Computation Makes Learning Visible

In the previous two essays, Digital < Computational and The Case for Computation, I explore the power of computation and computational making in learning. This final chapter makes the explicit connection between computation and essential aspects of the Reggio Emilia Approach®.
Such connections are visible through literal documentation of computer use in the municipal preschools of Reggio Emilia and through shared perspectives on debugging, transparency, and documentation.
Although the Reggio Emilia Approach is most often associated with early childhood education, its subtle and complex principles have much to offer teachers and learners of all ages. Unlike other early childhood approaches, our colleagues in Reggio Emilia do not subscribe to a strident reflexive rejection of technology in the lives of children.
George Forman’s chapter, The Use of Digital Media in Reggio Emilia, from the essential book, The Hundred Languages of Children: The Reggio Emilia Experience in Transformation, details the ways in which technology has been used for decades as a medium for creative expression, communication, and inquiry. Forman even included a mention of preschoolers in Reggio Emilia using programable LEGO.
Although this is but a brief mention of computer programming and physical computing, it documents the use of computation in Reggio projects.
Even more strikingly, the book Loris Malaguzzi and the Teachers – Dialogues on Collaboration and Conflict Among Children, Reggio Emilia 1990, features an extensive transcript of educators discussing their documentation of five year-old children programming a physical Logo turtle in 1990. The sophistication and creativity of the children is only matched by the curiosity, thoughtfulness, and wisdom of the educators. There is a lifetime’s worth of inspiration to be learned and relearned in these two books alone.
Essential Reggio Books
Debugging

Debugging — the act of identifying, understanding, and rectifying errors — is an essential element of computer programming and producing a computational result. The spirit of debugging is also integral to the project work undertaken in Reggio environments.
Seymour Papert’s standing in both the progressive education community as the theoretician behind constructionism, and as a computer scientist allowed him to think about debugging in a more global context.
Like our colleagues in Reggio Emilia, Papert acknowledged the reality of project work. Most attempts to learn or create something are plagued by misguided efforts, poor planning, unanticipated events, temporary setbacks, faulty logic, haste, or inattention to detail. This makes the development of debugging skills imperative.
Papert also viewed debugging as a critique of schooling and more poetically as a way of navigating life. Setting aside fears of being wrong and asking if either a computer program or a life problem is fixable is key. Being stuck requires the development of strategies for getting unstuck or charting a different path, perhaps even to a new destination.
Knowledge is not the direct result of having been taught and the world of knowledge is too vast and complex to be reduced to a scripted curriculum.

Papert rejected the Silicon Valley trope that failure is somehow virtuous. He understood that failure is judgement, imposed by others, often accompanied by social stigma or punishment. It is impossible to remediate classroom failure, the thing that students fear most, and use it to motivate.
“The best projects push up against the persistence of reality,” Papert told me. In other words, “sh*t happens.”
When a child is trying to build the tallest block tower and it crumbles, they laugh and build back better. That is unless an adult is watching them. Then fear of judgement turns to tears.
Instead of “embracing failure,” Papert and the educators of Reggio Emilia shift the focus of education away from assessment and towards the act of learners learning.
Reggio’s use of documentation isn’t a form of assessment in search of deficiencies, but a way of making thinking visible in a manner beneficial to the entire community of practice — teachers, parents, and learners themselves.

Documentation

In Reggio environments, one of the primary roles of the teacher is as a researcher sensitive to the thinking of each student. Teachers engage in a continuous process of observation, questioning, interpretation, and documentation of what children say and do in service of preparing the learning environment for their growth. Documentation is an active curated process that informs practice by making thinking visible.
“The concept of documentation, as it is used in the preschools and infant-toddler centers of Reggio Emilia, is a procedure used to make learning visible, so that it can be recalled, revisited, reconstructed, interpreted, and reinterpreted as a basis for decision making. Documentation may reveal a child’s skills and knowledge (or attributes), but more important from the Reggio perspective, in-depth documentation can reveal the learning paths that children are taking and processes they are using in their search for meaning.
As Rinaldi (2001) stated, “We place the emphasis on documentation as an integral part of the procedures aimed at fostering learning and for modifying the learning-teaching relationship. Documentation is a tool for helping teachers and children reflect on prior experience; listen to each other’s ideas, theories, insights, and understandings; and then make decisions together about future learning paths.” (Edwards, Carolyn; Gandini, Lella; Forman, George. The Hundred Languages of Children: The Reggio Emilia Experience in Transformation.)
Documentation does not only serve teachers, parents, and the community. It serves as a clear reflection of prior experiences intended to trigger memory and inspire future developments. It demonstrates to all stakeholders, the intellectual, creative, social, and emotional capacity of children. Documentation becomes a source of pride, accomplishment, and happy memories, rather than either a reward or punishment resulting from an assignment.
If educators possessed the skills required of Reggio-style documentation, the fate of innovations like Logo might have been different than the way in which Alan Kay described (above). The Logo programming language made quite a splash in 1980s schools followed by the predictable backlash against interventions led by passionate educators. Had those teachers engaged in the sort of research found in Reggio settings, their documentation of learning may have been useful in defending and sustaining students programing in Logo.
The beauty of computational projects is that the computer program or computational notebook used in the construction of a project is in itself a form of documentation making the thinking of a child or group of children visible to all to understand, appreciate, interpret, and build upon.
Children working in environments like Logo, Snap!, MakeCode, Scratch, TinkerCAD, and Wolfram Notebook naturally produce documentation of their thinking. Their creations narrate the story of their thinking. Code reveals epistemological pluralism. Product and process are indistinguishable.
Transparency

Computational projects benefit from transparency. Little is hidden or mistaken for magic. There are no tricks up your sleeve. This has serious implications for the advancement of science. Computation accelerates the ease and speed of collaboration, dissemination, replication, validation, or refutation of an experiment. This democratizes the scientific process and expands the universe of scientists.
Kids can not only assess the results of their peers, but also interrogate their thinking process by reading their code. Such transparency allows for children to be inspired by the accomplishments of their peers and put their knowledge into use. Reading another person’s code and modifying (remixing) it, is a popular and powerful form of scaffolding. This is true even if you do not completely understand the underlying program,
Shareability is a defining feature of projects and project-based learning. The transparency and documentation inherent in computational making, escalates sharing.
Checking another person’s work, verifying data, looking under the hood, attributing sources, and maintaining transparency are also essential to the preservation of democracy.
< – Read The Case for Computation, essay 2 in this 3-part series