Case (for) Studies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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?

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!

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?

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?

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”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Facial expressions of symbol-using beings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A young photographer’s point of view

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

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

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

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