Module 1 Discussion 1: Primal Landscapes and Young Children Resources Discussion 1 and 2: Stacylynn12. (2011, November 1). My primal landscape. Lusting for WanderLinks to an external site.. https://lu

To answer that question, we need to understan d space and place. Is there a difference between space and place? When you thought about your favorite childhood play space, was that memory a space or a place? Or are these two words just nomenclature? Yi -Fu Tuan believes there is a difference, and in hi s book, Space and Place, writes about something he calls "the perspectives of experience." How do we perceive the experience of our childhood, for example, and why? So maybe it's not the classroom's The Potential Place ©2021 Walden University four walls that children need most, but it is the experie nce within those four walls that is most important. When conducting some research for a book that I co -authored with Jody Martin and Rebecca Kreth -- it's called Rethinking the Classroom Landscape -- I conducted some informal focus groups with college stude nts, professors, teachers, parents, and child care administrators. I asked these people if they thought there was a difference between space and place. After much discussion and listening, I distilled the conversations and came up with my own ideas about space and place. For a space, I came up with the attributes on the left. A good example of a space is the space in the grocery store checkout line. You stand in this space, wait for the cashier to ring up your groceries, pay, and leave the grocery store, a nd rarely give a thought to your space in line. In that space, there was little social interaction, no emotional connections, and the space you stood in had minimal importance to you. On the other hand, a place is where you have positive memories, deep co nnections, and story -making experiences. A place is where you are emotionally connected, but more importantly, you experience deeply, like your childhood play space. Alan Gussow, artist and naturalist, defined place like this -- "Place is a piece of the en vironment that has been claimed by feelings. We are homesick for places. And the catalyst that converts any physical location into a place is the process of experiencing deeply." Here's an example of how Claire Nugent, owner of Ferntop Nature Preschool, l ocated in Nashville, Tennessee, has created a place where young children experience deeply.

Since Ferntop is a nature preschool, the children spend the majority of their day in the forest, which you can see beyond the gate. Every morning, the children run out to the Magic Gate and prepare to enter the world of nature. Prior to going into the forest, however, they go through the Magic Gate. One by one, they say good morning to the metal owl, push open the gate, ring the bell, and say good morning to all the ir nature friends. Although it would be easy to go around the gate on either side, children are held fast by the ritual of opening the gate and ringing the bell. As children enter the gate they ring the bell and say, good morning, forest. Good morning, ch ipmunks. Good morning, pine cones. When children return in the afternoon, after a grand day of forest play, they reverse the process and say goodbye to the animals and natural objects of the woods.

Goodbye, unicorn. Goodbye, chipmunks. Goodbye, squirrels. The Potential Place ©2021 Walden University Do you think that 20 years from now, if someone asked this little boy in the blue shirt about his favorite childhood place, he might say the Magic Gate in the forest at Ferntop Nature Preschool? I would say that it's a strong possibility, because Claire Nu gent, owner of Ferntop, has created a place, a magical gate, a sense of place, a place where children experience deeply. So how do we create places and not merely spaces? How do we design our classrooms to resonate with a sense of place and not just anoth er classroom with four walls and a door? Anita Rui Olds, architect and author of the iconic book, Child Care Design, says "A spirited design satisfies children's souls. The spirit of a place denotes a setting whose integrity helps people feel more fully al ive." Indeed, it is not above the classroom's walls. It is not about the classroom ceiling or its floors. It's about the experience within those four walls and a child's perspective about these experiences -- a place alive with joy, with excitement, with f reedom, with anticipation, with wonder -- a place and not merely a space. One strategy for transforming classrooms into a place is by designing with an emotion - centered framework called The Potential Place. So what is this potential place?

