the people garden

amazing post about children and risk by jeff johnson

2012-01-10T09:45:00.001-05:00

Jenny Cable at Let the Children Play let me know via twitter about this amazing post by Jeff Johnson over on his blog, about children and risk and how they need it. Super great, and perfectly relevant to my own studies. Awesomeness. Thanks Jeff, and thanks Jenny! Check it out!

Nerd Out!

dearest all y'all - happy new year!!

2012-01-10T09:38:00.000-05:00

I think that if I ever had any readers occasionally looking at this thing, they have abandoned it as my posting is so sporadic. I'm continuing to do it though, because I still think it's interesting to document this crazy journey I embarked on. I have made some small changes to the blogs appearance to reflect I guess my own changes and processes.

It's hard to believe, but I will shortly be entering the final semester of my Undergraduate Degree in Early Childhood Education.

It's been an amazing, surprising and fulfilling experience, I have to say. Last semester was a very intense push, maybe the hardest one yet, as I crunched through some heavy coursework, worked on three different research projects, AND did all kinds of applications for going on to different kinds of schools. My favourite would be the Yeates School of Graduate Studies in Early Childhood Studies at Ryerson, where I can continue to look at some of the stuff that's gotten into my head over the last few years - play, risk, playgrounds, kids autonomy and other stuff like that. As I have increasingly become more and more wickedly nerdy about this stuff, and I'm not really finished thinking about any of it, I'd be delighted to keep on keeping on for a while.

So, there. That's what going on right now. I'll post again soon about this semester, to outline what I'll be up to and what's interesting. Until then - NERD OUT!

new blog to watch out for

2011-10-28T17:27:00.000-04:00

Sean Frey, performer and designer, has just started a new blog. He's worked with Jumblies Theatre for the last 6 years.

photos

2011-10-26T21:21:00.001-04:00

I have been thinking a lot about ethics - up to my earballs in research projects as I am, and I decided to take down a lot of the really awesome photos I'd posted of the kids and the work we did together in Inukjuak. I really wanted to share those images with a folks, but more than that I want indigenous children to be in control of images of themselves. We are fed so many types of images, not under our control - by taking these photos down I want to give more control to the kids depicted in those images, and the beautiful work they created. There are still a few up - ones that are general enough that they don't wrest control away from the people appearing.

So much to think about!

nerd out!

research

2011-10-26T20:55:00.000-04:00

well folks...it's been a long time.

I've been running for a while now - last year was my third year at Ryerson in the ECE program, and it was deeply rewarding. I found a pretty big love of research, and got to put it to good use.
As I've posted before, I worked with Dr. Jason Nolan (part of our ECE Faculty) as a research assistant at the interdisciplinary research lab he directs, called the EDGE Lab. I did that for all of last year, and then got to run my own research project last summer when I got back from the Arctic, looking into Adaptive Design and the way people learn how to do it.

As the new year scooped it's way around, and I started back up into my classes, I got a nasty surprise. I had carefully set up my fourth year internship in an ACTUAL SCHOOL, to see what that was like - only to have it fall through when my police record check didn't arrive in time. I had to re-evaluate not only my semester, but my whole year, as not being able to do my internship this semester had some pretty major impacts on my academic timing. As you'll soon see, however, it all worked out for the busy busy best.

So - I re-evaluated and decided to do my internship in the spring semester, in a big block. It works better that way in a school setting anyway - since you're with the kids everyday and can build better relationships with that kind of time - but what that means is that I can't go back up to Inukjuak this year. Which will be hard, but Clea will go instead of me, and the continuity will continue in some form.

With no internship this fall, I was looking at having a leisurely academic time - until my profs heard about it, that is, and dangled in front of me some of the most un-pass-up-able carrots in the form of several fascinating research projects. Instead of working at an amazing school with amazing educators and kids, I'm the project manager of a pilot research project about outdoor play in child care centres, helping out as a facilitator and consultant on a project designing a game about privacy WITH CHILDREN AS CO-RESEARCHERS, on top of the ongoing research at the EDGE Lab about Adaptive Design and that sort of stuff. Yikes - but fun.

I got to go to Seattle to present on some of the stuff we've been thinking about and putting together at the EDGE Lab a couple of weeks ago, and got to meet my admitted hero Teacher Tom. My colleague and I spent a great afternoon with Tom, his parent co-teachers and the pre-K class - exploring boxes and scooter and super awesome floral beads that expand in water. It was a really wonderful time - oh, and the conference was pretty good too - although I did cause a bit of confusion for some folks, who were surprised that an undergrad was hanging out and presenting. I used to live in Seattle, many years ago, and got to see some very good friends that I hadn't seen for 10 years. That just made the trip amazing.

When I got back, I had to leap into a whirlwind of activity. I've decided to keep on keepin' on with this ol' academia thang, and am going to do graduate studies - but in keeping with all the re-evaluation that I've been doing this semester, I took a hard look at the plan I've been holding steady on, and threw it to the dogs. What I've realized is that I really like research, and I want to keep doing it. So - that's what I'll do. I'm gonna look into doing research about the things I'm really fascinated by these days - my favourite things that I've learned about during my courses in my undergrad and in doing research at the EDGE Lab. All our exploration about play and learning and learning environments, and autonomy and risk and child rights - they're all coalescing into some fun ideas that I want to keep chasing. Soooooooooo - that's what I'm going to do. I'm kinda thinking about looking into how children learn in informal spaces that they make for themselves - playgrounds and backyards and parks...oh my!

Anyway - more on that soon. I'm Mr. Poster Infrequently, so we'll see what soon actually means. Maybe I'll get back on here and tell some stories of what's going on in my crazy wonderful courses this semester!

Nerd out - :)

Children and Tech Series - the penultimate post - final exam question

2011-08-28T12:23:00.000-04:00

How much meaningful learning can one course have?

The breadth and depth of learning I’ve experienced in this course is kind of astonishing. I feel like I came into the course with an inkling of what the potential for learning using technology might mean, and I’m leaving with a tremendous host of skills and tools to use, not only in early learning contexts but in my own learning as well. This course hasn’t only given me practical tools and examples, but I’ve also been able to explore different ways of thinking and looking at both technology and learning.

Over the course of this class I watched myself loosen up a bit with technology in a way that I haven’t previously. Not only did I begin to game outside of class, but playing around with different media, programs and games in our labs really helped me to see the potential in different gaming environments and virtual worlds. Having been staunchly ambivalent about technology previous to this, I feel like I know have a much better sense of what makes good games, good online worlds, and good media environments. When I say good, I’m referring to virtual and online spaces where people, students and otherwise, can use technology to understand the task and themselves more clearly. This course has really helped me to unpack what kind of things are important to have in situations that foster authentic learning. Spaces where people become engaged with what they are doing and are able to make it their own are “good”. These “good” playful learning spaces are environments that people not only inhabit, customize to their own specifications, and take ownership of, but they also reinforce the transference of those characteristics and behaviours outside of that particular environment to other contexts and activities. Playing World of Goo, getting to know Flickr a bit better, and the truly transformative play that I experienced playing with Scratch – all that playing really helped me understand how to take ownership of virtual spaces, what made a game fun AND something that fostered questioning and learning, and how to think critically about technology and especially educational technology and evaluate it for fun AND learning potential.

Another really important thing I learned in this course is that it’s not as much what (although I will argue in a second that that is also important) but how technology is engaged with in a learning environment that makes the difference. In the first chapter of Jonassen, Howland, Marra & Crismond’s Meaningful Learning with Technology (2008) – ironically the last assigned reading in this course – the authors outline the basic requirements for meaningful learning. I deeply appreciate the clarity with which these characteristics are laid out for us. If the learning is intentional, active, constructive, cooperative and authentic, then it is meaningful (Jonassen et al., 2008). I really love this, because it incorporates some things that are dear to my heart – participation, child-directedness, engagement, reflection – elements that I feel are key to learning. I find myself now applying that criteria to other things, using that criteria to evaluate whether something is meaningful, whether it is technologically involved or not.

Reflecting on our readings and lab explorations helped advance my understanding regarding how the shapes of things influences how we learn. By shape, I’m referring to the expectations, hidden curricula, implied attitudes and assumptions that go into the environment and very architecture of the various games, online spaces, institutions and relationships that we engage with every day. Grimes’ Prezi presentation Playing By (and With) the Rules (2010) helped extend my thinking on commercial entities creating commercialized spaces to create commercialized children. Nolan and Bakan’s article Social technologies for young children: Cultural Play with Songchild.org (in press) about using the Web 2.0 user/producer phenomenon to engage children and educators back into the production of their own musical culture helped me think about how users can be incited to produce their own material by exploring the content of online environments and applications. Sharples, Davison, Thomas & Rudman’s excellent and thought-provoking Children as photographers: an analysis of children’s photographic behaviour and intentions at three age levels (2003) helped me think about how the limitations and affordances built into the structures of the tools we use influence our experience with those tools. To be honest, however, it was experimenting with Scratch that really got me going, though.

It seems to me that every element that went into the designing of both the Scratch program and the Scratch online community was thought through to bring about the most empowerment, the most community-building, the most collaboration, the most exploration and experimentation, and the most meaningful learning possible. From the intuitive construction aspect of the programming language, where creators can build programs using blocks of commands, to the sharing and downloading capabilities that the online community site affords, every aspect of Scratch reinforces the collaborative nature of it’s mix/remix approach to cultural production, learning and fun. The more I played with it, the more impressed I was with how democratic the whole thing was. I loved that I learned the basics by watching tutorials made by and with kids. I was entranced with how easy it was to incorporate new self-generated material into the already existing matrix. Most powerfully of all, the ability to download other peoples games to see how they put them together and apply that knowledge or those very codes to your own work, reminded me very viscerally of my own explorations as a child of two mechanics. My parents would hand me a broken object (I most remember an old fashioned wind-up brass alarm clock) hand me some tools, and I would take thinks apart to see how they worked. In the climate of advanced electronics we live in today here in North America, I find it fascinating that that kind of tinkering exploration has transferred in a way INTO the technology we can no longer take apart, without a lot of know-how. Scratch, and programs like it, create a bridge to take that physical tinkering into the virtual world. It was crucial for me to learn that that was possible, and how it was possible.

I could go on and on. The emphasis on meaningful learning in this course, and what that means, has seeped into many other aspects in my life. I think in new ways, about new things because of this course. I’m excited about blogging, and exploring blogging with young and preliterate children. I’m interested in how learning can make us more generous, and how technology and the shapes of things can promote generosity in people, and children in particular. I’m entranced by the idea of combining democracy and fun in play and learning, and overwhelmed by the potential for meaningful learning through technology. I feel like I’ve only really begun to learn, and that’s great. Thanks, Jason.

Words: 1140

References

Grimes, S. (2010) Playing By (and With) the Rules. Accessed at http://prezi.com/um0qdu9exxnp/playing-by-and-with-the-rules/

Jonassen, D., Howland, J., Marra, R., & Crismond, D. (2008) Meaningful Learning with Technology. New Jersey, Pearson Education, Inc.

Nolan, J. & Bakan, D. (In press). Social technologies for young children: Cultural Play with Songchild.org. Accessed at http://tinyurl.com/859rn8

Sharples, M., Davison, L., Thomas, G. & Rudman, P. (2003) Children as photographers: an analysis of children’s photographic behaviour and intentions at three age levels. Sage Publications 2(3). Accessed at https://cld419.blog.ryerson.ca/flickr/

Children and Tech Series - Post #12

2011-08-28T12:21:00.000-04:00

community building through technology

In my previous career, I prided myself on my ability to help build community. As a community artist, working with students in schools, kids in afterschool programs, and community members of all ages in drop-in situations and other venues, I thought a lot about using different artistic tools and media as bridges to bring diverse people together. My background in this work has biased me towards a collaborative form of working and learning, towards a certain openess and tendency to share. All that experience has been incredibly valuable in early learning contexts and the other educational contexts that my new field of early childhood education has put me in. It has also deeply informed my engagement with interpersonal dynamics.

However, it wasn’t really until I started studying my new field that I began to use technology as a means really build community, to look at technology in a critical and thoughtful way and choose to use it as another community building tool. I began a blog called the people garden in my first year of ECE here at Ryerson, and that’s where things changed for me.

I had kept blogs before, but they had been primarily archival and documentary in nature – a holding place for my work as an artist. While I was building the people garden, I set out one day to see if there were any other blogs out in the blogosphere that were by and about men working in early learning contexts. I was lucky, and found two key blogs that began a process of what’s now become a global community building project for me. I found Look at My Happy Rainbow, the blog of a male teacher reflecting on his surviving and enjoying his first year as a kindergarten teacher. His stories were warm and funny and interesting, and made me very excited to be a guy working with kids. I also found Teacher Tom’s blog – and felt like I fell down a rabbit hole. Teacher Tom’s writing about his work in a lab school in Seattle was a revelatory find, and I wrote him and told him so.

He responded, and we kept a loose dialogue going on each others blogs and via personal email messages. The more I read, and as I developed as an educator, I realized that Tom had become a mentor – a cyber-mentor – to me, and has inspired me on a continuous basis to be the best educator I can be.

Through Tom’s blog, I have connected with other bloggers working in our discipline, all over the world. I now am connected, professionally and personally, to educators in Australia, the US and Canada, to a Canadian teaching in Belgium for a year, and a host of others. I have been able to weave a virtual community, not dependent on geography or space, but instead on interest and passion and inspiration.

The profoundly transformative potential for community building using technology happened, and is still happening, to me. Before it did, I never even considered it as a possibility, and I’m pretty grateful for it.

Children and Tech Series - Post #11

2011-08-28T12:20:00.000-04:00

making meaningful music – return of the authentic voice and songchild.org

Music, and culture, was something people created in their communities everyday. With the commodification of culture as consumer product, children are growing up learning that culture and music is something created by people for money and purchased by the rest of society. Songchild.org, a project emerging from the Faculty of Early Childhood Education at Ryerson University, has as one of it’s goals a working towards the reversal of this trend. By using the democratic mix/remix cultural tools of Web 2.0 (folk-production), the aim of Songchild.org is to help people, and in particular children, create their own music and culture again.

Nolan and Bakan’s (In Press) article Social technologies for young children: Cultural Play with Songchild.org outlines the reasons why Songchild is coming into existence, and it’s goals and aims as a cross-cultural multilingual tool for emancipatory democratic cultural folk-production. That last sentence is so dense – what I mean by it is that the article talks about how Songchild.org wants to be a virtual place where kids of all languages and backgrounds can make their own music and meaning, and play with the concepts of autonomy, production, culture and democracy.

The voice of children is notably lacking in our day to day society, both culturally speaking in a broad sense and in online Web 2.0 spaces. This has to do with the skill levels required to access extant cultural production interfaces and a real lack of online spaces that are unmediated by commercial intent, but mostly have to do with a prevalent societal attitude that discounts children’s voices as valid and important, that does not recognize children as people or citizens, and that relegates children’s voices to a limbo of immaturity and inexperience.

Another really important issue is addressed in the article as well – the fact that teachers are products of “the commercialization of experience and institutionalization of learning” (Nolan & Bakan, p.8), and have a hard time seeing outside of that paradigm to the importance beyond product, goal, achievement and purchase. Educators are given packaged curriculum and standardized testing, and the very cognitive shapes of the institutions of public education can make it extremely difficult for teachers to create change and emancipatory spaces in their classrooms. That is why the democratizing elements of the thoughtful use of technology are so important. And, likewise, the democratizing elements of making meaningful music.

The participatory nature of Songchild.org, the cultural production work it could foster, the leveling of the playing field of musical creation, and most especially the “haven for the authentic voice of childhood” (Nolan & Bakan, p.10) it could provide make it a wonderful example of the potential for virtual spaces to be excellent learning spaces for young children, where they can develop the skills to be engaged citizens reclaiming their voices.

Children and Tech Series - Post #10

2011-08-28T12:19:00.000-04:00

feedback, assessment, authority, control and meaningful learning…oh, and a bit of Scratch

Chapter 10 and the Epilogue of Jonassen et al.’s Meaningful Learning with Technology articulates some interesting ideas about how technology, and using technology as a learning tool, can/will influence and change how learning happens.

I’ve posted before about my interest in reflective learning, and these readings really generated a lot more thinking. Since the midterm exam, I’ve been thinking about how digital technology and blogging could be used as a tool for reflection, documentation and communication in an early learning context. In my imagination, I see the ideas in Chapter 10 and in the Epilogue really fitting in with that thinking.

We know that standardized assessment doesn’t address the actual learning that students do, and that performance or authentic assessment which looks at the processes that students undertake over long periods of time gets far closer. Using technology – say something like a blog – as a portfolio, communication tool and archive in a classroom would be a great way to promote self-reflection, encourage autonomous learning and decision-making, provide a venue for constructive multidirectional feedback, and create an easy record for assessment use. Having it be a collaborative effort among all students and educators, who would choose to post examples of work, photos of classroom activities and other classroom artifacts together would further enhance the engagement and democratic elements of the technology as a learning tool.

In a constructivist/constructionist learning environment, where students are engaged in their own learning by getting involved in process that are meaningful to themselves, teachers have to give up some of the authority they traditionally hold. If the teacher no longer dictates what the students will learn, but holds a space open for students to create their own meaning, then the learning environment has become a very different place than what is usually seen in typical classrooms everyday. An educator engaging with learning in this way becomes “…not an arbiter of knowledge but rather a coach who helps students engage in a larger community of scholars.” (Jonassen et al., 2009, p.242) Technology, when worked with and engaged with critically and thoughtfully, can help carve out that kind of democratic space, create places for authentic feedback and assessment to occur, and build classrooms that are fun and interesting places where children learn.

To bring it back to Scratch – so interesting to contrast the ideas inherent in it with these ones. Scratch is so open source – the fact that you can download and upload so easily provides an amazing venue for feedback and peer-to-peer assessment. The Scratch community organized around the Scratch website where all that sharing is taking place engages in very democratic, anti-authoritarian process JUST BY PLAYING WITH SCRATCH. The very shape of the programming language and program itself lends itself to meaningful learning. That’s what’s really exciting about the convergence of all of this for me – the fact that the very shapes of things help us grow more into the kinds of learners, and people, that we want to be.

Children and Tech Series - Post #9

2011-08-28T12:18:00.000-04:00

scratch, generousity and learning by taking things apart

Interesting things are brewing in my head as I play with Scratch. At first bewildering, the lego-like programming language of Scratch has become increasingly intuitive – which is crazy. Is this the way code-monkeys begin to think, once they’ve mastered more complicated programming languages. It feels like I’m just fitting pieces together to make a well tuned machine hum to life.

