Here is the video that wowed the Association of Children's Museums conference this morning. John Seely Brown made the personal request that we release it as widely as possible -- and so here it is!
The video was made at the request of Sarah Orleans, Executive Director of Portland Children's Museum and was collaboratively created by Steve Davee, Melody Bridges, the Opal School students, and me.
The voices you hear are those of 8 - 11 year old Opal Public Charter School students, who know well the profound connections between play and learning.
These words (recorded during an unscripted lunchtime conversation) are evidence of the power of environments for learning that have as a first priority to sustain curiosity and the joy and wonder of learning -- both the wonderful and the wondering. They are also evidence of the deep pleasure of learning in itself, enough to engage and inspire and carry us on through the hard stuff.
This week, I was introduced to a powerful TED talk by Novelist Chimamanda Adichie:
At Opal School, we take the opportunity and responsibility we have to combat the development of single stories very seriously. We begin our work to support habits of heart and mind that expect multiple points of view with Story Workshop (a structure we have developed and continue to research here at Opal School) and our very youngest children. Using materials and play and the languages of the arts, children in preschool through second grade learn to uncover, invent, and remember their own stories. And they learn to listen to the stories of others. They learn to gently interrogate the perspectives of others and to define their own with confidence and a sense of belonging. Their stories are integral to the life of the classrom. Without them, we have nothing.
As they get older, these habits of heart and mind become tools to think with about the stories of people more distant from us now. Here is a recent example, written by Opal 4 (ages 10 - 11) teacher Levia Friedman:
At sunset tonight, Pa was standing on the hill, looking over our land. He called Ma to him.
“Look, look there,” Pa said, pointing to the fields. His voice was soft, and I could just tell that his heart was up there crowding his throat.
I looked where he was pointing. The sky had flared up red, then turned purple and gray and pink. Tiny fruit trees were showing tiny green buds in the distance. Our house was behind us, the walls strong, smoke from the chimney poking up into the sky. Pa had his arm around Ma’s shoulder. Ma had Hector in her arms, and Becky was clinging to her skirt. All four of them stood there close together, sort of shiny-looking in the sunset.
It made my throat feel choked, too.
And I thought again of Grampa and what he’d said that time. And I knew he was right: Oregon is a real fine place to be.
(p. 98-99, A Perfect Place: Joshua’s Oregon Trail Diary by Particia Hermes)
Levia: What mental image does this leave you with?
TW: They are strong.
HH: They got through the bad and they got the good.
Levia: Are we supposed to think of them as heroes?
SBM: This book is supposed to teach kids history. The moral is to work through the hard things.
RC: You will be rewarded for your hard work.
Levia: Is this the story of Oregon?
MC: There were a ton of happy, shining people.
KB: You made it to Oregon. There were sad things along the way, but you made it. You have your land.
TW: They could be role models for other peeps that want to come. Other people will pass on the story.
Levia: What voices are missing in this story?
SBM: This book says nothing about other races.
Levia: Did they mention Indians in the book?
MM: Well, they mentioned that Joshua is afraid of them attacking him.
EY: If they were to come on your land they would shoot them.
Now that we had started to look critically at the mental image of the pioneer family on the hill, I invited the students to go back to their seats and draw based on this prompt:
Reflect on the image of the shiny, happy, pioneer family on the hill. What voices are missing? Where can we find them?
KB: They’re visible of course, they’re not like a mile away. They’re real people, they weren’t actually invisible. They were big to them, but not in a good way. You can see them, they don’t want to.
HH: They want to stay. They are keeping their distance from the Indians. The Santiam Kalapuya wouldn’t go on their land. The pioneers think they will steal from them or hurt them.
DO: Where we would find missing voices? They weren’t allowed outside their square mile, that’s why I drew this. The voices are like, “shhh…” the people that are outcast by the shiny happy people. If we’ve claimed it, it’s our land. But, they were here first. The white people just have different laws, like planting the flag and making papers. These people didn’t know that. I have drawn what voices are missing and then figure out how to find them. I think it would be important to speak to Native tribes and talk to them. I bet they have it recorded somewhere.
