Exploring Eggs and Avocadoes

I challenged two of my students to observe their own children’s encounters “new materials”. For those 10 and 9 months old babies most of materials were new; the trick was to choose materials that would not harm them during their multi-sensory explorations. The assignment requested that each child got chance to explore two similar but not identical materials/objects. This would provide opportunities for babies to acquire new experiences, recognize similarities and to be surprized. Here is a reconstruction of what the students wrote in their assignments.
 
One of the students gave her 10 months old girl a cooked, pealed egg first. The girl brought it directly to her mouth. The egg was smooth, slipped from her hands and rolled over the floor. She quickly followed by crawling, supporting her weight with one hand on the floor and catching the egg with the other. When she finally grabbed the egg, she grabbed it so hard that the egg went to pieces. She picked some of the pieces and started to put them in her mouth. Then she suddenly realized that the taste was unfamiliar and looked skeptically at her parents to check if it was safe. They were smiling, she sensed their encouragement and continued to eat, cluck out loud and enjoy.

The second experiment took place few days later. This time the girl was given a raw egg with shell. Her mouth opened the same moment she grabbed the egg with both hands and she went on rubbing the eggshell to her gums (a new tooth was on its way out). After some time she started to swing her arm. If she slipped the egg it would fly away: Her mother was watching nervously. To her surprise, the egg did not crack when it fell on the wooden floor for the first time; But it surprised the girl when it finally did: With her eyes wide open, she gave her mother a questioning look. She started to pick the eggshell, but the mother decided to remove it to prevent the girl from putting it is her mouth. This upset the girl, but she soon calmed down and started to play with egg content. She crawled around and with her hands extended the egg area on the floor. She was excited when a bubble suddenly appeared in the egg white, and tried to pick it up. She tried several times but each bubble busted. After about five minutes of bubble catching, she lay down on her stomach and started to lick the floor. The experiment ended when the mother evaluated that the floor was dangerously slippery for the girl.

The other child, nine months old boy, was given a peeled avocado to play with. It was slipping away as the boy was trying to catch it. He was crawling and chasing the avocado across the floor, but it repeatedly slipped between his fingers. After some time he seemed to realize that there was more resistance in avocado than he had expected. He sat up a kind of trap for the avocado and caught it between his legs. Now he could squeeze it much harder and longer without losing it. The squeezed substance colored his socks and trousers green and he could not any longer see where the avocado was hiding, so he began squeezing his own foot. The avocado had disappeared, only the big brown seed remained – however, the boy did not see any connection between the two such different shapes and material qualities. He continued playing with avocado remaining, smeared them on the floor and found it amusing to crawl over the slippery surface.

For the second experiment, the boy was given an unpeeled avocado. He did not seem to recognize the object; The difference between the two avocados was probably too large: both the color and the consistency were different. This avocado was explored by rolling. At some point, the boy tried to squeeze it, but soon realized that it did not lead anywhere. He tried biting and tasting, but lost interest when he did not find much he could do with the object.

During their active interactions with the objects / materials the children discovered materials’ specific qualities. The materials offered different affordances and different types of resistance, and challenged different forms of physical and mental activities. What is this - and what can I do with it? Some properties were more interesting than others were. The boy’s mother comments that soft materials might be more fun to explore - her son played much longer with the soft avocado.

Both of the mothers noted how important intersubjective communication with their children was for making the material exploration possible at all. The boy’s mother wrote: “He was so aware of my reactions to his activities; He stopped his activities, looked at me and waited for an encouraging smile before he continued. He knew that he was usually not allowed to spill and smear things on the floor and he needed a "confirmation" that it was OK to do that this time.”

Look at me!

