com/ OECD-rapport presents research in early childhood space as important and emerging, especially emphasising the Nordic tradition where also outside spaces are seen as important for children’s learning (OECD, 2006).

OECD. (2006). Starting Strong II: Early Childhood Education and Care: OECD Publishing.

The Craft of Aircraft Construction

2010-12-05T00:35:00.000-08:00

One day I visited my little friend (three years and two months old), he met me at the door: “I am making aircrafts for my best friend”, he said. I was curious: “Making aircrafts?!” He picked two small folded pieces of paper from the floor and showed them to me.

I noticed another “aircraft” on the floor. It looked like a folded A4 page on the right way to become a functioning aircraft that might be able to fly around the room. But when I pointed to it, the boy was serious: “That one is not good at all!” implying that the two in his hands were much better. I was wondering which kind of criteria he had for quality of his work? He obviously had an idea that was leading his creative construction. He was though, still not satisfied with the two small forms.
“They were not ready jet”, he said.
“What do you need to complete them?”
“I need tape”, he replied.

He got some tape from his mother, but the construction problem was not easy to solve - not even with the tape - or maybe it was exactly the tape that leaded to new challenges: One had to take it off from the scroll, cut a piece, prevent it from curling, take it off from fingers, and finally places it around an aircraft. Quite complicated task for a three year old – but it is exactly the resistance in the material that made him try out, repeat, explore other possibilities - and learn. Without resistance from our environment we would not get to know about it, nor about ourselves, as Dewey (1934/29005) wrote.

The boy kept trying. His endurance seemed to come from missing and love for his friend who has been away from the preschool for days. The aircrafts were to become welcome-back-presents for his best friend. The boy had probably learned that you can make something for those you love. And here he was, expressing his feelings through creative work. His motivation to fight the sticky tape toward his goal, seem to have derived from his feelings, and his judgement of quality derived possibly from his empathy (Which kind of aircrafts would my friend like?).

Dewey, J. ([1934] 2005), Art as Experience, New York: Berkley Publishing Group.

Constrains – natural necessity for growth?

2010-11-20T12:13:00.000-08:00

We do understand how important communication and social interactions are for us humans. But why are we so social? Barbara Rogoff (2003) suggests that we are “biologically cultural” – social by nature. As newborn babies, we are dependent one on another - we need each other to survive. What else have we inherited from our mother nature?

What about getting stronger, smarter, more creative? Our muscles need resistance to get stronger, and our embodied mind needs challenge to act and think in new ways.

Look at the young tree here, supported carefully by my father’s hands. He supported the fast- growing tree with textile ribbons, but as non-professional gardener, he was learning from own mistakes: He realized that he had given the tree too much support. That is why it remained too weak and thin close to the ground. That part relaxed… and got spoiled… On the contrary, the tree became thicker and stronger around the highest point he supported it. Strange… or may be not? It was exactly at the highest point it was tied up, that the tree had to struggle against the wind. In the next turn my father had to tie it looser in order to make it fight the wind itself - if it would ever be able to stand on its own “feet”.

Through social interactions our ability to construct meaning is constantly challenged. Do meeting different contexts, different people, situations and problems help us to be more flexible, open-minded and creative? I believe so!

We are social beings, but each of us, physically separated one from another, experiences world through own body that moves around through numberless contexts. Our mobile and experiential bodies make therefore each of us unique. That is why, in the next turn, each of us has something different, special and unique to contribute with to the others.

PS. I am aware of that implementing nature into the socio-cultural understanding might be seen as “risky business”, but I do agree with the nicely written words at the web-page of International Journal of the Education and the Arts: “Nature connects everything in purposeful ways”.

Rogoff, Barbara (2003): The cultural nature of human development, Oxford University Press

Just how much resistance do we need?

2010-11-07T12:12:00.000-08:00

Writing and reflecting about my study of children’s interplay with 3D materials, I get more and more astonished how important experiencing resistance seems to be for learning. We have all experienced (and learned) that some kinds of resistance are important in order to learn, get self-confidence, strength and motivation. But pushing someone too far beyond hers/his “Zone of proximal development” can in many ways be damaging. How can we know where someone’s Zone begins, and where it ends?
Without connection to my study, my son and I decided to get a budgie. When we went to a pet-shop we were told to keep only one bird if we wanted it to care about people and eventually learn to talk. So we bought only one. But we also bought a book that said something like: Never keep a budgie alone. Another bird is as important to it as the air it breaths (Birmelin). “Who should we trust, the book or the shop assistant” my son (12) asked? How would we know who was right? We had to get our own experience.

The little, green bird was very tame and quite. We let him fly around and gave him a variety of food. But he looked sad... My son and I discussed what we should do: Was it more important for us that he one day learned to speak, or that he was happy? How miserable did we have to make his life in order to get little amusement for ourselves? Just how far were we willing to push, press and stretch his Zone of proximal development? (Sorry for my stretching of Vygotsky’s term in applying it to the non-human world.)
The bird kept sitting on the same branch and did not eat. Was our amusement so important that we would let the bird pay with his life? “It was not!” – we agreed and bought our budgie a nice young friend. They might thank us for that in their bird-language, but who knows, one day they might still speak in duet in human language -?

Birmelin, Immanuel: Undulater, Cappelens kjæledyrbøker

Oh… It’s alive!

2010-10-24T12:34:00.000-07:00

My little friend (three years old) got a hand puppet – a soft, white kitten. I put it on my hand and showed him. “Oh… It’s alive!”, he said. He was talking to the cat and cuddeling it kindly. Did he think it was a real kitten?

When the kitten stopped moving, pretending it was asleep, he said: “You have to move your fingers!” – He obviously knew the kitten was not moving by itself. But he absolutely did not want to put his own hand inside it and handle it himself… as if this would spoil his ability to imagine that the kitten was real. As long as someone else was handling it, the textile puppet and the real kitten could co-exist in the same time. In children’s play, there are no contradictions between reality and fantasy (Vygotsky, 2004), but rather synergy: The hand inside was activating the puppet’s movements, and the boy's experience of the movements was supporting his imagination.

Vygotsky, L. S. (2004). Imagination and Creativity in Childhood. Journal of Russian and East European Psychology 42(1), 7-97. Retrieved from http://mesharpe.metapress.com/link.asp?id=265tnearjknc0220

Experiencing Environments

2010-10-19T03:40:00.000-07:00

How does your home environment influence you feelings? Do you care if the floor is wooden - or just looks like wood? Or do you prefer polished, shiny surfaces? (Guggenheim museum in Bilbao)

Once upon a time, no other than natural materials were available; People used what their surroundings afforded them with: they ate meet they could catch, made clothes of fur and straw, built shelters of mud, or snow.

My friends fell in love with a 200 years old house in a little village in Northern Spain. (They did not tell me exactly that they “fell in live”, but I guess they did – Where would they otherwise find so much motivation and energy for the reconstruction that has been going on for years?) As far as possible they’ve been using the same natural materials the house was built with: mostly stone and wood, not to forget the roof tiles made by hand and shaped over a thigh. The old wooden posts and the rock walls, full of calcium and fossils, witness the time without machines. Shaped by bare hands and simple tools, the surfaces and lines in the house echo shapes from nature. The absence of geometry gives a special feeling … like going back in time … (Experience it by yourself! http://manzanela.com/en/manzanela.php )

Back in time people used what was available – today we use what we can afford. Compared to the speed of tree’s growing, artificial materials are produced much faster – no wonder natural materials are more expensive! But what is best for the global environment: to use (probably also misuse) the natural resources, or to produce unnatural materials (and waist)? Are we saving trees by using unnatural materials, or is the damage we make much larger? Which thoughts will they make about our time when they in 1000 years discover rests of linoleum with wood imitations?

The last three images are from the new building of Vestfold University College, where natural and human-made materials are "composed" in thrilling contrasts.

Interests Support Experience

2010-10-03T04:12:00.000-07:00

Can you imagine three ten-year-old boys totally engaged in discussing textile qualities? They spent over 30 minutes in squeezing, lifting and stroking different types of off-white textile: This one is too light! This one is too shiny… too thick, too stiff… They used many words to describe a single quality: “When you jump, the pants are supposed to fly with you, but with a slights delay, and fall heavily down just a second after you’ve landed”.

In the discussions they recalled their visual experience of Prince of Persia’s pants from the Play Station game they’ve been playing. They desired to have pants just like that – and this was the purpose of our shopping trip that day. I promised to help them saw three pair of Prince-of-Persia-pants, but I was not competent enough to find the right materials. The boys knew exactly which specific qualities they needed from the off-white textile and ribbons for the vertical decorations on the sides. They had long discussions about the ribbon colors, width and pattern. And since the selection of ribbons was limited, they had to improvise by combining different ribbons side by side.

Their fascination with Prince of Persia made them wish to be like him – or at least, have something similar to what he had; Their decision to make the pants motivated their attention to the aesthetic qualities, and their interests seemed to intensify both their experience and reflection about visual experience from the game, and multisensory experience from the textile shop. Motivation was essential for the experience – and the experience was the source of motivation.

A few weeks ago my son (12) was refurnishing his room. He seem to be motivate by responsibility to chose the furniture, textiles, decorations and the color for the walls, and was attentive, careful and proud when he was stitching the pillows and hanging the paintings on the wall. He and his stepbrother (12) were even singing while they were screwing the furniture and painting the walls.

If motivation is essential for learning, education should build upon student’s interests for their world.

The Research Days

2010-09-29T09:25:00.000-07:00

”Forskningsdagene” (the Research Days) is an annual arrangement at Norwegian universities and university collages – it is a festival that celebrate research. During the 5-6 days open presentations are held for students, employees, practitioners, and everybody who is interested to hear about (and experience) different research projects. This year’s theme was “Veien til viten” (“The way toward knowing”), which was appropriate for presentations of different research inquiries, as well as projects about educational.

At the Vestfold University College, September 28-th 2011 was dedicated to research in arts – more precisely, to research on “aesthetic learning process”. Judging by the number of books recently published, this concept seems to be emerging in Scandinavia, but it is still new and interpreted in different ways. My short interpretation is that “aesthetic learning process” is the process of meaning making that takes place when embodied forms of learning are appreciated.

The projects presented on September 28-th were about music making and performing, theatre for those who have just learned to walk (1-2 years old), relations between different modalities in art, creating links between traditional techniques and new contexts, knitting design, search for a fiddler’s music lost in time, testing own taste, students’ explorative design with spoons ...

I also had a chance to present my project, focusing on similarities between my own, and young children’s way toward knowing; When I was studying with 3-5 years old, their engagement with 3-D materials was as important for their learning as my engagement with them was for mine. Answering the question about ways toward knowing, I suggested that our knowledge streams through our nerve-, muscle- and blood- systems and integrates our embodied experience, mind and feelings.

