On Monday October 23, 2011 The Saint Louis Art Museum's Monet Exhibition "The Waterlillies" from from a "potential text to be read" to an multimodal resource for learning interacted with and learned from with ResponsiveDesign™, the CoLab's theory of action. 

CoLab and Interchange educators got to know each other and pursue their professional learning in an evening where the museum would become a cultural landscape for learning.

In order to develop a shared language on interdisciplinary actions, we unpacked what artists, musicians and dancers do in their respective fields. Then we rotated around each set of practices that were written on chart paper that eventuated in distilling the top most essential practices from within each field.  We then silently created a concept map of the relationship among those disciplinary actions. We learned that artists, dancers & musicians all go about their work as meaning-makers in particular ways particular to their disciplines. However, when viewed from a more distanced perspective, the functions of how they go about their works is identical across all disciplines: explore, collaborate, analyze, document, synthesize story-tell, etc.

We would then take these three disciplines an embody them during Mike's IIMP (Inquiry Into My Practice) as he guided us in a scaffolded processes of interacting with and learning from Monet's Water Lillies as multiple texts to be read.

Knowing that disciplinary actions are distinctive from one another and generally related to each other as forms is one thing. Exploring the relationship among them through and experiential process, and, the insights that emerge from simultaneously kinesthetically, aesthetically and intellectually engaging through concept-formation is altogether different. 

By having developed a shared language, or frame of reference, through which we would engage in subsequent experiences, the several communities of educators, became one experiential organism that began to interact with each other and learn form our respective experiences as educators from our own cultural landscapes.

Mike and Ralph guided the Monet experiences by first engaging in a Prefacing professional dialogue grounded in our ResponsiveDesign™ methdology to articulate what the lead teacher (Mike) would explore, envision and enact in his lesson that he will prototype and "test" or crow-source in realtime. In a consequentially progressive scaffolded process, we were guided into trying one multiple ways of seeing the Monet from broad-looking, narrow-looking, moving into the piece, sketching a part of the piece we wanted to own and representing the piece by enacting colors, shapes and lines that we began to see.

We became instruments, each of us, bringing sound to our own part of the Monet in a cacophony of beautifully and discordant sounds. Mike, helped us to become one larger organism, a soundscape making creature, that helped the Monet develop sounds and voices to its luscious and peaceful visual beauty that it is.

Our SizzleReel for the REDtalk Ann Taylor and I gave at Stanford University's d.School's REDlab on September 15, 2011.

Dr. Shelley Goldman, director of Stanford University's d.School's REDlab invited Ralph Córdova and Ann Taylor to give a REDtalk at their Intersection of Design in Education conference September 16 - 17.

On Day 1: September 15, 2011 all invitees gave their REDtalks. There were three clusters of talks around three themes: 1. Research in Design in Schools, 2. in Teacher Education and Professional Development Settings, and, 3. Researcher into the larger field of education and design.

After each cluster of talks, we created smaller groups to confabulate and tease out the main themes. Here, TayTay reports what her smaller group uncovered after cluster theme #1:

Patti then reported what her group teased out from cluster #1 REDtalks

As you can see, we got right into the throes of the discussion.