It’s pretty amazing how much is available in Scratch – and how generous the project is. Generousity is something that I’ve been thinking a bit about in terms of technology, and the ideas we’re visiting in this class. Technology, while being a consumer product and accessible only to those who can afford it, has the remarkable potential for built-in democracy and generousity. I think about the Facebook phenomenon of oversharing, and how we could reframe it as a human response mirroring the information overload provided by the Internet. Don’t we reflect our environments? The Scratch social networking site – where people upload the projects they’ve made with Scratch and publish the scripts that run it for everyone to see – is also an incredibly generous space. Learning by sifting through other peoples code is a really amazing way to figure out how to work the initially confusing array of things you can do with Scratchtasticness.

For me, it was a game called Egypt Pyramid, done by a kid somewhere and uploaded to the MIT Lifelong Kindergarten Scratch site for all the world to see. I downloaded Egypt Pyramid, not because it was a similar game to what we wanted to build, but because there were a lot of script and I wanted to learn how it had been done. It was really amazing.

By looking at someone else’s work, shared through a generous understanding that we often learn by what could in one way be looked at as copying or stealing, and in another way be seen as standing on the shoulders of giants, I felt like I gained some seriously deep understanding of how to work with Scratch. The rules became intuitive, the movements fluid, and it was after taking apart Egypt Pyramid and another game called Lemonade Stand that I felt strong enough in my understanding to start building our own. It was a powerful feeling – and also an interesting take on collaboration, copying and learning by doing.

In the first Scratch game I made, I used images and sounds provided by the program to see what I could do based on what they had. I used what I learned from my colleagues – the designers of Egypt Pyramid and Lemonade Stand – but not their specific codes. It was easy to see how to do what I wanted, which wasn’t anything like what they offered up in their own programming, after taking their games apart to see how they worked. It felt like I was tinkering in the best sense of Gever Tulley and Teacher Tom.

That’s my idea of meaningful learning. Well, one of them.

Children and Tech Series - Post #8

2011-08-28T12:17:00.000-04:00

flickr – communicating with images

Continuing my exploration with Flickr was a pretty interesting experience. I took some photos, and uploaded other photos of mine that I thought captured a little of what we were after – a child’s perspective and a child’s sense of why and how we capture images.
In reading Sharples article – I found it profoundly interesting that children were discovered to have completely different values around images, image making, and authentic photography. This quote from the article talks about how, like in drawing and writing “…children develop their own distinctive content and styles of representation that are not simply immature adult forms, but are signs of their abilities, interests, concerns and perspectives…” also in photography (Sharples, p2). Over and over again, it is clear that we short-change children’s understanding and like to believe that they are far less sophisticated and complex thinkers than they actually are.

I vaguely remembered reading on an ece blog about children taking photographs, and having a particular perspective. I was able to dig back and find it on Allie’s blog Bakers and Astronauts – http://bakersandastronauts.blogspot.com/2009/05/young-childrens-photography.html. After that blog post, she began to post kids photos regularly, and their visualizing was always really incredible. Examples – here, here, and here , and then Allie led me to this site – where a four year old (well, now she’s seven) named Adie is documenting herself with her Polaroid camera.

Really thought provoking stuff. How does documenting your experience change that experience? Having gone through times in my own life where I needed to document my work or experience because of archiving needs or artistic vision, I have thought a little bit about what looking through a lens at the world, or even just thinking about looking through a lens at the world, does for reflection/self-reflection/overthinking. I think I captured the whole spectrum there in that last bit! With photos, we can reflect images back at the world; reflect on our own vision, mind, thoughts; and we can get stuck in a place of too much reflection, where we are too critical and pick it all apart.

The apparent flexibility of digital media helps with all of this – upload, edit, change, archive, archive editability…the mutability of documentation, where we used to RECORD events for permanent perpetuity. I say apparent flexibility, because I’m unsure about that flexibility. I have a nagging suspicion that once you upload something to the Internet it’s there forever, whether you change it or not…archiving gone wild. The communicating/community building aspects, however, are really interesting. Flickr allowing you to connect with contacts to see their photos and ‘stories’ and ‘lives’ is an amazing feature.

I am so fascinated by the idea of using digital media to promote self-reflection in young children. And this leads me to my last thought for this post – a response to Jason’s suggested thinkings. How early is too early for children to interact with these kinds of technology? A googlesearch on the topic calls down an avalanche of conflicting opinions …don’t expose your kids to computers, get them in early, introduce them along with other tools of expression like pencils and paper and crayons…there doesn’t seem to be a definitive answer. I myself feel like at least limiting screen time for at least the first two years might be a good idea…

Children and Tech Series - Post #7

2011-08-28T12:16:00.002-04:00

design and visualizing with tech

From my work in art, I have a lot of experience communicating with images. It often felt like a form of telepathy – taking an image from your vision and directly transmitting them to someone else. It’s a whole other way of talking – without language getting in the way.

By incorporating digital technologies into the mix, technologies like digital cameras and the Internet, you get a whole new way of communicating quickly and simply across language and space. Chapters 8 and 9 in our text talk about design as a new literacy, as the literacy of the 21st century. To contextualize learning in a constructivist/constructionist framework means seeing learning as a design process. My own background as a designer biases me towards seeing that all around me, and my thinking is already skewed in that direction. It’s actually pretty exciting to think about.

In doing these readings I worked hard to try to keep the issues I mentioned above in mind. Why do we visualize? What are the tools traditionally used, and what are we using now? Our text has different examples of digital and online tools used to visualize object before they are built (programs like Pro/Desktop and SketchUp), create music with composition software (programs like Impromtu and Musical Sketch Pad), and new media design creating animated “microworlds” to learn programming and organizing skills (programs like Scratch). My own experience and bias, however, lead me to use pencil and paper, or even just the materials that I’m using themselves (cardboard, etc.) to create mock-ups or test objects – securing me more fully in my ‘digital immigrant’ status.
It’s just easier for me to use the tools or material that I’m familiar with and have years of experience using to visualize and create models with. So, while digital tech may make it easier to communicate my ideas across language and space, the tools that I prefer to use to work out those ideas aren’t digital. I have to go to other tools, like cameras or video, to take that next step, and to access the bridging effect that digital media can provide.

Which is a good lead in to my beginning attempts at Flickr exploration, and images on the Internet. It has become incredibly simple (and common) to use the Internet as a virtual storehouse of images and ideas. I can easily search something that I’d like to look at, can’t visualize, or don’t understand – and get a visual image (or a lot of them) to help me understand more. Flickr comes with a community aspect to it as well, which is really interesting, blending visualizing tech with sociable tech in a way that holds a lot of promise. Good thing we had two weeks to explore it!

Children and Tech Series - Post #6

2011-08-28T12:13:00.002-04:00

google – part 1
Sunday, February 13th, 2011

Here is my first post on Google. I’m delighted that we’re exploring it for two weeks, and am really curious to see what comes up for people.

As a precursor to this post, I put up a video I found on Youtube about the potential for a Google conspiracy. I posted it for all the groups in the class, and am very curious to see the responses. Some folks have already responded, which is great. We’ll see what others think.

My own take on it, and with most conspiracy theories is this – if someone is going to take the time to track my every move on Google-related internet interfaces, and target me with advertising or map my genome, let them. I am not that interesting, or important, a person for it to be worth the effort to do so. I am a little surprised by the whole idea, actually. It makes me really wonder about how much privacy risk I am really under.

If someone targets me with advertising media, I am going to apply my critical-thinking superpowers to the situation and do what I normally do, which is ignore the ad anyways. If someone wants to map my genome – go for it. What for? And why would they?

To be honest – I regret posting the video the way I did – without any critical preamble saying “do you believe this?” or “take this with a grain of salt” or “for more fear mongering, watch this”. There is a danger on the internet, and it’s in taking everything we find there as truth and NOT applying our superpowers to them.

Back to Googleland – which I enjoy, regardless whether or not they are trying to map my genome to make a huge artificial intelligence or not (a whole other story – Singularity, anyone?). Having recently switched over to gmail so that I don’t have check 18 different emails at once (slight exaggeration), I have been exploring and been shown some of the truly amazing things Google has developed. After trying to figure out what PageRank was about for 45 minutes straight, and still not really getting it, I’ve decided to concentrate on the things I do get.

Google Docs are wonderful things, designed to allow for instantaneous knowledge sharing and creation. They are great collaborative tools to, as you can simultaneously work on one with a group of people (frustrating and/or inspiring – depending on how much of your work gets scrapped or changed i guess). Learning about Boolean searches and Google Scholar have been a real boon too, for school stuff. But the most exciting Google product so far that I’m using are the awesome email alerts.

I’m in placement at the Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care, which is an advocacy group working to make child care actually supported by the government in Ontario. Part of my work there is to know what folks are saying about child care all over the province. Google offers this search thingy that will email you directly to your gmail account email alerts about specific search terms. So I signed up for one that searches “child care” and “ontario” and have gotten A LOT of great articles from all over the province about peoples thoughts, ideas, feelings and responses to the child care situation in Ontario – SO AMAZING.

If that helps Google map my genome – oh well.

Children and Tech Series - Post #5

2011-08-28T12:12:00.002-04:00

Hacking and making your own safety
Monday, February 7th, 2011

The video Hacking Human featuring Michelle Levesque is really really great. And so is the Stranger Danger article. They intersect for me in thinking about the policing of thinking, and cultural policing in general. We all buy into the dominant culture to a certain extent and work within it’s restrictions to get that thing called life done, and so to a certain extent participate in a form of cultural policing – this is cool, that is not, this is popular now, I make my decisions based on these ideas that I heard about…it’s kind of the way that cultural cohesiveness is maintained.

However, what we don’t want is our tools policed in a non-transparent way. I really like the emphasis Levesque put on transparency in her lecture. If we are going to have institutions creating structures within which we construct our meaning (and we are, there just isn’t much of an escape from that) we need to make sure that those structures are built right, with as open and honest policy as possible. We need to know what is being blocked/censored/monitored for us, and we need to agree to it. Transparency is key.

Thinking about transparency on a larger scale makes, in terms of large cultural systems of value and information sharing and education and political ideologies etc etc etc gets me thinking about transparency on a more personal scale – parents and kids and families. I’m doing a lot of reading and thinking about safety for my Major Research Project, and so I see how all this stuff applies. The more we box things in for our kids, and for ourselves – the more restrictions we build into our systems – the less empowered we are to make our own decisions, or have conversations with our children, or do things and our thinking for ourselves.

Which then brings me to hacking culture, and forgive me for rambling all over the map with this one but the goal is to tie it all up together by the end – when we feel empowered to do things for ourselves, and learn the skills we need to know to be able to do what we want, we are participating in the broadly defined hacking culture that Levesque spoke about in her lecture, and that Nolan, Raines-Goldie and McBride (2011) talk about in their paper. When we have a conversation with our children about how to take care of themselves when navigating the Internet sea in their awesome little submarines (it’s back!), we aren’t only helping them to learn and empower themselves and encourage them to stand on their own two feet and live their own lives, but we are also deflating the ideas that skulk around in the shadows of culture that tell us that it’s just so unsafe out there.

The statistics are down. The climate has changed. Things are actually way more safe than even when I was a kid, not so long ago but longer than for a lot of my cohort participating in this blog. Yet, our cultural policing, and those shadowy fearful ideas are constantly whispering to us that there is danger everywhere, that our kids are at risk and incapable, and that we need to protect and be vigilant and relay on others to create our own safety.

When instead we should be working to make our own culture of safety, ourselves

Children and Tech Series - Post #4

2011-08-28T12:10:00.003-04:00

WORLD . OF . GOO !!!…and can you speak-ah the lingo?
Monday, January 31st, 2011

Oh my goo-d. I can’t believe how much fun World of Goo has been.

I have to limit myself folks – seriously. I could play on and on and on…I have to admit that I had so much fun that I went on to purchase the rest of the game, so that I could take a look at what the rest of the world looked like.

That is a big component of games for me – exploring the world. I was talking to a novelist friend yesterday who was telling me about how writing a novel can be like holding something very large and alive, something with a lot of surface tension and viscosity and solidity, and I started thinking about games in the same way. The way the creators make a whole world, and then release it to the masses. And this is some of the important discourse happening around games right now (and probably always) – the made worlds’ confines as opposed the the open-source, co-created worlds’ diffuseness. The container of the made world allows for only certain things to happen – like not being able to scale certain terrain, steer certain things but not others, or interacting in prescriptive ways (hello drop down menu!). However, on the other side we have the intimidatingly openness of co-creative projects that sometimes seem like they have no limits, and things just get lost in the Twisting Nether. I don’t have any answers about this by the way, just observations and wondering.

But it leads me to think about communication, and communication through technology. The fears society has eloquently and excitingly (and hilariously, gorily) expressed in Terminator films and Technozombie cults of Borg may be a bit overwrought. I have faith in the body, in the hand, and I think we may be experiencing the rush of excitement that ALWAYS happens when something novel enters society. Technology may not be replacing face-to-face. It may only be changing it for a bit.

Communication in the 21st century looks like it’s going to be about literacy, and a broadening of that term (and of the term language) to encompass a lot more than we may be able to express right now. What if novels become multi-sensory collages of written text, holographic adventure, audio-video clips and visual material? What if letters shift from written to a mix of written, recorded, transmitted and visual snapshots or vid clips?Are we on the cusp of something giant and new, or are we expanding with the surface of the bubble of novelty til it pops?

There is no question that technology has changed communication – I can now skype with my parents in Nova Scotia every day, for free if I want to. However, I love what the text said about illiteracy in the 21st century – being not about not being able to read and write, but about learning, unlearning and relearning (Toffler, as cited in Jonassen, Howland, Marra & Crismond, 2008).

Children and Tech Series - Post #3

2011-08-28T12:10:00.000-04:00

Continuing on with the posts (ages later) from my Children and Technology" Course. Want to get it all up before school starts!

Internet submarines and coherence in writing
Monday, January 24th, 2011

Chapters 2 and 4 of Meaningful Learning with Technology by Jonassen, Howland, Marra & Crismond (2008) focused on the issues of information literacy and production. Technology offers us many ways to amass and interact with information, and also to produce works that are hopefully informed, creative and relevant.

The Internet is a vast sea of information, and you really have to be intentional about how you navigate it’s waters. An image of some kind of exploratory vessel, like an amazing submarine kept coming to mind as I read through Chapter 2, which is basically about learning effective ways of exploring the Internet and how to use it as a learning tool. Key to this is the basic premise of having clear ideas of what you’re looking for, why you are looking for it, and how you’ll use it to create deeper understanding for yourself and others. This demands real critical thinking, a hot topic these days and for a very good reason. Critical thinking is a learned skill that we aren’t really helping children learn – and Chapter 2 highlights why critical thinking and engaged learning are critical issues that need to be supported starting as early as possible.

While the Internet can provide an amazing and interesting arena for critical thinking and engaged learning to happen, it takes some pretty involved and skillful scaffolding on the part of teachers and educators to make sure that learners develop the basic tools so that they can make their own submarines to help them navigate their way through the endless Internet soup. I wonder about what shapes this could take in early learning environments – with and without computers – and I’m excited to think more about this and hear what people have to say.

Chapter 4 is really about writing, and how technology can support developing good writing. I believe that it can, but again it’s something that necessarily requires skillful scaffolding on the part of the educator to help hone learners skills and get the rules of good writing down into practice. The ease with which online web publishing makes it for people to get their writing out there for an audience (myself included) doesn’t guarantee that good writing is a given. Quantity is not quality, and practice doesn’t make perfect – you could just be practicing bad writing over and over again.

The great thing about web publishing, and the chapter talks about this, is the ease with which writers can now share with peers. This is awesome, as it allows writers to work in a collaborative way not really experienced before in history. Writing has been predominantly seen as a solitary craft – but sharing your work on the web for intentional collaborative editing is an amazing opportunity to draw the author out of their silo and hopefully find a supportive community with which to develop their work. This relies on the quality of the interactions with peers, and is again something that needs skillful facilitation.

I need to research Poetry Forge more, cuz it kinda scares me.

oh wow!!!

2011-08-12T08:03:00.001-04:00

2 kids and a nanny review every park in Manhattan - this is so wonderful - want to do it in Toronto!!!! yippee!

Check out NYC Park Hopper - so great!!

Plus - here comes school again - with the hope of slightly less sporadic blogging. Will finish the things I started.

soon again - nerd out!

Children and Tech series - Post # 2

2011-06-28T16:15:00.000-04:00

a brief history of tech and noah

Monday, January 17th, 2011

My own experiences with technology began early – when I was little I wanted to be a “scientist”. Not that I actually had a good handle on what a scientist did, but I was informed by cartoons, Star Wars and comic books – where “scientists” used technology to save the world multiple times on a daily basis. I wanted to go into space, meet aliens and fly around with robots.

My dad worked as an aircraft technician for Air Canada for 27 years, and was a carpenter and builder in his spare time. Technology as tools, and as something you work with were present through him throughout my childhood. My mother went back to school and also entered a technological field by the time my sister and I were in middle school. She studied robotics at a local technical college, and became one of Ontario’s first women industrial robotics technicians. They would have conversations at the dinner table that would totally mystify my sister and I.

Computers were a bit different. I was in Grade 5 when the first PCs were introduced to schools – we had two boxy Macintoshes in the school library, that got used for games and “educational purposes” but were mostly ignored. Friends had Atari systems, and we would play with them sometimes. My real introduction to the home computer happened through my grandfather, who gave me his old Commodore 64 when he upgraded to something else, and now I could write things, play arcade games and most awesomely print things out at home. I played a few games for a while, but found that I mostly got overstimulated from them and pretty well stopped playing them.

Even though my parents were technological at work, my sister and I could program the VCR far better than them. We were adolescents and teenagers in the time before cellphones, but we would’ve been ahead of them on that curve as well. It’s funny how the tech generation gap was so present, even in my very technological family.

In middle school, I realized that the more interesting aliens were here on planet earth – namely other people – and became less focused on being a “scientist” and started seeing art as the outlet for my creativity. In high school, I specialized in theatre, and learned a battery of technology specific to that discipline. A lot of what we had in school was dinosaur material (even at that time) and we were well aware that we were learning techniques on machines that were obsolete in the field.

