not only in the specific aspect of arts education, but in the creative process common to all the expressive languages, fostering the sort of "contamination"
Jessica Hoffmann Davis in her Framing Education as Art: The Octopus Has a Good Day shows how the specificity or arts education is precisely being a common denominator for the other subjects.
It is our actions that make the difference, and this implies our responsibility to be not so much the interpreters as the builders of the experience.
I feel empowered---like by a manifesto or something. We want strongmen or, in terms of social dynamics, fear managers so we can leave the building to them. It's easier to sit in Ivory Towers of Ivy League theory. The USA is still #1 precisely because of its elite knowledge production.
real
"[U]npredictability and uncertainty" are used here by the author as though they foresaw what was coming or as though what was coming was as clear as day, i.e. that which has happened to us over the course of this last year 2020. The revenge of the symbiotic-real?
organism
Hitherto I've been itching to do so, so I cannot help plugging here "Cartesian dualism 'as anxiety over separation from the organic female universe' (Bordo)."
an exchange and collaboration between certain kinds of knowledge and understanding
Now I realize that where I recently read about this idea of "self through other(s)" wasn't a reading from Reggio. Certain educational research (especially special education and social justice education) have rather recently picked up on the African equivalent of what we've labeled interdependence, which is perhaps older than the our Western equivalent, that is, so-called Ubuntu. "Ubuntu is [...] a spirit of mutuality that posits the idea that each individual’s humanity is expressed through his or her relationships with others...." (The Handbook of Restorative Justice: A Global Perspective: 148) One of the main differences between these two conceptions, on the level of epistemology (of knowledge and understanding), is that one doesn't involve co-optation of the Other.
a close connection between educational issues and general inquiry on human relationships, on the relationship between man and knowledge, man and the world
The mission to rehabilitate the emancipatory mission.
broadening the cultural context of our pedagogical approach. Within this ecological-systemic
Ecosystemic functioning is conditioned upon (bio)diversity. Interdependence, if it's what a homogenous group of people are defining (as it stands in say the world of creativity research), can't by definition be interdependence.
the unity of that which is normally kept separate
...even mutually exclusive, as mutual exclusiveness is the opposite of mutual dependence (interdependence). What is the EC connection between interdependence and ambiguousness or indeterminacy?
interactions over broad and multiple dimensions.
Early childhood learning characterized as multidimensional.
interdependence and reciprocity of thought and action
...that mirrors in a physical, embodied manner the dialogicality of (especially a child's) mind?
we cannot think in terms of wanting to exercise overall control
What the French call the "phantom of education"?
children search for completeness, and they realize that this can be achieved not only through internal dialogue but also through dialogue with others.
The social science field of dialogicality differentiates between internal dialogues, i.e. autodialogues, and external dialogues, i.e. heterodialogues.
relativity
It has even influenced our understanding of quantum physics like in the work of Karen Barad and her conception of "intra-actions." Also does anyone remember where else in our previous readings there was a sentence about self-completion in others?
learning to learn in a group, seems to be closely correlated to the quality of opportunities to share and participate in the daily life of the school
Social constructivism; socially constructed, especially "learning to learn" with and from one another.
each actof perception is an act of creation
This is what we have learned from art---as a way of thinking.
The more this reflective process becomes a collegial endeavor
The schools that deem this their guiding principle do the best. Such organization is a projection of the deep-level learning.
Staff collegiality
I realize that what they call here "staff collegiality" is the main way the psychic strain of working with the unknown is constructively offset. And that smacks of old-school interfaith ethics.
Therefore, the organization of work must enable and support communicative dynamics which, by interweaving individual and collective thought, leads us to experiment with the existence of "possible worlds" and the possibility of constructing new meanings or, better, shared meanings.
The generative tension invoked here is powerful! I do appreciate the reminder that any form of creative labor involves a (hopefully) healthy dose of destabilization as in: play as instability. On an emotional level, reading this makes me wanna quit working in private schools, but then again I know that is a false dichotomy.
we can clearly see how the plurality and diversity of the points of view, expectations, and interpretations in a group can become resources for influencing "reality."
No more dominant narratives. Who is to say?
the "dimension of the possible"
Is the REA a worldview? Is the model humankind garners by learning from w/children a way of embracing an unknown that is more and more impossible to unevenly displace, relegate or even ghettoize?
participation
Sometimes the overall expression of this resembles, to me, so-called "participatory design." I do, though, speculate that the Reggio understanding and application of participation has a built-in mechanism which protects it from what has lately been much critiqued about participation in terms of creative society.
interdependence
Finally! A text is good if the reader, whilst reading, has the impression they are co-writing it.
systemic approach
Systems approach? Holistic approach?
We have tried to counter the culture of separation and dualism, starting with our image of the child, which has always underscored connection rather than parceling, and including our systemic view of the school. Seeing school as a system of communication and relationships was an initial choice that continues to characterize and distinguish our commitment to valuing, as well as putting into practice, the dialogic nature of the individual and of knowledge
Nowhere else but in this kind of culture of childhood does the millennia-long story of the deconstruction of subject/object live and breathe so compactly. There are many clues here, and each, it seems, is polysemous.
with little recognition of its ethical and educational value
Power-knowledge, episteme, theoretical framework, optics, positionality, situated knowledge.
Traditionally, schools have constructed their identities and objectives by decontextualizing themselves, by separating the disciplines and fields of knowledge, and by being intolerant of any ambiguity or uncertainty
Hard boundaries between disciplines --> knowledge specialization
it is the main occupation to which they dedicate energies and passion from the moment of birth
Children are intersubjective, dialogical, mutualistic, etc.
deadline: February 23rd is Loris Malaguzzi’sbirthday.