All presented and exhibited project are a part of a larger umbrella project called “PES”. The “PES” gathers colleagues that teach and research in different disciplines at out teacher-education programs, and focuses on practice- , aesthetic-, and design-based approach to learning. The same interdisciplinary milieu is arranging a Scandinavian conference about “Aesthetic Learning Process” in May 2011. Welcome to send your paper proposals! http://www.hive.no/laereprosesser-konferanse/

The images:
Pål Runsjø plays inside an art instalation;
Pål Runsjø, Olav Ness, Stein Storsve, Geir Salvesen and Knut Høydal play music written by Jacob Olsen

Without experience – How would you know?

2010-09-14T11:51:00.000-07:00

I told my son (12) that he should not bite his nails, and he replayed: “But if I did not bite them, how would I know that the thumb nail is the thickest, hardiest and tears differently than the other nails?”

He was right: How would he know without experience?
We tend to understand thought as something opposite to what is directly perceived (Dewey, 2009). Michael Parsons suggests that thought itself is embodied (Parsons, 2007). I do not doubt that experience is essential for our understanding of the world and ourselves … it is just so seldom that we use words to mediate, explain, share, reflect about our embodied experiences.

Marte Gulliksen connects her experiences, thoughts and feelings in poetic descriptions of her embodied interactions with a three-dimensional material. In her master thesis – conducted as “research by design”- she wrote about her experience acquired through interactions with piece of wood she was carving. She observes her hands, tools and materials both from the inside of her body, and form the outside: with her eyes, nose, ears. And she tells us (and herself) about her intimate meeting with the material being shaped:
”The wood needs a long period of intense persuasion to accept my ideas, but when the shapes are found at last, the knife follows the fibres as if they had a secret agreement as to where they were heading. The knife follows the directions of the fibres. When they meet, the fibres and the knife, they unite like rivers connect, meet gliding down through shallow valleys” (Gulliksen, 2001)
Can writing about our experience help us to understand better? And what can we achieve by reflecting about the connections between thought, feelings and an experience? I believe more that we can imagine! But as far as our “tacit knowledge” and embodied experience remain unspoken, I fear they will remain a non-issue in discussions about learning.

I don’t have an image of Marte’s wood-work. The images presented here show two small sculptures that have been through hands of two male artists: “The Heart” has been cut on the lathe, re-constructed and polished by Tollef Thorsnes. Another piece of wood has many times been turned around in Mikael Nilsson’s palms; The shape of a horse that was hidden inside, slowly made itself recognizable through the artist’s touch (more than through his sight) and motivated his further actions with the knife. (I can tell this because I observed Mikael while he was making other small sculptures at the Slöjd conference in Linköping, in August 2010.)

Dewey, J. (2009). How We Think. Available from Digireads.com

Gulliksen, M. (2001). The Creative Meeting - A discussion over the Aesthetic Elements in the Creative Process. In C. Nygren-Landgärds & J. Peltonen (Eds.), Visioner om slöjd och slöjdpedagogik: visions on sloyd and sloyd education (pp. 55-64). Vasa: NordFo.

Parsons, M. (2007). Art and Metaphor, Body and Mind. In L. Bresler (Ed.), International Handbook of Research in Arts education (pp. 533-542). Dordrecht Springer.

Experiencing tools

2010-08-30T09:47:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, at the slöjd (handcraft) conference in Sweden, I heard of a research project about how young students learn to cat “strait” with a saw. If you don’t think cutting a piece of wood is knowledge, just try to imagine a child finding out how to hold a saw for the first time, how hard to push and press, how to adjust the rhythm of movements to the own breathing, length of the arms and sprawling elbows. The task is actually quite complicated if we take in consideration that different types of wood, with different levels of moisture and structure, would respond differently, and that also the tools’ qualities would demand variations in strength, time, precision, patience... Yes, it seems easy to use a saw when you have done it before. When you know how to do it, the knowledge suddenly seems to be hidden, your earlier struggles forgotten, and the complexity of the task somehow becomes invisible… the knowledge becomes tacit…

My little friend, 2,5 years old, was taking part in constructing garden furniture from ready-made parts, no sawing was involved. Still there was much to learn. First we found out which parts should be screwed together, and then the construction was mostly about screwing the parts together with a little tool. Before I knew about it, he had observed the activity of my hands. I was holding the tool between my forefinger and the middle finger while I was twisting it around. He did not have to do it that way, I showed him other easier ways, but he did not want to give up trying to do it just the way I did. His fingers were working hard, the eyes were concentrated, the tool resisted – but he was fighting.

What he had achieved through his endurance and experience (through the coordination between his different senses and body functions, through his fight with the tool, through the experience of being an asset in the social context etc.) can not be compared to the number of screws he managed to fix. The invisible results were much more valuable than the visible! But seeing the screws disappearing in the white painted wood, was certainly also an experience that enriched his self-confidence, joy and motivation.

Slöjd - Learning through hands

2010-08-27T12:05:00.000-07:00

On August 17-th and 18-th a “slöjd” conference took place in Linköping, Sweden. “Slöjd” is, among other things, a Swedish school discipline where students deal with handcraft with wood, metal and textile. In Norway the term “sløyd” is usually understood as woodwork and it is an integrated part of discipline “Arts and crafts”.

The conference was eleventh in the range of slöjd -conferences arranged each second year at the University of Linköping where people interested in slöjd: teachers, craftsmen, artists and researchers, gather to listen to the lectures, discuss at the workshops, view and experience at the exhibitions.

The theme of this year’s conference was “Slöjd – creating, keeping and extending boundaries”. Different types of boundaries were discussed, from preserving old techniques and design on one side, to dissolution of the boundaries of school-slöjd and merging with art, on the other; Here is the conference program: http://www.trippus.se/eventus/userfiles/17691.pdf . Marléne Johansson reminded us that slöjd is both ancient, modern and “cool”. Otto von Buch showed interesting examples of intersection between sköjd and contemporary arts. In his presentation, he focused on extension of aesthetic boundaries as for example in mutual influence between old techniques and modern design, while Lars-Erik Björklund spoke about tacit knowledge, the importance of experience, and relations between brain and embodied activities.

The participants at the conference were people who appreciated dealing with tools and materials: With their own hands they knew how valuable tacit knowledge was for them and their students. However, in a recent survey in Sweden, where students’ and their parents’ were asked to evaluate the importance of school disciplines, slöjd got almost the lowest ranking (Illum & Johansson, 2009). Teachers asked how this was possible when they frequently experience that their students enjoy the slöjd classes so much? I sensed the participants’ urge to convince school administrators, politicians and parents that human body is capable of learning in many different ways…. But what could they say? What should they say to explain and justify the importance of creating, crafting and experiencing with three-dimensional materials?

The fate of school-slöjd is in many ways dictated by contemporary educational philosophy, politics and values in the society. How much is learning by doing, learning through experience, senses and body valued in schools today? Possibilities for such learning are also bounded by teachers’, students’ and parents’ own expectations. Such expectations, which sometimes draw back to one’s own primary school education, can grow into harmful attitudes if one doesn’t start questioning them….

What can be done to raise the status of slöjd in the society? “We need more research!”, has been said many times during the conference.

Illum, B., & Johansson, M. (2009). Vad är tillräckligt mjukt? – kulturell socialisering och lärande i skolans slöjdpraktik. FORMakademisk, 2(1), 69-82. Retrieved from http://www.formakademisk.org/index.php/formakademisk/article/view/31/26

Mercedes in pajamas

2010-08-15T11:14:00.000-07:00

Sorry for not writing sooner – I have been busy with writing articles, and that’s what I should be doing most the last year of my phd-study. But I also have to find some time for small observations. Besides my “properly conducted” data collection, my little friend, soon three years old, has constantly been supplying me with fresh puzzles to keep my mind busy. As my co-researcher, he has been reminding me that young children are complexity experts, capable of combining feelings, memories, experiences and imagination into poetic metaphors.

I have earlier on this blog written about children’s metaphors. This metaphor is brand new: In South Europe, where summers are hotter and longer, plants and houses are different than in Norway. The cars are much the same, but they are driven and parked differently. One hot day my little friend told me there was a car wearing pajamas. It was a Mercedes (we could see the symbol on the wheel). Why dress a Mercedes in pajamas? I would say to protect it from the sun.

My little friend, not unlike other boys, is found of cars: he likes playing with them, watching them and parking them on his pillow against his ear when he goes to sleep. He could reel of a number of reasons why the car was dressed in a light, soft, cotton garment:

The car was parked, was asleep – of course it was wearing pajamas!
He (the car) was put to sleep in the middle of the day - of course it had to cover his head and eyes not to get disturbed by other cars, people and the sun.

But why didn’t my friend suggest that the car was wearing a jacket or a hat? I think it was because he recognized the white, cotton flannel with specific soft texture someone had used to tailor a dress – sorry: pajamas for the car.

As someone who appreciates tailoring, dress-design and textiles, I was glad to hear how much embodied knowledge my little friend (my little poet) had about textile qualities!

Something between

2010-07-28T12:10:00.000-07:00

Summertime: travelling, sunbathing and meeting people. This summer I had a chance to observe a Norwegian boy (almost three years old) meeting new friends in Croatia. Those meetings were usually not initiated by greetings or other forms of verbal interactions, but by nonverbal communication concerning something of mutual interest: a ball, sunglasses or beach toys. The interactions often started when one child kept watching, following or imitating another – and after a while (sometimes sooner, sometimes later) they both took turns in copying each other’s actions.

One day the Norwegian boy (let me call him Morten) got his first pair of sunglasses. During the day he was experimenting with how to wear them, and in the evening he met another boy, about the same age, also wearing sunglasses. The other boy was moving over the market place on his little bicycle, and Morten started to chase him around trying to establish contact. And when their eyes met through the dark plastic, the question “How to wear sunglasses?” seem to be the main issue in their non-verbal communication. They both mirrored each other’s actions and tried new and surprising ways of wearing sunglasses. The sunglasses became the objects or joint interest – something they could gather around and use as tools for their communication.

Another time, there was a ball on the beach. A ball is something you can throw and fetch - a toy perfect for scaring. Morten simply started to throw the ball to a few years older boy, and the boy replayed. Being taller, the older boy could stand in deeper water, while Morten was carefully not leaving the shallow water. When he realized that the ball landed in too deep water, Morten asked the older boy (in Norwegian) to get it – and the boy understood his body language. Morten seem to be proud to have an older and more competent friend to play with, and the six years old boy seemed to enjoy being more competent.

