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1. Introduction

It was on a plane coming home from a visit to the infant/toddler school system of Reggio Emilia, Italy that I was taken by the possibilities of what might happen if the model of documentation I had just witnessed fell into the hands of design students.

This paper is rooted in my intention coming to pass: over the next four years I developed my curriculum, The Teaching and Documentation Project, within the newly formed Graduate Design Program at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Simply put my students document their design and teaching of an art/design project at a site in the neighborhood. This paper is an overview of a semester spent with graduate design students immersed in – even as we became practitioners of it – the

Documentation, Assessment,and the Digital:Teaching Interpretation in Design Education

L i n d a Ya v e n

…the art of making things which easily slip by without a sound,moments which I call divine lizards, stay for a little.

—Daybreak, Ecce Homo, Friedrich Nietzsche

ly@lindayaven.com510-594-3602

©2004 Linda Yaven. All rights reserved. No portion of this document may be reproduced without prior consent from the copyright holder(s). Unauthorized duplication is punishable by applicable laws.

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All photos by the author (unless otherwise noted)

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nquestion what is documentation? Presented here is a mapping of the terrain crossed in documentation. It is my contention that this become a core practice for individual and group learners in design education.

Echoing the emergent nature of documentation itself this curriculum is

a work-in-progress replete with glitches, departures and modifications. Ideas and actions were pared down. This paper is written from the point of view of the teacher and my bias – even as I become adept at this – is to conserve the texture of an experimental curriculum and my classroom as a design laboratory.

2. History

Several snowy winters ago I visited Reggio Emilia in Northern Italy which Newsweek Magazine named one of the top ten learning systems in the world. Given that their students are three months to six years of age and since my work is with adults I was concerned about the relevance (but it was Italy: I was going!). My worries proved needless: it was all relevant and generated provocative questions. High on my list – in the context of Reggio’s focus on the child – was a question about who an adult could become in this collaborative model that provides equivalency to images in conjunction with the spoken word. The meaning documentation could impart to an adult life (students and teachers – learners all) became an on-going research for me.

We reward talking in education. Given the developmental age of Reggio’s “clientele” these infants and toddlers do not possess the same recourse to speech as adults do. In Italy I got to see systemically what else comes forth in learning when the tyranny of the spoken word was quieted. As a studio painter/teacher I embodied and was accustomed to educational practices that moved away from this zone. That said it was confirming and a breath of fresh air to experience this in another context entirely. The Italians speak of documentation as “the second skin” of their schools.

The children’s words, images and artifacts and their reflections about their work were everywhere on the schools surfaces and environment. While the work displayed ran the gamut from simple to complex what was striking was the way collections of documentation were displayed. The care of each work no matter how humble was notable. The school environment had an aesthetic order to it.

They say there that children speak 100 languages yet adults privilege only one: the spoken word. Through documentation the visual is restored its rightful place in learning.

During WWII Reggio Emilia was a stronghold of the Italian Resistance; it has long been a region of Italy with a fierce sense of self-hood. It is not surprising then that in this historical soil a sophisticated model regarding the individual in relation to the group has sprung up. It is my contention that Reggio Emilia is already

LEARNING IS CONVERSATIONAL:Sarah Skaggs teaching

a lesson on the alphabet

HISTORY IN THE MAKING: how do we ensure the creative child grows into the creative adult?

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living in a future paradigm – if not what it means to be an adult in culture – certainly what it means to be a child today. Documentation is central to how this panorama is playing out.

The first morning of the conference I attended opened with a beautiful warning. Although participants came from around the world the Italians spoke specifically to Americans – with whom they enjoy a strong alliance. “You Americans” they warmly admonished “you come to Reggio Emilia wanting solutions, formulas. You live with the widespread illusion that you can catch the identity of a place in a short while and want to know the top ten things to do so you can replicate us back in the States”. They refused this interpretation making clear that even after forty years they refer to themselves as an experiment. Formulas are applicable everywhere. Our American homework is to translate their example to our very different soil.

For a design educator this was not a trivial comment. We live in an era about which philosopher Jacques Derrida has commented “one is more or less obliged to reproduce the stereotypical discourse”. A foundational question for us when consolidation and control are key colorants of our time and in which art and design education becomes increasingly codified is how to conserve the improvisational moment at the heart of creative process and critical thinking. Documentation potentially protects this moment.

