Creating worlds of possibility: Observations and thoughts on kinetic learning

We are a family of movers. We need space and time, freedom and opportunity. Our propensity to move our bodies guides everything we do, and especially how we learn.

Movement stimulates increased brain activity, enhances the body’s ability to make lasting memories, and activates increased coordination, improvisation, and imagination. 

We create more worlds of possibility by moving our bodies. Synthesis happens more rapidly, cultivating intelligent questioning, robust idea formation, and thoughtful experimentation.

Moving our bodies in joyful, expansive, liberated ways allows for deepening understandings of the intricate and miraculous nature of life, our vast systems of interconnectedness, and the role everyone plays in shaping our collaborative experience of life.

Movement is an essential element of lifelong learning. Movement is the primary signal that life is in fact present. 

When we are in motion the brain reaches a more dynamic state of integration and generation. Whatever it is we’re curious about, excited about, and eager to expand our consciousness of has more neurological pathways with which to encode with knowledge. 

Movement invigorates new growth in the body on a cellular level. It replenishes our blood with fresh oxygen and brings new energy, power, and functionality to each cell in our body. 

Movement, in one form or another, is accessible to all living things. We can move wherever we are.

Discovering what our bodies can do is empowering, and encourages us to be responsible our bodies. We are reminded every time we move that this is the one body we will have. 

Kinetic learners use their bodies to help them understand the world around them. Having space to move and explore is vital everywhere they go.

How we got to America

We’ve recently started studying the Great Migration, the exodus of over 6 million black people from the harsh realities of the South to the uncertain promised lands of the North. The Great Migration happened in two phases, from 1910 to 1940, and 1940 to 1970. I now know my maternal grandparents and my paternal grandfather were a part of that second wave. My paternal grandmother’s parents were a part of the first wave.

Learning about the early migrations of other great-great aunts and uncles in the 1920s also fleshes out the family narratives. It’s interesting to reflect on the imprints of possibility both my grandfathers would have internalized about the North. As little boys growing up in different parts of North Carolina, seeing their family members head North opened up doors for futures yet to be realized. Their knowing that the world outside of their small towns could also be theirs too changed the course of all of our lives to come. The more we uncover about this pivotal moment in American history, and where our family stories intersect with it, the more fascinating it is to comprehend that I exist at all. 

For a long while now I have been marveling at how my own birth was set in motion so many generations ago, and from disparate lands across the globe. Decisions made by great-grandparents and their parents, tribes of people unknown to each other, yet all conspiring in some way towards the makings of me. So far I have proof of my beginnings in North Carolina, Georgia, New York, Jamaica, and the ever-present, geographically ambiguous certainty that once upon a time, before the transatlantic slave trade, my ancestors came from multiple regions of Africa. There are also high probabilities that some cells of mine began in Scotland, and that at least one strand of my mother line is Cherokee. Still, I feel, I know, all of me is beyond what is provable, and there are many more places on this Earth that I can also call home.

Bloom and I are simultaneously researching our roots. Our stories are shared and also divergent in so many ways. My parents were born in the same year, in the same country, and met in junior high school when they were 12 years old. In great contrast, I met James only 3 years before Bloom was born. Our mothers gave birth to us a decade apart, each on her own continent, separated by customs and language, by ocean and time.

Already, me and Bloom’s pathways into our distinct human forms are worlds, galaxies apart. Naturally as his mother, Bloom’s story contains all of my origins, but my story could never hold all of his. An entire realm of his existence extends beyond anything I know. I have no choice but to learn who else he is, who else all my children are.

Mapping the ways of our individual and collective creations means revisiting the routes that brought us to this now. It means looking back to the moments of rupture and undoing, of chance encounters and perfect timings. It means naming the tragedies and the blessings that collaborated in the forces that brought us together as a family. It means tracing the choices of ancestors—those with names and those without—remembering their nuances, imagining their prayers, and filling in all the gaps with our intuitive brilliance. Or maybe, as has happened for so long, it means leaving the gaps in tact, soft, empty, and unscripted for the next generation to interpret and author as they will.