Besides sand, shells and stones, beach toys are also good for sharing… especially if one child has something the other child doesn’t. Using their earlier experience from play with similar objects, each child had something of his/hers own to contribute with, and they showed each other what they could do with the objects. They become confident in each other by copying and repeating each others actions. The activities of scaring and doing something together become essential, making verbal language unnecessary.

Seeing and saying – matter of communication context?

2010-07-03T05:20:00.000-07:00

Kieran Egan wrote “we all begin as poets” (Egan, 2002) using imagination in making sense of our world. Young children often amaze us with their “poetic” expressions where their metaphors “sprawl” in different directions, connecting apparently unrelated things. These metaphors might not “carry the day” (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2006, p.8), but they might still reflect the world as it has been experienced by each of them. On the other side, what they see or say is probably also influenced by the contexts of communication: expectation to others, and what they might expect from one. For instance, by saying something unexpected you might get attention, show yourself off, make someone laugh – or “test” him/her!

Researching with three-year-olds, I have observed how the tiniest new-experienced details can remind them of their earlier experiences; I observed how a rhythmic sound of hammering reminded a girl of her embodied experience: “That’s my heartbeat”, she said. But each communication context is unique and it’s not possible to state just one reason why somebody says something – it’s much more complicated than that (I have learned from Robert Stake (2010) that one should be cautious addressing causality – we can never know for sure why something happens). Here is an event that made me think about a boy’s choices of what to draw, what to see and what to say.

I was a visitor in an early childhood centre. The children did not know me and I tried to observe from distance. When the joint activity ended, a 3,5 years old boy found a seat at the table close to corner I was sitting, found a piece of paper and started to draw. While he was drawing he was frequently looking at me and talking loud about the dramatic actions taking place on the drawing: There was a bad guy and a good goy. The lines over the paper, together with the energetic hand movements and the sounds he made, were indicating the good guy’s shooting on the bad guy. Somehow in the middle of the action the boy said “I” and it came out that the good guy (a super-hero) was actually himself.

The boy explained that the god guy killed the bad guy. I felt sorry for the bad guy (Or may be I simply got intrigued by the boy’s invitation to interact with him? …Or I (pedagogically-thinking) wanted to make him reflect about the act of violence he had just performed?). So I started to talk to the boy: “Oh, poor bad guy! What will his parents say when they find out that he is dead?” And he replied: “They won’t care – they are in jail!”

While the boy was verbally and visually making his story, I sometimes looked around the room to see what was going on outside our narrow conversation context. Even though the boy beside me seemed to be deeply engaged with his drawing, each time I raised my head, he immediately looked at me saying: “Don’t go!” or “Please stay!”

“May be some doctors can help him to get back to life?”- I tried again, and the boy drew an ambulance (not recognizable symbol), but he concluded: “None can help him now. He is dead! Not even a million doctors can help him!” And the good guy kept shooting, which resulted in large amount of crossing lines on the paper, until the shooting-lines had covered (almost) all evidence that any guys ever were drawn on the sheet of paper. He realized that the drawing started to look like something else. “Look, there is a spider web!”, he said. “Yes”, I said, and I noticed a little circle between the web-lines: “And here is a spider!”- I said pointing at the circle.

The boy straightened his back and looked at me seriously – almost angry: “No! That’s not a spider! That’s my penis” he said and kept looking me strait in my eyes for a long moment – as if he was testing my reaction. I tried not to look surprised and to continue the conversation: “Oh, it’s not a spider…” – but I was shocked. The boy got back to his drawing and started to draw a large, round spider with many legs, while I was trying to understand what had just happened.

The circle (the penis) could have been there all the time as a part of the drawing beneath. But the boy’s drawing of humans did not have any details, and I don’t believe that the circle was ever drawn as a symbol for a penis. Did the boy said that just to get my attention? He did not want me to go and he seemed to know which words had shocking influence on people (He might have for example experienced that if his older brother used the same word to shock their parents?)

This event can of course be interpreted in many ways – some people would, may be, get concerned about the violence, or about the boy’s vocabulary. And I, I am amazed by the boy’s communication competence – he really managed to impress me, engage my attention for more than 15 minutes, and motivate me to reflect in order to increase my understanding.

About the drawings: The boy did not want me to take picture of the drawing: “Only our teachers are allowed to take pictures!”, he said. So, the drawings presented on this blog are my son's, when he was 4 years old.

Egan, K. (2002). We begin as poets. In L. Bresler & C. M. Thompson (Eds.), The arts in children's lives: context, culture, and curriculum (pp. 93-104). Boston: Kluwer Academic.
Kress, G., & Van Leeuwen, T. (2006). Reading images: the grammar of visual design. London: Routledge.
Stake, R. E. (2010). Qualitative research: studying how things work. New York: Guilford Press.

Is this how I learn?

2010-06-20T03:40:00.000-07:00

My body remembers how it felt to stand completely serious, dressed in white, in front of my laughing and shouting colleagues a week ago. Now they tell me: “Don’t worry - you’ll forget!”, but it is difficult to reverse the learning process - my thinking and feeling body was acquiring new insights while I was standing there… feeling stupid…

On Friday June 11-th my college department (education), where I’ve been working for 12 years, was arranging a summer party. Two drama teachers responsible for the party asked me to lead one of the parallel sessions. When we were preparing multidisciplinary teaching we used to brain-storm and create something together, but this time they had a ready made plan for me.

The beginning of the party was to consist of different events inviting 120 participants (university college teachers, professors and administrators) to engage and be playfully. According to the plan I was supposed to be a serious teacher and give the participants (40 by time) an assignment to work on. When I heard about the plan, my intuition warned me: this is not going to work. And I said: “This is not going to work because the people would be in “party-mood” - they would expect me to be funny! The serious context of my teaching-session will not fit to the rest of the party!” The two colleagues asked me not to be so negative, and I, though still uncomfortable, tried to be positive and creative in finding ways how to motivate the participants to imagine education in future and discuss their hopes for “better teaching”, other forms of classroom relations, “better” education contents etc.

This was the plan I had to follow:
I had 5 minutes to motivate them to imagine schools in future. They had 10 minutes to work in small groups discussing how their perfect school lesson could look like in future. One of them should then imagine being a student who attended “the perfect future lesson”. This person should then be interviewed about his/hers experience. The interviews would be filmed and three “best” would be shown on large screen later the same evening.

This is how I prepared:
If I was to motivate for creativity in the given circumstances, I had do something special – and I had only 5 minutes. I planed to share my own hopes for the future of education (inspired by Kieran Egan’s educational philosophy) and to present that through a performance. The minimalistic multimodal composition was inspired by the dance performance Momix I’d seen at the Krannert Center in Urbana-Champaign. I imagined the performance to be “clean” and peaceful (!) and I worked on my clothing, movements, words, the tone of my voice… and adjusting to speed of my talk to the visual presentation which was “living its own life”; The still image showing only large number 2020, would gradually, behind my back, start counting years in accelerating speed. There was a point about time…

This is what happened:
When the first group of participants, my colleagues, entered the room, they were dramatizing naughty student: being loud, falling from their chairs, interrupting me with odd questions… I tried to play my role, to perform, but there was no room for it... they could not even hear me. They did not seem interested, and I realized that I did not want to share anything with them under such conditions. I did not want people to laugh about something I find important! They were expected me to be funny and I was not prepared to be funny but serious; They were caught in the roles of “naughty students”, and I was stuck in my role of a strict teacher – though in addition to being serious I was also struggling to find a way out the most uncomfortable situation.

I cut my performance short and stepped out of my role telling them that I could not continue under the conditions – but I don’t think they could not hear me through the noise. Which measures could I take to make them listen? – they were not my students but my colleagues! I met one of the drama teachers at the door and told her that the plan was not working. She told me to improvise. I said: “I can’t do this two more times!” She said: “Of course you can!” And I had to repeat the humiliating act twice again during the following hour. However, I did not do the performance, but I said something without any affection and confidence. The third group of audience was quiet, but also got the boring non-sense introduction and experienced the worst possible “teaching” I could do. I felt like a puppet, pushed on the stage, acting according to somebody else’s choices.

This is what I learned:
I learned that I should not overlook the importance of people’s expectations to communication contexts. My colleagues had expectations to the session and to me, but they also had expectation to each other. I was not fulfilling their expectation, but they could still be funny one for another – and for some of them this seemed to become the most important task in the context.

I learned that my ways of communication are affected by my confidence in people I communicate with. The context where I did not feel taken seriously, was not the contexts where I could improvise in a good way.

I learned how my feelings are important in my learning. While I was standing there, I could have reasoned that my colleagues were not trying to be mean to me, but my embodied feelings were stronger than my reasoning. I was disappointed and sad. One of my colleagues approached me later that evening and asked me how I was. She said she felt sorry for me. Some others told me: “Don’t worry, you will soon forget it all”. Yes, I might forget what was said and done, but my embodied experience from the wounding event had influenced my attitude towards my colleagues: I don’t wish to share my thoughts with them!

So, is this new knowledge of any good? Was my experience as unique as the context, or do other people also react emotionally in similar situations? I do not intend to answer this question - I am just astonished by the extent of my affection from a single experience. How much could 3 x 20 minutes of social un-comfort change in a person? This makes me continue to wonder just how important social relations, communication contexts and feelings are for learning!

The images are details from a student studying Norwegian Folk Art at the “Telemark University College” at Rauland. I find Anne Grete Krogstad’s hand weaved “tjukkåkle” as an excellent example how traditional techniques can be applied in creative ways in new contexts.

Journal Publishing

2010-06-15T05:15:00.000-07:00

Since I’ve decided to write an article based theses, I’ve been thinking about how to organize it. I think that the articles, deriving from the same material, should build upon each other, but should not ovelap too much; They should complement one another and show the empirical material from different points of view (?)

Like a path, my study cuts across different landscapes: early childhood education and early childhood teacher education, visual arts, language development, multimodality, imagination and creativity, learning through play, studies of learning environments, sculpture and three-dimensional materials, and arts-based qualitative methods of inquiry. Since it is hardly possible to find a journal that covers all of the areas, I plan to publish in different journals, addressing different audience. I will have to work on careful planning which contents to present in each of the articles, and which kind of narrator voice to apply. In order to do that, I should need to know what my current audience (for each of the journals) would need to know more about (what they are not familiar with) and what I should need to write much about (so that they will not get bored reading about something they already know). I should take a good look at the landscape and imagine my audience…

At the Sixth Congress of Qualitative Inquiry I attended panels where journal editors presented their work and gave advice to writers. Here is what I learned from them:

Some of the journals presented on June 28-th were not specialized for qualitative studies, while others would publish qualitative studies only – A writher should know which kind of journal his study would fit best into. Some journals were method journals (like for instance the Journal of Mixed Methods Research), that would not be relevant for publishing articles that present contents of a study. Readers of method journals would rather like reading which advantages the specific research methods had in order to understand the problem that has been studied.

