Documentation as a Forum and Showcase in an Education Faculty - Part 1

PART 1

Documentation as a forum & showcase in an Education Faculty
Anne Hunt, Pamela Nuttall Nason and Pam Whitty

This paper is the story of the establishment of a community of learners including children, teachers, parents and faculty of education students and professors through the project approach. Many voices of authority emerged as the work we are presenting progressed. Although we claim authorship we will strive to accurately represent the contributions of the other members of our community.

Background

Across the hall from the Early Childhood Centre in the Faculty of Education at the University of New Brunswick there is a well appointed classroom designed for young children. It has been a research and development site for over 20 years.

The classroom also provides practical experience for undergraduates in the faculty of education. Hands on experience prior to placement in an internship gives substance to the theoretical, and opportunity for observing, planning and evaluating their own and young children's learning.

Our classroom was empty in the fall of 1999. We had just finished a two year Health Canada project which had filled the space with parents, preschoolers, early intervention and family resource centre staff. We were looking for a project that would contribute to our education students, the teaching profession and the community surrounding the campus.

New Brunswick, like many other parts of North America, has experienced serious cutbacks to arts programs in the public school system. In order to continue to provide music, art, and movement, classroom teachers have been pressed to include these areas which were once covered by trained specialists. Often, little support is provided and teachers feel overwhelmed. They ask: "How can the arts be addressed in an integrated curriculum?" "I have no expertise. How will I teach music, art, movement?"

We wondered how we might explore these questions with our pre-service education students.

Fredericton has a scheduled professional development time for elementary school teachers each Wednesday afternoon. Children attend school in the morning and are dismissed at noon. A quick survey of Wednesday afternoon Children's Programs revealed that no one in the city was providing an "arts based" program at this time. How might we create a setting that offered this option?

Since Lilian Katz's 1992 visit to Fredericton the powerful images from her slide presentation of the work at Reggio Emilia have influenced our work. We have been particularly focussed on Katz's contention that "The major goal of education is to engage the mind of the learner, aesthetically, morally, and spiritually." Acknowledging that we are all learners, we set out to explore the possibilities of using the project approach to establish a program which encouraged the expression of knowledge and skills through the arts.

Getting Started

We were working under some constraints, both financial and political. The program needed to be cost recoverable. However, tuition ought to be comparable to existing programs in the city to attract a wide range of students. We were also aware that parents would need fairly specific information about what was happening in this "new" program to persuade them to enrol their children. This, to a certain extent, would affect the "organic development" (p.31 Project Approach) of the project. Ideally topic selection should be done in conjunction with the children at the centre. We, however, unabashedly chose topics that we thought would appeal to the children and "sell" the program.

We chose to do three 6 week projects. This allowed for flexibility in the case that families did not want to remain involved for the entire academic year. Together we created a web of possible areas of exploration and collected a bibliography of resources, including university faculty and members of the local arts community. The topics we chose were: Masks & Disguises, Flight and The Saint John River. Pamphlets with application forms were written and distributed and our phone began to ring.

Working in concert, we each developed, through the documentation process, ways of displaying our learning and our perceptions of what others were learning.

Here we switch to first person singular to focus on our own learning as we became a part of this learning community.

Anne Hunt: In a Community of Children

I had attended the 100 Languages of Children display at the Montshire Museum in the summer of 1998. This powerful experience helped me to see the relationship between documentation and display. I stood for a very long time in front of the three self portraits by Francesco, his words of reflection and his teachers questions and feedback, in order to come to a better understanding of the importance of "the product of a child's efforts as representative of the child's current understanding of a concept or experience." p.224 The Hundred Languages of Children. Their mounting Francesco's work with his words and the words of the teacher allowed me, the observer, to understand what it was that Francesco learned through the reworking of his self portrait.

