The Art of Documentation

  By Anne Thulson

"Before we hire an art teacher, please consider this possibility." I found this note attached to a copy of the article, "The Role of the Atelierista." I was given the article when I applied for an arts position at the Odyssey School in Denver. The article came from one of my favorite books, The Hundred Languages of Children, about early childhood schools in Reggio Emilia, Italy. The Odyssey teachers were trying to decide what kind of art approach they wanted for their school, and they thought they might be able to use Reggio Emilia ideas to help them document learning expeditions.

Reggio Emilia's early childhood schools are famous for their progressive and successful approach to learning. Newsweek named Reggio among the top ten best schools in the world in December, 1991. The Reggio schools place great value in reflecting on children's learning. The art teacher, or atelierista, plays an essential role in that reflection. Every Reggio school has an atelierista, the person who runs the atelier, the school's art studio. Students come to the atelier to work on projects that involve clay, wire, mirrors, beautiful papers, drawing materials, and paints. Reggio instructors see these materials as languages that children use to construct and express many kinds of knowledge. Teachers trace the children's discoveries through the artwork, and together with the atelierista, document and reflect on the children's learning.

In Reggio schools, documentation is an art form in itself. Pieces of student work are not hastily posted on bulletin boards. Instead, the atelierista gathers student work, photographs, and accompanying texts and arranges them with great care and artistry on beautiful black and white display panels. These panels grace the walls and windows of the entire school, thus surrounding the whole community with student learning.

Teachers at the Odyssey School were intrigued by this approach, and they wondered what would happen if they crossed an atelierista with expeditionary learning classrooms. What would that look like? As Odyssey's atelierista, that is the question that I have been exploring for the past year. The best way to describe an Expeditionary Learning atelierista is that he or she is the visual voice for the school. This voice helps tell the story of each expedition. It tells the story of children as people who are curious, resourceful, imaginative, compassionate, and intelligent. It also tells the story of an educational philosophy that embraces and supports this image of the child.

This telling is done by showing. First, we show it by helping teachers and students flesh out expeditions with high-quality projects and visual explorations. Second, we show by documenting and displaying teacher and student thinking.

THE STUDIO

In the first way of showing, the atelierista brainstorms with teachers on how to use visual exercises to increase learning in an expedition. This happens formally and informally all year long. We meet during planning times, before and after school, and during lunch. Some teachers know exactly what they want, some want me to come up with the ideas. It all works as long as the expeditions are being fleshed out and the students are working on artistic problems of design, metaphor, and media. In this context, students do not come into the art room to produce art. They come into the studio to work on their expeditions.

For instance, our first- and second-grade class did a year-long expedition on gardens. Before they started, their teacher and I discussed how the studio could support children's learning about plants and garden design. This turned into a ten-month discussion as the expedition progressed. During the immersion phase, students visited the Denver Botanical Gardens. In the studio, they looked closely at plants through many sessions of drawing and sculpting live specimens. After a student draws a petunia for a long time, she begins to wonder about what she sees. "What are the pointy-sticky-out things on the stems?" "What makes their color?" "Why are some dark and some light?" Drawing and sculpting from life produces big questions for further investigation.

I often write those questions down for teachers. They help teachers see students' understanding and interest from a fresh perspective. For instance, when students talked about petunias, they kept coming back to one big idea: the varied hue and value of the petals. When the teacher has this information she can respond to their preoccupation. Maybe they will investigate the acidity and basicity of petal pigment. Maybe they will use color variety as data for a mathematical investigation.

In the spring, the class designed and planted a garden. The studio supported this in many ways. We spent most of our time creating two-dimensional garden designs. This involved many drafts that reflected the students' growing knowledge of scale, bird's-eye-view perspective, water color and ink media, and Colorado plant life. The students also designed displays to show their thinking about gardens to a larger audience.

One group's display took the form of a handmade book called "How Sunflowers Grow." In an early draft, the group had shown their learning in a poster, but after a class critique, they decided to change it to a book. First they assembled a book shaped in the silhouette of one of their sunflower drawings. Then they worked through a series of paintings and drawings on the development of a sunflower from seed. They wrote their accompanying text with great care on separate papers then glued them onto the pages. Finally they painstakingly collaged tiny magazine letters and photos into appropriate places. "We want it to be fancy," said Brian. The result was a very coherent, lovely book about the journey of a sunflower made in a child's aesthetic.