Dorothy Becvar (Journal of Family and Therapy) said that she is devoted to the qualitative method and wants to make sure the method is well presented. Ron Chenail (Qualitative report) encouraged writers to write in first person and in active form (not “the informants were interviewed” but “I interviewed the informants”).

Ian Shaw, University of York (Qualitative Research Work) presented his applied qualitative research journal and explained that “applied research” is about “meaning worked out in particular contexts”. When one is preparing to publish in an international journal, the article should be written in a way that it speaks across the boundaries of different contexts. Before submitting one should ask the question: Would the theme be relevant for audience outside the specific contexts? (Some things migt be relevant, others not. One should be careful where and how to step...)

Harry Torrance (British Educational Research Journal) explained that one should know that growing journals would reject the most of the articles. Donna Mertens (Journal of Mixed Method Research) gave advice that writers should always refer to articles earlier written in the journal one wants to publish in (at least two references). One should also try to find out what the editor’s, and the board member’s, research and write about. She explained what one should do when receiving two different (or even opposite) feed-backs from board-members. This happens and can be confusing. The writer might take the position of one of the reviewers, but she/he would still have to respond to the requirements from both of the reviewers in order to get published.

Janice Morse gave an editor’s perspective on how to get qualitative research published. Her angle was to present usual rejection reasons and questions to be checked before submitting: Does the article fit to the mission of the journal? Have you writing who you are (student, researcher etc.)? Is the topic exciting for others? Do you write with confidence? Do you write with enthusiasm? Do you have too few, or too many, references? If the presented project is conducted together with others, did you make explicit how much of your study ovelap with other projects? (And make sure that the people you have collaborated with are mentioned.)

Congress of Qualitative Inquiry

2010-05-30T06:51:00.000-07:00

The Sixth International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry took place at the campus of University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign from May 26-th to 29-th. About 700 participants from around the world took part in large number of presentation, plenary and poster sessions. I will be writing more about the congress, but since I am publishing this blog on my way back to Norway, it will be just a short note about my own presentation on Friday May 28-th.

It is difficult to say much in short time: you have to present the contexts of your work so that your intentions would be understood, you have to say something relevant and important, you should say it in a way that makes the listeners interested, and you will have to sum up - or open up for further reflection. And all that in 12 minutes! Usually when I present I use many visual images. (This time the children’s parents had even allowed me to use films of their children.) But 12 minutes would be too short to sett up a projector, show the images and still have time to explain, discuss and tell about my lived experiences. I decided to write down what I should say, edit the paper again and again in order to make it shorter and more intense, and practice reading it in order to be able to look at audience while I was reading. Later, I was apologizing to Liora Bresler that I was reading while addressing the issue of multimodal communication and body language: “What a contradiction between the content and the form!” But Liora calmed me down: “That’s just how conference genre is!”

This is an image of me with Norwegian colleague Ingrid Grønsdal Arnesen outside the Union building.

And here is the abstract that can illustrate what I was talking about:
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.

The Secret Life of my Brain

2010-05-21T17:53:00.000-07:00

“Strange how brain sometimes work”, I wrote to my co-advisor to tell her how, during my preparing for presentation at the case study course, I suddenly understood how to solve a puzzle in writing something else. An hour later I receive an e-mail titled “Brain”. I smiled because I thought she was responding on my comment about the brain – but soon I realized that this mail was not from her. It was from Kurt Johannessen (2010), Norwegian performance artist and poet who from time to time sends inspiring words to the people on his mailing list. Here is the poem:

The Brain
In the year 4133 man discovered a new component in the brain.
It wasn’t clear whether the component had always been there,
or whether it had developed as a result of evolution.
It took many years for scientists to understand
the characteristics of this new discovery.
When they did finally solve the mystery,
everyone was astonished that they
hadn’t seen it earlier.

I thought how wonderful it was to receive exactly this poem, right now! In humoristic and complicating ways it described what I was just thinking about - It made me understand how complicated understanding can be. In the same time, I got curious about why receiving it made me so happy - ?

I used to collect napkins when I was a girl. May be I still am a collector? And this poem fitted perfectly to my collection of images, smells, words, experiences and sudden insights… Three months ago, in a plane magazine, I found an advertisement which amazed me. The text said: “Think before creating” and the image showed a textile brain. (The name of the photographer was not stated but the advertisement also said: “REDA – Finest fabrics made in Italy”.) Such collected “items” often inspire me even long time after they’ve been collected, and incredibly often make connections between themselves. I do not say that they do it without my interfering – I am sure that this process of connecting has something to do with my brain - or rather the unity Dewey called “body-mind”which is wirelessly connected to the world outside.

And here is what happened with the presentation I was preparing for the Robert Stake’s case study course: We were ten people in the room, some of whom I meet for the first time. I tried to be short, but felt like I was using too much time. I struggled with some words, and felt that I lost the structure I had planned… That is at least how I experienced the presentation from the inside of my body. And that is also why the feed-back I got from Terry Denny (who used to work with Robert Stake) was even more unexpected! What he told me after my presentation, and repeated it even more strongly when he approached me after the session, absolutely qualifies for my selection of extraordinary experiences! I have never before received such a strong encouragement to keep doing what I do! He said I have to write a book to describe how my understanding and learning from the 3-, 4- and 5-year-old co-researchers gradually unfolded during my interaction with them - or rather “intra-actions” as Hillevi Lenz Taguchi (2010) might have called this mutual influence between persons and their environments.

When I experience how strongly interactions with people influence my thoughts and feelings I am sure that trying to understand our brain has to include much more than “looking” inside it. As John Dewey wrote “the body-mind is not simply the acknowledgement of the sensory input that goes to the brain, but it is based upon the interaction of subject with a complex and challenging environment” (Davidson, 2004). We might never be able to understand all secrets of our brains, but being on our way to understand more is also something to celebrate, isn’t it?

The poem "Hjernen" / "The Brain" was first published in 1999 in the book "Nasefenomenet og andre hendingar" written by Kurt Johannessen, 1999.
In English: Kurt Johannessen (2010), translation by Gillian Carson: "Selected”. Zeth, Bergen http://www.zeth.no/boker2.shtml#selected

Davidson, J. (2004). Embodied Knowledge: Possibilities and Constrains in Art Education and Curriculum. In L. Bresler (Ed.), Knowing Bodies, Moving Minds: toward Embodies Teaching and Learning. Dorsrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Lenz Taguchi, H., Moss, P., & Dahlberg, G. (2010). Going beyond the theory: practice divide in early childhood education : introducing an intra-active pedagogy. London: Routledge.

Blurring Understanding

2010-05-12T11:32:00.000-07:00

Understanding is certainly contextual. After a month in USA I frequently keep misunderstanding; Sometimes, of course, because of unfamiliar words, but mostly because I don’t know what people expect me to do. The first time I was buying a coffee I stood like a frozen when the shop-girl asked me: “How many creams?” I was so confused by the question’s grammatical inaccuracy of singularity/plurality of “cream”.

Sometimes I misunderstand because I read different “parts” (modalities) of communication in different, or even opposite ways. For example, I misunderstood a party invitation because in my mind I could not match the lay out of the invitation card with its contents. Knowing that there are many things I do not know does not really help much when others do not understand that I don’t understand. Then, I can tell you, it is not easy to buy a sandwich, take a buss or even cross a street. Fortunately, I have now learned how to cross a street! And even more: I have learned that crossing a street is a local phenomenon which I can not expect to be applicable other places in USA.

On my son’s way to Urbana Middle School, there are several crossroads with four “stop”- signs. Every driver stops his/hers car and waits. But how would they know who should drive when? From a perspective of a pedestrian on rollerblades, crossing a road is usually a risky business because possibility for braking is limited. That is why I decided to follow my son to and from the school. I soon found out how dependent the “four-stop-sign” driving is on multimodal communication; Drivers look at each other. They look at us pedestrians to establish eye contact. They smile, nod or wave to let us cross. I am sure they also do their interpretations of what they see: People with unsteady movements and they wait and wait for us to move over. And sometimes I and my son cross in front of them even if we intended to go another way – We do not want to disappoint the drivers who have showed such kindness and patience!

Things are for sure done differently in different parts of the world. Meeting people through University of Illinois, makes it possible for me to get in touch with people from different places in the world and learn a bit about Korea, South Africa, Bolivia… Each meeting seems to help me achieve a little bit more understanding about how one can view the world, and how limited my own understanding always will be. Cultures have for ages been formed by interactions between people, but also by climate, geography, flora and fauna, migrations, power difference… We all carry them with us multiple layers of oil paint: new layers every day… may be each time we share word with someone?

… May be oil paint is not a good metaphor – At least I feel that the lubrications are much more moister than oil pain, and get more easily absorbed into my body and become a part of my thinking… Drawing a line between my personal experience, and my striving to be a “good researcher”, I want to quote Robert Stake who wrote so wisely:

“It is an ethical responsibility for us as case researchers to identify affiliations and ideological commitments that might influence our interpretations – not only for the contracting parties but for the readers of reports, and, of course, for ourselves. But there is no way for us as evaluators to identify all relevant predispositions, or even know them” (Stake, 2006: 87).

Stake, R. E. (2006). Multiple case study analysis. New York: The Guilford Press.

All images show the same sculpture from The Millenium Park in Chicago.

Case (for) Studies

2010-05-03T09:32:00.000-07:00

I am so pleased with possibility to attend Dr. Robert Stake’s case-study course (Educational Psychology 499) on Thursday afternoons! Showing up in the middle (or the end) of the course, not being familiar with the contents of the course, I try to participate as much as I can. This does not mean that I constantly undertake activities observable from the outside, but apparently passive engagement can also move and re-furnish one’s thoughts and understandings.

Getting engaged is not difficult in Dr. Stake’s classes: with variety of teaching approaches, he provides his students with possibilities for meaningful engagement and reflection. The three hours on the April 29-th seemed to be prepared to make diverse experiences possible (including diverse food tastes during the break); As an example of a self-study-case, Mr. Stake read for us poetically written essay by Loren Eiseley; To start reflections about (im-)possibilities of generalisation in case studies, he told us a fresh story from his own life; And to initiate a session of interactive, collaborative meaning making, he invited me to presented a half-imagined case study. Almost like in a “psychodrama” I played my role and the other students asked questions and gave advise to help me get closer to the core of my (imagined and borrowed) study. Little did they know that they in the same time also provided feed back on my “real study”.

Robert Stake was present on my presentation a week ago, but when we meet for a lunch, we did not directly speak about my project. Among other things, we spoke about curricula and documentation in early childhood, and I learned of his friendship with Loris Malguzzi (the founder of Reggio Emilia educational philosophy). Attentive and polite as he is, Mr. Stake did not ask many questions, but prepared some books for me to borrow as an extension of our conversation.

