THE RECIPROCITY BETWEEN PEOPLE AND MATERIALS IN MEANING MAKING PROCESSES

Extending our last post, I am now considering the way that materials can help us with both expressing and developing our ideas, perspectives and understandings. I often introduce materials to support educators with constructing meaning. I am always amazed by how we seem to be able to ‘say’ so much more when we have access to a range of resources.

Our relationship with materials is usually viewed as one in which we project our thoughts to materials, reducing them to ‘passive’ substances. Louisa Penfold challenges the idea of a cause and effect relationship between people and materials and invites us to reconsider this idea by offering a new point of view: ‘materials are active and vibrant entities that work in dialogue with people to mutually transform one another’ (Barad 2007 & 2011, Bennett 2004 & 2011). Penfold believes that creative thinking emerges from different points in time and various sources which ‘generates’ a dynamic relationship between people and materials over time (Penfold 2018).

I have included a few recent examples of how the process of interacting with paper has supported a team of school leaders to express their beliefs about early education at their school. A deceptively simple task which unpacks complex thinking. These material conversations helped us to align our beliefs and ensure that the direction and definition we give to our pedagogy is produced through a collaborative act. As our previous post suggests, this process relies on collaboration to ensure pedagogy ‘does not fall on the shoulders any one person alone, it is the ordinary magic in all our hands’.

To support the educators to build new relationships with paper as a tool for thinking, a deliberate choice was made to eliminate access to colour, glue and scissors. This supported the group to find solutions, perhaps exploring new pathways to reach hidden values and beliefs.

Another group used paper to think about their evolving understanding of documentation.

This piece (called ‘6’) expresses the idea that documentation involves all our senses as we tell the story of children’s learning. It involves our heart as the ‘sixth sense’ because it connects us to what we deeply value and lives in our hearts.

At the point of installation, the paper revealed a surprise! The appearance of a shadow delighted us and we wondered - could this represent another, deeper layer of ‘documentation as a process’ and ‘documentation as a relationship’?

This representation explored the idea of documentation as an ongoing process. A connection was made between the ‘string’ and the strings of a violin. When the bow hits the strings you hear the sound created by the impact… and then you start to hear a sound that is just beautiful…. A parallel for documentation, which can be hard at the beginning but then as the process unfolds, has so much to offer….

Documentation has the potential to connect to our hearts in unforeseen ways and transform the way we see the world - just as music does.

Perhaps this small snapshot of the documented relationship between thinking and materials will invite you to consider the following:

How do you view materials?

What is your perspective on the relationship between materials and creative thinking?

How might materials offer new possibilities for co-constructing understanding?

How can documentation help us with making learning visible?

What do we need to give attention to when we document children’s ongoing interactions with materials?