Making Marks, Making a Mark on the World

 MUSEUM NOTES 

Jeanne Vergeront 

Vergeront Museum Planning 

 

Atelié Carombola Escola de Eduçao Infantil
Mosaic Marks, an exhibit from the Municipal Schools of Reggio Emilia

There are phrases or terms that sound almost strange the first time we hear them. If they also sound intriguing, we might pay attention to them, think about them, and notice when we come across them a second, third, or fourth time. After a while, we aren’t able to imagine not having these once odd phrases to help us observe, wonder, think, and make connections. 

Mark making struck me that way at first. I think it was related to a project of the Municipal Schools of Reggio Emilia (IT). A favorable association for me, it connected with the idea of the 100 Languages of Children, a metaphor for the coexisting ways of investigating relationships, using information, and representing ideas through materials, movement, words, drawing, and sounds. 

Nevertheless, the term mark making seemed imprecise and vague. Reflecting on the phrase however, I gradually appreciated its lack of pretension. Mark making both recognizes that the marks children make with their fingers, markers, brushes, bodies, and imaginations are significant in many ways and yet it leaves open possible ways to understand those marks. 

The Extraordinary Ordinary 

That same tiny finger that points to the family pet or favorite toy indicating, “look” or, “I want that” is the same tiny finger that begins to make marks. An extended finger draws in the snow, pulls a line through the spilled food, drags a strand of spaghetti, and finds an uncapped marker great for marking on a book or a wall. 

Mark making starts early in a child’s life and is a building block to brain functions, literacy skills, self-expression, relationships, and communicating. When that finger, stick, brush, or pen encounters paper, clay, or stone and leaves a trace, a lot is happening. The hand, body, and mind are engaged and coordinated. Small motor skills and eye-hand coordination are developing. 

Often unnoticed by busy parents or older siblings or referred to as “scribbles,” this noteworthy effort emerges from the child’s observing others using materials, an interest in communicating, and the joy of authoring a visible trace. From watching others around them write, children become aware that marks have meaning and are intent on recreating that sense of meaning themselves. They pretend their marks represent something. In these first marks is the start of children’s writing and drawing. With time and more mark making, the child makes new marks and realizes they are capable of changing marks. Random swirls become circles, possibly a head, a sun, a world. 

Young children’s marks are created with intense focus. I recall that when, as a pre-kindergartener I worked hard to make a mark that I now know as a lowercase cursive “e,” I was delighted by creating a recognizable mark. At six years, writing my name was a gift to my mother. Writing names certainly is an accomplishment in children’s mark making and identity. Yet it’s only one milestone in a larger, life-long process from the first dots and dashes, to forming recognizable letters, drawing a scene, telling stories, writing poems, composing a life. 

And while a precursor to writing, mark making is not a brief, linear, or automatic progression. Learning to control any mark making tool, such as a pencil, pen or paintbrush, is hard; it takes time, and requires many skills. Opportunities with marking tools, various surfaces, and approached from different physical postures encourage children who are developing skills at their own pace. Some children want and need to spend more time in a particular mark-making world. 

Making marks is not just about writing and is not limited to paper and markers. It unfolds over time, recruiting new capabilities, expressing feelings of connection, and building on memories. In this sense, mark making emerges from the immediate context perhaps creating a moment of joint attention, responding to what the materials and surfaces at hand make possible, expressing delight. Marks are an opening to something new. Few or many marks, bold colors or fine black lines, snow and black dirt may represent something, cover large areas, or transform surfaces. 

A drawing can change with the addition of each mark, a new color, an act of play, or a spill. If

Photo credit: Interaction Imaginations

we are paying attention, children will tell us. They talk as they develop their idea; their words offer glimpses into their thinking; they give clues about what these marks mean to them. An arrangement of lines or shapes across a page might be a fledgling idea for a code, a diagram showing how a seed grows, or a lost island. The meanings of these marks are not fixed, but likely change as the child encounters them again and experiences them in a new way. A child may describe a drawing differently now and tomorrow telling a parent, caregiver, teacher, or friend about the marks on the page or in the clay. That spiral is a sleeping cat today; tomorrow it’s a windstorm; the next day it’s a new galaxy. 

