Future of Learning: Harvard Project Zero

Last week I attended a weeklong institute, Future of Learning at Harvard Graduate School of Education hosted and organized by Project Zero, a research group composed of multiple, independently sponsored research projects, whose mission is to enhance and deepen learning across disciplines and cultures in a variety of settings. Like many educators, I have followed the work of Project Zero for some time, reading and being influenced by the books of Howard Gardner and others.  I became even more interested when researchers at Project Zero worked with the educators in Reggio Emilia, Italy to research and write the book Making Learning Visible.  Now, Making Learning Visible is one the research groups of Project Zero.

The week was extraordinary.  I had never taken a course at Harvard Graduate School of Education and I was so impressed.  I was one of 180 educators from 27 countries.  Half of the participants were from the United States and the other half from all over the world.   The course was organized around plenary sessions, small group workshops called courses, and a learning group of 5 that we met with every day with specific goals in mind.

I will keep writing about this experience and referencing it for some time.  For now, I want to recommend several books by researchers who spoke at our sessions last week.

The first is David Perkins.  I purchased two of his books and am reading them now.  Making Learning Whole and Future Wise.  His stance and his research supports and gives new clarity to all the work that Ashley and I are doing with schools and that is both reassuring and exciting.

The second is Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, an affective neuroscientist at the University of Southern California.  Her work is another substantive and important contribution to all that we believe about emotion and learning that we have heard Carlina Rinaldi speak about for 25 years!  Mary Helen has a book coming out in November which I pre-ordered...Emotions, Learning, and the Brain.  In the meantime, here is a link to a Ted x talk that she gave entitled Embodied Brains, Social Minds.

The last recommendation for this post is a book by Natasha Warikoo called Balancing Acts: Youth Culture in the Global City.  I took a course with Harvard Professor Warikoo called Cultural Straddlers.  Along with other learning experiences during the week, she made me see and appreciate in a whole new way the richness that cultural, racial and every kind of diversity offers us.  By the way, along those lines, if you have not seen it, be sure and watch the TED talk called The Danger of a Single Story.

We ended the week with the reflection and writing prompt, "I used the think.....but now I think..." What an excellent practice to track how we change and grow, learn and change.  I highly recommend this and other Project Zero institutes.  I feel grateful and excited to be connected to a whole new network of people and ideas.

Art New England

This week I am attending a week long oil painting class in Bennington, Vermont at a program called Art New England.  Many of the faculty come from Mass College of Art and Design which is the accrediting institution for the program.  The site is at Bennington College on a beautiful campus with well designed and well equipped studios.  There are many choices over a three week period including printmaking, drawing, ceramics, oil painting, and watercolor.

It is a privilege to focus intently on one thing with a group of people doing the same.   The class that I am taking is taught by a true master teacher and still life painter, Stanley Bielen from Philadelphia.  Many people in my class are accomplished painters who work in the design and art world.  This is both inspirational and intimidating!  Ashley and I took this class last year and though we both have a good deal of experience in drawing and design, neither of us had ever painted with oils.  In my experience, oil paints are luscious, delicious and daunting.  I am making my way this year.  Ashley stayed home to work on other projects and to enjoy just being at home after a year of work and travel but I could't resist returning.

I am throwing myself into learning something new, something hard, something that I love.  It is a good thing to be a beginner at something...humbling, frustrating, and worth the effort.  So many new things to learn, so many things to remember, so many failed attempts, so much to let go of all at once.

To be surrounded by color and the beauty of the natural world and to become completely absorbed in studying small vignettes and compositions is such a pleasure and an effort.  I am just plain in love with oils and I always have been.  I am happy to be here and happy to be giving learning something new my best effort.

All best wishes to all of you wherever you are and whatever adventures you are enjoying during this beautiful summer.

