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

Doing “Clean” with Documenting and Rain

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

We are curious to think with how we move with documenting – how do we keep our pedagogical documentation in motion, as a process entangled with our everyday movements with the playground? We printed and laminated some images of the children jumping with the logs. As we brought the laminated images into the sand, there were a few children who became concerned with keeping the documentation “clean”. They seemed interested in preserving the documentation as intact images, uncovered by sand or by a presumed, predictable idea of what the sand might do to the images. This makes me very curious to think more about the relations with documenting that we hold and participate in: in the name of what do we want to “preserve” documentation? What inheritances and existing conditions in the field invite relations with documenting concerned with preserving or keeping documenting intact? How? Why? What relations with documenting might we be interested in cultivating? What ways of being with documenting align with our pedagogical commitments? 

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‘Monstrous’, Unruly Movements

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

The sand area in the playground is studded with cut stumps from trees that were uprooted along the other side of the building. These stumps stand as tiny adult thigh-height towers. Climbing on to and jumping off of these stumps is a very interesting way of moving with the playground, and for a few weeks the children often climb and jump barefoot off the stumps. As we moved within the sand with the children, paying careful attention to how we all move with the tree stumps, we began to notice there’s many questions and ways of noticing unfolding: there’s ideas of rules and unfamiliarity (“was this really okay to go barefoot and to jump off the log?”), relations with sand and skin and tree stumps and towels, questions of why and how jumping happens, and curiosities about how we can understand barefoot-sand movements as a collective, situated, unique event.

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Bordermaking and Ownership

By Selena Ha and Nicole Land

“How do we move together?” and “How do we get to know a place with movement?”. These have been the big questions in part of the movement research in the preschool room. 

From the start of the research project inquiry work, we noticed children’s conversations and play, such as “No you can’t play here, it’s my house” and “It’s mine”. We wondered: What did children tell us with this play? What ideas and concepts were they thinking with? We noticed children were creating structures and using them as boundaries that stopped the flow of human moving in the playground; structures and boundaries that interrupted the children’s movements. Thus children that used structures, words, and even their own bodies to create boundaries – they were border making, a term we used to describe our acts of creating and participating in boundaries. Noticing how important borders were in shaping moving, we started to question: what do borders really do? 

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