3 What is documentation?

In retrospect I see that the most obvious of questions guided the conversations my students and I had the first day of class: what is documentation? I had been so preoccupied with the stuff of getting the project off the ground – handouts, readings, time lines etc. that it wasn’t until we began to talk that it dawned on me this question was the underlying thread.

We ordinarily think of documentation as something conclusive which occurs at the completion of a project. An alternate definition is emerging however in cutting edge educational circles - one congruent to my way of thinking with design practice. This innovative stand holds documentation to be a powerful tool for making learning visible. Here documentation is not something moribund but alive and responsive to a social context of learners. Reggio Emilia, Italy and Making Learning Visible at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education’s Project Zero are among the leaders of this vision.

BREAKING THE “LEARNING LAWS:” documentation allows for exuberance in individual and group learning

DOCUMENTATION IS PART OF THE DAILY LIFE OF OUR CLASS:here students Adriana Perez and Chih-Yang Tsao document a critique

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nWe do documentation an injustice if we come to it merely as a methodology. More helpful – although initially unnerving - is to approach it as a shift in paradigm in which glaciers of learning are able to surface. What comprises documentation is a long and often subtle list. Listening, looking, relinquishing the act of speaking would be on it. We would also find

the realm of the emotions in learning, questions about what constitutes the aesthetic beyond form making and also the shaping of time in our accelerated learning environments. For the documenter there must be an account of these moments – a readiness to surrender to not knowing – something suspect in western education.

A working definition of documentation could be the traces of a learning process, the visual footprints of an individual or group’s learning process so that someone who was not there could follow the tracks through reading/listening to the images and sounds presented. Documentation implies that participants revisit their learning through the artifacts generated and ideally are able to design next steps and trajectories for their learning based on what they see and the interpretations they make.

DOCUMENTATION UNCOVERS THE VISIBLE ACT OF LEARNING... ...AND TEACHING: Dan Shafer’s yo-yo lesson offers many possibilities for documentation

In documenting we leave visual footprints of our learning

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The first day of the semester we created a thoughtmap on documentation on the blackboard. Among the distinctions the students came up with were: research, evidence of progress, non-empirical evidence, meant to be read, transference of knowledge without teacher present, understandable by whoever reads it. On the last day of Project Zero’s first Making Learning Visible Institute this summer Melissa Rivard, faculty, held up a pencil and said “this is documentation”.

The second year I taught this course midway through the semester I received an E-mail from a student, Julia Flagg, who had been in my class the year before. She had been leafing through sheets of

slides taken of the 5th and 6th graders she taught and documented then. Referring to her photographs Julia wrote “its meaning rests for a while in my slide sleeves but perhaps more powerfully comes to greater meaning when I revisit months later that slide sleeve…I have even found new pieces (usually close up details) from the photography so a reciprocal relationship is introduced: the documentation becomes the work itself and not just a record of it.”

Several layers of documentation took place – in fact more than I counted on. On the second day of class I was surprised and delighted when one of my students, SangBack Yeo, showed up with a video camera and began filming. This continued

throughout the semester with students directing the handing off and sharing of the filming themselves. The video camera going became transparent to us as we worked.

It is the daily life of learning – nothing extraordinary – that is the subject of documentation. Among the projects my students documented this semester was a papier mache mask project, a “blind” coke taste test and one about favorite buildings in the neighborhood. Documentation is a kind of phyllo dough layered between the prosaic that makes us appreciate how delicious the everyday can be. We come to documentation already as documenters – to be human is to observe, take note. Documentation is observing, with residue.

It is precisely because in the documentation model we are not asked to create museum quality work – although this happens – nor to document anything astonishing that the possibility of turning design students loose as documenters was intriguing. Or to qualify it was the possibility of designers documenting who were trained in straddling the worlds of social engagement and form making as interdependent in design. One of the more moving moments in the semester for me personally was the day I showed my students the slides I had been diligently taking all along of them with a digital camera. It was the late middle of the semester when we sat down together

SPINNING A TEACHING WEB: California College of the Arts (CCA) Graduate Design students created this on the first day of The Teaching and Documentation Project

TEST RUN DAY 1: the team practices what they will be teaching – CCA Graduate Design students Man Hui Chan, Caitlin Lang, Robby Pande, and SangBack Yeo

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to look. I had planned on editing out photos but there wasn’t time. Initially I had considered reorganizing the photos so that each student would have their own sequence but soon after I began this it proved too daunting a task. Instead we looked at the photos unedited and in the time sequence in which they actually occurred. This made sense given our topic of individual and group learning. The camera moved from student to student the way a teacher’s eyes do.

