Educators as Researchers

Earlier in the year I alluded to a couple of educator research projects that are taking place at Flinders this year. One of these is called Making our Mark, an investigation into children’s mark making and 2D art. Making our Mark is running in all houses across Flinders and is managed by the programming educators. But what exactly are we looking at… As discussed in previous posts (the Making Meaning, Making Marks series), Flinders values children’s mark making and considers it both a language and a literacy skill. Mark making occurs for children from a very young age and continues throughout their time at Flinders. It is this pervasive nature of mark making that has prompted us to explore it in more detail. We educators have been wondering, how can we better understand children’s mark making? How can we better support learning in this area? How can we learn to read children’s messages, to become more fluent in their language? As a means to begin answering these questions we developed the Making our Mark project. Each programming educator has chosen at least two focus children, one boy and one girl, who attend Flinders for at least three days each week. The educators are collecting a sample of each child’s mark making each week as a part of our ordinary documentation practices, and analysing this over time to track changes, recognise patters and better understand each child’s mark making language. We will collect and analyse the data over a full twelveRead more