Before I came to Ryerson, I worked as a professional artist for 14 years. Technology was even more important, as a means of documentation through photos, video and audio data; word processing and editing for grant writing, archiving and evaluation; flexible ways to save and present previous work and projects in progress; networking and collaborating with artists in other places – and a gazillion more. Technology just keeps on growing into my life. I bought my first computer (a Mac) and won’t look back.

Children and Tech series - Post # 1

2011-06-28T16:13:00.000-04:00

Learning like knitting – blogging, self-reflection and making meaning together

Saturday, January 15th, 2011

In reading Alex Halavais’ (2006) article assigned to us this week, several wonderful things jumped out at me. In clear, readable prose, Halavais outlines the development of online publishing and weblogging, and the potential blogging has to create flexible learning spaces.

Now, this is really exciting. I have maintained blogs for several years – mostly to keep records and to reach out to others about the work that I’d been doing. My latest blog has mostly been a way to document my development as an early childhood educator. It has also become a place of learning as I connected with other early childhood educators blogging all over the world. Not that I’ve actually updated it in a while…What Halavais is talking about in much of his paper is a much more immediate version of this – students expanding and enhancing their learning through the use of open, online publishing as part of coursework they share.

The self-reflective aspect of blogs is I think enhanced by the fact that you’re writing for an audience – you write for yourself, but/and you become part of that audience. That is a really interesting notion – that in your self-reflection you take yourself out of yourself to watch what you’re doing. Now, some may argue that this is a less authentic experience, but I think as long as it’s articulated and conscious (the way it is and is formalized through the structure of blogging) it avoids becoming navel-gazing, especially when open to an audience. That constant integration, back-and-forthing over your ideas, behaviours and practices moves away from the “disposability” of our school-type learning – it’s gone after the exam and no longer relevant to our lives. When that self-reflection gets shared, especially in visually documented formats such as online web publishing, the potential for discussion and self-reflection is even greater and learning is bound to increase exponentially.

The immersive, engaged vision of learning presented by Halavais in using blogging as a collaborative tool is really great. As he states in his paper “…to learn by becoming a member of that community rather than by learning about that community.” (p. 8) reminds me of debates in Research Methodology class about compete participant and participant-as-observer methods of data collection. The difference here is the transparency, and how exciting is it to watch the development of your own mind, growing with others.

Halavais also raises an interesting point about the mentor/apprenticeship form of learning. I really like thinking about learning about anything as learning a craft – coming from my arts background this isn’t so surprising. But the way that we argue about the “dehumanizing” aspects of technology could be reframed using a “crafting” lens. Looking at using technology as a collaborative learning tool as a craft could reintroduce a “done by hand” aspect to our technologically mediated education. Equally interesting would be a reframing of ECE as a craft – how cool would that be?!

lax lax lax!!

2011-06-28T16:06:00.000-04:00

I have been so bad at posting - even tho I really wanted to get the bloggyblog up and rolling again.

I took a really interesting course last semester that sucked up some of my blogging juices because we had to post to a class blog. The course was Children and Technology and opened my eyes and brain and was a great, thought-provoking learning. I'm going to transfer those posts on to this one, and that way will transfer some of that thinking into a more public sphere.

My colleague at the EDGE Lab also suggested that I blog about the great books and things that I've been reading - such a great idea so I'm going to try to do that too.

Here goes - back at it.

Nerd out!

a few more photos from Inukjuak - masks!

2011-05-20T10:15:00.001-04:00

Because the storage building was frozen shut when I went to get our plaster face forms to make masks, I needed to improvise. I picked up some cardboard at the Co-Op and some spare boxes that were around the school and built a whack of mask 'frames' for the kids to choose from and build on. These are the documented results. woot!

mask frames

making them

this is how they'll go.

The May long weekend fast approacheth, leaving us less and less time to get ready. Last night we hammered out the ending of the story. Today we'll begin rehearsals, and we'll work on the set over the weekend. More photos to come about the process but I'll leave you with this one.

nerd out!

some more photos from Inukjuak

2011-05-19T13:22:00.001-04:00

Hi folks

I wanted to post some photos of the insanity happening up here the last while.

I'VE TAKEN THESE PHOTOS DOWN.

More to come on the masks we've been working on the past couple of days. The show is fast approaching, and even though things can be brutally depressing in the world today, I've somehow made it back to a place where I'm feeling that the imagination of young people is the only thing that'll get us out of the mess we're in. And that makes this project really valuable indeed...

nerd out.

well HELLO there, winter!

2011-05-09T12:47:00.002-04:00

Let me just get this over with - this was what it looked like yesterday when I went on my walk.

Ummmmm. Brisk, yes. Springtime - not recognizably so.

I have been here for a week, and what a week it's been. Unbelievable full and busy, lots of organizing and getting my feet on the ground. The program is popular again this year - with a bunch of kids returning and bringing along some new kids too. On friday we had 29 kids - which is one less than we had all month last year. That feels pretty great.
We worked on paper plate masks, played some theatre games, got used to working together as a group and taught the new folks what kinds of things might happen and are expected. Here are some snapshots of those processes.

Ahhhh, paper plate masks. So versatile, so fun, such a good way to ease into puppets and masks. We worked on simple interactions as our mask characters, and laughed a lot.

And now - no post about the North would be complete without gratuitous snaps of tundra life. Here you go.

While it is really amazing to be up here, and I feel lucky that I'm familiar with some of the aspects of life in the North, being up here is pretty challenging. I'm staying with a teacher at the school, and am friendly with many of the teachers up here, and run the program in the school (this year I'm sharing the classroom with the Survival teacher, who takes kids out onto the tundra on excursions and teaches them both modern and traditional techniques of hunting, fishing and living on the tundra in all seasons. He is amazing and taught me about caribou matresses last week) I get to see a lot of how the school system works here in Inukjuak. Having been immersed up to my eyeballs in educational theory and the critique of educational systems in particular this year, I am really struggling with the way things are implemented in the school here. It's hugely complicated and involves historical, cultural, political and educational dynamics that I'm not equipped to plot out clearly in a itty-bitty blog post today, but suffice it to say the school system is limited and doesn't really even attempt to work with the kids it is supposedly serving. Teachers do the best that they can, but are working against a dizzying array of extrinsic and intrinsic obstacles - and when I think about it too much I wanna throw up. So maybe I'll stop.

There are some great aspects to the school here - the fact that from Kindergarten to Grade 3 classes are taught entirely in Inuktittut to help preserve and promote the language, and the way special programs like ours are supported and welcomed in. However, with the weight of history, oppression and exploitation leaning heavily on a system that's not that responsive to the needs of the kids and community, the school up here is kinds of a majorly depressing place. Thank god for the kids, is all I can say --- they do the best the can and are often smiling and happy to engage with our art and goofiness.

I feel pretty lucky to be up here, all in all. People are welcoming and there are a number of teachers here from last year, so we get to reconnect and reknew friendships. The tundra is as captivating and breathtaking as always, the air scouringly clean and chilly, the sky either opaque with glowing clouds that do funny things to perspective or startlingly luminous blue. The sun is HOT and somehow feels closer, amidst all these fields of snow and rock.

Tonight we're going to start making rod puppets - I think that these will be our main form this year - and I'll let you know how that progresses. If you want to, you can also follow our goings on on facebook at Nunavik Theatre Arts Program http://www.facebook.com/pages/Nunavik-Theatre-Arts-Programs/117799471576298

This is where I'll leave it today - struggling with my overactive brain. Hope you're all well and enjoying the sunshine wherever you are!!

Nerd out!

unbelievable

2011-04-30T08:41:00.000-04:00

Spring is sproinging all around me, and last night I packed up my parka, big insulated rubber boots and other snow gear cuz I'm flying up the Arctic!!! Tomorrow!!
Today I take the train from Toronto to Montreal...it's all a bit surreal.
Here we go! I'll keep you all posted as to the goings on, like last year.
Nerd out - noah

oh my, life is certainly spinning by...

2011-04-23T22:38:00.000-04:00

Here I am, studying for my final exams of my SIXTH semester into this adventure, and I can't really believe it. How did I get here - so fast?
This year has been ridiculously busy, and isn't going to stop being so for a little while. While the school year is winding down, with two exams this week, I head back up to Nunavik next weekend. Not much rest time for me! It's ultimately good, no great - and the tundra will be incredibly restful, and it'll be fantastic to actually work with kids again, which isn't something I've done much of this year...but it also would've been nice to have a leeeettle bit of a break.
I gotta quit whining tho - come on!! I get to go back here!!!

How can I complain?

So so so so so so much to think about - my courses this year covered a pretty wide continuum of subjects, from assessment for programming to various methods and applications of research to health promotion and community and development. I took a course with Jason, the prof I'm working for as a research assistant, and got some excellent thinking done as well as some quality playing with things like Scratch from MIT's Lifelong Kindergarten project and the open-ended environmental/anticonsumerism game of World of Goo.
All this to say - I've got a lot to think and write about while negotiating my elongated winter up North, and I can't wait to share it!
Nerd Out, more soon

The Girl with the Brown Crayon makes an eye in the storm

2011-03-18T10:29:00.000-04:00

I have written about Vivian Gussin Paley before, here and here. I even already quoted the passage that I came to the blog today to quote, but I'm going to do it anyways-
"I too require passion in the classroom. I need the intense preoccupation of a group of children and teachers inventing new worlds as they learn to know each others dreams. To invent is to come alive. Even more than the unexamined classroom, I resist the uninvented classroom." p 50 in The Girl with the Brown Crayon.
I finished The Girl with the Brown Crayon (for the something like fourth time) this morning on the streetcar on the way here. What is remarkable, and inspires and excites me to keep at school so that I can GET MY OWN CLASSROOM, FINALLY is the intense and profound things that happen in Kindergarten. So much learning, so much discovery, so much thoughtfulness documented in Vivian Gussin Paley's writing. Her self-reflection is a balm.
In the hurly-burly of this semester, with research projects and work and IEPs and working here at the Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care, reading this stuff is really good tonic - the long perspective Vivian Paley brings to her writing helps calm me down.

very smart - Hara Estroff Marano on over-invested parents and brittle kids

2011-03-11T10:35:00.002-05:00

Hara Estroff Marano is the Editor-at-Large of Psychology Today in the US, and in this fantastic interview talks with Australian broadcaster Richard Fidler.
Lots of great stuff talked about - letting kids have a childhood is now a revolutionary idea.
She talks about the importance of play, contemporary interest in learning, helicopter parenting and children building resilience through bumps and bruises, scrapes, mistakes and failure.
She's pretty awesome!

Nerd Out!

schooling the world - the film

2011-03-08T19:44:00.000-05:00

inching towards readiness

2011-02-06T22:49:00.000-05:00

The past bunch of months have been busy ones. I have been snowed under with, starting last semester:

big, giant assignments in each of my courses
and then exams
and then ridiculously busy holidays
and then the start of school all over again for the new semester

I was barely able to get a breath in there, but things are now coasting in a way where I can reflect and research again, and that feels great. But whoops! Did the bottom ever fall out of this blog for a while.

So, this semester is also busy. I am taking the second half of our research class, and doing a wonderful project on perceptions of safety and how they affect kids' outdoor play, with some stellar group-mates. There is the assessment course where we are focusing on authentic assessment, tools, and critiquing "standardized" testing - it's awesome. I start the week off with a 3 hour class on children and learning with technology, very fun and very profound - with the prof that I'm working on the research project(s) with (thank you Jason), where we are writing our own blog with all the whole class of 40-odd ECE students. It isn't public (yet) but there is some REALLY interesting thinking coming out of there.

I got kicked out of a class due to timetable conflicts (not rabble-rousing) on children in society, and the only class that worked was a class about health promotion and community development on Mondays at 6.30pm, making that day super-long. I was dreading that class a bit, but then it turns out to be absolutely dynamic, interesting and thought provoking filled with great people and a great prof. SURPRISE!

And last but certainly not least - its placement time. I am spending two days a week this semester at the Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care - an advocacy group working to secure real, necessary funding for child care in the province. It is REALLY CRAZY AWESOME, and I harken back to my activisty days in Montreal and Seattle etc. I'm 4 weeks in to placement and have already written a Student Outreach and info guide, edited a booklet on greening child care centres, presented to other ECE students about the role of advocacy, taken on the organizations publications, and helped a bit with coordinating the province wide community forum tour that the OCBCC is conducting to get people revved up - it's a provincial election year, and we need to make sure that the government starts REALLY funding child care. It's just ridiculous, the state we're in. More on that maybe later - ELP, the new Early Learning Program that gets all 4-5 year olds in the province into kindergarten (sweet!) is gutting child care, as a lot of those kids used to be in child care centres, and without the support of their fees centres are freaking out. It's pretty nuts.

Back at school, I have a seminar once a week for that too. On Mondays. It's silly.

Work at the lab is also fun, but I'm not going to write about that now, because this is already long enough and no pictures. That's too bad.

Here's one of Conan, that I used in my post on our class blog about children, the internet, hacking and safety.

protect us, conan

So...that's what's been keeping me busy. It feels really great to put words up here again. Hope all is well with anyone who might read this - best to all those awesome friends I made oh so long ago when I was posting more regularly! Hooray for blogging!

Nerd out!

oooohhhh - like a little sleeping bunny buried under an enormous pile of research notes, schoolwork and readings

2011-02-04T10:35:00.001-05:00

friends.

It has been several, several months since I last tuned in to this part of my life, the documenting part.
Well - never fear, I am returning. Not like you've been waiting...but I have been gently asked by a couple of friends when I was going to post next. I appreciate the helpful nudge folks, so I am on my way back to the blogosphere with o so many tales to tell.

But not this second, as I am at my community research/policy year placement at the Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care stealing time while I write this excuse. So I ought to get back to it. Never fear, I will return soon with pithy observations about my adventures in school, learning, education, play and small developing humans and all that goes with them.

see you soon!

really, I promise.

Nerd out...ooooof!

oh dear bloggy mcbloggersons...

2010-10-30T23:18:00.000-04:00

I have neglected this poor ole bloggy in the face of a giant tidal wave of SCHOOL. Exhaustimacating and awesome in equal parts - work school and life have been keeping me super busy.

Things are still interesting - have discovered the work of Kieran Egan and his merry band of Imaginative Educators. That was super exciting, and I was staying up late into the nights reading his revisioning of schools and cognitive tools and super cool school transformation instead of reading politics and literacy and families textbooks...well that came back to bite me in the butt, as midterms crashed down up me, and I scrambled to prepare. Truth be told, I did pretty good, juggling assignments, scholarship applications, exams and meetings with the research team, as well as handling an incredibly festive Canadian thanksgiving where we made our yearly Mount Vesuvius tofu volcano. This year, my dearest friend Andrea was here and we took it up a notch and did a whole diorama, with the tofu volcano erupting mashed potato lava covered in cranberry sauce, flowing down onto a forest of steamed broccoli with raisin people fleeing the destruction.

So - I've been a little busy. Our sweet friend Nicole took a bunch of photos for us, which are pretty wonderful.

I must say, school this year is a crazy rollercoaster of onslaught compared to the last two years. However, I'm eating it up like dessert, because I am a nutbar.
I wanted to show you this.
Little posts of teacher inspiration.

I have been thinking a lot about engagement recently - how to foster it, what are the key ingredients...kind of exciting as it feels like something I want to sink my teeth into and think about for a good long time.

Ok. I will post more regularly - things should quiet down a little bit. It's time to say goodnight, as I've been wrestling with a paper about private money in public schools all day. Enough - sleep sweet and see you soon again.

Nerd out!

gifts and wrestling

2010-10-05T16:11:00.002-04:00

These days, I am consistently amazed and grateful at the wonderful incredible quality of my life. I am head-over-heels with my crazy, human situation.

First - school is awesome. I have 5 full-time fascinating courses, all with really engaging instructors and thoroughly interesting and challenging material. Second - my new job as a research assistant is kind of like the coolest amusement park ride, mixed with a collaborative project and some fabulous philosophy. The project that I'm involved with is part of a much larger one called the Experiential Design and Gaming Environments Lab, a cross-disciplinary collaboration involving folks from three different universities, from a whack of different sectors (technology, DIY, social economics, gaming, new media, early childhood ed & development, hacking, disabilities studies, etc, etc, etc). Everytime I go to work I hang out with exceedingly smart people and have wicked-cool, INSPIRING conversations. My work there is hilarious, and has so far involved learning to play Farmville (to explore social media), having in-depth conversations about co-construction and autonomous learning (to work out what our themes are for the project I was hired to work on), organizing cardboard (for the adaptive design lab and workshops), and playing with (learning how to use) an off-the-shelf brainwave monitoring device that Dr. Jason (the prof who hired me and a pretty awesome amazing guy) got off the internet to study biomapping. So many brackets in that last paragraph!

It feels like there are so many situations and conversations and people who are like gifts in my life right now! So, my brain and heart are being regularly kicked into overdrive, but in a good way. I have noticed that my critical thinking has picked up it's pace, too. I have started to wonder about school and teaching and the edu-crisis that is smacking North America upside the heads. I have thought about teaching styles and why I love direct instruction (it's like candy to me) but don't think it's an effective way of helping folks learn...and that's just it. I have started to think about helping people learn, instead of teaching people. That's a wonderful, fundamental change that feels really good.

Anyways - I wish I could post the gazillion things that are rushing around in my head right now - things like:
- how can we create learning environments that foster autonomous learning in a school system that is so authoritarian you have to ask to go to the bathroom?
- what is the role of technology in learning, now that technology is becoming more and more inseperable from everyday life for a lot of people on the planet?
- who has access to good educational opportunities, and what can we do about the folks who don't?
- do schools work? Teachers sure do - HARD! So what's creating the oncoming educational crisis?
- imagine teaching kids in early learning environments that asking questions was one of the most important things they could do - how would that change a lot of things about school, society, inequality etc?
- with technology becoming so prevalent - what are schools going to look like in the future?
- how can I make the greatest playground in the world?
- games and learning - bringing play back into education, don't just stop playing once school starts...
- does there have to be a struggle between 'natural' and 'technological'?
- authentic learning, collaborative innovation, asking questions - how do you inspire people do deeply engage with these things?

These and another million things are pummeling my brain. I feel so lucky to be wrestling with it all...

Nerd out for now

oh my '80s

2010-09-25T12:03:00.000-04:00

I never realized how much I'd been influenced by Whitney Houston.

Soon more, but right now I just have about 500 pages of politics to read - and I'm not even behind in my readings or anything.

nerd 0ut

yowza! year three in full swing

2010-09-16T12:49:00.000-04:00

Hello there -

Third year is going full-bore already, and we're only in week 2! Yipes!