The room was quiet as we watched. Just prior I had had a conversation with Adriana Perez, one of my students, about how many seconds to leave each slide on for. She was more versed in the digital than I was and we went up and back. Her vote was for two seconds while my penchant was for longer. We smiled, not changing one another’s minds and I set the slideshow for four seconds.

I cannot say what my students saw. For the observer I am my affection for my students was revealed – along with an ineffable quality that attached to the poignancy of the learner. I have taught for many years yet it was only at the moment of seeing my documentation that the presence of this mood – that I had always been looking at my students in this light – clicked for me.

Afterwards we spoke about whether these photos would have meaning for another audience who was unfamiliar with each participant. Adriana suggested that perhaps with culling and editing they would. Again I cannot speak for the group but I felt a breath of fresh air at having this visible way to share my read of them. I was the teacher and I didn’t have to speak.

In particular the second semester of The Graduate Design Program has been nicknamed “the group semester”. Students worked in groups in my courses, The Teaching and Documentation Project and Design Leadership: Case Study. In the later they designed all aspects of CCA’s MFA show with the constituents in the MFA Program as their clients. Simultaneously my colleague Raul Cabra

4. Design and the Social

While designers have always acted within a social context this is not an arena in which they are explicitly trained. My courses at CCA echoe an aspect of the mission of our Graduate Design Program as a whole within which my colleagues and I work. As originally envisioned by Founding Chair Lucille Tenazas the concept was to bring forth the social as a subject for learning in design.

GIVING VISIBILITY: the teacher is always looking – documentation provides evidence of this

NOT YOUR AVERAGE FAMILY TREE:Cassandra Keggler’s chart of the different groups CCA Graduate Design students participated in during a particular semester

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was teaching a studio course where groups of students needed to be engaged out in the world as they designed for clientele in communities beyond the college. A guiding question shaped my initial approach to designing the documentation curriculum: How to educate the introverted designer who creates and the extroverted designer who collaborates, teaches and leads?

There were 14 students in my seminar. The students were asked to design an art/design project that they would design, deliver and document at a site in the community. During spring semester the students worked individually, in pairs and in teams at a variety of sites: a 3rd grade class, a 6th grade class, mentoring 2 elementary school kids at home, an after school program, an inner city high school and a small high school for youth with special needs.

Highlighted here is the documentation done by a group of four of my design students, Man Hui Chan, Caitlin Lang, Robby Pande, and SangBack Yeo, on this school:

Documentation both facilitates group interaction and can have as its subject group interaction. The class worked in teams or individually and then came together again to build the growing collection of documentation and design its presentation. Throughout the groups and solo practitioners worked at different paces.

Some students had teaching experience. Others had never taught nor interpreted their work as designers as containing teaching and leadership moments. Despite initial trepidation though everyone was game to try.

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For many years now I have directed collaborations between students at CCA and students in the wider Oakland/SF community. In the Project Approach, as the Reggio Emilia pedagogy is called, there is a moment when the children go out into the world to research their chosen topic: poppies or crowds or supermarkets. They test their initial hypothesis about the subject they are investigating there. Same with college students: collaborations were set up between the design students and sites in the community where they would teach. The rubber needed to meet the road for the learning to stick.

Our teaching/documentation project was not only about increasing knowledge but about changing the observer we are of relationships. To underscore the social aspect at work in learning groups Dr. Thomas Lewis, author of A General Theory of Love, was a guest to class. His research provided the biological grounding for our emphasis on the social in pedagogy and demonstrates how as human beings we are wired to be in relationship with others and there are repercussions for our capacity to learn when this is absent.

5. Antechamber The Teaching and Documentation Project course lasted one semester in which we met once a week for three hours a week. This was an incredibly short amount of time given what got accomplished. How did we spend it?