We got only as far as the opening paragraph in our first reference material for the Great Migration before we had to stop and rewind. “Who is Jim Crow,” Bloom asks. And that opens up another dimension I hadn’t fully anticipated. I should have, though. How else to explain the terror so many black people were escaping without framing it within the brutal, post-Civil War environment of the South? How else to convey the significance of these long-ago migrations that directly shaped the part of his life he gets from me without painting the whole picture? 

What is the whole picture, really? Is it possible to ever know it all? Is the journey worth taking even if it sparks more questions than it answers? I feel it is. 

In this first week of attempting to help Bloom understand the complexities of the Great Migration, we have come to other critical research questions inspired by current global migration movements, Bloom’s father’s family’s immigration stories from East Africa, my family’s immigration from Jamaica on my father’s mother’s paternal grandparents’s side, and the family journeys we know about from others in our community. Every story requires pulling up multiple maps, looking up historical records, re-examining the timelines of a war, combing through the dense layers of humanity’s becoming, each horror and each triumph illuminating something essential all the same.

“How did you get to America?” Bloom’s question erupts like a spring in the wilderness of our explorations, an opening to a universe yet unexplored amidst the laptop, notebooks, dictionaries, books and atlases strewn across my bed—my preferred “classroom” most days. Our dialogue about why black people started fleeing the South a century ago led us into talks about the risks so many people take today to leave their home countries in search of a better life, oftentimes in America or Europe. He’s trying to wrap his nearly 10-year old mind around the idea that sometimes people do leave home, and everyone and everything they know, and never return.

 “I was born here,” I say automatically, “and so were you.” But as soon as I say it, I know it’s not true. And this knowing brings me pause. Simply being born here doesn’t explain the why, the how. It is in this moment that I feel something magical can come from our research, something bigger and brighter than merely coloring in the branches of our own family trees. 

I see this beautiful possibility of sharing the experiments and labors of discovery with our family and learning village. I’ve been dreaming up a community story creation practice for so long, and slowly positioning Wildseed to be the space where we grow these programs for our community. I see that even if we have intimate moments of researching as mother and son, Bloom and I don’t have to venture into these terrains alone. There’s something healing and powerful about creating a communal space for more families to do this work together. 

The Great Migrations family story collage project is a seed that has been activated from our preliminary studies about the Great Migration. I added the “s” because it’s not just going to center stories about black Americans moving from South to North, but also the multitudes of migrations powered by people of the African Diaspora. This is both a personal necessity—because my children carry multiple black migration stories in their blood—and also a community invitation because I do believe there are more opportunities for us to genuinely connect and commune as a human family, in the gathering and sharing of our stories, in the sorting and sifting of our memories and dreams. This budding idea is just the beginning of another journey. Where will it take us this time?

Cover Photo Story: Once upon a Mommy, almost 2 moons along with Bloom
Photo by Colin A. Danville

Storyboard Brilliance: An alternative archiving process for making a 'homeschool portfolio'

I am celebrating that I have arrived at a sustainable way to archive our family learning lab practice. This has been a nearly 3-year experimentation process. It started out with me trying to figure out the simplest, softest way to meet the portfolio requirement for the homeschool registration in our state. But it felt so disingenuous to me, to my children, to our way of life, to center the documentation process around an arbitrary mandate. Where’s the freedom in that?

So, I sat with this question for a long time. It has always been important to me to archive the experiment of our familymaking so that the munchkins can witness their becoming, and experience the creation of their personal stories in a way that is uniquely possible because we spend so much time together as a family. When they grow up and want to understand why their lives were so different from many of the people in our family, I want them to have pictures, videos, diaries, tangible memories that they can comb through and piece together the meanings for themselves. 

I want our commitment to nurturing liberated learning spaces, amplifying curiosity, and living with kindness to shine through the way our story is gathered and told. The more I feel into what we need to fully capture our story, the less of a “portfolio” is actually being made. Rather I have come to a clarity about what this archive I’m creating really is: a storyboard. A storyboard is a thoughtfully curated visual + textual retelling of significant moments that shape an experience. Our storyboards at Wildseed bring light to the nuanced ways we embrace creative opportunities to learn in all our family moments.

Wonder experimenting with gravity, again.

