Digital Story Workshop

Not too young to watch, not too young to make

2008-12-22T15:17:00.000-08:00

I wrote an article for Youth Media Reporter, and it has come out in the online edition of the journal, Vol. 2 Issue 6. The print version will be available in January. It is called Not too young to watch, not too young to make, and features several of the children I worked with last year at PS 27 in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Here is an excerpt:

While at young ages like four and five, children are not ready to operate cameras or editing equipment, they are ready to take the first step toward media creation, by being videotaped, watching their actions, and retelling what they did using their inherently diverse and creative storytelling voices. This process harnesses the vital role of storytelling in young children’s lives and pairs it with technology so as to make both components not only valid but also easily accessible to children.

Rainforest Thank You

2008-08-22T09:57:00.000-07:00

The second graders at PS 50 wrote this lovely thank you letter at the end of our Rainforest video project this Spring. I have not received anything like it since I student taught first grade in Terry Ashley's class at the Marion Cross School in Norwich, VT, and the class wrote me a couple of collective thank you letters, referring to all the fun we had had with our studies of fairies. . .
To come back to PS 50 (in East Harlem, first school for my friend/colleague Rebekah Marler-Mitchell to head up as principal, after a successful career as early childhood educator): this Spring I made four original video stories with one second grade class and three original travel shows with a fourth grade class, and we all viewed them together on the last day. The second grade videos were imaginative story-plays woven together from several days the children spent playing and narrating their stories in the Rainforest Library. The fourth grade travel shows provided information from the students' in-class research and interviews with teachers from the school who had visited various rainforests of the world. Doing both projects simultaneously was an exciting way to explore two developmentally appropriate uses of the video medium. And perhaps more importantly, making videos with students was the perfect way to explore the completely original phenomenon of an actual public school Rainforest Library! Every school in NYC should have one, or something similarly un-characteristic to New York. . . truly mind-expanding, giving children entering the space a reason to feel in awe of reading and its relationship to the world at large.

Little Creatures

2008-08-06T10:48:00.000-07:00

As of this summer, I am formally refocusing my children and video energies into making Little Creatures, my new film company, a reality. I am currently writing and rewriting my business plan, which I have submitted and will submit to future business plan competitions, reading everything I can about the film and children's media businesses, and talking to people in these fields. My hope is that Little Creatures will receive seed money from an angel investor within the next year, so that I can complete Mysteries in the Woods and also produce another short film I am currently planning to make with children in Brooklyn, which I believe could revolutionize the children's film genre. If you know of any potential funders, do send them my way, and I will gladly provide business plan and work samples. I am also seeking families who would like to participate in my market research, which will consist of viewing a DVD compilation of my short films with their children, and answering a few questions about the films and their children's interaction with them. The data that I gather from these ongoing conversations with parents and children will help me to frame my work in the context of what media is out there for children, what is needed, and how my work can better fill that gap and flourish as a viable option for parents to buy and view with their young children. Perhaps these conversations will bring similar endorsements to what I have heard so far:

• Kristin captured the authentic sights and sounds of childhood . . . she uses her camera as a lens into the deepest inner-workings of a child’s mind . . .
- Vivian Gussin Paley, author of 12 books on the lives of young children

• The remarkable videos made by Kristin are unique in their ability to bring us into the very life of childhood play itself. Wonderful as tools for teaching the importance of play - or as a means to validate for children why their playing is always meaningful, these videos should be made available to anyone who cares for what learning and education need to be about – and could become.
- Richard Lewis, Director of the Touchstone Center for Children

• I believe that, in honoring children’s play, Kristin’s movies will also help audiences reflect and learn about the overall experience of being human.
- Olga Hubard, Assistant Professor of Art Education, Columbia University Teachers College

• I would gladly support more initiatives such as these that speak to the true essence of childhood and would rather put my dollars in movies and projects like these.
- Kathy Malone, Clothing Designer and Mother of Milo (10), Brooklyn, NY

I am very interested to compile specific reactions of parents and children to my films, which will help me immensely as I restructure future projects, and which will strengthen the argument for making more of these films, as only research can do.

Through the Window

2008-06-20T14:28:00.000-07:00

"Through the Window," a short film featuring young children's impressions of the Yale Center for British Art (designed by Louis Kahn, completed in 1974) from vantage points inside and outside, and the art collection within, premiered Saturday, June 21 in the museum's auditorium in New Haven. Sean and I were commissioned by the Education Department at the museum to collaborate with first and second grade children from the Foote School for the project. The premise of the film came from producer Cyra Levenson, Associate Curator of Education: have small groups of 6-8 year-old children narrate the world as seen through the lens of Kahn's last building, with particular focus on looking through the large window within the 4th story gallery housing many of J.M.W. Turner's paintings from the 19th century.
The children came to the project with characteristic poetry and wisdom. Here are some excerpts from their narration:

• All the things outside are the painters of this painting. All the cars, all the people, all the bricks, are the painters. Everyone is a painter. The painting is called “Outside.” It must have took him a long time to make this painting, like a hundred million years, and everybody moving and stuff, and all the cars.
• A painting’s kind of like, if you walk right into it, you’d slam right into it, you’d probably break it. In the real world, you can walk around in it.
In the real world, you can go in stuff, you can touch stuff.
• When you’re an architect, you’re kind of like, important, cause you designed the buildings, and if there were no architects, it would be hard for the people that build the buildings, to decide where to put the stuff, cause they didn’t have a plan.
• I see trees, the leaves on trees, and the wind is blowing them.
• The building has probably more than a thousand pools in it.
• There are lots of tiny people one inch tall waving at us.