Then, just prior to the opening session of our first project on Masks and Disguises, I attended the Canadian Association of Young Children conference in Montreal, (Oct. 1999). A slide presentation by the University of Vermont preschool centre addressed a problem I had been anticipating. I had been wondering about continuity for the children enrolled in our program. They would be coming only once each week and I was concerned that they might become disengaged from their work during the interval between sessions. The University of Vermont slides demonstrated a strategy for helping children to reflect on, in their case, the previous day's activities. By photographing children at work and documenting what they said about that work, then putting this up on a bulletin board, the children had a focal point for reflecting and continuing when they arrived at school the next day.

We decided to implement this approach as a bridge for the children from week to week.. As the weeks unfolded and the project developed, the power of the display to attract people grew. I watched as the children used the display to reflect on their own learning and to learn about what other children were doing. Many different areas were being explored simultaneously in the program, and the bulletin board pulled this together.

Parents used it to see what was happening in this "new" after school program. They were able to see what their child was doing in relation to the other people involved in the project. They were able to connect what was happening in the classroom with learning that was taking place at home. One mother brought in a set of sketches of different noses her daughter had done at home as she thought about creating a mask. These and other family photos were added to the display, and family stories were told.

University students and faculty used the display as an example of the investigative process. Here, they could see how one learning adventure was progressing. They were able to see how specific curricular outcomes might be addressed through contextual, holistic learning. The education students learned from the "revisioning" of their work and continued to follow the progress of the project, volunteering to come and help on the busy and momentous day that the children created plaster masks formed on their own faces.

I was using the bulletin board to inform parents and the wider community, but I was also using it to shape what the children were learning. I realized that, as the person who selected what was posted, I was in a position of power and responsibility. What I chose to place on the board and where I chose to place it emphasized specific issues and imposed specific relationships.

Part of the experience we created for the children was opportunities to connect with the artistic community. We were fortunate to have two renowned mask creators in our area. Each of these artists had a focus and this soon emerged as the "big ideas" of our project. This emergence was not entirely co-incidental. I recognize the power I exercised as the person responsible for documentation and display.

George Fry is a mask maker who is concerned primarily with the transformation that takes place when one puts on a mask. George encouraged the children to think about the character they were creating for themselves as they fashioned their masks. He asked questions as the children worked. He showed sketches of the ideas that he worked through before the actual creation of the mask. And he spoke about the transformative power of the mask.

Ned Bear is a native North American mask maker who has carved many beautiful "larger than life" masks from the trees found in our forests. He is interested in the contemplative nature of the mask. Ned sees the power of the mask emerging as he works. One child asked how that felt. She said, "Do you have a complete idea before you start your mask or do you just begin carving?" Ned described te creative process as "like looking at the face from far away. I see it faintly and as I carve is seems to come closer and have more detail."

The children listened to these "big ideas" about contemplation and transformation. I ate them up. Here was "the beef" from my point of view. I used the display area to promote what I designated as the core of the program, an understanding of the role of the mask as an object to be contemplated or as something one puts on to become transformed into the character they have created. I used photos, the children's sketches and quotes from specific interactions between children and artists to emphasize this powerful idea, and in doing so, I made the idea even more powerful.

Now the larger community could see, in passing our display, that there was some serious engagement happening. People began to stop by on a regular basis to see how the work was going. They, in turn, would become engaged in discussion, not so much about the work on display as the ideas behind the work.

	I am Ashley, sister to Camille. I live in a mansion in Florida. I swim all the time at the beach. I feel happy because I am having fun.		I am Firetta, a Fire Goddess. I live in volcanoes in Hawaii. I protect kids from burning in house fires. I feel hot and happy. I can save people from burning in fires.
Camille		Sarah
	I am Sir Lancelot, a knight warrior. I live in a jungle in a little hut. I fight in wars. I fight dragons and evil people. I feel strong.		My name is Waterdam. I am a water god. I live in the ocean. I feel watery and wet. I run the waterfall.
Taryn		Nicolai

Part 2

Part 3