Yes, I am still figuring out how to put a portfolio together. But the storyboard is the central focus of my archiving labors. The portfolio (when it comes together) will be more like a footnote, a (compulsory) summary of the requested “academic record” that must be “on file." I am using the storyboard to guide the completion of the portfolio, and not the other way around. This is critical to me, and the distinction around this brings me great joy! Everything we do comes back to our story as a family, and that story is too expansive to be abbreviated in the name of a portfolio.

But where to begin? In the 6 years that I’ve been consciously cultivating our family learning lab, I have documented so much already! Photos, videos, recordings, writings—I have things everywhere! On every device, in closets, in bins, in multiple inboxes, on flash drives and Google drives, there are pieces of our story. I am reminding myself to breathe through the labor of unraveling and untangling what we have journeyed through so far. I’m (slowly) learning how to live more minimally, and especially as it relates to digital clutter. And right now, I’m still wading through the thick of it all. This is going to take some time!

In the last few years since I started to sort out a documentation process, I have tried out various templates and cataloguing systems. I once attempted to retroactively record everything we did at the end of the day—when I’m exhausted!— in a day planner. Unsurprisingly, that didn’t last long. I began collecting voice notes about our days and then really did intend to transcribe them later. I filmed hours and hours of our mundane life moments, thinking if I could “show” the way we really do “learn all the time,” that would be translatable enough for the portfolio. I wrote notes to myself in journals, in emails, on looseleaf paper, and within the folds of colorful composition books. I created albums of photos for each munchkin, over the years, from our story times, experiments, field trips, and family fun days with other homeschooling families. I have printouts and book logs and worksheets. All together, I have a fabulously wild mashup of the evolution of our family learning lab. And I am now ready to form it into something someone other than me can decipher.

One of the tools I started using in this documentation experiment was Canva. I LOVE CANVA!!!! Canva makes you feel like you can do all things! There is a layout or a vibe that you see, and then you can make it your own—just like that! It really feels like magic! I’ve always enjoyed visual design. I’ve been creating websites and putting together virtual programming materials for years. So finding Canva was like the digital design dream come true!

Embodied alphabet play with munchkins before dinner time. Can you tell what letter this (almost) is?

One reason Canva really works for me is because I can do Canva from my phone! THIS IS ESSENTIAL! Life on the move with munchkins means I cannot be stationary on a computer most days. And since the vision I have for our storyboard requires continuous archiving, being able to easily upload content into the templates I’ve generated for each munchkin’s storyboard is AMAZING! 

After years of trying and trying and trying again, I have activated a seamless integration that flows with the way I naturally document our lives. In the many stops and starts, and frustrations and explorations that it took to get to this synergy point, I realized at the heart of any sustainable archival system has to be its ability to complement what you already do in life. For me, it was the photos. I take photos to mark our moments. Then, when I come back to the pictures from that moment, I can write the story about what we did. This works for me because I love taking pictures for myself. Even before motherhood, I captured images as a way to trace back through my experiences dancing and creating in different places, sometimes moving with new people everyday. Photography became a way for me to remember what time and memory might otherwise erase.

In coming to our storyboard process, I was able to apply my well-practiced art of photographing our lives to the documentation of our family learning lab and the collection of materials that can also be used for the portfolio. The images are placeholders for the stories. The stories give me space to remember the details of our moments. And then I can sift through the bounty of details in the story and pull out the highlights that are relevant to the portfolio. I will also use Canva to make the portfolios. Even though I still roll my eyes a bit at the mandate, the designer in me is curious about creating a visually dynamic and intelligently designed portfolio as well.

What excites me most about this whole adventure is that I followed my Yes! If I had only worked to meet the portfolio requirement, I wouldn’t have felt so deeply into this more abundant story sharing creation and archiving practice that is the storyboards. I’m grateful for the long labors of discovery. Something beautiful is born every time. 

Bloom edits his journal entry for the storyboard.

Dancing into the mangrove

I study trees and I am fascinated by mangroves. There are many species of mangrove trees, but the ones I research the most are the ones that have prop roots and look like they are walking on water. These mangroves grow mostly in warm coastal regions, and they fortify the coastline against storm surges and flooding. As they grow they eventually “reclaim” land from the sea because their root systems extend outward into the ocean. Another way to think of it is that mangroves facilitate the opposite of coastal erosion. For this and many more reasons, mangroves are extremely vital to the planet’s well-being.