The Puppets Ate the Sun Up

2008-06-20T07:33:00.000-07:00

While making the final edit of the PS 27 videos for the end-of-project school screening today, I was again struck by the poetic language of the kindergarten children, as evidenced by this story Vertyce told about her group's play with their puppets, planes and backdrop representing Coffey Park:

When the sun woke up, the sun fell down, cause it was hot.
I got on the sun, then I got burned-ed.
The fire truck fired all the sun down, then it melted.
The sun melted, cause they put water on him, and then the wind blowed the sun, and after that, it fell on the ground.
And then the puppets ate the sun up, and then they spit out the sun, cause it was very hot.
And the sun got warmer, and then they ate it all up.

These children's poems will live on in the in between spaces, among the images of their lives, lived through story, when the children look back over these videos for years to come. At times like these, I truly believe in the video medium as a powerful tool in capturing such profound ideas that would not be remembered otherwise.

Puppets and Planes at Rotunda Gallery

2008-06-14T12:48:00.000-07:00

Our DSW/PS 27 School Arts Partnership Grant project is currently on display at BRIC's Rotunda Gallery in Brooklyn Heights, in the 16th Annual KidsArt Exhibition, curated by my colleague Hawley Hussey. The teachers (Shariffa Martinez, Andrew DeMers, Sandy DeFrancesco and Elizabeth Pavis) and I took all three classes, Pre-K, Early Kindergarten and K-1 (Self-Contained), to the gallery to interact with their own videos made over the course of the year, their backdrop and props (puppets and planes), and some representative picture story books compiled by my co-teaching artist Terry Solowey. What a wonderful culminating event of this year-long project!

Our Shadows are Real Animals

2008-06-08T23:10:00.000-07:00

I have been making videos with first graders exploring the theme of play between animals. As much of the action has taken place outdoors, in the school yard, I was not surprised to see the element of shadows come into the children's narrations of their videos. Many creature-like shadows came alive underneath the children's running, skipping, hopping, trampling, searching forms, and upon viewing these taped images, the children took note, and seemed to be taken with the arresting shapes their shadows made on the earth, and intrigued by their abilities to manipulate their own shadows. See this compilation and notice the scientific and poetic conclusions the children have drawn about shadows. What sparked my interest in compiling this short piece, aside from my own wonder at shadows and thrill at seeing young children explore them, was the breathless comment of the boy in character as a Mouse searching the school building for a lost cat and bird, who turned to me and said with amazement: "Our shadows, they look like real animals!!"

Vivian Paley at PS 27

2008-05-14T08:41:00.000-07:00

Last week, PS 27 in Red Hook was graced with the presence of the lengendary teacher and writer Vivian Gussin Paley, author of 12 books on childhood and recipient of numerous awards, such as the MacArthur Fellowship. We had a wonderful day with Vivian, who entertained teachers' questions in an informal lunch discussion, provided a Storytelling/Story Acting workshop for the Early Kindergarten class (Shariffa Martinez and Andrew DeMers, teachers), took questions afterwards, went on a walking tour of Red Hook with teachers and students from the neighborhood, and gave a keynote address in the auditorium to a crowd of around 150 people. I felt so honored to experience Vivian working with the same teachers and students I have been collaborating with over the past three years in the school. It was a day none of us in Brooklyn will ever forget.

Here is a highlight from the teachers' discussion with Vivian:
My first approach, in terms of using play as a starting point for whatever kind of lesson you want to teach, is very literal. That is, to put it briefly, you listen always, notebook in hand, you listen for a piece of play, a piece of dialog, or a piece of action. Now you’ve got something concrete. Now, a subject comes up, and here’s where the artful nature of teaching comes in. You say something like, “I heard Jeremy say this, before, on the playground, and it made me think of this. Can we act out what Jeremy was doing?” And bring in your math, your science, ...now this is just the first step….to show how vitally interested you are in every child’s exact language, exact interests, in other words, we’re not speaking of play in general, play in the abstract. We’re not discussing how to improve your golf, in general, we’re actually discussing things children have said, pretended to be. It’s a kind of game we play, that the teacher can play. Because the question is, how can I bring it in? Don’t think that the child will say to you, as adults often say to the child, “Well, how is that relevant? Why are you telling us about your Aunt Suzie’s canary, when we’re talking about. . .” Because the child thinks anything anyone says is relevant. Or why would they have said it? They have something on their minds that makes them think of, you know: "I was wondering when I heard you play, if the Ninja had to count out how many balls were in the air. . ."or whatever. We want the connection; it’s not phony. It shows, in fact, how logical thinking can progress. The logic here being, "I want your conversation to become part of ours." Think of play being a conversation. That’s what it is: it's a conversation. After that, I would simply say, become, yourself, a storyteller. That also binds together a disparate group, in all these subjects, being 4 to 7 is no problem. Being 4 to 11 would be no problem. These are the universal things children care about. Stories, make believe, and how what I’m thinking connects to what my teacher wants to tell. It’s the best classroom conversation.

