Chris Colley: 0:12

all right, here we are another episode shifted podcast coming to you from cold quebec. Um, the snow just never seems to stop, but we are moving forward with it and we're thinking spring, because I think it's already spring right, or it should be soon. Anyway, today I have Shannon Merenstein coming in from the Creative Project and also the Hatch Partners in Play she works with, also an author, wrote a great book called Collage Workshop for Kids, which you should definitely check out, and today we're going to talk about her work and what she does with creativity and play and art and kids, which I think is going to be fascinating for our listeners. And Shannon, before we start, thank you very much for accepting this. First off, this is a real pleasure to talk to you. I've been following you forever. This is a real pleasure to talk to you. I've been following you forever. Well, since the dawn of you know. It's been going, I guess five years, five, six, seven years, your project.

Shannon Merenstein: 1:26

Yeah, yeah, we started Hatch actually about nine years ago when, just when my older son was just a little baby, so on his first birthday we opened Hatch, which was a studio, a physical space here in Pittsburgh and has evolved into many and morphed into many different projects. And that also kind of gave way to a collaboration with my good friend and partner at the creativity project, Bar Ruchi, and we've written these two sister books together, as you mentioned Collage Workshop for Kids and a Bar's book Art Workshop. And we have been working with teachers and caregivers really all over the world in the past five years or so since the beginning of the pandemic, really encouraging folks to prioritize play and creativity in their classrooms and at home.

Chris Colley: 2:11

Absolutely. And, shannon, how did you get to where you are now? Like, what were some important moments in your journey so far in your career that brought you to what you're doing today?

Shannon Merenstein: 2:35

Yeah, so I have always been a maker and an artist since a young child. My parents agreed to let me go to art school in New York if I would tack on something practical. So I studied painting at Pratt Institute in New York and I also ended up studying art education there, and so I worked with some amazing art teachers in two New York City public schools, one in Brooklyn and one in Harlem, and, of course you know, studied with some amazing professors who introduced me to the Reggio Emilia approach, to Montessori, to all sorts of methods and pedagogical approaches that really honor the child and their instincts and ideas, especially around making, and I really enjoyed that program. I came back to Pittsburgh, where I'm from, pittsburgh, pennsylvania shortly after that and took a teaching position, um, at a, at a local school where I taught art on the cart Uh, if, if listeners are familiar, that's, that's where the um where you roam without a room um visiting all of the classrooms in the school.

Shannon Merenstein: 4:00

Um, I did that for almost a decade and when I had my first child, I was really wondering what it would be like to be able to stretch my wings a little bit and be able to really implement some of the practices, especially around process art and open-ended play, that I was really craving to do in the school system.

Shannon Merenstein: 4:27

But, you know, was sort of confined in many ways by objectives and standards and, you know, a call to integrate sort of the more academic subjects even into our art curriculum subjects, even into our art curriculum, and which is wonderful in many ways, but also was limiting in some ways.

Shannon Merenstein: 4:52

And what I wanted to create was a space where, where children could guide their own experience, they could be the decision makers in that studio space, they could decide how they would combine the materials they would be supported in, you know, moving around the space as they wished, really having some agency, and I have just found that young children really don't get very much opportunity to do that, and so that space was very special and it eventually kind of morphed into other projects and other work around the same time, kind of 2021 or so. You know I was starting to crave the community of being in schools again to be with other teachers, teachers, and also to kind of legitimize some of the practices that we were exploring in the studio space by integrating them back into the schools. And so I put a call out there asking if there were any public school teachers in our area who would be interested in kind of taking a risk area who would be interested in kind of taking a risk in embedding some of those open-ended play practices within the context of their school day.

Shannon Merenstein: 6:12

And I was literally led in the back door by this amazing team of kindergarten and first grade teachers who told me that they would let their principal know a few months into the project how things were going. Get it going. Yeah kind of give him a sense of you know how positive they knew it would be. You know how beneficial they knew it would be for the children who were just coming back to school after almost 18 months of, you know, virtual on and off learning through that first year and a half of the pandemic. So that sort of leads me to where I work.

Chris Colley: 6:53

That's an interesting journey you've been on so far. I mean it looks so bright, the future as well, with a few caveats as we go through, I guess. One of the first questions I love your story and I sometimes have a problem explaining creativity. You know, teachers sometimes, when they come into our space and we're about to do, you know, a workshop on, you know, again, we tend to like doing open-ended as well and they always have well, not always. Some of them have this idea that they're not creative. Right, that you're either creative or you're not. I guess it's kind of like a fixed mindset versus a growth mindset. Can you talk to us a little bit about?