ME: Camped out, hiding in trees, hiding from whites. They are afraid of the white people and the whites are afraid of them.
MG: It’s SO many people.
AW: Why are they scared?
MM: ‘Cause of assumptions. America is still not a very welcoming place.
SBM: We have to read REAL diaries, pioneer diaries. We can reverse it. See what the Native Americans – what the purpose of that was. Why were they doing that? If we do that, we will find a lot more truth. Joshua’s story is good, but it’s not the whole story. It would be totally amazing to have a diary from a Native American or from a Chinese American. It would probably be translated. I want it to sound real, not always be perfect. One person who kicked the Native Americans off. The pride and joy of “This is all mine!” I own this one mile.
TW: What voices are missing? African Americans, Chinese, Mexicans and others. Where can we find them? Where ever they're welcomed to stay at and be greeted.
MC: So, this is so weird, but if you don’t get free land, you don’t get land at all.
Levia: Why is that? Who made that so?
MC: Yeah, really, who governs the land?
(pointing at the ground) Land, are you owned by this person?
(looking at me, confused) Who says that?
And some students went to the language of writing.
NF wrote from the perspective of a young Kalapuya girl:
I gather my things in a leather sack and sigh. Earlier, white people came and cut down our tribes’ trees. They are building a house without even a word. I’ve been watching them for more than a day now. Finally Chief Sophan said we were rolling and leaving and I had no power to argue. But inside my head I promise myself to come back.
The day of travel was long and tiresome, but we finally made it to a new reserve. I still can’t get over our constant moving! With whites taking over our places, our reserves, our homes, but why? We were here first, we were… I take a deep breath and exhale slowly. All this moving was driving me crazy. So that night I made up my mind. I creep out of bed and push the flaps of our teepee away. I take off on a run just the way we came. I finally made it to our old camp to see that whites had completely taken over. Then I realized that our home, our land, will never be the same again. And that frightened me. I’m just a normal Indian child. What else am I?
AW answered the questions in her writers notebook:
Reflect on the image of the “shiny” happy pioneer family on the hill.
So when I reflect or when I am going to reflect, I’m going to put myself in the perspective of them because if I don’t I will always take sides with the people who don’t get their voices heard…
So, if I was a pioneer, and I made a long journey all the way from Missouri, then I would probably want all of the land that I had signed for.
But, not very many people had encounters with the native tribes, so they were relying on the rumors of what they had heard.
What voices are missing?
I think the voices that are missing are the people who are judged by their skin color, religion, or people who can’t get land because of those reasons. The people who will be ignored, hurt and/or threatened when they try to defend themselves, and their people/tribes.
Where can we find them?
I think if we really think, and take time to wonder, and think where they would choose to be before they disturbed them. Where would they choose to be? Where would they choose? Where do the salmon jump? Where do the camas root grow? We have already encountered them many times but have we have just chosen not to.
The US Government is powerful and they just don’t know how to use it.
This post was written by teacher, Avery Hill, and is a window into our Opal 3 classroom, serving children ages 8 - 10 years :
Patricia McLoughlin's All the Places to Love begged of us this week the question: What makes the places we love so unique? What places do we love so much, we want others to love them just as much as we do? And how do we tell others about these places, so that they can see the magic that we see in them?
As we've continued our studies of Northwest Native American tribes, we've learned that the elders often told stories about where elements of their landscapes came from, or why their landscapes looked the way they did - from landmarks to vegetation to animals, as well. What if we began imagining the origins of the landscapes we love in our lives today?
Robert James Challenger is a Northwest Coast author greatly inspired by the Northwest Native American tribes' stories and artwork. His collections of stories and images provided us the next step in imagining how we might write today, inspired by the stories of a very old tradition.
This week's thinking about landscapes we love has been a path through materials and texts that finally invited our imaginations to walk into our landscapes with us, imagining characters and stories we might find there, telling the stories of those landscapes.
Below are the journeys of three students, told in photos and excerpts from their writer's notebooks.There was such delight this week in watching the children bring their landscapes to life and begin imagining possibilities...
