Rewind: Creativity, Play, and Learning

Combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought.

ALBERT EINSTEIN 

Some of us might say there’s some relationship between creativity and play…maybe. Stretching a bit, some may say they appreciate play for its role in creativity. Fewer are likely to have considered the possibility that creativity and play are closely related. Mostly we tend to think of creativity and play as worlds apart. 

Play is for younger children; creativity is for adults and older children. Creativity is a charm that unlocks potential; play is for blowing off steam. Creativity is serious business, play is what happens when there’s nothing else to do. Creativity seems mysterious; play is ubiquitous.

Yet, looking at creativity and play more closely and together highlights some important similarities and connections between them as well as to learning. 

Admittedly there are many views of both play and creativity. Furthermore, both concepts are difficult to capture and often assigned overly elastic or simplified meanings. Traditionally creativity has been considered unrestrained, uninhibited, cathartic and emotional; or individual talent and flashes of insight. More recently creativity has been theorized from perspectives of education, sociology, psychology and philosophy. It is viewed as generating something new that has value. Educators in the schools for young children in Reggio (IT) consider creativity as the art of thinking. Then there is one of many recursive five-stage processes. Expansive territory, indeed.

The Inner Circle by Jaime Filipe

No less vague and fraught, play is likewise viewed through multiple lenses of psychology, evolutionary biology, and child development and enjoys many definitions. Complex and ambiguous, play is recreation, the child’s work, and a pleasurable activity carried out for its own sake. Just as there are multistage processes for creativity, there are play taxonomies galore. According to Martin Buber, “Play is the exultation of the possible.”  

The rhetorics of creativity and play mirror one another in significant ways. We see in both, ideas and forms that are consumed with pleasure. In neither is the object, form, or idea accepted as a given. Whether manipulating blocks, making music, designing a new font, or redesigning packaging, we do something to whatever we started with, combining, stretching or somehow up-ending its original form. In play and creativity, we draw on stored information, ideas and skills from accumulated experiences and settings. In both creativity and play, a similar push-and-pull of drives is at work. We make bold connections, are flexible, and find different combinations of ideas on the one hand, and we respond to the drives of conformity, familiarity, and predictability on the other. And although forts, songs, apps, and new food products may result from play and creative activity, neither necessarily produces tangible products.

Creativity In Play

A sense of a more substantial relationship than a list of similarities between creativity and play emerges from recent thinking in cognitive science and neuroscience. It builds, in fact, on Einstein’s idea of creativity as combinatorial play. Versions of this idea have been explored in articles in American Journal of Play as combinational creativity (Boden p. 7) and combinatory play (Stevens. p. 99).

Leaf Bowls by Kay Sekimachi

In combinatory play a person uses conscious, deliberate connection making and imagination, manipulating familiar ideas, images, sounds, or forms and comes up with unlikely combinations of ideas, images, sounds, or forms. Recombined they are novel, surprising and valuable. We may experience this in combining disparate information, repurposing an abundant discard, imagining dried leaves as a bowl or translating a metaphor into an immersive environment. When we do, we play with possible outcomes, adapt to unexpected results, and link what had seemed unlinkable. We envision what is not present, compare and contrast various combinations, fuse and peel apart constructs to arrive at a new whole. The brain plays.

Connecting previously unconnected images, facts, or elements in ways that are new and meaningful occurs through both conscious and unconscious cognitive play. The mind hovers between structure and openness; it wanders between focused attention and diffused attention. It skates freely with and among a series of combinations without imposing a conclusion. This is a complex form of play as well as thinking.

Falcon Model made of cardboard boxes

The Brain Plays

Thinking outside the box speaks directly to creativity as well as play. For both, this image celebrates freedom from constraints and attraction to possibilities. Creativity invites us to detour rigid frameworks, assumptions, and rules. By thinking outside the constraints of a cardboard box’s original size, proportions, and purpose, a familiar box is transformed into a child’s boat or spaceship or an animation artist’s detailed scaled model.  