Few years ago I took part in a multidisciplinary, multicultural project in an early childhood and care institution (ECEC) close to a refugee centre. Half of the children group did not speak Norwegian. The project aimed to collaboration and integration of children and their parents in the new community. We wanted to do something that did not rely on verbal language, some kind of activities both children and their parents could participate in and exchange cultural knowledge and experiences. As teacher of visual arts I suggested that some kind of material, common in all parts of the world, could be good foundation to build content and curricula (since materials can structure curricula (Fredriksen 2010)). With some inspiration from the children and corn field landscapes in the ECEC’s surroundings, the choice fell on material: flour. This was no usual art material, but can you imagine how many different tasty things could be made of it? We invited parents to show their baking / cooking skills from different cultures ... but that's another story. The story to be told here is about little Adi, who turned three on the first project day. Wearing his special birthday suit, together with his mother he stood speechless in the doorway and watched the kids playing on the floor with toy tractors full of flour, and flour-dusty clothes.

  

Adi was a quiet boy, so quiet we thought he could not speak a word. He did not even make any sounds. Ones he hit his forehead on the edge of a table, he held his hand on the painful spot, but did not cry or make ​​any sound.

When we, a week later, visited a farm with old-fashioned mill and stone own, Adi made a loaf of bread and marked it with special sign. When the bread came out of the own, he recognized it and pointed with smile, but still no sound. On our way back home, he fell asleep sitting in the back seat in heart-warming embrace with his bread.

I will never forget what happened the morning after. When Adi arrived to the ECEC with his mother, she hugged and kissed everyone she came over. With joyful tears and broken English she managed to convey that Adi had told her everything! He explained the whole process that started with crushing of grains between the millstones and ended with golden bread on his chest. Her joy was overwhelming, but our surprize that Adi could speak was even larger! We realized that Adi understood so much more than we had imagined: He had even understood that there was no point in communicating in the only language he knew! He had to be creative in exploring other ways of communication. 

Images from the project were printed and exhibited on the ECEC wall. When Adi few days later saw a picture of himself with his bread, his alternately pointed on the image and on his chest. He was tapping on the picture and looking around to get attention. He hoped that everyone could hear his silent shouting: LOOK AT ME!

Children need to be seen, heard and acknowledged, however silent they are! This requires attentive and caring adults -  kind of adults that are so engaged that they can see the invisible and hear the soundless. 

Fredriksen, B. C. (2010). Meaning making, democratic participation and art in early childhood education: Can inspiring objects structure dynamic curricula? International Journal of Education through Art, 6(3), 383-397.

Engagement in Teaching and Learning

For the last 10 years or so, I’ve been presenting my research on conferences in USA, France, Canada, England, Spain, Lithuania etc. but never in my birth country, Serbia. In Fall 2012 I got an e-mail from an teacher educator who occasionally found my articles on internet and realized that we had common research interests. At that point she only knew my second name (which is Norwegian) but when she found this blog she saw my first name and got excited – the name uncovered that I was Serbian. Her e-mail reached me while I was visiting my parents in Belgrade and we had a chance to connect. Nevena Hadzi Jovancic is an art professor at Teacher Education Faculty at Belgrade University. She invited me to give a talk at her faculty, which I finally did in spring 2014, more exactly April 15th.

I have to admit that I was curious how many people would show up the afternoon before Easter holiday, especially because the lecture was not required for the students, but I was positively surprised. The auditorium was fool of people, mostly students but also faculty members: teachers in mathematics, music, pedagogy and visual art. Next astonishment: No phones, no computers, nor hiding behind the screens - the student showed full attention. I could feel how this act of respect and trust that I was given strengthened my self-confidence. The expectations reflected in the faces of the audience made me even more engaged.

I told them how important eye contact end body language is for children and students of all ages - in the same time as my body verified my words. The communication was immediate and the positive energy was flowing back and forward: the audience was motivating me, so that I could motivate them back. So, when the applause broke loose, I must say that it was the audience that deserved at the least the half of the cheering. The applause sounded suspiciously similar to what you hear on rock concerts - a kind of applause a teacher only can dream of. Nevena later commented that she was afraid the students were about to light their lighters and phones to glow in the dark. And I felt like I was supposed to go back on stage and repeat one of my songs – though I did not sing that afternoon at all…

No wonder, after this experience meeting my students back in Norway was a bit disappointing. I don’t like to say this in public (though I am quite sure that these specific students will never bother to read my blog, even though I did ask them to do so). I have to make explicit that I am not saying that students in Belgrade are more engaged than students in Vestfold, but I am saying that some groups are more engaged than others; Some student groups develop to be more engaged and positive than others, and some groups unfortunately bring the worst in each other.
 