According to psy chologist DW Winnicott, the potential place is "the intersection between the child and the environment. The potential place is an intermediate area of human experience in which inner reality or emotions and external or shared environments exist." Winnicot t believed that the individual sees his world at this intersection, this intersection of internal emotions and external realities. Interestingly enough, Winnicott called this intersection "the potential space." I am calling the potential space "the potenti al place," which I believe is also the intersection of emotions and environments. Architect Faith Swickard picked up on Winnicott's theory of transitional space and developed the spatial conditions of emotion from an architectural point of view. Faith Swi ckard said, "Potential space exists as a lens for which the individual sees the world and is influenced by his inner and outer realities, more specifically, through physical and emotional senses." Prior to Winnicott's theory of transitional space, Martin Buber wrote a paper entitled "I and Thou," in which Buber also recognize the existence of this intermediate area between an individual's inner self and the outer space of reality. According to Buber, this outer space of reality includes the context not onl y of built environments, but the affairs of politics, geography, economics, and culture. The Potential Place ©2021 Walden University I believe that we, as early childhood practitioners, need to be at Winnicott and Buber's intersection of child and space when designing environments for young childre n. It is at this intersection where children's positive growth and development takes place. It is here in this intermediate area where the needs and emotions of young children meet the ecology of the classroom space. It is The Potential Place. So the chil d is the inner. The environment, or the space, is the outer. And the intersection, the intersection right in the middle between the child and the space, is called The Potential Place. This information comes from the immediate area of human experiences by W innicott, and also Buber. If you stop to think about it, The Potential Place is not only the intersection of inner child and outer classroom, but it's also the intersection of qualitative, or children and emotions, and quantitative, or classroom, equipmen t, furniture, and materials. Too often, we only think about the quantitative when designing classrooms. How many chairs? What kind of tables? What types of shelves? Which classroom materials? And where do I put all these objects in the space that I have? That's quantitative stuff. You can see it physically. You can touch it. You can count it. It's quantitative. Although we pay enormous attention to the quantitative aspects of our classroom, we sometimes overlook the importance of the child's inner space o r the emotional connection. This oversight may be because inner space is hard to quantify. It's hard to measure. It's difficult to count. This oversight might also be a result of mandated environmental rating scales, which primarily rate through the observ ation of visible objects -- i.e. the number of blocks, the number of learning centers -- rather than children's emotions. Perhaps considering the spatial conditions of emotions in a classroom never occurred to you until now. The Potential Place is a way to design early childhood environments at the intersection of child, or inner, and classroom, or outer. It is not an observational rating scale. It is not an assessment for deciding if your classroom is appropriate or not.

The Potential Place helps you discov er what might be useful in designing for emotions, for the qualitative side of the equation, for the spatial conditions of emotion. So what are the spatial conditions of emotion? What should we be thinking about when designing for the intersection between the child and reality, or the child and the classroom? The spatial conditions of emotion stem from and originate with classroom design. The Potential Place ©2021 Walden University How the classroom is designed, how it's laid out, or the materials we select for use within the space creates opportun ities for children to experience important emotions, such as awe, thrill, intimacy, kinship, and power. In other words, the classroom design grants, or empowers, children to experience important and powerful emotions, which, in turn, promote children's pos itive growth and development. The spatial conditions of emotion are essentially what you should consider when designing a built environment. For example, if you were designing a place of worship, what would you need to consider? In this built environment, consideration should be given to offering a place, for example, of reverence, of beauty, or perhaps quiet and solitude. Your design of the space should reflect the expectations, or what you want people to experience, when they're within the four walls. On ly then does it become a place. The same is true for an early childhood environment. The spatial conditions of emotion are what you need to include when designing an environment for young children.