Thinking outside the box also suggests how we might look at the relationship between creativity, play, and learning. Making connections between one thing and another is also fundamental to a conceptualization of learning as a connection-making process. Deliberate and conscious, learning involves connecting formerly isolated concepts, linking abstractions with hands-on concrete application, associating previous experiences with a fact, and reinforcing understanding a concept. In contrast to the fresh, unlikely combinations that characterize creativity and play, learning is concerned with making connections that construct a meaningful system of relationships that changes and grows with experience.

Just as creativity requires sidestepping conventional ways of exploring thought, structure, and objects, letting go of well-used and decidedly separate categories for play, creativity, and learning allows us to see how each helps advance the case for and supports the others.

Judging from the number of articles, reports, blogs, journals, and magazines, there’s no shortage of opinions, advice, and evidence about the importance of creativity and creative development and how to foster it. A valued attribute for 21^st century learners, creativity enables us to respond to a rapidly changing world and deal with the unexpected by extending our current knowledge and skills to novel situations and by using it in new ways. For everyone–a parent, barista, software programmer, museum, plumber, accountant, or a child–the day job requires creativity. 

Taking any of these three seriously means taking all seriously. Valuing creativity and learning relies on valuing play (at every age). Providing for one provides well for the others. Expanding experiences and enriching opportunities in one area, fuels the other two. If we want children, youth, and adults; citizens, learners, and workers to be creative, follow different ways of imagining, thinking, linking, exploring and challenging ideas, we need to create the conditions that allow players, connectors, and learners to think artfully, to combine and recombine, connect and reconnect pleasurably even exuberantly.

To do this, we have every reason to be generous with tools, machines, images, designed objects, natural forms, found materials, artifacts, and bio-facts; in maker spaces, studios, discovery rooms, and ateliers; backyards, play yards, and junkyards; experiment stations, kitchens, or labs. Unlikely, intriguing, and fresh combinations will emerge as we hold back on judgment and ease up on the pressure to come to closure. We need to respect the element of time for imagining, drawing on previous experiences, successes and failures; for building and rebuilding representations; and for talking about, working with, reflecting on, and making ideas or connections their own.

• How do you see the relationship among creativity, play and learning? 
• How do the connections among them expand your understanding of each?
• How would you create the conditions in your museum or classroom to invite all three?  

Related Museum Notes Posts

• Creativity and Museums 
• Playing With…Loose Parts 
• 21st Century Skills in the Wild
• Making Makers 
• Making and Tinkering, The Missing Piece

Creative work is play. It is free speculation using the materials of one’s chosen form.

STEPHAN NACHMANOVITCH

21st Century Skills in the Wild

Everyday we encounter evidence of how the next generation’s success hinges on not only what they know, but also on their ability to think, act creatively, and connect with others. These are often referred to as 21^st century skills and are necessary for navigating increasingly complex life and work environments and succeeding in work, life, and as a citizen.

Museums are, in many ways, well positioned to cultivate 21^st century skills. Rich learning environments with fascinating objects and filled with people, we create experiences to engage visitors’ interests, fire their curiosity, inspire creativity, and invite critical viewing. Furthermore, museums have mission-related interests in these skills as well as view themselves as offering learning value.

While these are critical attributes for cultivating 21^st century skills in museum learners, they are, relatively speaking, the easier conditions to put in place. Just as some conditions for building skills must be present, others must not interfere. Alignment of our understanding of 21^st century skills with learning and active, learner-centered experiences is critical to having the right conditions in place.     

What view of learners and learning informs the experiences we create? What sources of information shape our ideas of what these skills look like? How are we supporting the practice of these skills through self-directed learning in our informal learning environments? We might think about these questions from the perspectives of agency and emergent skills of competent learners.

Agency for Museum Learners 

Increasingly, I have been wondering how we actually view and provide for agency for learners in the museum experiences we create. In an earlier post I asked: How do museums create experiences that allow visitors to complete the experience by directing it and changing it? 

Agency is very much at the heart of that question. When we view museum visitors as curious, motivated to try an activity, making choices, and engaged in conversation, we recognize them as learners with agency. We see them as active in directing their learning, shaping their experience, and making sense of their world.