Something obviously happened during the hour “on the stage” on Belgrade university. On the other hand, some of my own students never gave me a chance to share with them my research, but with anger and disrespect stopped me before I started. After a few attempts I actually gave up. When their virtually asked “Why do we have to be here, when we would rather do something more fun? Why are you bothering us – listening and reflecting is so hard!”, I felt like drawing under a heavy wave of discouragement and disengagement. Why should I bother when they don’t? I know, I know… because I am responsible for the teaching. But I don’t believe that anyone can be thought if she/he does not want to be thought! What do you think?
  
One thing I am sure of is that teaching and learning are much more meaningful, fun and long-lasting if each student and teacher invests own share of positivity and respect, and responsibly contribute with whatever they can bring to the context. A friendly smile is a big contribution.

Hiding Just Enough

We sometimes hide, but want to be found. My niece Ana demonstrates how one can hide just enough. She does not want to vanish – so she does not cover all of her body with the duvet. She does not want to risk not being found. The two year old is begging to understand the game of hiding and the privilege of deciding where and how much one wants (and needs) to hide.

My game is different - actually it is not a game but serious business of research – but my imagination finds some similarities between Ana’s and my activities. While preparing for conducting qualitative interviews, I have been thinking about how to present myself. I fully respect my interviewees, I do not plan to be dishonest and would never do anything to harm them, but they do not have to know everything about me and my research. A trusting relationship is important. Interviewees needs to feel comfortable in order to uncover their believes, feeling, thoughts and ideas, but if the relationship become friend-like wouldn’t that make my interviewees tell me what they assume I want to hear? I think that there is nothing wrong with being friendly, curious, attentive and caring, but I should not tell them about my hopes and expectations.



I am not worried about my misinterpretations during the data analysis - I am more worried about that I can come to say and do during our “momentary meetings”(Aspelin, 2010). A facial expression that only takes a millisecond can decide further development of our conversations. I know myself: if I experience that someone is uncomfortable I can start bubbling in a supportive way in order to restore their confidence. My most important homework is to prepare to constrain my talking and I find this difficult particularly because I care about my interviewees and I feel responsible for their wellbeing, especially because I had invited them. (The one who invites is responsible for paying the bill, I suppose.)

 

Redrawing from talking is not a question of honesty, is it? What if I just hide a toe or my left shoulder as long as the rest of my body (including the heart) is fully present? Ana’s examples function as helpful instructions. Thanks Ana! - Your playful ways of approaching the world trigger my reflections about things you probably never thought about.

Aspelin, J. (2010). What really matters is 'between'. Understanding the focal point of education from an inter-human perpective. Education Inquiry, 1(2), 127-136.

Bodies Communicate Attitudes

I am in Urbana again, a guest of University of Illionis and a Fulbright scholar. In 2010 I spent seven weeks here and really enjoyed the possibility to be a part of the large community of researchers where is always possible to find someone who shares my ideas about the arts, teaching and qualitative research. However, on my way to Urbana I found someone with similar interests even before I had sat my foot on the American ground. On the plane from Stockholm to Chicago I found myself sitting beside one of such people I had so much in common with! Strange coincidence, isn’t it?  We did not know about each other and before we could start our five-hours-long conversation a few other coincidences had to take place: that I placed a book I hoped to read in the pocket in from of me, that this was a book Walter Gershon (that’s my new friend’s name) recognized the book (Nachmanovitch, 1990: “Free play. Improvisation in Life and Art”), and that he did not hesitate to ask: Why are you reading that book? That is how the most interesting conversation started.

We spoke about learning in arts, we found out that we knew some of the same people and that we used much of the same literature. Somehow we begun to discuss body-language – possibly I started to talk about my horse, or Walter started to talk about his classroom interactions with teacher students. It really does not matter what we started to talk about first, in my body-mind all of my experiences, professional and private, suddenly merged; I suddenly realized how my recent interest in communication between humans and horses was relevant in understanding of communication between human.

