Markings
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Disturbance
Researchers join educators and children on walks in a nearby urban forest. Toddlers negotiate jackets, snow pants and boots, and then move, as fast as layers of winter clothing would allow, across a sports field. On the other side of a chain-link fence is the forest. The group moves along its edge to a small clearing they’ve come to regard as the entrance. It’s marked with a fallen tree and, on rainy days, a large puddle at the edge of the path. The entrance is different today. Smaller shrubs and trees have been cut down, and a wave of orange markings – bright flags and smears on tree trunks leads…
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Noticing With Cardboard and Engaging the Artistry Within
Today we shared our curiosities around cardboard – questions we’ve considered and continue to think about. We are curious about… How do we construct and deconstruct knowledge with cardboard? What are we learning? What are the children learning? How can we engage or connect the research with the community? What happens when we stop verbal communication in the classroom? What drew us to the silence? Is the cardboard still valuable to us when it is falling apart, broken, tattered? What do we shy away from the “less strong” cardboard? How do we connect our experiences with cardboard to the forest or vice versa? We are noticing… We are paying more…
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Disturbance
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Paying Attention to the Sounds of Water: A Simple Encounter with a Storm Drain
listening on a simple walk around the parking lot We can’t stop too long in this frigid weather but even a brief listen and look at the run-off drain provokes a range of meanings and possible thoughts. It is loud. We peer down and look and listen. Where is it going? What is down there? What is happening? Are there fish? Where does the ladder go? We discuss this simple, often overlooked feature so prevalent in urban worlds. It prompts us to look at the road and wonder what’s underneath us? A storm drain is an innocuous item yet part of our system of living. It connects surface to soil,…
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Disturbance
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The Tensions of Considering Nature When Confined to the Indoors Due to Bitter Winter Temperatures
Even with a good snowsuit and cold weather gear, taking infants out in a polar vortex is unwise. It presents particular challenges to our role as caregivers and educators.. The cold weather can foster perceptions of nature as ‘other’. In January in much of Canada this is an annual reality leaving us all stuck inside staring longingly out of the window from our place of warmth. How do we engage meaningfully from this physical and mental space? The answer is simple – we talk and remember and observe. We sit together by the window and look deeply out at the ever changing view. We take the time and choose to…
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Disturbance
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We Did This (Leaving Our Mark With Charcoal)
We sit on the floor and revisit our work together. Who did this? Using a finger we trace the marks left on of the page. There are long ones, smudged ones, short marks, dark and light marks. The variety is endless and evolving. Every touch, with or without charcoal, changes the marks. We observe and discuss these communal offerings, sometimes asking who made this? Sometimes we are silent and trace the marks with our fingers. We revisit our experience. We lie on the floor and look up at our work. We flatten our faces to the wall and observe up close. We point out features of interest to each of…
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Disturbance
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Slowing Down Time Through Charcoal Encounters
I wonder about time… We live fast-paced lives instilled early on to talk fast, move on, check in but something keeps happening to me during these intra-actions that move us into a different time zone where a minute can become an hour. During the charcoal encounters, which often happen with a single child, I lose track of time. I don’t remember what else was happening or who else was there. I am caught trying to remember when it happened – before or after the walk? All I can remember is an intensity -that distinct squeaking sound. It is less disturbing than scratching a chalkboard but it makes my inner ear…
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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.…
