Arts Impacting Achievement

Building Documentation Panels

by Lara Pruitt and Kate Thomas

Two AIA staff sit down to have a conversation about the use of documentation panels in the AIA project. The concept of panel making came out of the Italian Pre-School system in Italy called Reggio Emelia. In this internationally recognized pre-school system, documentation panels serve to facilitate greater understanding of the teaching and the voice of the child. The panels exist within a triad of Design (instruction), Documentation (explaining instruction) and Discourse (conversation about the instruction). The panels that we have made contain photos of students working, transcriptions of conversations with children and narration of the project from the perspective of the documenter (usually the teacher). In our conversation we debate our different styles of panel making and reflect on our own learning process along the way. Finally, we predict where the panel making will go with the teachers we have worked with in the years to come.

Kate: I was introduced to documentation panels in Denver at an Expeditionary Learning Outward Bound school by a woman named Anne Thulson. I was new to the school and the hiring committee suggested to me that as an artist I use Reggio Emilia documentation panels and so I came into the school learning my new role as an art teacher K-12 and then Anne was coaching me and teaching me how to use these panels in my work. I saw her use them in her school. She used long pieces of colored craft paper, minimal photos of students doing their work, samples of the students work enlarged and big pieces of text explaining what the students were doing. And I remember these panels being very striking and simple and I got a glimpse of what the students were doing in their classrooms. So I was given a snapshot of panel making in Denver and then I came to Chicago and started to do my own investigation of the Reggio panels and taught myself how to do this work.

Lara: And so the panels that you did were K-8?

Kate: Mostly K-8.

Lara: Was it all art practice?

Kate: No, the Expeditionary Learning Outward Bound model uses hands-on experiential based learning as a foundation for the classroom experience. Kids were engaged in projects. You could see that they were enjoying what they were learning but, no, art was not always part of what we were documenting. I think what struck me most about the panels was that I had seen traditional bulletin boards all my life as a student but the panels in Denver took what students were doing and made it really clear what work was going on. The panels had a transcription of what the child was saying. It was not just a display of the best student work and everything was uniform. I felt that I was seeing a living document and it was elegant and simple and it didn´t have to be a display of everyone´s work and neatly put in a row.

Lara: I feel traditional bulletin boards are not very interesting most of the time. I walk by them and take five seconds and say, “oh look everyone got a hundred percent on their spelling test” or “look they did a drawing of a fish” or whatever . . .

Kate: There´s no narration . . .

Lara: I don´t see children. I see stuff. I feel like when I see Reggio panels I see the magic of children, the magic of children that makes everyone in the world love and smile and watch children´s work. I feel drawn in and I want to read and I laugh out loud or I say isn´t that cool or I look at that kids face. I don´t feel like there is a lot of commentary in my own mind on traditional bulletin boards. My personal experience with Reggio boards was going to a pre-school called Chicago Commons and looking at their panels. And I had never seen anything like this before.

Kate: What brought you there?

Lara: CAPE was doing a professional development session there and we were invited to participate.Chicago Commons showed us the Reggio approach and let us look at their school. So we walked through and we got an explanation of what the panels were and how they evolved. It was so exciting, it was one of those moments you have where you think I have to do this next and I have to figure out how to do this. At the time, I was really struggling with coming to this side of the work from being a teacher, with how to get people to really understand. I felt like people were still not getting that arts integration was such rigorous work and the critical thinking that kids developed when they did this work. I felt like funders and administrators, people in our own Center, needed to understand what was happening in the classroom. That´s why this was so exciting for me because you get to observe the classroom. You can´t be there from 10-11 on Tuesday the 4^th when that dancer will be there, but you will have the panel that will live for weeks, for months, and years and kids will get a taste of what actually happened as opposed to having people come to the performance and not really understand what happened. So for me it was really about trying to get people to understand arts integration and process work. The first time I did panels, I built my own panels to try to analyze my process and I was looking at it more from a teacher´s perspective and we´ve talked about it, my panels vs. your panels and how they are slightly different and we´ve grown closer in what they look like. My first panels were definitely teachers demonstrating what they knew and making comment about their own practice and their classroom and saying this is what I want people to know. I have always used the saying “What wouldn´t you want people to say about this work and how can you provide evidence so that they cannot say it?” And now I see that there are so many other ways that you can use panels in the classrooms to develop curriculum. Mine were conclusionary in design as opposed to exploratory in design.

