PART 3
Documentation as a forum & showcase in an Education Faculty
Pam Whitty: Reclaiming our Places
in the Greater Community
This project in both the children's and adults learning environment was constructed,
in part, to offer teacher candidates in Cultural Constructions of Childhood
an opportunity to work directly with the children and their teacher, Anne, in
the UNB Wednesday Arts programme. In the mid-nineties, our university shifted
from a four year BEd to a consecutive or concurrent education requirement for
graduation and licensing. Consequently, both our practicum opportunities and
the Early Childhood concentration within our faculty have been seriously diminished
for incoming teachers. This educational reality combined with the loss of funding
for a teacher in our early years classroom has left us scrambling to keep the
children's space occupied in an educational and financial viable manner. The
point I am making is that our project approach had certain constraints placed
upon it from the outset. Anne and I had determined this particular topic, in
a broad way, to appeal to children and families throughout the city who might
have both the disposition and finances to take part in an after school arts
program. Our other constraint, if you will, is that the topic needed to fit
within the framework of Cultural Constructions of Childhood. We "advertised"
this topic in our brochure "The Saint John River". This program will reclaim
and represent our natural and historical heritage:
a) through archived photos, drawings, paintings and maps we will examine the settlements along the river in the past
b) through story, song and dance we will explore the importance of river to various cultures who have lived on its banks
c) we will learn how people and especially children have worked and played on the river
d) we will develop awareness of wildlife in, on and along the banks of our river. It was an ambitious plan.
The
history of the British in Fredericton has received significant recognition over
the past two centuries and in many ways this Anglican Protestant Loyalist story
has become the history of the city. After the American revolutionary war of 1776,
several thousand subjects "loyal' to the British crown made their way to Atlantic
Canada. Many were given land grants in recognition of their allegiance to the
Crown. Today, local tourist attractions continue to emphasize this part of our
history. Everyday throughout the summer tourists and locals alike bear witness
to the centuries old ritual of the"redcoats " changing the guard at the Officers
Barracks in the downtown military compound. The broad aim of the Cultural Construction course which I have been teaching/learning
within over the past 10 years is to examine various ideas of what it means to
be a child and how these ideas work in the lived experience of children. The
process is one of both designated and emergent curriculum. The questions which
permeate the course readings, discussion and activities are: "what does it mean
to be a child?" and "what social, economic, political and/or personal conditions
contribute to the cultural conditions of the lives of children and their families?"
We began in the first half of the course by examining our inherent and lived
ideas of childhood as well as the perspectives of various cultural and feminist
theorists and cultural text . Examples of cultural texts included Naomi's
Road a fictionlized autobiography about life as a experienced by a young
Japanese-Canadian girl and her family in a Canadian internment camp during WWII
and Out of the Depths, a series of autobiographical accounts of life
in a residential native school in the mid 50 and 60's. Thus by the time we began
this joint project with Anne, the idea of a singular notion of either childhood
and history had been disrupted.
We worked with Anne and the children in the UNB Wednesday Arts programs through
direct participation with the children in the program and/or acted as resource
support to the teacher. We formed conversational clusters in which various roles
were selected by each person. In this way, we participated in the children's
program directly, located resource materials and/or assisted with documentation.
Anne
and I decided to take as our overlapping, starting point a reading of My
Place by Nadia Wheatly and Donna Rawlins. My Place is an Australian
picture book that begins with a child's brief telling of an episode from the
life of a piece of land in 1988. We thought it important to start in the present
with the children and work back in time. The text and illustrations go back
in Australian history to the time prior to 1788 when the aborginals were the
only people on the land. The power of this text is the manner in which it evokes
multiple histories, demonstrating that everyone has a story to tell and that
every place has many stories. The visible constants on the land are natural
heritage - the rising and the setting of the sun, a tree and a river.
When I read this book in our Cultural Constructions class, I asked, "What does
My Place evoke for you?" This is one of the same questions Anne had
asked the group of children. The verbal responses and visual mappings which
my question elicited ranged from "my room is my place for now as I from out
of town" to "my place in the world" to explicit connections with the text and
illustrations and the stories being told therein.
Three
women had ideas immediately. Bev, a potter and mother of three, living along
the St John River below Fredericton said she would look at native histories
in the area. Specifically she looked at how First Nations peoples were represented
in "our" history books. We are living on contested ground was one of the first
comments she made as we began this discussion. Debbie, a child care provider
and mother, wanted to interview her grandfather who lived above Fredericton
and hear his stories about the river prior to the building of the Mactaquac
hydroelectric plant and dam in 1968. In particular, she wanted to learn about
the effect of the dam upon the lives of the people living there. Zoe, a farmer
and a breeder of the Canadian horse wanted to represent her own land. She and
her husband own a large farm. She began to envision how she might represent
her farm in a manner similar to that communicated in My Place and trace
that link to the Saint John River and early days of white settlement on the
tributary of the river that ran through her farm.
Kim and Mary decided to look at Acadian history. Mary was taking a degree in history and was
comfortable in that field. Kim was from out of the province,
had a keen interest in social studies and was interested in learning more about
the Acadians.
Two other students, Emily and Susan, were working with Anne and the children
in our earlier project that Pam just spoke to. They provided thoughtful and
compassionate bridging to our class from this earlier project. In addition,
both had extensive prior experience working and being with children.
Karen and Namal, new to the project approach and Reggio conception of representation,
and both mothers, assisted in the children's room with ongoing activities and
in our setting with discussions about the emerging projects and the overall
challenge of how we would document process and learnings.