Birthday as deadline.
"[T]here are two beginnings, and in the middle, [...] there is the end."
unexpected perceptions
Unexpected in the sense of unforeseeable? I love 'em, but adults are all about making life predictable, calculable, 'futurologizable,' orderable, ordinary---though, interestingly enough, also coordinable. What if as a person I was but one of the two necessary coordinates, you being the other one?
the children’s willingness let themselvesget lost and not follow linear paths
Are "maps for getting lost" non-linear? What does a non-linear map look like? Do we need to linearly know in advance?
This research reflected the presence of Loris Malaguzzi and his pedagogy. I don’tbelieve that educators can know each day where theyare going and where they would like to go. It is a routethat you discover as you travel. We have the obligationto think about the future because of the type of workwe do. We have to be open to moving and changingbecause young children are always growing.
Responsiveness might say the educator's guide is the child, especially during those times when the child's creativity-meaning narrowly escapes the educator.
Whether encountering Reggio for the first time orreturning, it’s an invitation for those of you who mightget lost in the city.
I can hardly wait to go to Reggio and use this guide!
did not seem to have an end
Dialogism speaks of 'unfinalizability.'
we, as adults, can gainsomething because the children’s view of the city isoptimistic and full of life, open to the future while firm-ly rooted in the present.
The future is superlative.
—
[In response to the second drawing on page 8] One time at the Brooklyn Children's Museum I was facilitating a neighborhood map-making class. One of the learning objectives was zoning, being able to zone: residential, commercial, industrial, public and so forth. A student very divergently decided to include in their group's neighborhood map a black hole---to the chagrin, of course, of some of their more by-the-book peers and in this case partner urban planners. Upon our dialogue, the student concluded black holes, however disruptive of spacetime norms, were public zones.
piazza
The infant-toddler centers have their piazzas, too.
“In the city, there are two beginnings, and in the middle, right in the middle, there is the end.”
It's interesting to imagine just how many utterances had to be systematically notated, data-mined, for this gem to surface.
Maybe we couldmake a map for getting lost, too!!!
"A map for getting lost" fascinates me as a constructively critical querying of whether maps do not in fact reinforce the positivity and value of being oriented and localizable as a discrete, unique unit on some Cartesian grid and the negativity and disvalue of being disoriented or lost on a walkabout or dispersed and existing in multiple locations at once.
hesekinds of maps are composed of fragments of personalstories
As opposed to the racist---and yet authoritative---maps of the world we hang in our schools, which feign they aren't telling a very personal---not at all global---story.
with a kind of exactnessthat forces us to turn our adult standards upside down
Exact in their spontaneity?
nterior paths.
Does this add to the metaphor of map?
mental maps
Does this add to the metaphor of map?
conic, made up of drawings, sym-bols, post cards, maps and photographs
Iconic, indexical, symbolic? Diagrammatic? The differences, however subtle and interwoven, are crucial in discerning and interpreting the expression of each child, as preverbally there is something visual---non-linear---about language.
This is a context that wedecided to support.
Why? Because it is a student-generated creative expansion of the definition of "guide"?
he children also sug-gested to us that a guide is an invitation given to theothers and it is beautiful
Ascribing invitation and welcome to what a guide is is an example of the children taking the teachers up on their offer to re-imagine and re-invent.
how we translate these tiny gestures
Must be able to speak many tiny gesture languages.
e-launch.
Circling round but one rung higher on the spiral?
This is important because interpretation is subjective. We have to be aware of such subjectivity. Is the interpretation mine or that of the group I am observing?
Reminds me of so-called 'strong objectivity,' amplifying researcher bias since anyway it's irremovable.
emerging
Emergence.
We asked them to tryto tell the story of the city from the perspective of people of different ages
Getting the adults to be creative!
to change their point of viewand their way of seeing through the eyes of anotherperson
Multi-perspectival.
So we asked the parents to try to imaginehow the children lived their experiences in the city
As though the children become the parents' guides to the city?
It isn’t necessary to do alarge project in the school to leave a trace, to giveback.
Perhaps it is stereotypical thinking to think that a project cannot take place over the course of say a minute.
Great minds, people who produce the culture of ourtime, do not work in isolation. Most original work isdone through the opportunity of exchange with otherpeople.
Distributed creativity?
how theculture is produced rather than on what is produced
From how the conversations with students were documented and analyzed, it seems pretty clear that in this case the product of a guide, what a guide should be or look like, is open to both personal and cultural interpretation.
as long as we are aware of this risk
Awareness of the risk sometimes for me means being aware of the fact that the interpretational theory with which a child is responding to my interpretational theory is not at all in the (adult) language mine was.
Can you tell where a city starts?
"Who decides how a project begins?"
open questions
Open or open-ended questions are very relational in nature: An open-ended question requires imagining not only of the questionee (for the question to be answered) but also of the questioner (for the question to be formulated in the first place)—the questionee draws on their subjective experience, as the questioner has been responsive to the questionee’s situation.
We chose this theme of the city forthese reasons.
he processes of children’s learning becomethe basis of our dialogue with families
Very relational. A child's learning processes is what both the faculty and the family are concerned with, but the faculty and the family do no base their dialogue on anything else, that is, on anything external to the child's learning processes.
xpressive lan-guages
Expressive languages as opposed to what? The provocative categorization makes me think of the semiotic functions of language (i.e. expressive, referential, poetic, connative, phatic and metalinguistic), but the use here of "languages," especially in the sense of a thousand-languages philosophy, leads me also to think that "languages" is meant more figuratively than literally---as in: expressive arts.