Children's Places of Importance
Meredith Dodd
Meredith Dodd is an early childhood and teacher educator. While a Head Teacher in the Nursery School at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, Meredith focused on the craft of pedagogical documentation. She thinks deeply about the role children have in democracy, cultivated by her connection to her Kanienkéha:ka (Mohawk) ancestral homelands of the Six Nations of the Grand River. Meredith learned about the incredible influence the Kanienkéha:ka, and all the Nations within the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, had on the creation of democratic thinking and governing structures of the United States. Meredith’s passion is to support people of all ages to open the doors of self-acceptance, self-love and to know how it feels to belong, the essence of living fully in a democracy.

Secret spaces may be found inside, outdoors, or in the middle of nowhere – in a tree, fort, snow igloo, or beneath the stairs. But seeking getaways like Cruso’s bower or the bridge to Terabithia, is essential to putting things together for themselves and becoming who they are… The social construction of a voice, the discovery of a way to be “Me,” thus requires a complex bridging such as words and objects perform, locating a middle ground of experimentation and expression.   

-Elizabeth Goodenough

Childhood memories play an important part in who we are as adults. To make a difference in the world, remembering our secret spaces of childhood is important. Whether real or imagined, they connect us to our earliest experiences of belonging. These spaces often mark our first sense of autonomy, creativity and agency. They are our first encounters with systems of relationships and culture. 

Such memories are not just nostalgic, they are formative. They offer insight into how we began to understand ourselves as participants in a shared world. The cumulative impact of these early experiences shapes how we engage with others, how we express our needs, how we listen, how we are heard and how we speak up. These are foundational acts of democratic participation.

When adults reflect on these formative spaces, they reconnect with a sense of agency and belonging that is crucial to civic life. They remember what it felt like to matter, to explore and to enter spaces. This remembering can strengthen their voice in the present. It becomes easier to understand why participation matters, why every voice counts and why systems must include all people, not just those who speak the loudest.

“Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.” 

-John Dewey

If democracy must be continually reborn, then childhood, and the education of the heart and mind through lived experience, is where that rebirth begins. When we take childhood seriously, we lay the groundwork for more inclusive, imaginative and participatory futures.

The context for this investigation, about children’s special spaces and memory, was a college lab school with access to many indoor and outdoor places. We invited the students to think about places important to them, beyond those we explored at school. The children involved were four and five-year old students who had been with me the year before as threes and fours.

Children constantly make meaning by constructing their understandings of the world from where they’ve been, their experiences in those places and the relationships in their lives. The early childhood teacher is in a position to hear children’s deep, thoughtful, joyful and complex ideas about the world, which are often wrapped in expressions of emotion.Too often and sometimes inadvertently, adults stifle children’s efforts to make sense of the world.

In our classroom, we used the word landscape to define spaces: our block building area was the landscape table and the outdoor environments were particular landscapes. In this investigation, students were offered multiple languages: drawing, building using wood and other three-dimensional materials, paints and storytelling. In their play, children developed a repertoire of ever-changing environments to develop a lived sense of the patterns that connect. 

What is the pattern that connects the crab to the lobster and the primrose to the orchid, and all of them to me, and me to you? What is the pattern which connects? 

-Gregory Bateson 

The children’s voices and emotions are patterns that connect, expressed through the hundred languages – spoken, unspoken, through gestures and media. Language is sacred because it connects the inner life and the shared world; it is how children enter places, express their truths, begin to participate and listen each-other into being. In honoring their languages, we are practicing democracy in its earliest form–listening deeply, making space and recognizing that every voice matters.

I created a process for investigating “Children’s Places of Importance” with the intention of supporting the students’ thinking and was curious to observe how they would respond to the sequence I proposed. Over the course of a month in the spring, and working with the children in small groups, we began with questions: 

What landscape, place, space is important to you?  
How would you share its meaning with others?

 

DRAW: Imagine an important landscape.

SELECT: Inspired by materials. 

BUILD:  Find the tools, begin 3D construction.  

STORY-TELL: Reflect with watercolor.

My role was to take the children seriously and listen deeply. Having selected the sequence, I made strong invitations, changed the invitation or made it more complex by moving into a pre-selected language and was patient with even the most reluctant children. All this created the conditions for students’ thinking to become visible. 

They started by talking about their memories of important places. I was present but conscious of listening carefully. Over the course of the work, some stories shifted and a few places changed. Some students were hesitant while others were eager. Different media drew out different competencies. There was storytelling throughout, but the stories presented here came at the end. 

Henry 

     

Once my dad was walking along when he saw a flower. His wife, my mom, was walking with him. And they were at the botanical garden. And then they saw a flower. And I was walking along with my dad and mom and Arlo. It’s important to me because I’m a big brother.

Nora

       

Me and my sister were at the beach and my sister went in to swim and she saw a fish and I was making a sand castle. The end. I like going to the beach, because I get to make sandcastles.
Gabriel 

 

It’s called the Black Treedom Forest. There’s animals in it. And they are armies for me. The path leads to my kingdom. The path is made out of wind. If someone steps on one of the wrong pieces of wood they die. The wind helps the bad guys to fake it.  

Gus 

   

 

Above the Clouds 
My landscape is a land floating above the sky. And the chains are supposed to be connected to the ground. There are floating trees and floating bushes. It’s my peace place, that’s why it’s important to me.

Livia 

 

It’s about the birdhouse. So birds come inside. They could go on that piece of string, but it’s not there because I forgot to do that. This is the roof. The green and blue pompoms are pillows for the birds, and they can take them off. The colors of the sky are red, purple, blue, light blue. It’s so important for the birds because some of them don’t have homes.

Children’s early experiences, and the memories of those experiences, influence who they become as adults. My hope is that the exploration of spaces brings us, the adults, closer to understanding each child and children as a collective of thinkers, dreamers, makers and thoughtful partners with our environments. Families can, by listening (or not), affect that process. If you don’t know that your voice and feelings are important and that you need to advocate for them, you won’t know how to participate. Democratic habits are learned during early childhood. 

Perhaps we can learn from children the importance of the places we introduce them to, participate in and care for, and take part in the patterns of memory-making that will inform their developing sense of self.

We cannot live without meaning, that would preclude any sense of identity, any hope, any future. 

-Carlina Rinaldi