Fooding and Foraging
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Avocado Encounters – Extended
I do love how easily it marks up. I love how I can manipulate charcoal in ways that make me feel like an artist. I’ve never really paid any attention to shading in order to make a particular thing I’m drawing look round or to account for the light and think about shadows. In fact I’ve never really noticed shadows from an artistic perspective before. I definitely never noticed that an avocado seed can actually cast a shadow over the rest of the fruit depending on the light. I’ve never taken any art classes, but charcoal has a certain way about it that offers me the illusion that maybe I…
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Trees of Life
A colleague this week reminded me of being a child. She reminded me to think about how I learned about trees as a young girl in school. She remembered learning about trees in a way that was all about what the tree does for us humans. She suggested it was a silly example of thinking about how we centre children and, by extension, the rest of humanity. I was reminded about how I was taught about trees and it was similar to her experience. Trees give US life. Trees give off oxygen for US to breathe; they remove CO2 from the air WE breathe. They clear pollutants for US to…
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The Spider Web
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Back to the Forest….
Today we welcomed back the research team after a long break for the holidays. A lot had changed while they were gone, and we were all feeling very excited to jump back in and start up our investigations again. While they were gone we still re-visited some of the ideas that we were exploring with charcoal and paper during our morning meetings, and we still went to the forest as often as we could, but there’s something energizing about their presence. On our first trip back to the forest with Carrie, we went to a part of the forest some of us had never visited before. Immediately I noticed connections…
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The Spider Web
In the forest, we stumbled upon an area with large tree trunks, branches, sticks, and vines intertwined. The children stood together on this entangled mass almost in awe, possibly wondering “What is this? Why is it here?” Some of the children started walking towards it and the rest followed. As we got to the edge, the children stopped and seemed hesitant to proceed. We entered slowly at first, ducking under the low branches to go further inside. Some of the children observed how the entangled mass resembled a spider web. Some wished to climb it. A small group began not only ducking under but climbing over top of the branches,…
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Trees of Life
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Slowing Down and Embracing the Silence
Working with charcoal and paper was a beautiful, albeit messy, way to slow down and pay attention for everyone. I noticed moments of true connection between the children and educators that I did not necessarily notice before the introduction of the paper and charcoal. I noticed Katlyn slow down and spend serious time quietly making strong connections with the children while they engaged with charcoal. There were beautiful connections between educator and children as they explored how charcoal made marks, how it made dust, how it was messy, but that messy bit on our hands could be turned into new mark making. At one moment it was so calm and…
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Mushrooms and tracks
Our small group ventured out to the forest this morning. We left the centre with an intention to link our experiences with the charcoal to the forest. Our experiences from the day before lingered with ideas of mark making, tracks and circular marks on the paper. We set out to pay attention and notice these connections on our walk in the forest. At first our walk was fast paced, and the children quickly moved. We had to intentionally pause and slow down. I stopped at a puddle where a large impression was embedded into a mud puddle, drawing the children to come back, pause and look at what we had…
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The liveliness of charcoal
The invitation to slow down, notice and pay attention to the liveliness of which charcoal offers and the potential connections to the beloved forest, sparked many thoughts of practicality and curiosity in my self as an educator. Lines began to move rapidly from one place to another, offering the extension of a line from one being to another, waiting for the line of travels to connect to the feet of ones body. Charcoal moved with the bodies in fast pace, with gentle pressure to the paper, slowing down was not offered through the children’s bodies but from the noticing of the marks left behind as the charcoal travelled across the…
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The Experience
Lines began to move rapidly from one place to another, offering the extension of a line from one being to another, waiting for the line of travels to connect to the feet of one’s body. Charcoal moved with the bodies in fast pace, with gentle pressure to the paper. Slowing down was not offered through the children’s bodies, but from the noticing of the marks left behind as the charcoal travelled across the paper. Fingers pushed tiny pieces of charcoal, but the creation of dark, thick lines moving from beneath fingers was noticed. How could such a small fragment offer such darkness? Intricate and thoughtful up and down movements with…
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A Walk in the Forest with Educators
We (educators, pedagogists, researchers) took a walk in the forest with the intention to pay attention, notice, engage in the presence of more-than-human others. We asked ourselves…. What and how do we notice when I walk in the presence of others – including non-humans? What relations do we notice? What logics do we notice and how might we follow these logics? Our Engagements… We noticed life, death, playfulness, garbage and plastics, patterns and textures, sounds (wind, squirrels, sticks and leaves under our feet, a plane flying above us), human-made and organic structures, levels and heights, animals (frogs and insects), a wide variety of trees and plants, strength and resiliency. The…
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Witnessing Ruins of Progress: Recuperating “Staying with the Trouble”
Our pedagogy is guided by a devoted commitment to the aspiration of noticing and the active and ever shifting process of paying attention. We are committed to an aspiration, as opposed to a tangible goal or outcome, because it signals our willingness to engage with the only true constants our world offers us: uncertainty and mutability. In this extended moment of history, our world (the children’s world) is characterized by ecological and economic precarity, one that educational systems too often try to soothe by fostering illusions of stasis and stability. We are committed to bringing this essential instability of our surroundings to the surface of educational encounters with the children.…