Playing in the Dark: The Tao of Shadows

"In Chinese philosophy, the concept of yin-yang...is used to describe how seemingly opposite or contrary forces are interconnected and interdependent in the natural world...how they give rise to each other as they interrelate to one another...Yin and yang are actually complementary, not opposing, forces, interacting to form a whole greater than either separate part...Everything has both yin and yang aspects, (for instance shadow cannot exist without light)...."  --Wikipedia

          

The Taijitu symbol, which represents this concept or philosophy, shows light and darkness, or white and black, encircling each other, almost like twins in the womb (I lived through this experience), with each element containing a small dot of the other; the elements are inextricable, and Taoist philosophy generally seems to pass no moral judgement on either element, suggesting that each is simply part and parcel of life.

It is easy to see how Taoism might fit in with the mission of a nature center.  Naturalists and teachers here at Dodge spend a lot of time pointing out how inextricable life and death are, how one gives rise to the other in an endless cycle, or circle (there's that Taijitu symbol in actual form).  But what do yin and yang have to do with preschoolers here in the classroom?  Well, I'm extending a metaphor to illuminate curriculum that has recently emerged in the Spruce Room:  shadows.  

We've been "romancing shadows" and "playing in the dark" here in the classroom (my apologies to Toni Morrison).  While our shadow inquiry hasn't been overtly philosophical, the fact that we are learning that shadows are wonderfully complex things begins to allude to the deeper mysteries of life.  Philosophies seem to emerge when humans mull over the more complicated physical mysteries of existence.  Despite Taoism's neutral stance on lightness and darkness, historically, shadows are often scary or mysterious things.  The dark can be inscrutable or unpredictable, especially for young children.  In our American culture (if such a thing can be generalized), shadows also seem to have a bit of tantalizing, nearly delicious danger, like Halloween.  On yet another hand, sometimes, in stories, shadows personify playfulness or trickery (remember Peter Pan?).  Physically, shadows are darkness, the absence of light, and yet they exist because of light.  You can make some shadows, and control some shadows.  Shadows move with objects, or around them.  Some shadows contain light, or color.  

Preschoolers know what shadows are innately, physically.  Preschoolers understand physics through actual, physical experience.  However, putting experience into words, forming hypotheses about something you already know on a certain level is a challenge.  Shadows exist; kids know this innately, but, What is a shadow?  After shining a light at a classmate, one preschooler answered:  "There is no shadows without light!"  The answer was arrived at by discovering the absence, the negative space, if you will, and putting words to the discovery of relationship.  Things are related.  This is a big discovery.

overhead projector in the loft

How did this shadow play begin?  Well, we needed to move some things in our classroom, and we could not find the right spot for our big rectangular light table.  "Stick it up in the loft," we said.  And so we did.  We threw some transparent materials up in the loft, with the light table and attended to the rest of the room.  By and by, kids drifted upstairs to play with the stuff, and they had fun, but it wasn't really grabbing them.  And then my colleague, Joey, who is always reflecting on our classroom materials, and turning possibilities over in her mind, resurrected an old workhorse of ours:  the much out-dated, outmoded but super-fun, overhead projector.  Sure enough, the old projector got the juices flowing.  Kids applied transparencies and objects up above, in the loft "Light Studio," and projected them on to our classroom wall down below.  Classmates came to dance and play in the resulting pictures, or projections.  We added colored papers to the mix, and just like theater gels, kids could use these to alter or set the "stage" down below.  

dancing in the projected light down below

The children dancing in front of the wall, discovered their own shadows.  Hands became puppets.  And then paper became puppets.  And one day, my other co-teacher, Luzia, drew a marvelous dragon on black paper, cut it out, and mounted it on a stick.  The children were ecstatic.  The dragon inspired puppet-making.  Enter Joey, stage right:  "I'm going to go find that old puppet theater " (a wooden folding screen that we had employed to make a giant pinhole camera the year before).  She found it and the puppet theater window was covered with a white sheet and set strategically in the stream of light from the overhead projector.  And just like that, we had a shadow puppet theater!  Luzia fashioned a rabbit, a jaguar and a tree puppet.  At Group Time, she re-told a favorite old Brazilian folk tale, with the new puppets and then...

Luzia tells a Brazilian folk tale with shadow puppets

Hair seemed to light on fire!  Sometimes you can almost actually see a catalyst ignite children.  We had a frenzy of puppet making.  When children discovered they could make puppets for anything they could imagine, any story inside their heads, they set to work as if possessed.  We ran out of materials.  And then children began to write stories for the puppet theater in their journals...

As you may know, here at Dodge, children keep story acting journals in our classrooms.  These journals already function as places to write screenplays, as we act out the stories at Group Time, but now a child writing in her journal can choose to write specifically for the puppet theater.  With a little nudging, we followed the kids' lead and instructed everyone to "write a shadow story."  And they did.  And then they did it in reverse, staging shows that they then dictated into words and pictures in their journals.  Now the animals we are studying show up in journal stories, and puppet shows too.  As they imagine, dictate, write, read, draw, trace, cut, tape and staple, the kids are experimenting with the nature of things, with the physics of light and dark.  At Group, we discuss transparency and what "opaque," means.  We talk about light travelling and bouncing.  And all of these terrific discoveries are being made because the kids just want to play.

behind the scenes in the puppet theater

Play, as Joey, points out, is driving this inquiry.  It is the love of entertaining one another, of delighting in thrilling or funny stories.  It is the competition to direct a show, the control of running the projector or designing the lighting, the excitement of standing up high in the loft and looking down at your creation on the wall, the pride of being in the spotlight on your own, the fun of being in the audience together and the power of seeing your ideas become "real," that drives these kids.  The kids learn through play, as they always do, responding to the presence of new, or familiar, things and people in their environment.  Children are shaped by their entire experience; they have a relationship with the world.  These experiences inform their play and the play itself generates new experiences.  Play and learning are as inextricable as light and shadow.

projecting art and words

The Spruce Room had a request to perform a shadow play for the Willow Room.  So we wrote a story for them.  It is a squirrel story, because we are studying squirrels.  The story features a "dust puddle," because some of us are very fond of vacuum cleaners, and it has a spaceship in it, because, well, space is always cool.  Each child dictated several lines to build the story at Group Time, just as you might have done around the campfire as a kid.  The resulting story is of course hilarious, but we have shaped it into three acts and Joey ran us through our first rehearsal this morning.  There was a bit of a tussle back stage.  One puppet got broken.  There was some arguing.  Some children cannot remember to keep their heads out of the frame, others insist on chatting through the performance, veering from the written plot or abandoning their puppets in the middle of the action.  The staging is rough, to say the least, but when asked, "What did you like about the show?"  They said, "Everything."  And when asked, "Which parts do you think are working?"  They said, "All of them."  We will practice more for our show, and perhaps this will develop some more critical thinking skills, but at the moment, we are enjoying the moment-- the entire moment.