From KG's Writer's notebook:
I see the green shrubbery out the window, then I have an urge to go outside onto the beach. I open the sliding glass door, then I go down the stairs. I am in the backyard. In front of me is the walkway that leads to the beach. I go through the walkway onto the sand. The beach stretches out as far as I can see. As I walk forward, my feet touch the water, and now my ankles. The water is cool. It feels, it feels soothing in the hot sun. I walk out onto the sand. The waves crash at my feet. Where can the waves crashing at your feet make all the difference?
"I'm thinking about the beach in Molokai, Hawaii. I'm starting to imagine that a mermaid came up on the beach to become my friend. This is the house we stayed in. My mother was making dinner, and my dad and my sister were taking a walk one way, and I was by myself, just waiting for something magical to happen."
* * *
MM: "I drew Hamilton Park. ... There's this big hill that's really steep. I started imagining a bird with a sword that flew down from the sky and cut it out. ..."
"This bird used a knife to make a field with hills. And then when people in the future come they build over it, turn it into a playground with a school. The spirit (the bird) gets happy because the 2-footed people come and make something there for all of the people."
* * *
From PG's Writer's notebook:
There's a place called Clay Butte in North Dakota. To walk to Clay Butte, you have to walk in long, wet grass. Sometimes when you get back, your feet feel as wet as if they had been dipped in a cold pool of water! Where else is the grass so long, itchy, and wet, but leads you to such an amazing place? ... When you reach Clay Butte you walk up a steep, steep hill, to get the top. When you reach the top, you can sit down and see everything. You see the valleys, mountains, more bluffs, and North Dakota. ... As I walk back, I love to look over my shoulder and see Clay Butte, getting smaller and smaller and smaller.
Color changes a lot of the landscape that shows new things that you didn't know about before. Before I drew the landscape, I felt like there needed to be something more in the landscape. But when I drew it out, emotion came out of it! That was what I had forgotten. Because emotion and metaphors and feelings and description can change the landscape a lot.
"When I think about Clay Butte, I remember seeing a breadcrumb on the ground. I imagined I could follow lots of breadcrumbs into a cave. I don't know what's in there yet, but maybe some kind of creature who lives in there... No, I think my characters are a woodpecker and a mouse."
If you walk to Clay Butte and all the way to the top, you may find a crumb or two. But they aren't any type of crumb, they are bread crumbs! If you keep following the bread crumbs, you may find yourself at the bottom of Clay Butte again. But on the other side when you are at the bottom, you should try not to yell in amazement, because right in front of you, you will see a WHOLE trail of bread crumbs. As you follow them, you will come in front of a huge cave. (That's where the bread crumbs stop.) And there, standing in front of you, will be Mouse and Woodpecker. Mouse's name is Moon and Woodpecker's name is Woody. But if you ever want to see them again, you always have to go see them at sundown. And sometimes you can watch them fly away. Woody always holds Moon, and then they fly off. You probably are wondering why they are best friends, when they could be enemies, but that's just a part of the story! (I haven't figured out why!)
* * *
PG reminds us of the role materials can continue to play as the children develop as writers: "...When I drew it out, emotion came out!" As their teacher, I saw reaffirmed this week how powerful the languages of the arts are to strengthening the language that becomes the children's writing. As KG suggests, what else is the process of writing, but "walking by myself, just waiting for something magical to happen"?
The following post is from our Early Kindergarten, serving children ages 4 - 6 years:
I have always had tempera paints in my classroom from my first year of teaching many years ago in a sixth grade classroom, to three year olds, and every age in between. I have offered paints, encouraged the use of them, taught care for the materials, and listened as the children painted. This was good, but a few weeks ago I had a chance to watch a master at work. Elizabeth Craig, our studio specialist, was in our classroom helping the students with a very important painting. We were making paintings to show how much we cared about the tree that we had helped plant, that mysteriously ended up out of the ground and subsequently died. The children were all contributing to the painting which was painted first just with black lines and was now being filled in with color. These paintings had the unique quality of being collaborative - shared works of art. Collaborative paintings are exciting, and at times can be challenging because everyone's ideas and contribution effects the final outcome. These paintings were tricky on two levels - navigating the skill of painting around the black lines as well as navigating the different choices students wanted to make. It was a joy to watch Elizabeth work with the children on both of these challenges.