Got some interesting courses - a families course that focuses on diversity, ethnicity and culture; a politics course looking at well-being and opportunity; a literacy course where we'll learn instructional methods and theories of literacy, as well as get to explore a lot of good books; and a year-long Research class, with Methods in our first semester and Applications in our second. Each class has a bucket of reading, and a couple of projects, but if I keep on top of it all I think I'll be ok.

Add my Feminism in Society class, a professionally related course, to the load, and that's some heavy-duty academics. I'm going to be reading and writing and thinking 'til the cows come home, and I haven't seen them for ages.

So, of course, I'm psyched, being the silly little nerd-lord that I am. But I ALSO just got a pretty super job - I'll be working as a research assistant on a project in the ECE department that sounds wicked-cool. The project will be looking at how kids interact with technology and sociable media practices, and how those interactions influence their learning and socializing...I think. The prof I'm working with is zany and inspiring, and I have yet to meet the rest of the team, but I am pretty excited about the whole thing. Hence, the post down below of the thought-provoking TED talk about child-directed, technology mediated learning.

By this little TED talk alone, I'm not convinced that this is the bright new future of education. However, it is really interesting to think about how incorporating sociable technological learning tools into social, constructive classrooms facilitated by thoughtful, nurturing teachers might invigorate learning.

Anyway - I gotta get back to those books...more for sure soon!!!

whoa

2010-09-16T12:30:00.000-04:00

Ok - this is pretty crazy. It sure has got me thinking...

Nerd oUt, peeps.

the octopus's garden in Victoria

2010-09-07T16:10:00.001-04:00

We were brought to this totally AMAZING playground in Victoria on Vancouver Island while we were out there - I have become increasingly fascinated by outdoor play, playgrounds and outdoor learning environments since Teacher Tom bent my brain around some great ideas (and here, here and here) and I found Arcady's blog. Irresistible Ideas and Let the Children Play have also been huge sources of inspiration and fascinated reading and wondering.

So check this out - Octopus, Salmon, and Cadborosaurus concrete climbers and a huge boat playstructure, all poised on the edge of the beach looking out onto the Pacific. AWESOMENESS.

I mean, it's practically heaven. I wish that I was 10 years old and had had all day to hang out here, climbing and playing and seeing how deep the Octopus's arms went under the sand. Ridonkulously great.

If you're out in Victoria anytime soon, go check it out - it's super-fun.

Nerd OUT on the playground

Summer summary and the first day of school

2010-09-07T15:55:00.000-04:00

woot!! Today was the first day of school - yeeehaaawww! As I rode my bike downtown to Ryerson to start my THIRD (gasp!) year of this degree, I saw a ton of parents walking their kids to school all the way through the neighbourhood. It got me so excited!

So, today's class was Research methods, and I think I'm going to like it a lot. The prof is very human and approachable, and also the first male prof I've had in the Early Childhood Ed. department. His name is Bob Rinkoff, and he's from a developmental psychology background, and his research right now is focused on outdoor education and children in mountain wilderness environments. Pretty awesome, as I've been getting excited about that kinda stuff too - playgrounds, adventure learning, outdoor schools and classrooms. Zowee.
Anyway, it seems promising.

The summer went by so fast - I can hardly believe it. Oh! I promised some more photos of the end of Snail Trails Camp - here they are:

So - Snail had a Carnival to celebrate the end of camp, and we had a lot of different carnival-esque activities for everyone to get involved in. This is a photo of the giant snail that Alison and I built with the kids - 2 x 4s and screws, duct tape and sheets, and the head is made out of foam core.

This giant Snail really wanted to play on the playstructure...

...and looked really wonderful after the kids and their families applied beautiful colours to it's shell...

We put food colouring into spray bottles - and we used the same thing to do another activity, our Spray Snail...

...this activity ended up looking like this...

...so colourful!

We also had another fun activity, using squirt bottle paints on big snail forms. They were pretty fun, and ended up looking fabulous!

Some other cool, but slightly random things that we did at the end of camp were these - check it!

and...the mixing bin!!! It grows real grass!!! Just add kids and water!

I feel so lucky that I was able to work with the kids and educators at Play and Learn - I learned so much and felt so good, and it got me really thinking about playgrounds and outdoor classrooms and learning and ...well, the list just goes on and on. It was super-duper.

What a summer - first being up in Inukjuak, remember that? Look here, and work your back if you don't remember. Then Snail Trails. Jam packed goodness.

Then, when Snail Trails Camp ended, I got to go on holidays! The greatest holiday ever of my life so far. First I was in Nova Scotia with my parents, and then all the way across the country to B.C. visiting friends and family there. I came home feeling soooooooooooo relaxed and recharged, and psyched for school.

And so here I am and here it is - just a quick little look at my summer. More real soon, cuz I want to show you this amazing playground we found in Victoria.

Nerd out!!

empathic civilisation - what we're working towards in early childhood ed!

2010-09-05T15:16:00.002-04:00

Watched this AMAZING video on TEDtalks (love it!) and was blown away at how it fits so deeply in with what we're trying to do with the education of young people. Lots of interesting things to think about and some great drawings.
WATCH!

Jeremy Rifkin on "the empathic civilization" | Video on TED.com

Also - I'm home now from my most amazing vacation ever of my whole life, and I'll begin to post regularly again. Third year of school starts in two days, on Tuesday, and I'm looking forward to it, especially with ideas like these bubbling away inside me. I'll get some photos up, and other thoughts real soon.

Nerd OUT!

ack! teeny update

2010-08-20T21:41:00.000-04:00

whoops! Hello there folks - it's been a rollercoaster!

I'm on vacation now - in Nova Scotia with my parents, and then out to BC for a bit (coast to coast!) - but I'll post intermittently as I've brought my laptop with me so I can keep working on scholarship thingees, and bloggy thingees.

I'll have some photos and some last words about Snail Trails: the awesomeness, and other things that I've been thinking of/reading about/talking to folks about/learning about.

***AND***

SCHOOL IS COMING!! I can't believe how excited I am for it. Righteous.

Nerd out for now - more to come

"What are you trying to tell me with your hands?"

2010-08-09T17:41:00.000-04:00

At our Snail Trails Camp, we deal with kids with all kinds of needs. We have kids with behavioural things, communication stuff, physical quirks, developmental differences. While last year was the year our program focuses on special needs, and I learned a lot then, I am learning buckets and tonnes and heaps and I can't even tell you.

So it's nice to know that all that learning is actually shifting things and settling in, in different ways.

I am lucky to have had some really amazing models - in my placements, in my reading, in my courses at school and in my mentors. I have found myself really thinking and questioning the way I communicate with the kids that I work with and how to do so clearly and descriptively, rather than directively, vaguely, bewilderingly or demandingly. I have been working hard and changing how I talk with kids for the last two years. So here's a story about how I'm coming along with it.

One of our kids, a boy who no doubt would be labeled a problem kid in a regular setting, has some processing and communication differences, as well as having almost no impulse control. The little guy basically goes from 0 to 100000000000 in a REALLY short amount of time. He strikes out, out of frustration or not being able to say what he wants or process what he's feeling or for scads of other reasons, and we've been working to model other ways of getting what he wants.

One day last week, our friend spun out of control outside on the playground and was doing his regular jumping and twisting and smacking routine, and as I moved between him and another bystanding child, he swatted and smacked me a couple of times. Without really thinking, that question just came out of my mouth - "What are you trying to tell me with your hands?" As I led him over to a quieter part of the playground, I helped him get calmed down and organize himself again. I've been thinking about that question since last week, and really wondering about it. I meant it when I asked him, which means that my assumptions have really shifted on a foundational level about what motivates behaviour and what might have been going on. I also didn't yell, or say no, or ask him to tell me he was sorry, or any of a number of unclear and not useful things I could've said, and have probably done in the past. I really wanted to know what was going on for him, and was modeling a tool he could use when he started feeling internally unbalanced, which seems to happen often for him.

That feels awesome. I am really working hard on my communication, and it's paying off. I'm sure I'll flub it up again in the future, but it feels good to know that I'm digesting these things I'm learning. It's lead me to imagine a classroom environment that sees conflict as attempted communication, and gives me a lot more room to work with it. And it makes me think about all kinds of other questions, disarming questions like that, thoughtful questions that we can ask ourselves and the kids we work with, to dig deeper into the how/why we do the things we do.

nerd out.

score!

2010-08-05T20:13:00.000-04:00

I found these on my street a little while ago. I am sooo excited. I'm kind of into just playing with them myself for a while, and then MAYBE sharing them with the kids in my life. For now they are going to stay in my room, though. Ha!

Wooden block city building nerd out.

as promised, PHOTOS

2010-07-23T17:57:00.001-04:00

ha HA! Here are some snaps of my little universe - the playground at Play and Learn. As you can see we have a big expanse of weird rubber paving - soft and bouncy for falls (of which there are many) and a garden that grows pretty flowers and TOMATOES! We planted two tomato plants last week, and they seem to be bouncing back and beginning to thrive.

I love this place, and pretty well all aspects of it, but this is the least favourite element of mine in the playground - the playstructure. It was installed a while ago by the powers that be, and is not that imaginative or inspiring. In fact, it takes up a lot of room that we could use for something else. So we use it for as many diverging uses as we can come up with, and it definitely makes a good anchor for construction projects.

A really great but not well used aspect of the playground is the hill. Because of the physical or cognitive involvement of a lot of our kids, not many venture up the incline. I'm trying to plan some activities that use it - and I'm pretty sure it makes an amazing tobogganing run in the wintertime.

Ok - here are some photos of the evolving water wall. We used an old roll-up vinyl blind as our backing, and started wiring on all kinds of funnels and plumbing and objects that can channel water. It is pretty popular with our kindergarten-aged kids, who spend a lot of time watering the grass, themselves and each other while keeping cool in our heatwave. We've got some serious pouring happening. So much in fact that it's having some great effects. One parent earlier this week asked if we'd been doing any pouring, and when I told her about the water wall she told me how her son had easily filled up his cup from the juice bottle. She told me she'd been so surprised, thinking "Holy moly! I didn't teach him that! Where he learn to do that?!" Say hello, AWESOMENESS.

This was the first version...

...and this is what it looks like now. Every few days, some of the kids and I will wire something else on there, and add a new adventure. Behind the fence that the water wall is hanging from is a bench that faces the sandbox, and kids can climb up there with jugs and bottles and fill and pour and direct water all over the place. You can see Max's waterfall made out of cut open sonotube on the right side of the water wall.

And here it is in action!

I found this firetruck with some very interesting firefighters when I was cleaning up on Wednesday.

And here are our volcanoes - the amazing lava spouting (water with red food colouring, piped in via the surgical tubing from the water wall), rock and sea-shell covered geological marvels. The kids have been making these all week, mirroring what happened over at Woodland Park here. Sometimes we here in my life and Teacher Tom and the kids in his preschool are really on the same wavelength!!

Ok, enough. It's too hot to write on the computer anymore. It's Friday! Time to relax in front of a fan for a while.

Nerdy nerd nerd out.

Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital Snail Trails Summer Day Camp

2010-07-19T16:12:00.000-04:00

hahahahhahahahhahahahahahah!

That is the official name of the summer camp program that yours truly is the outdoor coordinator and basically summer camp teacher at. GRAMMAR! Forall it's ridiculously long name, and imposing sounding-ness, it is a really laid back summer program forboth kids with extra support needs and typically developing kids. It runs for 2 1/2 hours Monday to Friday, and I get to mostly organize the fun stuff to do outside and then also get to go inside and hang out with the kindergarten-aged kids until they go home. It's basically a blast everyday.

We've been dealing with a heatwave here in Toronto for the last while - the last two weeks were blisteringly hot (like living in an oven), but it's tapered off a little bit and is a lot more liveable this week so far. The entire city basically was suffering from heat exhaustion within moments of stepping outside of any air conditioned enclave they may be lucky/environmentally insensitive enough to partake in. We had some parents wondering if we were actually SERIOUSLY going to be taking the kids outside during the hot hot heat - and I said yes of course we are, but we'll be playing with water and wet most of the time, and wearing hats too, so we'll be ok. And we were.

My territory at Snail's summer camp is the playground, and I am happy. We have a kickass sandbox, a hill with a pretty intense incline, some green space, a garden and a big ugly metal and plastic playstructure, but we make up for the last with our enthusiasm and funtimes.

Today was BubbleMania day - we have one each week - and I just realized that I should have taken some pictures of our awesome bubbles - we had bubble makers of all shapes and sized all over the place, and made some pretty wonderful bubbles. My goal is to make a bubble big enough to have a kid inside it --- by the end of the summer. YES! Photos of that for sure!

The camp is run out of one of the Bloorview Nursery School Preschool sites called Play and Learn, which I think I mentioned before. The preschools run on a Reggio Emilia inspired emergent, creativity based curriculum, and I feel really lucky to be able to continue playing with these ideas - follow the kids interests and build your curriculum on what they want to do - progressive education, right?! AWESOMENESS. I'm lucky enough to be working with some of the educators from the schools, as well as other talented folks, who are fluent in these ideas and ready to just go for things. My co-teacher Allison in particular and I seem to be cut from the same cloth - we're jazzed about creative construction projects, like getting wet and dirty and painty with the kids, and I'm learning so so much about listening and clear communication with her. No joke - it's super fun. And the kids are the darndest!

For instance, one of our lively fellows has been working on making a waterfall as a part of our water wall - thank you Jenny, Tom and Donna - out of cut open cardboard sono-tube. We've been pouring and scooping and getting wet, working together to get the water up to the top of the waterfall with other friends, and today we figured out a gravity feed method to make the waterfall run. We just keep everyone wet and no-one gets heatstroke.

All in all - it's pretty wonderful.

More soon, and photos.

Nerd, out.

what's new - SO MUCH!

2010-07-01T13:54:00.001-04:00

whoooooo!

I don't know where to begin!

This week has been so busy - coming home from an amazing vacation (more about that in a bit), starting a new job, and settling back into the rhythms of Toronto and home, especially after the recent civil turmoil around the G20 summit and protests - and still struggling with the reality of what's happening in the Gulf...

Everything is contributing to me FREAKING OUT about education - which feels pretty good, actually. Anyway - it's a lot to tackle all at once in one little blog post. I'll break it down a bit to the immediate - that oughta help my roiling thoughts.

So - first things first - we went on an amazing vacation to Vermont and down to Cape Cod to visit my grandmother and aunt, and back again. Vermont...ohhhh I can't say enough amazing things about you...how I love you! especially since we got to stay at this wonderful place - Shelburne Farms. This place is ridonkulous in the most amazing ways. It used to be a wealthy family's estate, but has become an incredible education centre, working organic farm, heritage and conservation site and all around amazing place that focuses on "cultivating a conservation ethic". Explore their website to get a glimpse, but GO GO GO GO GO to get a taste of how actually awesome this place really is.

We were wandering around inside the castle-like barn (no kidding, look at the photo, that's the BARN), and I kept wishing we could run into an educator, when that's exactly what happened!! We met the incredibly kind, welcoming and generous Sarah Kadden, an educator at Shelburne Farms also involved in the Sustainable Schools Project. Sarah gave us a tour of the facility and we talked and talked and talked, and I left in a daze of magic and wonderment, after wandering across the courtyard of the castle, I mean barn, to the Children's Farmyard to gawp at their amazing teaching spaces and pet some sheep, goats and calves, and where you could play fun games like in the following photo
.

It was really great. I feel really lucky that we got to go there, and really grateful for meeting Sarah, who I'll stay in touch with and who's work is so inspiring! AWESOMENESS! Am busy now reading about their very well thought out curricula on teaching the basic ideas of sustainability to kids of all ages, and am beside myself with excitement at the potential it has. I feel like I'm having a mega paradigm shift, and am holding tools in my hands to help kids explore ideas and subjects I hold really dear - community, nature, food, conservation, ecology, justice...it's a real long list, folks.

Then we went to Cape Cod and had a really great time with my Nana and Aunt Pam, who trek from Austin to the Cape every summer. It was so restful and wonderful and we had a ball.

Coming home just in time to witness police brutality and the government spending excessive amounts of money on needless things to impress, and get ready for my stint as counselor and outdoor coordinator at Holland Bloorview Kid's Rehabilitation Hospital's summer camp, at the Play and Learn site. I'm working with a bunch of awesome educators I worked with at my placement this year, and some other fantastic folks. We had one day of HR intake and two days of training and prep, and now Canada Day has descended upon us, long weekend HO! The kids come on Monday, I'm working in the kinder-aged kids classroom, with Allison who teaches kindergarten at Play and Learn during the school year, and Tatiana with whom I worked at High Park! That's when I'm not outside coordinating art, science and nature shenanigans in the elegant and potential filled playground, and I AM EXCITED. It'll be great to work with young kids again - after Nunavik I need some little kids energy. Am psyched to try out some of the ideas from Shelburne Farms and Sarah and the Sustainable Schools Project stuff I've been reading.

More photos and news and enthusiasm to come - summer AHOY!

get ready for summer - NERD OUT!

I am home

2010-06-08T13:29:00.004-04:00

And wow does it feel wonderful!

Nunavik was really amazing, and I'm very seriously considering going back to do the project again next year - that kind of continuity feels right, especially for this shape of project and for that community. However, I'm HOME now and that feels really amazing. Leaves on trees, warmer temperatures, my own bed...wonderful pleasures.

I got a great job, working with Isabel and other awesome educators at the Bloorview Nursery School - where I had my placement last year - at the summer program they run at their Play and Learn site. I think that I'll be the outdoor coordinator, connecting the curricula and activities of the three classrooms through outdoor creative activities. I want to do a combination of art and gardening activities with the kids, all adapted and inclusive, and try to spend as much time outdoors with them as possible. Really inspired by Spiral Garden, I think. I want to do stuff like this...

It'll also present me with the perfect opportunity to read up and research more outdoor learning, and outdoor play-based learning. Hello, all my bloggy friends experimenting with indoor/outdoor learning (I'm looking at you, you, you and you, friends!), I'll be hanging out and studying what you're doing for theory, ideas and best practices.

But that doesn't start until the end of June, so I get to just hang out, read, eat yummy food and garden. We may go visit my grandmother in Cape Cod, and have a little road trip adventure in Vermont, but these things are still up in the air and I'm not thinking about them too much. For now, relaxing and recharging, reading and gardening.

Perfect.