Making Marks, Making Ourselves 

Museums are full of meaningful marks. Collections, exhibitions, and programs interpret the languages of lines, patterns, texture, shapes, and material properties as drips, splashes, brushstroke, and etchings on canvas, plaster, stone, walls, the world. Deciphering the marks created through movement and sound, museums tell stories, reveal beauty, challenge thinking, and inspire new questions. They deepen our awareness of ancient and modern makers and offer glimpses into how marks create community, follow our families, and express our individuality. Museums honor the functional, ornamental, and spiritual marks of letters, documents, and decrees that celebrate our survival, voice our aspirations, and record our struggles. 

Even more than all of the meaningful marks that museums hold, share, and interpret are the ways in which they can nourish the human desire to leave a mark. Each time they develop an exhibit, display an object, set a tinkering challenge, facilitate a program, shape camp activities, or lead a tour, museums have an opportunity to support and extend the powerful disposition to create connections and transform a small part of the world. 

Children's Museum of Pittsburgh

This work emerges from an expansive idea of mark making. Grounded in an optimism about the capabilities of all of us, even babies as mark makers, this view understands swoops, patterns, and gestures as an extension of the mind, thinking, exploration, communication, and play. This work is advanced by: 

• Focusing on the mark maker. 
• Exploring the conditions that encourage, support, and expand the possibilities of mark making. 
• Integrating mark making into a wide range of activities, experiences, and spaces across the museum. 

•  Focus on the mark maker. Whether novice or experienced, an individual’s interest in the world and what it offers, and finding a place in that world is the impetus for mark making. Mark making nurtures the individual’s voice, ideas, and thinking. 

- Situate mark makers at the center of an experience. Who are they? What are they curious about? Allow flexibility for how children encounter, explore, and engage. 

- Frame questions around developing an understanding of mark making. How do children fill a space with their marks? What are intriguing forms for them? 

- Observe children’s attention to their mark making. What are their initial marks? How do they elaborate on them? How do they use instruments to explore, transform surfaces? What brings them delight? 

- Listen to children narrate what they are doing. What words do they use to talk about their drawing or project? Does a story emerge from the gestures? How does their telling change? 

- Reflect on how children respond to and use materials, surfaces, words, and feelings. How do they work with them individually? Together? How might children’s images, symbols, ideas, and efforts be extended to other experiences? 

- Document in words and photos insights into children’s thinking about their mark making in a format that serves as a tool for creating new mark making experiences.

•  Explore the conditions that encourage, support, and expand the possibilities of mark making. A wider range and richer mix of materials invite a deeper exploration of mark making. Push the obvious limits to create new and wider openings for mark making; search beyond the art studio. Check the shed, shop, kitchen, or woods; look for both materials and ideas that prompt exploration. 

 - Think about all the conditions that encourage mark making: materials that modify color, texture, smell; tools, instruments, and media that shape and transform; surfaces that hold marks; ideas to explore; and time to engage and focus. 

- Select varied materials and objects: brushes, markers, pens; sticks, feathers, straws, yarn, cord, wire, fabric, torn paper; leaves, seeds, or petals; found objects; crayons, charcoal, chalk, paint, ink 

- Look around for tools, instruments, and media: an overhead projector, cameras, light, mirrors, circuits, hammers, saws, scrapers, and etchers. - Include surfaces for receiving marks may be textured, porous, or contoured: walls, rocks and stones, sand, the earth, mud, clay, bubble wrap, foil, fabric, sandpaper and wood planks. 

- Experiment. Some materials change with use or interact with other materials in various ways. Water evaporates, light creates shadows; creative accidents happen. Go big with rolls of paper. Add plant material. Select materials with special properties such as clear acetate; overlays invite children experimenting with backgrounds, foregrounds and combining drawings. 