Everything, including furniture, furnishings, and materia ls, influence how and what children experience. Everything either promotes or doesn't promote children's opportunities for experiencing spatial conditions of emotion. What furniture you put into t he environment, the furnishings you choose, and the selected learning materials empower children to experience, or not, the spatial conditions of emotions. Even the positioning of the furniture within the classroom grants children opportunities, or not. Th e spatial conditions of emotion is, according to architect Faith Swickard, "the experience of doing that arises out of the being." The Potential Place focuses on five spatial conditions of emotion that were put forth by architect Faith Swickard. They are kinship, power, intimacy, awe, and thrill. Each spatial condition of emotion has certain attributes. For example, the attributes for the spatial condition of kinship might be collaboration, communication, friendship, teamwork, and sense of community. Or th e attributes for the spatial condition of emotion for thrill might be prospect, novelty, surprise, monumental, or bright. Or the spatial condition of intimacy might be refuge, respite, soothing, safe, and reflection. So let's take a deeper look into the s patial condition of emotion for kinship. As you can see, the attributes for kinship might be communication, friendship, community, collaboration, and teamwork. Much of the spatial condition of kinship is based on emotion, so it's very hard to quantify. In order to make this qualitative concept of kinship a little bit more visible, and therefore understandable, one needs to think something like this. What can I physically do in the The Potential Place ©2021 Walden University early childhood environment to promote the qualitative aspect of kinship? Ho w do I, for example, encourage community or encourage friendship or collaboration? What can I do in the spatial environment to encourage kinship? So let's look at a classroom and see how the spatial condition of kinship can be promoted through seating, fo r example. There's some research about benches and how benches promote collaboration and communication between children. The researcher took a table and three separate chairs and put three children in the chairs and offered them some manipulatives to play with. Then she stood back and watched the children play. All three children sort of went about their play by themselves. They didn't communicate too much with the person next to them. They didn't share the manipulatives. They didn't collaborate. They pret ty much stayed by themselves in their individual seats. She called the middle child out from the middle seat, and then she observed to see what happened when she called that middle child out. Did the children on the ins scooch together, talk to each other ? Did the change in the landscape make any difference when the middle child was not there in his seat? What the researcher found out was nothing happened. The children continued to play by themselves, not sharing, not collaborating, not communicating. The n she put the three same children on a bench and gave them the three same manipulatives to play with. She stood back and watched them and observed to see what happened. Immediately, almost, the children started talking together and scooching a little bit c loser together and collaborating and sharing. I guess they thought that they felt a little freer because they didn't have to move the individual seat. All they had to do is move their bottoms over closer to their neighbor.

She did the same thing as she di d with the individual seat. She called the middle child out, just to see what would happen. Immediately, the two children on the outer edges of the bench scooched together and started playing together. So what she ascertained from this research was that b enches promote children's communication and their collaboration and their sharing of the manipulatives and of the projects that they have that they're working with. So that's one idea, is to offer benches in your classroom. Instead of having just chairs, i ndividual chairs, think about how you could offer a bench, how you could maybe offer a variety of seating for children in a way to promote kinship. Another way to promote kinship is to offer spaces specifically designed for very small groups of children, perhaps just two children. Look to the back of this classroom to the The Potential Place ©2021 Walden University left of the playground door. You will see three tall sticks that have been woven together to form a teepee -like structure. In this image, you will see how the teacher created this very s mall area -- just right for two children, perhaps three -- a place for them to tuck away, to have great conversations, perhaps to share a book, whatever they want to do. But they are able to get away in a small group and promote the spatial condition of emot ions, of kinship of friendship, of buddies, of best buddies. This is a great example of how you can take your classroom and offer the element of kinship in it. Here is the same classroom, only this time let's talk about the spatial condition of awe.

