Our Planet

Text : Aya Endo

The year is about to end -it was the beginning of October when we first heard the swans so really, it is astonishing just how fast the time flies. Our current plan at Yamanoko is to have as many outdoor activities as possible before the snow starts to fall.

In this text, we are looking Back on Yamanoko Open Day 2019. Learning from the previous year when we had the first snowstorm from the morning of the event, we arranged this year’s in October -however! This year we had typhoon Hagibis raging on the very day of the 13th October. Acknowledging safety first as our top priority, we decided to only do the dinner event on the day, and postpone everything else to the following day. Despite the postponing, we managed to have around 250 people visiting us in the end. This year it seems like many local families, families from other areas in Japan, and professionals from educational field seemed to have visited.

We shall look back on the process in the making of the exhibition “Our Ever-Transforming Selves” and report from each educator’s point of view in serial form. At Yamanoko where child education is practiced all based on the “exploration method”, we bring up and explore “questions” from daily scenes and develop the content of child education. However, this was our first attempt to keep exploring a single question over several months. For this exhibition, we continued to observe based on a single research topic, and put our heads together to create the work. I was initially expecting this whole project to contribute to further development of our education, but it turned out to be way, way beyond.

As the first installment in a series, I would like to present below the text of exhibition’s introduction:

 

 

Action Resarch “Our Ever-Transforming Self”

Children, adults and this space itself exist while they simultaneously transform and compose themselves—this perhaps might be the nature of child education at Yamanoko. Although it is still challenging for us to explain in words, we feel that this is an important realisation, and this motivated us to check whether our intuition was correct. And so, we decided to explore and respond to each of the transformations to figure out any signs of transformation that happen in us.

The act of responding to children is one of the crucial factors that contribute to developing each child’s educational environment. To talk about the frequency of this, in the video recording of research no. 4 in the exhibition “It Is Just As If I’m Dreaming”, you can hear the adult verbally responding to the child 60 times within 12 minutes. Which means, if we calculate a day as a total of 8 hours it is happening 2,400 times within a day to be exact. It makes me almost dizzy to imagine just how many times adults respond in a day, including the non-verbal responses as well.
When we adults respond, we make decisions towards what to do next based on our responsive interpretation towards their stages of growth. Such musical jam session-like interpretation and decision-making process are elaborated through incorporating the environments and relationships that already exist there. This ever-continuing jam session is what is actually happening right here, making simultaneous ever-transformation occur.

I am delighted to be able to share the findings of our 3-month action research as an art exhibition. We shall continue to spread our findings from daily scenes of child education, bearing in our minds that “to know about children is to know about humans”.