- Above all, think how invitations to mark making that are a starting point for greater explorations. 

•  Integrate mark making into a wide range of activities, experiences, and spaces across the museum. More than lines and shapes on paper and more than an art activity, mark making is an act of a person having an impact on the world. Recognizing the importance of this powerful, natural disposition acknowledges individuals, makes children’s capabilities visible, and enriches the museum experience for others. 

- Extend mark making invitations into exhibits, programs, and social spaces to invite new ways of looking and thinking. Put sketch pads at the top of the climber; roll out great lengths of paper on the studio floor; add materials to a light table; invite map making at the water table or the city building area. Add a friendly provocative question to initiate exploration. 

 - Vary the context for mark making activities to provide inspiration, new perspectives, or introduce varied conditions. Take mark making outside; vary the scale; go to new heights; incorporate natural materials; add music; use the whole body. 

- Incorporate mark-making into materials exploration, investigating light, shadow, color; building gizmos; imaginative play, STEM play, and nature exploration. 

- Showcase children’s work, using their images and drawings to help interpret concepts and express the museum’s value of thinkers and doers. 

Louisiana Children's Museum
Photo credit: Jeanne Vergeront

Just as the very first marks emerge from a child’s powerful desire to leave a trace, mark making throughout life is a response to a compelling invitation. Museums can extend that invitation everyday. Photo: LCM: children’s drawings 

• A Traveling exhibit from Reggio Children, Mosaic of marks, words, materials will be in New Orleans in fall 2021. The exhibit is based on an investigation to gain a better understanding of the poetic interweaving between children’s drawings and words, in order to restore to drawing, to the instruments.

Making Sense – Two Ways

When you start planning a museum experience for children—an exhibit, environment, event, program or even a museum for children—how do you go about understanding the children you intend to serve?

While professionals and researchers across the museum field have various methods for learning about museum visitors, they are generally not used widely with children. Even when they are, they often have a narrow focus. This is somewhat understandable. Gathering input is time consuming and requires expertise to be helpful. Familiar methods are generally less suited to engaging children. Outside of behavioral observations, methods like focus groups, surveys, and interviews rely on skills children may not have developed fully. When we do consult children, the focus is often limited. We assess their understanding of a concept or a preference for one activity over another.

Wonder of Learning Exhibit: Reggio Children

And yet, we are undergoing a change in our conceptualization of children. Advances in
neuroscience and brain development and educational projects like the Reggio Emilia schools have expanded our view of children as capable social actors, thinkers, and doers, active agents in their play, learning, and development. This provides ample reason to go beyond occasional questions about a specific activity or a focus on a skill rather than on the child to more fully understand and engage them in museums. 

To be more than a good intention, however, we must create meaningful opportunities to actively involve children and learn with and from them. There is no lack of interesting and important questions to explore. In fact, the questions we might ask for planning museum experiences can also tell us something we didn't know about children's thinking, learning, and understanding which is critical to creating experiences with greater impact. These are questions as much about children as about museums; as much about what delights them as what they are learning; and as much about our broader understanding of children as testing a prototype.

Familiar Steps in an Open-ended, Iterative Process. We can explore these questions using familiar steps and methods in evaluation and research and draw on approaches like the pedagogical documentation used in the Reggio schools. This blend creates an open-ended, qualitative, descriptive, emergent, and exploratory approach which offers a broader, richer, more comprehensive view of children's engagement with their world while helping us glimpse what we couldn't otherwise see.

Reggio Children

Like a series of small studies unfolding over time, one study builds on another, fueled by new questions. We don't know just where such studies will lead. We do, however, know that this iterative process of framing questions and thinking and discovering together, will build our understanding of children and contribute to authentic experiences that engage their potential. 