Photos found on the internet -
games.preschoolrock.com
Joe Mangrum Sand Painting

goodbye Inukjuak - hello down south

2010-06-01T09:50:00.015-04:00

Well - if you can believe it, it's done.

I can't, and I was there.

My last days in Inukjuak were a whirlwind. AN AMAZING whirlwind.

The play was a fabulous success. We moved things into the gym, and did our best to have a rehearsal. It wasn't as smooth as we would've liked, but it was useful, and the show itself was fantastic. We had an audience of around 60-70 people - family members, kids from school, teachers and elders - and they laughed and clapped and seemed to have a great time.

Here are some photos -

Everything is set up in the workshop - ready to begin! Costumes, masks, and props.

Here is the Royal Family - the Queen, the Princesses and the Older Princesses dog.

While the Princesses are picking flowers and berries, two thieves steal their crowns. Here is one of them sneaking out into the audience.

Tracy was the youngest participant in our project - she played the cat.

The Queen, under the influence of the witches spell, is very mean to everyone in the castle.

After being banished and imprisoned, the bunny, the Older Princess and her dog make a plan to break the spell on the Queen.

They realize that LOVE will break the spell, and tell everyone in the castle their plan.

Everyone hugs the Queen!

Everyone hugs again, rejoicing that the Queen is back to her normal state.

The End - the Queen is nice again, the Younger Princess is freed, the spell is broken, the cat and dog hug, and the thieves are caught and put in the dungeon. The crowns are returned and there's nothing left to worry about - except maybe the Witch who at the end of the play runs across the stage laughing...The End?

As soon as we'd finished however, Pam scooted backstage to tell us that some parents had come in late, and should we do it again. I asked the audience if they wanted to see it again, and they responded positively, and the kids were game, so we put everything back in place as fast as possible and then DID THE SHOW AGAIN, immediately after the first. I don't think I've done a back-to-back show like that in a while! It was awesome, and everyone got a chance to see it, and be seen.

We all got pretty great feedback from the audience, and after everyone had gone we went to the kitchen to have a mega-feast.

Then there was the clean-up that had to happen. I spent a while Friday night organizing and cleaning, and then a chunk of Saturday packing everything up, labeling and cleaning and putting stuff away. We now have 19 rubbermaid bins and the big trunk full of costumes that belong to our project - chock full of useful tools, supplies and materials.

Sunday I cleaned the house I'd been staying in, went to a wonderful brunch and packed up all my stuff. My plane was only 3 1/2 hours late, which is pretty typical, and
so I went for a long walk - to the waterfall behind the airport and then out along the tundra. It was really beautiful, and I still feel really lucky to have been able to come up to this amazing place, work with these kids, participate in this community for a while. Here's a couple of photos from my last walk in Inukjuak.

I've spent the last few days in Montreal visiting with friends and loved ones, and replacing the clothes I'd blown out by hard wearing up north. Tonight I get on a train and go HOME. Ahhhhhhh, the sweetness of just thinking that! Awesomeness.

Ok folks - that's all for now - the adventure to Nunavik is pretty well done (I just need to write the report). Thanks for staying tuned in with me - I'll be relaxing for most of June, trying to save money and garden and visit with friends, before starting the next adventure, which is my job working with the Bloorview Summer Camp! More on that soon.

Nerd Out, my friends!

whooo! where I am pooped by the evil queen

2010-05-27T19:02:00.007-04:00

Ok folks - it's the night before the big show! The kids are doing amazing things, the story has come together, we even have COSTUMES, and I am tired. I'm feeling really good, much better than I was at this time last week - there is hope, being are being real nice, things are in good shape (including myself). I am just pooped, that's all.

Here is an update on the Puppet Project - in the form of the script for the play and some photos from after rehearsal today. The script will be narrated in Inutittut and English, and maybe even French if I can pull it together tomorrow - but the beauty of this piece is that it's visual theatre, and therefore visual, and you can pretty much get the story even if you don't hear the words.

But anyway - here are the words, in English -

The Happy Ever After that Almost Never Was

One day, the Queen and everyone were out picking flowers and berries.
Two thieves found the princesses crowns and STOLE THEM.
A huge wind blew everyone away, except the Queen, and a witch appeared.
The witch cast a spell on the Queen.
The next day the maids tried to help the Queen.
The princesses discover that their crowns are missing.
The evil Queen sends the princess to the dungeon.
The bunny tries to help the princess escape.
The bunny meets the princess's dog.
They make a plan.
With LOVE we can break the spell!
The spell is broken.
Everyone lived happily ever after...maybe.

Thus, you have the bare bones of our story. Unfortunately for you all - you don't get to see the hilarious Samantha being the witch, or Savaana who can't stop laughing try to clean the windows, or just how funny the cat and the dog are as they chase each other around through the audience. It is a really strong piece of work made up by girls in a remote northern community ages 7 to 15, and I am so so so proud of them and of how it's come together. WOW!

No wonder we're all so tired!

And here are some photos - I'm going to try to take more tomorrow during the rehearsal, so we have a record of the action - but this'll whet your whistle.

So clearly, this is the evil Queen, complete with sparkly crown...

After I cleaned up the workshop, I had to take a photo of most of our set and the evil Queen just hanging out...ahhh, so restful!

This is a shot of the witch's spell from backstage - secrets revealed!!

Ok - I'm going to crawl home now and make something to eat. Tune in soon for more on the play, and wish us all merde and broken legs and wonderful times tomorrow!

nerdy outy!

hoo-hah - did I need this!

2010-05-24T14:05:00.006-04:00

This amazing gem is from one of my total mentors Teacher Tom - CHECK IT!

So - I'm homesick. REALLY homesick.

I usually get this way, which is why I don't often travel. And this is the longest I've been away from my home on a trip in about ten years. It's been a real gift to get to be up here and experience life in a remote community - I have learned SO fricking MUCH being up here - and the project is continuing to do pretty well - facing challenges and time-crunches and all the day-to-day crazy-business of a regular community arts project...and I want to go home. Which is totally ok and fine and natural for me, and I'll use it to fuel the next week (which will be bonkers as last weeks always are) and we are going to have a really great time. And THEN, I get to go home.

PERFECT.

I'm feeling both elated and a bit down-in-the-dumps, which is why Jessica's encouraging messages to herself are so exactly what I needed right now. And maybe you do too.

Due to the long weekend, I've had a bit of an enforced vacation, and don't have anything to show you of the project that you haven't seen already since I haven't seen the kids since Wednesday (Thursday all programming was canceled due to a death in the community). I've done a few things for our set (you'll see once the kids get their hands on it), but I've mostly worked on relaxing, going for walks and getting things ready for this week.

Here are a couple of photos just to remind you of where I am...wandering around some of the bones of the planet waaaaaaaayyyy up north -

This was taken on Saturday, on a ramble on the rocky hills out behind town, and this...

...was my walk yesterday. Wow.

Ok - enough for now, I'll post more about the play as the week progresses!

nerd out.

wow! shadow puppets!

2010-05-19T20:03:00.008-04:00

Today we finally got to playing around with some shadow puppets - the thing I was most excited about bringing up here! The kids ooohhhed and aaahhhed at the light and colour and I was deeply gratified by that.

Here are some photos - of all kinds of things...

Here we are making some shadow puppets for up against the screen, and on the overhead projector...

...and here's some beautiful playing around with shapes and colour.

Over the past few days we have really banged out the important points of the story of our play - and almost have a script. Here's a photo of me trying to map out the points and some of the action. As you can see, it's the age old story of good Queen turned bad by witch's evil spell, missing crowns, heroic bunnies and dogs and, of course, thieves and servants. Eat your heart out Disney - the kids at Innalik Public School are kicking your butt!

I have been through this process no few times, and I love it when the story grows organically out of the participants imaginations and art. Really, this story grew out of the masks the kids made - and all this reminded me of Teacher Tom's recent Pre K Play - although we've had a lot less role-switching than he did. A LOT of bunny masks were made (for some reason) and they all mutated into other things like villagers and castle workers, and the thieves just turned up out of nowhere one day, causing a huge and awesome plot twist.

Let's not forget the days (and days and days and days...) of effort spent on getting the handpuppets together. Here is a photo of a few in action - at some point in the play, all the villagers get blown away by a strong wind while out picking flowers - and I think we're going to do that with the hand puppets, as they all turned out to be pretty much regular looking people, with the odd dog and bunny thrown in to boot.

Yes! I love the stylish hair on all of them.

My dear friend Jane has run programs like this for year in Toronto, and has documented an amazing continuum of imaginary development in children. We have laughed and laughed at the regular re-occurrence of heroic animals and princesses wrongly accused. The kids of Inukjuak aren't any different, and it's a treat to see those common themes of childhood running so strongly across cultures.

Ok - enough for now, more shadowy goodness tomorrow - OH! Except for at the end of the session, because we'd spent so much time in the dark, the kids wanted to tell ghost stories instead of play games, and so we turned off the lights again and pretty well instantly had 24 kids screaming for the next 15 minutes. SOLID. Ha!

Shadowy nerdness out!

arctic springtime - and more snow

2010-05-18T13:25:00.003-04:00

Just wanted to let you all know that yes, springtime is on it's way here in Inukjuak, and I have photo evidence to prove it.

Here are some tundra plants that I took pictures of on an amazing and uplifting walk on the weekend, on a balmy springtime day...

...and now, just a few days later - more snow.

HA!

What a sense of humour the nature has up here!

Heh...

nerd OUT!

whoooosh - and a week goes by in a flash

2010-05-14T10:35:00.014-04:00

I can't believe that it's been a week since I posted - I'll blame sporadic internet access and a very busy time - and it's only week TWO!
We continued working on our masks - and some pretty amazing creations have been coming alive under our fingers.

Here we're using papier-mache to build our masks and in the next photo we're cutting out the eyes. I feel really good about encouraging these kids to use tools, and do things for themselves - a few of the younger ones start out by saying "I can't do it!", but after some encouragement to do it on their own I often get to say "Hey! You said you couldn't do it but you did!" I LOVE saying that.

Masks are really incredible things - you get to make whatever kind of face you choose! Even before they're painted, they are fun to put on and feel different.

We painted the masks with a base coat of white paint - to cover up the print of the Scholastic catalogues we used in the papier-mache. That base then frees us up to be able to use all kinds of light or dark colour to finish off our masks.

We've been playing some pretty awesome games too. The girls from Kangirsuk taught us a game called Mrs. Mumbles, where you make a face like someone without their dentures and try to ask the person sitting next to you "Have you seen Mrs. Mumbles?" without peeing your pants from laughing. It took us almost a half an hour to make it all the way around the circle when we played this, and some of the girls were laughing so hard they were crying...

We also started making some hand puppets - sculpting heads out of more Scholastic catalogues and masking tape, covering them in papier-mache and painting them.

This is what the hand puppets will look like - head and body together - and some may even have clothes!

And these are some of the heads in process - some painted and some on the way...

It is still very amazing being up here. The snow last weekend was a bit of a twist, as my home rhythm is full of daffodils and tulips and springtime. Add to that a dramatic northern event - last Thursday a man was lost out on the tundra. AND THEN IT SNOWED FOR FOUR DAYS. Early Monday morning however, he was FOUND. He'd spent the blizzard out in the elements, keeping close to his snowmobile (it had run low on gas, which is why he got lost in the first place) and had burned parts of his t-shirt to stay warm. He's apparently fine, and was on the radio telling his story that very morning.

Ummmmm. Wow.

This is something that happens to people up here. Makes me not want to leave the school.

Ok - one last thing. Since the puppet project is only open to the kids in Grade 3 and older, over the past few days I've been working with the Grade 1s and 2s in their classes making paper-bag puppets to include them, and to also get a bit of a little kid fix. Working with older kids and youth has been pretty great - but I've been missing the younger ones - being in school has really gotten me into a groove.
The sessions were only a half an hour long, so there wasn't much time to take many photos, but I'll leave you with this monster that I used as an example, and inspired several creatures with pointy tongues and multiple eyes.

Nerd OUT!

hah! it's SNOWING! Welcome to the Arctic...

2010-05-07T12:45:00.004-04:00

Hello May 7th - it's snowing!

Last evening, on the way home from the school I took this photo of some really beautiful clouds.

I should have guessed that they were carrying something special for us. I was chatting with a woman in the Co-Op yesterday who said that February and May have swapped places!
The Co-Op was for a long time the only commercial centre in any Northern community. It's a huge department store, carrying everything from groceries to hardware to furs to carvings to bicycles - here in Inukjuak there are the Co-Op and the Northern - a chain store that provides another choice. The Co-Op is pretty cool - it's home to the bank, the Post Office, Hunter's Support, and a carving shop.
Anyway - back to the present that the clouds brought us - SNOW. I don't know why I'm so surprised - we were told to expect this kind of weather...but still! It's pretty hilarious to hear about t-shirt weather back home and then not be able to see across town because of the blizzard here.
It's hard to see in this photo - but fine snow is drifting down and blowing all over. The boy next to the snow mound in the schoolyard has tied a rope around his waist to pull the little qamutik (snowmobile sled) he's got behind him.

Thinking thinking thinking about learning up here - what is appropriate, what is needed, what the expectations are and need to be...huh. No easy answers, and I'm lucky as I'm an option - presenting a choice to participate in something fun and enriching (hopefully!). Onwards...

Nerd (brrr!) out!

masks week...and more thoughts

2010-05-06T19:43:00.009-04:00

This week has turned out to be pretty much about masks, which is great, and the kids have made some really beautiful things. But before we get into the masks, I'll tell you a little preschool story.

I was walking out to the waterfall on Tuesday before heading for the school, and I saw a group of really happy kids off the side of the road. They looked so happy that I had to go talk with them. It's kinda hard to see them in this photo - but it does show the land nicely...if you click on it you can see it better.

Annie and Elsie had brought their 4 and 5 year olds out to pick last years red berries, freeze-dried by the winter. Everyone was smiling and scampering around picking exquisitely tart berries (I tasted them - kinda like cranberries) and having a good time in the sunshine. Talked with them for a while, and I may go on over and do some puppet stuff with them too - it was really great to be around younger kids, and made me realize how my life has really focused in on preschool, and how comfortable I am with that age-group in particular now. It felt AWESOME!

But then, so did the rest of the week, pretty much...

We continued working on our paper plate masks, elaborating them and coming up with rudimentary characters...such as Qulliq's cat...

and others...

We played some fun games this week too. The group is still all girls, although we had one boy come and play some games with us, but he couldn't convince his friend to come in so he ended up leaving, even though he was really having a great time - I could tell by his huge smile. Things are pretty gendered here, which is cultural...and when I think about it, I'm glad to be providing something different for the girls to get up to. I have a feeling it's a bit weird for them to have a male educator showing them this stuff - and I think that's pretty great. World wide there is such a challenge to ensure girls are even allowed ACCESS to education - so I feel pretty good to have about 28 of them coming to the workshop.

The first two photos are of a mirroring game, where kids in pairs follow each other, build body awareness and create physical vocabularies. The last photo is of a new game to me - the kids call it Snakes and Ladders, and it's a relay race we played in the gym today. The kids sit with their feet touching in a long ladder-like line, and one by one pairs race each other to one wall, around the ladder, and then as fast as they can up the ladder to the next pair and sit down. The first side to complete it wins. WOW! Lots of enthusiastic screaming to this one.

That big face in the background of the first picture has some potential - we'll see what it becomes. I made it this afternoon to show the kids what else we could do. And look at all those bins!! Those are our once lost, now found treasure boxes - thank goodness we found them, their contents have already made the workshop a million times better.

This is how the papier-mache masks progress - we build them on plaster casts of faces from previous years - alternating paper to make them strong and also so we know which parts we've done. Then we build up different features on the mask and do a final layer on top of that to seal them all in. Tomorrow hopefully everything will be dry, and we can cut eye-holes and paint them! Zowee!

I'm feeling more at home here...and becoming more friendly with both teachers and folks around town - walking everywhere and smiling at my good fortune to be up here experiencing all this really helps.

Ok - supper time - more soon!

Inukjuak catch-up, training week ends and the first day of puppets

2010-05-03T18:55:00.017-04:00

Welcome back to Inukjuak, everyone! This sign is outside of town on the road to the airport, and I thought it fitting to start off this mega-post with it. I have a lot of photos and a lot of things to say, tell you or tell myself I don't really know.

It is so amazing up here - it is warmer everyday, and although it freezes every night, the snow is disappearing at a crazy rate. It's spring in the North, or getting close to it.

We ended the training week with a big feast on Saturday, where vegetarian me and my fellow artists made CARIBOU STEW and various other things, and ate RAW FROZEN CARIBOU, too. I knew coming up here that this trip would require a different sort of diet than I keep at home, and so far the experience has been truly amazing, and un-pass-up-able. When will I get to eat this kind of food again? I'll tell that story another time, but first I want to tell you about the rest of our week getting to know each other and sharing skills.
Lisa, our fearless leader, really did a great job getting us all riled up about our respective programs, and we played games and did hands-on workshops every day for hours on end. We amassed a pretty hefty list of fun games, and shared puppet-making, shadow puppet, play-making and movement skills with each other and the other facilitators.

In my last post, there was a photo of us working on an art activity - it was an earth blanket, a concrete vision of what makes a good learning environment. This is what it looked like when we were done - pretty awesome, hey? So many colours, textures and viewpoints.

We did a shadowpuppetry workshop, where I got to show some of the great things I've learned from all the amazing shadow and light artists I've gotten to work with. Isa did some cutting on a scenery piece that we made of Inukjuak - maybe I'll get a photo of it to put up on here - it's pretty magical.

The next day Natasha led us through a movement workshop and it was pretty hilariously fun - we did some great non-dance dancing! As you can clearly see, we are boogieing down to our own choreography.

The next day we worked on more puppets, this time sculpting paper with masking tape and covering it with paper-mache. As you can see, we totally rocked it, and our birds are very very great.

Isa's hummingbird kinda takes the cake. He took it home to hang up for his 5 month-old daughter to play with.

So that was the training week pretty much - we gelled as a group and got some pretty great hands-on knowledge. Over the rest of the weekend, we hung out together wandering around Inukjuak until folks left for their various destinations - Lisa back home to Fredericton, Natasha and the girls to Kangirsuk, and today those of us left here in Inukjuak dove headfirst into our own program.