Attributes of awe are wonder, inspiring, joyful, uplifting, and stimulating. Look to the back right corner, where the teacher has created a place where children can play with the illumination, with light, and with shadow. There are mirrors, a light table, shiny and shimmery materials to reflect in the light. There's an overhead projector that's adding colorful splashes of light on the wall. Notice the mirror hanging from the wall at an angle so children can see their reflections and constructions from a to tally different perspective. Fairy twinkle lights add to the magic and ambience of the place. The teacher has truly created the spatial condition of awe in this back corner. This is another classroom. This classroom is definitely filled with awe, in terms of novelty, wonder, wonder with nature, illumination, and reflection. Take a special look, though, at this table. It's currently upside down. It was intentionally left upside down and free of encumbrances. In this room, the teacher has given children the power, the spatial condition of power, to invest in their own environment and to make a change, if they wish. The children have the power to turn the table right side up and use its surface for placing a plate of seashells and twigs. A little bit later, b ecause the children had the power to make the change, the table became a fire pit for cooking dinner. The environment gave them power for change and power for play. The spatial conditions of power afforded children opportunities for change. Because childr en are given power to change, they are encouraged to use the furniture in creative ways. They do not have to keep the chair under the table. They do not have to keep the chair exactly where it was placed. They are encouraged to use chairs and tables in cre ative ways. They have the power to do that, such as this little person made a cradle out of an upside down chair. Or another child made a construction table from a chair, and also The Potential Place ©2021 Walden University put the table upside down to encompass the chair. They were able to do that because the teacher afforded them power and the environment afforded them power. The special condition of thrill is prospect, novelty, surprise. When children are given the thrill of experiencing authentic materials and objects, they oftentimes make inte resting and new discoveries with these novel materials. Placing an unbreakable mirror on a table surface and providing a variety of authentic metal objects promotes the spatial condition of thrill. Add some LED lights to the mix and the thrill factor just multiplied. The characteristics of the spatial condition of intimacy are refuge, reflection, safe, soothing, and respite. When children are offered opportunities for getting away from that mainstream of the classroom environment, they are given the spatia l condition of intimacy. With this condition, young children are able to regroup, both physically and mentally. This small intimate space was made by taking the door off from a closet and using the bottom area for a place for one child. Add a soft, fuzzy rug, some pillows, a box of puppets, and maybe some books for the perfect place to get away from the hubbub of a busy, chaotic classroom. Even a cardboard box can offer refuge, especially one that's just right for one small person and no more. The definit ion of an intimate space can be "where a child can get in, under, or behind an object in order to feel separated from the group." In this presentation, you have learned that The Potential Place is the intersection between the child, or the inner, and the environment, or the outer or reality. You have also learned that within this intersection are the environments spatial conditions of emotion, which are kinship, power, intimacy, awe, and thrill. Finally, you have learned the importance of not designing st rictly to the child, nor to the environment, but rather to design to the intersection of the child and the environment, where the spatial conditions of emotions reside. Young children are losing their childhoods in today's traditional classroom. Children' s childhoods are being threatened by the classroom -- the classroom filled with plastic, gadgets with buttons, televisions and computer screens, and close -ended learning materials. You know, those materials that have only one solution and one correct way to use them. Traditional classroom design are those governed by numbers -- the correct number of blocks, the right number and type of books, the required number of centers and necessary manipulatives, and governed by stuff. This stuff is supposedly equated t o quality. The Potential Place ©2021 Walden University The right number achieved on the ECERS or the FCRS or the SCRS or the A -CRS, or whatever observation assessment tool, is not the answer. Although useful for understanding the basics of classroom environment, critical essentials are being overlo oked and actually thwarted, resulting in an institutional and cookie cutter children's habitat, and therefore a loss of childhood. It's time to stop the erosion of childhood. It's time to create new habitats for young children, where the spatial condition s of emotion -- kinship, awe, thrill, power, and intimacy -- are transparent, where habitats are places and not merely spaces, where children can do what they do best -- be children. Let's make a commitment to bring back every child's right, the right of chil dhood. The Potential Place Content Attribution AdobeStockLicense_52972514 Pavla Zakova AdobeStockLicense_66589926 cromary AdobeStockLicense_52292066 vvoe AdobeStockLicense_285673563 panadda AdobeStockLicense_51961563 Brian Jackson AdobeStockLicen se_204100677 Iryna AdobeStockLicense_91650581 maria1701 AdobeStockLicense_334407021 The Potential Place ©2021 Walden University Thomas Milton