Learning through connecting the small pieces

Below is a comment that my friend Tony wrote on a blog I posted last year, the last day of SI:

Tony IannoneJuly 20, 2012 at 6:22 AM

Wow Steve...thank you for such a deeply thought out reflection on the past 12 days. I must say that you are one of the reasons that I feel my thinking has moved forward during this time. You came to SI...each day...ready to make connections...not in a forceful sort of, "If they're not there...I'm going to make them" kinda way but in a "If they are there...I'll accept them...if they are not...who cares...just enjoy the ride" sort of way. To someone that can be very close minded at times (that would be me) your openness contributed to the things I will take away from this experience...a broadened definition of the ways ideas and knowledge can circulate within and around the classroom. Thank you Steve!

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   Steve FultonJuly 20, 2012 at 7:09 AM

   You're welcome and Thank you, Tony. It's funny how you refer to yourself as the close minded one. I was feeling that way about myself, and it is the time with you all this week that has opened my thinking up. I remember writing a post earlier after hearing what Donald Graves was saying on wondering, wondering to myself why I wasn't wondering beyond a level of immediate and "practical" things. I wasn't inquiring, I wasn't digging into all of the, familiar, ideas that I accept to be true every day and the strange ones floating around me. This week, with your help, I felt like I was able to move forward with my thinking and writing in a way that before I had not. So, again, Tony, Thank you!

It wasn't until after I began writing this post that I came accros the above exchange, and when I did I was immediately drawn to Tony's remarks about my readiness to make connections, as well as the comments I made about the depth of my wondering.  Both of these areas have existed in some form in my thinking about teaching and learning this past year, and I am also seeing these pieces as being important to the work we are doing in SI this year.

During orientation, making connections seemed like a theme that threaded into each of the demos.  Either making these connections physically, like with string ( in the photo below) in Lacy's demo, or representing them spatially on a map, as it worked in both my and Lil's demos.

In documenting, like we will be doing over the course of SI on our blogs and other spaces, it seems like the value of the process comes from the connections we make through it.  How when we go back into the pieces we've collected and make sense of them, meaning and learning grows out of the connections the process requires us to make. I have been (and still am) thinking about the value of documenting and reflecting in the inquiry process, and  I think that it's this area that I am most excited for this year's Summer Institute.

I am excited to wonder about just which pieces I will hang on to each day and will drive my posts.  I am excited to think about the collective story that these short pieces will tell of my learning over the course of the next three weeks.  I am excited to think about the points in which my path will intersect with those of others.

And I am excited to, in a year from now, read what I am writing in this space now and realize the significance of what happened in SI in affecting who I am as a thinker, writer, and teacher.