When we talk to someone, or present something, we always make thousands choices. What I wrote here about my meetings with Robert Stake and the three hours from the case-study-course is just a narrow selection from my experiences… and my own experience is of course completely different from experiences of others that were present that day. But what happens if someone mistakes that through my blog (research report, or conference presentation) I intend to present a “truth”? Can I ever prevent others from misunderstanding, or even misusing my words if they suffer from chronic need to generalize? Yes, I can try to express my self clearly, but how clear is possible to be would still be limited because a texts (according to Bakhtin) is always dependent on at least to participants – in addition to the text’s physical conditions and format, the present contexts … and all of the previous contexts and experiences the participants carry with them.

Communication is complicated! Writing about complex processes (as children’s meaning making is) feels like trying to wind up treads which are all tied up. If I pool too hard, they will tie worse… or tear. I know that there is a possible choice to cut them in small pieces - but then I would be disconnecting them from their original contexts, and someone would probably accuse me for simplifying…. I really need help with this! … And I am secretly hoping that my conversations with Robert Stake and other wise people would somehow help me to get out of this knot…

Connections

2010-05-01T08:44:00.000-07:00

On April 26-th, I presented my phd-project at the College of Education, University of Illinois. Liora Bresler was so kind to arrange the seminar and invite people from the education and other departments who might be interested in my study. Among the 12 people that arrived, some had their interests in early childhood (like Robert Stake, and Nancy Hertzog with her guests), some in education in general (as Walter Feinberg and Bekisizwe Ndimande), and some with interests in arts-based methods (as Liora Bresler). One person was a researcher in mathematics (Gloriana Gonzalez) but found familiarities with my project thought some of the theoretical framework we both use (Michael Halliday).

After my presentation, we had time for a few questions, but I am still in the process of meeting the people who were there, and I keep getting feed back from them. My conversations with wonderful, wise and kind Walter Feinberg have developed in many different directions, based on our life stories rather than narrowed to my study. It is amazing how many connections can be found between different worlds, lives or studies! Bekisizwe Ndimande was right when he said “There are always connections” to my question if my study had any significance for his study of education in South Africa.

Daniel Walsh (one of the writers of the book “Studying children in context”) has given me valuable feed back on my presentation, and has really challenged me to search for a better balance between complexity (which without doubt is there) and a narrow focus (which is certainly simplifying the complexity, but is necessary in order to understand). We can not understand everything in the same time – as much as we can not make a “theory of everything”.

The Bricks of Urbana-Champaign

2010-04-27T18:33:00.000-07:00

This moment, and all my moments for the next five weeks, I’ll spend in the middle of the flat Illinois, in the twin-town Urbana-Champaign (or Champaign-Urbana). They say it’s so flat, that you can watch you cat run away for three days! Scenery without mountain tops might be difficult to orient in, but is perfect for cycling and skating on rollerblades. And there is enough space for everything: buildings, green parks and trees.

The University of Illinois, founded in 1867, was situated on the border between Urbana and Champaign, but now, when the towns have merged, the university area has become the heart of the twin-town, stretching across 2 km from North to South and 1,6 km from West to East, including the green open spaces between the buildings.

I noticed that many of the buildings are made of orange bricks. The same were also the old roads in Urbana. Usually in Norway, or other places in Europe, old roads are put together as mosaics of gray cubic stones – but here, the main units were bricks, the same as used for the buildings. My son and I discussed the colours and materials of the roads and houses whiles walking through Michigan avenue - interrupted only by the threes and the sounds of their green garments while dancing to the rhythm of the wind. Where would one find enough stone to builds a road in this land of fields and soil? Clay seems to be the most natural choice to build with. Without easy transportation, one had to use what was available. (This brings me to the core of my research project: Specific qualities of the materials in our close environment, afford us with possibilities … “for good or ill” (Gibson, 1979)).

I am a visiting student (of visiting scholar) at the University of Illinois, but I don’t think that I count as one of the 42 000 student at the university – or of the 17 000 graduate students (master- and phd- students). Anyway, I am happy to be here and have possibility to learn from, and with, many successful researchers, scholars, teachers and students!

NAEA’s Convention 2010

2010-04-23T10:06:00.000-07:00

This year’s (American) National Art Education Association’s (NAEA) national convention took place in Baltimore, Maryland, USA from April 14-th to 18-th. Over 4000 art educators and researchers were gathered at the Baltimore Convention Center to learn from each other. The title of the convention connected art education and social justice. Together with the logo, showing a fist clenching around brushes, the conference title “Art Education and Social Justice” was a powerful message and invitation to make visible how art education can promote social justice, addressing not only art teachers and researchers, but also educational policy makers.

I attended many of the sessions carried out by the Early Childhood Art Educators interest group (ECAE): “Re-Centering the Child: Mindful Arts Practices in Early childhood” on Friday, “Living the vision: Early Childhood Art education in Troubling Times - The child’s right to Artistic expression” on Saturday and “Living the vision: Early Childhood Art education in Troubling Times - Art: essential for early learning” on Thursday. My own session also addressed children’s artistic activities as essential for early learning (meaning making).

The title of my presentation was “Reflection about Sculpturing Materials – Foundation for Development of Aesthetic Competence and Meaning Making”. In hope to be able to visualize the complex and merging processes that I experienced took place during my co-researchers’ (children 3-5) play with three-dimensional materials, I designed and presented a visual model. The model’s main parts were illustrating: 1) specifications of the contexts where children’s play with three-dimensional materials took place; 2) children’s experiencing activities; 3) materials possibilities; 4) materials limitations. (I don’t think I should say much more about this before publishing – and those who have asked me to use my model will unfortunately also have to wait).

One of the best things with attending a conference is that one can meet other researchers and practitioners, and can learn which kinds of interests and issues are emerging in the field. At least it was very important for me to experience that I was not alone in understanding children, arts and meaning making the way I do! I met others with familiar interests and realized that my project is somehow related to an emerging field that celebrates imagination, embodied meaning making, lived curricula, relational pedagogy and experience with materials:
- I listened to Charles Garoian’s fascinating presentation about embodied practice of art – exemplified through a practice narrative where 3D materials were even digested.
- I heard Linda Lewis say that possibilities for representation are inherent in materials.
- Rita Irwin showed me how we all have something to learn one from another.
- Alice Arnold remanded me about issues of globalization that influence cultural meanings, art and education.
- The winner of Manuel Barkan Award, Donal O’Donoghue, convinced me how relational acts of art are.
- Margaret Macintyre Latta emphasized how essential play is –something I completely agree with her on.
- I listened to Lars Lindstrøm, the winner of the 2010 USSEA Ziegfeld International Award, presenting a Scandinavian project about creativity.
- And I met Heidi Davis who shared many of my interests: sculpturing materials, meaning making and respect for children’s imaginative ways of knowing. It was a lucky coincidence that I met Heidi… again…!

Last time I met Heidi, it was in Vancouver July 2009. She presented a paper about young children and sculpture which I attended, we exchanged a coupe of words during the conference, and that was it. Almost a year later we met again. I had just missed her presentation, but she came to see mine. When we later met for a coffee, we both understood how familiar our projects are and that we should not rely on coincidence any more, but with own wish and will keep in touch!

There was another coincidence which I find even more peculiar… It is about my meeting with Maureen (or Marina, as her husband calls her), K-3 art educator (which means that she teaches 5-9 years old children). She was occasionally sitting beside me at the convention’s first general session (when Liora Bresler, and three other ladies, received NAEA’s Distinguished Fellow Award). When we started a conversation, she asked me where I had my accent from. I said: “From Norway, but probably also from my mother tongue, Serbian, as well.” She stared at me for a second and started to speak Serbian! She was American, but her husband was from the same million-people-city I originally come from. And as if this was not remarkable enough, after a few hours of talk later that day about teaching and other things, we found out that her husband attended the same middle and high school as I did, and lived in the neighbouring street… 30 years ago!

I do not want to sound superstitious, but how large were the statistical possibilities for meeting Heidi and Maureen? I am sure that all of us sometimes experience coincidences (or whatever we call them) - sometimes we don’t notice them, other times they even change our lives. A friend, practicing psychodrama, has often reminded me that only when we open our eyes we will be able to see... and when we open palms of our hands, we will be able to embrace new possibilities.

We sometimes need to clench our fists in order to hold directions toward our goals, but we also need to open our hands in order to welcome jet unimagined possibilities …

Church Dialogues

2010-04-14T20:14:00.000-07:00

My colleague and artist Tollef Thorsnes has recently, during the Easter holidays, had an art exhibition in Nøtterøy church. His thee-dimensional works in wood placed on the floors, walls and spaces between the columns, addressed the visitors in variety of ways: invited them to touch, to open and close, and children were even invited to make drawings and attach them to one of the art works; The observers were invited to actively take part in “creation of the art” – because the artist does not see his art as some ready made product that exists unaffected by the visitors’ body and mind. New “meanings are created and negotiated within a community”(Bruner, 1990: 11).

Bakhtin addresses art as a dialogic and interactive concept. He wrote that both art and creativity “must be understood in a dynamic relationship where self and other, work and world are intimately connected” (Haynes, 1995, p.21). An art work is “not a finished world but a range of possibilities, of potentials for interesting and unpredictable histories” (Haynes, 1995, p.12).

When experiencing the art in the church, each person brought his own understanding into the context, and different dimensions had different significance: For some of the visitors, the fact that exhibition was set up during the Easter had a significant importance for their experience and meaning making; For some others, the relation between the art objects and the church room was probably important; While for the children, I assume, the functional quality of the benches designed for them to sit while drawing (and knowing that their drawings would become a part of something larger) might have had a significant importance for their conceptualization of the exhibition and for their meaning makings.

We all bring our earlier experiences and pre-understanding with us to the new contexts. We ”act toward things on the basis of the meaning that these things have for them” (Blumer, 1969: 50), but this past experiences are “given new life and soul through having to meet a new situation” (Dewey, 2005: 63).

BLUMER, H. (1969) Symbolic interactionism: perspective and method, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Prentice Hall.
BRUNER, J. S. (1990) Acts of meaning, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press.
DEWEY, J. (2005) Art as experience, New York, Berkley Publishing Group.
HAYNES, D. J. (1995) Bakhtin and the visual arts, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Inside the Fog

2010-03-31T03:28:00.000-07:00

I finished my data collection three months ago, and since then I’ve been watching the videos from my interactions with young students (3-5), and I am constantly discovering something new. My embodied experience has made it possible for me to see “from the inside” and try to understand the complexity of children’s process of meaning making. But from the inside-position, like when standing in a foggy landscape, my sight might not reach too far: Our practitioner-researchers’ own lived experience can “cloud our vision against the very complexities we seek to capture, trapped as we are in socially derived constructions of the world we experience” (Brown and Jones, 2001, p.6).

