All posts by Nicole

How do we move well together with/in the yard?

Moving with Living and Dying

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Nicole Land thinking with Maria Wysocki, Selena Ha, Andrea Thomas, and Alicja Frankowski

We’ve been thinking about rats and understanding the yard as a complex, lively, more-than-human world since yesterday – and this question of responding well, or moving well with, the common worlds of the playground; living with rats and bugs and the yard vs inheritances that tell us we need to control or manage the yard. There are, in this urban place, rats, chipmunks, racoons, bugs, and slugs. I’ve been thinking about this alongside our intentions to want to unsettle practices of ownership or commodification (and concurrent relations of comparison, status, competition). Why, and how, do we invent relations with the yard with children beyond ownership and property? What happens when we refuse to see the yard and its inhabitants, including critters and materials, as things we can control and own and occupy? How do we notice and respond with the yard without centering our inherited ideas of human exceptionalism and mastery and control? 

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How do we practice noticing while walking together?

What is it to Notice Together?

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Nicole Land thinking with Angélique Sanders, Kassandra Rodriguez Almonte, and Angela Chow,

I’ve been thinking about our beginning conversation about developmentalism and deeply entrenched discourses in the field – children as bounded individuals, promoting independence at all costs, thinking learning as a linear, discrete, step-based process. As a response, we are wondering how noticing while walking slow might be a strategy toward disrupting this; how noticing causes us to pay attention differently, to be differently implicated in a place. 

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How do we move well together with/in the yard?

Figuring out how to Move Together

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Nicole Land thinking with Maria Wysocki, Selena Ha, Andrea Thomas, and Alicja Frankowski

Maria shared a reflection about interrupting the children pulling paper out from the fence to ask the children WHY we might want to do this. This moment makes me think so much about the question of being thoughtful and intentional in moving: why are we moving the way we are? Why are we making the movement choices (and border choices) we are making? What in this place pulls our bodies to move in particular ways and not in others?

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How do we move well together with/in the yard?

Response-Ability and Sticking with Paper Borders

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Nicole Land thinking with Maria Wysocki, Selena Ha, Andrea Thomas, and Alicja Frankowski

Today we continued to think together with the children about making borders obvious in the yard by attaching a large sheet of white paper to the fence bordering the yard – fences that we rarely notice. I thought that it was quite challenging how we forced ourselves and the children to stick with the paper after an initial flurry of destruction and over the fence that took place when the children first meet the paper at the fence. There’s something to keeping the paper visible, having to work hard to think at what this material can do with the fence after our initial first reactions with it – and, in noticing how we and the children are and are not interested, do and do not notice, the paper when it is no longer novel or easily disposable. The paper, in a way, creates an interesting problem with the fence: both the fence and the paper become less-noticed, more easily ignored, while at the same time they pose a problem through their existence – we have to do something with the paper and the fence. They’re part of how we move and form relations in the place in this moment; they’re both still here, even if we ignore them. 

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How do we practice noticing while walking together?

Noticing Holes with Slowness

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Nicole Land thinking with Angela Chow, Angélique Sanders, and Kassandra Rodriguez Almonte

We’ve been thinking together about how we might build together intentions for walking with the children. We are careful to want to think with intentions in ways that break intentions from “rules”, but to begin to build the idea that we can walk with intentions, we can walk care-fully. What happens if we emphasize that on our walks, right now we want to think with going slowly and seeing what we notice, and noticing what places are calling our bodies to stop and spend time with them? This is something we’d have to return to often in our questions and in the ways we move, I think, as we practice having intentions for walking together. I am curious about setting an intention for the walk and repeatedly using that intention (slowness, noticing, seeing, perspective – whatever we are thinking with) as almost an “anchor” for our walk together. 

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How do we move well together with/in the yard?

‘Doing’ Borders Together?

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Nicole Land thinking with Maria Wysocki, Selena Ha, Andrea Thomas, and Alicja Frankowski

We’ve been thinking with the idea of bordermaking, and how our bordermaking practices create certain possibilities for being and moving together in the sand (and beyond): how do we do borders? Why do we make borders? What do our borders create or shut down? How do we practice borders? Why? With what materials, ideas, intentions? How do the borders we make shape how we move together?

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How do we do movement as communicating?

Moving and Care

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Nicole Land thinking with Sanja Todorovic and Jajiba Chowdhury

Sanja proposed that we might think of moving as a way of working with an idea together, as we’ve been thinking with moving that happens with the side-by-side slides in the yard. I think this is really interesting and something to think with. Moving as grappling with an idea or concept or tension together; not as medium to resolve that tension or fully understand or learn a concept, but instead paying attention to how our movements become a way of thinking collectively about the complex relations we encounter in everyday moments. Moving as something complicated, not just physical or outcome-oriented. I am thinking, for example, of the ‘ideas’ that were present last week with the slide: care, negotiation, obstacles/interferences, proximity/closeness, energy/wildness, together and common/shared movements, and creating. These are complicated ideas, and often things that developmental theory might tell us are too complex for toddlers to think with, but through moving we do grapple together with these big, complex ideas. I think there are probably multiple other ideas we could pay attention to with the slide too. 

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How do we move well together with/in the yard?

Noticing Borders Otherwise

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Nicole Land thinking with Maria Wysocki, Selena Ha, Andrea Thomas, and Alicja Frankowski

While we were sitting on the logs around the sand last week, Andrea asked: what borders do we need to care well together? I think this question is important, because in living well together with the sand, I don’t think that anyone is suggesting relations of anarchy or disorder where we refuse all borders, or a romanticized anti-border world where we suggest that we are post-border or that we have created a space so harmonious there is no need for borders. I think, instead, Andrea’s question reminds me that we need borders; borders are part of world making – borders are a way of navigating, of standing for something, of making choices about care and attention and learning and life. I’ve been thinking about this question alongside a proposition from one of my favourite authors, Alexis Shotwell: “what it means to notice the world as a practice of responsibility” (p. 79). What would it mean to notice borders as a practice of responsibility, where borders are a way of being implicated in worlds and relationships? 

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How do we move well together with/in the yard?

The High Stakes of Thinking with Borders

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Nicole Land thinking with Maria Wysocki, Selena Ha, Andrea Thomas, and Alicja Frankowski

I have been thinking about questions of what borders do. Recently in the sandbox we thought with large sheets of white paper, and about how these sheets of paper might help us to notice how we do and make borders (and why) in the sandbox. As we sat “inside” the paper border that the children created with large sheets of paper in the sandbox, a few of the children began to name what the borders created – the sand area was a farm, it was a track; things, I think, that remind me of strict borders and being penned in. Farms have fences that control how animals move, race tracks have a particular path that you are expected to follow to be successful. I want to wonder what relations with borders this logic comes from: are borders something that control? That certainly seems like an inheritance we have in ECE, the idea that we need to use fences and boundaries to regulate moving. The language that we were using for being “in” and “outside” of the paper border is also fascinating.

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