Shannon Merenstein: 7:41

creativity what it is. How do we develop it? Kind of the nuts and bolts of it a little bit, yeah. I mean, Bart and I often talk about creativity as a muscle that needs to be flexed often, exercised often, and none of us are without it. But it can get lost along the way, depending on our you know, the experiences that we have as children, as adolescents, even as adults, in being told that there is one right way or that creativity means that you're a technically excellent artist, or creativity means that you know just how things go together, or that you have you know lots and lots of ideas.

Shannon Merenstein: 8:24

But I think that creativity is a lens really that we look through the world with, and creativity and play to me are so intertwined. The play is sort of the activity of being creative, of being generative, whether that's, you know, building worlds, whether that's telling a story, whether that's you know combining materials and making a sculpture, making you know an idea, sharing an idea with somebody else. I think that all of those are creative ways of being, and then it's just you know. I think creativity is a way of approaching the world, you know, thinking flexibly, the ability to kind of see the possibility in something and to express that. And yeah, I think it's a muscle that needs to be flexed, and the more opportunities we have, the more we feel confident in that creativity, I think.

Chris Colley: 9:27

Great, great. And you mentioned the connection to play, which I totally agree with you. And again, play is also something that seems to be a bit misunderstood. Could you define what play so? Creativity? I love it is something like when I bring people in and we practice, I say is brain? You know creativity gym, brain gym, you know where they have to practice it. It doesn't just come now. You're not just going to start playing Mozart or drawing Picasso, like it just doesn't happen that way, like in anything right, you don't start hitting home runs if you've never picked the bat up Right. Where's the intersection between creativity and play?

Shannon Merenstein: 10:09

meet one another and play meet one another. Yeah, I mean I, I. There are so many definitions for play, but for in my context anyway, in my work with children and with teachers, I really think of play as this self motivated, self driven experience that we're having that, you know, can get us into a flow state or it can produce new ideas. It can, you know, build this connection with somebody else that we didn't know we had. It can help us know about ourselves, and play looks so different for every person, the way that I, you know I've thought about this a lot, especially as my own children are growing up. You know they play with their whole bodies, they play in big ways. You know they play with their whole bodies, they play in big ways. You know they want to play outside, they want to be outside, they want to be exploring. I played as a child very differently. I loved, you know I was very much into, you know, art making and paper dolls and mixing potions in my bathroom and all sorts of you know sort of independent play.

Shannon Merenstein: 11:13

That's just so different than how my own children engage with the world and that has helped me shape the programs and kind of guidance that we offer so much, because I think the most important sort of aspect of play for me is the choice and agency that the player has in that experience. And when I talk about open-ended play, you know that's very different than you know say, doing a puzzle, for example, or playing a board game with rules, or even some of the recess games that you know, sports or other play activities. I think open-ended play, you know, can take on so many different forms. Of course it might have rules or boundaries that are created by the players, but it's about iteration, it's about innovation, it's about trying things. Testing things out might come to mind immediately when we talk to teachers or other adults, parents or administrators who kind of have a bird's eye view of recess or what other sorts of you know, other kinds of play, like I mentioned, kind of yeah, for sure, for sure, and with with the demands of school.

Chris Colley: 12:48

You know the stuff they have to deliver and I guess the knowledge they have to, you know, engage with and share. Does that conflict with? I guess? My question is this can open-ended play or open-ended projects or activities be incorporated in a classroom that is very structured with the content that they have to deliver? And, if so, can you offer some examples or some tips and tricks on how a teacher, seeing that they want that to happen more in their class, how do they start opening up their lessons to the students?

Shannon Merenstein: 13:28

Yeah. So I think you're hitting on something here is that the first step is that that teacher has to at least have some curiosity around what it might be like to incorporate some more of this open-ended play or project work in the classroom. I think that curiosity and openness is kind of the critical first step, because when we engage in these experiences there is a shift in the adult's role in the classroom and I think that that can be intimidating or even a little scary for many educators. And the project that I was mentioning earlier Play Lab where we began this work with three veteran kindergarten and first grade educators one of my partners, a first grade teacher, jerome Morris he's been teaching for over 30 plus years in Pittsburgh public schools wanted to know what is my role in this in-play lab, which is, you know, this protected period of open-ended play where the children are really deciding how they're going to play, with whom for how long, and the teacher is kind of curating the environment a little bit to offer these choices. But other than that, you know, the children are really driving this play experience. And so he was asking again and again what is my role in this? You know, what should I be doing during this time, and I think that that has come up. So now, you know, with dozens, dozens and dozens of teachers, what is my role in this? What should I be doing?

Shannon Merenstein: 15:14

Because many educators are so used to, you know, kind of being the sage on the stage and directing the experience and guiding it the way, and, you know, really being a performer in so many ways too, and so it can feel uncomfortable at first to take on a quieter role, a more, you know, as a researcher, as an observer.