Today was a pretty great day - yesterday I did a ton of setting up, as I mentioned yesterday. Came in this morning to finish up, and we got underway this afternoon, after school. We had 24 KIDS come!!! We had one boy, but he was 13 and the sheer number of girls was too much for him I think. We're going to work on finding some other guys to work with him, and give him some more advanced puppet work to do - maybe he'll be our shadow puppet guy! We'll see.
We played games and spoke all three languages all the way through, as we have kids who either only speak French or Inuttitut. Most of the kids are in Grade 3 and 4, and that suits me fine. We'll figure out ways of involving the younger kids - but since most of the work will happen after school-hours it makes for way to long a day for them. We'll figure it out.

We made really simple masks out of paper plates, to ease us in to creating and masks - tomorrow we'll decorate these and put them on and maybe even break into groups to tell some simple stories with tableaux. We'll see how that goes. Anyway, things went pretty smooth - HOORAY! Having three other folks facilitating with me sure helps - yay team teaching (in three languages no less!)

The photo above is the Inuttitut syllabic alphabet. It was brought to Nunavik by a minister in the 1800's, and is the same symbols used in written Cree. The fact that the community contains three languages is pretty wild, and pretty significant too. There is a real collision of cultures going on, each with it's own priorities, expectations and values, and school is one place where it's really evident. Announcements are made in three languages, and a lot of work is put into finding common ground between all three to make a place for learning and teaching to happen. It is so so so so sooooooooo complicated up here - I am constantly thinking about it, and really am blessed when I realize that my teaching team reinforces this common ground searching. Pam, Isa and Louisa Louie (the older teen assistant) are all Inuit, and that makes a huge difference - I can't imagine trying to do this without them.
So I'm putting a lot of thought and energy into making this accessible to everyone, and am grateful that kids are pretty much kids all over - we all like to create, tell stories and have fun, and that's common ground I can build on.

I'll leave you with some more photos of Inukjuak - stunning, beautiful and wild place!!

This is where the school has me staying - my own two bedroom pad! Half of this house is mine while I'm here, and it's turning out to be a bit of a haven for me.

This is the view of the Bay and the Island, just south of town. All that white is water, and may melt while I'm here. Then Inukjuak becomes a lakeside village.

A shot of downtown Inukjuak.

3 crazy artists - Lisa Ross our fearless mastermind, Natasha Eck Kangirsuk artist extraordinaire, and me.

This is the beautiful waterfall on the opposite side of the airport from town. We walked there with Lisa when she flew back home on Saturday - it's so beautiful I want to go visit it as often as I can - and I can! It's only about a 35 minute walk.

Ok - enough - I've been in the school for almost 12 hours today! It's time to go home and make supper and collapse. Wish me luck for the upcoming days, and I'll post more soon!

Nerd out...

here we go!

2010-05-02T19:11:00.002-04:00

Whooo! I'm tired!

Yesterday we finished our leader training program, and started scattering either back down south or to our respective communities - I'm the lucky one who gets to stay here all by myself in a community pretty well prepped for this project. YAY!

We took Natasha and the Kangirsuk girls to the airport today, and then I came into the school (YES! On Sunday!!) to prep the room and unpack all our once-lost but finally found supplies bins (another big YES!). The room is sort of ready, and I still have tomorrow morning and afternoon before we launch the first workshop out into Innalik School waters.

I wish I had more staying power right now, to put up pictures and tell you more...I will soon, but I'm going to go back to my house now, have supper and relax to get ready for our big day tomorrow!!

Wish us luck!

nerd out.

inukjuak...oh inukjuak

2010-04-28T18:15:00.010-04:00

Ok - here I am!! We've managed to get internet in our room in the school, and we've just had a mightily successful Day Two of the training week/skills share, and I'm tired but I want to get some word out that awesome stuff is happening, and maybe even get some photos on here! The internet connection is REALLY SLOW, tho - so it might not be many!

Nunavik is an amazing part of the world. We're in Inukjuak, and it's pretty amazing. There are about 1 200 people who live here, and the majority of those folks are Inuit. Inukjuak is above the treeline - so we're here on tundra, and it's mostly frozen at the moment. The village has a handful of roads, and people get around mostly on foot, by four-wheel ATV, or snow-mobile. There are two department stores, the Co-Op and the Northern, and they sell everything from clothes to produce to appliances. It's pretty quiet, and the house that I'm staying in is right smack dab in the middle of everything.

Our hosts - the school and some key teachers - have given me my own house to live in, which has pros and cons. While it's right around the corner from the school, and I can go home and have quiet and peace very easily, it's also a little lonely and by not billeting with someone I'm missing out on some important social connecting. I'm working hard on trying to make those connections, and it'll happen, but at the beginning it feels like just a little too much peace and quiet. That could change once the program gets underway, though.

We're doing a training week, and the folks who'll be working with Natasha in Kangirsuk have come to Inukjuak so that we can all bond. We're playing a lot of games, and all sharing how to do all kinds of theatre-related art activities. It's going pretty well, except for the fact that no one can find the 15 rubbermaid bins that were left up here from the previous 6 years of this program that contain all the accumulated supplies, puppets and materials we were sort of banking on using. I'm rolling with that punch - it's pretty typical of community arts, especially when done remotely like this - and we're making do. If anyone wants to spend a lot of money and donate some random art supplies to us, however - please feel free!! Just email me and we'll work it out. We'll take anything! hahahahhahha!

I feel pretty honoured to be up here, and for the most part everyone is really welcoming. It's pretty wild to see the collision of several cultures trying to work it out - and that's exactly what's going on here. Inuit culture and the dominant western culture of Canada and North America are - newsflash - REALLY DIFFERENT. Different expectations, understandings of time, priorities, values...it is really complex. So - we just roll with how things come, and try to become friends. That's what I'm focusing. As I mentioned in my last post, there are THREE languages being spoken constantly here - Inuttitut, English and French. It's a lot to wrap my head around, and I feel lucky that I can at least speak the last two.

My team is pretty amazing too - Pamela Epoo, who is a primary gym teacher here at the Innalik School, and Isa, a young man from the community will be my primary folks - Isa and I will be side-by-side full-time, and Pam will join us after school and when she can during her spares. The kids'll be with us for a couple of hours after school, and that's when we'll be doing most of our work with them, so as not to disrupt their school days.

It's a big thing I'm involved in up here...but so far so good! More later!

Here are some photos though - to wet your whistles...

Nunavik from the air!

this was my first view of the village - coming in from the airport.

a closer view of Inukjuak.

The school and some houses at night - it's light here from 5.30am til about 9.30pm - loooooooong days and getting longer.

Some random things found on the window-sill of the kitchen where I'm staying - rocks and...teeth? Probably dog teeth - there are a lot of beautiful husky-type dogs here.

The Nunavik Theatre Arts Program Facilitator team at training week - or at least some of us - that's Lisa Ross, the artist-organizer who got us all into this, Isa from Inukjuak (my right-hand, right-on dude!), and Maggie, Sarah and Misty from Kangirsuk.

Here we are working our art-vibes to the max - working on different pieces to quilt together into a tapestry that expresses our ideas of an ideal learning creative experience.

More to come for sure, but I've got to go eat supper and rest up - big day of movement and more puppet building tomorrow ---- wow wow wow!

northy nerd out.

I made it!!!

2010-04-27T15:28:00.002-04:00

I'm here!
It's amazing!
I have no internet connection where I'm staying, so I'll have to do all my stuff at the school.
Inukjuak is amazing. It's like a suburb on the moon. The folks are friendly, and there are three languages being spoken at all times. My mind is constantly blown by the light, the bare snow and rock, the big blue sky when it's clear and the clouds so close when there's cloud-cover.
Never fear - I'll be posting lots of photos - but our training week is going well for the most part - there's just not much time to do anything other than PROJECT!
It's awesome - more soon -

nerdy nerdy nerd nerd in the north out.

on our way!!!

2010-04-24T22:43:00.002-04:00

Ok friends!

I am totally tired from the high level energy and anxiety and whirlwind prep that the past few days have been, but we're finally on our way to NUNAVIK! After a mutual mad dash to the airport, Natasha and I met up at security and made our way on to our flight to Montreal, met up with our colleague and organizational genius Lisa, and are one sleep away from the North.

I'm pretty well knackered - and I'm going to make the most of having my own hotel room, and watch a little bad television until I pass out. So far, the adventure is AMAZING!

hahahahahha!

Seriously though, it is amazing to be included in this adventure, and the more I find out about it the more I am delighted and excited to be doing this.

More tomorrow - when we actually get to Inukjuak!

Zowee!

Northbound nerd out.

done...

2010-04-22T08:38:00.005-04:00

Ahhhhh - the totally bittersweet victory of completing exams!

I hate tests. I don't test well, I feel like the don't reflect anyone's learning all that much, and I think exams are a terrible way to end a year of learning - with stress, isolation, and a burnt-out brain. I think that's why I'm feeling a complicated mixture of dissatisfaction, unfinishedness, relief and discomfort. I don't feel like exams honoured my year of intense effort, integration and learning. But - what can I do about that right now? Not a heck of a lot - giant changes like that will have to wait a while, until my super(educational)-powers are fully formed.

So - it's the anticlimactic ending of another year at university - and I don't want it to end! Even though I leave in two days for dramatically exciting educational adventures, it's hard to let go of my scholastic routines. I didn't want my classes to end! HOW NERDY IS THAT?!?

But they did, and that's the way things work - and now I have A MILLION things to do to get ready. So far, my packing has consisted of idly wondering which books I'll take up with me to read and use as resources, and buying soap. Oh, and goji berries. It's just the burn-out from end-of-school times -- I know that I'll start getting REALLY excited once I'm packed and on my way.

So, now I have a couple of days to do that, and putter around seeing friends and slowly putting things in suitcases. While spring is sproinging all over the place here in Toronto, it's -4 Celsius right now in Inukjuak. It's going to be a bit like going back in time, weather-wise. So, I'll do some wandering around in the cherry blossoms and unfurling leaves before I go.

I will certainly be posting a lot while I'm up there - stay tuned for news!

Nerd outside in the springtime...

exams exams exams...

2010-04-15T12:40:00.002-04:00

...study study study

sweet-sad endings and the next adventure...whoa.

2010-04-09T22:11:00.005-04:00

My school year ends, in fits and starts, over the next two weeks. I can hardly believe that this year has come and gone, slid through my living like water. My History and Philosophy course is over, which is a tragedy as I wanted to keep taking that class forever; my interpersonal class has ended, and it was maybe the MOST RELEVANT educational experience of my life. This semester rocked hard - my courses were deep and influential, and there was SO MUCH WORK.

And on Wednesday, I had my last placement day at the High Park Bloorview Nursery School. It was a sweet day, where we planted bean seeds and sang songs, and as I led my last goodbye music circle, each child said "Goodbye, Noah!" and smiled and waved, which they'd never done with me before, not every single one! I was really touched...it is such a special thing to create relationships with kids. It is a truly powerful thing. I'll miss them a lot there. My placement was really spectacular - I felt welcomed by the educators I worked and learned with, and learned so much with the kids too. The power of integrated classrooms, emergent curriculum, reflective practice, interdisciplinary support teams...the list goes on and on.

And now - just a couple of other things to do...presentations, final interviews, and two exams. And then...it's off to the next adventure.

I can't remember if I've talked about this yet on the blog. I've barely had a chance to think about it, with the end-of-the-year push, and when it was being conceived and organized it was still too far away for it to percolate into these pages. Soooo...here's what's happening next. When you hear about what the heck I'm doing, you'll wonder how I managed to NOT think about it for so long.

I'm flying to the Arctic to teach art for five weeks.

WHAT!!!!!!!!!

I know. I can hardly believe it myself.

Lisa, an amazing artist and friend of mine, has been running an arts and theatre program in Inukjuak, a remote fly-in community in Nunavik for the last 6 years. Last year, she had a baby, and now being up North away from her family would be too much. So she asked me to go up instead. She is also expanding the program to another community, and so another friend of ours Natasha, will be starting a similar project in Kangirsuk.

I can hardly believe that I'm going to have this opportunity. I hardly know what it's all about. I've dreamed of the North in different ways for a long time, and now I'm going to experience it, and get to work with real kids and a real community. Because Natasha and I are both in school, and Lisa's been doing it for so long, she's been organizing it all, and I only have the vaguest notions of this whole thing. The next two weeks are going to be a bit of a crash course. I'll write more about it as I find things out.

So --- spring is here, and the school year's almost done, and I'm starting to get ready to go to an amazing place where there will still be blizzards, you have to fly to get there, fierce beauty and let's not forget the turbulent history of colonialism and general awfulness that our government has smacked the Inuit people with. Whooooo, nelly.

I hope I can do all this justice. Lisa thinks I can, and she's done it and knows. It's gonna be a crazy ride!!!

More soon -

Nerd out.

generous Deborah's amazing ideas

2010-04-05T22:07:00.010-04:00

The online community of educators I've found myself in really is a wonderful thing. I find myself constantly inspired, affirmed and energized by all the folks out there passionate enough about the time they spend with young children to write blog posts about them after spending a good chunk of their day with them. My kind of people. In the sidebar are listed a whole bunch more really interesting folks.

If you haven't encountered Deborah Stewart's wonderful blog Excellence in Early Childhood Education, go there now. Deborah's enthusiasm for early learning and warmth pour out of her incredible blog, where she shares her ideas and knowledge gained from over 20 years of experience working with young children. Her blog is like a storehouse of ideas and jumping-off points, and her encouragement and kindheartedness have been a big part of weaving an online community of early childhood educators together.

Researching activities that promote prosocial behaviours (sharing and negotiating) for my final project in my Social Emotional Intelligence course, I turned to Deborah for some ideas. She was generous beyond my wildest dreams, and in FIVE comment posts left me some of her ideas. Absolutely amazing ones, I might add.

I deleted them after copying them to another document, and immediately regretted it - they were such good ideas I wanted more people to get a chance to see them. I wrote her back and asked her if I could re-post them in another post of their own. She said yes, being herself, and so here they are. Enjoy as much as I did! Thanks Deborah.

********

Hi Noah,
I don't know what age students you are planning for but here are some ideas as requested. These would probable work best for children ages 4 and up. This is a long post because I couldn't find and email address - you can feel free to delete the post once you have save or copied the material somewhere... Deborah:)

Activities that promote the development pro-social sharing and negotiation skills

#1 Sensory Play: Pepperoni Pizzas
Tell the children that you want to make a pizza. Show the children a large pizza pan and a very small ball of play dough or use real pizza dough.
Tell the children that the ball of dough has to cover the bottom of the entire pan and ask them to tell you what they think you will have to do to cover the entire bottom of the pan. As you follow their suggestions, have the children notice how one ball of dough is too small to cover the entire pan.

The goal is to get the children to recognize that in order to cover the entire pan it will take more dough.

Next, divide the children into partners or small groups. Give each child a small white ball of dough. Set a large pizza pan and one rolling pin in the center of the group. Tell the group of children that you want to see how they can work together to make one large pizza crust that covers the whole pan. While the children are working together, walk around and make comments such as, “You all make a great team!” or “Making pizza is so much more fun when you do it with a friend.” Or “I like how you take turns using the rolling pin.”

After the children have covered their pans, give them either real pepperoni or red play dough (and one round cookie cutter) and ask them to work together now to create pepperoni for their pizza. Continue to walk around and encourage them to work together.

Finally, have each group bring the pizza to the large group and show the results of their work together. Use this time to praise them for their ability to work together as a team to create a fabulous pepperoni pizza.

#2 Music and Movement: Circle of Friends

Place a number of large tape circles on the floor. You should have at least one circle per every two to three children.

Tell the children that when you play music, that the children are to walk around the circles and when the music stops, all the children are to find a circle and stand inside of it. Tell the children that they are to make sure no one ends up inside or outside of a circle all alone. Ask the children what they can do to make sure no one is left all alone.

Brainstorm ideas with ways the children can make sure no one is left all alone. What can they say? What can they do? How will they know if someone is all alone? Talk about how the children are actually sharing the space with each other.

After you play the music and stop, wait for the children to work out their situation until everyone is in a circle with their friends. Then talk about the words that you heard that were helpful to each other. Have all the children step outside of the circles and start the game again – tell the children that each time the music stops, they should choose a new circle to stand in.

#3 Creative Arts - Creating a rainbow

Begin by having the children join you and watch you use crayons to make a simple rainbow. Show them how to draw one arc of the rainbow at a time using all the different colors of crayons to make each color of the rainbow.

Tell the children that they are going to make their own rainbows. Set out a piece of paper for each child on the table along with one crayon of each color of the rainbow. Brainstorm with the children what they will need to do to create their rainbow since there is only one of each crayon color on the table.

#4 Setting the Table

Gather some magazines that show beautiful table settings. Show the children the magazine pictures and talk about what makes the tables look nice. Ask the children how they can work together to set a table that looks nice too.

Bring in a set of plates, spoons, forks, napkins, napkin rings, a tablecloth, a flower, a vase, and other items to set a table. Talk about the each of the items with the children so you are certain they know what the items are. Set the items on a tray beside a table and invite a group of children to work together to set a table.

As each group of children work to set their table, take pictures of them working together. Later, print out the photos and create a class magazine of your own titled, “Designer Table Settings.” Read and discuss the pictures in the magazine with the children.

WOW. And all that was just off the top of her head. Ladies and gentlemen, the ever-resourceful, ever-amazing Deborah Stewart!

grateful nerd out!

groooooaan...and twinkle. time for tired.

2010-04-04T00:28:00.004-04:00

We are almost there.

My fellow students and I can really see an end to the academic year close at hand. Only a couple more major assignments - finish my paper on sharing and negotiation for my social-emotional intelligence course, and put together my portfolios for interpersonal communication, creative arts, and field education. Oh my...I hadn't written it all out like that yet...yikes.

But considering I've worked through a good two thirds of the majorness, I feel good about it all.

That's not really what I want to be writing about. I want to write about the gazillion new thoughts that firefly through my heart and mind, even when I'm brain crushingly exhausted from working non-stop on final assignments and never hanging out with my loved ones. I want to write about the amazing feeling of watching tulips sprout up with young children. I want to write about the amazing free feeling of playing outside after a cold-weather climate winter. I want to write about reflective practice, and new thoughts on how we can encourage children to talk and plan with each other, and how we can guide and encourage a lot of learning with stories and narrative, or some new picture books I found at the bookstore, or the amazing feeling of the springtime sun on my back as I ride my bike to placement or class. Or the wonderful, warm, exuberant and inspiring community of thinkers and writers spinning threads of connection through the internet to inform and make community. The early learning and education bloggers are doing a wonderful job of weaving a feeling of togetherness right now...very awesome.