Source: Marine Conservation Institute

As a dancer, the shape and growth patterns of the red mangrove trees inspire movement discoveries. I enjoy exploring dance experiments with my children because they bring their own understandings to the process. Their questions and interpretations of what they think we’re doing can be hilarious, and can stimulate magical, unexpected adventures.

Source: CNN

The movements for our explorations were also inspired by a beautiful children’s book I’d just found at the library. The Sea, The Storm and the Mangrove Tangle by Lynne Cherry told the full life cycle of the mangrove tree in a way I hadn’t been able to piece together before. I loved learning about the propagules, the “seeds” of the mangrove tree. They’re not actually seeds! They are literally baby mangrove trees, that may take up to a year to develop, and they’re designed to be like a falling dart so that they can fall off the mother tree and take root in the seabed below. If the propagule doesn’t land and take root immediately, it is strong enough to withstand drifting for TWO years in the open sea until landing on a coastline where it can take root and seed a new mangrove forest over the next hundred years.

The more I read about the mangrove, and its diverse ecosystem teeming with life, the more I felt inspired to move my body with the stories of the mangrove’s creation process. I started reading the story to the munchkins, but each page, each paragraph, was an invitation to get up and see how something could be imagined in our bodies. So, we didn’t read the book straight through. In fact we didn’t even finish it together (I read it all on my own). We would read a bit, dance and experiment. Read a bit, dance and play around some more. Munchkins streamed in and out of the dancing, taking turns watching, participating, and documenting with the camera.

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A Propagule’s Journey, starring Mommy & Jubilee

Mommy and Jubilee pretend to be a propagule that is tossed about the sea, drifting and rolling across the waves on its way to a new homeland. Original images by Bloom, editing by Mommy.

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Surprisingly, the munchkins were more inspired by the animals living in the mangrove ecosystem than the composition of the trees and the intricate configurations of their root systems. I guess that’s a “duh” moment, but I really thought they’d be more into making the shapes of the trees. Instead, they wanted to be the birds propped on the branches—also known as my arms and legs! They wanted to be the fish and the crabs. The majority of their enthusiasm was around attaching themselves to me—all at the same time—and hanging off of me in some way.

My vision of everyone discovering some cool way to make prop roots out of their own legs never really caught on. I followed their joys and we kept dancing. They led me into places in my body I didn’t know were there to be found. I was rolling on the ground like a propagule in the sea. I was twisting and contorting my arms and legs to simulate the complexity of a dense mangrove. I was sprouting up from the earth like a newly rooting propagule. I was on my back, my legs high in the air, swaying softly like seagrass in the tide. Every page we read, every fact we learned became another way to understand and embody the magic of the mangrove.

What stayed with me the most from our mangrove explorations is how physical my labors are as a mother. Much like the mangrove that supports multiple organisms, creatures, and it’s own decades-long, centuries-long expansion into a mangrove forest, my body is laboring and sustaining multiple munchkin frequencies at all times. I am nourishing babies at the breast. I am wearing babies on my back. I am soothing bigger babies in my lap, or as they lean into me, their growing bodies making me lose my balance when they put all their weight on me.

Not only is there so much physical connection in my day-to-day labors, but I’m almost always with them, caring for them, in the same room or house as them. Their hunger needs, their conflict resolution needs, their bathroom needs, their my-tablet-is-out-of-battery-needs, their wish-we-could-go-somewhere-and-play needs—all of it pulls on some part of me. I identify with the mangrove in its constant performance of sustaining labors. There is no dormancy, no pint where the action breaks. This too is my experience of motherhood.

Dancing into the mangrove helped me process a reality of my life as a full presence mother in a way that I had yet to gather language for. Once again, trusting the power of the experiment to bring clarities to my process was so generative, and there are more mangrove adventures in the works!

Source: Mission Blue

Source: Green Matters

Learning how to paint with 4 children

Everything takes time.

We hear this often as children when we’re growing up. Then we repeat it to our children as parents needing them to understand that elusive thing called patience. This sentiment about learning that things/people/plants/processes evolve in their own time is what comes to mind when I think of how long it has taken me to feel like I can manage a painting activity when I’m on my own with the munchkins. After plenty of painting mishaps when there were only 3 of them, I felt extremely wary about facilitating painting with the 4 of them when Revelation was born.