Agency may be intrinsic to learning, but it is not assured. In a recent blog post, early childhood educator Tom Bedard reflected on the agency children have and he has as a teacher in the classroom. Children’s agency, he observes, is intertwined with his agency as a teacher. Neither something he has nor children have, agency emerges in the space between the materials, the children, and him.

This is true for museums as well. In museums, valuing agency means leaving room in the experiences we create for learners, for multiple solutions and uses of resources we never imagined. Learners, as active agents, can make connections with each other that we have not planned for them; they can discover possibilities and construct pathways to new understandings that are relevant to them. Drawing on our creativity and imagination to create experiences, present objects, or set challenges for museum learners, we can encourage them to explore and develop skills with opportunities to make, think, question, and imagine.

Conversely, the experiences we create can circumscribe learners’ opportunities to practice and stretch the very skills we hope to encourage. By driving the process of creating learning experiences and feeling accountable to outcomes and funders, we risk limiting learners to our learning objectives and what we have conceptually constructed for them. Without realizing it, we may be inculcating our way of thinking in them or influencing them to think what we want them to think. In confining their agency, we also limit the related agency of the museum, its designers, educators, and interpreters.

We don’t know what sense visitors will make of their experiences and what they will take away. We need them and their agency, however. They engage and enrich our learning, learning that is essential to our increasing the value of the experiences we deliver. Ultimately, a museum learner’s meaning making empowers them and makes possible our realizing our goal to inspire life-long learning.  

Ideas about teaching and learning weave through the concept of agency. Learning actively serves the interests of agency as Loris Malaguzzi, co-creator of the Reggio philosophy, notes. He observes that, "… between learning and teaching, we honor the first. It is not that we ostracize teaching, but we tell it, ‘Stand aside for a while and leave room for learning, observe carefully what children do, and then, if you have understood well, perhaps teaching will be different from before.’” A recent museum blog post, on the other hand, illustrates how teaching steps in before learning, “Every educator is in a position to teach students how to gather information, evaluate it, screen out distractions and think for themselves.”

When we insist on teaching skills rather than observing and understanding them and when we direct activities rather than trust learners’ capabilities, we eclipse agency.

Finding Skills In The Wild

I once heard Blake Ward, Museums Program Manager at Minnesota Children’s Museum, observe that 21st century skills are skills children have naturally and in abundance; I was delighted. We tend to think we’ve discovered skills and abilities when, in fact, we are overlooking their ample presence in children as well as in youth and adults. It’s as if valuable skills aren’t present unless we have decided they exist. In deciding to focus on particular skills we assume we are fostering them; we think we are directing them. We may be curtailing them.

Where do we get our idea of what the 21^st century skills are and what they look like? The multiple taxonomies of 21^st century skills are geared to skills that “students” need, “student outcomes,” and the context of school settings geared to measurement and testing. If we are interested in cultivating skills sturdy enough to meet the challenges of our rapidly changing century, we can’t limit ourselves to skills contained in classroom activities or museum exhibits.

Rather, we need to look into places and situations that share a high correspondence with the real world where these skills are applied, tested, and truly matter. We need to fish where the fish are. Because our goal is for people to succeed in life, not get better at museum exhibits, we need to understand skills in contexts with varied materials, shifting conditions, human interactions, and real-life consequences.

What do versions of 21^st century skills that are meaningful to museum learners–from babies to elders–look like? Beyond the museum walls are myriads of real life experiences, activities, and contexts in which people think critically, respond with empathy, communicate clearly, and collaborate with others. If we focus on people engaged by their choice, guiding their own experiences, using their selected strategies, and making their own decisions, we can both grow and refine our sense of what these skills are. We will have greater clarity about what they look like in work and life situations if we observe them in the wild.

Imagine how we might deepen our understanding of 21^st century–and other valued–skills by following learners as they hike, trim tree branches, fix a bike, or prepare a meal. What 21^st century skills are at play as someone throws a pot, builds a fort, repairs a broken zipper, starts a fire, or learns to juggle? When someone plays a guitar, figures out a bus route, coaches a co-worker, or plays with the wind at the shore?

