Ph.D. General Exam

Administered by Mitchel Resnick

By Hayes Raffle, for studies in Media Arts and Sciences

May 30, 2006

PART 1. 

Imagine that Maria Montessori were alive today. Give an example of a "dynamic craft material" that she would design, and describe how she would use it in a classroom. Discuss the guiding principles that she would use in designing the materials and activities for the materials.

I suspect a 21st century Maria Montessori would not be more interested in craft materials than the 20th century one was. Montessori did not take a strong interest in the arts or the craft traditions, instead favoring more structured activities where children could discover a preordained order and system embodied by a range of materials. In contrast to Froebel, she seemed more interested in children learning "right answers" or "right methods" rather than Froebel's apparent emphasis on children learning to invent "right questions." In my view, art and craft are more aligned with Froebel's way of learning than with Montessori's so I prefer to instead ask the question of today's Maria Montessori, "how can your materials better help children learn about temporal phenomena, and relationships between parts of a system?" 

WHY NOT MONTESSORI CRAFT MATERIALS?

Historically, Montessori's didactic materials excelled at:

• giving physical form to formal and semantic relationships generally taught in mathematics (geometry, algebra)

• honing sensorial abilities, abilities to discern similar things that differ in a measurable way (color hues, movements, shapes, sizes of cylinders)

• supporting children's development of refined physical abilities. pouring water, learning writing... 

• supporting children's development of social graces, learning how to get along with others. 

• developing an environment that empowered children. Objects in her classrooms are orderly, architecture is their height, projects are designed for their physical abilities, and activities are accomplishable for them.

She did not emphasize personal esthetic expression and the kind of fantasy and storytelling that seems to fuel artistic investigations. I think that "art" or "craft" lacked the structure to appeal and fit into her educational framework. New materials for a Montessori education will not support invention and symbolic expression, but rather the discovery of certain common and fundamental relationships that help children both refine their sensorial skills and learn new ways of seeing and relating things in the world.

DESIGN GUIDELINES FOR BEHAVIORAL MATERIALS

Many of Montessori's original exercises were "dynamic." Some of them focused on mechanical principles, kinesthetic movement and social dynamics, all of which involve change over time. I find it helpful to borrow Roy Ascott's (1967) term and propose "didactic behavioral materials" for use in a modern day Montessori classroom. These materials should be guided by Montessori's original design guidelines from The Montessori Method (Montessori, 1912):

[Didactic materials] are not learning equipment in the conventional sense, because their aim is not the external one of teaching children skills or imparting knowledge through "correct usage." Rather, the aim is an internal one of assisting the child’s self-construction and psychic development. They aid this growth by providing the child with stimuli that capture his attention and initiate a process of concentration. If the teacher has materials to offer that polarize the child’s attention, he will find it possible to give the child the freedom he needs for this development.

First, the difficulty or the error that the child is to discover and understand must be isolated in a single piece of materials. This isolation simplifies the child’s task for him and enables him to perceive the problem more readily. A tower of blocks will present to the child only a variation in size from block to block – not a variation in size, color, designs, and noises, such as are often found in block towers in toy stores.

Her concept of "isolation" is difficult, because she created multisensory experiences that are, by definition, not completely isolated phenomena. For example, her baric materials are wooden blocks of identical size and shape that differ in both color and weight (Montessori, 1914). The idea is for children to discern the difference in weight, and may use color to help them learn this. Weight is not isolated unless the child wears a blindfold. I think she is after a sort of scientific objectivity in the design of her objects, and the ability to isolate a sense when a child is prepared to do so. So multisensoriality is a good thing, but mixing messages is not. For instance, putting stories on the pink cubes would be a distraction rather than a support(Montessori, 1912).

Second, the materials progress from simple to more complex design and usage. A first set of numerical rods to teach seriation vary in length only. After discovering length sensorially through these rods, a second set, colored red and blue, in one meter dimension, can be used to associate numbers and length and to understand simple problems of addition and subtraction….

This concept seems to apply best to learning of symbolic systems like math or writing, where a great deal of skill and mastery is required, and a clear and common goal is in sight of a long-ranging and cumulative curriculum. For many of her materials, this guideline seems vague, and is best used to think about designing appropriate activities with the materials. 

Third, the materials are designed to prepare the child indirectly for future learning. The development of writing is a good example of this indirect preparation. Knobs on materials have acted to coordinate his finger and thumb motor action. Through the making of designs that involves using metal insets to guide his movements, the child has developed the ability to use a pencil. By tracing sandpaper letters with his finger, he has developed a muscle memory of the patterns of forming letters. When the day arrives that the child is motivated to write, he can do so with a minimum of frustration and anxiety. 

