Investigating in the Community

In their beautiful and provocative book, Cup, Bridgette Towle and Angela Heape describe the many ways a long-term investigation of simple plastic cups grew into remarkable discoveries. Here is one of them:

“The children’s interests when they built with the cups still primarily involved buildings from their own experience, mixed with elements from their imaginations.

We wondered what would happen if we went out into our immediate community and investigated the buildings there. Would this inform and influence what they knew about buildings? What new potential connections and possibilities might this open up in their experimentations and thinking?”

The authors go on to describe how investigations in the community sparked amazing work – from drawing elaborate pictures of buildings they had observed, to using cups and other objects to recreate their observations. “Drawings and images made visible the multiplicity of children’s different ideas...documentation became active and alive; alive with a movement and force in itself to affect new potentialities and possibilities.”

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