An Evening of Professional Development: The Language of Recycled Materials

Teachers from Boulder and Denver joined us at Boulder Journey School to find a buffet of recycled materials waiting for them.

After a brief introduction to Frances and David Hawkins' ideas of the three phases of Messing About, the teachers were invited to mess about with recycled materials, with the invitation to choose from the following three possibilities:

• Make up a story and use recycled materials to either illustrate it or act it out.  Write your story to share with others.
• Create a 2 or 3 dimensional composition from recycled materials that conveys an emotion.
• Create a plan for a simple machine you would like to build, and construct it out of recycled materials. 

As participants worked, the faciliators took notes on the interactions and observed to see where support was needed or where further provocation would be valued.

We finished the evening with dialogue to discover the a-has we had uncovered about ourselves as teachers, ourselves as learners, and the properties and affordances of recycled materials.