Framing Questions, like developing research questions, brings focus to our interest in better understanding how children make sense of themselves and their world. Questions about children's interests and understanding need to be generous, not reduced to one activity or behavior while ignoring the richness of the context. A question about how children explore a natural setting, for example, can look at how they navigate undefined spaces, are curious about mud, and develop a connection to the natural world. We might even notice something germane to siting the museum building itself or an outdoor nature play area.

Designing for Engagement, like designing a study, considers a promising focus and how to investigate it: the children, their ages and groupings; the setting, the nature of the engagement, and appropriate methods. Here, engagement is understood as children's activity—behavior, movement, conversation—as well as their attention, interest, and its intensity. The study itself is an opportunity for children to interact with materials, the setting, other children, an artist, animals, and ideas in ways that maintain the complexity of the real world. This approach is necessarily open to the unexpected happening.

Watching and Listening, may appear to be less orderly than data collection typically does, but it is no less intentional. An approach that centers on children, their capabilities, agency, and potential follows their interest, attention, actions, questions, hunches, and conversations. Methods like video, photos, recording, drones, drawings, and mapping capture dialogue, movement, play, and transformations of space. Data collection literally follows them, bringing in multiple points of view and ways of capturing their encounters. A debrief immediately following gathers what has escaped the eye and ear to produce multiple snapshots and sequences of the children's explorations.

Reviewing and Reflection, much like analysis, is concerned with thinking about what we are

Photo credit: Vergeront

seeing in the information and impressions we have gathered. Multiple passes of videos, photos, recordings, or drawings by different people capture what we think might be happening. With careful consideration, we arrive at possible interpretations. We work to locate the meaning making in the child and then in ourselves. And we do it again. Why? Because in suspending our certainty about what we are noticing, what the child might be feeling, paying attention to, or doing, we are also learning about how we see. We are making sense in a way that is provisional both for the child and for us in understanding the child.

Relaunching, much like results, considers where exploration might lead. While a study might be a starting point for understanding a child's interests, questions, and ideas on a potential exhibit topic or activity, it should also help us make sense of how children work with others, set their own goals in play, or view their capabilities and accomplishments. The genesis of an exhibit can come from observing and listening to children rather than from exhibit planners, marketing, school curriculum, or funder interest. A Relaunch invites exploring alternative meanings, pursuing another line of inquiry, and shaping questions around a museum's long-term interest in children. 

Making Sense of Children Making Sense. The involved and evolving nature of a process concerned with making sense of children making sense of the world is challenging both in practice and in making the benefits concrete and concise. Brief descriptions and photos from 3 museum projects follow, each highlighting various aspects of this approach.

•    Planning for the recently opened Louisiana Children's Museum (LCM) in New Orleans involved groups of children and parents in a set of activities and conversations that informed the design direction, exhibit development, architectural design, and graphics. Development of LCM's 2011 museum strategic master plan began with a visitor panel of a dozen children, 5 - 10 years, their parents and caregivers that met 3 times. Sessions focused on what was fascinating to children in LCM's Julia Street exhibits, how parents and caregivers saw their child's thinking and learning, and what was important and interesting to the children about water in their everyday lives. Children's drawings, discussions, photographs, and words not only expressed their ideas and interests, but also inspired planning. 

Photo credit: © Gyroscope Inc.

One boy's drawing of his ideal exhibit showed a giant chessboard overlaid with a map of New
Orleans and sounds collected from across the city. Moving a chess piece would activate a city sound on that square. His drawing inspired the Jackson Square entry experience in the Make Your Mark gallery.

Recognizing how this first round of conversations and drawings brimmed with children's ideas and parent observations, dialogue sessions were held throughout the 8 years of planning. They were incorporated into camps, one-time sessions, and school projects. Sessions focused on topics about growing food, where ideas come from, water, animals and their habitats. Some focused on the relationship between grandparents and grandchildren. The insights and interests that emerged from children and families inspired experiences (a crawfish boil), became gallery graphics, were incorporated into way-finding, and even appear in LCM's logo. Highlighting the role of children's contributions, use of a child's art work includes the child's name and age.