Materials begin as concrete expressions of an idea and gradually become more and more abstract representations. A solid wooden triangle is sensorially explored. Separate pieces of wood representing its base and sides are then presented, and the triangle’s dimensions discovered. Later, flat wooden triangles are fitted into wooden puzzle trays, then on solidly colored paper triangles, then on triangles outlined with a heavy colored line, and finally on the abstraction of thinly outlined triangles. At a certain stage in this progression, the child will have grasped the abstract essence of the concrete materials, and will no longer be dependent upon or show the same interest in them.

Materials are designed for auto-education, and the control of error lies in the materials themselves rather than in the teacher. The control of error guides the child in his use of the materials and permits him to recognize his own mistakes. This dialogue with the materials puts the child in control of the learning process. In time, he will be able to see it and will correct his own errors.

"Control of error" is a double edged blade. It allows children to work with little outside support and develop autonomy and self confidence. But it requires the material to guide children toward a prescribed solution. This runs contrary to artistic investigation, or as Papert complains (Papert, 2000) "discovery stops being discovery when it is orchestrated to happen."

What interests the child is the sensation, not only of placing the objects, but of acquiring a new power of perception, enabling him to recognize the differences…

I admire her original design guidelines because I find them to remain fairly relevant today, almost 100 years after she wrote them. I find that they do not need to be changed to be helpful in her classrooms today, which have remained fairly faithful to her original approach. However, they have limitations. Where her approach works well to efficiently communicate known ideas to a large number of children, it does not encourage them to invent novel ideas and new ways of knowing that did not occur to the curriculum designer (Montessori, herself). While a modern Montessori may take a different view on how to prepare children to understand our (scientific) world, she would likely have adopted a similar didactic style.

NEW DOMAINS OF KNOWLEDGE

Since Weiner wrote Cybernetics in 1948, the science of pure relations has begun to have a dramatic impact on everything from how we do science to how we create and understand social structures. As such, computers and electronic technologies present new opportunities for hands-on learning about these processes, and I'd like to focus on four different approaches that could work in a Montessori classroom:

• New ways to learn about sound and music

• temporal and cyclic didactic materials

• flow, system behavior and inspiration from cybernetics

Sound and Music

The didactic material, in fact, does not offer to the child the "content" of the mind, but the order for that "content." It causes him to distinguish identities from differences, extreme differences from fine gradations, and to classify, under conceptions of quality and quantity, the most varying sensations appertaining to surfaces, colors, dimensions, forms and sounds. The mind has formed itself by a special exercise of attention, observing, comparing, and classifying.

—Montessori, 1914.

Although Montessori did not focus on children younger than 3 years old, her approach has been successfully extended to younger children, and Montessori schools internationally teach children as young as 18 months old. For toddlers, the teachers focus on the "development of the unconscious mind," which I believe to mean that much of the learning is difficult to measure quantitatively (and may correspond to Piaget's definition of the preoperational stage of development). Materials for this age child are exploratory and often puzzle-like, and sensorial materials are incorporated from older classrooms when children will engage deeply with them.

A commercial egg toy is used in Montessori classrooms today: White eggs open to reveal a geometric puzzle shape with bright color. For instance, two halves may reveal the positive and negative impression of a red square. The egg conveys the idea that objects have insides and outsides. They help children develop color sense and manual dexterity, as well as visual pattern matching skills that are typical of shape fitting toys. 

hear-egg:

Today, one might imagine using a similar "egg" metaphor for learning about sound, where the shape matching includes a new element of sound matching. The egg contains a speaker in each half, and plays a stereo sound clip that a child can hear by holding the egg up to his ears. The egg might play an animal sound (chicken clucking), a spatialized audio clip (an ambulance driving by, from one ear to the other, where the direction is changed by switching ears) or environmental sounds (rain in the forest). 

A basket of eggs would be shown to a child. The teacher would open an egg and hold the egg halves up to each of her ears, demonstrating how to hear them. Then, she would put the egg back together, and hand the basket of eggs to the child to explore.

music boxes:

Montessori used wooden cylinders to help children learn to identify, sequence, and isolate different qualities of form. One series of cylinders decreased in height only. Another decreased in diameter. Another decreased in both height and diameter. A fourth increased in height, but decreased in diameter (retaining constant volume) (Montessori, 1965). These series of blocks cleanly illustrate her concepts of "control of error" and "isolation" of idea, and organize physical form into measurable, scientific parameters, and are among the best known Montessori materials. 

