Architecture for kids podcast with Ann Gadzikowski author, STEM educator and curriculum designer at Northwestern University

I believe that architecture-inspired construction play is one of the most valuable, creative, and complex learning activities that can happen in an early childhood classroom (ages 3-6). 

Transcript

UNKNOWN: 0:00

Thank you.

SPEAKER_01: 0:09

Hello and welcome to another episode of Architecture for Kids podcast. I'm your host, António Cablão. I'm a trained architect, an architectural educator and founding director of award-winning Architecture for Kids CIC. In this podcast, I'm going to talk to practitioners and creatives that share the same passion as I do, to inspire and to engage children and young people to shape their built environment and the creative industries. The podcast is brought to you in collaboration with the Built Environment Trust, the Thornton Education Trust, and the Wells School of Architecture, Cardiff University. My guest today is Anna Gazikowski. Anna is an early childhood educator and author of Young Architects at Play, Red Leaf Press 2020, and other award-winning books. She's an expert on block and construction play, and she develops innovative STEAM programs for children in the Chicago area at Northwest and serves on the faculty at Oakton College. Her current interests include the role of climate change in the lives of young children. Anne, thank you for talking to me today and I'm looking forward to our conversation.

SPEAKER_00: 1:26

Thank you. I'm looking forward to it too.

SPEAKER_01: 1:28

What subjects did you enjoy most at school and what subjects were you good at if they were different?

SPEAKER_00: 1:34

Oh, that's such an interesting question because I've been thinking so much about architecture and block play and young children and remembering how when I was a little girl, I was of a generation where we were raised to think that block play was for boys and not for girls. And even math and science were generally thought of for boys and not for girls. And sometimes I look back on my experience in school and I wonder if I had been encouraged more, would I be an architect now or would I be an engineer now? And a lot of the work that I've done in classrooms with children has been encouraging girls and other children who may not have have received that kind of encouragement, the sciences, technology, engineering, and math, that those are really for all children. And I do remember when I was a child, I have two older brothers, and we had a very nice set of wooden blocks in our home, but I was always told that they were my brother's block, and they would let me play with those blocks, and I loved playing with them, and I loved building with blocks, but I always had the sense that these blocks belonged to the boys and not to me. I'm trying to change that now in the work that I do with children.

SPEAKER_01: 2:41

You are an author, and you I think

SPEAKER_00: 2:48

of myself as a teacher and a writer. And I write about teaching and I write about children. And throughout my career, more than 30 years now, I've been working directly with children as a teacher or as a school director. Young children ages three to five is my sweet spot. But one of my really important, interesting experiences was working at Northwestern University in the Chicago area. And I ran a summer program for young children called LeapFrog. And this was part of the Center for Talent Development in the School of Education at the university. And because it's a large university, we had access to collaborating with professors, engineering professors, and I learned a lot about technology and robotics and things like that. It was a very influential experience for me in terms of becoming really interested in STEM learning, science, technology, engineering, and math. And we would offer classes for children in the summer And each class was one week long. And we would take a really deep dive into one topic. And a lot of those topics were related to architecture, architecture and engineering. We had a very popular class called Lego Metropolis. And for one week, the children had thousands of Lego pieces, Lego bricks, both the standard Lego bricks, as well as the specialized kind of architectural feature Lego brick. And they would build a city. And on the last day, the parents would come in and see the city that the children had built. And it was such a fascinating experience to me because they had to collaborate in such important ways. They weren't each building a house and then we put the houses together. They had to figure out scale for one thing. They had to figure out if my two-story house is this big and it's the same size as your one-story house, how big are the people who are going to live in it and is that really going to work? They had to come to some consensus about scale. They had to use math to figure that out. And they also had to figure out the infrastructure that that would support their city. They had to build roads. And sometimes the conversations would lead to discussions about electricity or about water or even about accessibility. If someone uses a wheelchair, are they going to be able to come inside your house? This whole experience for me as an educator was really so exciting. Using these materials in such an open-ended way, but letting the children lead the learning was true inquiry-based learning, where the very wonderful teachers that I worked with, they were so skilled at found And so that was such a great model for me, and I was able to develop architecture-oriented courses for even younger children. We had a class called Blocks and Blueprints. These were four-year-olds who were building with blocks, and they were creating two-dimensional documents showing their buildings. That's why it was called Blocks and Blueprints. They would build with blocks on a big sheet of paper, and they would trace what they had built. And then when they removed the blocks, they had the footprint or the floor plan of what they had built. Or they might build a structure and then project a shadow on the wall and they would trace that shadow. They were learning how to represent what they had built in lots of different ways. They could take a picture of it. They could sketch it. And my background as an early childhood educator told me that these different ways of demonstrating what we know and showing what we know deepen the children's learning because every time they recreate it in a new way, they use a new language and they learn something new. To answer your question, I think that my work at Northwestern really set a spark or set a fire in me to explore STEM learning in a way that I had never anticipated. I don't have a degree in science or technology or engineering, but I could see what rich learning experiences these were for the children. And so I carried that into the writing that I've done, the research that I've done, and the other work with children that I've done since that time.