The quality of this project was heightened in several ways. Their teacher, for instance, allowed a great deal of time for it. Students spent several sessions with me and many more sessions of work time, revision, and critique in the classroom. The tools also enhanced their work, because they used quality watercolor brushes and paints, artist-grade colored pencils, and beautifully textured papers. The anticipated audience also made the students work very hard. The stakes were high because they knew they had to take it back to their class for a final peer critique, and they had to present it on exhibition night. Finally, the process of revision challenged them to do well. This irritated them, but it also bonded us in a intense and pleasurable working relationship. They knew I viewed what they did with serious respect, and they rose to the occasion.

We also spend time in studio making containers for student work. The teachers and I have stressed that what we put our work in should be made with care to honor the work itself. Sometimes a folder or binder from Office Depot just does not do the honors well, so we make our own.

Students make beautiful books and artists' portfolios to contain carefully chosen pieces of work. We create student presentation panels that have clean edges, balanced compositions, pleasing color combinations, quality student drawings, and attractive titles. We stress order and clarity, but not at the expense of students' losing their voices. We talk about the importance of having themselves come through the media. We use computer-generated text, but we balance it with some handwritten text, student-drawn images, collage, and painted titles.

DOCUMENTATION DISPLAYS

Our school days are full of profound provocations and celebrations, such as disagreements about pond-life activity, reasons for an essay's revision, and doubts about the theory of gravity. Part of the atelierista's job is to collect some of these wonderful moments of learning and display them. This involves photographing students, transcribing their conversations, photocopying field journal entries and drafts of student work, collecting teacher reflections, and finally displaying this on the walls of the school, in booklets, or in slide presentations. The audiences for these include all the protagonists of the learning process: students, teachers, parents, and community members. For instance, the first- and second-grade teacher told me about a crew that had made some interesting math discoveries when they went shopping for seeds. Some had vague ideas about taxes, but paying 7% on every dollar was a new concept to a lot of these first and second graders. They mastered the concept, showing many ingenious and diverse algorithms to figure out 7% tax.

After sifting through stacks of student work and a few articles that reflected our school's philosophy of math instruction, I put up a display of this process in the hall. On top of off-centered squares of purple and red tissue paper, I posted the evidence of complex learning: student computations; sales receipts from the classroom store; photographs of students working with money; quotations from mathematician Constance Kamii; and comments from the first-and second-grade cashiers, such as, "We need a price check on aisle four!" This display let other teachers, students, and parents in on innovative and authentic learning that otherwise might have been invisible. It served as a tool to educate parents who might not trust or understand our math pedagogy because when they peek into the classroom, they do not see the reassuring rows of children silently doing worksheets.

I often see students and parents in the hall planted in front of one of these displays with their arms folded. I hear voices from students. "That's me counting!" "That's Yuri. Hey Yuri, there's you!" "Where's my investigation? There's yours. Yours is long! Why is yours so long?" "Where did they go? Could we go there?" "Are we going to dissect fish?" "Did Jackson really draw that? That's tight!" "She put my drawing up!" Continually changing displays tell students that the grown ups are making a big deal about their work and ideas.

TRANSCRIPTION

In addition to the displays, we also document student learning through transcription. Teachers, assistants, parents, and I write down things that students say, and often, these conversations provide incredible windows into student thinking and social learning.

Every week our staff discusses a transcribed conversation. Recently, one of our teacher assistants shared a transcription of playground conversations. The documentation revealed that the school lacked a consistent authority on the playground. Different assistants had different sets of rules, and everyone was getting frustrated and confused. Our teacher assistants had been saying that recess was chaotic, but this documentation helped us talk about specific goals.

Transcriptions also serve to create continuity in our school culture. Teachers ask me to lead formal conversations among students so they can see how teams work together or how students assimilate an assignment or project. These conversations reveal a great deal about character issues, false perceptions, group dynamics, and misunderstandings about content. One teacher was disappointed with some of her fifth and sixth graders' work on individual projects. She asked me to use studio time for students to present their projects to other students. She thought that peer critique would help the less motivated students become aware of the poor quality of their finished pieces. After documenting some of these sessions, I realized that this context of peer critique was not working with this group at this particular time. The majority of the students did not really listen to the presentations and often gave uninformed praise instead of real criticism. After a particularly weak and incoherent paper was read, these were some of the response:

"I noticed that you had good solid research."