Focusing on these everyday moments we will undoubtedly glimpse learners’ existing capabilities and appreciate the emergent skills they possess, valuem and are honing. We may discern a prior question they are exploring or something that matters to them. Given thoughtful attention, we may notice how learners approach a situation, perhaps back up and rethink a step. We may discover some of the ways they enlist the help of others, adapt tools and materials to suit their purpose, and how they come up with ideas or moves we have not seen nor imagined. Their faces, gestures, and words will give us greater insights about the role agency plays and how feelings of accomplishment empower. As we further reflect, we can imagine how these behaviors and those strategies could be applied in other situations, in museum exhibits and programs. We can begin to envision museum experiences that are responsive to the learner’s agency and support skills that correspond to real life situations and many contexts.

If we are serious about cultivating 21^st century skills–or any other skills, for that matter–in museum learners, we need to value agency as well as the capacity of experiences to support it. We are going to be in the 21^st century for a very long time. We need to do our part to ensure museum learners experience agency and want more.

Photo credit: NASA

Community Engagement on Parade

At noon on the first Sunday in May, 50,000 spectators lined Bloomington Avenue in Minneapolis for the mile-long May Day parade that ends with an outdoor pageant and music and dance festival that lasts until dusk. The parade is not always May 1^st. It is not always pleasantly cool and sunny. In fact, one year it’s 91º and another year it’s 30º with snow flurries. But the parade and pageant, a distinctive blend of Bread and Puppet Theater, Earth Day, and Mardi Gras, are marvelous–lively, colorful, humorous, joyful, and powerful community experience.

Stilt walkers and hoop spinners; costumed and masked characters; swirling dancers and musicians; and unicyclists in this walking theatrical performance are from the neighborhood, community organizations, and school groups. They are volunteers, friends, teachers, clerks at the store, and artists. Cheered on by the crowd, they become the celebration of spring, dancing down the street, pounding on tambourines, pulling floats, pushing carts, and carrying banners. At the pageant in the park, the Tree of Life awakens from the darkness of winter and rises to the steady beating of drums. A festival of food and music extends the celebration to dusk.

The Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theater’s (HOBT) annual May Day parade is not just a great way to spend a fine Sunday afternoon or a rite of spring. Honoring many cultural traditions, showcasing local talents, and giving voice to many, it is a grand and festive expression of community engagement assuming many forms and reaching back 42 years.

Photo credit: Max Haynes

Preparations begin months in advance and are nurtured by the creative vision and community spirit of Founder and Artistic Director Sandy Spieler as well as HOBT staff and friends. Groups and individuals, newcomers and veterans come together regularly in the social and creative environments of HOBT’s Community Build Workshops. More than two hundred committed participants help in workshops and construct 20-foot puppets and floats that punctuate the parade. On the day of the parade and pageant, 2,000 participants dance and boogie in the parade, carry water, hand out maps, serve as parade marshals, and star in the pageant.

Over 4 decades, the Heart of the Beast has become a catalyst for the creativity and connection that make community visible.

Rich and varied expressions of community and connection are everywhere along the parade route, in the banners and bantering, cheering, and in the strains of the parade’s anthem, “You Are My Sunshine.” The community workshops, much of what happens in the months leading up to May Day, and on the parade route itself is relevant to museums’ efforts to engage more fully with their community and friends. Several qualities strike me as particularly relevant and adaptable.

A roomy vision inspires and invites groups to craft their own messages. Much as a museum’s vision and mission guide and inspire its campaigns, initiatives, and community work, HOBT’s mission to create vital, poetic theater for all ages and backgrounds inspires the annual parade and its theme. Radical Returnings was the 2016 parade theme.

