Learning from the Children We Teach

Abstract

In preparation for writing these comments, I went back and revisited the children's invented notations for simple rhythms and melodies that I have collected over some 25 years. I had begun to wonder if the children really did make the inventions that I had copied and put into those various articles and books.1 Digging the old cardboard box that the children's drawings were stored in, I not only found them all there but I found myself intrigued and puzzled all over again. I marveled at how it is we ever learn to turn the continuous flow of our own singing or our inner, bodily feel for continuous, rhythmic actions clapping, bouncing a ball, swinging on the park swing into static, discrete descriptions that hold still to be looked at out there. Looking at the children's inventions, I saw once more the complexity of this conceptual work and the evolution of the learning involved as it is happening. Sometimes this complexity emerges by comparing one child's work with that of another; and sometimes it can be seen by watching children as from moment-to-moment they transform the very meaning of the phenomena they are working with. Caught on the wing of invention, the notations mirror in their making the process through which action can be made to hold still in representation. The inventions become objects of reflection giving us the opportunity to learn from the children we teach. But to seriously study children's spontaneous productions, we need to take a bold step. Cindy Liang, a student in one of my MIT classes, put it very well. Reflecting on an experiment in which she enlisted some of her MIT dorm mates as subjects to replicate my study of children's invented rhythm notations, she wrote:

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 12 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.