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Children Are Citizens Book 2017

A resource from Children Are Citizens

Children Are Citizens Book 2017

A resource from Children Are Citizens

People from all around the world know about Washington, DC. They talk about it, write about it, draw it, and make movies and TV shows about it. But almost always, we hear only the opinions and ideas of adults.

For this book we invited some of our youngest citizens—preschoolers, kindergartners, and first graders from DC Bilingual Public Charter School, Sacred Heart School, Seaton Elementary School (DCPS), E.W. Stokes Community Freedom Public Charter School, Sunshine Early Learning Center, and J.O. Wilson Elementary School (DCPS)—to tell us what they think of our city. We asked them to share their ideas in order to help other children (and adults) learn about what is important about DC. We asked their teachers to help students research the city and discuss their ideas with classmates and children from the other schools. Each teacher guided the children in different ways. The result is Washington, DC: "What People Like Most is in This Book!,” a title suggested by the children that conveys their connection to their city. In this book you will find a set of descriptions, theories, and stories—shared in pictures, words, and photographs—that are thoughtful, informative, and sometimes surprising. As Sergio Spaggiari, a veteran educator from Reggio Emilia, Italy, notes, "It seems that for cities to be understood and appreciated, they should be talked about in stories." You can learn a lot about our city from the stories in this book.

Jim Reese

Director, The Professional Development Collaborative at

Washington International School

On behalf of the Children Are Citizens coordinating team: Mara Krechevsky, Ben Mardell, Nathalie Ryan, Joanne Seelig, Stacy Steyaert, and Tim Wright

Use the resource links on the right to view the full book.

Children Are Citizens Book 2017

Article

Howard Gardner on Good Work for Lawyers

A resource from The Good Project

Howard Gardner on Good Work for Lawyers

A resource from The Good Project

Article Sample via Harvard Law School's periodical The Practice.

Article Sample

David B. Wilkins: Your recent work focuses heavily on conceptions of “the good.” So I’d like to begin with the most basic question that you address in your work: Who is the “good worker,” and what are the profiles of “the good” that you’ve been writing about?

Howard Gardner: Let’s start with the good professional—the good worker. At the Good Project, we’ve looked at nine different professions, and we’ve conducted and analyzed close to 1,500 interviews. Over a 10-year period we determined that being a good worker had three components—the Three Es: Excellence, Engagement, andEthics. We produced a visual of the three intertwined Es and somewhat whimsically dubbed it the “Triple Helix” or “ENA.” If you want to be a good worker, you can’t just be excellent, you can’t just be engaged, and you can’t just be ethical. You need to have those intertwined strands of ENA.

The Triple Helix of being a good worker.

Let’s take the law as an example. You could be very well informed and an expert (hence, excellent), but you could be bored or alienated (hence, disengaged). Lawyers report more unhappiness—including depression—than almost any other profession, so clearly many lawyers are not fully engaged. As we well know from the press, lots of lawyers skate on thin ethical ice and test how far they can push limits before falling into a chilly pond! On the other hand, you are also going to have people who are highly ethical but aren’t up-to-date. So the Triple Helix—the achievement of all three Es—is aspirational.

This is exactly where John Bliss’s work (see “The Professional Identity Formation of Lawyers”) is so illuminating, because you see these strands competing with one another. Nobody would say that corporate lawyers don’t try to achieve excellence, but often engagement is more a role they seek to fill rather than a genuine intrinsic enthusiasm about the work they perform every day. I would add, however, that I don’t think any branch of law has a corner on being ethical or on testing limits.

We would all like the professionals with whom we are involved to be excellent and engaged and ethical. That’s what we’d like of our doctor, our accountant, the architect of our home. And most of us would like to realize that combination in our own work lives. When you look at the tensions experienced by “drifters” (see “The Professional Identity Formation of Lawyers”), they prefer to think of themselves in one way—doing God’s work—but feel they’re being pulled in ways that don’t make them happy. That pull risks making them less engaged. They also worry that when they have to look in the “ethical looking glass” or the “moral mirror,” they’re not going to be happy with what they see.

