"It's all about the feet." So explains Jeanne Goldhaber, Associate Professor of Early Childhood Education and director of the UVM Campus Children's Center, while standing in the ‘piazza,' a large open area in the middle of C-building of the Living/Learning Center, on University Heights Road. She stands there ready to take another group on tour of the beehive-like system of classrooms stretching down the hallway from where she speaks. What she is referring to is not some training manual for bobsledders, or how to do the tango, but something more mundane yet nevertheless profound in the effect it has had upon the evolution of the programs offered by and practices followed at the University's nationally recognized Campus Children's Center. And home to the UVM Early Childhood PreK-3 and Early Childhood Special Education Programs.

Where the feet come into play is in keeping with the Center's belief that children benefit from a richness of experience. "It's one of my favorite stories," she says, launching into it by carefully explaining that the role of the Center is to give the children in the program access to and engagement with the world they experience. "Children's opportunities to get out into the community and be part of its life are more limited these days. This seems especially true in the fast paced busy lives that so many families live today," Goldhaber adds. To combat this separation is one of the central tenets of the Center's mission. "A priority of ours is to make sure that children experience the diversity and the wonder of the world around them."
And that's where feet became important. The feet in question, of course, being those of the children at the Center, and the feet responsible for bringing her and the Center's teachers out into the community. "We decided," she says, "to pay attention to what the children were doing, to what interested them, when we went on our walks around the campus." Anyone who has walked by the Center on their way to University Heights or Patrick Gym knows it is not uncommon to see children walk in tandem holding hands crossing the street as they begin their excursions. Walking surely IS a way to give the kids some exercise. "But now," she says, "We decided to pay more attention to what they were doing on their walks."

Two things happened. One, as they began to observe the children, in particular the toddlers, the teachers realized that the children were spending most of their time exploring the campus – with their feet! And so they started to take pictures. Not canned pictures of kids on a walk, or in a playground, generic representations of how we think children spend their time. Rather than that kind of picture, the pictures they took were of what the kids were doing on the ground. And what they saw in the images they gathered – feet jumping off curbs, climbing up onto rocks, balancing on low hanging branches - were kids getting to know the campus through its landscape. "And that," Professor Goldhaber said, "was a breakthrough for us, in the deep sense of understanding children's constructions of space by virtue of the terrain."
One doesn't have to appreciate this breakthrough from some philosophical poetics-of-space viewpoint to gain insight into how we relate to the places we occupy. The children intuitively understand this, which led, she explained, "to the children continuing to challenge our definition of just what constitutes the campus." And that was the second thing that came out of this experience, she said. "At one point we let the children take the lead and see where they would take us. Eventually, we found ourselves at the lakefront! We realized then that the campus wasn't the community. The community for the kids was somewhere else, beyond some arbitrary Prospect Avenue or Main Street boundary."
From the beginning, the Campus Children's Center has been guided by the principles gained from the world famous program developed in Reggio Emilia, a city in northern Italy, at the end of WWII. The story for them, then, was to make a strong commitment to preventing the possibility of a fascist perspective from being planted again in their community. And so they began to build schools for young children that created opportunities for autonomy and independent thinking and a strong sense of community. They were ambitious goals. But for others, who learned of their efforts, and who have studied their program, it has never been to simply adopt their principles. For the Reggio program has consistently resisted any attempt to do so, insisting instead that every community find its own way, by reexamining its own values, its own cultural context, by coming up with its own story. And from that, to develop a more integrated identity and one that is more reflective of what is important to the individual community.

And that's precisely what the people at the Campus Children's Center have done. "It has taken us a long time, " Professor Goldhaber acknowledged. "The invitation offered us by Reggio Emilia to be reflective about our own practice and community has taken us years and years to appreciate." To embrace the view of children as competent, and citizens of their community, was the easy part. To re-invent those ideas here so that they reflected our particular context, that was the hard part, she said. And add to that the notion of teacher-researcher, an idea we are still thinking about and re-examining over these many years.

So, in essence, the Center's evolution has been to develop a point-of-view. A viewpoint expressed in the knowledge gained by letting the children lead. A viewpoint obtained by observing the children's relationship with the natural world, from which the Center developed its interest in the environment. And that is for the Center a unique area of research, elaborated Professor Goldhaber, particular to our cultural context, one which says a lot about the fact that we are in Vermont." Moreover, it is on a campus that not only shares that point of view, but at a University that is one of the leaders in the field. And all this came about, Professor Goldhaber said, "from looking at children in the world, and from our view as teacher-researchers.

When she said this, she was standing at the door leading to the playground outside, which last summer had gone through the second of a three phase project to reconstruct it as a space that incorporates what they have learned from watching the children at play in the space. From watching and having conversations with them about the playground's design, plans were drawn and a major reconstruction of the space was undertaken and finished last summer. This summer, she explained, we will watch what the children are doing in the playground, and tweak the result to enrich even more the experiences they have there.

The children have also developed a relationship with the UVM greenhouse across the street. Having planted their seeds in the greenhouse's flats, the children will go every week and take care of the plants. And when the plants are ready to be put into the ground, the children will go with their wagons, pile in their plants, and bring them back to the playground. There they'll start planting them in all the various garden areas that they have created.

Now that the daffodils have come and gone, replaced by the brilliant colors of fall, if you happen to be passing by the Campus Children's Center on your way to University Heights or Patrick gym, stop for a moment if you see groups of small children, from toddlers to pre-schoolers, playing in the yard as you walk by. If you have a minute, you might pause and look at the kids and the adults working with them, watch as they move about the yard. Think for a minute that behind all the child's play you observe, that there is a story to tell, of a dedicated group of people, teacher-researchers, students, and a host of children, too numerous to count, who have worked years to create the natural environment that lays before you. It didn't happen over night, nor is it catch as catch can. And if you were lucky, maybe early this summer, you might have seen the children busy at work tilling the soil, planting their plants, weeding the gardens, nurturing what they have grown from seed to full bloom, in the very space that they have created which nurtures them. As they themselves follow the same path.