Pay attention to how the horse trainer’s leg movement is copied by the horse. (The photography is owned by Heidi Lysdahl - the horse trainer).

Walter was talking about his experience how the inner attitude, respect and determination to lead a group of students easily gets perceived by the students; I was thinking about the course in horse-human communication that my horse and I recently attended, and how the teacher at the course (slightly intimidated by my horse’s inner strength and teenager attitude) stood still before she entered the space where the horse was running freely - She said she was working on her inner strength; Horses are extremely capable of detecting such inner strength and would adjust their attitudes accordingly. When we relate this to teacher training, a teacher student might think that it would be easy just to learn how to stand and by that control a class of young students – however this is not simple at all, particularly because it is not possible to fake. You really have to mean, end fell and know who you are and what you stand for. If you want to influence your student’s attitudes, you will first have to get to know yourself and work on your own attitudes.

Today (November 18th) I am giving a lecture that touches upon a similar issue: To be good teachers we have to know our attitudes about teaching and learning. To be good teachers of young children we need to know how they learn - And this is something we can learn from them. The title for my talk is “What Can Young Children Teach Us About Learning?”



The image of me and the horse is from Meg's Riding Academy in Homer, where I've been learning western riding style.    

Attention to the other

If we are not alert to the changes in environments and contexts, we might fail to react in a proper way … like looking to wrong side when crossing a road in England, not being attentive can have fatal consequences.

This summer I had possibilities to observe a horse and a donkey. However, the two animals also had a chance to observe me and read my body language, and I’ve heard they are so good “readers”. Horses have extraordinary ability to interpret body language horses and humans and this kind of attention can save them from being eaten by predators. Attention seems to be a necessity of survival and a very early way of learning from the others.

My little niece, nine months old, is attentive to her surroundings. She touches and grabs what she can reach. Once she was in my arms, we were sitting on a floor and a cat was lying next to us. With her bare foot the girl was touching the cat’s tale. Knowing that this cat could suddenly jump and use his claws, I was alert to its movements. Unfortunately I was possibly too alert: when the cat lifted his head, I quickly moved the girl away, rotating my body about 20 cm to the right. Nothing else happened, the cat just looked at us, but my reaction really scared the girl. My body movement communicated danger and she detected that. I wanted to protect her, but scared her instead. She was screaming and could not calm down until her mother came from the other room.

This reminds me of something Stern (2003) wrote: how young children often observe their mother’s body language to find out if something is dangerous or not. Young children seem to learn through this kind of first-hand experience mediated through care-givers’ body language, and I felt bad because I did not want to teach my niece that cats are dangerous animals. I can of course not know how this experience could influenced her understanding, however, to comfort myself I imagine that she has learned about the importance of being attentive to body language of other beings.

  
Stern, D. N. (2003). Spebarnets intersubjective verden (Ø. Randers-Pehrson, Trans.). Oslo: Gyldendal Akademisk.

Against Seat Belts

On one of my plane trips I happened to sit beside a two year old girl and her mother, more precisely: I was sitting by the window and the girl was sitting (or supposed to sit) between her mother and me. It took some time before the plane was ready to take off, and the girl had enough time to explore the foldable table, her toys, colourful crayons and books. The time seemed to pass very slowly and the air was hot hotter inside the plane. Fearing for the girl’s reaction to the unavoidable seat-belt-tying, the girl’s mother was waiting as long as possible before she finally had to attach the belt around the girl. The girl protested. The mother then tried to place the girl on her lap and use the special seat belt, but the girl kept protesting more and more loudly. 

The mother desperately tried to talk to the girl and get her attention while she was struggling to hold her on her lap. The girl seemed to engage all of her muscles in order to get free. She was expressing her discomfort through loud screams and cry, and was persistent in her resistance to sitting.