Kate: What I am struck by in my evolution of learning panel making is how long it has taken me to understand what makes a good panel. I have read the Reggio books, over and over again and yet it hasn´t been until the last week that I realized that narration plays a critical role in telling the story of the panel. It should read like a good story. Recently, we did a training for artists in panel making and I was struck by one of our artists, Eduardo´s panel because he was most successful at telling the story of the dancers he observed and he comes from a place where the English language isn´t his first mode of expressing himself. He found the right words to pull the whole story of the panel together and told me what was happening as a story. He said, “A group of dancers go the beach to explore space” Then, “How does an artist fight with space?” Then, “The dancers look for a personal space.” And finally, “The fight is over.” He found four simple phrases to explain to me what they were going through and then I suddenly understood how important it is to tell a story in the panel. As a group of artists we discovered that we wanted to make the panels as clear as they could be, as if we were telling our mothers who weren´t there what had happened. So at the beginning of the panel making we thought that we had to be rich, complicated and layered in our telling of the event. No, we have to be able to say this is what happened.

Lara: That same kind of epiphany happened to me when we had the panels hanging in the Chicago Teachers´ Center and people were coming through to look at them and I was standing there and people were asking questions and I was telling them, and I realized, that I had to narrate the panels because they were saying to me that, “If you weren´t here, we wouldn´t get the richness of what happened.” You have to remember that the panels are going to be in places where you won´t be. It´s always so hard to put yourself in the position of not knowing what you know, to explain what the experience was first and then what did the kids say about it, what were they investigating?

Kate: So this leads us in how we came to do panels with the teachers we worked with in AIA. We decided to take two different approaches. One was to do a Reggio style panel in the third semester of working with artists. I did a training with some teachers ... then we did a panel making session with the teachers where they were focusing on the student voice rather than the teacher voice and so we had file folders of transcriptions, photos, interviews. I think we still hadn´t figured out the narration piece yet. The teachers worked on putting the panels together in a three hour session and I would say that some of teachers were more empowered than others and felt that they knew what their task was and how to get there.

Lara: We talked about the Reggio panels with the teachers but in retrospect we didn´t give them enough training for them to really understand it. We went into different classrooms and tried to gather pictures, interviews, quotes from the students and as an outside person that proved to be a bit challenging. I think teachers thought, “I wish someone had been here this day.” I think we learned a lot about how the teacher and the artist have to be the ones to gather the material. The teacher has to make a commitment to do that work. I think that initial panel making experience sort of helped them put together a lot of different pieces of the grant. For some teachers, there was a clarification of, “I need to listen to my students. And if I listen to my students and gather all this data from my students, I´m going to have a really profound realization about what I´m going to do.” It´s like the idea of process over product. Maybe that first set of panels weren´t what we had envisioned them to be but the process of doing them had some real breakthroughs for the teachers in terms of their understanding of the role they could play.

Kate: Of course the other challenge that we faced was that the panels were a culmination of an experience versus an on-going documentation of an experience. We just didn´t have the time or resources to make them as we were going along in the artist teacher collaboration, so we did a final panel.

Lara: I still think they were amazing. I think of two of them hanging at Coleman school. They helped the whole school understand what the work was about. The teachers felt empowered having them up and having people understand how much work they had put into this project and the richness of what had happened. Teachers don´t get the chance to say, “Look at the great work we do.”

Kate: Teachers gravitate toward panels because they are like a scrap book of their practice. There is a part of me that loves the sense of ownership they have over the process. We had an experience with one teacher where the teacher was really invested and wanting to create decorated trimming around the panel with a pattern, very embellished. But as I review what we are trying to do with the panels, I think we have to step back from how much we want to be artistically creative as we represent student work. I´ve noticed the Italian Reggio panels are pretty straight forward. They aren´t so much an artistic expression.

Lara: That´s the biggest struggle for the teachers doing the panels. They want to put the kitschy stuff on the panels. That´s what they have seen.

Kate: So coming off the bulletin board experience they think, “I want to make this pretty . . .”

Lara: They come to the panel making with the frog boarder that needs to be around the outside and they come with the pre-cut out letters that are going to make the words. There is this sort of “things need to look perfect on the outside” (sentiment). They don´t want rough edges. Artists love rough edges.

Kate: And also this practice that we´re engaging in says, “Let´s show challenges, successes and failures.” It doesn´t have to be the perfect moment. Let´s show how a student struggled and leared from that. So this was our attempt at the Reggio panels and from there we went on to create the final set of panels that we used with the teachers.