Photo Credit: Louisiana Children's
Museum

Through the team's observations and listening, members learned that these children have a sense of place, understand something about local food culture, and how water plays a role in moving food from New Orleans to the world. Relationships are important to them; they take care of things, help each other, and are careful observers. These observations and new questions are being folded into LCM's ongoing work.

•    Interest in exploring children's ideas about communities and the places that make up communities prompted a 2014 collaboration between Minnesota Children's Museum and the Reggio-inspired Network of Minnesota. As part of MCM's 2014-2017 expansion and renovation, Seeing Everyday Places was a project within a project within a project. MCM shared with educators and families in local early years programs the community settings the Our World gallery would include: a fire station, park, farmers' market, hardware store, post office, and food truck. 

Over several months, children visited one of the settings with their class, in small groups, or with their families. They met and talked with people at the hardware store; went behind the scenes at the bank; and visited the fire station. New lines of inquiry emerged: curiosity about types of mailboxes and each child's family mailbox, and how more money is made. 

Fire Station Kitchen
Courtesy Minnesota Children's Museum

Documentation panels from each of the groups highlighted connections children found between everyday places in their neighborhoods and communities. "A Story of Materials and Money" captured a family's trips to the hardware store. That parent noted that, over the course of the family's exploring hardware stores, her 4-year old's building constructions changed from spaceships and fantasy vehicles to gas stations and neighborhood scenes. Children who explored parks created Nature Park Blue Prints for the Our World park. Four-year old Oliver's blue print specified the number (6), size (s, m, l), and type (deciduous and evergreen) or trees; a button for making rain sounds; a fountain and a bench; and magnifying glasses. Responding to children's curiosity about firefighters living at the 

Fire station living
Photo credit: Vergeront

station when they work, MCM devoted more space and activities to a fire station kitchen where children could explore firefighters' daily routines through dramatic play.

 •    Planning currently underway for Region 5 Children's  Museum (R5CM) in north central Minnesota is conducting a set of small studies and community engagement based in the Museum's strategic master plan. Referred to as encounters, they are intended to engage children, families, and communities around understanding more about how children find their place in the world. They are also part of early exhibit development. The first of several encounters for small groups of children 2 - 10 years is underway in a park that is likely to be the home of the Museum.

Photo credit: R5CM

With an interest in understanding more about how children engage in open-ended exploration and child-directed play in an outdoor setting, the Museum's team set up 2 conditions, a park playground area and a natural area, both with loose parts the children could carry, build with, pretend with, and investigate. In one session, an extended play experience laster nearly 25 minutes. Captured on video, a group of children ages 5 - 9 from a summer day camp program worked collaboratively at the climb-on play equipment. Using 50-feet of rope and moving back-and-forth between two structures tying the rope between them, from 3 - 6 children worked to make a zip line. 

They tied knots and tested their strength. When knots loosened and the rope—and the child—dropped, they tied new knots. They lowered the height of the rope at one end and raised the other end by shimmying up poles and boosting each other up to reach higher bars. Working with an apparent hunch about reducing friction on the zip line, they found a length of PVC pipe and slid it over the rope. Like good problem solvers, they tested, revised, rethought aspects of the problem, and improved their design.

From review and discussion of this and other videos, photos, and notes, the team has been thinking about what the children are doing and what their engagement might mean to them. The team noticed the children's extensive and innovative investigation of materials; how they were collaborative and managed their interactions; had hunches and persisted in exploring them; and that they socialized easily. The child-directed curriculum of everyday STEM the children developed was rich.

The first set of encounters has laid a groundwork for the next which will focus on the natural phenomena at the park the children notice and how they use their senses and imaginations to explore and represent them. The team has yet to see where that will lead.

More Like a Milkweed Pod Than a Pocketful of Rye. Where we place our attention is where we begin to see what is happening. When we follow compelling questions and when we wonder, think, and discover together, we deepen our understanding of the thinkers, doers, and learners in our museums including ourselves. We push on safe ideas, shift perspectives, fold new insights into everyday choices, and create new touchstones within a group working together. Each person takes something of that shared understanding into a new setting, fresh possibilities, and a new set of questions.

