NAREA NYC

Attending the NAREA Winter Conference in New York City was such a gift! So many aspects of my life converged in one place and time.  Many people made an enormous effort to make this conference a success in this very busy city hub.  And, 700 people traveled a long way to be a part of it.  Seeing so many long time friends and colleagues in the big city which is slowly showing signs of spring, and staying with a dear friend, made this March one that I will long remember. It was such a celebration to see Vea Vecchi, Marina Mori, and Amelia Gambetti, lifelong friends and mentors, beginning in 1991-92, the year that we lived in Reggio Emilia and I worked and studied at the Diana School and La Villetta School.  It was wonderful also see and hear Claudia Giudici and Chiara Spaggiari.  I am holding onto the words and images offered by these Italian women in the beautiful and powerful stories of learning that they shared with us as I return to Boston on the train.  I will write reflections soon in a future blog post.

The NAREA Winter Conference coincided with the miraculous publishing of the second edition of In the Spirit of the Studio: Learning from the Atelier of Reggio Emilia.  I was privileged to stand next to co-editor and another friend and mentor, Lella Gandini, and Vea, to sign books, thanks to NAREA and to Karen Hewitt of Learning Materials Workshop.  We missed our other tireless authors and co-editors, Lynn Hill, who truly saved us all so many times, knitting together countless details and becoming our go to editor for any kind of problem, and Charles Schwall, the organizer of all the photographs and the keeper of quality.

Congratulations and a toast to...my three most esteemed co-editors and to all the contributor colleagues who wrote beautifully in strong voices about their important work: Pauline Baker, Barbara Burrington, Susan Harris MacKay, Carlina Rinaldi, Lori Geismar Ryan, and Vea Vecchi, and to Steve Seidel who wrote the wonderful new foreword and to Pam Bliss who designed the bright new cover.  And, last but not least, at Teachers College Press, thank you to Susan Liddicoat our editor, and Karl Nyberg our production editor.  Tanti Auguri a tutti!

And finally, and most importantly, thank you and congratulations to the members of the board, staff and volunteers of NAREA for all of the hard work that you do to manage and lead such a worthwhile and important organization and to host conferences that inspire us all.

Materials, Learning and Technology

If you have not seen the series on Story Workshop on youtube produced by Opal School of the Portland Children's Museum and The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, please stop right now and take 6 minutes to watch this one.   We are confident that viewing this short film will enrich the way that you imagine what is possible with materials, the school environment and learning. There are six videos in this series on Story Workshop and how this approach is inclusive, inspiring, socially constructive, beautiful and empowering.  You will find the whole series listed once you watch the first.  One of the most powerful pieces of the narration is:

I expect the environment to communicate what I believe about children.  They are all competent and capable.  They come to this work full of experiences and with stories worth telling. When given the time and tools to do so they will readily and eagerly take every opportunity to share those stories, those pieces of themselves.  They will do so because that is what we do as human beings from the moment we are born.  We share our stories to make sense of this world that we live in.

In our work, Ashley and I are often asked to help teachers rethink their environments and to help schools to redesign their spaces for learning.  This approach requires that we start with what we believe about children and learning, what we know about well-designed spaces and the well-being, focus, motivation and meaningful student and teacher work that they support.  In the municipal schools for young children of Reggio Emilia, aesthetics are understood as an underlying thread that holds everything together...our relationships, our interactions, our learning and our work.

This morning I found another link through a friend with another great resource on environments and materials linking it to children's use of technology...Thinking with Things.  They feature some inspiring videos of children working with materials, loose parts, recycled and natural materials.

There are so many resources out there in the world to support our work in these areas! Let us all keep sharing them as we discover them and as we design beautiful, well- stocked environments that reflect the best of what we believe and know about children and ourselves.