Hello again everyone!

I am delighted to welcome several new members to our list.

These last two weeks have seen personal introductions by:

Lynda Hardwick, Eugene, Oregon, USA
Julie Sawyer, central Pennsylvania, USA
Susan Henry, Acton, Massachusetts, USA
Diane Simmons, Pregny-Rigot, Switzerland

For those of you new to the list, I am Sylvia Chard, co-author with Lilian Katz of the book: Engaging Children’s Minds: The Project Approach, published in 1989 by Ablex and author of two Practical Guides to the Project Approach for teachers (1992, and 1994). I am co-owner of this list with Dianne Rothenburg and Lilian Katz. My role in contributing to the list has developed as I responded weekly at first to the contributions made by individual members on whatever topics of discussion emerged. Then I had a vacation break and have been working at conferences and institutes since the end of May. During these last few weeks there has been less discussion than before due probably to end of school year pressures on teachers and the vacation period.

However, several new members have introduced themselves and some interesting information has been exchanged. In response to Julie and Susan’s interest in learning more about earlier discussion on this list, I would like to report on the Projects Home Page. I began this website on the internet to offer teachers a place to feature the stories of their own project work in school and to provide a place where teachers could go to read stories of projects undertaken in different teachers’ classrooms on different topics with children of different ages.

I have posted four projects to date and I am working on coding more which I have currently on my computer. The coding takes time but I should be able to post a new project every week or two from now on.

The Home Page also has details of the books and other published materials which can help teachers with their project work.

Julie and Su asked about earlier discussion in this group. I have not found out about how you can access this and will do so next week. I can suggest however, that you visit the Home Page and see the Reviews of the discussion which I have posted there. This will give you a good idea of the kinds of issues we have discussed and don’t worry if what you read there raises as many questions as it provides answers!

URL: http://www.ualberta.ca/~schard/projects.htm

There are few definitive answers to questions in education but there are principles of learning, if sometimes competing ones. The complexities are many and just looking at your contributions this past week we can see that people work with children in very different contexts! We can all learn from teachers’ stories and questions. So please enjoy contributing to all our thinking! And don’t worry about raising questions again which have been discussed before.

Some which we continue to think about are

- the nature of the topic of study for productive project work
- the structural features of projects (discussion, field work, display, documentation, investigation, representation... etc.)
- choices for teachers and children in planning and implementing projects
- distinctions between themes, units and projects
- the value of the three phase structure proposed in our conceptualization of the project approach
- the use of time and the physical environment of the classroom for project work

and many more...

The main value of this listerv and of the Projects Home Page is to encourage communication among teachers about projects so that we can develop our ideas in disucssion together on the basis of first hand experience in classrooms. It is all too easy to feel isolated in our field so it is great to be able to network with teachers who have similar professional interests and goals for their teaching.

I was very interested in Susan’s description of the class jobs undertaken by the children in her school. I can imagine that these provide a basis for rich project work throughout the school year. Your snapshot was indeed very helpful. I look forward to reading more about the consumer magazine project through the Summer. (Susan wrote, “I will send in more details over the summer.”) I would be very happy to be able to add your account of this or any other project to the Home Page too, if you would like to see it there. The advantage is that photographs can be posted and samples of children’s work too can be scanned in.

If you would like to send me an account of this work, Susan, perhaps particularly if you have single examples, fairly fully documented, I would be very happy to include them on the Home Page.

I hope you will all let me know what you think of the Home Page from time to time. I hope it will not remain too static but will gradually become quite multifaceted. I am sure you can help me with suggestions for its further development!

One section (which doesn’t yet exist) ought to include reference to research relevant to our concerns. David Smith and others have been particularly interested in this area. Maybe we could all look out for references which I could post there.

Have a good week and keep checking in with us! Cheers,

(July 15 '96)