My thanks to Lani Shapiro, Tom Bedard, Cheryl Kessler, Mary Weiland, Jim Roe, Peter Olson, Maeryta Medrano, and Julia Bland

Related Museum Notes

• Observation: Seeing, Un-seeing, Re-seeing:

• Listening to Children's Thinking:

 

   

Four Years Later: Reflections on 2013 Museums Study Tour to Reggio

Ray of Light Studios continue to inspire

In November 2013, 50 participants from 11 museums with partners from higher ed, libraries, community organizations, early childhood, and preschools traveled to Reggio Emilia in northern Italy for a study tour of the city’s schools. Over the course of a week, the group was immersed in the pedagogy of the municipal schools with presentations by early childhood specialists, educators, and studio teachers; visits to infant-toddler centers and preschools; and tours of documentation and recycle centers.

Returning from the November 2013 Museums Study Tour Reggio participants shared their experiences with colleagues and area teachers. One group of participants organized a full day pre-conference for InterActivity 2014 in Phoenix. Attended by more than 30 the conference was followed by a set of articles, Adopting/Adapting: Reggio in Children’s Museums, in the spring 2014 issue of Hand To Hand.

Since then participants have been active in exploring these ideas more deeply, engaging in and adapting Reggio-inspired practice to museum and school settings. Work ranges from events with visibility like Tacoma Children’s Museum’s annual co-sponsorship of Symposium on Our Youngest Citizens to personal acts of rereading notebooks and journals from the weeklong visit. In some of the groups such as South Dakota Children’s Museum and Opal School, Reggio practices are foundational, embedded into the work, and supported by the shared experience of several study tour participants. In other cases individuals intently and patiently have looked for opportunities to weave these ideas into existing “duties as assigned.”  

Our group: November 2013

Recently I proposed to the study tour participants that we look back at this remarkable opportunity and share our reflections with one another. A dozen study tour participants, approximately one-quarter of the group, wrote and talked about their experience in Reggio and its presence in their work now. A continuing energy and appreciation for the roomy ideas we were able to explore comes through all of the reflections. The opportunity to visit schools, observe children, and listen to seasoned Reggio educators over the week added depth and dimension to understanding this complex pedagogy and increased awareness of the rigor that guides it. Moments stand out, shifting perspectives on existing practice were noted, and new questions have emerged. Yet, these reflections also indicate the challenging, on-going, and some times lonely nature of this work, work variously described as a life-long journey and a struggle to weave learning from Reggio into daily work.

As I reflected on connections between the study tour and what these participants have been doing, thinking, and wondering about, several threads emerged. They are, hopefully, invitations to further reflections, questions, and explorations.

•                Moments from the 2013 study tour still stand out vividly 4 years later. Illuminated moments around the relationship between aesthetics and ethics; children as citizens now; and the child’s agency have become touchstones and provocations for continued thinking and further exploration.  

•          Consistent with Reggio philosophy, relationship and collaboration characterize on-going work among study tour participants. Participants were encouraged to apply with museum, school, or community colleagues and many pairs and groups did so. Hence, it’s not surprising that relationships among participants have grown and are active. Less predictable, however, is that the study tour group has become a kind of Reggio-inspired network for its participants, building on pre-existing relationships, strengthening connections, and offering new associations. 

Adapting Reggio to the museum: from the final reflection

•                The complexity of Reggio ideas combined with the challenge of translating them into new contexts invites collaboration around projects. Appreciation of the challenge of translating practices into another culture and contexts in meaningful ways is very apparent. This challenge points to the importance, or perhaps necessity, of thinking together about these rich, complex ideas. Projects have been instrumental in adapting Reggio ideas and practices to other settings.