She also made explorations in musical learning (Montessori, 1914), using physically identical bells that varied in tone only, or using tokens on a physical musical scale. However, her musical materials could have been designed to be more consistent with her design guidelines, by using modern technology. The greatest benefit of electronic music may be that musical instruments are no longer constrained by acoustical physics, and music instruments and players can be any form at all. So we can imagine new Montessori materials for music that are similar in spirit to her cylindrical materials, each isolating a different quality of sound.

• Frequency: Twelve blocks correspond to the musical scale and vary in hue, where the lowest note is dark blue and the highest is light blue. Each block has a knob-shaped button on top and a speaker on the bottom. Pressing the button will make a note play, and a child can hold the blocks up to his ears to hear the sounds. The blocks fit onto a rack with 12 corresponding holes. Holes for the blocks are painted white for the tones and black for the semitones, as on a piano keyboard. 

• Duration: Eight blocks play the same note, with a different musical duration (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 beats). The block design is identical to the frequency blocks but the color is red. The blocks fit into a rack with eight holes that each have a light next to them. When a block is placed in a hole and its button is pressed, the light turns on as long as the note plays. A single button on the base will start all of the blocks playing at the same time, and children can watch the lights to see if they turn off in sequence.

• Loudness: Eight blocks play the same note, with different loudness (scaling 1-8, logarithmically).  The block design is identical to the frequency blocks but the color is yellow. The blocks fit into a rack with eight holes that each have a light next to them. When a block is placed in a hole and its button is pressed, the light turns on with a brightness corresponding to loudness. A single button on the base will start all of the blocks playing in sequence (left to right) and the child can watch the lights turn on when the block is playing, and listen to hear if they get progressively louder.

The exercises consist in taking out the blocks, mixing them, and putting them back in the right place. For instance, with frequency blocks a child will hold two blocks to each ear and sequentially play each note, deciding which is higher or lower. He quietly sings each note to mimic the sound, learning do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do with each corresponding note. He exercises his hands in moving the blocks carefully and quietly. He orders the blocks from lowest on the left to highest on the right, and can see if he has ordered the notes sequentially by noticing if the color hues change from darkest to lightest. Once he has practiced the work, he may work blindfolded and focus on the sound alone. 

The child may also work with two identical sets of blocks, and mix them together. Then, the object is to find two matching tones, say of matching frequency, and arrange them in pairs and in order. 

In these exercises, the teacher may, in the first instance, intervene, merely taking out the blocks, mixing them carefully on the table, and then showing the child that he is to put them back, but without performing the action herself. She may also isolate two greatly contrasting blocks to give words to the ideas. Grabbing the loudest and quietest blocks, she will show them to the child. Holding the loud one to the child's ear, she says "this is louder." Holding the quieter one to the child's ear, she says, "this is quieter." Then, she allows the child to explore herself for a moment and asks, "show me louder. Now, show me quieter." In this way, the child will learn the concept of contrasting loudness and softness and learn the words to describe the sensorial experiences.

temporal and cyclic didactic materials

Number, space and time can be related using computational didactic materials. While musical expression allows us to begin to investigate the mathematics of time as frequencies, computational materials could also allow children to learn to think of processes in the "time-domain," where scientists consider occurrences that happen at the scale of a single period of a cyclic event.

The light stair: This material is based on Montessori's "broad stair" and "long stair" that isolated different numerical dimensions using measurable objects of varying length. In the light stair, rods of length varying from 1-10 cm each have one LED per cm. When a button on the end of the stair is pushed, a light begins to oscillate up and down the rod (one light per second), traveling from one end to the other. If two rods are placed end to end, they act as a single rod, and if rods are next to each other, pressing one button will start all of the rods at the same time. 

The exercises begin with arranging the rods in order of length. The rods are started together and the child notices that longer rods take longer to cycle. Children can explore addition by arranging and comparing rods of different length: rods of length 2 and 3 can be assembled to have an identical behavior to rod of length 5. Multiplication and ratio can also be explored by counting how many times each block reaches the end in a minute. For instance, rod 10 will reach the end 6 times and rod 5 will reach the end 12 times. Block 2 will reach the end 30 times and block 1 flashes 60 times. Children can also compare space and time: by arranging blocks in geometric shapes, such as rectangles of different dimensions, distance can be measured by measuring the time it takes a pulse to traverse the perimeter of the rectangle. Or, time can be calculated by measuring the physical circumference.

