Arts & Aesthetics

Art and design is all around us, from the objects that we make and use, to the complex systems we participate in, to the ideas we imagine and construct. With a foundational focus on learning and the arts, Project Zero has spent nearly five decades exploring skills and capacities that will help learners of all ages notice, understand, and manipulate their designed world.

Resources

Book
Studio Thinking from the Start: The K–8 Art Educator’s Handbook
A resource from The Studio Thinking Project

Studio Thinking from the Start: The K–8 Art Educator’s Handbook
A resource from The Studio Thinking Project

This new publication shows how the eight Studio Habits of Mind and four Studio Structures can be used successfully with younger students in a range of socioeconomic contexts and school environments. The book features classroom examples, sample templates for students to use, and innovative approaches to assessment.

Visit Publisher Site
Find it on Amazon

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Book
Children Are Citizens Book 2017
A resource from Children Are Citizens

Children Are Citizens Book 2017
A resource from Children Are Citizens

People from all around the world know about Washington, DC. They talk about it, write about it, draw it, and make movies and TV shows about it. But almost always, we hear only the opinions and ideas of adults.

For this book we invited some of our youngest citizens—preschoolers, kindergartners, and first graders from DC Bilingual Public Charter School, Sacred Heart School, Seaton Elementary School (DCPS), E.W. Stokes Community Freedom Public Charter School, Sunshine Early Learning Center, and J.O. Wilson Elementary School (DCPS)—to tell us what they think of our city. We asked them to share their ideas in order to help other children (and adults) learn about what is important about DC. We asked their teachers to help students research the city and discuss their ideas with classmates and children from the other schools. Each teacher guided the children in different ways. The result is Washington, DC: "What People Like Most is in This Book!,” a title suggested by the children that conveys their connection to their city. In this book you will find a set of descriptions, theories, and stories—shared in pictures, words, and photographs—that are thoughtful, informative, and sometimes surprising. As Sergio Spaggiari, a veteran educator from Reggio Emilia, Italy, notes, "It seems that for cities to be understood and appreciated, they should be talked about in stories." You can learn a lot about our city from the stories in this book.

Jim Reese
Director, The Professional Development Collaborative at
Washington International School

On behalf of the Children Are Citizens coordinating team: Mara Krechevsky, Ben Mardell, Nathalie Ryan, Joanne Seelig, Stacy Steyaert, and Tim Wright

Use the resource links on the right to view the full book.

Children Are Citizens Book 2017

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Book
Participatory Creativity
A resource from Agency by Design

Participatory Creativity
A resource from Agency by Design

Participatory Creativity: Introducing Access and Equity to the Creative Classroom presents a systems-based approach to examining creativity in education that aims to make participating in invention and innovation accessible to all students. Moving beyond the gifted-versus-ungifted debate present in many of today’s classrooms, the book’s inclusive framework situates creativity as a participatory and socially distributed process. The core principles of the book are that individuals are not creative, ideas are creative; and that there are multiple ways for a variety of individuals to participate in the development of creative ideas. This dynamic reframing of invention and innovation provides strategies for teachers, curriculum designers, policymakers, researchers, and others who seek to develop a more equitable approach towards establishing creative learning experiences in various educational settings.

Participatory Creativity

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Book
Maker-Centered Learning: Empowering Young People to Shape Their Worlds
A resource from Agency by Design

Maker-Centered Learning: Empowering Young People to Shape Their Worlds
A resource from Agency by Design

Maker-Centered Learning provides both a theoretical framework and practical resources for the educators, curriculum developers, librarians, administrators, and parents navigating this burgeoning field. Written by the expert team from the Agency by Design initiative at Harvard Graduate School of Education's Project Zero, this book

Identifies a set of educational practices and ideas that define maker-centered learning, and introduces the focal concepts of maker empowerment and sensitivity to design.
Shares cutting edge research that provides evidence of the benefits of maker-centered learning for students and education as a whole.
Presents a clear Project Zero-based framework for maker-centered teaching and learning
Includes valuable educator resources that can be applied in a variety of design and maker-centered learning environments
Describes unique thinking routines that foster the primary maker capacities of looking closely, exploring complexity, and finding opportunity.
A surge of voices from government, industry, and education have argued that, in order to equip the next generation for life and work in the decades ahead, it is vital to support maker-centered learning in various educational environments. Maker-Centered Learning provides insight into what that means, and offers tools and knowledge that can be applied anywhere that learning takes place.