Commencement Wisdom

We just attended the 214th Commencement of Middlebury College where Julia Alvarez, a classmate of mine at Middlebury and a 1971 graduate,  gave the commencement address.  Julia is a beloved poet and author of novels, essays and children's books.  She is a native of the Dominican Republic and though born in the United States, spent most of her childhood in the DR.  Her family was forced to flee the dictatorship of Trujillo and move to the U.S. in 1960.  Julia is writer in residence at Middlebury College and has made Middlebury her home.  Among her many honors is the National Medal of the Arts which she received in 2013 from President Obama. You can click here to hear her whole speech and see other commencement highlights. I was so moved by her words today.  She said that she wanted to give the graduating seniors a backpack of supplies in the form of stories to take with them as they left.   She said that she is a story teller and that stories are her currency.  I love that.  Julia asked students to spend their lives giving themselves whole heartedly to what they love and to always know that what they do is soulful work, soul nourishing rather than soul depleting.  She told a story about a woman who wanted to touch the stars and when she finally did, Father Sky asked how she could be so tall.  She said that she was standing on a lot of people's shoulders.  Julia reminded us to feel great gratitude, for we are all made of the people we have learned from and the people who have helped us along the way.

Julia told us of Mayan weavers who begin every project asking for the patience and the intelligence to look for the true pattern and she encouraged us all to do this in whatever work that we are engaged in.  She told a story of learning from the people of the Haiti, the poorest country in this hemisphere.  She said that they received what they needed by sharing and that we all receive what is most important by sharing what we have.  She quoted Toni Morrison who said that "the function of freedom is to free someone else."

Julia has written many books including my favorites, In the Time of the Butterflies, A Wedding in Haiti,  A Cafecito Story about the sustainable coffee farm that she and her husband, Bill Eichner established in the Dominican Republic, and The Best Gift of All: The Legend of Vieja Belen which my three year old grandson, Asher asks me to read to him over and over again.  Read Julia's books if you haven't.  You will learn from her wisdom, her humanity and her beautiful story telling.

Materials, Learning and Technology

If you have not seen the series on Story Workshop on youtube produced by Opal School of the Portland Children's Museum and The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, please stop right now and take 6 minutes to watch this one.   We are confident that viewing this short film will enrich the way that you imagine what is possible with materials, the school environment and learning. There are six videos in this series on Story Workshop and how this approach is inclusive, inspiring, socially constructive, beautiful and empowering.  You will find the whole series listed once you watch the first.  One of the most powerful pieces of the narration is:

I expect the environment to communicate what I believe about children.  They are all competent and capable.  They come to this work full of experiences and with stories worth telling. When given the time and tools to do so they will readily and eagerly take every opportunity to share those stories, those pieces of themselves.  They will do so because that is what we do as human beings from the moment we are born.  We share our stories to make sense of this world that we live in.

In our work, Ashley and I are often asked to help teachers rethink their environments and to help schools to redesign their spaces for learning.  This approach requires that we start with what we believe about children and learning, what we know about well-designed spaces and the well-being, focus, motivation and meaningful student and teacher work that they support.  In the municipal schools for young children of Reggio Emilia, aesthetics are understood as an underlying thread that holds everything together...our relationships, our interactions, our learning and our work.

This morning I found another link through a friend with another great resource on environments and materials linking it to children's use of technology...Thinking with Things.  They feature some inspiring videos of children working with materials, loose parts, recycled and natural materials.

There are so many resources out there in the world to support our work in these areas! Let us all keep sharing them as we discover them and as we design beautiful, well- stocked environments that reflect the best of what we believe and know about children and ourselves.

Materials

I am about to co-teach a course: Environments and Materials in Reggio Inspired Teaching and Learning at Lesley University and about to see the second edition of our book, In the Spirit of the Studio: Learning from the Atelier of Reggio Emilia come out next week... so, I have been thinking a lot about the whole idea of materials and what they mean to me and have come to mean to many with the perspective of the work in Reggio Emilia. A central thread in Reggio Emilia is aesthetics and the power of materials...paint, pens, pastels, clay, stones, shells, sand, earth, leaves....to hold meaning together, to prompt connections, stories, exchange, pleasure and wonder.  Playing with the stuff of the world... the pigments, the earth itself, the fibers and filaments, the graphite and charcoals...all of it of the earth and from the earth, gives us human beings the chance to make marks and make meaning in many forms.  This is never so clear as it is in Reggio Emilia, Italy in the municipal schools for young children.  What a wonder to live now and to take inspiration from Reggio Emilia as many of us do all around the world.