Each section of the parade carries a message which may be poetic, serious, or humorous. Groups of like-minded individuals compose messages to share on banners and signs along with elaborate costumes. The Rivers Have Called Upon Us honored Berta Cáceres the Honduran environmental activist who recently passed away. Dozens and dozens of fantastic costumed crabs, snails, lobsters, and hermit crabs swirled around a banner asking, Feeling Crabby? In the spirit of a community event, the parade is capped off by the beloved and sometimes zany, Free Speech section with banners, signs, and floats announcing causes and issues. 

My personal favorite among the sections: a banner announcing, Safety is measured by human kindness. 

Everyone gets into the act. During the 6 months of public parade preparation (internal work at HOBT begins on the heels of the previous parade), there are multiple opportunities to engage and connect. Opportunities allow both extended and briefer degrees of involvement. This openness to anyone and everyone participating reveals itself on May Day as a celebration by, for, and with the community. Babies through elders march in the parade and sit along the parade route. Spectators see cousins, teachers, and neighbors marching, waving, and singing. Local bands and cultural groups play and dance in the parade and at the park. Hometown music idol, Prince, was honored as a larger-than life puppet leading a parade section. 

"Can you take care of this snail for the rest of us?"

The parade spills into the crowd; spectators become participants. More than a few of the 50,000 spectators become participants along the way. Happy May Day greetings from paraders invite responses from spectators. Strains of “You Are My Sunshine,” fill the air and the crowd sings along and claps. The banner, Howl for the Whole Earth, elicits howls from paraders and spectators that last long after the banner has passed–just for the fun of it. In a quieter moment, a giant fish approaches a young child holding a very large snail made of clay in its hands. The fish asks the child, “Can you take care of this snail for the rest of us?” A quiet conversation follows. The child accepts and solemnly holds the snail for the duration of the parade.

A joyous blend of serious and silly. The edge between silly and serious blends and blurs moving the parade along in a spirit of joyous celebration. HOBT stirs imaginations and offers the materials– water, flour, newspaper, paint tape, and lumber–to tell stories, explore the struggles and celebrations of human existence, to build and create. It is also a welcoming place that individuals and collaborative groups can inhabit.   Rollerbladers and cyclists on tall bikes, backwards bikes, and unicycles cruise through the parade. Some, like the Southside Battletrain, build their own creations. This Mad Max" esque, bicycle-powered float has preceded the parade over the last few years, treating the crowd to new features including a Ferris wheel, band, and bar-b-q.

 Not every museum will find a "Mad Max" esque, bicycle-powered float with a Ferris wheel, band, and bar-b-q to be an expression of its community engagement intentions. But it does suggest that every museum can become a catalyst for  the creativity and connection that strengthen community and make it visible.  

 Related Museum Notes Posts

Local and Happening Now

Creativity, Play, and Learning

Combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought.

ALBERT EINSTEIN 

Some of us might say there’s some relationship between creativity and play…maybe. Stretching a bit, some may say they appreciate play for its role in creativity. Fewer are likely to have considered the possibility that creativity and play are closely related. Mostly we tend to think of creativity and play as worlds apart. 

Play is for younger children; creativity is for adults and older children. Creativity is a charm that unlocks potential; play is for blowing off steam. Creativity is serious business, play is what happens when there’s nothing else to do. Creativity seems mysterious; play is ubiquitous.

Yet, looking at creativity and play more closely and together highlights some important similarities and connections between them as well as to learning. 

Admittedly there are many views of both play and creativity. Furthermore, both concepts are difficult to capture and often assigned overly elastic or simplified meanings. Traditionally creativity has been considered unrestrained, uninhibited, cathartic and emotional; or individual talent and flashes of insight. More recently creativity has been theorized from perspectives of education, sociology, psychology and philosophy. It is viewed as generating something new that has value. Educators in the schools for young children in Reggio (IT) consider creativity as the art of thinking. Then there is one of many recursive five-stage processes. Expansive territory, indeed.

The Inner Circle by Jaime Filipe

No less vague and fraught, play is likewise viewed through multiple lenses of psychology, evolutionary biology, and child development and enjoys many definitions. Complex and ambiguous, play is recreation, the child’s work, and a pleasurable activity carried out for its own sake. Just as there are multistage processes for creativity, there are play taxonomies galore. According to Martin Buber, “Play is the exultation of the possible.”  