Even though it can feel lonely researching inside closed contexts, it also feels quite safe and painless being inside the barely transparent “bubble” in the beginning. But as long as I have just my own eyes to see with … my own head to think with, and there is none there to help me sharpen my sight, I can (often unconsciously) overlook what I don’t want to see. Liora Bresler suggested once that I should let my colleagues take a look on my data with fresh sight and clear mind… oh, no, she probably did not say “clear mind” - but with their mind highly influenced by their professional focuses and personal understandings. And this is what I did:

• asked the children’s parents if my colleagues could watch the videos form my interactions with their children (two children by time)
• applied and got permission from Norwegian Social Science Data Service to show my data to my colleagues
• asked some of my closest colleagues to watch the videos with me and comment on them
• chose and edited some video-parts (the selections were made according to what I needed to get comments on, as well as according to my colleagues’ interest areas: drama, language, pedagogy, social science, qualitative research)
• placed a projector, a large screen and a camera to film the two events (This way I could later watch the collaboration meetings in order to note the feedback on my research, but one could also watch the events in order to learn form, and about, the improvisational style of meaning making that took place when many insightful people shared their thoughts.)

Liora Bresler says that collaborative, team research, involves improvisation and that it “emphasizes interdependent voices and diversity of perspectives within a connected group” (Bresler, 2006). My colleagues interpreted my data in variety of ways, helped me to see new details, and, what I found the most important, they questioned my ways of understanding. They could, of course, not see the way I could see… and I realized that my ways of seeing have also changed over the last months. The collaboration meetings made me more conscious about the process I’ve been through, and thought me that I will have to work hard to uncover the layers of my new embodied knowledge if I want others to see through the fog….

BRESLER, L. (2006) Embodies Narrative Inquiery: A Mehodology of Connection. Research Studies in Music Education, 27, 21-43.

BROWN, T. & JONES, L. (2001) Action research and postmodernism: congruence and critique, Buckingham, Open University Press.

Documentation or Mapping - different points of view

2010-03-09T14:02:00.000-08:00

Some time ago I was asked to give a talk about documentation in early childhood education. I was prepared to talk about documentation as a pedagogical tool for learning about own practice, but a week before the talk I got an e-mail saying something like this: “We are looking forward to hear you talk about mapping of children’s competence...” I got confused: What was I actually supposed to talk about?!

I made a call to the organizer of the seminar for about 300 practitioners, and was told that I had to say something about mapping because the purpose of the seminar was to start implementation of a new strategic plan for the community which, among other things, focused on mapping of children’s competence. So, I decided to talk about my understanding of the two phenomena: “competence mapping” and “pedagogical documentation” with hope that this would initiate discussion and reflection about ways to understand, and perform, the concepts.

From my studies with children I have experienced how easy it is to make quick judgement about their competence if we do not see ourselves as significant for the meaning making that takes place at the very moment. Meaning is made in a curtain context and communication with young children is highly intersubjective. Therefore can “results” of mapping lose their meaning when they are interpreted separated from the contexts; The “results” can be misleading and even set the child’s self-confidence, motivation, and understanding of social relations, at risk.

Dewey wrote that “life goes on in an environment; not merly in it but because of it, through interaction with it” (Dewey, 2005, p.12), (Environment is understood as both about physical and social.). People make meaning through intersubjective relations with each others in given contexts (Bruner, 1990, Bakhtin and Slaattelid, 2005), and communication contexts have enormous influence on what we say and how we say it (Halliday in Maagerø, 2005). It means that when we meet a child for mapping, even if we are highly careful not to show our expectations, the reason we meet in itself will influence the context and the child’s expectations, feelings and “the results”; Not to mention how our tone of voice, body language and choice of the words can practically decide what the child’s answer will be.

I believe that the largest difference between pedagogical documentation and competence mapping is in our way of seeing ourselves in relation to the “results”. Are we aware of that “results” sometimes say more about us and the pedagogical work a child has been exposed to, than about the child’s competence? If we see “results” as dependent of the child only, it would be so easy to blame the child and deny own responsibility! On the other hand, if our aim is to learn about own pedagogical practice, if we observe carefully and reflect about any kind of “results”, we might have a chance to improve our practice. And instead of comparing children to each other, we would have possibility to respect them as they are, with all their individualities and “personal signatures” (Eisner, 2002) they affects the world around them!

Dewey, J. (2005) Art as experience, New York, Berkley Publishing Group.
Eisner, E. W. (2002) The arts and the creation of mind, New Haven, Yale University Press.
Maagerø, E. (2005) Språket som mening: innføring i funksjonell lingvistikk for studenter og lærere, Oslo, Universitetsforl.

3D-materials’ Resistance and Challenge

2010-03-04T06:06:00.000-08:00

Long time ago I watched my son building with Lego-blocks. At that moment, building in height seemed to be one of the main challenges he faced and he was using whatever was possible to stack on the top of each other – even pigs and palms!

A week ago I experienced a massive sculpture carved in Norwegian stone Larvikitt by Martin Kuhn (in cooperation with Makoto Fujiwara) and placed as a part of the Norwegian peace monument in Sarajevo (Norsk Fredsmonument i Sarajevo). Can you imagine which kind of challenge it can be to re-shape the hard surface of the solid rock with you hands? - and to transport its 30 tons 1800 km away?

Today I analyse what “my” early childhood students did in contexts where they played with 3D-materials. What happened when the materials surprised them with their resistance? How eager were they to take action when the materials’ qualities challenged them?

Some of the children, when they discovered a new quality of a material, seemed to be curious and motivated to different kinds of activities towards the material (jumping on it, lifting it, crawling through…). But the materials’ resistance also initiated activities in their mind when they tried to understand – to make meaning of the new experiences.

Elliot Eisner wrote: “Constrains and affordances emerge in any selection of tasks and materials. These tasks and materials constitute what it is that the student will need to “get smart about”. Getting smart, in this context, means coming to know the potential of the materials in relation to the aims of project or problem; and since each material possesses unique qualities, each material requires the development of distinctive sensibilities and technical skills. (Eisner, p.72).”

With another words, our environment offers us possibilities and limitations to learn through interactions with it. The selection of 3D-materials for student activities in early childhood and schools will therefore also be “the selection of an array of forces that will influence how students will be challenged to think” (Eisner 2002, p. 72).

Eisner, E. W. (2002). The arts and the creation of mind. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Growing with hand crafts

2010-02-14T01:08:00.000-08:00

Bascarsija is the old centre of Sarajevo (Bosnia Herzegovina) where people for centuries have been crafting metals, wool and leather. The community is still alive, but only a few people still live of weaving or hitting with a hammer. In one of the traditional shops I noticed two children playing around a table with large, heavy plate of lead. The plate was soft - hammer and other tool would easily leave marks on the strong but vulnerable surface. The plate’s specific quality provides the necessary support for forming copper, silver and even golden plates, each by individual unique design.

The children’s father told me that the craft is slowly dying out. He himself has learned the craft from his father and his father from his grandfather, and so on. The sounds and smells form his childhood have remained in his life. He doubts that he would ever choose this occupation without his experience from the childhood. The childhood experiences seem to have provided him with interest, appreciation, love… and will to continue… He told me that he still had much to learn about crafting plates and coffee cans, even though he has literally been learning by doing for the last 16 years.

I left the shop while the children were still playing, and entered a large open marked with thousands of scarves and carpets form India, Iran and Turkey: It was such a colourful sight, pleasant for eye and hand. The shop assistant spoke with devotion about materials’ qualities and origin, about different techniques and time it takes to make a single carpet in traditional hand craft. We ended (again) in talking about childhood: He was brought up in a village in Iran, surrounded by aunts and grandmothers who were constantly spinning wool, colouring, and weaving… I believe that his early experience of qualities had given him possibility to develop differentiated perception, aesthetic attention and passion to study arts history … and handle the textiles between hands.

You need an open mind

2010-02-05T07:55:00.000-08:00

These days I am helping Norwegian criminal police with interpretation, during their work on a case of serious crime. And during the evenings I work on another form of interpretation: analyzing my conversations with children. No wonder my friends policemen and I often discuss communication. And when we talk about communication, I relate our talks to my conversations with children, and they relate them to interrogations with criminals and victims. It is incredible how many issues are the same.

Since our choices of words depend on the communication context, the purpose and the function of the conversation (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004), these two forms of interpretation: trying to make meaning out of conversations with children, and transfer of meaning to another language, will have to be different.

If I need to understand a sentence before I am able to transfer it to another language, it means that such transfer can never be completely neutral and independent of me. My voice and body language, as well as my cultural understanding will color the interpretations.

Listening seems to be a good way of learning how to improve own forms of communication. We asked a victim of war: What does it take to tell about humiliation one has been exposed to, even if shame is unbearable? He, an old man, told us that people of course are different, but for him it takes time to establish confidence in an empathic, kind person who wants to listen without prejudice. Like young children, he also seems to be highly sensitive to facial expressions, body language, eye contact and tone of voice. In the relation with the one who listens, he would look for respect, care and interest that could motivate him to share his terrible experience. To be able to tell, he would have to be confident that the person who listens is open-minded and will try to understand.

Bruner wrote that “open-mindedness is the keystone of what we call a democratic culture” (Bruner, 1990, p.30). Only when we are open-minded we can truly listen with empathy, see each person’s uniqueness and learn from each other.

Halliday, M. A. K., & Matthiessen, C. M. I. M. (2004). An introduction to functional grammar. London: Arnold.
Bruner, J. S. (1990) Acts of meaning, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press.

What’s so funny about tearing?

2010-01-16T12:28:00.000-08:00

After I’ve practically spent three months in a “kindergarten” (as we in Norway call any early childhood education setting) where I was observing young students and interacting with them in visual arts contexts, I am just about to start analyzing the video material. For the start I was watching the films to get a feeling of “distance” - since I was myself both a teacher and a researcher: an A/R/Tographer (form Rita Irwin’s A/R/Tography – where roles of Artist, Researcher and Teacher merge).

Another reason for jumping through the videos was to look for the parts I could show my colleagues. Professor Liora Bresler suggested once that my colleagues could help me to see the video material in new ways – each of them, with her unique personality and competence, would see other things that I would be able to see. I invited my dear colleagues, teachers of language, pedagogy, social science and drama, to help, and was happy to get 11 (out of 12) positive responses!

Professor Gunvor Løkken suggested that I should make a selection of videos I wanted to share, and here I am: seeing the video material in different way just by knowing that someone else will watch it. Struggling not to choose only the most interesting and less embarrassing parts to show my colleagues, I feel how important trust is for successful collaboration.