Listening to the Children's Voices

2008-01-21T08:43:00.000-08:00

On Friday, January 18, I presented my work for the New York Coalition for Play, a group of colleagues in the NYC area who are working to improve children's opportunities for play. Some of the entities represented were: The Alliance for Childhood, Children’s Environments Research Group at CUNY, NYC Early Childhood PD Institute, the Rockwell Group (creators of Imagination Playground) the NYC Parks Department, the Child Development Institute at Sarah Lawrence College, the Brooklyn Children's Museum, the Children's Museum of Manhattan, the UFT, NYC DOE teachers, and independent education scholars and consultants.

I shared clips of videos I had made with children in Brooklyn and beyond, from 2001 (Sophie in the Trees) to the present (Red Hook/PS 27), and gave special emphasis to the poetic language I have experienced children using in their voiceover narrations of the videos. Some examples:
• She's looking at something that we can't see. (Sophie in the Trees)
• The seeds will be able to grow inside the dolls, and maybe they will pop up as a little kind of food. (Ark)
• A grass pulled me down, all the way down, all the way to outer space. (Mystery Castle)
• It's raining because the leaf is putting up to the sky. It's raining. (PS 27)
• I think it was a camera but nobody was watching. Or maybe somebody put a camera inside a seed to look at us. (Mysteries in the Woods, work-in-progress)
I remarked about the sense of mystery that has permeated this work, particularly as heard in the children's voices themselves, as they have told the stories of their video-plays over the past seven years. Regardless of the setting or project, each group of children I have worked with has been captivated with the idea that something mysterious may be going on outside while they are playing, or even the idea that they might have found an actual treasure, hidden in the ground, behind a bush, or in a hole in a tree. Young children are completely tuned in to the metaphysical possibilities inherent in the simplest act of play. In that sense, they have much to teach adults about awareness of the spiritual realm of everyday life. I hope that at the least, my videos may help young children to access this other side of life, especially if they are not given other opportunities to do so, in school or at home.

The group also heard from Penny Wilson, esteemed Play Worker from the Play Association Tower Hamlets in London, who gave a heartfelt talk about the power of play to open up children's hearts and minds. The Alliance for Childhood is sponsoring her current tour of the U.S., which will include stops in MD, D.C., IL, MI, and CA, where she will facilitate Americans studying Play Work as practiced by Penny and her colleagues in the UK, in Adventure Playgrounds and other conducive play environments. Penny spoke so eloquently about the depth of meaning inherent in children's play. Educators in the U.S. have much to learn from her.

Finally we were enlightened by Richard Lewis, founding director of the Touchstone Center in NYC, who, there in the basement of the NYC Parks Rec Center on 25th Street, guided us in making "snow"! If anyone could remind adults about the power of the human imagination, it would be Richard. I have attended wonderful workshopsthat he has given surrounding the theme of the poetry of childhood at Henry Street and other venues around the city, but it had been a few years since I had seen him at work. Richard truly gets at the heart of the matter of the life of the child as seen through the lens of imaginative play, both inside the mind and outside. He showed us a telescope made in a workshop with children (see image above), that could function as a viewfinder for children's thoughts about play. When asked to look through their newly-made "telescopes" and to see and describe Play, here is what two children said:
• The universe is like fireworks.
Things are always burning up.
The universe started by somebody playing. (Anoah)
• I feel very good.
I feel so good when I play.
I catch my moment. (Cristol)
Richard did such a beautiful job of making the imagination more real to all of us.

Ark at MCV/NYC

2008-01-09T21:33:00.001-08:00

Ark, our 15 minute video from 2002 (about which I wrote my Ed.M. thesis), featuring four family groups of children from Brooklyn, in a mysteriously linked story about dolls, seeds and a box, has been installed for the past month, with the dolls, box and all eight costumes, at Artspace MCV/NYC in Brooklyn. We were thrilled to be part of the show "Risus," which benefited Toys for Tots, and to meet the artists/curators behind MCV, who were gracious enough to build out a beautiful corner of the gallery just for Ark. Thank you Jason, Sean and Lauren.

