(un)framing
These five frames are the foundation of Children’s Innovation Project and what I often use to guide collaborative learning design for digital/analog integration and interdisciplinary, play-based, notice-to-wonder inquiry.
I’ve facilitated hundreds of workshops and conversations around the what and how of these frames—where they show up, how to explore them with raw materials, ways to grow them through robust language opportunities, or how to develop them as through-lines in interdisciplinary curricula.
The why for the frames usually exists as a value held inside a request from a particular context—a school looking for analog play-based connections for computational logic, educators looking for ways to deepen language development for all children, people looking to support children’s curiosity and intrinsic motivation for learning.
I love the what and how of these frames because they provide endless opportunities for play and revision. And I appreciate the various why perspectives people bring to their engagement with the frames because there are endless ways to connect and find value in their use.
What I’ve come to especially love about these frames is how they show up for me in my life and how they continue to nudge me further in my personal learning and growing. It is clear to me, that although I sometimes call them “logic frames” or “thinking frames” depending on the audience, they are much more bountiful than this. These are frames to guide us towards ways of knowing, connecting, and being entirely beyond what our mind might compute or hold.
Just as the materiality of small objects is essential to guide us towards deeper noticing, naming a frame of understanding brings its materiality to the surface so we can notice it more deeply. When ways of thinking/knowing are made more visible and explicit, we can more readily see how they shape our lives and make choices to live more authentically in our lives.
Here’s a little of how I’m playing with the materiality of these frames right now… the things I’m noticing and wondering when I bring them to my attention. I’d love to hear how you play with, see, and re-see these frames in your life, too.
Same-Different
Do—>Happen
Sequence
Part-Whole
Know-Unknow
What I’ve come to especially love about these frames is how they show up for me in my life and how they continue to nudge me further in my personal learning and growing.
Same-Different
It’s all in the overlap—to tease out something different from what appears as the same and to search for layers of commonality in what is posed as a binary. This is always full-on rigorous playful delight with children, and I do this kind of play so much in my own life that it has become a way of being for me. A Venn Diagram is one of my most favorite materials.
Lately, I’ve been playing with this frame differently. I’ve been wondering in the overlaps from a place of intuition and unknowing. Instead of “searching” or “trying to find” something, I am practicing how to allow myself to receive wisdom while I relax and stay in the expanse of the unknown overlapping space. It’s not comfortable, and on the surface it doesn’t feel delightful, yet it’s showing me new ways of trust and helping me accept more shadows.
Sequence
There’s always been a playful nuance with how I explore sequence with children—including but also beyond what’s linear, in cycles, with systems, in overlaps, full of patterns and disruption. That said, this is my least favorite frame and I sometimes want to throw it out as if it’s not as worthy as the rest. But it always surprises me, and I find gratitude for it once again.
So much of our human orientations are held in constructs of past-present-future. I find it helpful (and sometimes frustrating) to see/name the sequenced frames influencing my life. Today I was doing a little of this and a little of that and I didn’t know where I was going. And I saw the story I was telling myself about this: I was being scattered and should get “back on track,” as if some ordered arrangement of tasks was a preferred path. When I noticed this, I chose a different story. I saw a web around all the points of each moment in my days, like the fascia system in our bodies. I sensed the deep connections and let myself live into that glimpse as right now.
Do—>Happen
Although I love this frame for young children’s language and developing expression of agency in the world, in my own life, I find it most helpful to practice ways to release or expand from this when I notice it. It’s interesting to take time to make a list of all the things that are embedded with cause-effect logic, often woven so tightly into their fabric that when you can see and tease out the frame, the “thing” itself unravels.
For the past year or so I’ve been impacted by the idea of precession from Buckminster Fuller, and I’ve found a beautiful expansion that comes from releasing any attention the effect of something. I make a choice (do, say, think, feel) and many things happen in ripples following from 90 degrees of the making of the choice. With this shift, there’s a deeper honoring, appreciating, and noticing of each DO that expands its power and potentiation beyond anything I might ever “know.”
Part-Whole
This frame is a favorite because to learn to see that a part is a whole and a whole is a part is quite transformative, especially for children. It is surprising how often we can get ourselves out of a tangle or a fixed way of seeing simply by stepping outside and looking at the “whole” as a part of something else or seeing a small part as a gigantic whole in and of itself.
Like Same-Different, this frame has become a way of being for me. Shifting perspectives to see other/ larger/ more complicated wholes happens as instinct. And I can see how small this frame is, how it is also part of a larger whole, most of which I do not understand. So I wonder what an octopus knows, what worms say to the trees, how other creatures and elements of nature orientate in the world and how part-whole is maybe silly to them, like “Who would think like that?” because they know things far beyond what we can know. Maybe the whole point is that there are no parts at all and everything is always already whole. (This is what the trees tell me.)
Know-Unknow
In a way, this is the only frame that has ever mattered to me. All the others fall inside it (or fade away). When we know to unknow—notice to wonder—there is no separation between learning and living. We are here to find and follow questions… to live into our questions now… to find something new inside something known… expansively, like a button.
My learning now is to embrace the knowing that comes from the unknowing. Finding new questions, following them, letting myself sit inside not-knowing for longer and longer has led me to find depths of intuition and ways of knowing that feel expansive beyond my mind. They are deeply rooted. Grounded, connected, known. I am learning to not shy away from what I know.
There are endless frames that exist in our minds and in the world. It’s an interesting and worthwhile exercise to try to find them, maybe name them, see where they are (or have been) helpful, what kinds of values and understandings they hold, where they are no longer needed and might be released (or expanded) into something else.
love and light, Melissa