But it’s complicated. You’ve got people who do public interest law who are very unethical. You’ve got people who are doing high-end corporate work and are very ethical. It’s not a necessary correlation or lack of correlation, but it’s probably not random either.

Download the full article in the Resource Links section to the right.

Download Article

Article

Out of Eden Learn White Paper

A resource from Out of Eden Learn

Out of Eden Learn White Paper

A resource from Out of Eden Learn

An initiative of Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Out of Eden

Learn is an online learning community that connects school-age students from

around the world to engage together in “learning journeys” of cross-cultural inquiry

and exchange. These learning journeys invite young people to do several things: to

slow down to observe the world carefully and to listen attentively to others; to

exchange stories and perspectives related to people, place, and identity; and to reflect

on how their individual lives connect to bigger human stories. Out of Eden Learn

accompanies Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and National Geographic Fellow Paul

Salopek’s epic Out of Eden Walk: his multi-year journey on foot around the world

along the migratory pathways of our ancient human ancestors and experiment in

“slow journalism.”

This white paper is intended to explain the underlying philosophy and model of Out of

Eden Learn.

Use the link under Resource Links to download the entire white paper.

Download White Paper

Article

Children Are Citizens: The Everyday and the Razzle-Dazzle

A resource from Children Are Citizens

Children Are Citizens: The Everyday and the Razzle-Dazzle

A resource from Children Are Citizens

How do children get to know their city and the city get to know its children? How often are children asked their opinions about their city? The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) established that in addition to children’s human rights to protection from harm and provision of an adequate standard of living, children also possess civil rights to participate in the cultural and civic activities of their communities. We, the authors of this article, maintain that children are indeed citizens from birth with the right to participate in the civic life of their cities. Cities belong to the adults and children who live there—even young children, who are capable of generating compelling insights about their communities.

The recognition of children as citizens is an essential pillar of the Reggio schools. Sustaining the strong bond between children’s and adults’ destinies has characterized 50 years of dialogue and cultural and political collaboration between the city of Reggio and its municipal preschools and infant-toddler centers. Loris Malaguzzi, founder of the Reggio Emilia educational philosophy, believed that schools are a critical context for fostering the relationship between children and the city. Once Malaguzzi said:

Our children go outside of the school as often as they can. They go to discover what is there or not in the city and to reflect and maybe conquer, with the help of the adults, what could be there . . . [They go] to strengthen relationships with cultural and sports institutions, to run in the fields, to meet the farmers . . . [They go] to discover people’s most beautiful trades, where and how their fathers and mothers work, to make friends with the elderly in their nursing home— images that are missing from their eyes and minds but that are essential to launch themselves into life, into the future. They invite to school the farmer and the factory worker, to hear their stories, their problems, the conditions of the work, and to understand the meaning of life, to feel they are part of a wider community. (see also Cagliari et al., 2016)

How might we help children imagine their futures as active members of their communities? Schools are an ideal setting for fostering a dialogue between children and the city. Like the ancient Greek agora, classrooms can serve as laboratories for life in a democratic community—places where knowledge and culture are both created and transmitted. When children encounter other perspectives—when they discuss, argue, and compare ideas—they are building understanding and making public that which had been private. Cities also provide a construct that three-, four-, and fiveyear- olds can understand—places they can experience and to which they can respond.

This article is written for those who wish to foster a relationship between children and their cities. We start with two examples of children’s contributions to their communities, one from Reggio Emilia—a city with a long and rich history of connecting children to their community, and one from Washington, DC—a city that has more recently built child-community connections. We close by identifying three lessons learned about engaging children in their communities.

From Innovations in Early Education: The International Reggio Emilia Exchange, v. 23, n. 4, published by NAREA (North American Reggio Emilia Alliance)

Download the PDF (under Resource Links) to continue reading this article.

Download the PDF