Matches Struck Unexpectedly in the Dark

2007-08-23T07:55:00.000-07:00

Imaginative Education: Provoking Excellence Across the Curriculum Presented by the
Conference Presentation Abstract: In this workshop, Kristin Eno will provide a multimedia presentation including portions of several of the videos she has made with children since 2001. She will discuss and invite dialogue surrounding these issues in relation to making videos about children’s play: adult play-facilitation and how it helps children access their zones of proximal development; intellectual empowerment and growth through spontaneous storytelling; the poetic voice of children’s voiceover narrations; the relevance of playing, teaching and learning in natural outdoor settings; the great potential of more artistic, poetic children’s media; the viability of video-stories as teaching strategies for a range of curricular goals; the role of video as connector of diverse populations of children throughout the world; and the accessibility of digital video technology to teachers.

This conference was a wonderful opportunity to connect with teachers and professors of education across the world. I was most honored to present my work when Vivian Paley was in the audience. I have been admiring her work as a pioneer of storytelling/story-acting in the classroom ever since I first discovered her books in my elementary education classes at Dartmouth College. Vivian's response to my presentation was that the videos had captured "the authentic voice" of children's play. That sort of stamp of approval is something I do not take lightly. If anyone could make sense of the beauty and profundity of life as seen through the eyes of a child, it would be Vivian, who in her eloquent Keynote address, reminded us that our relationship with children is one that encircles the very mystery of the meaning of life itself. She invoked Virginia Woolf's words in To the Lighthouse: "What is the meaning of life? . . . The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one...Mrs. Ramsay saying, 'Life stand still here.'" By calling up the words of this book I have so loved through the years, and applying Woolf's words to the context of young children's play, Vivian herself struck a match unexpectedly in the dark, and made life stand still. As Resa Matlock of the Childcare Collection at Ball State U. commented later at the conference, there is something about Vivian's voice that somehow helps us see what children are capable of teaching us, in a way that so few can. She is the rare teacher-thinker-writer-poet-friend to children. There should be many more of her kind in the world. We can try to do her legacy justice by taking her words to heart: "Just a few moments of spontaneous drama tell so much. Their storymaking spirals in pursuit of ideas, and in the midst of chaos, there is shape: life stands still here, the children are telling us...Watching children play invites philosophical discourse. Why do children do this, if not to prove the very necessity of their existence? They solve one problem and create another situation. The have a reason to exist, and it is to be with others, to prove that they are necessary to each other. They keep telling a story over and over as if to understand it. The child practices her thoughts, listens to her thoughts, so that she will understand her thoughts better. She will practice, practice, practice. We who spend our lives with children are surely trying to erect a listening community. The children will show us how it is done, if we give them the time."

Also at the conference I was pleased to see Beth Ferholt present her dissertation work towards a PhD in the UCSD Communication Dept., done in collaboration with a K-1 grade class on a military base Southern California. She and colleagues at USCD and universities in Finland (Pentti Hakkarainen, U. of Oulu) and Japan have been studying “Playworlds," a term that describes full engagement in imaginative play by both children and adults, and stems from Vygotsy's analysis of creativity and imagination, by way of Gunilla Lindqvist's work (The Aesthetics of Play: A Didactic Study of Play and Culture in Preschools, 1995). Beth shared her play world project based on The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, including video clips that documented Beth and her colleagues' costumed interaction, in character, with the entire class, over the course of a year. As the adults played with the children, creating variations of the original book by C.S. Lewis, they developed an ongoing cross-generational spontaneous interactive story. As Beth was narrating through the video of the children and adults enacting the story, in full costume, with elaborate props that took up major portions of the classroom, I had the distinct feeling that this work was something truly special. The adults had made a huge effort to not only put on a show for the children, but to invite them into the show, so that they could all live and breathe the story. This effort was obviously not lost on the children, who could be seen to be experiencing the deepest, most profound joy at the progression of their play, which culminated in the whole group chanting "party, party!!", at the moment when the faun, Mr. Tumnus, was freed from the White Witch. Seeing the children's otherworldly happiness on the video footage was worth more than any words could say. It reiterated to me that the video medium is so powerful for us as adults, as we peer into the world of children's play and attempt to understand it.

DSW at the ICAF World Children's Festival

2007-07-07T09:36:00.000-07:00

On June 24, Digital Story Workshop made four imaginative videos with small groups of young children on the Mall in D.C. for the 2007 World Children's Festival, hosted by the International Children's Art Foundation. This event brought hundreds of children to D.C. from all over the country and the world, and thousands of children with their parents from the surrounding area.

See the videos here. Here are stills from our play with four groups of 4-10 year-old children from all over the world:

Sean did the camera work, and then we edited with the children on-site, under a tent, immediately following our twenty minute play/videotaping sessions.