Several layers of documentation took place. My students documented their students at their respective sites in the community, I documented my students and they documented each other and me. In some cases my students’ students were documenting. We all documented the objects and artifacts generated.

The documentation took many forms: photographs, video, drawing, charts, paper and pencil/pen, audio, analog, digital. Yet in all of this perhaps the key material was time and its design.

We cannot intervene in a world we do not see. In an introductory undergraduate design studio I at one time taught we limited our pallet to black, gray and white for the whole semester. At first the students would groan that they didn’t get to use color but I promised that with time they would be able to see distinctions in gray that they couldn’t discern at the beginning of class.

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Youth participant in ArtSpark, a summer collaboration between CCA and Oakland high school students

...A PARTICULAR PRACTICE OF LOVE:from early on we thrive in constructive proximity

A SPACE BEFORE BEGINNING:an antechamber in a palazzo in Venice

A GENERAL THEORY OF LOVE...

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nUnless we slowed down our approach to documentation many potential distinctions along the road would never be uncovered. I was drawn to the idea of stations as a way to approach and proceed through our documentation project and devised the idea of The Antechamber as our first stopping point for research. I thought of John Cage’s line “I always like to be starting from zero”; my intent was for the students to dwell a little

longer than usual in beginnings. What were they predisposed to and what new predispositions would they try on?

In The Antechamber phase the students were asked to document any preparation for their documentation and teaching. They could begin at home and move out from there. At this moment they were asked to refrain from documenting the people at their sites. What would be

revealed through mining the environment, objects and artifacts, the light, the finishes, the formal devises without being peopled yet?

In their next documentation move people would be included, particularly, to begin with their on-site contact person.

The aim was to have the students float awhile with the questions and concerns that the project elicited. The idea was to establish an orientation if not of explicit action, and there was, then of time to absorb and digest even as they swung into design action. In the documentation model emphasis is placed on the questions “what

SHADES OF GREY: the subtleties of individualand group navigation as depicted by Chul Kim

ARTIFACTS AND ENVIRONMENTS: in the antechamber phase documentationtakes on many forms

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do we already know about what we are about to study? What are our hypotheses going in?” We needed this initial phase before entering the body of the documentation proper to conjure up and collect ourselves even as (constructive) confusion was being aroused. It was also an opportunity to give visibility to the enormous unseen preparation that underscores teaching.

As part of this phase the students were asked to design two syllabi: The Private Syllabus and The Public Syllabus.

6. The Adult

The fact that I looked forward to coming to class each day did not go unnoticed by me. There are teachers in Reggio who have been teaching there for decades without burnout. I had glimmers while there what that might be about.

This process has profound implications for teacher learning. Educator Debra Meier, author of The Power of Their Ideas speaks about how it is not good for students to be around teachers who have to recurrently say regarding problems “it’s out of my hands”. Documentation is inviting and yet raises tension because it offers the possibility of invention. In rote learning systems it returns decision making back to those who work side by side in a classroom – teachers and students. It is full of choice making based on the knowledge of participants of the inner workings of their culture. Although frameworks for documentation may come from outside the “doings” of it happen internally.

Documentation is a conversation between teacher and student, student and student and each with form. While this describes the design studio as well documentation adds something else to the mix: it allows learners to reflect not only upon the development of their form making – the poster being designed let’s say - but upon the social interactions and learning progress (or not) surrounding the creation of that form.

The artist Marcel DuChamp spoke about how the work of art is not complete until it has been viewed by an observer. Documentation is not complete until there has been reflective conversation about it with various constituents. These can include the subjects of the documentation, the makers of the documentation, observers of the process and those who did not take part in of any of these phases.

Assessment conversations are woven throughout. While this is a requirement for any learning context in this instance because the teacher is participating as a maker in documenting she does not stand outside the learning process in quite the same way as ordinarily happens. Teachers practice self-reflection in varying degrees; being a form maker in the classroom has the effect of opening out reflection in intriguing ways for the documenting teacher.

When I began teaching I, like the majority of art and design educators came to it from studio practice rather than education programs and I was astounded by what teaching was teaching me. No one had told me

TEST RUN DAY 2: the team practices what they will be teaching...