Lara: The panels that we did as teacher reflection panels were created to display work to the public so the idea was that they would have less rough edges and less of an intention of showing the conflict. We asked teachers to take the two years they had with the project and try to pull it all together and process. It was a reflective practice to have them think about the work and analyze the work and draw some conclusions about why it was important. I think again, the most exciting part was that a lot of teachers grew through doing the panels because they had to analyze their work to create a panel. But once again, teachers are always so strapped for time. They said, “I can´t do this in three hours.” And we said, “great let´s do another session.” “But I don´t have time to do another session.” So we struggled with how to get this done.

Kate: Can you tell me about the way these panels looked? The Reggio panels were on kraft paper and they were fairly long, maybe seven feet by two or three feet tall. They had lots of colored photographs and quotes.

How Does AIA Address the Students´ Needs?

Bev Allebach ­ 5^th and 6^th Grades

Lara: I developed this frame out of logistical practicality. A few years ago, we took the size of the traditional bulletin board because we wanted it to become the size of the bulletin board as a way of giving teachers a structure to synthesize their experience. Then we divided it into four sections and asked what they needed to come up with an inquiry question about the work. What did they really want to know about the work or what question did they want to answer for other people? So the idea was that they had a question and then each of the four panels was an answer to that question, using photos, student quotes and artwork.

Lara: The frame was to get teachers to think about their work. Different teachers had some level of frustration with going through the data and trying to figure out how to show what they wanted to say. Some teachers were so excited about the opportunity to look through stuff and show their experiences and some were overwhelmed by having to make those choices.

Kate: Was that a design frustration?

Lara: Not being about using the kitschy materials. The panels were all covered in brown kraft paper. And we gave them the multi cultural, skin toned construction paper to use to make the lettering and then we said you could use color to punch the photos. We also gave them vellum so they could make layers to comment on things. Again, just like our other experiences, I think they still need further narration. That´s the continual challenge is to make sure you tell people what happened so they know how to read the photos. Because they were trying to say more, the text and the photos were smaller then on the other Reggio panels. We were trying to wrap up so much work. I think we were putting them in a place where we thought people would have more time to read them. They were designed for an audience that would be willing to really come in and look at them. It would be interesting to have a conversation about different kinds of panels. What kinds of panels really work? What audiences? Are there certain kinds of panels that work better when you´re looking for parents to interact? The primary audience that I was going for was people who already knew about arts integration; trying to get them to really understand. To go into the detail we had in this research from this grant. Why are students benefiting from this kind of experience? Why is this work so important? How can we show evidence of what is working?

Why Place Artists in the Classroom?

Cynthia Wendt ­ 6^th Grade

Kate: When we were making the Reggio panels with the artists we had a conversation about how the design is such an important part of the panel because that invites you into the content. What we learned about these panels is that they should stimulate conversation so that they inform the teaching, but I am always struck by what makes a panel successful. What makes a person want to go into the design so you can have a conversation about what´s working?

What Did Each Unit Teach Us About?

Annie Dickerson ­ 4^th and 5^th Grades

Lara: And how do you balance, that with people, there are different personalities in the panel. The ones we did in the end have such distinctly different designs. We commented as the teachers were making them how much they reflected their personalities and we worked with teachers so in depth with this project. We know them really well so we see the person who liked to be neat and clear, and his panel was very precise. And the person who loves to explore and loves color we could see her. People´s panels looked like their classrooms, the room that is covered wall to wall with pictures and that´s what her panel was. And the person who´s classroom is very austere and only very important things are up on the wall . . .

Why Do I Do Arts Integration?
Eric Runyan ­ 5^th and 6^th Grades

Kate: Let´s talk about the impact the panels have had on the teachers? How will they go forward?

Lara: I hope that the panels can help all of us see the need for student´s doing authentic work in the classroom. One idea I got from reading Reggio was the reality that school isn´t preparation for life ­ it is life. As a teacher and a mother, that is so profound to me. Kids need to be doing real work, solving real problems, creating real solutions and feeling empowered by their abilities.Panels are such a great way of demonstrating the insights of children through listening to their words and the capabilities of students through observing their products and work process.

How Are We Learning When We´re Having So Much Fun?

Kim Edwards ­ Kindergarten

Kate: I worked with a teacher this summer as she used panel making to support her student´s reflective practice. The students assembled the panels. This was challenging even though the students were old enough to participate in the decision making it was difficult for them to provide narration for the process. This was my role as an outside documenter. In order for teachers to continue this work they will have to carve out a time and space for panels in their practice. The school community will gravitate towards the panels. People love to see what is going on in the classroom. So it´s only a question of time before they catch on, but making time for this to happen is key. We will certainly continue to advocate and support for panels in the arts integration process. The panels are a very concrete way for the school community to engage in the work.

Lara: We are only beginning to understand the value of panels. I hope we can have this same conversation next summer and see what else we´ve learned.