"I noticed that since your presentation was so long that you must have had good solid research."

"I wonder what your source was for such an in-depth timeline."

I talked to the teacher about the effect of the critique, and we were both pretty discouraged. We started thinking about why our critique protocol had not worked. Maybe I should have taken more leadership in the critique. Maybe there should have been a clearer rubric to begin with. Maybe some students spent too much time on their visual presentations and not enough time on the content. We are still thinking and talking about this, and next year our critique sessions will be stronger as a result.

DO IT BEAUTIFULLY

All this documentation is part of an atelierista's week. It takes up about one quarter of my work time. Next year my goal is to spend more time with teachers discussing documentation, because I have seen how much it helps us deepen our reflection as a staff. Since I focus a great deal on documentation, the school gets less studio instruction. So far the staff and parents have valued it as much as studio instruction. As an artist and art teacher, doing documentation is very fulfilling, because it involves finding creative ways to communicate abstract concepts with beauty and clarity.

This is where one year has taken us. Hopefully, Reggio's atelierista model has helped our school to reflect deeply, create quality work, deepen expeditions, see children more clearly, reach out to visitors and parents, and to do it all beautifully. "Before you hire an art teacher, please consider this possibility."

Anne Thulson is the atelierista at the Odyssey School in Denver, Colorado.

List of Work Collected for Documentation

• Copies of pages from field journals
• Drafts of finished work (especially nice to show all drafts of one piece)
• Excerpts from any kind of writing in class
• Scientific journals, fiction, research
• Math research, math work showing problem solving
• Drawings, diagrams, maps, keys
• Photographs of students working, talking, and thinking (not posing)
• Teacher reflections about the work
• Student reflections
• Parent reflections
• Artifacts from fieldwork (museum guides, rock rubbings)
• Art work
• Copies of written critique comments
• Transcriptions of:
  • Teacher-led conversations
  • Students' conversations while working
  • Group critiques
  • Morning circles
  • Closing circles

Every Learning Expedition is a Story: Student Documentaries

By David Grant

The students sat in rapt attention. At this point in a documentary project, they always do. The room was dark and the computer and television monitors counted down in perfect symmetry: eight, seven, six, five, four, followed by three seconds of emptiness, and then the music. A video sequence of a medieval castle surfaced and slowly dissolved into a slow motion glide over the medieval city the students had made. Images of classmates, teachers, and student performances, mindfully selected and sequenced, alternated in time to the period music they had recorded. The narrator's words began.

"What is it like to take 200 kids, bring them back 800 years into the past, and have them return to the present to share on stage the stories of what they learned?"

All of the students in the room understood the question. They had worked on it for months: unpacking the guiding questions of a learning expedition, interviewing teachers and classmates, analyzing student products and product descriptors, taping and reviewing hours of video, and sorting through piles of pictures. Now for the first time they sat before the nearly completed answer.

It was a story, ten minutes long, complete with exposition, rising action, a climax, and a conclusion. More importantly, it was the story of their learning. In this moment, they were telling it to themselves, describing their own intellectual journey. It made sense. It was meaningful. It was memorable.

Three years ago, I accepted the gifted/talented teaching position at King Middle School in Portland, Maine. I had never expected to find myself in such a job. I had always been suspicious of the exclusive and disconnected G/T models I had seen. But the administration at King wanted something different: a program that was not exclusive but still addressed the needs of academically exceptional students, a program that moved beyond what was currently being offered in classrooms and yet remained unambiguously integrated with learning expeditions.

I have always believed that an excellent measure of education is the stories our students tell about their learning: what they have learned, how they have learned, and where they want their learning to lead them. When I arrived at King, I found a building full of learning stories. For the past three years, I have made these learning stories the focus of my G/T curriculum.

Through student applications and teacher recommendations, students form documentary teams. Around the time their classmates wrap up their expedition projects, these students begin a new phase of work: it is their job to tell the story. Students create learning documentaries by drawing from student products, interviews, photographs, and video clips shot throughout the expedition. The components of the documentaries-sounds, visuals, text, and narration-are assembled by the students on computers using video and sound editing software and published on videotape for the students and their families, their teachers, our school, and our community.

