CLOUDWATCHING – THE SHARED POWER OF SEEING THINGS WITH NEW EYES

Recently I was collaborating with a team of teachers in Singapore to analyse a collection of documentation pieces from their three to four year old group.  Our aim was to revisit documented moments of learning both as separate elements and also as connected experiences; searching for the threads that would perhaps reveal the story as a whole. 

This moment in time came towards the end of a long and clever investigation into rain by the children and educators in one of the Pre-School Learning Community Groups. To support our understanding, we spent a few hours reading, discussing and also drawing out key threads of meaning as we plotted the various twists and turns of the children’s investigations onto a storyboard.

Exploring the ways that children and the natural world are entwined together in mutual relationship, the investigations began, as often happens, when a heavy rain storm offered the children a provocation: stay inside and watch the rain from a comfortable and dry place, or venture outside and enter into ‘an encounter with the rain’. Naturally, the children chose the latter.

Over subsequent days and weeks the educators listened to the children’s deep fascination with rain and the many ways they were posing questions, building theories and investigating hypothesis for research. 

“There was a thunderstorm.”

“The wind makes it go and 

the lightening asks the rain 

to come down.”

“I think the lightning 

makes the rain.”

“The storm comes 

when it is very dark.”

“We need to investigate!”

Some time later, as they fervently pursued multiple inquiries into water and rain, exploring many turning points for thinking, until one child offered a new question to the group: 

“I was wondering, how do white clouds, 

turn into dark clouds?”

At this point the investigation turned once more, captivating the researching group. 

"Ideas fly, bounce around, accumulate, rise up, fall apart, and spread, until one of them takes a decisive hold, flies higher and conquers the entire group. Whatever it turns out to be, the adopted idea, in turn, adopts the children and the teachers." 

(Malaguzzi in Strozzi, 2001, p.75)

Collaborating with other members of the school community is an important and cultural element of the learning process at this school. Inside a longer process of research and investigation into this question (and other related questions), the children decided to draw on a relationship they had cultivated previously with the School’s Sustainability Manager. He had been involved as a protagonist in this particular investigation as well as previous projects at the ELC. On a visit to the ELC to discuss the viability of installing rain tanks (in response to this project), the children asked the Sustainability Manager for his theory on clouds. He offered a new layer of complexity for their research:

“Clouds are really lots of tiny, tiny dots of water vapour. Sometimes the sun can go between the dots so the clouds look white to us, but if there are more water droplets it blocks the light and looks dark.”

The children went on to investigate, co-construct and represent the layered formation of clouds and rain in many ways, including a very important exploration of the way shades of light can change gradually using tissue paper and a light box.

    

Images courtesy of Hannah Connors *

“Encountering powerful ideas and educational practices with a spirit of self-reflection can help identify and understand what lies beneath our classroom practices.”

Ben Mardell, 2001, p.281

At this point in our re-reading of the documentation, it struck me that this clever description of clouds also offered the teaching team an important metaphor for the relationship between the learning of the individual and the shared meaning making of the group. 

The inter-subjectivity of the learning group is a construct that forms an essential premise of the Educational Project of Reggio Emilia and places a significant distinction on the many functions of pedagogical documentation. I began to wonder what the idea of clouds might offer our shared interpretation… clouds are made of droplets of water coming together… water refracts light… refracted light changes the way we see and understand the world around us. 

I pondered…

Like raindrops gathering to form clouds, perhaps the relationships between individuals have the ability to ‘create energy’, to come together and refract the way things are viewed, to bring about new ways of understanding life, to transform and to achieve far more together than they ever have alone.

Extending this to the role of documentation, we suddenly understood that the individual significance of any one piece of documentation is always shaped by the documented moments that surround it. In its essence, the documented ‘parts’ inform the meaning of the ‘whole’ and vice versa.   

As I left the school at the end of the week, I wondered, would the teaching team, or even I, have reached this new understanding if we had not come together in shared analysis? How differently might we have understood the documentation if we had analysed it independently?  How might we have understood this documentation if all that we searched for was ‘evidence’ of the children’s developmental skills or progression?

It left me with a renewed understanding of the role of documentation as an act of collaboration through listening, both in the moment of collection and in the moment of interpretation. Listening to children, to learning, to meaning making and to our own understandings of the role of pedagogy is a transformative act.

 “It is important to understand listening as a process which is not limited to the spoken word. The voices of children begin at birth and children can speak to adults though their play, their actions and reactions.” 

(Clark & Moss, 2011)

As a result of this experience I have further understood the process of listening and how the act of documentation itself has agency, laced with the potential to transform understanding by listening to many voices and perspectives. 

As we listen to, collaboratively analyse and interpret our documentation, we can all begin to search for new metaphors that might help us to understand this significant process more deeply.

When you ‘listen’ to the voices of children and adults

 through your documentation, what do you hear?

Fiona

*Sincere thanks to Hannah Olsen, Katie Goggins, Beth Cone and Jo McIlroy from Singapore American School for permission to share elements and images of their story