The Essential Elements
We thought we would be overwhelmed. We thought we would be challenged, stretched. We thought we would learn ways to overcome, to grow professionally. We thought we would return with new insights, new appreciation. What we didn't anticipate, however, was that these insights, this learning, would come from an experience that had very little to do with the conference we were attending.
Our journey started with a beautiful early morning ferry ride at sunrise, the brilliant colors of the sky reflected on the water. Shortly after driving off the boat however, our path took an unexpected turn. A flat tire, a state trooper, a tow truck and a dead battery threatened to turn our weekend into a disaster. But good humor prevailed and we kept our focus. "This weekend is about documentation." Out came the iPhones and we began to document. The flashing lights of the trooper's car. The helpful mechanic from the Muscle and Speed Towing Company. The battery that was declared "junk" at the tire shop. Our faces, exaggerated looks of dismay and disbelief. Finally, new tire, new battery, we were back on the road and headed to Cambridge.
Arriving two hours after the start of the conference, we were tossed into project work, without direction, without guidance from the missed morning session. The task was to create an artifact of a memory of a relationship with some form of technology. At least that was what we understood the task to be. What we had missed was the instruction that this work was to be completed individually. Instead we jumped into group work. The technology? The wheel. The memory, only a few hours old? A flat tire. We represented our morning's experience with wire, ribbon, foam, stickers, rocks and markers. In the process we remembered each part that contributed to the journey. We relived the string of emotions. We assured ourselves that things could have been worse. As we revisited our experience, and struggled to represent it accurately through our work, we gained control over it.
And we documented. As we worked, one took photos, took notes, recorded thoughts, words and emotions. And we shared our work, and our story. We retold and revisited and told our story again. Each time we felt stronger, found more humor. Other groups shared their work as well. Our new task was to document each group's story and find relationships among the groups' artifacts. In this process we discovered how important a role camaraderie had played in our successful navigation through the challenges of the morning. We found a commonality among groups that reflected a need for human relationships.
Saturday night we went out together. Our staff, all of us, relaxing, eating together, exploring together. We were frustrated that we had missed the morning session, that our hopes for the conference were going unmet. But as the evening wore on, we were grateful for the rare time spent with one another, all in the same place, all at the same time. We woke on Sunday hopeful that day two of the conference would provide us with more knowledge and understanding about documentation and how to bring it to life in our classrooms.
When we arrived in the auditorium, we were inspired by the documentation presented by Jason Avery, an artist in the Artists at the Centre project in Hamilton, Ontario. His presentation was thoughtful and inspiring. We hoped to see and hear more. We were thirsty for it. We were disappointed to break into small groups, to try our own hand at documentation, to struggle together to create meaning, out of context, without our familiar tools.
Returning to the artifact we had created the day before was like returning to the scene of the accident. Emotions swirled. Our task now was to create documentation that showed the relationships between our work and others that we had discovered the day before, documentation that demonstrated the big idea that connected our experiences.
We gathered our materials, circled around the table and began to create sketches and narratives. A completely collaborative endeavor, all of us, our entire staff, working together to create a single idea was new to us. It was a loud, dynamic affair. Ideas were picked up, one from the other. Cheers were raised with each epiphany reached. Negotiations were heated and our already heightened emotions were stretched to their limits. Joy and wonder and even tears. Jason, observing our group, remarked offhand, "This sounds like Italy!"
There it was. The cultural context in which this approach to education is embedded. The joyful, noisy, emotional, poetic context. So different from our polite, focused, organized, hierarchical context. This was it. This was how the discoveries were made. How the meaning was drawn out. How the joy was found in every moment, even the ones that brought you to tears. This was Reggio. This was the essential element that is so often missing from our process.
We learned a bit about documentation, about collecting data, about Photoshop, about flushing out the meaning in the children's work, about documenting their thinking rather than their doing, about telling the child's story, about using form and design to support communication, about creating documentation that is flexible and loose.
But we learned a great deal more about ourselves and about the incredible gift it is to have others join you on your journey.
Leigh Ann Yuen is a teacher and director at Garden Gate Child Development Center on Martha's Vineyard. This was her fifth year attending the Reggio Emilia Inspired Institute at Lesley University. She is incredibly grateful for the amazing people who share her journey.