Shannon Merenstein: 15:40

But what we have found again and again when we're having these conversations, reflective conversations about play with the teachers that we work with, is that play gives children an opportunity.

Shannon Merenstein: 15:54

It gives the adult an opportunity to see the children in much more multidimensional ways. I can't tell you how many times I've had conversations with teachers who, you know, describe children in really deficit-based ways, you know, about their academic selves, and again and again and again, teachers are so surprised by what they learn about the children when they see them engaged in their preferred way of learning through play. And that has been really powerful for me to be able to then begin to build this case for play, because you know one of my partners in Detroit. Her name is Carla Shalaby. She's the author of Troublemakers, but she also works in with Detroit public schools through the University of Michigan and she has said to me so many times you know there is no denying that the behavior issues that we're seeing in schools, the mental health issues that we're seeing, are significant. They can be just totally disruptive to teaching and learning. It can throw off the entire day.

Shannon Merenstein: 17:04

Teachers are exhausted, administrators are sort of at a loss for what to do about this, at a loss for what to do about this, and PlayLab gives children this opportunity to show their classroom community the best version of themselves in that context. So there's a huge opportunity for teachers, in open-ended play, to actually become observers and researchers and learn about their students and then use that either to sustain the relationship and the energy that it takes, you know, throughout the rest of the day, or to even inform their instruction in some ways, you know, based on the interests and ideas of of the children.

Chris Colley: 17:50

I love that.

Shannon Merenstein: 17:51

Yeah.

Chris Colley: 17:52

That's it's, it's cool, like, I remember that too, like, and teachers, if I go into their classrooms and we do these open-ended, they're like I've never seen that kid like that before. Or that kid, I've never seen them so engaged. They're always, or they'll point them out ahead of time. We'll have to watch for this one and this one and in the end those guys become the models of the play and others watch because they're not afraid, I find you know of, of error, like we're so error focused all the time. And in free play and open-ended play, I mean you can't, there's no, there's no mistakes, right, you're doing what feels natural to you and you're directing your play.

Shannon Merenstein: 18:35

Yeah, so many opportunities to correct your mistakes If you feel that they are mistakes, right, like I think you know, in much more direct, you know, didactic instruction. There's really no opportunity to go over something again and again, and again, and that's how I mean, that is how we learn and that's something that happens in play I you know, another sort of facet of the case for open-ended play in the context of a very traditional school day is that you know another sort of facet of the case for open-ended play in the context of a very traditional school day is that, you know, this gives children a chance to actually apply what they're learning holistically. They also see in real time children taking the concepts that they're learning in their math and literacy blocks and applying them. You know, when they're making a restaurant and they want to make a menu and they are adding pricing and they want their friends to make money so that they can pay for the food that they've created in the kitchen area. They're integrating every skill, every concept that they're acquiring.

Shannon Merenstein: 19:49

Young children that we work with kindergarten, first grade, second grade. They want to apply those skills. They want to be able to use these new skills that they have writing friends' names, use these new skills that they have. You know, writing friends names. There are so many children actually we've we've seen use this open-ended play time to actually, like you know, walk around the room copying some of the words or like you know testing, testing, testing these math concepts out in their journals and the teachers are like, is that play?

Shannon Merenstein: 20:17

But it is, it's like it's, it's just just, it's the this chance to decide, like, how I'm going to spend this time. And they really are seeing. I did write down and you know, I love, I love getting the question how do we build the case for this?

Shannon Merenstein: 20:34

Because you know we're collecting all of all of this evidence that it actually has huge, huge benefits socially and emotionally and academically. But one of the kindergarten teachers that I was just talking to said that when you know they they do this kind of mid year math assessment. It's very focused around geometry and shapes that the children who had PlayLab this year, who had a chance to build with magnet tiles, had a chance to work with wooden blocks, have, you know, really like physically know these shapes and this geometry and play this geometry, have performed better than ever on this mid-year assessment. And I mean to me, okay, like that's great, but to an administrator, like that actually matters.

Shannon Merenstein: 21:26

You know these outcomes do matter, and so you know, I don't think it has to be one or the other. I think that this, just this, enhances the curriculum in so many positive ways.

Chris Colley: 21:41

Oh for sure, you know.

Chris Colley: 21:42

It kind of leads me a bit to just the development processes that our youngest learners go through and that they have to go about it naturally at their own pace and they're not all going to be at the same pace.

Chris Colley: 21:54

So if we're trying to retrofit some lesson or everybody's doing the same thing to all these different levels of kids, I mean you can get discouraged, right, because you success or whatever success might mean for whatever that activity is, might not show itself. But then you kick open the doors to free play and then you know it starts to transform and develop those skills. Because I do find that skill development in our youngest learners, as you alluded to is, is getting trickier, as you know, with mental. You know mental health and just what covid kind of instilled in some of these kids is as, as they're going through the system now you can still feel that wave of, you know, do it for me. You know, like, take care of me, like I don't want to invest in anything that because you'll just give it to me anyway, kind of passive learning almost, which is the opposite of what play really um should instill in a student.