SPEAKER_01: 6:35

It seems that it's very much about looking at the built environment, teaching kids how to work through processes. And I know it ties in with the curriculum because you're dealing with STEM, but this idea of critical thinking, analytical, how does that tie in with the curriculum or it doesn't? Or do you think that what you're doing brings something more than actually is expected?

SPEAKER_00: 6:56

Yes, it's so much more than just the content knowledge. It is the process itself. And in fact, the book that I wrote called Young Architects at Play focuses on construction play, focuses on architecture, obviously. But the next book I wrote, my most recent book, is called Problem Solving. with young children. And it focuses on the problem solving process and not just in STEM Learn, but a lot of it is about the questions and issues that come up in an ordinary day. Say two children both want to be the line leaders when it's time to walk out to the playground. And how are you going to negotiate that and navigate that so that everybody's voice is heard and the children have a sense of power and making decisions and having a say in what happened. The process is really key. And I've seen over the course of my career how the priority in education have changed because of technology, because it's no longer about being able to remember a specific set of facts. It's not about memorization. It's about what are you going to do with that information. And more recently, I've become really interested in the role of early childhood education in climate change and anticipating and preparing for the world that these young children will grow up in and being able to solve problems collaboratively, being able to use materials creatively, coming up with innovative solution to unexpected problems. That's going to be such a key to the future. So how can we prepare children at a really young age so that they're ready to do that kind of work and do that kind of problem solving? A lot of my recent work has been focused on that, not just content knowledge, but problem solving and processes.

SPEAKER_01: 8:33

Do you want to talk about your program, the one that you have about climate change in the lives of young children? What does that consist of?

SPEAKER_00: 8:40

I just recently went to the annual conference of the National Association for the Education of Young Children and presented a session on climate change in young children. And what I talked about is the importance of play. And I spoke about four specific categories of play that I think will best prepare children for a future that's impacted by climate change. And the four kinds of play I talked about were, the first one was play that encourages a sense of joy and wonder in the natural world. And getting outdoors, of course, is the way to do that. And what What was so interesting is during my session with educators from all over the United States, I asked them, I kind of took a poll, how many of you have had to change or limit outdoor play because of climate-related events? And pretty much everybody raised their hand. Teachers are having to limit outdoor play because of heat, because of air quality, and many of their communities and families have been impacted by floods or by fire. It was really amazing how many people have had to change how they teach and how their school day is run right now, not even looking ahead in the future, right now because of climate. If children are going to learn about and appreciate and enjoy the natural world, we're going to have to be really intentional about it. It's not going to happen as easily and as spontaneously as it may have for my generation or other generations when we would just say, okay, we'll just have recess, we'll play outside. Or when you get home from school, you're just going to play outside. Playing outside is not a given anymore. So we have to advocate for it and we have to speak up about it. Natural world is the first one. The second type of play is the problem solving play. And a lot of that is related to block play and construction play and other kinds of materials where questions come up that children need to answer. How am I going to put a roof on this house? How am I going to make sure this bridge is strong enough? The third kind is play that will develop content knowledge and specifically around water and weather, because those are two topics, of course, that are top of mind and are going to be really crucial. And I I've been working on developing a water curriculum for young children that I piloted at a school in the Chicago area. So I'm very interested in water. In fact, my daughter is a hydrologist in Colorado. She's studying and researching hydrology at Colorado School of Mines. So she's my consultant on a lot of this work. And then finally, the last category of play that I've been talking about a lot is play that helps to nurture empathy and care, both for each other, for friends and family and people in our world, and also for And I could go into more detail about all four categories, but those are the four that I presented on at the conference. And then this winter, I'm piloting a climate explorers curriculum with three, four, five, and six-year-olds in Chicago, where we'll be working on some specific activity, science experiments, as well as open-ended play experiences, storytelling, other kinds of collaborative projects where we're going to be living out these four kinds of play experiences. How are