...in order to compose an effective syllabus

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about this. With the exception of a few sustaining conversations with colleagues this layer of the experience – the teacher’s learning – remained pretty much a private matter. A colleague returning from Reggio Emilia to the States said the hardest thing was going back to being a solo practitioner in a school full of other teachers. It is the conversation with colleagues about teaching praxis that fuels that practice. Documentation provides the concrete accrual that instigates teacher self-reflection and conversation.

The teacher becomes a co-participator/conspirator generating artifacts along with students. In documentation the adult, like the child researcher, comes afresh and as a beginner to subject matter. This is accomplished in many ways but key among them is that the documenter takes on the position of listener. And in listening we cannot script what we will hear.

For myself and I imagine for my teaching students documentation lightened a burden of teaching and complicated it in other ways. Instead of teacher and student and course content there was now teacher and student and course content and artifact based on the social processes of learning groups.

7. Mistakes

Over the course of the semester each teaching group went through the pitfalls and set-backs that accompany group learning – and in this case teaching as a way to get at group learning. One of the gifts (although I am not sure at the time my students would have described it this way) was that the documentation taking place included the gaffs, the mistakes, the let’s not go there again moments. The backstory of the learning was being revealed.

And in a real sense that’s what learning is made of: moments of mistake, redo and yes, failure. In learning the learner needs to be habitually removed from the tyranny of what they know. This shows up in a myriad of ways – a student’s conversation of “I already know that” or its variation “I could never learn that” or – ironic in learning - the hesitancy to reveal what one doesn’t know. Shame is attached to being a beginner. As human beings we are forever stepping into our incompetence – deep learning underscores this. In design education the relationship between form and formlessness is pivotal.

The act of documenting implies willingness to surrender control – something designers have to be pried away from! In this context documentation is not an act of neutrality but an assessment rich process. The documenter – and the observer of documentation – is often a rapid decision maker. Despite this we find embedded within documentation a de-centering mechanism which acts against the documenter realizing full control of her process.

Within scripted/standardized culture learners in design must be sent to the dynamic of form and formlessness – what they do not know and cannot control – as participants, as observers and using a term Donald A. Schon has coined as reflective practitioners. Design pedagogy has the potential to bring forth the formless as an inherent part of the learner’s gestalt. Because of its built-in unpredictability documentation is a brilliant tool for softening the blow of learning.

The idea is to fail fast, often and in public along with others who are doing same – in the right hands this can be an agent for both individual learning and the group coalescing. We become acclimatized to wiping off the dust, beginning again and soon. Documentation offers opportunities to revisit hot material in a cooler mood. In class the documentation allowed us to revisit the moments we wished had never happened in a lighter mood – even with humor. This also implies we are learning to revise our initial assessments – a pivotal competence in learning. As their witness I saw that documenting students augmented and/or tested their capacity for both autonomy and interdependence. They got to see where they stood and where they wanted to stand.

Having the experience did not convince everyone that teaching was something they intended to do – nor was that the point. It did reveal where students found themselves in the spectrum of navigating the collaborations, negotiations, designing and leading of group learning they would embrace as professionals.

NOT QUITE ABANDONING SHIP... documentation reveals paths not taken

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8. Assessment

Assessment is a national buzzword in education. Yet assessment is misrepresented when we relegate it solely to the realm of standardized testing. Narrative is central to documentation. Here responses are not right or wrong as much as an occasion, as it is said in Reggio Emilia, for testing an individual’s or a group’s ideas and hypothesis.

In conventional educational practice the teacher plays the role of pivotal assessor. In the documentation model however an equivalency between teacher and student is brought into play. We provide spaces for acts of interpretation to become caringly public. While assessment is certainly at work in any classroom documentation makes this explicit – its intended visibility invite public scrutiny and comment. Teacher and student become co-constructors of the knowledge base being built in a documenting classroom/studio. While trust needs to show up recurrently throughout any learning process it is at the core of the decision to introduce documentation into one’s classroom.

There is a distinction to be made between coordinating with others and collaborating with them. In coordinating we have a pre-established aim and each participant gets something out of the transaction. Coordinators can participate without changing much. We do this all the time. We need to give less of ourselves, it is more mechanistic. On the other hand we can speak about the emotions of collaboration. We all know some emotions work better than others for this: trust, respect, openness. We can coordinate without these being present. Yet collaboration requires that at moments we relinquish our position and allow ourselves to be influenced by another’s assessment. The pleasure

and anxiety of collaboration is that we enter into an unknown social space. Uncertainty is present. They say in Reggio that uncertainty is the key emotion of the documenter. Trust is the safety valve.