Flow, system behavior and inspiration from cybernetics

Cybernetics, or Norbert Weiner's science of pure relations, suggests Montessori materials that deal with flow, relationships and system behaviors (Weiner, 1948). Although some people have begun to explore this area, such as Zuckerman's Flow Blocks (Zuckerman, 2006), this metaphor could be extended further in many other ways.  

Perhaps the most interesting activity for such modeling systems is to consider them as metaphors for social dynamics and begin to deal with time sharing, remote collaboration and group behaviors that are increasingly defining young people's social structures. But I will begin with a simpler example that explores ideas related to Gaussian distribution.

Visitors to the Mathematica installation by Charles and Ray Eames have seen their mechanical representation of a normal (gaussian) distribution, in which a machine drops a series of plastic balls into a pachinko-like array of metal pins. At each pin, the ball has a 50/50 chance of going left or right. After dropping many balls, they collect at the bottom in a bell-curve distribution. This Montessori didactic material is inspired by this process. 

The child has a plastic board with 8x8 (64) square holes that blocks fit into, that looks similar to a "travel Scrabble" board. Small plastic rails separate the holes, and each rail can light up next to each hole. Therefore, any side of any square on the board can light up. Sixty-four wooden blocks can be arranged in the board. They all have an identical arrow pointing along their diagonal. When blocks are arranged in the grid, one of them may be pushed to send a pulse of light through the blocks. The light will travel along the edges of the blocks, in the directions the arrows are pointing. If the light reaches a "dead end," it will stay lit and define a new "dead end" so that further lights stack up. For instance, if all of the blocks  

are arranged in a right triangle, and are pointing the same direction, repeatedly pushing the block at the right angle will send pulses towards the hypotenuse. Lights will accumulate in a bell curve shape, identical to the mechanical example described earlier. If the blocks are arranged in other patterns, different distributions will result. 

The exercise consists of beginning with 8 blocks and arranging them in different ways to learn the behavior of the system. Then, a small gaussian distribution is built and its effects are explored and students build right triangles of different sizes and determine how many pulses are required to create a bell curve in each size triangle. Later, puzzles may be provided where the arrangement of blocks and final distribution of lights is know, and the child must determine the correct orientation of the blocks.

As may be obvious to the reader, the difference between computational flow blocks and simple marble chutes or water pipe games is that computational behavior allows the designer to invent new rules about flow that respond to ideas other than gravity. For instance, we can more easily introduce processes like feedback and recursion and can help children develop intuitions for flow-based computational models that dominate much of today's scientific investigation.

A SCIENTIFIC APPROACH

My approach to temporal Montessori materials has been rather conservatively rooted in the idea—espoused at Montessori schools today—that Montessori's original ideas are still relevant; changing technology has not significantly changed the types of things young children should learn, or the ways they should learn it. However, I wonder if a modern Montessori would take the same opinion today. She was a revolutionary thinker, but clearly a proponent of science. But science itself may provide a clue to how her opinions may have changed in 100 years: In some ways her pedagogy reflects a 19th century scientific community that was largely based on empirical observation and classification. Today's science much more thoroughly employs computational modeling, simulation and augmented ways of seeing—from the electron microscope to the PET scan—that are far removed from first principles or empirical knowledge. A modern Montessori might find more value in modeling than the original one did, and favor design as a creative process that is fundamental to both the arts and the sciences.

PART 2. 

Imagine that the founders of the Reggio Emilia schools were alive today. Give an example of a "dynamic craft material" that they would design, and describe how they would use it in a classroom. Discuss the guiding principles that they would use in designing the materials and activities for the materials.

REGGIO EMILIA

The municipal infant-toddler centers of Reggio Emilia, Italy are internationally recognized for their original approach to educating young children. They are focused on group and social learning, how children support each other's work and success and process, and how children manage social dynamics, fairness and negotiation (Giudici, 2001). Documentation, such as drawings and sculptures, is a very important part of children's learning, and the school's implicit focus on the arts emerges in children's self-motivated artistic endeavors. Children guide much of their own curriculum through their personal and group desires, and teachers facilitate and direct the children's project-based learning. 