This was the first time that we worked with children to edit their own videos. Children as young as 4 were invited to see their play footage and interact with us as we edited in iMovie on a Mac laptop; 8-12 year olds participated in the editing process and learned the software with amazing speed. One young collaborator, Jonathan, 8, from Chicago, simply took off, editing quickly and intelligently, moving the mouse around to drag and drop scenes from one place to another in the timeline, to move scenes to the end of the video for a "Behind the Scenes/Making Of" segment. This prompted a whole new consideration of the role of editing in Digital Story Workshop projects. Could we figure out a way to use the editing activity in first and second grade classrooms, whether to teach story sequencing in literacy lessons or simply to teach technology education? I can only imagine how skilled Jonathan and others of his age could become at this task, if given the opportunity to edit video once every day, for fifteen minutes. Would any school in this country offer that as an option for him? Should it?

The other exciting element of this project was the spontaneity of the groups, from the four-year-old girls in the first group that included a child from Turkey and another from China by way of Virginia--the little English that the girls both knew provided a few words for them to say to each other, but for the most part, the play happened silently, with many facial expressions and a lot of body language (see "See Me Play")....to the mixed-age group of five 6-11-year-olds, from all over the world, the older of whom took roles as directors/documentors/prop assistants. The collaboration of this group of four, some of whom had only met moments before, was exciting. The improv team took their places, played their roles, had a cathartic experience, and life rolled on. The joyous result was "Superhero versus the Villain:" take a look at the fun these kids had! Since they were able to see their play on the computer screen shortly after they did it, and manipulate their actions within a storyline that they were developing together as they went along, even after the play itself, the learning experience was very tangible, and most of all, became like play.

Kindred Spirits Grow in Tulsa

2007-05-25T08:15:00.000-07:00

My friend and colleague Heather Oakley's dream has come true: Global Gardens, an educational garden project for children in Tulsa, OK, is up and running! Through her garden workshops at Eugene Field Elementary School, Heather has combined her love for children from all over the world with her care for the earth, infusing her work with characteristic joy, hope and wisdom. The creation of a community garden with 31 student, family, and teacher garden plots (each with a theme, from "Oklahoma" to "Literary" to "Berry" Garden!) is providing a wonderful forum for members of the school and local community to learn about each other and the earth in a cross-disciplinary way, with science and peace education constantly interacting and informing one another. Heather's amazing method of gardening and teaching reveals to students and friends that physical, tangible growth is a vibrant manifestation of the growth of the soul. She is offering to the children a bridge from inside to outside, a solid link between their learning and their real lives. The centrality of documentation and blogging to the project provides yet another bridge--from the Eugene Field and Tulsa communities, to the world around them. I am looking forward to inviting children in NYC to dialogue with the Global Gardeners...

Global Gardens is a nonprofit, educational organization that provides schools and neighborhoods the resources that they need to incorporate educational, multi-disciplinary, science-based gardens into their curriculum and community. Global Gardens' primary goal is to establish student-centered garden spaces, where students and their families have ownership of the implementation, progress, maintenance, and activities of the garden. Global Gardens believes that these experiences encourage personal growth and lead to individuals becoming empowered to live healthier lives and become agents of change in their communities.

Bringing the Outside In

2007-05-10T22:31:00.000-07:00

Two weekends ago, starting on a farm in western MA and ending up in Cambridge at Lesley University, I did video documentation for a wonderful Reggio Emilia Institute led by Dave Kelly of Grand Rapids Child Discovery Center, Cathy Topal of Smith College, Brigid McGinn of Pratt Institute, and Lella Gandini, U.S. Liaison for the Dissemination of the Reggio Emilia Approach. I am grateful to Kristina Lamour of the Art Institute of Boston and Brigid for inviting me to document this weekend full of beauty.

This three day experience was an amazing combination of a beautiful misty morning by the stream, summer camp, a personal hike through the woods, a journey into the minds of young children, and a collective, organic process of artmaking in reference to natural materials. The collective unconscious was truly at work, as pre-school teachers from all over the United States were invited outside to make sculptures that had a relationship with the land, and inside to manipulate clay such that its shape would echo seedpods, shells and branches. I felt that through the video camera lens, I was seeing my own artistic dreams played out by many hands. It was beautiful to see so many teachers be artists; and to think that this was all done in the service of becoming more attuned to the lives, thoughts, dreams and learning styles of 2-5 year olds. . . and on up through 5th grade and beyond, was truly life-affirming.

This event also called to mind the book I have been reading, Last Child in the Woods, by Richard Louv. The Children & Nature Network has many resources regarding the issue of children's outdoor play, and the more I think and read about it, the more I realize that outdoor play is the primary type of play I am advocating for, through the Digital Story Workshop videos. Children need to have freeing, beautiful experiences living and learning outside of school walls, far out in the meadows, forests, gardens, creekbeds, beaches, and mountains. We educators who are aware of the potential of outdoor adventures and projects to improve upon the life of the mind and spirit must be sure to provide such opportunities for the children around us.

