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Helping Students Get to Where Ideas Can Find Them

2009; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 5; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/1547688x.2009.10399573

1549-9243

Eleanor Duckworth,

Diverse Educational Innovations Studies

Winnie the Pooh said, of the hums that came to him from time to time, “Poetry and hums aren’t things which you get. They’re things which get you. And all you can do is to go where they can fi nd you” (Milne, 1928/2007, p. 173). This journal issue is about helping students get their minds, their awareness, and their feelings so active and thoughtful and informs that they are in a place where hums—or connections, understandings, new ideas—can fi nd them. I start with a brief story. My colleague Alythea McKinney and I were presenting some of her work to a group of research educators. She described engaging fi fth and sixth graders in a critical exploration (see Cavicchi et al., 2009) of documents pertaining to butter making in the United States at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. These children had been examining original historical texts and images, and forming ideas about how U.S. farmers and their families might have experienced the Industrial Revolution; and they were taking those ideas further through drawing and writing about them, through considering each other’s thoughts and drawings, and through examining further documents that McKinney offered them (McKinney, 2008). Our audience was interested, engaged, and impressed with the student work. But we had presented the work as an example of critical exploration, our particular approach to curriculum and teaching, and near the end of the session one member of the audience asked us what was unique about what we were doing. She recognized that the children whose work we presented are working together, that they are provided well selected resource materials, that they create artwork in the interests of