Their approach is much more student-guided than Froebel or Montessori's, and is somewhat reminiscent of Papert's philosophy in Mindstorms (1980) that children should be active designers and inventors of their own knowledge through solving personal and emotionally relevant problems. The difference is that the children are much younger. As such, design materials are simpler and more immediate. Instead of a computer, we find paint, pens, paper and clay.

INTELLIGENT MATERIALS

Reggio Emilia schools favor "intelligent materials." These invite questions, curiosity and experimentation. They balance simplicity and complexity. Whereas some materials guide children in a direction, others are more evocative and facilitate discovery, exploration and the creation of stories, metaphors and games. Intelligent materials lead to a sense of wonder and excitement, so that children are motivated to come back to them. Tools like the overhead projector that modify one's perspective and support a combination of different "languages" (modes of expression) are especially seductive (Giulio, 1988)

The environment of the Reggio schools is sometimes called the "third educator." Children's art and creative expressions fill the space, helping to define the environment. In choosing materials, one must ask: Do the materials promote a sense of wonder? Do they generate unexpected transformations or strong esthetic effects? Pleasure is esthetic and can coordinate the actions of children. Scientific thought, too, is advanced through this esthetic dimension. In trying to sort out things in the world, an esthetic of knowledge allows children to choose among competing ideas and theories (Giudici, 2001).

SOCIAL LEARNING

Reggio relates to Vygotsky's approach to learning, taking the perspective that development is inherently social  (Vygotstky, 1978). Ways of thinking are transformed internalizations of social interactions: we are guided into ways of thinking, feeling and behaving by our family, peers and others. Even when working alone, we rely on socially created tools and artifacts. All cognitive activity is bound to a social context. The Reggio approach to education supports this idea, where we find that children work together, in groups, in collaboration. Children negotiate, argue and solve problems together, understanding their own, and others' skills and limitations. While a peer collaborator may have less expertise than an adult, a peer to peer relationship is inherently a more level playing field for collaboration (Rogoff, 1990).

DYNAMIC MATERIALS

While Froebel, a the turn of the century, advised giving the child (seen as a small creative genius) a sphere and a cube, just a few decades later, the Agazzi sisters, Rosa and Carolina, advised instead to 'rummage through the pockets' of children to find the simple and ingenious instruments of spontaneous self-teaching embodied in play.

—Adrea Branzi, "Education and relational space" (Ceppi and Zini, 1998).

Design Principles

New design materials for a Reggio center could embody dynamic qualities. They would embody all of the existing principles of "intelligent materials" and incorporate new principles that are specific to dynamic materials. My preliminary list of design guidelines for dynamic materials includes the following.

New materials and activities should:

• allow for multi-modal and multi-sensory expression, creation, and consumption

• work even if the power is turned off

• emphasize existing material qualities 

• build on knowledge children already have

• encourage children to express their desires and emotions through play and creation

• help children to better understand one another and the world they live in

• offer children ideas for dramatic play and representation

Materials

Some new materials could be like notions found at the craft store. Buttons and pom-pons are mixed with new behavioral objects that are self-powered (with small batteries or solar cells), cheap and always work ("always on"). I imagine a few little trinkets that a child can use to add movement and an element of time to a composition. No material is complete on its own; rather, they are small toys or trinkets that give another composition a greater identity.

• Touch-Hide is a small ball that curls up like a sow bug when it is touched.

• Touch-wiggle is a large fuzzy half-pom pom that replays a gesture made to its fur (based on Super Cilia Skin technology).

• Wiggle-Phone is two paired devices similar to touch-wiggle. But when one is touched, the other moves.

• Rattle back is a vibrating rattle that repeats your shakes.

• Reflex is a single plush joint with kinetic memory.

• Hidden mirror is a roll of half-silvered mylar film that is used with a light with a remote control on/off button. The mylar can conceal creations that are invisible until the light, placed under the mylar, is turned on and reveals that creation.

• Buzz-do is a vibrating buzzer that gets stronger as a person gets closer to it.

• Glow Yolk is a translucent yellow egg that glows brighter as a person gets closer to it.

• Two Beat is a pair of pulsing lights (a sphere and a donut) that become more synchronous as they get near each other.

• Happy jax is an object like the spring loaded bead animals, but it stands up when you touch it.

Other trinkets could allow for personalized and hidden messages and compositions. They embody more than surface appearance or function.

• gossip egg is a two-part plastic egg similar to the shape fitting egg described in Part 1. Each half of the egg has a matching color, shape, and 2 speakers that a child can hold up to her ears to hear a message. The difference here is that the message is recorded by a child and the egg is left for another child to open and listen to. The listener may choose to add a message to the end of the existing one(s), extending a story in an unpredictable direction.

