catch-up time!

Dear people I have neglected this space terribly! It's been almost a year since the people garden got an update. Well, I'll just tell you a little about what's been going on. School was crazy, and my undergrad studies ended with a bang, not a whimper. I managed to work through a handful of courses and a seniour internship at a public alternative school, where I got to know a bit about the school system and how alternative schools work within the Toronto District School Board. I got to work long-distance with the AMAZING Donna Ridley-Burns from Irresistible Ideas for Play Based Learning in an international project contrasting different early childhood education contexts. I got accepted into the Master's of Early Childhood Studies program at Ryerson. I worked all summer on trying to figure out how to stabilize the methodological approach, data storage and access procedures and data analysis protocols for a research project at the EDGE Lab, which was a HUGE learning process. I then listened to 100s of hours of audio data, sifting through the information gathered in encounters with the child participants to find patterns and themes in a process called open coding. It took me weeks, and was excruciating, motivating, inspiring, mind-numbing and illuminating. It was a lot of hilarious kids and a lot of learning about research methods, which totally got me excited about that as an area of research - how do we listen to kids, how do we involve their voices in research? I decided to explore this area more in my grad research. Then I started the Master's program. hahahahahahhahaahah I'm laughing because it's been a whirlwind since then. Grad school is really great, and has taken work and school to the next level. Last term I took three courses - Research Methods in Early Childhood Studies, Theoretical Frameworks of Early Childhood Studies and Social Justice in Education. I have never learned so much in such a compressed amount of time. I thought I was a good student - undergrad sure was fun, and I seemed to do well. Grad school put a whole new spin on my identity as a learner - we talk so much about lifelong learning, and here I was living it! The cognitive chaos has been a lot to deal with, but it's been amazingly fruitful. I worked hard, wrote some good papers, learned some good lessons, and when I accidentally backed up the wrong version of a final paper,erasing 7 hours of solid work, I stayed up all night to finish something for school for the first time ever as I re-wrote it from memory. I also got to TA for a course on Childhood in a Global Context with a prof that I love, and learned a tonne doing that. Then, a couple of days before the winter break happened, Jason told me about a PhD program that he thought would be a great place for me. So instead of resting over the break, I applied to that. I'll find out by mid-April. It's kind of competitive, so we'll see. I have to ignore the overwhelming freak-out about whether I got in or not, and develop alternative plans in case I don't get in. AND I also have a couple of things to do before that anyways, like finish my Master's degree and stuff like that. hahahahahahaha Out of the busy break, this term started at a running pace. I'm trying to complete all my course-work this term, so that I have the whole spring and summer to work on my Major Research Paper (MRP), which is basically our thesis. My courses this term are all as amazing as last term's - Social Research with Children, Curriculum Design, and Families and Equity, as well as a Directed Study with Jason about autoethnography and critical reflective narrative research methods. I'm also TAing this term, for another prof that I love for a course called Assessment for Programming, and this time I have my own tutorial. The students are great and I'm having a good time - the only thing is that this makes for A LOT OF WORK. My MRP IS focussing on how research is being conducted with children, how researchers perceive and position children in their research, and basically whether research is being conducted ON or ABOUT children or WITH and ALONGSIDE children. I've done a tonne of reading about kids' participation, children's rights, children's voices and "child-friendly" research methods, and it's all bubbling over in my mind. I'm looking forward to talking with researchers doing work in the field and hearing what they have to say. So, suffice it to say, I'm a little busy. It's doubtful I'll post here on a regular basis, but I'll try to keep up with it a bit better than once a year! There are so many amazing tidbits and huge mind-altering things in grad school, I'll try to share a few every now and then. NERD OUT for now...

Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital Snail Trails Summer Day Camp

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.

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

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.