As student after student came over to spend time with the painting and with Elizabeth, I was amazed at the constant support she offered. She was so grounded in what would make the act of painting easier and more successful - suggestions just flowed in ways that built the children up by giving them what they needed at that moment to succeed in a difficult job, but also by giving them skill and knowledge for the future. Here are a few of the gems - ideas and words I saw and heard her use...
“You want to be painting like a turtle - SO slow.”
“When painting near black line, turn your brush to the side and pull the brush to you rather than push it.” The she would follow up with, “Pull. Remember to pull towards you.”
“If you have to lean in your chair, you should stand up!”
“Do you see the black line here? Do you see it?”
This was my personal favorite because I could hear myself saying this but with a completely different tone of voice. Elizabeth made no assumption that the child saw the line. The line was right in front of a child and he was struggling to paint around it and she, so gently, brought his focus to the line pointing to it as you might to a sign in the distance. With her words and actions she created shared understanding - so that they both started from the point of ‘this is the line we are talking about, the one we are trying to paint around’. There was no judgement, no assumption - just a willingness to start with the most basic and move forward. I know I would have worked from the assumption that the child saw the line - maybe now I won't, because, really, who knows what another person is focusing on?
She notices a child losing focus. She gently takes the brush out of his hand and says - “stop for a minute,” - so gentle. She offers to him the chance to be done and he takes it. How nice to have someone notice, to know when to keep pushing gently and to know when being done is not only just the right thing, but is totally acceptable.
I often talk with children about different size brushes. Elizabeth took the brushes in question and flattened them on the paper as if she was going to paint with them but without paint to offer visual information about what kind of line they would paint (see photo third from the top). She says, “Which would be thick, which would be thinner, which one do you think you want?” So simple.
Then, one of the last children in the class comes to paint. There are a few chunks left to paint in. Students before her have painted the background around the scene. The sky is blue and the grass is green. She sits down to paint one of the ‘sky’ areas and says she wants to paint it green. I happen to walk by as Elizabeth is saying with curiosity and a twinge of confusion, “You want to paint it green? Do you really think it should be green?” (Again, tone is so important here. Elizabeth is not asking a leading question that gives the ‘clue’ that she doesn’t think it should be green. She is asking genuinely - trying to understand what the child is thinking.) The child responds yes, she really thinks it should be green. I wonder what Elizabeth will do; I wonder what I would do. I try to imagine what it will look like with the sky part blue and part green and I am struggling to do so. I am pulled away and when I return, part of the sky is green - a beautiful light green (not the kelly green I had immediately imagined). Even though I don’t know if she could envision the green herself, she trusted that the child could envision it and she, as the teacher, believed in and trusted the child’s vision - even when the stakes were high on a collaborative classroom painting.
Instead of leading, she decided to ask questions, to suspend judgement and follow the child's lead while holding a vision of the whole out of respect for the work of the whole.
The children were so proud of their work; they could feel how much care went into all that slowing down. One child made this clear in the statement he made after working for a long time painting in the colors. He looked the paintings over and said,
"How can the tree not know we love him?!”
R.S., age 5
Written by Marcy Berkowitz, Opal School Teacher Researcher
They are the sons and daughters of life longing for itself
and though they are with you they belong not to you
you can house their bodies but not their souls
for their souls dwell in a place of tomorrow
which you cannot visit not even in your dreams
...from Sweet Honey In the Rock's adaptation of Kahil Gibran's The Prophet
We had a wonderful opportunity on Tuesday night this week to come together as a community and begin the conversation we need to be having about supporting our children to develop strong and healthy multicultural relationships. With the help of Opal 2 teacher, Zalika Gardner, a skilled facilitator of reflective discussion intended to support the development of cultural competence, we courageously opened the door to a world that it is time we explored together. Zalika brought with her a colleague and fellow parent who has worked with skinhead youth (among others) to broaden their understanding of stereotypes, bias, priviledge and predjudice. She shared strategies to support our very youngest children, examples of picture books to begin conversation, and encouragement to accept the emotions that run through these experiences and memories.