The rhetorics of creativity and play mirror one another in significant ways. We see in both, ideas and forms that are consumed with pleasure. In neither is the object, form, or idea accepted as a given. Whether manipulating blocks, making music, designing a new font, or redesigning packaging, we do something to whatever we started with, combining, stretching or somehow up-ending its original form. In play and creativity, we draw on stored information, ideas and skills from accumulated experiences and settings. In both creativity and play, a similar push-and-pull of drives is at work. We make bold connections, are flexible, and find different combinations of ideas on the one hand, and we respond to the drives of conformity, familiarity, and predictability on the other. And although forts, songs, apps, and new food products may result from play and creative activity, neither necessarily produces tangible products.

Creativity In Play

A sense of a more substantial relationship than a list of similarities between creativity and play emerges from recent thinking in cognitive science and neuroscience. It builds, in fact, on Einstein’s idea of creativity as combinatorial play. Versions of this idea have been explored in articles in American Journal of Play as combinational creativity (Boden p. 7) and combinatory play (Stevens. p. 99).

Leaf Bowls by Kay Sekimachi

In combinatory play a person uses conscious, deliberate connection making and imagination, manipulating familiar ideas, images, sounds, or forms and comes up with unlikely combinations of ideas, images, sounds, or forms. Recombined they are novel, surprising and valuable. We may experience this in combining disparate information, repurposing an abundant discard, imagining dried leaves as a bowl or translating a metaphor into an immersive environment. When we do, we play with possible outcomes, adapt to unexpected results, and link what had seemed unlinkable. We envision what is not present, compare and contrast various combinations, fuse and peel apart constructs to arrive at a new whole. The brain plays.

Connecting previously unconnected images, facts, or elements in ways that are new and meaningful occurs through both conscious and unconscious cognitive play. The mind hovers between structure and openness; it wanders between focused attention and diffused attention. It skates freely with and among a series combinations without imposing a conclusion. This is a complex form of play as well as thinking.

Falcon Model made of cardboard boxes

The Brain Plays

Thinking outside the box speaks directly to creativity as well as play. For both, this image celebrates freedom from constraints and attraction to possibilities. Creativity invites us to detour rigid frameworks, assumptions, and rules. By thinking outside the constraints of a cardboard box’s original size, proportions, and purpose, a familiar box is transformed into a child’s boat or spaceship or an animation artist’s detailed scaled model.  

Thinking outside the box also suggests how we might look at the relationship between creativity, play, and learning. Making connections between one thing and another is also fundamental to a conceptualization of learning as a connection-making process. Deliberate and conscious, learning involves connecting formerly isolated concepts, linking abstractions with hands-on concrete application, associating previous experiences with a fact, and reinforcing understanding a concept. In contrast to the fresh, unlikely combinations that characterize creativity and play, learning is concerned with making connections that construct a meaningful system of relationships that changes and grows with experience.

Just as creativity requires sidestepping conventional ways of exploring thought, structure, and objects, letting go of well-used and decidedly separate categories for play, creativity, and learning allows us to see how each helps advance the case for and supports the others.

Judging from the number of articles, reports, blogs, journals, and magazines, there’s no shortage of opinions, advice, and evidence about the importance of creativity and creative development and how to foster it. A valued attribute for 21^st century learners, creativity enables us to respond to a rapidly changing world and deal with the unexpected by extending our current knowledge and skills to novel situations and by using it in new ways. For everyone–a parent, barista, software programmer, museum, plumber, accountant, or a child–the day job requires creativity. 

Taking any of these three seriously means taking all seriously. Valuing creativity and learning relies on valuing play (at every age). Providing for one provides well for the others. Expanding experiences and enriching opportunities in one area, fuels the other two. If we want children, youth, and adults; citizens, learners, and workers to be creative, follow different ways of imagining, thinking, linking, exploring and challenging ideas, we need to create the conditions that allow players, connectors, and learners to think artfully, to combine and recombine, connect and reconnect pleasurably even exuberantly.

