Moving the Bricks Around

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

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

ECEC-research and Policymaking

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


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

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

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

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

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

Arts Teaching Conference in Larvik

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Expression or Communication?

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

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

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

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

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

Supervisor Worth Gold

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

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

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

Not strong enough

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Targeting at Quintain

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

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

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

Negotiating Grasp

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

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

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

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

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

Tikalalala and other first words

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

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

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

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

Caballo

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

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

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

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

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

Just busy with writing…

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

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

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

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

Jump with care!

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


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

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

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

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

The Craft of Aircraft Construction

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

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

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

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

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

Constrains – natural necessity for growth?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just how much resistance do we need?

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

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

Birmelin, Immanuel: Undulater, Cappelens kjæledyrbøker

Oh… It’s alive!

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

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



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

Experiencing Environments

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


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


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

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

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

Interests Support Experience

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

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

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

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

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

The Research Days

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

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

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

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

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

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

Without experience – How would you know?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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