There is no aspect of our work together in which the fundamental "Parents as Partners" is more so. We must develop structures that support us to push past the discomfort of getting to know one another, lean in and listen to one another's stories with the understanding and compassion we wish to see in our children. Because it is true, we cannot just give them the ideas we wish them to know. Nothing is rote about culture, identity and belonging.
Here are a few resources to energize our thinking about these issues:
How will we make this practice a part of our Opal Heritage? Can we become a school where all adults take care for other people's children? Where we've developed a layer of partnership with homes and neighborhoods that creates the world we want our children to live in?
The point is for teachers and parents to think of themselves as masters and to challenge their apprentices. If the parent watches TV instead of reading, or the teacher reads one book a year—I'm told that's what the average teacher reads—that's the message the kids will get. But if the adults read and write and talk about current events, the kids will do it, too.
Howard Gardner
This letter to a teacher reminds us why it is so important:
Dear Teacher,
I am the survivor of a concentration camp. My eyes saw what no person should witness:
Gas chambers built by learned engineers.
Children poisoned by educated physicians.
Infants killed by trained nurses.
Women and babies shot and burned by high school and college graduates. So I am suspicious of education. My request is: Help your students become human. Your efforts must never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths, educated Eichmanns. Reading, writing and arithmetic are important only if they were to make our children more humane.
From Teacher and Child by Haim Ginott
Included in Lisa Delpit's Other People's Children, 2005
We can't give our children our thoughts. What we CAN do is create experiences in which they will develop their own. Our intentional and proactive design of these experiences will support the thinking we hope to inspire. And it will begin to ensure that the conflicts and hurts in our private and public histories are not repeated in the place of tomorrow.
The final goal and expecation that we have for Opal School students is this:
Develop strategies that contribute to the quality of the community by having a keen sense of place, identity and belonging while respecting the rights and identities of others.
In the end, it's about understanding the complexity of a community that intends to function as a healthy democracy. If you've ever questioned the need for direct and intentional focus on the authentic development of this understanding, have a listen to this recent interview with the Superintendent of Public Instruction in Arizona : Mexican American Studies: Bad Ban or Bad Class? In this interview, he states:
These issues are going to be huge philosophical issues for the United States as we become - as our whole racial makeup changes and we need to know that there are a lot of serious concerns about how you educate kids, the values that you pass on to them.
John Huppenthal, Superintendent of Public Instruction in the state of Arizona
On this point we can agree. But his fear is palpable. And he weilds his power with it.
For a somewhat lighter (but no less serious) take on these legal decisions in Arizona, you might watch these interviews from a recent episode of The Daily Show that feature a Tucson School Board member:
The gift of working with very young children is that we can choose to support our human drive towards relationship. Before we find ourselves needing to share the tragedies of history with children, we can choose to spend our time supporting them with strategies to know one another, to develop emapthy for one another, to listen, to speak up, to recognize assumptions, to tell our own stories, to value one another's stories, and to be curious about the differences.
It turns out, this drive towards community and connection, even across groups that are not like our own, is hard-wired into our DNA. A new book published last week by biologist and naturalist E.O. Wilson, The Social Conquest of Earth, focuses on how humans and insects conquered the Earth by forming complex societies based on group cooperation, and he discusses the evolutionary struggle between our altruistic and selfish natures. This interview with Wilson was featured on Science Friday yesterday on NPR. From the interview:
We want to be as fractious and quarrelsome and uncertain and dithering from now on, but we just want to do it with more wisdom and making better decisions.