To do this, we have every reason to be generous with tools, machines, images, designed objects, natural forms, found materials, artifacts, and bio-facts; in maker spaces, studios, discovery rooms, and ateliers; backyards, play yards, and junkyards; experiment stations, kitchens, or labs. Unlikely, intriguing, and fresh combinations will emerge as we hold back on judgment and ease up on the pressure to come to closure. We need to respect the element of time for imagining, drawing on previous experiences, successes and failures; for building and rebuilding representations; and for talking about, working with, reflecting on, and making ideas or connections their own.

• How do you see the relationship among creativity, play and learning? 
• How do the connections among them expand your understanding of each?
• How would you create the conditions in your museum or classroom to invite all three?  

Related Museum Notes Posts

• Creativity and Museums 
• Playing With…Loose Parts 
• 21st Century Skills in the Wild
• Making Makers 
• Making and Tinkering, The Missing Piece

Creative work is play. It is free speculation using the materials of one’s chosen form.

STEPHAN NACHMANOVITCH

Book Sculptures

 "There is no Frigate like a Book, 
to take us Lands away,..." 

(EMILY DICKINSON)

For the ingenuity, beauty, and delight books bring and the unexpected possibilities they offer in their many forms:

Books for hiding 

… for relaxing 

… for play 

… for the garden 

… for the garden wall 

… for fashionistas 

… for celebrating

… for contemplation 

Some of these creations I have come across on my walks and travels. Some have been sent to me by friends and colleagues. A few have shown up as design precedence for projects. All suggest possibilities.

Related Museum Notes Posts

• Anywhere and Everywhere… Books

• Playing with…Paper

Reggio After Images

A striking idea; a persistent after image; connections engaging with multiple and foundational ideas. Together these are the first indication that a new idea has staying power.

Over the years Reggio educators and their pedagogy have been a source of provocative ideas. The museums group study tour this year was no exception. Ideas were presented and unfolded. Thought leader and wonderfully quotable Loris Malaguzzi was often cited. One month later, I am holding onto some ideas and some ideas are holding onto me. Those with the greatest staying power and that engage with projects, practice, and pedagogy are ones I will likely explore them in future blog posts.

1.     The social value of materials. The significant role of materials exploration in the Reggio schools is well known and well documented. Educators select materials for children to explore with their hands and imaginations, as tools, for their expressive potential and to make connections between languages. Less obvious is selecting a material for its social value, its capacity to build a sense of group or to encourage cooperation among children. Distinctions among materials may consider how they build the child’s familiarity, relationship, and confidence with the material. A material may also be selected because it enriches a child’s elaboration of their ideas and desire to share them with others. No doubt other carefully considered dimensions also help extend exploration and I have yet to discover them.

2.     Connections as learning. Clarity about learning through connections threads through Reggio pedagogy. Consistent with a constructivist learning perspective, decidedly interdisciplinary, and congruent with the interconnectedness of the world as we experience it, connections recognizes learning as actively engaging multiple senses, construction across different dimensions, and forging links between experiences and ideas. In this way, we actively build understandings of social and physical relationships operating in the world. Connections start where the learner is and go everywhere and anywhere. Neither limited by nor respecting subject matter boundaries, they follow interest, and encounter the unexpected.

3.     Prepared to follow. To be able to follow children’s explorations–with light, movement, air, or the city–the adult must be familiar with a wide range of concepts that children might explore in the classroom, the museum, outdoors. Thoughtful preparation acknowledges the child's significant capabilities and natural curiosity as well as opening the adult to the possibilities of the context, the project, the studio, the exhibit, the activity. The adult becomes a learner and researcher along with the child who is a ready learner. In the role of following, the adult extends children’s exploration; gets a sense of what is and isn’t happening; and activates, especially indirectly, the meaning-making competencies of children (Bruner).

