Spark City!

A story from Spark Land Vol. 2 from our Assistant Director, Jeni Vash:

Once upon a time in Sparkland, a new city was born. The only parameters: a giant cardboard box lid for the platform and placement of each learner within a team. Guides threw out a few questions to launch learners into action: What is the purpose of your city? Do people live there? Are there stores, restaurants, businesses?

Inspiration caught like wildfire and the materials came pouring in from home. Learners started saving boxes and bottles from the recycle bin and even the toilet paper rolls from every bathroom! As materials collected, so too did ideas. City themes, names, layouts, building plans…everything was starting from ground zero. Many learners became passionately inspired architects drawing detailed building plans and city layouts. Beaches and parks evolved with miniature trees and mushrooms, a mechanic shop was under construction, and a gift shop decorated as a present started to fill up with trinkets, coins, and treats. A few teams, however, struggled to come to consensus. Arguments that started as simple pebbles grew to giant mud pits in which learners became stuck, unable to move forward with any ideas. Guides longed to throw learners a rope by offering a suggestion or solving the argument for them, but that is not the way learning happens in this studio. Here, at Acton, the studio is learner led. 

What does that mean, to be learner led? If the adult is not the teacher, what is the role? How do we support without telling or showing? And, for goodness sake, how do we relinquish control over the process and outcomes?

But, as Guides, we must. We must let go and trust the learners, and so we did. As the days unfolded and weeks went on, Spark City began to grow exponentially. Solitary buildings turned into neighborhoods within consistent themes. Skyscrapers raised. Parts of the city were lit by day, while the haunted neighborhood crept through the eerie fog into the darkness of night. Unexpectedly brilliant ideas formed in the creativity that flowed in the river under the rainbow bridge past the river houses. Up and up, the ideas climbed into the sky as airplanes flew amongst the clouds, rain, green lightning, and, of course, past the rainbow. Colorful strips of bacon flew up from the smokestacks of the bacon factory between the stars to the double moon. Electricity from the center of the city brought a bit of extra glimmer to the eyes of the learners and to all of their families as they showcased their work at the public Exhibition.

Maria Montessori said, “Imagination does not become great until human beings, given the courage and the strength, use it to create.” How does your family create environments and opportunities to allow for exploration of ideas and creative expression? When is your family learner led? How do you trust the process to follow the journey with your fellow travelers?