Old Blog in New Gown

Last month or so the text number 100 was posted here. Today’s short post is a kind of celebration, also marking the blogs fourth birthday. I think it deserves a little attention – a kind of meta-reflection.
 
Even though I do not write here as frequently as I wish to, it is amazing how keeping a blog in itself motivates my attentiveness and in deepens my curiosity. Knowing that many things around me might qualify for a post, actually makes me look for possible themes, observations and reflections I could write about. It sharpens my attention.

Some time ago I got a pleasant request to translate and customize some the posts from this blog for a Norwegian magazine for early childhood teachers called Barnehagefolk. They were especially interested in short stories about children. I was flattered!  Even though all Norwegians understand English, I am happy to make my stories more available for Norwegian audience. Selected texts from this blog are converting to columns on pages 6 and 7 four times a year. http://www.barnehageforum.no/magazine.aspx?magazineid=1

Writing in English (my third language) has been challenging and instructive, and when I decided to publish something in Norwegian (my second language) I fell like that was going to be really easy. But it is not. Writing in another language also means that audience will be different and this requires considering more than translating the words. A part for the column writing I’ve been busy with writing a textbook on the basis of my dissertation. The dissertation was written in English and the textbook in Norwegian, and there are many other considerable differences between the two. I get a bit impatient when I spend too much time at the same page – especially when I realized that the book is already on sale! Look here: http://www.universitetsforlaget.no/boker/boker_som_kommer/katalog?productId=70380756  A translation of the title would sound like this: “Grasping with Body: Children’s experiences as basic for all learning”. So, you should know what I am up to if I don’t show up at this blog so often…

Among Books

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.

Supervisor Worth Gold

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)!

The Bricks of Urbana-Champaign

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!

About the PhD-project Sculpturing Words

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