SPEAKER_01: 11:42

you going to involve the kids with these topics and how are you going to explore that in a practical way?

SPEAKER_00: 11:48

The program that I work with right now is called Families Together Cooperative Nursery School. It's a cooperative nursery school, which means that all of the families are actively working at the school in one way or another. Some of them volunteer in the classroom. Some of them serve on the board of directors. The environment is already a highly collaborative structure. And then within that structure, we're doing this climate exploration. Explorers curriculum, but there's a really beautiful connection with a city project that we're involved in right now. The Chicago Park District has a program for developing nature play spaces in public parks, and they have a process that they've already created that we've joined where the children and other members of the community where these parks are located have a say in what kinds of equipment and materials and natural plantings and structures are going to be put into these play spaces. We're in a, what will probably be a two-year process of developing a nature play space in the public park that's across the street from my school. And the children have already been involved in that process where the park district staff have come in and explained to them that there's this space and what can we do with it. And they bring in materials like pieces of wood and log and string and all kinds of interesting things that the children can play with to imagine what a play structure might be. And so they're designing models of play structures, but we're also observing the kinds of play that they enjoy in order to make some broader decisions about what could really happen in these spaces. For example, a lot of the children are really into digging. When we give them materials, they'll end up digging in the dirt no matter what we give them. That kind of tells us that that's the sort of play structure or play equipment that we would want to have in this space. We're collaborating with the children, and it reminds me a lot of what I have heard and observed in Boulder Colorado. There's a project called Growing Up Boulder, and that is a municipal group that has been developing public spaces in Boulder, Colorado. And they have really developed some very innovative ways of including children and other stakeholders, community members in their process. Well, they'll bring the children in, they'll interview them, they'll watch them play, they'll put little cameras on their hats so you can see where the children go and where their attention is. And this whole idea that children should have a say, they should have a voice in the decisions that are made about the spaces in which they live and work and play. That's so fundamental and foundational. And I see a connection between that work and the work that we're doing to prepare children for a world impacted by climate change. Because the children have to have the initiative and the sense of agency in order to make these really smart decisions about what's ahead. We have to give them a voice. We have to include them in the process. And these are just a few of the ways that we're doing that?

SPEAKER_01: 14:42

The park that you are talking about, it does a lot of things. It looks at the environment, it looks at the natural environment, and it looks at how to bring agency of children within the design process as well as bringing the intergenerational, which is quite an ambitious project because it's just so much what we're dealing with at the moment. In your 30 years of career and dealing with children and young people and your interest in the built environment and bringing agency to children, how much have we moved Moving on. That's