The Imagination is a Very Powerful Thing

2007-05-08T11:44:00.000-07:00

Last week, my friend Kathy's son, Milo, 9, watched Ark for the first time, and he made these effortlessly profound statements and descriptions:
• Are they looking for the sea or what? Are they looking for a map of the sea?
• It's like a scavenger hunt.
• I guess they're using their imagination. The imagination is a very powerful thing.
• Oh look, it comes back to the beach; I always thought that would happen. It could go to all these places--to China!
• [The narrator of the last scene says "cause if you don't tell a dream, it might come true. I knew that it was gonna come true."] Sometimes the universe speaks to you in dreams. The universe spoke to her.
• It was hard to open. . . probably because it was very, very old.
• They kept on adding dolls. . . through generations.
• The universe is very strong to that family.
• The dream was completely true about everything. Every single thing.
• [The children put the box in the ocean]. Just as it has been, for generations and generations.
The contemplative Ark seems to have held the gaze of this thoughtful child who I thought was at the higher end of the age spectrum. Turns out that Kids First! Film Festival's child jury named Ark an official selection this year, and the festival labelled it appropriate for a 5-12 year old audience. That was a jump into the older regions of childhood, for Ark, but after hearing Milo's fascinating commentary, I agree that the 9-12 year-old set should definitely see it.

Notice that above, in Milo's drawing of the lid from the box, which the children discover and interact with throughout the story, he includes a representation of the photograph that is part of the inside of the lid of the box, so it's a drawing of a photograph, but not only that: Milo has drawn the box itself into that photograph. Once he told me that, I pulled out the real box itself and showed it to him, and he checked to see if the box was there in the photograph, inside the box lid. It was not. But shouldn't it have been?

Here are two more works of art Milo made that day, "Deep Space" and "Abstract":

Children's Video Art at NAEA

2007-03-18T21:34:00.000-07:00

Mystery Castle with a Lot of Treasures was featured in the NY Children's Video Festival at the National Art Education Association Convention in NYC, on March 16. George Szekely, artist, writer and professor of art education at the University of Kentucky, and Renee Shaw of Barrett Elementary School in Arlington, VA, hosted this event. I was so impressed with the amazing diversity of the work produced by Renee's 2nd-5th grade students. Claymation, stop-motion, digital storytelling, the works. Beautiful, hilarious, experimental, and everything in between. Renee will curate next year's NAEA children's film fest and made a call for submissions from art/media educators. Brigid McGinn, an atelierista from Brooklyn, attended this session and remarked that the videos were refreshing because at the convention this year we had not seen nearly enough images of children themselves, but instead had been inundated with ideas (in the form of research studies about art education) and stuff (to buy from the art supply vendors who had set up booths at the convention). I agreed, and wondered what we might do to change that.

I saw a beautiful and exciting presentation given by Ricardo Rubiales of the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo at UNAM in Mexico City, who started the Reggio Emilia-inspired atelier/art studio at the Museo Nacional de Arte in Mexico City. I was so encouraged to see the imaginative learning that took place in the museum when the children were given the time to think and question before looking at the art in the museum. The projects he showed us--of explorations of pirates and monsters--had come out of the kids being given the time to explore. Their drawings and constructions were intricate, meaningful and full of story--universal marks of truly engaged child art. Ricardo mentioned that when questioned by parents who wondered why their young children needed to stay in the atelier/art workshop for three hours, he would reply that they were working within "Reggio Time."

Also at the conference, I was happy to see Olga Hubard, my Ed.M. advisor, who does such wonderful work in her own art and in teaching in museums and at Teachers College.

Childhood Regained

2007-03-16T09:33:00.000-07:00

This Monday and Tuesday I went to a conference that the Art and Design Education Department at Pratt hosted: Childhood Regained. Vea Vecchi, first Reggio Emilia atelierista; Kieran Egan, Imaginative Education Research Group founder/director; and many others contributed. The work of Vivian Paley was woven throughout the conference, as presented by Patsy Cooper (NYU) and Jane Katch (who worked with Paley). I was struck by the film, "My Own Backyard to Play In," a document of children playing in the streets of Hell's Kitchen, c. 1950, by Tony Schwartz. Because it combined voices from so many of my influences, with the addition of this film document that I had not known about, the conference was quite a powerful experience.

I was riveted by Vea's invocation to us as early childhood educators to "explore the digital environment." She presented the most beautiful images of a project from a school in Reggio in which the children (4-6 years old) explored the shadow/reflection of a window on a wall in the new Malaguzzi Center, created in honor of Loris Malaguzzi, founder of the Reggio Emilia schools. The children photographed, discussed, traced, and created an animation of their drawings based on this window's moving image on the wall. Children's exploratory thoughts about the shadow: "The wall is crooked." "The sun is attached to the wall." "When the sun is straight, the shadow is straight." "The shadow went back into the window." "It's a sneaky shadow." "This shadow tells lots of stories." "It's pushing hard to open." "Listen--its heart is beating." "When it goes away, it takes the memory with it."