In the last few weeks though, I’ve experimented with collaborative painting activities. The biggest things I shifted in my painting-with-small-children practice is that I removed all water from the process! This has made allllll the difference. The reason painting was so wild and chaotic in previous years—when the oldest 5!— was because I was giving them each their own water cups to clean brushes. Now instead we use old rags or paper towels, or they don’t even care about clearing paint off the brush because their real joy is in mixing all the colors up anyway!

Assorted colors mixed by Wonder and Mommy for the lowercase alphabet wall.

This is Revelation’s first time getting to paint—and he’s nearing 2 1/2 years old. Once it occurred to me that I didn’t need to complicate the already full labors of painting with 4 munchkins by adding water to the mix, a whole new world of possibility opened up. Suddenly group painting projects felt like something I could do when I’m on my own with them.

Another simplifying factor that made painting more accessible was taking the paint party to the floor. Trying to paint at the table was often too difficult to navigate. They didn’t have all the space they needed to work. Unnecessary squabbles about people infringing on other people’s space popped up—draining me of the little bit of energy I’d actually set aside for the intensity of the activity!

Mommy holds the “e” letter stencil while Revelation guides his paint brush to form the letter “e” on the wall.

Moving to the floor gave them more room to spread out. It also saved me from countless trips to the floor to retrieve runaway brushes and slippery paper-canvases. Being on the floor gave them better control over their materials and more space to engage with their explorations.

Once I realized this 6-pack of acrylic paints was able to support us in many artistic adventures, I finally had all the pieces in place to add the lowercase alphabet wall to the collection. The uppercase wall was done months ago. The chaos and stress of that attempt at a group painting was a lot to process. Yes, I had water then too. If only I had just figured out that we could paint without water.

Also, I hadn’t preset the stencils on the wall, and eager munchkins were impatient with each letter having to be positioned one at a time. Fights raged on as people forgot their place in the painting queue. Mysterious paint streaks of blue and orange landed on sheets, tables and other parts of the wall. A wailing Revelation protested from the carrier on my back—the entire time!— because he too wanted to paint.

Still, the wall turned out great with all of that, and they loved it. They kept asking when were we going to finish the lowercase set too, and I couldn’t tell them when. I knew I’d need to think of a smoother process first.

Wonder enjoys seeing how the hot pink paint he mixed looks on the wall as he adds “t” to the alphabet wall.

Gradually as the months passed, and the seasons changed, a whole new approach for the lowercase wall was emerging. It all came together in a moment when I wasn’t looking for it, and I was curious and open to a new experience unfolding.

This time we were starting the process with ONE munchkin! James had taken everyone else to the library, and Wonder didn’t want to go. It was the perfect moment to get our paint process going. Finding one-one-one moments with each munchkin is an experiment and a wobbly dance with time, energy, and resources. Some days moments appear unexpectedly—like on this day—and you roll with it.

I taped all the stencils on the wall. Then we mixed our paint colors. Beginning with “z,” we alternated painting letters, so that we could remove the stencils as we went along. We were in a nice groove, and I was noticing how much softer the painting process was with one munchkin. It seems obvious enough, but rarely am I doing something with only one child in mind. I was happy that I had everything ready to go to make the most of my time with Wonder.

Revelation and Jubilee “enhance” Mommy’s painting without her knowledge while she is putting dinner on the table. Filmed by Bloom, a willing collaborator it seems.

We made it all the way to “j” before the rest of the munchkins came home and discovered the paint party going on. Of course they all wanted a turn, and wanted to paint on the wall, and wanted to do it now, now. now! My quiet painting moment with Wonder was upended in a second, and he slipped out of the room while his siblings took over the process. Later though, he came back to document some of the process with my phone, and so we have some pictures of our process in action.

I am celebrating the discovery of a painting practice in our family learning lab! It’s been a long time coming, for sure! I enjoy that it’s something I can facilitate when I’m the only adult around, and that it creates an engaged-and-seated interlude from their usual frequency of bouncing, running, and jumping. Also, last night I was really excited to finally paint my own picture during our process. It was fun to show them that there are so many more colors to mix when you use a dab of white in red, or a touch of yellow to green.

