Robin Duckett, Sightlines Initiative.
“We just realised how absolutely brilliant mud is!”
The educators at Walkergate Early Years Centre in Newcastle had been venturing into a woodland preschool one recent spring and mud had been a big feature. The ‘mud-ludder’ children jump and squelch in it, getting stuck, feeling it, moulding it, churning it, finding worms.
This is all part of the lovely mix of exploring, climbing, collecting, and making dens. Sticks can be living, dead, dry, wet, brittle, rotten, strong, long, for helping, carrying, building, sticks with fungus on, sociable sticks, power sticks. They are limbs from the trees the children were playing amongst, in the mud, down where the mud monster scared and fascinated them and was their friend. The leaves and pine-cones, feathers, all with their insistent tales of mystery and imagination, are waiting to be picked up, interpreted, re-told, re-invented, with a deftness of curiosity that connected children to one another and with the world all around them.
Back at nursery, lucky children, they explore again inside and outside with clay, soil, compost, in the natural and vibrant ways of exploration and exchange they’d naturally moved with in the woods. Why lucky? They had good companions, who made time and space for them, their interests and the mud.
It isn’t always the case that adults in education are ready, willing and able to see and respond to the simple enthusiasm of their children.
Inside connected with outside
Our children spend too much time inside, separated from the world, but nevertheless the domestic shelter of the classroom can be a good place, so long as it relates to the primary experience and stuff of the world. Space outside, whether woodland or nursery garden, seems to be the place for relationships, exchange, delving and exploration, it is after all our elemental home. The inside space, the classroom, seems more the place of reflection, recall and imagination, alongside the sensory encounter with materials. Here materials have a life away from their home, in this artificial, domestic, studio space.
Being there
Working with elemental materials reduces our dangerous adult cultural separateness from the living, sentient world and brings the possibility of a better understanding and alignment in our children. There is an inborn sense of wonder; an easy, rewarding sense to nurture.
This is not simply a matter of stuff, it is a matter of speed and intent. Tasks, goals and achievement need repetitiveness, efficient ways of doing things, lowest-common-denominator simplicity.
Enquiry needs fascination and engagement; a different understanding of time. The point is not to get somewhere else, but to be exactly where you are, switching on senses, thoughts and feelings. To be good companions with children, we need to rekindle, to cultivate in ourselves, the habit of walking in the unknown – and listening. Carlina Rinaldi1 refers to a pedagogy of listening: listening not to what we expect or even seek, but to what is, what we see; to listen to ourselves listening.
Sometimes we are encouraged to ‘think outside the box’ but can we more courageously learn to be aware that the box itself is a figment of our imagining: it does not really exist at all anyway. Step out of the box, walk a few paces, turn around – pam!: the box simply isn’t there any more. Can we notice the complexities of the forest instead; learn to live and be amongst the trees?
Can we ‘good companions’ learn to cultivate this being in complexity? Can we encourage children’s natural sense of enquiry in which thought, feelings and senses are passionately engaged? We talk of ‘researching the children who are researching the world’. We need to be ready and to make our settings ready for their researchfulness.
We need to learn to get off the beaten path, to walk off the track and into the woods. It took me years to walk off the track, to remember, to decide to let my feet follow inclination, to dare. But once you walk into the woods, wait and let the woods come to you. It is not a matter of being lost but of being there, being in uncertainty. I do not mean being tremulous, indecisive, lost, fearful: it is being ready to listen well, without needing to explain or dissect, to be ‘in tune’, so that senses naturally attune to the patterns, the orders, intricacies and relationships of the world. We are ourselves, animated, vibrant, rhythmic, perceiving and related to other animated, vibrant, rhythmic, people around us.
I think this is something of the vital ‘sense of wonder’ of which Rachel Carson2 writes so eloquently, and which we cannot have if we separate ourselves from sticks, leaves, feathers, shells, clay, water, wood, wool, stones …or from air, mountains, woods, rivers, fields, seas.
There are simple, humane starting points from which to imagine and create educative spaces in which children can explore and learn in joyful, vibrant, meaningful ways. If we choose, we can focus on making places which speak of the ‘pulsing of life’: places which celebrate our encounters with the stuff of the world.
References
1. Rinaldi, C. (2005). In Dialogue with Reggio Emilia: Listening, Researching & Learning. Contesting Early Childhood Series, Routledge.
2. Carson, R. (1988). The Sense of Wonder. Glasgow: Harper Collins.
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Robin Duckett is Director of Sightlines Initiative, following ten years as a nursery teacher. He is at home in sun and rain, woods and mountains.
More information: sightlines-initiative.com
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This article was first published in 2021 in Vol 126 of the NAEE journal which is available free to members. This edition was an arts-themed special, written with Cambridge Curiosity and Imagination.