Thinking Routine
Parts, Purposes, Complexities
A resource from Agency by Design & Early Childhood in the Making
A routine for looking closely at systems.

Preschool Elementary School Middle School High School

Parts, Purposes, Complexities
A resource from Agency by Design & Early Childhood in the Making

This activity is recommended for the following learner age ranges

Preschool 15 - 30 Minutes
Facilitation: Heavily Facilitated by Peer/Teacher/Caregiver
Elementary School 15 - 30 Minutes
Facilitation: Lightly Facilitated by Peer/Teacher/Caregiver
Middle School 15 - 30 Minutes
Facilitation: Lightly Facilitated by Peer/Teacher/Caregiver
High School 15 - 30 Minutes
Facilitation: Lightly Facilitated by Peer/Teacher/Caregiver

Parts, Purposes, Complexities
Parts, Purposes, Complexities (for younger children)
Parts, Purposes, Complexities (for exploring complexity)

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View the Publisher's Site

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Article
Children Are Citizens: The Everyday and the Razzle-Dazzle
A resource from Children Are Citizens

Children Are Citizens: The Everyday and the Razzle-Dazzle
A resource from Children Are Citizens

How do children get to know their city and the city get to know its children? How often are children asked their opinions about their city? The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) established that in addition to children’s human rights to protection from harm and provision of an adequate standard of living, children also possess civil rights to participate in the cultural and civic activities of their communities. We, the authors of this article, maintain that children are indeed citizens from birth with the right to participate in the civic life of their cities. Cities belong to the adults and children who live there—even young children, who are capable of generating compelling insights about their communities.

The recognition of children as citizens is an essential pillar of the Reggio schools. Sustaining the strong bond between children’s and adults’ destinies has characterized 50 years of dialogue and cultural and political collaboration between the city of Reggio and its municipal preschools and infant-toddler centers. Loris Malaguzzi, founder of the Reggio Emilia educational philosophy, believed that schools are a critical context for fostering the relationship between children and the city. Once Malaguzzi said:

Our children go outside of the school as often as they can. They go to discover what is there or not in the city and to reflect and maybe conquer, with the help of the adults, what could be there . . . [They go] to strengthen relationships with cultural and sports institutions, to run in the fields, to meet the farmers . . . [They go] to discover people’s most beautiful trades, where and how their fathers and mothers work, to make friends with the elderly in their nursing home— images that are missing from their eyes and minds but that are essential to launch themselves into life, into the future. They invite to school the farmer and the factory worker, to hear their stories, their problems, the conditions of the work, and to understand the meaning of life, to feel they are part of a wider community. (see also Cagliari et al., 2016)

How might we help children imagine their futures as active members of their communities? Schools are an ideal setting for fostering a dialogue between children and the city. Like the ancient Greek agora, classrooms can serve as laboratories for life in a democratic community—places where knowledge and culture are both created and transmitted. When children encounter other perspectives—when they discuss, argue, and compare ideas—they are building understanding and making public that which had been private. Cities also provide a construct that three-, four-, and fiveyear- olds can understand—places they can experience and to which they can respond.

This article is written for those who wish to foster a relationship between children and their cities. We start with two examples of children’s contributions to their communities, one from Reggio Emilia—a city with a long and rich history of connecting children to their community, and one from Washington, DC—a city that has more recently built child-community connections. We close by identifying three lessons learned about engaging children in their communities.

Download the PDF (under Resource Links) to continue reading this article.

Download the PDF

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