Generating artifacts and assessments in our work groups was an intense process. Not all of it went smoothly. However uncomfortable these were learning moments for designers whose professional lives after school will mirror the dynamic between solo work, working with others and with objects. Liz Craig and Ellen Hsu created an oversized graphic of their on-site teaching progress and charted their “victories” and “challenges”. They also included “the emotional terrain” as a category to be followed. Seeing their chart was confirming given the room we had granted in class to the emotions in learning. Without becoming saccharine we can say that children’s charm in part stems from the ease with which they change their assessments – they are more yielding than grown-ups in this. Through documenting we create a safe context to listen to others whose assessments may be different from our own. Pouring over another’s documentation we make available our willingness to listen to their meaning making.

It is a learned competence to be mobile in relations to our own assessments, to move off our position and acquaint ourselves with the freedom to take up another position. In collaboration the legitimacy of the other is acknowledged: we accept that someone else is entitled to pursue their own interests and concerns. Then

also as it is with teachers so it goes with documenters: different observers reveal different selves to us.

We all need trusted others who can see what we cannot: our learning blind spots. A teacher traditionally provides this; a group interpreting documentation possesses this agency. In Reggio Emilia they refer to their system as a “pedagogy of relationships” and say that to provide only one teacher for a child is a least generous act. They speak about providing the student with many teachers citing the parent, the teacher, peers and the environment. Artifacts and objects (and the interpretations we provide about them) are teachers.

A collection of documentation becomes an alternate observer: the detritus of a learning process uncovers what we – immersed in praxis – were unable to see. We can ask not only what is the level and quality of the work that students are producing but – especially in design where we are cued to product – what are students discerning through this making that is reproducible in other future contexts? All

EMOTIONAL TERRITORY:Liz Craig and Ellen Hsu’s charting of their teaching

experiences includes the emotional terrain

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this presupposes trust as the prevalent group emotion. When this is present the limits to learning slowly unclog.

One more word about the role of the teacher in the documenting classroom: let’s not be naïve. The teacher is a provocateur initiating sequences and then, no matter where and how the project evolves continues to carry the through line. I couldn’t predict where my students would go with their material. Steve Seidel, Director of Project Zero, likens a group engaged in documentation to a jazz ensemble engaged in improv.

9. FutureHistory: The Back Porch

If the project began with The Antechamber phase I think of its coming to pause, not cease, at a Back Porch of sorts. In a strict sense documentation does not end. In this it is akin to generating a suite of serial imagery: elements can be added, subtracted or shifted. The impetus behind it is to create trajectories for future investigation.

Still the Back Porch image lends itself to closure because if the documentation works at all it has deepened group cohesion. Everyone has worked with intensity and now we pause to sit a spell, revel and dream a little about future directions. We have gotten to know one

another a bit better and feel a little more at home in the world. It’s comforting to enter a metaphoric back porch even if we have less access to them these days. Several years ago I was working at a school in Oakland with a group of teachers on a project integrating art/design into the K-6 curriculum. One afternoon as the class was at work crafting a collage I fell into conversation with a 4th grader. “I’m not good at imagination” she told me “but if you tell me what to do I can do it”. This was a discerning assessment from one so young – and already steeped in prescriptive culture. While I respected her self-savvy her comment concerned me.

Coming home on a plane from the first Making Learning Visible Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts I thought of something I heard while there. One of the participants had spoken about how teachers here in the States care as much about their students as teachers in Reggio Emilia do. Education is a daunting issue everywhere in the world. I am most familiar though with what makes our context so. Documentation is a possible inroad – enhancing team and individual learning and meaning-making in design and addressing in some fashion the question of who the child growing into an adult may become in a learning culture.

THE VAST EXPANSE AHEAD:pondering the options that documentation makes possible...

...Including the different selves we may become

The lesson comes to fruition as evidenced here by the CCA team’s students’ work

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Man Hui Chan’s reflections on her first day of teaching

and documenting.