Vea Vecchi's book, Art and Creativity in Reggio Emilia is a must read for those of us who want to peek into the real world of aesthetics and learning as it has evolved in Reggio Emilia.  Margie Cooper's chapter in the newest and third edition of The Hundred Languages of Children, "Is Beauty a Way of Knowing?" synthesizes and interprets a talk by Vea Vecchi that is the foundation of much of the work in Reggio Emilia.  All of the publications from Reggio Emilia communicate in myriad  ways through many learning stories the power and pleasure that materials of all kinds hold for students and adults.

We have shared a list of basic materials in different contexts and for different reasons. We are now sharing it with the students in the Lesley course that begins this weekend.

We share it here to remind you what you might need and what you could look for.  The list is not complete by any means but it is a good start.  Have fun and never doubt that some good pens and some soft colored pencils in the hands of children, over time, will inspire and amaze you.

Suggested Materials

These are basic suggestions for ordering materials to use with children.  Several sets of colored pencils should last a class of 20 children a school year if they are treated well. You do not need to order a set for each child.  Soft, high quality colored pencils are a pleasure to use and produce results that do not compare to low quality, hard student sets of 12 pencils.  The same is true of other materials.

These are brands that we find reliable and good.  There are others that are also fine. Experiment and have fun.  It should not cost so much more in the end, and you, as a teacher or parent, will become more educated and refined in making choices. Remember that these are beginning basic suggestions and only suggestions.  We order most of our materials from Dick Blick: 800 828 4548, www.dickblick.com

 Drawing:

Fine line black pens: Permanent black Sharpie pens

Prismacolor colored pencil-set of 36 or more

Pentel fine markers-set of 24 or more

Drawing pencils in HB, 2B, and 4B (hard to soft)

Kneaded erasers

Painting:

Pelican Gouache-12 color set

Water color sets-16 color set

Dick Blick medium grade tempera (Order as many colors as you can afford           and then mix new colors. We use jelly jars to mix colors.)

Brushes:

Economy camel hair for tempera, sizes 4, 6, and 8

Assorted sizes of brushes for watercolor and gouache

Sponges for blotting

Papers:

Basic white drawing paper in 9x12, 12x18 for drawing, and 18x24 for tempera    painting

Textured grays, and off whites

Vellum for painting, marker, qouache and colored pencil

9x12 Biggie Junior watercolor pad

tissue assortments

foil assortments

origami paper

decorative collage paper

corrugated cardboard and other mat board scraps for collage and paper sculpture

Glue:

Elmers gel glue

Glue stick

Hot glue for heavy objects

Wire:

Twisteez colored wire

Aluminum, copper, brass, fine and medium gauge from local hardware stores

Beads, buttons, sequins, shells, yarns

Beautiful Stuff to collect with children and families:

Sequins

Unmarked envelops of all sizes

Stamps, wildlife and others

Unused postcards, cards and stationary

Beads

Buttons

Fasteners (paper clips, brass fasteners and grommets)

Hardware (rubber and metal washers, screws, nuts and bolts)

Clean rubber or plastic tubing, clear tubing

Snaps, zippers, eye hooks, thimbles

Cord, tassels, threads

Ribbon, lace

Lace

Interesting wooden pieces

Rubber stamps

Old keys and charms

Silk or dried flowers

Leather strips

Dowel rods

Plexiglas or mirror pieces

Springs

Doilies

Colored straws

Corks

Cellophanes

Twigs, acorns, seedpods, shells, dried leaves, flower petals

Sources:

Basements, junk drawers, garages, sewing boxes

Flea markets

Hardware stores

Craft supply stores

Gardens and woods

Party supply stores

IKEA

Craft supply stores