Light Through Texture - Digital Projections

Light is the foundation of digital projections in the classroom. Here we see a projected image of a snail on a stem. From the front of the image below, we have a much different perspective. We can see how the mesh softens the crisp image and distorts the light as it passes through the surface, creating an offset pattern. From behind the mesh, we are able to see the image project clearly but with a much different perspective. When we changed the mesh (last picture), we saw yet another image. This is the beauty of light through mesh in digital encounters.

This type of work asks us to extend our thinking beyond what is solid and what can be transformed as light encounters other materials. We engage in a type of Interactive Imagination through this work, extending out the 100 languages of children into a hundred more. Entering into dialogue with the children allows us to wonder together in what is a brave new space for us as co-learners in the classroom. Our attempts to understand the language of the digital is slow, we have starts and stops as we learn the affordances of these materials. I have found that my own work in learning how to navigate digital spaces has many moments of uncertainty. But, I take this opportunity to embrace my disequilibrium in this process. For it is in my unknowing that wonderful new experiences arise.

It is also in this unknown journey- working alongside early childhood educators and children- that I learn that the benefit of disequilibrium in opening another new space. It is a space of listening. I take the words of Carlina Rinaldi to heart.

“If we believe that children possess their own theories, interpretations and questions, and that they are co-protagonists in their knowledge-building processes, then the most important verb in educational practice is no longer to talk, to explain, to transmit, but to listen.”

In listening, we come to see see that we are not the leaders in this new space, rather we are co-constructors of interactive imagination bringing the children’s real and imagined worlds together. Thus, we enter into new ways of being together. Listening then becomes the foundation of my digital dreams.