LEARNING BY TELLING

Most of our learning expeditions have been supplemented or documented in this way over the years. Though the stories are always different, each new project begins with the same exercise. It goes like this:

Directions:

Unscramble the words below to form two sentences. Use the space provided to explain what these sentences mean about your learning.

the tell story. story the you You not do cannot know if cannot have story if story. know told the you You the not

Students who have already worked with me on a project sit quietly, knowingly, while their uninitiated peers unravel the puzzle. It does not take them long. The meaning of the solution, however, is more elusive. The sentences taken together form a paradox: you cannot tell the story if you do not know the story; you cannot know the story if you have not told the story.

This paradox provides a simple way for me to share with students one of my core beliefs about learning: that it is a recursive process. We discover, examine, interpret, and represent, and, from that representation, we begin again. If we do not reach the stage of representation, especially narrative representation where discrete content is concerned, discoveries are often forgotten.

By making documentaries of content-rich learning expeditions, students represent their most current comprehension of the learning expedition. Subsequently, these representations provide the basis for new interpretations, new syntheses of facts and concepts, and new possibilities for representing learning. Even expedition content that falls outside of the narrative becomes more meaningful and memorable by association with parts of the story.

NEW AND OLD TECHNOLOGY

All of this is nothing new. The practice of learning through narrative representation is tried and true. In the language arts classroom it is called writing-to-learn, although it has rarely been just about writing. In the most recent publication of Classroom Structures for Best Practices, (Heinemann,1998) Zimelman, Daniels, and Hyde have more appropriately renamed the writing-to-learn practice representing-to-learn. The new term acknowledges that a variety of new media can also serve as the end-products of learning. Although good writing will never go out of style, the future will place equal if not greater value on sentence fragments and word links, visual representations, and aural information. For years, the cost of technology made in-depth student explorations in multi-media too expensive for schools. But this is no longer the case. Today, multi-media hardware and software come bundled with many new computers, and virtually all computers can be upgraded to produce high-quality multi-media work. Add video cameras (old, used, whatever) and within a short time, students in any school can design and produce complex multi-media products.

There is, however, one kind of older technology that is essential: flexible schedules. At King, for example, we rearrange class schedules, revise expectations and assignments, and make-up work. This flexibility is what makes it possible for our documentaries to reflect learning in an in-depth, thoughtful way.

Naturally, students are not always thinking about these outcomes when they apply to participate in an expedition documentary. They want to make a movie. They want to work with cool equipment. They want to make something that a lot of people will see. They want to make something that looks like the videos they buy. Whatever their reasons, they want to make something that feels real and useful. Real work, useful work: these are the forces that motivate students to go on learning expeditions in the first place.

During expeditions, I ask students to take a journey, to participate in something that they will be able to tell stories about in the end. For both my students and myself, making expeditionary documentaries has increased opportunities to meaningfully represent our most current learning and (for me) teaching practices. Once we've embodied the stories and watched them, we may see things we wish we had changed or could do differently. But there is always the next time, and the time after that, and the time after that.

David Grant is the gifted/talented teacher at King Middle School in Portland, Maine.

Learning Stories On Line

By Meg Campbell and William Duke

This summer twenty-two Expeditionary Learning Outward Bound educators from fifteen schools effectively created a dot.com web publishing studio in the classrooms, hallways, meeting areas, and playground of the Odyssey School in Denver. Like any other dot.com start-up, folks worked from early morning to late at night to meet an ambitious deadline: documenting a learning expedition on a web site within nine days.

Why would Expeditionary Learning Outward Bound offer a web publishing course? What does web publishing have to do with our design? The answer is simple: the technology of web publishing offers an excellent way to document and reflect on student learning.

This potential becomes clear when you think of the difference between a photocopied pamphlet that describes a school, and a web site that offers visual images, sound, and unlimited opportunities to capture learning. Documenting expeditions on-line opens the door to the public and tells them what learning looks like in a school. How does this school portray learning? Is it thoughtful? Is it reflective? Has the community placed student learning at the center of their web site and their school? Yet when we started our web publishing institute, we had no templates to follow. We could not show teachers existing web sites that documented learning expeditions in the way we were envisioning. We had to create them ourselves.