4.     A helpful disruption to the play – learning connection. Calls for more play in the lives of children in the US, born of grave concern about the lack of play in their lives, come from many voices and sources. Appeals for more play often argue for its value by equating play and learning, linking it to more recognized public health issues like well-being or obesity, or elevating it to children’s work. Inadvertently, this undersells play by reinforcing unproductive dichotomies, suggesting that a simple equation (play=learning) can explain a rich and dense relationship, and concealing the very complexity of play that makes it valuable. Opening up the connections and pathways between play and learning and other important processes such as creativity help expand the idea of play, reveal the power within play and why it’s valued. Can we speak of playing without learning? Creativity without play? Play without stories and narratives?

5.     When a drawing is not a drawing. “Can you draw a picture of a …” is a question adults often ask a child. Because of the way it’s stated, it may convey a sense of expectation of the child; the child thinks the adult wants her to make a specific drawing–a chair that looks a certain way or that very tree out the window. Inviting a child to draw is not necessarily about the child drawing the object, the dog, the bike, or the shell. Rather, it may be about the child getting to know that object, seeing the shape, noticing how the petals of the flower touch, or attending to the spiral of the shell–and translating that knowledge into a drawing. A question posed or a request made frames the experience for the child. Will it be an experience of looking and thinking or an experience of guessing what the adult wants?

6.     Stakeholders in children’s learning. We often refer to a museum’s stakeholders: partners, supporters and friends, both individuals and groups, who are likely to affect or be affected by the museum. These are valuable relationships that can be even more valuable when they focus on what is of highest priority to a museum. Shifting the focus to children and, more specifically to their learning, applies a powerful new lens, invites additional considerations of current and new partners, and opens opportunities for increasing impact. Stakeholders in the museum might be interested in the foot traffic it generates for local businesses. Stakeholders in children’s learning, on the other hand, might be interested in engaging children’s ideas and giving visibility to their thinking. They might be interested in advancing these interests with the museum. Thinking about stakeholders in children’s learning might bring new partners to the table and allow the museum to set a different table.

7.     Aesthetics and ethics. The most intriguing and provocative idea of the study tour–and in a long time–was atelierista Vea Vecchi’s assertion of the “emphatic” relationship between aesthetics and ethics. Referencing poet Josef Brodsky’s statement, she placed this powerful connection in the culture of the atelier, the context of Reggio pedagogy, and the lives of children around the world. She further related aesthetics and ethics with struggling against indifference. She did not, however, explain the connections. In exploring how these apparently unlikely ideas might engage with one another, it seems that the aesthetic dimension keeps alive in us a search for beauty and an attitude of being attentive. What we attend to with a particular sensibility, we value: loveliness, harmony, nature, exchange with others, a sensibility in the moment. What we value, we care about and we care for. We are not indifferent to what we care about and what matters. How do you understand and imagine this relationship between aesthetics and ethics?

8.     “Imagine it before being asked to do it.” A comment shared by Tiziana Filipinni, pedagogista in the Reggio Schools in the first sessions has proven to be a Matryoshka doll with many and intriguing meanings. It is, certainly, advice to be alert and prepared across a range of situations. This includes bringing a pro-active stance to considering the long-term, strategic interests of a museum, a school, or a city: paying attention to the time and community we live in and updating our understanding of the present. An unusual vision of leadership is also carried within this statement. When we use our capacity to imagine what’s possible and what’s next, we are able to construct the future. Our “imagining it” puts us out in front to shape what comes next and allows us to bring others along, something the educators in Reggio seem to have been able to do over the last 60 years

Thanks very much to members of the Reggio-Inspired Network of Minnesota that came together on December 15 to hear about the study tour and discuss many of these ideas: Tami, Christy, Tom, Lani, Eileen, Michele, Alaina, Katie, Stephanie, Erica, and Andrea

 Reggio-related blog posts on Museum Notes:

• Journey to Reggio 

•  Seeing Children In the City  

• The Children of Reggio Welcome You 

• Documentation: From Reggio Schools to US Museums 

• Poetry and Precision and the Language of Reggio

• Reggio Study Tour and the Children’s Museum Field