I have chosen to show them the part where two three-year-old girls were experimenting with different textiles, trying to find out which of them could be torn. And for some strange reason tearing was so funny! Was it the sound, or the strange tickling in the fingers that held the fabric? Or something completely else? I am not allowed to show you the video – but here is another young person who finds tearing at least as enjoyable. I’ve seen it on a friend’s blog sometimes in October (see it on YouTube)– little did I know by then that just a week later “my children” would laugh too! What’s so funny about tearing?

Irwin, R. L. (2004). A/r/tography: A Metonymic Métissage. In R. L. Irwin & A. de Cosson (Eds.), a/r/tography. Rendering Self Through Arts-Based Living Inquiry (pp. 27-38). Vancouver: Pacific Educational Press.

White, white – with all its shades

2010-01-06T12:56:00.001-08:00

These days everything seems white around me. Cold and white. When there is no wind the glazed trees are still as frozen, the time also stops and I can use all the time I need to absorb the silence and harmony, and pay attention to details.

Then I then see is that White is not the only child ms. cold and mr. winter, but has many brothers an sisters. Some of them are dressed up in fluffy textures. Others have tiny shades of blue, pink or violet – dependent on the temporary mood of the sun or the moon.

It is the apparent absence of contrasts that makes me curious. When some things seem the same at first sight, I get surprised when I discover the diversity of qualities between them. Differences are often so small that I can not match them with such small words, but have to describe them with long sentences – IF I had to describe them to someone I would probably have to sharpen both my language and attention.

This is why I love playing with harmony and contrasts when I choose visual art materials (or inspiration material) for my students, whichever age they are (3 or 43). Here is the collection of 11 balls in approximately same size, made of yarn in different qualities and origin. How different where they actually? Two 5-year-old boys found out that some of the balls ripped off the floor when they let them fall – others didn’t. Some of yarn would make a nice ice bear - others wouldn’t. The yarn balls were not so same after all.

How the boys made meaning of the yarn balls, and what they chose to knit of the yarn, is still to be analysed form the empirical material form my Sculpturing Words study. Wait and see which meaning I will make out of the boys meaning making…

Intersubjectivity, Interpretation and Improvisation

2009-12-17T04:59:00.000-08:00

I’ve got a mail (from 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?

2009-12-08T12:15:00.000-08:00

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!

2009-11-24T12:08:00.000-08:00

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?

2009-11-22T07:05:00.000-08:00

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?

2009-11-02T13:28:00.000-08:00

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”

2009-10-29T02:03:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-11T07:30:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-04T08:25:00.000-07:00

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.

Defeating a blueberry

2009-09-27T11:44:00.000-07:00

”Each thing organizes the space around it (…) each thing calls, gestures to their beings or battles them for our attention…”, says David Abram. In his text “Astonished by a stone: Art and the eloquence of matter” he writes about body’s ancient relation to nature, claiming that “our animal senses know no (…) passive reality; they perceive things only by interacting with them”.

I am sure that each of us has experienced how “things “catch our eye” and sometimes refuse to let go” (Abram 2007). Even if we do not remember the moments when textures, colours or forms spoke to us and invited us to listen, look and touch, I am sure that such moments were at least the part of our early childhood. If you do not remember the last time a stone or a blueberry spoke to you, here is how such meeting might look like;

Observing my two years old friend tells me about how forms with different surface, size, shape and mass invite his body to action. I can’t hear the voices the way he does, but I can notice the way he tunes his responses. This teaches me how much he (or his body) already knows about the physical world around him. Another thing I realize is how willing he is to extend the limits of his body. It seams like there is an interactive relation between the challenges that the forms provide him with, and his own choices that lead him to construct challenges he need…as if he was aware of Vygotsky’s “zone of proximal development”!

He sees a rock of just right size: he tries to climb, but slides down. He tries again from another angle, explores different techniques and manages to get over the top.

He sees a round stone – quite the same size as a football. He tries to kick it – but it doesn’t move. He tries to lift it with his fingers grabbing around, but the weight of the stone pushes his fingers into the ground. He doesn’t understand why he can not lift the stone smaller that a football…and he learns about weight and different materials.

He picks and eats small blueberries, and discovers some really big ones. These, he doesn’t try to pick or lift. He doesn’t’ try to push them downhill (or my be he does but soon realizes that they are fixed to the ground because they are a part of the sculpture park “Sti for øye” - “Path for the eye”). The large round forms invite him to climb… and the polished surface to slide down again.

Writing about a stone, David Abram says: ”To my sensing and sentient body, the rock is first and foremost another body engaging in the world.” This might be similar to how the little boy experienced the stone, the rock and the blueberry sculpture, but he is not able to verbalize his experience. Fortunately our knowledge about the world is not limited to verbal language – there are many others modes of knowledge and thought (Eisner 2002). The boy’s new knowledge about texture, shape, volume and weight remains embodied in his muscles and veins…

Sculpture park "Sti for øye", Fossnes, Stokke South-East Norway
Eisner, Elliot (2002): The arts and the creation of mind, New Haven: Yale University Press
Abram, David (2007): Astonished by a stone: Art and the eloquence of matter. In Bresler L. Ed. International Handbook of Research in Arts Education

Children’s consent, or not?

2009-09-17T01:26:00.000-07:00

The title of this year’s EECERA-conference (held in Strasbourg, August 26th-29th ) was Diversities in Early Childhood Education, and the theme involved many different kinds of diversity: language, social situation, disability, gender, and also methodological diversity in research with young children. My presentation was about diversity in children’s expressive languages (and merging of the languages during children’s play 3D materials), but I wish to write about something else here – some reflections about children’s consent in research.

I attended the parallel session “Qualitative research – revolutions of continuing tensions?” where one of the presentations was: “Children should be involved in research design: even in early years?” by Lorna Savage and Muriel Logan, form Stirling Institute of Education. Some of the addressed questions were how to involve “the competent child” in the research process and design, and “whether early years children have adequate skills and research training to be included in the design process”.

At the same time, one of my colleagues attended another presentation which was about children’s consent and “research contracts” in form of drawings. When we occasionally met that sunny afternoon, we exchanged our experiences form the presentations. This made me think about ethical challenges when I, as a researcher, see a child as both competent and fragile in the same time. I believe that we have to be attentive to the children’s voices (also when they are silent), but isn’t is something completely different to ask them a questions like: “Is it OK for you that I take pictures of you and put them on the internet?”? Can we expect a child to consider all consequences before giving us the answer? Probably not…

What scares me here is that it is possible to be superficial: ask a direct question, and later say that the child has been informed and has given her/his consent (one can even show a contract). But how ethical is it misuses the child’s impossibility to understand complex questions about research and ethics? We can’t be serious to believe that a four year old would understand what “research” means? The complexity of a question is not about how easy it is to give an answer (like in “yes-no questions”), but in the thick levels of consequences that lay behind.

Making a language of friendship

2009-08-19T04:37:00.000-07:00

Do you believe in friendship at first sight?

In the following case such friendship can not be denied. It was really about sight (or touch, or smell – I don’t know) because it certainly was not was not about words!

Two girls age 4 and 5 met for the first time. They were from two distant countries, and one might say that they did not share any common language – but they must have had since it took them just a few minutes to become attached to each other. Full of happiness the four-year old was jumping and singing: “I’ve got a friend! I’ve got a friend!” She was looking forward to every minute she would spend together with her new friend.

Smiles and gestures, shells and pebbles, running and swimming were enough for the friendship to flourish in the beginning. Words were really not necessary, but they emerged with the girls’ wishes to share more. The youngest started to imitate the other girl’s language - not exactly the words, but the sounds and the melody of the Norwegian language. When her mother asked her: “What are you saying?”, she replied: “I don’t know, but you see that it works!”. After a while the other girl also started to adjust her words to what she experienced sounded like Serbian. Both seemed to try getting closer to the other one’s language – and it worked: the girls were talking in their strange language, nodding and smiling, and were completely overwhelmed when a familiar word occasionally was pronounced.

During the five days they spent together, I observed only one occasion where the “language of friendship” appeared to have some limitations: Some problems came about when one of them tried to explain rules of a game they wanted to play together. But it didn’t matter because they still had their language of body, action of play (like taking pictures of each other), and shared interests in objects – like shells and cameras!

Today they are thousands of kilometres apart from each other. I wonder how a telephone conversation between them would sound like(?) A video conversation would probably be much better – but even if visual it would still be inferior to a personal meeting; Interactions between children really are multisensory and dependent on their three-dimensional bodies in space, and all kinds of actions they can do together with or without physical objects like flowers, water, sand…

Imaginative Education at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver

2009-07-24T09:20:00.000-07:00

The 7th International Conference on Imagination and Education was my second and at least as inspiring as the last summer’s! The keynote speaker Dr. Eleonor Dunckworth suggested in her plenary session that one should go where one can be found, and that is exactly what I did: I went to Vancouver “to be found” by those who share my interests in imaginative education, and see arts and imagination as sources of creativity and invention. And I found many kindred souls who share a vision that it is possible to “build a better world by thinking of the possible, not just the actual” – as the conference title suggested. (Read more about the conference)

I met Dr. Kieran Egan (se the photo below), the man with great ideas and the driving force behind the IERG and the conference on imagination and education. I appreciate that he chose to come to my presentation also this year. I also appreciate that people spoke to me after my presentation –This is how I met Kerrie Bellisario from Lesley University in New York who spoke about arts-integration as “universal design for learning” for students of all ages, and arts, creativity and imagination as important part of “21 century skills”.

I met, and became a friend with, Liudmila Gusteva from Magnitogorsk State University situated on the river Ural, exactly at the border between Europe and Asia. She presented Leonid Zankov’s educational system directly related to his teacher’s (Vygotsky’s) work, and especially to “the zone of proximal development”. She invited me to the conference at her university in November this year (with submission September 10th ).

I met Marni Binder and Sally Kotsopoulos form the School of Early Childhood Education in Toronto, who share my interests in visual arts and teaching student how to foster children’s imagination, creativity and play. Fortunately, these two wonderful lades are also coming to the EECERA conference in France this August, where I hope to meet them again!

I met Prof. Gradir Cadral form Criciuma in Brazil who told us about the interesting concept of the Museum of Childhood – a museum without walls, where visiting children are involved in re-interpretation, “museumization” and creation of the exhibition objects.

And I met Heidi Davis form Indiana University who spoke warmly about sculpture as “playground for the imagination”, and Milena Droumeva from Simon Fraser University (SFU) who took us to a “sound walk” in the streets of avncouver, and many other most imaginative and inspiring people!