“Family House, One Day”, Mommy’s colorful abstraction of a dream for a house that is bigger and has lots of space and grass for munchkins to play outside all the time.

There will be more painting explorations to come. We are just getting reacquainted with the possibilities. I am grateful for washable paint materials, and an abundance of things to paint on in the meantime. Now when they ask, “Can we paint?”, I don’t feel a wave of anxiety about how am I going to hold all parts of the experience together without getting paint everywhere.

Every art medium makes something more possible that wasn’t possible another way. The magical powers of the colors that can slide, and bend, and swirl and mesh together is fascinating every time. The smoothness with which you can blend and reconstruct whole worlds with the stroke of a brush—it never gets old. With painting there’s always a new journey for us to discover, and we never know exactly where the colors, and shapes, and densities of shade will take us. I feel we’ll be turning to painting as a family practice more and more. I am grateful we are finding a rhythm with it.

Supporting kinetic learners takes space and time

The munchkins were born into a family of movers. Seeing them develop as dancers, capoeristas, spinners, leapers, sliders, and shakers is fascinating to watch, and at times can be challenging to facilitate with people moving at different speeds, in varying directions, and with diverse skill sets at sharing the space with others. As with most things in our family learning lab, finding space for everyone is a daily experiment.

In my pre-mommy life I traveled the world as a space activator, dancing in as many places as I could, feeling into the energies and creative opportunities everywhere. My roots as a spatially sensitive mover, and James’ life’s work of studying the capoeira, meant having space to move was central for our creation flows and our family rhythms.

Mommy, the Visionary Space Activator, 4 years before birthing Bloom. Photo by Elen A. Awalom

With the birth of each munchkin I learn more ways, and navigate more complexities, about giving everyone the space they need. I am deeply committed to making sure my children have as much space as possible. Some days my efforts don’t work out all the way, but I know we can always try again tomorrow.

When I reflect on what it takes to really support my children’s freedom to move, the first thing that comes to mind is our conscious choice as parents to have an open-space, living environment. We have very little furniture. There are very few objects that are too precious for kids to touch, damage or break. In prioritizing creating a space where we can dance and play capoeira all the time, we naturally ensure that there’s always space for the kids to run, play, and be expansive in their movements as well.

James training capoeira at sunset, 2 years before Bloom was born. This is a still taken from a video filmed by Binah.

Before the pandemic, our house was also a site in our village of families where people came so that their kids could move around freely too. I loved that we could share the bounty of our own space with others. For some families, our house was one of the few home-like spaces where their children could move with ease—and it meant a lot to them that we actively shared the gift of our space.

Baby Jubilee playing inside the spatial-objects maze that Mommy created.

Living in the city, space is a precious thing to come by, and finding safe, free spaces for my children to be themselves is an ongoing discovery for me. Where can they run? Where can they be loud? Can they eat their snack? And make a mess? Where are the bathrooms? Is the ground clean? Is it away from the street and traffic? Can the baby and the big kids enjoy this place? Is it near the metro? Factoring these and many other questions go into the way a space is chosen.

Moving around as a family, primarily on public transportation, as large as we are is complicated sometimes. Many days, home is the only place that meets everybody’s needs—Mommy’s included! So our home space is intentionally as open as it can be so that we can make our adventures here when I don’t have the energy or resources to search out welcoming spaces in public.

Jubilee and revelation rearranging Mommy’s library for their own purposes.

I’m constantly reimagining space to be more functional and accessible for all the movers in our family. One of the big shifts I made this year—and it’s been the BEST thing ever—is taking away the headboard and bed frame, and putting my mattress on the floor. It freed up so much space in my room, which is the heart of my creation laboratory and where so much of our family learning lab labors take place.

My bed also doubles as a launch pad for munchkins wanting to flip, tumble, and jump. Supporting kinetic learners means designing spaces with their movement needs at the center. I dream of a world where more public spaces are shaped with families, young children, and movers of all ages in mind. I dream of a world where more people develop a consciousness around creative ways to make home spaces and other private spaces more accessible and inviting to families nurturing little movers.

One of their last big field trips as a trio before Revelation is born. Photo by Mommy, who is nearly 8 moons along with Revelation.