Shannon Merenstein: 22:58

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that play gives educators an opportunity to give children the reins in terms of their pacing. You know, something that's really been uncomfortable for some educators is allowing a child to return to the same kind of play every single day. You know, when they have a regular play lab every day and we talk so much about how that gives children such an opportunity to become this expert and to become really confident in this area.

Shannon Merenstein: 23:35

There was a child who every day was building the kind of the same structure with the magnetiles, just this very small, you know kind of handheld structure. And you know, several times his teacher asked, like you know, should I try to push him to like try something else? Should I, you know, see if you know he wants to play the group? And we just said, you know, like, at every other part of the day, you know he has to keep up with you and that's first of all so exhausting for a teacher to wrangle, you know, 25 or 35 and six-year-olds by themselves for the entire day and try to keep everyone in the same place. So we find this is a moment of joy for the educators as well, to really just you know educators as well, to really, just, you know, be able to, you know, be surrounded by so much learning, so much activity in the classroom. But, yeah, but giving children a chance to pace themselves, you know, and allow that learning to unfold.

Shannon Merenstein: 24:35

Another example this child. We have this practice called play journaling which is, you know, at the end of the play experience, giving children a chance to kind of write and draw about their experience and just have a moment of reflection, a completely non-assessed writing opportunity, which is great for young, you know, young learners, to just put pen to paper and not be afraid of, you know, it being graded or corrected. It's just, you know, it's their space. They can write, they can draw, they can dictate a story to an adult. But this.

Chris Colley: 25:14

I like that idea too. That's a great idea.

Shannon Merenstein: 25:17

Yeah, one child was just, you know, experimenting with mark making for weeks. You know, the teacher was getting a little impatient, like when is he going to, you know? When is he going to draw what he was playing, you know? And because even when we say an open ended activity, like there's still, we're all so beholden to what is you?

Chris Colley: 25:36

know what is familiar and uh, it's like goes against her. Yeah, when is he?

Shannon Merenstein: 25:42

gonna start? When is he gonna develop this? You know, visual literacy? Um, and it took a really long time, I did. He just drew these circles over and over again and we just, you know, we encouraged her. We have such a great relationship with so many of our partner teachers but she said just just wait and see. You know, just let him let it be for now and we'll see. And surely enough, you know, when he was ready, maybe it was February, maybe it was March, but he, you know, started combining some of those shapes. He started saying this is me in the. You know, this is me playing. You know, these are block. This is the block structure I made. I played in the kitchen today. You know, these are block.

Chris Colley: 26:34

This is the block structure I made. I played in the kitchen today, like those are, those were huge leaps for the child and there is such a satisfaction in seeing that growth. But seeing that it happened good, like I'm always trying to figure out, like so we've done this play, and like I take photos and videos and we sit and talk about it and how it felt. But I never thought of just doing a journal like that with them so they could just kind of like draw things out, just you know, no stakes to it, just like have them for them, them their reflection purposes. I really like that idea.

Shannon Merenstein: 27:02

I might, yeah that practice started as a way to, um, you know, convince administrators that we were spending this time wisely, that we were incorporating, um, you know, these new, newly acquired literacy skills. But, um, it has actually become a really powerful practice because it communicates to children that you know, this work that you were doing, this play that you were doing, actually matters so much that we're going to spend time thinking about it and the children are never required to share. But we do offer lots of different ways. You know we share it. You know, through the creativity project, especially with educators, about how to kind of document these play experiences. But how to bring children and their voice into, you know, the sharing out of that documentation so we might show children photos and they might respond to it and, you know, dictate what was happening in that picture, in the video.

Chris Colley: 27:56

But the journals kind of give this longitudinal study of the child's experience over the year, all this trace evidence of of this child's growth and thought process, and I love that. I love that I'm gonna borrow that and try this.

Shannon Merenstein: 28:13

Some cool examples after after awesome, awesome.

Chris Colley: 28:17

Well, shan, this has been fascinating. Um Love your stories. I love your journey so far in this crazy educational world that we choose to be in, but such good reflections for us up here listeners. I really appreciate your insight into play and creativity. It's always these subjects that come up in the work that we do, so I love your perspective on it and you've thrown out some great seeds that will start to grow around here. So thank you for sharing some of your insight.

Shannon Merenstein: 28:52

Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure.

Chris Colley: 28:56

Absolutely, and I mean it feels like we need to continue this conversation, so we'll let some time pass and maybe we can um continue this because it's I've really enjoyed it a lot, thank you absolutely.

Shannon Merenstein: 29:08

Thank you so much, chris.