But I won't write about that now. The 'soft animal of my body'(thank you universe, for Mary Oliver) needs to rest, and not look at screens for a while. I will write about all of that soon.

nerd out, friends. let's rest.

oh yes...

2010-03-30T23:57:00.004-04:00

Almost there.

I am nerding out quite hardcoredly - papers are coming together, the semester is ending, I am feeling more peaceful, in a frantic, panic-flavoured way.
Oh yes.
And spring seems to be here. It's so good to get outside, especially with some kids, and feel the sun warm us! Hooray!
Onwards, friends.

PS - anyone want to read my History and Philosophy paper for me? Har har har...

Nerd out.

glub glub glub!

2010-03-23T23:29:00.004-04:00

If I thought last week was busy - it's only Tuesday and I feel like I've had a couple of nervous breakdowns!

I have SIX major assignments due in the next two and a half weeks. I am working on them all - in fact, I just completed one tonight, so we're down to FIVE! YES! I feel pretty good about them all, and I just need to keep working really hard on them all to stay afloat. However, this leaves very little time to do anything other than schoolwork. I definitely feel like I'm up to my eyebrows. I haven't had anytime to read any of the inspiring blogs I love so much, even.

Yikes.

I'll just have to steal moments here and there to post when I can.

Nerding out HARD

end of the japanese visit

2010-03-19T09:54:00.007-04:00

Well - our Japanese guests have gone home. This is a picture of the origami jumping frogs they taught us to make, in presentation to the students of the Ryerson School of ECE, on Monday.

It was an amazing experience. Wednesday was the biggest day of all with visits to the Gerrard Resource Centre in the morning, and Invest in Kids in the afternoon. The Gerrard Resource Centre is a family resource centre operated out of Ryerson University, and we went to see their site in a local school. Invest in Kids is a national charitable organization, dedicated to improving life for children in Canada by supporting parents. Both visits were pretty interesting, and I felt really lucky tagging along - I learned so much!

When we got back from Invest in Kids in the afternoon (which is a terrible story, but all worked out in the end) the faculty and students split up to do their own things. While the Ryerson faculty were going to have a serious dinner with the faculty from Urawa, we got to take the students out for dinner and to the ROM. We asked them what they wanted to eat and they requested that we go for POUTINE!!!! So we did. This is what we ate.

We took the subway to the ROM, which is free on Wednesday nights so that was pretty wonderful considering how large a group we were. In the short time that we had we passed through the dinosaurs, explored the Bat Cave and the interactive biosphere exhibit, and dropped them off at the hotel at the end of the night having had a really great time. I am totally wiped out however. I'm still sick, and after the intense push of mid-terms and projects and this - being responsible for folks all day with whom you don't share a verbal language, even with interpreters, is surprisingly exhausting - well, today I'm staying home. RELAXING. And probably doing some readings for school. WOW! What a week!

hmmmm...

2010-03-16T22:11:00.008-04:00

I don't know about switching my blog hosting - it's so friendly over here and the blog would have a real different feel. maybe, maybe not - but I guess not for now...

I am totally wiped out - been working on a project that I haven't mentioned yet. Since it's March Break here in Toronto, and placement schools are closed, instead of taking a break and resting and getting a jump on things, I decided to add a pinch of crazy to my week.

A group of visitors from Urawa University in Japan, with which Ryerson has an ongoing connection, is visiting and I got hired on to coordinate our shenanigans and hang out with them. I've been organizing my face off for the last four weeks, on top of school and placement and being sick and everything else. They arrived on Sunday after a 13 hour flight, and we've had a jammed packed educational visit with them. Not that I had anything else to do.

Yesterday it was mostly exploring Ryerson and our ECE program, as well as our lab school the Early Learning Centre. Today it was more exploration of whats going on in our program, and then for a special treat, we went up to Bloorview Kids Rehab, the hospital, school and resource centre for children with extra support needs that my placement Nursery school just happens to be affiliated with. It helps that I worked there, and have many dear friends who have and still do. The folks there treated us supremely well, and gave us a great tour. We are LUCKY!!!

Tomorrow, more site visits and then dinner and the ROM - and then I get to fall exhausted into a puddle of jelly, sleep for twelve hours, and get back to my real life. We're giving a real whirlwind tour, since they're here for such a short amount of time, and it's making my head spin.

Speaking of heads however, I managed to do some fun homework today, in the middle of everything, and when I say fun I'm not even being sarcastic. An assignment in our History and Philosophy of ECE class (LOVE.IT.)is to make links between historical philosophers and everyday life, by examining TV programming for preschoolers and connect it to one of the educational philosophers we've been studying. Did you know that Sesame Street - our beloved Sesame Street - was designed as a televised Head Start program?!?!?!?!? Did you even?!?

Awesome. The idea grew out of a silly little cultural race, when the USSR beat the USA into space and North America FREAKED. Educators were blamed, who then blamed each other. College profs blamed high school teachers who blamed elementary school teachers - all the way down the line to preschool teachers and parents. The US government went ape, invested a ton of money in educational reform, and as part of the War on Poverty Head Start was born, and gave us Sesame Street. That's the nutshell - research away.

Anyway, today we got to analyze Sesame Street, and wow was it ever great. Apparently it is the most heavily researched educational program (not just TV program, but ed. program of any kind) EVER. And here we grew up thinking it was about Jim Henson and sharing and singing and spelling, with counting and stories and imaginary (but not really) wooly mammoths thrown in for good measure. Again, AWESOMENESS.

So, in my little Japanese whirlwind, I got to go to the awesomest rehab hospital for kids and visit their totally RAD Centre for the Arts AND watch TV (and admittedly think about it, and then write it all down). How cool is that? And all I have to do is turn into a puddle of goo after.

moving...?

2010-03-14T15:56:00.003-04:00

I'm thinking of moving this blog thingy over to wordpress. My very smart friend Nicole thought it might be a good idea. I've taken a look, and will think about it.

Hmmmmm....

baby teacher

2010-03-09T19:40:00.000-05:00

I forgot to mention - yesterday morning I woke up laughing.

I had been dreaming of a teacher talking to his class, but all that was coming out of his mouth was " mahh mahh mahh, mahh mahh mahhmahh". As I slowly woke up, I realized that I could still hear him - ?? And then I realized it was the 11-month-old that I live with, yelling his head off in the kitchen, enjoying his breakfast. He's started singing through most of his meals.

I laughed and laughed - I got teaching on the brain.

Nerd OUt

OUTSIDE!

2010-03-09T17:03:00.016-05:00

It might be spring.

I finally got to get back to the Nursery School, feeling all better, and since the weather has been so glorious (+13 degrees Celsius!!! SUNNY!), we got dressed early (sans snowpants, since it's so warm) and had a blast playing outside. Here are some pics of our space, what we had set up, and the kids going berserk from a little wee touch of Canadian it-might-be-spring fever.

Wow, it felt good to be outside with them! They played a lot with the dried up leaves from last fall - the play ground was full of them. It was pretty amazing to catch S.J.'s leaf toss - my camera takes the darndest pictures!!

Hooray for outdoor play - I've been wishing and wishing...spring might be here!

nerd OUTside!

field trip!

2010-03-08T23:33:00.005-05:00

Yowza!

Today we went on a field trip for my Creative Arts class. We went to Lillian H. Smith Public Library, the amazing children's library here in Toronto, at College and Spadina. The fourth floor of this crazy building houses a public rare children's books reference library called the Osborne Collection. It specializes in the development of English Children's Literature, and is made up of over 80000 "rare and notable children's books."

Heaven.

It was deeply deeply awesome. Leslie McGrath - one of the reference librarians who cares for and curates the Osborne collection - did an amazing presentation for us, basically taking us on a tour of the history of books, printing and children's literature in about 40 minutes. The Osborne collection was set up as a way to prevent revisionist history, and she described some of the unsavoury and downright awful things that are kept in the collection to show that yes, people at one time thought ________________ (fill in the blank with whatever dumb, backward idea you want). It's a brilliant thing that teaches not just about books and kid's lit, but also about attitudes and context and history and the shifting tide of our society.

It was really mind-blowing to see a cuneiform tablet from Mesopotamia, made 3000 years ago. It's the oldest thing in the Library!! Next on the list of awesomeness was a 600 year old book, hand-written and illuminated with ink and quill on animal skin. It's a book of Aesop's fables written from the fourteenth century! Whoa!!!! Then, it was pretty awesome to learn about why kids books were so gruesome in the 1600s, how the first English storybook that wasn't written to either terrorize kids or teach them manners was about bugs, and how Alice in Wonderland is the first example Leslie could find in the English language of a book that is written as a joke between the author and it's readers.

I'd tell you more but you should just go and check it out for yourselves if you can. It was really, really great.

book lovin' nerd OUT!

PS - I finished my papers! Yipeeee! I made it through! AND I'm healthy again. On to the next...

hello mellow

2010-03-03T16:11:00.007-05:00

After yesterday's post, you'd expect more harsh ravings about how bad it is over here, but today I am feeling decidedly mellow. And I'm feeling better.

Is it the sweet, sweet pages and pages and PAGES of educational theory, history and philosophy that I've been reading and trying to understand for these last papers, or the copious amounts of chamomile tea that I've been consuming to try to wrestle first a stomach flu and then a cold into submission, or the fact that the sun has shone for the last four days straight (four days I've been cooped up inside, I might mention - either banging my head away at said papers, in class endeavouring to follow what the prof was saying through the miasma of illness, or sleeping off that miasma, you choose they're all inside)? That sentence was long and convoluted enough for you to lose track of what that question mark was about. Why am I feeling so mellow?

Not sure, but sure glad it's stopped by.

Reading about play today, folks, since the last legs of this cold kept me away from the kiddies at placement AGAIN. Joan Almon wrote at length - and I mean long, for an article at 35 pages - about the importance of play. She's a Waldorf kindergarten wonder-star, part of the Alliance for Childhood, and describes play in her wonderfully long article that "creative play is a central activity in the lives of healthy children"(Almon, 2003, p.1) That's on page one, and the rest of it talks about the importance of making sure preschool is place where kids can play, as play is central to small humans becoming fully developed humans. She goes on to make a pretty strong case, as if a stronger case was needed than the one we already have. High stakes testing? Not good for kids or learning. Business models for education? Not good for kids or learning. Play? AWESOME for kids and learning. I'm paraphrasing - but that's what she's saying.

And I guess that's another reason I feel mellow. I am DOWN with these ideas. These are the ideas I live and breathe, and am readying to defend from an informed, academically backed point of view for, I imagine, THE REST OF MY LIFE.

From what you all out there in the classrooms everyday are telling me, it still needs defending. I'm DOWN with that too - to join with all you cool cats, you exhausted-from-the-demands-and-pressures-of-ridiculous-bureaucracies kittycats on the front lines of our children's chances. I'm IN. I'm DOWN. And I'm relaxed and ready and ripe.

I also have THREE and a HALF more years before I get MY OWN CLASS, survive my first year out there on my own. But, still feeling like an ally in the struggle. Learning all I can get into my head and heart to win over the folks who think that factory-izing our kids is the way to make a workable world to another way of thinking.

Yes.

MeeeeOW! Chamomile all day is GOOD STUFF.

nerd out

in like several lions...

2010-03-02T19:03:00.007-05:00

...and stomach flu, midterm papers and fever. And then another cold.

I started getting a little queasy last week, and came down with the stomach flu on Thursday after a feverish night. By the weekend I was feeling better, and was able to pretty much nail the paper we were working on about Maria Montessori and her method. Doing research from bed wasn't that bad, and I just wrote the thing all weekend.

While I'm glad it's done, working as dementedly on it as I did may not have been the best idea, as yesterday I woke up at 4am, coughing to beat the band and unable to get back to sleep. I went to school anyway, because I am a nerdy nerdster and had a crapload of stuff to do there anyway, and by the start of my Social Emotional Intelligence class I started feeling crappy again, and spent another night shivering and sweating in turns. F...

Anyway...early yesterday morning when I was barking up my lungs I tried to do some research for my other paper, and was reading The Hundred Languages of Children, edited by Carolyn Edwards, Lella Gandini and George Forman, which is the totally rocking book that goes along with the exhibit by the same name that is touring all over, showing folks what Reggio Emilia schools are about. Check it. The book is a wonder - full of all kinds of things I feel like thinking about.

One thing - well, one of many - caught my feverish attention. In an interview about influences on their philosophy with Lella Gandini, Loris Malaguzzi - the director and philosopher of the Reggio Emilia approach - mentioned this crazy school that in the 1970's inspired the teachers who were setting up the schools in Reggio Emilia. It was a school in France that moved every 3 years "where the reconstruction of old, abandoned farmhouses would be the basis of the educational work with the children." (Edwards, Gandini & Forman, 1996, p. 52)

Ummm...hello? RAD! The idea blows the roof off my head - or is that just the pounding of my head cold? The thought of this wandering school, teaching through hands-on experience, coming upon old, falling-down, uncared for places and learning and growing and playing together and then leaving behind rebuilt, loved places...wow.

Anyways, I didn't go to the Nursery School today, so I don't have much fun stuff to report. I hope I'm better enough to go tomorrow. I miss it! Instead, I stayed in bed and slept, which felt great, and when I wasn't sleeping I read picture books, and then slept some more.

Maybe I'll go back and sleep now. I want to get RID OF THIS THING. All I can say is that this month had better end with candy and roses and gentle breezes and fun - or else that saying is full of doody.

nerd out.

more risk for healthier kids

2010-02-25T10:26:00.005-05:00

Found this on Teacher Tom this morning. So awesome! And TED is a great resource.

Tom wrote this morning about getting kids to do their own safety assessments, to figure out themselves how to do what they want and do a lot of learning, while keeping injuries to a minimum. Imagine a society where instead of hovering over our kids to keep them safe we empower them to make their own safety...wow.

More risk for healthy kids! I definitely want to think more about this, and post more later.

Safe risking Nerd OUT!

yesterday we made that, today we made this, what are we gonna make tomorrow?

2010-02-24T18:01:00.007-05:00

The kids at placement are really into the materials we used for the shaker bottles yesterday, so today after we made more shakers, we just played with the materials! So awesome for fine motor development, and scooping and pouring, we ended up transferring the stuff over to the kitchen in the house area and 'cooking' with it. Pretty fun - the kids had a really good time and it got pretty messy. It felt like a gong-show, but somehow somewhere in there it gelled, and I got to witness some pretty high-quality play going on.

Now - I'm coming to understand the value of mess. It's pretty awesome to encourage kids to explore a material until they have a thorough, experiential understanding of it. Usually that can get really messy. I can understand how a lot of educators are a little put off by this - it takes time to clean up, time educators often don't have, or find it hard to invest. It's so much easier to work at controlling the classroom, making sure messes don't get out of hand, do our best to tame the chaos. However, kids are messy, and if they get messy, it seemed to me today that they were really getting a lot out of it. I'm not talking about making a mess for the sake of making messes - that's behavioural and doesn't need to be encouraged - but I think over-controlling kids, be it helicoptering over them, overscheduling their lives, or making sure everything's always neat and tidy impacts play, learning and ultimately kid's civil rights to be kids. Are we so concerned about our kids not getting hurt, or getting too messy, or staying safe that we are limiting them, holding them back from experiencing things fully? Is controlling kids the most effective way of ensuring their safety, health, learning?

Kids need protecting - our society is shaped in a particular way that necessitates that. And I don't want kids to come to any harm, by any means. But the constant mantra of "be careful" and "that's not safe" is starting to sound like walls hemming our kids in. It's exciting to think of alternative ways of being with kids as they learn. Thank goodness I'm in school for this.

Make the messes, my friends. I'll clean it up so we can make more messes tomorrow. I feel like I owe you all that, considering how many messes you're going to get handed in the future by us.

Messy Nerd out.

My Nana laughing

2010-02-23T22:00:00.009-05:00

Today I was at placement, thank goodness, and we made some great shaker bottles, practicing scooping and pouring. I'll get some photos tomorrow. Isabel comes up with some great ideas.

I was feeling sick all day long, and so my energy was not that great. Ate some ginger, felt better, and then found out my Nana, my dad's mom, fell yesterday and broke her femur high up near her hip. She had surgery today, got a pin and a cable installed, and apparently is already on the mend. The thing is, she's in Texas, and here I am in the frozen (well, slushy today) north. Far away from family in times of trouble. Doesn't feel so great right now. So so glad that my Aunt Pam and cousin Erica are there. Whew!

My Nana's 87. She got me into reading, by first getting me into Star Wars and then science fiction. My omnivorous insatiable reading habits stem in good part from there, I'm sure. I have deeply felt memories of her reading A Wrinkle in Time, Fantastic Mr. Fox and other books way beyond what was judged to be our 'reading level', and my sister and I eating it up like the best dessert. Nana would laugh at the funny parts harder than we would, probably because she understood them way more than we did, but her laugh is still a deep part of my delight in reading, imagination, story and literature. I'm GLAD she's ok.

Been thinking a lot about outdoor play, due a lot to the weather here and blogs like Teacher Tom, Place + Inquiry, Free Range Kids, and I'm a teacher, get me outside here! . Our half-day schedule doesn't allow us too much time to get outside at Bloorview Nursery School, but the kids do tend to play outside all together when their folks come to get them in the playground outside our classrooms. Alternatively, at the Early Learning Centre at Ryerson, the kids spend about 2 hours a day outside. It so necessary to get ourselves outside, no matter the weather, maybe even because of the weather. I know I feel so much more human when I've been outdoors. I've also been thinking a lot about this video, about outdoor preschools in Norway. I want my life to be kinda like this.

Wouldn't it be amazing to do more of our learning outside. "There is no such thing as bad weather, only improper clothing." Stuff to dream on.

nerd OUT!

reading and reading and reading...

2010-02-20T12:29:00.009-05:00

I will catch up. This is possible.

Everyone I talk to in the field and at school - they all agree with me. Placement semester is a gong-show. We have so much to do! A full course load + two days a week of placement + jobs to help us bolster our much appreciated but not-quite-adequate student loans = a lot to do. Not to mention homework, projects and papers.

So the academic powers-that-be invented Reading Week, so that we can attempt to catch up on everything and not become blubbering basket-cases.

HOWEVER, if you're nerdy like me, and get obsessed with all you're learning and immerse yourself in extra projects to explore and inquire even further, and go to your placement on your break so you don't lose connection with the kids (lose your place in placement) because really, is two days a week enough to learn all that this opportunity presents? And read inspiring books and articles and blogs that get you even more excited, ever more sure that you made the right choice, even though your brain feels like it's overheating sometimes.