E.O. Wilson, Harvard University
So, with this in mind, the teachers and young childen at Opal School have put as the first priority in all endeavors to focus on relationship. As such, they are working with great hope to an end that is ripe with the wisdom needed to make better decisions for everyone. Strategies that lead us successfully through conflict, develop strong voices, and take perspectives with a well-informed social imagination support habits of heart and mind that will serve to make them strong enough (and skilled enough) not to be fearful of one another. These strong habits provide resilience and fuel the imagination necessary to solve the problems that remain the legacy of the history of civilization and that all children are certain to encounter as they enter the wider world.
In the Fall 2011 issue of The American Journal of Play, there is an interview with Richard Louv (author of Last Child in the Woods) and Cheryl Charles (Louv's partner in launching the No Child Left Inside initiative in 2006). From Charles: "There is ample evidence that when children experience structured and unstructured learning within a school's curriculum, and beyond that, unstructured play in nature-based settings, a host of benefits results -- increased achievement on standardized measures, less bullying, more positive teacher attitudes, and more cooperation and creativity among students, to name a few."
Developing a relationship with the natural world through ample time to play in nature is one of the most important values of Opal School. This time for play and exploration support two more of our goals for students:
Develop an understanding of our interdependent relationship with the natural world.
Take action as mindful citizens who care about making contributions to a future that acknowledges living systems as an integrated whole.
Here is further support for this emphasis -- I'll continue to borrow from the article:
"Nature-deficit disorder is a disorder of society, because it shapes adults, families, whole communities, and the future of our stewardship of nature. If nature experiences continue to fade from the current generation of young people, and the next, and the ones to follow, where will future stewards of the earth come from?" (Louv)
"Human beings exist in nature anywhere they experience meaningful kinship with other species. By this description, a natural environment may be found in a wilderness or in a city. We know this nature when we see it." (Louv) "Realizing that one can find nature nearby is a wonderful, inspirational, and often life-changing concept." (Charles)
"The decline in children' independent playtime - as childhood has become increasingly regulated by adults - parallels the human disconnection with nature. Nature experiences - particularly when they're part of independent play - contribute to a sense of wonder and awe. That's the greatest gift we can give our children." (Louv)
"Nature play is critical through all of the phases of childhood. For the youngest children, beginning with infants, nature stimulates the imagination and provides a basis for recognizing patterns. Toddlers and young children learn empathy and bonding with other life-forms through nature play. The middle years provide opportunities to take appropriate risks, expand the play territory, and learn critical skills." (Charles)
"Studies of creativity show that kids who play in natural or naturalized play areas are far more likely to invent their own games and far more likely to play cooperatively. Children who have nature-play experiences also test much higher in science.* We have learned that children who evolve as leaders in flat, hard surfaced play areas tend to the strongest, while the leaders who evolve from play in natural areas tend to be the smartest. It just doesn't make sense to suppress a child's inborn urge to play. It is better to use play to develop diverse mental and physical skills." (Louv)
"Contact with nature allows children to see they are part of a larger world that includes them." (Louv)
"Every day, our relationship with nature, or the lack of it, influences our lives. This has always been true, but in the 21st centuty, our survival - or thrival - will require a transformative framework for this relationship, a reunion of humans with the rest of nature, and a new nature movement that includes but goes beyond traditional environmentalism." (Louv)
"We hope that nature play becomes a way of life again, a right and rite of childhood. People of all ages will realize the benefits for everyone's health and well-being, including a sense of peace, prosperity, beauty, and happiness." (Charles)
* Opal School's 5th graders consistently score well above the state average on Oregon's statewide standardized tests in science. Most years, 100% of the students meet and exceed benchmarks.
Develop an appreciation of and capacity for accuracy, elegant design and efficiency.
This is the stuff that makes creativity visible and useful. Arguably, these are the things, when skillfully applied, that are the only way to produce novel ideas that mean anything to anyone else. Howard Gardner, Harvard scholar and author of 5 Minds for the Future writes:
I believe that you cannot be creative unless you have mastered at least one discipline, art or craft. And cognitive science teaches us that on the average, it takes about ten years to master a craft. So, Mozart was writing great music when he was fifteen and sixteen, but that is because he started when he was four or five. Same story, with the prodigious Picasso. Creativity is always called “thinking outside the box.” But I order my quintet of minds in the way that I do because you can’t think outside of the box unless you have a box.