Listening to these young children's profoundly beautiful observations about a moving shadow on the wall, I was again convinced that it is truly great work to encourage children to come into that space within which they can arrive at such conclusions. They are poets, as Richard Lewis of Touchstone Center reminds us. They teach us how to live, how to be poets, how to see.

To go one step further, seeing the inherently visual nature of Vea's presentation about an activity that for the children had been so visual, and yet scientific and literary, reminded me that the teachers at the Reggio schools have consistently showed us the power of adult facilitation of children's visual, and by extension cognitive, understandings. We have the responsibility to help young children take their explorations of the world to the next level, cognitively, by sharing with them more tools to explore, and by showing them how they can use these tools for deeper exploration. Vea showed us in her presentation how important digital media, particularly stop motion with still images like the children's drawings, have become to the Reggio atelier. She challenged the audience to mine the digital mediums available to us, to fully employ the "digital environment," as she put it, and I heard her loud and clear.

New discoveries....new lenses on children's play

2007-03-11T21:17:00.000-07:00

Tish Shute has created a wonderful project, UgoTrade, which has as its mission "Crossing Digital Divides - tracking innovative uses of technology in new environments," and not only that, she has gone a step further with Ugonet, "a video sharing community focusing of films and videos coming from 'off-grid' communities." This is a thrilling find and I am starting to upload DSW videos.
Through Ugonet, I have discovered the good work of filmmaker/photographer/writer Marcelo Fortaleza Flores and director Dirce Carrion of Imagem da Vida (Image of Life). They're working on a lovely project called "A Meeting of Eyes," which establishes an exchange between children and communities that have similar cultural roots, but have been separated by the history of slavery. In this case they have focused on Dakar and Gorree Island in Senegal and Sao Lourenco, in Northeastern Brazil. This cross-cultural dialogue between children has massive potential and dovetails my work with Digital Story Workshop.

Drawings by children in scene 4 of Ark

2007-02-21T13:30:00.000-08:00

These drawings were done by Keziah or Isiss on the way back from Coney Island, shortly after shooting scene 4 of Ark (April, 2002).

shine beauful nice

"This is cool"
"Really cool"
"I knew" [what would be inside the box]

Then we did a puppet show with little people

Ark, revisited...

2007-02-20T09:33:00.000-08:00

I ran across these notes I had made on the day we filmed the last scene of Ark, in April of 2002, out at Coney Island in the freezing cold, with Keziah, Isiss and Rodney, ages 7, 6 and 5.
I had asked the children, during our shoot: What could be inside the box?

- I don't think we should open it because someone might be looking for it now.
- Let's just open it; it's just a treasure.
- Maybe all the way when some Indians lived at the beach and they buried it in the sand and some pirates be looking for it! For 15 years. . .
- I think it's fairies or I think it's golden shiny rocks and golden shiny jewelry.
- I can't imagine what's in it--let's just open it!

And then they opened the box. See this portion of Ark on the Digital Story Workshop website.

Early Childhood: Listen to the Children Play*

2007-02-08T20:41:00.000-08:00

Last week I attended the latest meeting of the New York Voices for Childhood, a group started by Deborah Meier in the Spring of 2006, as a reaction to the recent developments in "school readiness" as put forth by the national and local departments of education. Rather than test pre-kindergarten children to see if they are "ready for kindergarten," the professors and K-12 teachers who have been attending these meetings believe that educators should be supporting the youngest children as they play, not teaching them how to take standardized tests at age 4. This group, NY Voices for Childhood, in collaboration with the Alliance for Childhood, is developing "a campaign to restore creative play and hands-on learning to preschools and kindergartens." Their goals are as follows:
1. to develop and implement a public information, engagement, and advocacy campaign, with outreach to educators, parents, policymakers, and others concerned about the well-being of our nation's children.
2. to cultivate multi-faceted media coverage--including print, broadcast, and web-based--that focuses on the broader picture of childhood and the need for creative play and hands-on learning.
3. to realign the education and professional development of early childhood educators with the tenets of experiential learning.

It saddens me that it has come to this, that our supposedly modern society has allowed our educational system to turn into a bureaucracy that has abandoned what Dewey and the progressives taught. We are plummeting backward at a steady clip, such that if we can ever get out of this quicksand of assessment-based education, we will have to re-learn those long-lost innovative and creative teaching strategies that once promised to positively transform society through education. Digital Story Workshop is but one tiny tool that can help interested artists, teachers and citizens to counteract the stranglehold testing has on our schools and, by extension, the children we have the responsibility of raising.

*with apologies to Manuela Testolini Nelson's organization, which is working on a documentary called "In a Perfect World . . . Listen to the Children."

Treasures, continued. . .

2006-11-14T20:54:00.000-08:00

Transcription of voiceover narration for Mystery Castle Project
(Each item is another child's voice. My questions are interspersed.)