SPEAKER_00: 15:14

an interesting way to say it, because so much of what I see as valuable about some of the new language that you hear, at least to me, it's new in my career, the design engineering process or innovative thinking or design thinking. To me, that sounds like what I learned early in my career in terms of open-ended play. So I think in some ways we're using new language to talk about concepts that we've known about all along. And I've been very much influenced by that. by the educators of Reggio Emilia, Italy. And in 2015, I went on a study tour and I visited the schools there. And this idea of the hundred languages of children, which is so beautifully expressed by the educators of Reggio Emilia, that children and really people of all ages have so many ways of exploring and expressing what they know and what they want to know. And I just found this concept so valuable in my work with children because if we insist on academic language or we insist on children being able to read and write in specific ways, especially when they're very young. We really limit what they can say and do. But when we use visual language, when we use construction materials, when we use paint and drawing and dance and movement and facial expressions and, oh gosh, I don't know. I mean, there are a hundred languages, more than a hundred languages. Then our work with children becomes so much richer and so much more productive and you get a really incredible sense of the intelligence and the creativity of young children. And it gives you a lot of hope and optimism about the future during a time where it's easy to get discouraged. I guess to answer your question, I would say I see a sense of continuity in those who value play and creativity. And that hasn't changed. And I don't think it will change. But I do think we're finding new ways of describing it and promoting it that I hope will be really rich and productive in the future.

SPEAKER_01: 17:08

You are encouraging individuality and uniqueness encouraging children to be expressive. It made me think about individuality and inspiring kids to become their own selves and finding their own language, which I think is something so important. And learning through design can do that. And that is how we challenge the way we live. We change things and have a more interesting society. I think it's already quite clear, but I would like to ask you, what

SPEAKER_00: 17:33

do you

SPEAKER_01: 17:34

get out of the work you do?

SPEAKER_00: 17:35

I did just mention optimism and hope. And I think that's really key because I've had some different roles in my life, in my career, where I was more working behind the scenes and I wasn't in the classroom or working directly with teachers. And this position I have now, I mentioned it's a cooperative nursery school and it's a small school, two classrooms, and I'm working directly with the children and the teachers every day. And that's so important to me. I'm not the kind of practitioner that can move up the ladder of the administration and move farther and farther away from the in order to have that sense of connection and to really be inspired and have a sense of my own creativity through those relationships. And the teachers that I'm working with right now, I have to say they are absolutely exceptional teachers. I have never in my career seen a team of teachers that so consistently value children, respect children and the conversations that they have in the classroom, the way they listen to children, the way they ask good questions, the way they connect children to each other. They're really skilled at helping children resolve conflict and work together cooperatively. So I am learning so much from them. I think that sense of being at the point I am in my career, as I said, having done this work for a long time and still being inspired and still having so much to learn myself and putting myself into new and interesting environments where I'm constantly learning from other people has been such an amazing experience for me. Do

SPEAKER_01: 19:09

you want to talk about the books? that you've written or if there's another book that you're planning to tell us about?

SPEAKER_00: 19:14

Sure. So my last three books that I've written have been really focused on STEM learning. And as I mentioned, originally, that wasn't my focus. The first book I wrote for teachers was really about language and literacy. It was a story dictation book. But robotics and coding for young children was a focus for me, especially when iPad and other more sophisticated technologies were first coming into the classroom 10 years ago. And I was very concerned about whether these materials, whether these devices were going to be used appropriately. What kind of impact are they going to have on play and on relationships in the classroom? And touchscreens changed everything in terms of really young children engaging with technology in new ways. And everyone was very concerned about screen time. And I think people still are concerned about screen time. But I think now we understand it's more of the quality of children's experiences with technology that than the actual number of minutes they spend looking at screens. I've been very interested in that, but then as I mentioned, my interest has moved more towards engineering in terms of the Young Architects at Play and the problem-solving book. Right now, I'm very much focused on the Climate Explorers curriculum that I'm piloting, and specifically on water. I admit that part of this is the influence of my daughter, who's a hydrologist, because we talk about water all the time, but I see so much relevance in the lives of young children. They're already very interested in water. They understand a lot about water already. It has meaning and we can build on what they already know. And when I piloted a water curriculum this past summer with four and five-year-olds, I was really amazed by how interested they are in the built environment. I thought they would be more interested in fish and dolphins and whales and things that would be a little bit harder to teach in a hands-on way in Chicago. We're not going to invite a shark to visit our classroom. I was really curious about how was going to follow their interest, if that was the direction they were going to go. But what they seemed to be most interested in was plumbing, was pipes and plumbing. And of course, we were able to find that in the school building. We went on a hunt looking at all of the examples of water in the built environment that we could find within the building. We looked in the bathrooms and we looked at the drinking fountains and we did as much investigating as we could to see how that worked. We had a game that we played about a leaky pipe and how you fix a And that was probably the funnest thing we did the whole summer. They were so fascinated by this idea of how to fix a leaky pipe. And a lot of their stories and the drawings and the things that they did in their journals was focused around the drama of a leaky pipe. I just thought that was amazing. It was so fun. And when we played with water, we had water tables, you know, big bins of water that we would play with in the classroom indoors. We found all different kinds of pipes and tubes that we could use and they wanted to build them as high as they could and they wanted to pour the water in. To answer your question, my work right now is really focused on water. And I'm working on a manuscript with my daughter, a water curriculum and some water picture books that could be used with children. One of the things I've really noticed is that a lot of the current literature for young children that describes climate events like flood, it's either written for older children. Well, it is written for older children. And a lot of it is too high level in terms of the content, but it's also too scary. We need a way to have playful conversations with children about things like water and flooding that's not going to terrify them. A lot of my work in terms of the writing that I'm doing is around issues like that. How do you explain a flood to a child without really frightening them? So those are just a few of the topics and the projects that I'm working on right now.