•                Four years after the study tour, the hopes and possibilities of Reggio-inspired connections, conversations, small experiments, and projects are coming to fruition in some of our museums and schools. This is encouraging in several ways. In museums such a time frame is typical, even short, for major projects, re-imagining a museum, or changing course. Learning, adapting, and meaningful change take time. Undoubtedly, promising connections and new projects that will emerge in perhaps 4-5 years are incubating now.

Looking Back

Four years after the museums study tour, 16 years after my first study tour, and 24+ years after first being introduced to Reggio, I am as drawn to the question of how one transforms thinking and practice as I am to the hardworking principles of Reggio pedagogy itself. The principles of the child as a born thinker, doer, and planner; the 100 Languages of children (or learning); the environment as the third teacher; and the role of pedagogical documentation continue to be compelling. They bring an aesthetic to thinking and learning that is powerful. I am keen to explore these ideas with others more knowledgeable than I am and I want to share them with others who indicate the slightest interest in related ideas such as exploring materials, asking new questions, or children as citizens.

Because I don’t work in a museum, school, or a firm with others, I have “borrowed” the participants on the 2013 study tour and their museums, schools, and firms to serve as a kind of community of learners for me. I check in on-line, meet-up at conferences, and stay in touch via email with these colleagues. I follow activities like the Children’s Museum of Tacoma’s annual Symposium on Our Youngest Citizens and read the Opal School blog. Opal’s thoughtful posts help shape an image for me of a culture of following ideas and connections and creating movement in thinking for children and teachers.

Diving into these ideas in various ways–through reading, writing, and talking; trying out small experiments; and folding them into my museum planning practice–keeps them present, active, and evolving. Members of the local MN Reggio-inspired network are a great source of Reggio-inspired, related, and connected blogs that are local, national, and international. Exploring Reggio-inspired ideas on my Museum Notes blog pushes me to dig into, unpack, and rethink documentation, the image of the child, the environment as teacher, learning together, etc.

New Starting Points

Strong, capable agents in
thinking, doing, and connecting

My planning work with museums most readily lends itself to advancing an image of the child as strong, capable, and an active agent in their thinking and learning. While not an easy shift from how we as a culture view children, I have found this to be an accessible entry point for a team or museum. It does not require a deep understanding or commitment to the Reggio pedagogy yet it goes to the core of a transformative view of children. It also resonates personally with a desire in each of us to be viewed as capable and appreciated for our strengths. This can lower resistance to a new idea.

With an image of the “rich” child as an organizational value, at the center of learning frameworks, or in experience planning, a museum is poised to make a fundamental shift. Here is an opening for other practices, perhaps developing a shared vocabulary around the strong child, the possibility of a child-driven experience planning process, or the use of documentation to make thinking visible. It may prompt new questions about children’s–and adults’–capabilities and how parents, caregivers, and staff can support, extend, and deepen explorations.

Along with this work, a few museum planning projects have offered opportunities to explore Reggio ideas in the context of museums with like-minded colleagues. Time together with Maeryta Medrano and Julia Bland on the study tour further inspired and grounded approaches to exhibit design, caregiver engagement, graphics and text for the “new” Louisiana Children’s Museum. In a collaborative project between Minnesota Children’s Museum and the Reggio-inspired Network of MN, teachers, parents, and caregivers documented children’s questions and thinking about places that make up communities as part of the redesign of MCM’s Our World gallery.   

Reflections from Reggio

I am fortunate that the Twin Cities has an active, robust Reggio-inspired network I can draw on in this work. Since its founding in 2000, the Network has grown and now offers varied entry points and activities, encouraging self-forming groups: monthly materials explorations, a book study group, and documentation lab. A group around big body play is active. 

Most weeks I am able to join 2 Reggio-inspired educators who encourage and challenge me with their reading, questions, and ideas. For the last 15 months we have been reading from the Contesting Early Childhood series by Routledge. We think together about the conditions that encourage the dispositions in educators and policy makers to be open, creative, and reflective. Often in these moments I am able to glimpse how the rich, hardworking ideas I have found in Reggio interact and take hold with the power to transform.