Tag Archives: liveliness

Resisting Explaining

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

Today we went to a walk with a steamy/sweaty/dripping/raining/foggy quad – it was this unexpected, unfamiliar phenomena where the quad seemed to trap the warm air after a rainstorm, filling the quad with a dense, heavy mist as though it was raining from all directions.

The “rain” caused us and the children who noticed it to stop, to ask “what just happened”, but not necessarily to seek a rational, science-driven water cycle/weather explanation, but to actually wonder: what just happened – what is this incredibly cool thing that this quad place can do, and how do I respond to it?

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Noticing and Negotiating “Alive”

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

We have been thinking about the non-innocent choices we make about what questions to live and follow, and what questions/lives/trouble we choose to ignore with the playground. While I was with C and Z in the corner of the sand, C was telling us how he watched a documentary on sand and oceans. He mentioned that sand in the ocean is very alive because there are crabs and waves. This made me wonder if sand in the sand pit was alive – I shared this question with C & Z, and C thought that sand in the sand pit wasn’t alive because it didn’t go as deep as sand in the ocean. Z suggested that sand here might be alive. We thought about why and wondered how the worms were alive. I asked if we could keep thinking with this question together: how is sand alive? How do we know? How do we notice what lives in sand?

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