Hello out there!
How to review week 3 of our PROJECTS-L discussion group? I have been reading the messages here as well as the messages on the REGGIO-L group. Sometimes it is hard to know where the different threads of discussion are developing. In this group I would like to pick up on the structure of a project, particularly perhaps the place of representation in projects.
Here are the discussion group members who have introduced themselves this week:
Marjon Barton, Japan
Margaret Brooks, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Loren Johnson, Durham, New Hampshire, USA
Peter Milne, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Sue Novinger, Columbia, Missouri, USA
We hope that more people will be willing to write a short introduction to themselves so we can know who you are. In the short life of this group to date there have been introductions given by people in Canada, Estonia, Indonesia, Japan, & the USA
Last week I was in Orlando. I facilitated a three day workshop on the Project Approach. The participants studied topics at their own level and within two days presented a wide range of learning they had accomplished on chosen real world topics in the local neighborhood. In small groups they studied road construction, a restaurant, a famous local fountain, and a cinema. It was amazing how much they learned from just observing closely, speculating on cause and effect relations, predicting and finding out, asking questions of people at work, and counting and measuring and calculating. Every one of these teachers learned things they had not known before about their own relatively immediate environment.
They then had to represent what they had learned and share it with the rest of the group. This was accomplished through field work (making sketches from observation, writing notes and recording measurments and frequency data). These rough notes formed the basis of representations done on return to the classroom to clarify and elaborate their newly found understanding. At this point books, brochures, menus and manuals were consulted. The representations were done with the knowledge that they would be shared with peers who had not had the benefit of their investigative experience. I find adults become very involved with such first hand study even though it is only for an in-service workshop to illustrate an approach to teaching and learning. Reality when observed close up is captivating and a powerful motivator to investigation.
Clearly adults have a greater number of representational strategies at their finger tips than young children. The teacher's role here is to capitalize on what children can do easily and well. Very young children can be amazingly expressive. They often show a strong desire to comment on their own experience and observations. They can construct with blocks, make models with almost any material to hand, represent with wood, clay and sand, take roles in dramatic play, draw amazingly detailed pictures, paint and of course with all of these, talk, talk, talk...
The simple answer I would offer to Greg's complex question is that the teacher will help each child to choose the representation which best illustrates and describes the detail of what was learned. The teacher's role in project work is a guidance role. As children gain in representational skill and maturity the systematic instruction of the class in new and more complex and detailed forms of representation will be undertaken alongside the project work. Older children can use many different kinds of graphic organizers (diagrams) to represent what they are learning.
As children learn more and more ways to record and represent they also learn to become more skilful in the use of the strategies they aready have. A Venn diagram is for instance a very useful way to represent comparative studies at any level. You can do a very simple version in kindergarten and a very complex one in sixth grade. Once learned, this representation can be applied together with others so that a whole bulletin board might be organized to compare two communities in different parts of the world, the lives of animals in different environments, or buying and selling in different contexts, and so on. Each representational strategy a child acquires can be applied and elaborated over and over again as an information shell with a communicative purpose. The same representations can be used to share understanding of many different phenomena.
Also one object or event can be represented in many different ways. A tree, for instance can be represented in a drawing, painting, free-standing folded paper cut-out, papier mache, in a poem, as a cross sectional diagram (horizontally and vertically), in a written description, as a drawing with all the parts labelled, as the center piece of a bulletin board about trees, with links (yarn, arrows...) to other information, in a time line, with a cycle diagram, a venn diagram, and many more. The representations offer different ways to understand the tree in terms of its life, its location, its type, its uses and links to other areas of knowledge.
Where I see the imagination and fantasy coming into this investigation is through children personalizing their understanding of trees. For example, a child might imagine the view from the top of a large one, imagine building and living in a tree house, or empathize with creatures for whom a tree is a home. Going further, children might imagine how the world might look to a tree, how it might tell its own life story. They might imagine what some other kinds of tree on other planets or in other ecosystems might be like (the baobabs that were weeds on the planets in St. Exupery's 'The Little Prince'), they might also read tree fairy poems, stories like Pinnochio, or fantasize about an enchanted forest. There are many legends about trees for example the various staffs or canes used by saints which have rooted themselves and begun to grow again like the thorn at Glastonbury in England.
This fantasy is all the more complex and interesting if children also have a good understanding of trees and forests as the environmental miracles that they are. The children will be most creative in their imaginative/fantasy representation if they have local trees and forests to experience: to lie under a tree looking up into the branches to gain an alternative perspective, to walk through deep forest and feel the cool and humidity in the undergrowth, etc. It also seems logical to me that the understanding of the reality would come first through serious investigative study (phase 2) and the fantasy later in the project (phase 3) as the teacher was anticipating the children moving on to a new topic of study.
(Mar 4 '96)