• listen here is a small button that can record and playback an audio message. It might be glued to a painting to embed a verbal story in a picture.

• jagger stamp is a microphone with a rubber stamp on its bottom. When a child is drawing a picture, he can press the stamp down on the picture and record a message into the image. Later, touching the stamped image will play the message. (This is similar to listen here but would use different technology and design.)

• story dolls can record sound and movement of their limbs and know where they are in the room. Children can carry the dolls around and create a performance with spoken voice and movement. Later, other children can listen and see the story played out through the dolls. Or, kids can script the dolls' stories in advance and later act out a narrative with the children playing their parts, and the dolls playing the dolls' parts.

Some "materials" could use the architecture in novel ways.

• project me not is a video projector that can record and play back a person's shadow's in front of it (as with some of Scott Snibbe's work). Children may use their bodies or shadow puppets (with or without an overhead projector) to create animated stories, and the projector could later be moved to display the story in a surprising place or way. 

• lightamove is a light table where children can animate shadows. A child will put an object on the table and yell "go" as she moves it around. She yells "stop" when she's done, and the table portrays the moving (looping) silhouette of the object she was moving. She can now add more silhouettes to the composition.

USING NEW MATERIALS

New materials can present new opportunities for education, design and emotional expression. I have proposed some materials that have the immediacy and simplicity of common objects and existing craft materials. For these materials, teaching practices will not have to evolve. However, as children's compositions begin to embody performative qualities, and qualities that change depending on the audience, new approaches to both teaching and artistic expression will emerge. 

In an environment like Reggio schools where self-discovery frames the children's activities, the materials and their embodied behaviors must be self-evident. Teachers will present the materials in ways that allow children to discover the materials' qualities on their own. Therefore, there will not be set activities, but rather places ("stations") for children to work with different materials, where distractions and interruptions can be avoided, where children can observe their peers exploring new ideas.

A lot of learning at this age is about children working through anxieties that they may have, both with others and then alone. Since objects can help children externalize and make concrete their feelings (Piaget, 1976), physical materials can play an empowering role for children to understand their roles and abilities in the world. 

For example, the Story Dolls use technology to empower children to take control of their environment, by allowing them to control a simple doll. This concept is inspired by StoryMat (Cassell and Ryokai, 2001) and Topobo (Raffle et al., 2004) that give children's actions a physical form and dynamic presence. Where the modularity of Topobo would emphasize physical construction skills rather than dramatic play, kinetic memory embodied in a doll can allow children to externalize and express their stories and feelings through performance. Sound, too, can support storytelling and the design of social constructions. Where the paint and drawing materials found in today's Reggio schools effectively support children adept with visual expression, objects with kinetic and aural recording abilities can support documentation for children who are kinesthetic or dramatic learners (Gardner, 1984). 

In order to empower children to externalize and socialize feelings and actions that are difficult to express and capture in day-to-day life, new materials must focus on existing play activities without distracting learners with new technology. Making mistakes must be easy and not frustrating. Being successful at making the machines work should come as quickly as learning to draw. For instance, an important part of the design of dramatic dolls like Story Dolls would be the shape and feel of the dolls themselves, which should be soft, pliable and comforting and portray many different characters. Other recording media like Project me Not would emphasize dramatic play rather than focusing on visual expression. Jagger Stamp would emphasize drawing and writing and encourage children to associate spoken and writtenexpressions.

USING MANY SENSES WE MAY CREATE NEW EXPRESSIONS

Technology is beginning to disappear into the environment. The challenge, in working with young children, will be to create technologies that make the children's existing feelings, thoughts and ideas easier for them to capture and communicate to their peers and adult teachers. In 1860, Abe Lincoln aptly noted that "Writing, the art of communicating the thoughts to the mind through the eye, is the great invention of the world . . . enabling us to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn, at all distances of time and space." (quoted by Freedman, "Newbery Medal Acceptance"). Communication is founded on the idea of using one's senses (e.g. sight) to portray and perceive the invisible thoughts of another person. It is central for learners in Reggio schools, where documentation provides a central support in children's social learning. In a Reggio environment, children's many "languages" of expression are encouraged, and we have a special opportunity. We designers of new technologies are charged is to create objects and materials with which children can use all of their senses and skills to record and communicate their feelings, thoughts and actions, and more easily collaborate and learn in an ever changing world. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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