SPEAKER_01: 22:57

And you're interested in water. Can I ask you, because water is vital, or is there a more poetic connotation to it, or to you in this case?

SPEAKER_00: 23:05

Yeah, so the themes or ideas that seem to emerge from the work that I've done with children on water One is that water is everywhere. Water is life. We need water. Plants and animals need water. One of the things that seemed to really fascinate children related to the idea of the water cycle is that we have a limited amount of water on the earth in the atmosphere and below the surface of the earth and that that water continues to be recycled. And the children I worked with were just so fascinated by that. The idea that the rain coming down and we were talking about this at the school on a day that it was raining and it was windy. And these drops of water, these kind of sheets of water were like pounding against the window as we were having this conversation. And we were talking about, well, where has that water been before it came to us? And imagining it could have been an iceberg in the ocean. It could have been in someone's tea in China. It could have been the tears of an elephant in Africa. Like all of the different things that we could imagine where that water had been was magical to the children. It was so exciting to them. So this idea of water being everywhere and how important it is, but then also how much we need to protect it. Because if that's the case, if this is our water and this is the water that we're going to keep using, then we need to take care of it. We need to use it sparingly. We don't want to waste it. We need to keep it clean and respect it. There's a wonderful picture book that you might know. We are the water protectors and it's about a child who is involved in activism to protect water from pollution. The children love that picture book. We did some experiments where we filtered water to make it cleaner. We took water that had been dirty from dirt and sand, and we ran it through some different filters to see what would work best, protecting water. But also sometimes children are afraid of water, the whole idea of floods and flooding. And they know that there have been water events that have hurt people and destroyed buildings, respecting water and understanding. And one of the things that I hear from my daughter, who's the hydrologist, she says, water always wins. So in terms of thinking of like, we're going to beat the water, we're going to master the I don't think that that's probably useful or helpful and that teaching young children to respect water and that we need to work with the water instead of against the water to solve climate issues that we'll have in the future. I think that's an important perspective as well.

SPEAKER_01: 25:25

I think it's really interesting because you look at it from a practical and basic life survival, but as well as the poetic. I love the tears of the elephant in Africa becoming of the rain in Chicago on that morning or afternoon. That's really wonderful. Is there a question I should have asked

SPEAKER_00: 25:45

you that I haven't asked you? And what is that question? play experience. They are recreating and they're creating new creative models of structures that they know that are in their lives. They have, hopefully, they have a home that they live in. They're certainly in a school at the moment that they're making that block structure. There are train stations and airports and hospitals and libraries and all kinds of structures in their lives. I think the idea that children, very young children, have an intelligence about architecture Thank you very much to my guests today, to all the listeners.

SPEAKER_01: 26:58

And please subscribe to Architecture for Kids podcast and leave your rating and the review. Recommend us to your friends and family. And we'll see you next time. And to find out more about it, visit our websites. And follow us on And please join me again next week for another episode of Architect Architecture for Kids podcast brought to you in collaboration with the Build Environment Trust, the Thornton Education Trust and the Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University.