Only a half meter away, I could not avoid noticing the desperate struggle of the mother, and looks from the people with their well-behaving children. I could not avoid hearing the girl’s cry, which was louder than the plane engines, “ear-hurting” …. and heart-braking. During these long minutes I kept switching my points of view: an irritated passenger, desperate mother and frustrated girl.

I observed the stressed flight attendants and glances of people who were sending toys in hope to calm the girl down. I tried to imagine the mother’s experience: feeling sorry for her child, feeling guilty for disturbing the passengers as well as for being so hard with her daughter; I observed the girl: she was like in trance and did not seem to pay any attention to other people and things, but her own embodied experience. That her mother did not respond to her wishes seemed to make her not only sad, but devastated. What possibly hurt her most was that she could not understand why she had to be tied down – and there was no way to explain in way that could make sense to her.

I felt compassion for both the girl and her mother, and in the second the girl’s eyes met mine I weaved to her to come and sit on my lap. I don’t think she could hear me through her screams and sighs, but she somehow understood my body-language or the facial expressions and accepted my offer. Her mother helped her over to my lap at the moment the plane was taking off, and the girl almost instantly fell asleep. Deep sighs remained for the following 30 minutes. The little body, soaked in sweat and tears, glued to my clothes… and to my heart.

The image: http://madsiers.com/tag/babies-on-a-plane/

Meeting the Audience

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…

Expression or Communication?

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…

Caballo

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.

Something between

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.

Pedagogical documentation in “Hide and seek”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Facial expressions of symbol-using beings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Making a language of friendship

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…

Experience Lost in Words - ?

On Friday the 3-rd of April, I had a day-long meeting with my colleague Ann-Hege Lorvik Waterhouse from Oslo University College, Faculty of Education. In our projects we both deal with young children (0-5 years old) and argue for the importance of children’s experience with the three dimensional world around them: I focus on children’s play with materials, and Ann-Hege on their experience with sculptures. Beside discussing different challenges in choice of research methods, genres of writing etc., our conversation touched on something I kept thinking about: What characterizes a child’s pre-linguistic experience? Are there significant differences in human experience before we are able to verbalize the experience, and after?

Kieran Egan speaks of humans as “creatures whose understanding of the world is profoundly shaped by our particular kind of bodies and senses” (Egan 2001). In the same article “The Cognitive Tools of Children’s Imagination” he writes that: ”…literacy has psychological costs as well as the more obvious benefits” (Egan 2001). I suggest that one such cost is that we, during the process of naming objects and qualities around us, somehow stop giving attention to our senses. Can our “mature” ability to name objects and categorize them in taxonomies hinder us in exploring details and qualities the way small children do when they experience an object for the first time? (See for example “Sharing a nacho”, published 14.02 on this blog page.)

Egan explains that young children first learn words that are opposites, and later fill the gap between the opposites. “Once they have formed an opposition, they can learn other terms along the continuum between such opposites.” I believe that learning the other terms is possible only if the environment offers a spectre of qualities, and if the people (pedagogues) in the child’s environment acknowledge the importance of such learning. As Elliot Eisner wrote ”… the ability to experience qualities requires more than their presence. Experience is a form of human achievement, and as such it depends upon an act of mind; qualitative experience depends on qualitative forms of inquiry” (Eisner, 1991)

Ann-Hege and I watched a video from the pedagogical context where two children explored different types of clay to value the best for their sculpturing. They had never played with any type of clay before. The materials in front of them had different (and surprising) visual and tactical qualities (some of the clay had been dried, some put in water, some shaped in geometric forms etc.) To begin with, the girl and the boy had problems with explaining their experiences, but they commonly used metaphors, songs and imaginative stories to describe the clays’ qualities. After the hour of exploring, the simple word “clay” they knew before the activity, would never again be enough to capture the diversity of qualities they had experienced.