Reflections:
In
writing about this process, I am struck by the way in which our classroom community
brought together people who were differently located in a variety of communities.
Three women immediately connected with the content and articulated an idea -
they were able to initiate and carry out their own project within the broader
visions Anne and I had articulated. They were part of the local community. Two
women who had been in Pam's class knew the children, knew Anne, knew the process
so were able to be peer links, if you will, in the collaborative process of
reflecting upon learnings and discussing the process of documentation. They
were part of the early childhood educational community in the faculty. Two undergraduate
women with a interest in a particular content area jumped in, found out there
was little in English on the Acadians, recognized the limitations on materials
available with which to teach and learn from themselves. They were able to engage
the children in a play about the expulsion of the Acadians which the children
re-enacted, rewrote and presented to their parents- with just one week left
in the program. 
They
also brought in an archival map borrowed from the Provincial Archives that reiterated
on the map itself how the river and its tributaries came to be known to the
Acadians and the Brits through native knowledge. Although they did not capitalize
on this fact in the context of this particular class, Kim subsequently returned
to the map in her social studies class as a direct result of this work - a way
of reclaiming the native voice through the available records. Two more women,
both mothers gave a great deal of thought to what representation meant in relation
to their own children, 4 and 5 years of age. In their self reflections they
were very clear about their own learning about the importance of multiple forms
of representation, how children might better use one form than another, and
how one form informs or elaborates another.
Zoe's work provided examples of how "Her Place " paralleled aspects of My Place. She created her presentation as a joint effort with two girls who clean her barn in exchange for riding lessons. The girls arrived in riding outfits to enhance their presentation to Anne's class. We all gained a sense of the communities Zoe was combining, creating as a horsewoman, farmer and participant in our classes.
As a class we decided to document our work using the Saint John River as a
time line. This decision came about as graphic way to address the emerging evidence
demonstrating the absence of native histories from the more readily available
histories, as well as the apparent scarcity of Acadian history
and artifacts. On the other hand, we were surrounded by British artifacts in
terms of actual
teaching /learning resources and local architecture that documented the British presence since the arrival of the Loyalists in 1776.
We began the river time line one morning with whomever from the class was available.
Two of the moms brought their children which added to the community spirit -
we had heard about these children in class. We all pitched in painted river
in various shades of blue on paper and on the windows. We began in one corner
took up over one half of the room with native related stories, drawings, paintings
and plasticine representation. Then we entered into the representations of Acadian
work by all Anne's children the two students in my class - including the Acadian
arrival and their expulsions in 1755 by the British. It was not until the British
arrived in the late 1700's that this dual history of 'our place' became multiple.
The
visual representation of the river as a timeline clearly demonstrated how one
cultural community had been supplanted by another and, in the case of the British
arrival how they were refugees themselves seeking political asylum. We could
also see how the histories blended and how one racial group was treated differently
than another in the 1960's. For example, when Debbie interviewed her grandfather
about the flooding of the village of Jewett's Mills to make way for Mactaquac
hydro electric power plant, she learned that the native burial grounds on the
Snowshoe Islands were simply flooded while the English cemetery was moved to
a new burial site above the dam. We were able to make a link between the photographs
she brought in of the Snowshoe islands and one of the native stories that Bev
located. Seeing this so graphically illustrated on our river time line prompted
new questions about who is included in our official histories and who isn't?
And if not, what does this mean - how does a teacher identify and correct for
omissions of cultural groups in the curricula ?
Conclusion:
In his book Children Closely Observed Armstrong (1980) uses one child's work to demonstrates how the practice of art and the growth of understanding are inextricably interwoven: the very act of trying to make visible what one knows is what prompts the search for deeper understanding, which in turn prompts renewed efforts to represent that knowledge. The process is ongoing. We offer this paper in that spirit. As we have practiced the art of documentation with/in our faculty of education we have begun to see new possibilities for understanding, reclaiming and building community in the context of our teacher education program. We need now to practice some more.
End Note:
Publications developed from Parenting for a Literate Community project, Health Canada grant
Parenting for a Literate Community: A training Program for Family Resource and Early Intervention Personnel, Pam Nason, Anne Hunt, Pam Whitty and Lynda Homer, 1999.
Publications born from this project are:
Training manual/Getting Started Pamphlet, Pamela Nuttall Nason and Lynda Homer
Books for Babies, Lynda Homer
Singing & Dancing, Anne Hunt
Anticipating Text Predictable Books, Anne Hunt and Pamela Nuttall Nason
Honouring Domestic Literacies, Pamela Nuttall Nason and Anne Hunt
Folk & Fairytales, Pamela Nuttall Nason and Anne Hunt
Cultivating Lanuage & Literate Play, Pamela Nuttall Nason and Anne Hunt
Where Does Fonix Phit?, Pamela Nuttall Nason and Anne Hunt
Connecting: Home, School & Community-Based Programs, Pamela Whitty with Mollie Fry
The following children participated in the Wednesday Afternoon Arts Program:
Nicolai, Sarah, Alex, Christopher, Elliott, Jonah, Camille, Devin, Emily, Hilary, Gabrielle L., Bess, Stephanie, Sebastian, Gabrielle M., Holly, Taryn, Caitlin, Jaime, Michael, Tyler, Adam, Thomas, Megan, Sarah, David, Michael.
We strive to honour their work in this paper.
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update: 2000/08/21