THE ARCHITECTURE OF A SITE

The institute began with an exploration of the nationally renowned Denver Central Library. Designed by architect Michael Graves, the library provided an excellent metaphor for a web site. A person can enter the library with the purpose of obtaining information and find it easily, and because the library organizes information both horizontally and vertically, it encourages serendipitous learning. People can find treasures they did not expect to discover. All of this is true of a good web site as well.

Wandering around the library helped the teachers ground the abstract concept of a web site in something concrete. This was especially useful, since only half of the group had ever posted a web page before. Other folks had designed their school's web site, but were new to certain programs or the experience of documenting a learning expedition. By the end of the first day, all of the participants had put up a simple web page. The remainder of the course was designed as a flexible studio with tutorials offered as needed on topics from Photoshop and Dreamweaver to how to infuse design principles into web sites.

WEB SITE AS PORTFOLIO

Once the participants began to master the technology of web sites, they turned their attention to the content. Often, the first inclination when producing a web site is to throw everything on the site at once. While the technology can handle a great deal of material, visitors still need carefully selected and well organized information. At the institute, we discovered that the learning expedition offers an excellent framework for designing a site. The categories of guiding questions, learning goals, fieldwork, and culminating projects steer people to the material they need and offer a good picture of what students experience on an expedition.

As the teachers began pulling together the information for their sites, they discovered that the process of designing a web site is similar to creating a portfolio of student learning. They had to carefully choose the pieces of student work, the projects, and the drafts that would tell the story of the expedition most powerfully. As with a portfolio, the act of selection became an opportunity for reflection.

In the culture of web publishing, there is a growing tendency toward glitzy sites, bright banner ads, and snazzy graphics. The teachers at our institute never lost site of the primary importance of rich content. The teachers continually asked themselves if their web sites focused on student learning. They recognized that schools have a lot of information to communicate-upcoming events, scheduling changes, and school lunches-but these details do not need to be the core of the site. The core can and should be student learning. Vic Yonash, a teacher at Winnequah Middle School in Monona, Wisconsin, said, "We are under a lot of pressure now from our principal and the public to put up a web site. We came focused on the wheels of the race car. You made us lift up the hood and focus on the design of our engine."

BRINGING HOME A NEWBORN

The institute culminated with a presentation of the new web sites. Participants also shared some of the discoveries they had made during the week. They had learned practical skills, like understanding software programs and using technical tricks, but on a deeper level, they were empowered by the individual and group learning. They got inspiration from their colleagues through guided critique sessions. After seeing one of the emerging sites, one teacher said, "I wish I had taken photographs of drafts of work. I'll do that next time because I can see that it is a powerful form of documentation."

Anne Thulson, a teacher at the Odyssey School, said she had not experienced such a steep learning curve since she brought her newborn home from the hospital. She explained that when she went jogging every morning, she used to sustain her pace by counting each block she passed. When she jogged during the institute, she started imagining herself cell padding, a process she learned making a template on Dreamweaver. This little change in a daily habit, she said, told her that she had made a significant shift in the way she thought about web sites.

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

The work the teachers started at the institute is still very much underway. The teachers left Denver committed to critiquing each other's work and sharing ideas and problem-solving via our list serve. We created a schedule for ongoing review of each other's web sites throughout the year. It is also our hope to be able to reconvene the group this winter to work on more advanced tools and to review the next expedition they have committed to web publishing this fall.

There is an ethic of generosity in cyberspace. By sharing their learning on-line, the teachers at the institute have provided a great service to educators. Expeditionary learning teachers in faraway cities can learn from their colleagues' experience. They can benefit from the links, books, experts, and projects that these teachers have documented on their web sites. Just like a well-designed library, these sites are now open to all interested learners.

Meg Campbell is the former executive director of Expeditionary Learning Outward Bound.

William Duke is a poet and new media consultant who co-teaches the Poetry Summit and the Web Publishing Institute.

DOCUMENTING LEARNING EXPEDITIONS ON LINE

Teachers created or redesigned the following web sites at the Expeditionary Learning Outward Bound Web Publishing Institute.

Odyssey School, Denver, CO:
http://www.lightlink.com/elobweb/thulson
Offers an imaginative template for teachers to document learning expeditions.