So as children practice the disciplines of writing, history, mathematics, science, reading, or art at Opal School, always it is with the goal of increasing accuracy, elegant design and efficiency. But always, equally, it is with the goal of understanding the discipline, and with the adult understanding that each individual must construct these understandings for herself and in her own time.
By way of example, here I am re-posting an article written by Levia Friedman, Opal School teacher of our oldest students.
How can primary sources inform our understanding of the stories of history?
The students in Opal 4 have spent some time “stalled” on the Oregon Trail. They have used this time to deepen their understanding of where they are, where they have been, and where they are going. Most overland emigrants in the 1840s and 1850s were motivated to make it to Oregon Country or Oregon Territory (after it was established in August, 1848) by the prospect of receiving free land, “Donated Land” from the United States of America (an entity that owned it, purportedly, through its purchase from France in 1803).
Some students were counting on their 640 acres of free land, no matter who they were. Now in our classroom drama, we are all overland emigrants in a Wagon Train bound for the Willamette Valley.
In our Wagon Trains we have the five families. Two of the families are made up of a mom, a dad and a child or two. One of the families is now a widow and her two grown children, and another family is a group of orphaned children, and the oldest is an almost 18 year old boy. The male head of the final family is the son of a French Canadian fur trapper father and a Shoshone Indian mother. He is married and has two children.
As RC kept reminding us in his best pioneer voice, “Oregon is the Promised Land! 640 acres of free land for everyone! Anything will grow! The soil is like gold!”
While it is true that through 1853 land was free for the taking in Oregon, it was not true that anyone could take it. There were conditions on who could claim the land, and how that claim was recorded and patented. For our wagon train, planning on arriving in October 1853, the Donation Land Claim Act passed by the US Congress in September 1850 laid out exactly who got land, when and how. We needed to know what was in that Act.
There are accurate, clear, understandable summaries and explanations of the Donation Land Claim Act of 1850 written for all sorts of audiences. I could have told the students what the Act said, but what I knew was that my students were invested in their characters and in their land claims. I couldn’t be the one to tell them that there was a possibility that some of them wouldn’t qualify for land. And I wondered, what would 9, 10 and 11 years olds do with the text of an 1850 Federal Act? Would their immersion in the drama of the time and in the promise of free land be motivating enough to get them through 160 year old legal-ese? How would decoding this text and discovering the nuances of the law of the time inform their understanding of this period in our state’s history?
What role do Primary Sources play in an elementary school classroom?
Of course these incredibly capable, motivated, invested students jumped right into this challenge. The text of the act can be found here. The Act is broken up into sections.
We read sections 1, 2 and 3 together and charted what they meant in words that made sense to us. Then I sent the students off with their families to read one other section of the Act, create a poster that explained what their section said, and then create a tableau that showed what their section said.
The depth of understanding demonstrated by the posters and tableau were amazing by themselves, but the excitement and drama that happened as the students discovered what the Act actually said was the other amazing part of this experience.
KB (the widow whose son was almost 18 years old): Can I find someone to marry me? I can’t get land by myself and my son isn’t old enough yet. Who can I get to marry me? Can I make up a man?
MM (the oldest son of the family of orphans who was almost 18 years old): Should we get a family to adopt us?
And eventually…
MM: Levia, this is crazy. Can I be older? Can I be 21?
And the most passionate discussion of them all, one which an Oregon City judge will have to decide for us…
RC: Will half-breeds get land in the Oregon Territory? I think they will. First white male settlers are defined as “white settler or occupant of the public lands, American half-breed Indians included,” even though the words, “American half-breed Indians” aren’t written into the Act the second time they talk about white male settlers, I think they are still included.
MM: No, the second time it is for any time after 1850, so American half-breed Indians were included before 1850 but not after!
And the students start to understand not only the potential impact of this Act, but the power of the ambiguous nature of law. A few days later this group of students informed me that they were going to spend their silent reading time holding a court hearing. They had arranged the judge and the jury (all Opal 4 students) and they were ready. I reminded them that there couldn't be a hearing until we reached Oregon City, but that the lawyers for each side could work on preparing arguments. They did. And they are eagerly awaiting their day in court.