• Maybe I would think that it’s called a treasure box. Because it looks like treasure, because when we put it somewhere, and it looked-ed like a treasure that nobody can find it there.
Whose treasure?
• Our treasure. Everybody’s treasure that you took, to that, to that, to there, and maybe they saw it and they was like, “that’s a treasure.”
What is a treasure?
• A treasure is when you find—when you, when you. . . when you want to go to it, and you open it, and it has stuff in it.
• A treasure if you, if you have a key, and you open it but squirrels don’t eat keys cause they use their own thing for their own house.
• They use their arms.
Why were you dressed in orange?
• Because Orange is a beautiful color. . . and we found a mysterical (sic) treasure.
What was the box like?
• (With great excitement on her face, whispering urgently): It had berries! And porcupines!
We love the box. We were the first ones to find it. Cause it was a treasure. When we left, he was crying…the box. Cause the box was our friend.

There may be many definitions for treasure, and certainly each of the children saw the box in their own unique way. But every child involved in this project perceived the box made of seeds and nuts to be something special. It was something that no one had ever seen before, an object that could help the squirrels and the other 'little ones,' a place that was mysterical and mysterious, a thing that was loved and treasured, by humans and animals alike.

These children's journey together into the world of the seed-box-treasure is something 'mysterical' in itself--it draws me in as I sit here editing it. I have found myself often shaking my head in disbelief at the artistry and poetry of the words the children put together. If you want to venture inside the minds of young children and their imaginative wanderings, as scarily brilliant and beautiful as they are, this might be a good place to start. Order the DVD here.

2006-11-12T13:19:00.000-08:00

The following is spontaneous dialogue from the latest DSW project, in which four groups of 5-6 year olds played in the park and found a sculpture consisting of hundreds of seeds (acorns, maple seeds, sycamore, sweet gum, honey locust, horse chestnut) made, unbeknownst to them, by older children from their after school program.

Group 1
It’s something like a coconut!
It might be a squirrel house! You can’t go to this place! It might be a squirrel, and it will bite us!
I’m not scared…. (as he picks up the sculpture)
Ewww! Ewww! (two children squeal in alarm)
I saw a real nut, it’s a little baby one!
Oh, touch this! Touch this! It don’t itch, it don’t itch! I see a clue inside!
And this is stairs!

Group 2
I found something!
Oooh!
Look, that’s the same thing! (found sweet gum seed on ground like one on the sculpture)

Group 3
We found it—it’s a treasure!
What is in here? Oooh, it looks nice!
It looks famous!
It’s a treasure! Let’s bring it to our home! Let’s bring it to our mobile home!
Where’s our mobile home?
Right here, right there (puts object down in front of a tree).

I’m going on a piggy bank ride!
A what?
A piggy bank ride!
I give you the DESTINY! Of! The forest! I give you my own ___ of destiny! Today! We will bring a treasure to the King! I’m going to put a flower!

Group 4
Look what we found!
Nuts….
Freaky….
I think that we should put it in there…
I see a hole over there…
Careful with the pointy stuff!

Notes I wrote as I edited Group 3’s scene:
When all of the children see it, their eyes get bigger. They stop in their tracks. They look around for someone to whom they can share this secret finding. How quick some of the children are to label this strange object a “treasure.” What is that readiness, the willingness for the object to be special, to be so unique and wonderful as to be worthy of the moniker “Treasure”? They have no qualms, they waste no time in whispering, saying, shouting the word. They do not wonder if it is a treasure; they merely speak the word, they give the object its rightful name: treasure.

Others do not speak a word. They merely look at the thing and touch it warily and look around incredulously at their companions. This is quite strange, their eyes say to each other. One among them may move to pick it up, but others in the group are convinced that they should oppose this decision and shout at that person or even kick the sculpture. What is certain is that this object is not anything the children know about. They will soon figure out among themselves what it is and what should be done with it. They will create its mythology.

Two weeks after the play/videotaping in the park, I showed the children the video of their play/discoveries. Each group viewed their own scenes, only, such that they didn’t know what the other groups did with the sculpture or thought it was. I will write more soon about the voiceover narration they provided, as they were watching.

Mystery Castle with a Lot of Treasures

2006-11-11T12:30:00.000-08:00

On Wednesday of this coming week, the latest DSW video will be screened, at Cypress Hills East New York Beacon Afterschool Program, in Brooklyn. The video is the product of the Brooklyn Arts Council Community Arts Grant. The Arts Council gave the project one of the two Individual Artist Tier prizes that it awards every year, so that I could produce a work of art that involved members of the community.

These stills of the project say it all:

Special thanks to Sean Eno, who was videographer for this project. What lovely pictures he makes.

Please join the children for the screening of their video:
PS 89/IS 302 Auditorium
350 Linwood Street (at Atlantic)
(C train to Shepherd; J train to Cleveland)
Wednesday, November 15, 2006
5pm