Unfortunately, there are probably people who would turn up their nose at a lump of clay, call it “dirty clay” and leave it untouched…. if they one day found it on their office table…

References:
Egan, Kieran (2001): The Cognitive Tools of Children’s Imagination, paper presented at the Annual European Conference on Quality in Early Childhood Education, Netherlands
Eisner, Elliot (1991): The Enlightened Eye, New York: Macmillan Publishing Company

Complexity of Communication

My group of PhD-students at The Oslo School of Architecture and Design attended a course “Schoolarly Chritisism II” on the 9-th, 10-th and to 11-th of March. We prepared to present and critique a relevant PhD thesis to our fellow students/“opponents”, answer to their questions.

The thesis I presented was written by Marit Holm Hopperstad and is about children’s meaning-making through drawing in classroom settings. The drawings she peresented were results of inter-subjective, multimodal meaning-making because the children spoke to each other and negotiated meaning in each other drawings. Verbal and visual communication forms supported each other. (The goat drawings are form one of my kindergarten projects - made by the same boy before and after a close examination of the goat that had visited the kindergarten that day in 2005.)

The presentations were leaded by the professor Halina Dunin-Woyseth. With her broad competence in research, supervising and teaching she easily recognized what we needed to know more about, she gave us some “tools” for better understanding, and suggested relevant books. With her accommodating and recognizing way of communication, Halina made the discussions in to enjoyable, motivating sessions that stimulated my reflections and curiosity to learn more.

Some educational settings are more fruitful than others. – Why? Being a teacher on teacher education, I often ask this question... I believe that “successful communication” is important for learning. All those small smiles, acknowledging nodding and eye-contacts that are a part of a multimodal communication, are powerful signs of respect and interest that can make an educational setting flourishe. In opposite, if a teacher is authoritarian, uninterested or bored, his attitude might infect the students. In the cases where teacher and students are more equal and show respect to each other, the communication seem to be more fluent and productive (in educational terms).

Understanding is influenced by expectations to each other, activity in the communication contexts, relationship between the persons and their roles in the situation. (Here I refer to Michael Halliday’s functional linguistics, the way my colleague Eva Maagerø describes it in her book “Språket som mening” (2005) – Language as Meaning.)

To illustrate the point about expectations and roles, I’ll tell you about my personal experience, where cultural differences additionally complicated the communication. The example is from a kindergarten project where parents were invited to contribute in the activities with children. The man I’ll tell you about was a father to a four years old girl (besides being a father to five older children). They were refugees in Norway, but he had learned to speak Norwegian at worked at a pizza restaurant. In this communication context a group of 15 kindergarten children stood in form of him in the kitchen of his pizza restaurant, while he was showing them how to make Arabic bread. Four and five years old children were curiously watching him putting different ingredients into a large mixer he had placed between them on the floor. The children, usually energetic and loud, how were completely silent. We had agreed that he was to tell the children what he was doing, but he might have been a bit nervous, and remained silent himself. To help him start talking, I asked him: “What is that?” He stared at me for a second, and then fetched another ingredient. I got impatient and worried – didn’t he remember what we had talked about during our preparations for this activity? I repeated: “What’s that?!” He looked at me again and said: “What’s wrong with you!? You know what this is!!”



His answer made me instantly understand that I didn’t succeed in my indirect way of communication. I had taken it for granted that he knew that I didn’t ask him stupid questions to get answers for my self, but that I wanted him to tell the children. I took it for granted that his understanding of communication with children was the same and mine! I academic communication I’ll have to know better than to expect others to have the same position and understanding as I do…

In communication through written texts, and academic writing, the chances to fail are larger - I wouldn’t even be able to see the facial expressions on my reader’s faces, and wouldn’t even know if they fell a sleep whiled reading my theses! To prevent this I will have to imagine them and have them on my mind during my writing process...

Dealing with a multidisciplinary study, in my imagination I’ll have to create different audience from a variety of fields that I touch on to. This worries me! Will I succeed in addressing different fields of knowledge that obviously have different relationship to genres and ways of writing, language traditions, use of concepts etc… Will I be able to organize my article based thesis in a way that different articles, published in different journals in different fields, fit in the same thesis?

The critique of the thesis presented on the Schoolarly Chritisism II has shown me that there are many possible ways of writing an article based thesis. But there are also many limitations I should know about – at least I should know about my own limitations…