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Drawing and Young Children: Re-Connecting With Our Own Poetic Languages

I was privileged last week to be invited to run a workshop about drawing, teaching and young children. My work began by collecting many different types of drawing media (inks, watercolours, charcoal, soft pastels, oil pastel, pencil crayons of different varieties, aqua crayons, non permanent and permanent markers, graphite, charcoal pencils to name a few. …
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Describing the Complexity of Learning

“Survival of the fittest, in a world that worships development and ‘forward-moving progress’ makes us all lost and small.” Nora Bateson. 2016. Small Arcs of Larger Circles I have been thinking lots recently about the language we use to describe learning and learning processes. We often speak in linear ways of ‘progress, ‘development’ and ‘next…
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Looking for Learning, Seeking Meaning-Making: Fostering meaning-making in a learning experience

There is an abundance of ideas and activities all over Pinterest, Instagram and Facebook that point to many ‘learning experiences’ and activity set ups for young children and whilst I appreciate the sharing community of educators all wanting to do the best by children, many of these pinned activities are devoid of their learning context,…
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Young Children’s Drawings: Marks, Meaning and Materials

I have been reading the Reggio Children book Mosaic of Marks, Words, Materials. It is a book dedicated to their ongoing research into the One Hundred Languages of Children as expressed in Loris Malaguzzi’s poem of the same name. This research focuses on the interplay between drawing and narration; on the interplay between marks, surfaces…