Then, OH THEN, you need to remember to breathe. And make space. And not get too thrashed up over things. And that way you - I mean I - will become the teacher I want to be and not a burnt-out bonglehead.

And then, when I am that teacher that I want to be, I'll go on to maybe inspire a kid who'll in turn go on to invent a time-machine or something that will enable us to get all the things we want/need to get done in the time allotted to us, or add a couple of extra days onto the week. Or something.

Anyways. in my readingreadingreading, I have bumped into something I like thinking about - in my Creative Arts course text Art & Creative Development for Young Children by Robert Schirrmacher and Jill Englebright Fox (2009), in the chapter about designing early childhood art programs they talk about 4 important elements to include. I think they're all really important -

1.sensory experiences - situations that engage and enliven kids through stimulating all of their senses
2. beautiful and creative experiences - exploring nature, culture and art to create a relationship with beauty
3. time, space and materials for making art - provide a place and long enough periods of uninterrupted time for kids to express themselves, and enough interesting materials to explore and play with
4. an introduction to the world of art, artists and a variety of art forms and styles - what is art? Who are artists? Why do they do it? Beginning to ask these questions, even in early learning, is useful and important.

I really enjoy thinking about this, and picturing how to shape curriculum to incorporate them. Starting to understand different ways of thinking about curriculum, from the very structured plans that seem to be expected in our school systems here, to the more almost philosophical stances, open-ended questions or points of inquiry that seem to underlie emergent curriculum.

OK - I gotta get back to homework. BREATHE and DIVE.

NERD out.

chalk murals

2010-02-17T18:39:00.011-05:00

wella wella wella -

These are some photos of the chalk murals I did in the classrooms at my placement at Bloorview Nursery School - High Park. I'm real happy with them, particularly when we were discussing the new tiger one and one of the girls in our class said "What happened to the boat?" Well, sweetheart, don't worry. It's still in the other classroom...all chalkboards are not the same chalkboard.

This is the Tiger I did for Chinese New Year - I peeled away the blue corro-tint to find a green chalkboard wreckage beneath. It was covered in tape and the sticky remnants of some teacher's great idea. It took the better part of an hour, a scraper, goo-gone, two steel-wool pads and a shit-load of elbow grease to get the gummy residue off, and leave an easily chalkable surface. I'm happy to say I feel like it was worth it.

Because sidewalk chalk is so light, and doesn't come really in black, I had to get inventive -- and erasing the tiger's stripes worked really well.

This other mural I did in the classroom we were in at the time, when the kids were captivated by pirates and treasure. It was pretty gratifying to hear the kids talking about mermaids and islands a couple of weeks after it was up - amazing what enters the kids' stories.

I was a bit more aware of my language today - that is going to be an ongoing thing. Good thing it's so worth it, and awesome, and I'm into it. It's a challenging thing, though, and being aware in that way of how I'm speaking and framing things takes a lot of effort. I talked about it with Isabel, who said she'd be happy to back me up if I'll do the same for her. She framed it as having an inside voice and an outside voice, and letting your inside voice say what it needs to -- "NO!" "Don't do that!" or "Hey, buster, don't sit on the table!" -- IN YOUR HEAD -- and translate it into your outside voice saying "Hey, friend, it looks to me like you're thinking of sitting down. Let's go get a chair or a beanbag instead." Awesome. Demanding. Fake-sounding? A little, but I think that's just the constructed clarity and intensified intent that grates on my ear. Practice that for say, ten years or so, and it oughta come out more naturally. It's a good goal to point towards, anyway.

Always learning, even when it feels against my will! Positive attitude, check. Sense of humour, check. Loads of stuff to do, check. Groan!

Nerd.OUT!

reading week...

2010-02-16T17:20:00.008-05:00

ARG - just found out that my sister and nephew AREN'T coming to visit this week - which sucks, but there is a silver lining in that I can get the schoolwork done that I need to, study for my other midterm which is coming up, and work away at my projects. It was going to be complicated but worth it that they were here, and now it'll be a bit easier.

I did decide to keep going to placement, and I'm really glad I did. My new project at placement is a personal one, born out of noticing that the language I use when talking to kids is not really the kind I want to be using. Not like I'm swearing like a sailor (do they swear that much these days?), but I'm not always clear and my speech could be a lot more helpful, more conducive to communication.

Teacher Tom, one of my blog education heroes, wrote about it here, and here, and also along the same lines here. Check out his great great blog Teacher Tom. It's on the blog list over there in the sidebar, too. It's chock-full of good teacher stuff, told in great narrative, with real kids and real teacher action.

So, today, I kept messing up how and what i was speaking, and after a particularly wonderous blunder (done out of earshot of the kids, and I'm still chewing on it embarrasedly) I resolved to really really REALLY be mindful about how I speak. Good thing, too.

We also changed rooms again, and this week are in the room I started placement in. I'm not really sold on this room-switching business - I mean, I see some logic (fresh environment, fresh materials, new perspectives) but it just ends up feeling like a whole of transitions for everyone. All the kids did was wander around and explore, really, except in the House Centre where things were familiar enough to dig in and really have a feed-the-babies-wooden-birthday-cake love fest. However, switching rooms means four walls that i haven't really been able to have much effect on, so here we go! Got at it after everyone was gone, and spent most of the afternoon doing new chalk mural for the Year of the Tiger. Again, I forgot to effectively document the thing, but will do better next time, and take some photos of it to post tomorrow.

Also, even tho my mouth wasn't up to par, my play was - totally inspired by Vivian Gussin Paley, I played with the kids in a really engaged way today. It felt great, and a boy who's shy and a bit anxious blossomed and had fun with me after a unusually short interval of shadowing one of the regular teachers first thing. AWESOME.

Nerd Out - for now!

PS - Had a great time in Montreal over the weekend, and went to the ridiculously gorgeous Waldorf school stuff store, La Grande Ourse on Duluth. Wood wood and wood, lovely toys, and wonderful colours - those anthroposophists sure know how to make fetching felt fairies and wooden gnomes. Check it out if you're ever around there, and look at this gorgeous photo of the wooden kitchen, all kid-sized, that they have for sale for an unfortunately enormous price. I found the photo on flikr at pleasurecraft's site.

Vivian Gussin Paley makes me excited

2010-02-10T07:36:00.004-05:00

Among the 18 other books I'm reading, studying for my midterm tomorrow and working on two papers, shoveling the snow, and getting ready to go to Montreal for the weekend, i am reading the amazing Vivian Gussin Paley's The Girl With the Brown Crayon.
I can just barely handle how excited I feel about getting back to the classrooms I spend time in, about having a classroom of my own...yowza!

Check this -

"It is passion Reeny wants: a roomful of dancing brown girls and dreamy mice, mother rabbits who rescue babies from an eagle's nest, princesses who sleep with their cousins and have crocodiles for pets, and friends who color and hug and whisper to each other all day long.

I too require passion in the classroom. I need the intense preoccupation of a group of children and teachers inventing new worlds as they learn to know each other's dreams. To invent is to come alive. Even more than the unexamined classroom, i resist the uninvented classroom."
- Paley, V.G. (1997) The girl with the brown crayon. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts. (p. 50)

Nerd Out.

the book tree

2010-02-09T16:40:00.003-05:00

I'm in placement this semester at Bloorview Nursery School, it's High Park site. It's an integrated classroom, meeting the requirements of our second year Children with Special Needs placement - there are about half and half kids with extra support needs and kids with typical needs. I am lucky - it's a really great school, and I'm learning tons.

My field educator Isabel is really great, and encourages me to 'be artistic' in the classroom. We laugh about it, as her background is in performance, and so we're a good match of artistic temperaments.

So...we're decorating the book-nook. I am into this - DEEPLY. I've already done a chalk mural of a pirate ship, following some of the kids fascination with pirates from a couple of weeks ago. But this project feels a little bit more integrated. Anyway, Isabel and i were jamming ideas about how to pull documentation, the kids' art and beautifying the classroom all together, when we realized that making a 'book tree' on the wall above the book area was the way to do it.

I sketched and cut out the bare bones of a tree (one of my favourite motifs) and stuck it up on the wall last week, on my first day of placement for the week. Then, on the second, we started a collage project with the kids, getting them gluing and cutting with different colours of cellophane paper and glue to make leaves to add to the tree.

The kids got right into it, glopping glue on and layering the clear colours on top of each other in a totally unexpected (why didn't i see that coming?) way. A couple of random objects also made their way into it, as well as the inevitable bits of glitter. Isabel and her team-teacher Tatiana continued it with the kids while i was gone, and i got back today to an interesting, still drying (after 5 days, that's how much glue) layered piece of work.

After all the kids left, i got to it with the scissors, chopping up the bigger collage into vaguely leaf shaped pieces, and this is what resulted.

The idea is to start with these leaves, all different colours of the imagination, and slowly add photos of the kids reading, pictures of favourite books and characters, and maybe even letter or words to the tree, tying it all together into a living documentation of creation and literacy in the classroom.

I feel real good about how we documented this too - the only thing is I forgot to take a picture of the bare-branched tree and the collage before i started cutting it up - but I'm a learner, it's ok.

I am proud of this. It feels great to merge two of my worlds, and felt great to put it together like this. I can't wait to see what the kids say tomorrow...

Nerd Out!

beauty and the smartypants

2010-02-08T21:45:00.004-05:00

"...aesthetics are a quality as of play, describing it as a meaning-making process, capable of generating both cognitive and affective engagement - important components of the aesthetic dimension."
- L. Vygotsky in Wright, 2003 p. 213.

Wright, S. (2003). The arts, young children and learning. Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon.

And isn't this one of the most powerful reasons we love education - using beauty as a way of making meaning with children, so as to help them become as deeply engaged in the world as we can.

Nerd Out.

Quotes from Bluma...

2010-02-08T20:17:00.002-05:00

My dear friend Bluma has been in the hospital for about a month now. She's an older person, and has a neuropathic disorder that has severely affected her balance and motor skills. She's in the hospital because she contracted pneumonia, and since her family is far away in Rochester, I've been visiting her as much as possible.

This lady kinda reminds me of her...

She is an awesome, hilarious, crotchety jewish lady, who swears more than I do and cracks one-liners non-stop. She is a talented musician, who sang and played both flute and guitar. She also worked for years as a music teacher and an arts educator, both here in Toronto and in New York, and has about a million stories and tons of advice to share. She's become a real mentor to me, and has been totally supportive of my switching over from the arts to teaching.

I biked over there in between classes (the hospital is real close to school) and found her sitting up in the sun, going through some of her papers. Her illness has been a real kick in the teeth, as she can't play music or sing anymore, and pretty much feels like she won't be able to again. Instead of getting real depressed or gloomy, she's been pretty realistic and her amazing sense of humour keeps her from going completely crazy.
She was feeling a little sleepy, so after i got her a coffee and a couple of timbits, she said, "OK, what words of wisdom can i impart to you today?" Here's what she had to offer-

"I loved it. The children, all the different kids, shining like a garden. Their responsiveness, and their differences -- that is what i loved most about the work."

"To feed them with the things that they need, and to be sensitive to who they are."

She told me that even as a child she strove to "make the unfamiliar familiar." And that's what we can be doing with our kids, too.

Pretty awesome...but she didn't even swear once.

Nerd OUT.

wow the amazingness of the early childhood education blog

2010-02-07T18:06:00.002-05:00

In honour of the total amazingness that is the early childhood educational presence out there in blog-o-land, I've connected the folks who are really inspiring me these days out there on the internet to this blog. Over on the right there's a list of blogs written by thoughtful, insightful educators all over.

Really really amazing thinkers out there. Thanks folks - it's really inspiring and affirming.

Nerd Out!

ok

2010-02-07T16:04:00.001-05:00

so - i think that i'll start this thing - a record of my writing and thinking about education, my nerding out about this stuff that is FASCINATING to me. I'm going to start by importing some of my writing from those other blogs of mine about education. Nerd out! That is what's below.

Up above, will be little articles and thoughts and excitement about school, learning, curriculum, education and all that kinda stuff.

awesomeness. Nerd Out!

school SCHOOL school! from AofU

2009-10-16T16:28:00.001-04:00

wahooo! It's started again! Thank goodness - even with gardening, i was starting to get dried up by doing too much all the time. School is back, and now i can rest somewhat, within it's schedule.
I love my classes, i'm real interested in everything we're talking about, i'm nerding out. Feels awesome!
Time to go learn more about how to help little things grow.

images found on the internet.

wheeeew! from AofU

2009-05-23T16:26:00.001-04:00

A year blows past and here i am in another spring - almost summer!

The year at school was absolutely amazing - so much more than i thought - a rich, satisfying experience that has got me thinking and composting my thoughts and ideas. OH EDUCATION! OH LEARNING! OH KIDS!

Pretty dang great.

And now the school year is over, exams are done, and i'm working full-time at the Early Learning Centre (which is the lab school at Ryerson), still learning - AND i'm in full garden mode. It's really all i want to think about these days. SO... I'll write more later, cuz i'm going up to buy some white clover seed to be a living mulch in the garden.

a new adventure from ChIL

2008-08-26T16:22:00.001-04:00

Hey there y'all -

Well. Here's some news. In just about a week, yours truly will be beginning something i never thought i would - my undergraduate degree.
I'm taking a hiatus from full-time arts-making and i'm going to learn about child development in an Early Childhood Education program. I want to be a teacher, and to do that i have to go to Teacher's College. To get into Teacher's College, however, i need to have an undergraduate degree. Never mind that i've been working with kids for longer than i haven't been working with kids, and i've been working in schools for the past 7 years. I need the piece of paper, and that requires an undergrad, which will require the next 4 years of my life. And then teacher's college, which will take at least another year.
However, after i've paid all that time to various institutions i will be able to do what i feel is important for me to do - have a Grade 2 class of kids of my own.

This came out of something i did with my amazing friend Jen Bulthuis, and about 14 years of working with kids and thinking about it. Jen is a toymaker, and she asked me to help her launch her new puzzle/puppets with a workshop for kids at a local kids shop. Well - I had about 20 kids under 5 all working together and having fun, the parents all asking where i taught - and in the middle of everything i asked myself 'why am i fighting this?' For years i have been working with kids and feeling pretty good about it, why not try to dive into it in more concentrated way?

I began looking into it, and all the Education Faculties said that they needed me to have an undergrad before accepting me. So i started looking around at the possibilities of an undergrad...at the same time as doing a six month residency at Islington Junior Middle School. The time I spent there with the students and teachers confirmed for me that teaching was something that i was feeling more and more called to do. Especially after spending time with the wonderful Grade 1s and 2s. So, i did even more research and finally decided on Ryerson here in Toronto and their Early Childhood Education program. That'll give me an even more solid base in child development than i already have, and then off to whatever teacher's college i can get into, maybe OISE at U of T. FIVE YEARS!!! Five years of school is what i'm looking at. It's a lot, and a big shift.

So, less art projects will be filling up my days. However, i won't be able to stop completely, so stay tuned if you like, and more will be coming. I've started another blog too, about ecological and sustainable living...you can check that one out too. It's called Artists of Unwaste at artistsofunwaste.blogspot.com.

Take care, keep checking in. I'll be seeing you!

sage seeds, education... from AofU

2008-07-29T16:12:00.001-04:00

I collected 7 seeds from the golden sage in the herb garden just now. Shook them off into my hand, like magic. Seven round brown seeds, complicated creatures tucked inside them. Like little worlds.

Got excited today about education...Elyse my dear friend, philosopher artist and Waldorf teacher extraordinaire sent me a letter she wrote to Barak Obama about intuition and education, nature and the role of teachers. I am excited, although feeling a little leery of the EDUCATION SYSTEM. How will i navigate it, with it's checks and balances and bureaucracies, tests and exams and boxes and numbers? As i enter into dedicating my life to working with kids in a way that hopefully helps them become whole people with deep relationships with their worlds, their ecologies, themselves and others, how will i work inside it? I might be asking myself these questions for a long time.

Elyse's letter, and a chunk from John Gardner's 'The Secret of Peace and the Environmental Crisis', published in 1971, got me thinking along these lines. It is still so so relevant, which is unsettling. Here's a quote i liked.

"It seems to me that when teachers can settle down quietly to the real business of education, which is to awaken, empower and improve human beings, they will be glad to do so. When children are so taught, they will respond. When external goals and pressures are removed, teachers and students will begin to listen to what life says to the heart and to the conscience. And this concern will bring to pass what we need more than anything if we are to stop the ravaging of the earth."

Brilliant brilliant brilliant.

well howdy! from ChIL

2008-07-22T16:14:00.001-04:00

Hello the peoples. Hope yer all dandy.

Me, i'm fine. I have been very busy making crazy art, first with about 530 elementary and middle school students, and i just finished a bonkers re-enactment of a 1920's Jewish Children's Work Commune. 28 kids dressed up and pretended to be living collectively in Communist Russia, shortly after the Revolution. It's been intense, but swell.

And so the world turns. Been working with kids so long, i've decided to make it official. I'm thinking of becoming a public school teacher. So, got accepted into Ryerson University's Early Childhood Education programme here in Toronto, set to start in the fall, on my way to Teacher's College and that little piece of paper that folks seem to think is so important. I'll be working with Jumblies and MABELLEarts for the rest of the summer.

The Jumblies project is Phase 2 of that re-enactment project i mentioned above - a movement/installation piece called Di Velt Ven Vern Yinger (The World will Grow Younger) detailing the history of the jewish secular communist summer community Camp Naivelt in Brampton. The MABELLEarts project will be Lantern Garden, the outdoor art garden we started last year. And then i'll be off to studentsville. For the rest of my life!

Maybe. Or maybe i'll discover something else in my scholastic adventures, and go off in an entirely different direction. Anyways, the Lab will be quieter than usual i think, with less beakers bubbling and more internal experimentation happening. I think that THE INFLAMMABLES will have more work to do, and i'm sure other weird stuff will be popping up. I'm looking forward to a change, tho.

In other news, permaculture is very good, i am trying to grow a good supply of tea for us this winter in my birthday herb garden, and the most fun that i'm having these days is composting. Remember to be good to yourselves and the earth, drink a lot of water from faucets and hoses, and become talented artists of unwaste.

Talk to you all soon - noah

Photo of Mimico Creek puppet by Katherine Fleitas
Photo of 12th Jewish Children's Commune by Michaela Otto
Photo of water found on the internet