During the closing session, Mark Fettes form SFU expressed his hopes that imagination will be given a larger importance in upbringing and education around the world. He said: “imagination is re-emerging on the educational scene as a significant concept”. But his words also reminded us that “the lack of theoretical and philosophical coherence undermines its (imagination’s) impact in the field (education)” and in a way invited us to continue with research that can show why and how imagination is essential for learning and development.

Commercial - but still a unique experiencing

2009-07-16T23:27:00.000-07:00

We have all seen pictures of a fantastic castle flowing in clouds, surrounded by fireworks!? I’ve just seen it for real, and I’ve experienced the Disneyland (in Los Angeles) with all of my senses: a sweet smell of syrup, unusual taste of a frozen banana, texture of a yellowish retro-decorated napkin, and sounds of old-fashioned music accompanied with the noise form crowded streets and the old-fashioned cars.

Apart form choosing to travel with an old car, one could choose between different kinds of high speed entertainment facilities which could give you un unique 3D (or even 4D) experience of insecurity and fear, either you are afraid of height or of crashing your space ship into a planet.

All kinds of entertainment (for more or less money) were there to surpass children’s expectations, but this special atmosphere also seems to waken adult’s playfulness – or at least made their ears grow large and round…

And when the evening comes, there is even more to bee seen: thousands of small coloured bulbs light up in the dark, shaping large three-dimensional fairytale characters (and the American eagle) in a parade accompanied by music and followed by fireworks - every night!

“Traces” that lead into children’s imagination and inspire teachers in pedagogical planning

2009-07-05T12:21:00.000-07:00

I’ve been working on an article and presentation for the 7th International Conference on Imagination and Education. The conference theme is: Imagination - the Source of Creativity and Invention: build a better world by thinking of the possible, not just the actual. And here is what I will be talking about:

If we want students to participate actively in their own learning, they should be able to influence the methods and contexts of their learning. Student’s influence is meaningful and motivating, but challenges teachers in their work with pedagogical planning: How to plan, but still have enough space for students to create their own solutions and expressions? How open-ended a pedagogical situation can be, but still safely lead toward educational goals? I believe that a teacher should consider arranging of imaginative contexts, including careful choices of physical surroundings and artefacts to be used for inspiration.

The project I present here was carried out in a Norwegian kindergarten, with 3-5 years old children. To begin with, the main project theme was “water”, but the teachers and a researcher (teacher educator, teaching visual-arts) wanted children to influence the theme development. The first project day, storytelling was combined with nature experience, art experience and physical objects as “traces” to provoke children’s curiosity. Pedagogical documentation was used systematically in order to identify children’s interests. Inspiration for teacher’s further planning was often found in children’s verbal expressions – children had left their own traces! The theme “water” ended with “mermaids and monsters”, in the project where borders between reality and fantasy suddenly were dissolved…

Besides teacher’s imaginative usage of suitable artefacts, the respect and appreciation of children’s individual expressions had a significant importance for children’s motivation and joy of learning. This wouldn’t be possible if the teachers had a predisposed attitude towards children’s expressions.

Learning to walk – a matter of physical context?

2009-06-14T15:17:00.000-07:00

Isn’t it quite human to be proud of own children? -Tell everyone about their first smile, the first word, the first step... especially if they are "early"! But what do we tell if our child is 15 months old and still not interesting in walking? What do we say when people try to comfort us because they assume that something must be wrong whit the child?

We’ve been thought to apply theories in order to understand, but the same theories can prevent us form understand the world in new ways. Take for example Piaget’s stage-theories: Even if his intentions were good (and the way we know him is a result of misunderstandings and misinterpretations (Sjøberg 1996)), his work has for decades resulted in testing and comparing children, disconnected form contexts. “When we separate considerations of individuals from their contexts (and each other), we tend to look for all explanations within individuals” (Graue and Walsh1998) – And this is exactly what happens when we think that something is wrong with a 15 months old that doesn’t walk.

Ten years ago, my son was 10 months old during a cold Norwegian winter. The house we rented at the time had wall-to-wall carpets. When my son crawled he must have experienced the resistance of his knees against the synthetic carpets, fiction and static electricity. On the other hand, the same carpets were good support for his small feet while he was toddling around. Walking was much more comfortable than crawling.

My friend’s son was 15 months in the winter of 2009. It was cold on the naked parquet flooring, and he wore warm woollen tights that covered his diaper and feet. The boy was easily sliding around on his buttocks. He would sometimes stand up, but just when there was something to hold on. I guess he had experienced how frictionless his feet were against the floor … which also was hard when hitting his falling body…

I am sure that the boy knew much about his environment (at least about the floors). If he could speak he could probably reel off much more adjectives about the floor that his mother could. Who dares to say that something was wrong with him because he didn’t walk? How can we ever forget to consider the importance of physical environment in a child’s development and learning?!

Sjøberg, S. (1996). Forstått og misforstått? -- Brukt og misbrukt? Jean Piaget 100 år - Revitalisering av an kritisert klassiker. Det utdanningsvitenskapelige fakultet, Universitetet i Oslo.

Graue, E. M. and D. J. Walsh (1998). Studying children in context: theories, methods and ethics. Thousand Oaks, California, Sage.

Co-researching with children

2009-06-05T11:47:00.000-07:00

I’ve been writing assignments for my PhD-courses, lately … and thinking much about methodology…

The project “Sculpturing Words” is based on the socio-cultural perspective on learning. In pedagogical settings in kindergarten, there is a mutual influence between a child as a competent individual and “democratic participant”, and professional kindergarten personnel. Construction of meaning, that takes place during communication in kindergarten, is essential for learning (Carlsson and Pramling Samuelson 2006). Learning is a result of inter-subjective processes. “Operating from a socio-constructivist perspective, the educators act as careful observers and co-autors of children’s experience” (Piazza 2007). In the same time the children are co-researcher in the process of mutual learning.

Regarding the methodological choices for my project, I wish to undertake a role of a preschool teacher and carry out activities with kindergarten children. This method, where roles of a teacher and a researcher merge, reminds of action research, more specifically intervention (Bjørnsrud2005) - or rather inter-action-research ? As a teacher, I will communicate with the children in order to stimulate their reflections. My own multimodal expressions will influence the inter-subjective meaning making that takes place in the context. Seen form a role of a researcher, such communication can also be seen as a form of inter-view method (Kvale and Brinkmann 2009).

Both a good teacher and a good inter-viewer have to listen carefully, with respect and curiosity, to a child’s different forms of expression. Genuine listening also requires immediate reflections, interpretations and reactions form the teacher/researcher. I am aware of that my feed-back to the children will influence the process of their learning. In the same time the child’s expressions will be an integrated part of the research process – the child becomes a co-researcher in the process of mutual learning…

Bjørnsrud, H. (2005). Rom for aksjonsforskning - om tilpasset opplæring, inkludering og læreplanarbeid. Oslo, Gyldendal akademisk.

Carlsson, M. A. and I. Pramling Samuelsson (2006). "Lekende lærende barn." Barnehagefolk 1/2006: 66-79.

Kvale, S. and S. Brinkmann (2009). Interviews: learning the craft of qualitative research interviewing. Los Angeles, Calif., Sage.

Piazza, G. (2007). "On the wave of creativity: Children, expressive language and thechnology." International Journal of Education through Art Volume 3(Number 2): p.103-121.

A minute to "charge"

2009-05-29T00:06:00.000-07:00

These days I really don’t have time to blog. I have two dead-lines in a few days, and it feels like I don’t have time for anything else. Yet, I have to breathe (in rhythmic repetitions that my body approves) and have to keep my eyes open. I should try to deny the sounds of the birds outside the window – but I can't. Even if my eyes are mostly busy with the screen, I still give them a minute (or two) to charge… through my aesthetic attention.

Here is what I observed during a minute of such attention: all of these flowers would fit in the category “pink orchid”, and still all of them are so different in size, shape, nuances, patterns, details…

“And so, we examine our dreams. What do we value mostly in ourselves? What do we want to become? We try to have a glimpse of the riches that life has to offer us: to hear more, see more, perceive more, feel more – an aesthetic experience which touches the subtleties and beauty beyond the simple boxes of numbers and other useful categories” (Bresler, L. 1991).

Fortunately, our senses do not just get numb by becoming a researcher. On contrary, we need them more than ever!

Reference: Stake, R., Bresler, L. and Mabry, L. (1991): Custom and Cherishing: The Arts in Elementary Schools, Urbana

A distant celebration

2009-05-17T00:05:00.002-07:00

Happy birthday, Norway!

Last night I watched Eurovision Song Contest from my hotel in Stockholm and cheered on Alexander Rybak and his crew! What a fantastic event to start the national holiday by winning!!! I didn’t think that I would so much miss being in Norway. Thanks to the internet connection, I have possibility to take part in the celebration!

These days I am attending a course with Liora Bresler and other (Swedish) students. We have been discussing writing about lived experience in qualitative research, and different points of view. I am trying to imagine how it is to be my son today … trying to “recall his memories” through some old images I want to share with you. I wonder if it is possible (through some kind of empathic approach) to “re-experience” the lived experience of others - ?

They say that 17-th of May is children’s holiday! The day starts watching processions, or walking (in this case sitting in a carriage) in a school procession.

Children are supposed to look neat and tidy, and during the day get green grass-stains on their knees, sticky ice cream spots all over their body and wet hair, and have fun! And the weather is supposed to be very nice, sunny and warm, so that the children wouldn’t freeze after they have splashed water over each other. Joy and fun have to colour everything children do on this day! Enjoy the day!

Associations and inspirations

2009-05-11T15:09:00.000-07:00

I got a new umbrella – nothing special, its even a cheap example, but each time I get the umbrella in the corner of my eye (it has to be just a gleam) I experience a sudden desire for a glass of cold, sweat, creamy coffee. How strange is that?!
After a couple of coffee brakes, while driving my car with the umbrella sticking under my bag on the front passenger seat, I understood that my eyes had registered something I consciously didn’t realize: the pattern of the umbrella textile had some kind of resemblance with a particular coffee package. The signals between the pattern and my feeling of coffee-thirst were instant that they either went strait through my brain, or somehow managed to avoid the places where my thinking was situated. The visual information went directly to my stomach. Other times it can be a different kind of "unconscious information" that initiates associations, or inspirations.

In her presentation on EECERA- conference in Stavanger (September 2008), Hillevi Lanz Taguchi showed an example of a child’s play with clay, and mentioned how the material “communicated with the child”. I believe that materials can “speak back” - they give resistance and offer a variety of qualities. I know they do – I’ve experienced that many times.

Here is an example of a textile that gave me associations to old letters, envelopes, stamps… The textile has inspired the details for two garments I made. The process of making required precision, and challenged my “aesthetic attention” in making choices of additional materials: I even used some string because of its origin, colour and associations to binding a parcel. before posting.