The child is made of one hundred. The child has a hundred languages a hundred hands a hundred thoughts a hundred ways of thinking of playing, of speaking.
A hundred.
Always a hundred ways of listening of marveling, of loving a hundred joys for singing and understanding a hundred worlds to discover a hundred worlds to invent a hundred worlds to dream.
The child has a hundred languages (and a hundred hundred hundred more) but they steal ninety-nine. The school and the culture separate the head from the body. They tell the child: to think without hands to do without head to listen and not to speak to understand without joy to love and to marvel only at Easter and at Christmas.
They tell the child: to discover the world already there and of the hundred they steal ninety-nine.
They tell the child: that work and play reality and fantasy science and imagination sky and earth reason and dream are things that do not belong together.
And thus they tell the child that the hundred is not there. The child says: No way. The hundred is there.
-Loris Malaguzzi Founder of the Pre-primary Schools of Reggio Emilia
Opal School strives to be a school that preserves and expands on the ninety-nine. This goal for our students supports that value:
Uncover and communicate observations, questions, theories and ideas through skillful and imaginative use of the languages of the arts and sciences, including mathematics.
Opal School's goals and expectations for developing readers and writers are stated:
Reads the world: explores, ideas and relationships; makes connections between new and known information.
Uses the written and spoken word with increasing proficiency to communicate ideas, relationships and understandings.
Long before children learn to read the words they'll find in books, they learn to read the world. In this sense, learning to read is learning to make meaning of life. Children are natural researchers, searching for meaning in all their interactions. The quality of the meaning they make from their environment is strongly influenced by the relationships they form with people, animals, objects, and the special places that they explore, visit, and revisit.
Human beings are pattern seekers and meaning makers. Words are complicated. Consider this quote from Paolo Friere and Donaldo Macedo:“Reading the world always precedes reading the word, and reading the word implies continually reading the world…. [T]his movement from the word to the world is always present; even the spoken word flows from our reading of the world. In a way, however, we can go further and say that reading the word is not preceded merely by reading the world, but by a certain form of writing it or rewriting it, that is, of transforming it by means of conscious, practical work. For me, this dynamic movement is central to the literacy process." (1987)
We are constantly involved in a process of revision -- rewriting the words we hear and learn to read with the experiences we bring to them. So our interpretation, our relationship with the world means everything.
Experiences give us stories to share with others, stories we can put into print and read again and again to relive our encounters, relationships, and surprises. Every time we revisit our stories we can offer new interpretations and expand upon the meaning we are making of our experiences. Reading the world and reading the word are interdependent ways of understanding life.
At Opal School we build on the reciprocity inherent in this desire to be in relationship with the world. We know that human beings desire not only to see, but equallly to be seen. A school environment that trusts this drive to communicate can build environments to support it. As children grow in this environment, we see increasingly sophisticated development of both expressing and interpreting words on the page. We also see sustained joy in the rich potential that communicating well with carefully chosen words can bring.
Here's a snippet recently found in a 4th grader's writer's notebook -- written just for fun -- found by her teacher, a precious gem of encouragement to trust in the power of words to inspire, engage, transport and transform...
The damp, cool earth nurtures the trees, sacrificed for us. For paper. A river of thoughts flows on the earth, with seeds carried out by the wind or carefully plucked out by hand. And they are planted, grow with words flooding from the pen to the paper. They grow from seed to sprout, sprout to stalk, stalk to bud, bud to story.
I hope my notebook nurtures the seeds for me. I hope it waters them for me. I hope it helps me garden my stories.
The mission of Opal School is to strengthen public education by provoking fresh ideas concerning environments where creativity, imagination and the wonder of learning thrive.
Food for thought
"So despite everything, it is permissible to think that creativity or rather learning and the wonder of learning... can serve as the strong point of our work. It is thus our continuing hope that creativity will become a normal traveling companion in our children's growth and development."
Loris Malaguzzi
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