Dr. Chelsea Bailey
Independent Educational Consultant
Interview conducted on January 30, 2019
Jesse Coffino: I sent out some questions to start the ball rolling for these interviews, and I started with play memory. Have you asked people about their play memories? I’m wondering how you do that. Do you do that? Is that something you do?
Chelsea Bailey: I do. I don’t. I use it strategically. It’s not like a regular thing that I do. Actually, you know what I do? Here’s what I started doing. I tell other people about how Ms. Cheng approached this. I tell them Ms. Cheng’s story, and then, when I get to the part where I talk about play memory, I just feel this shift. I know that they are being triggered with their own memories, and so I like doing it that way because it’s not, I’m being . . . It feels a little too therapist-y to say to someone, “Let’s just go there and talk about your earliest play memory, memories of a place, of a child.”
It feels more . . . It’s like this interesting thing where we’re going along and we’re having a professional conversation and then everything shifts. I think it’s . . . I was going to say jarring, but it’s jarring in a good way. It’s unexpected for them, and then I can reflect back to them. “What just happened for you? You just remembered your play, didn’t you?”
Then, they’ll say, “Yeah,” and then they’ll tell their story. I like paralleling the story of Ms. Cheng’s creation of Anji Play with triggering that play memory in them, because it has that same jarring effect. It’s a paradigm shift.
So it’s more about that, and it’s only . . . It’s only like once or twice where it didn’t really work, once recently it was because this person already knew too much about the story and Ms. Cheng developing this.
Jesse Coffino: Yeah. Is there any memory of play that comes up for you that you go back to, or that’s like the thing, you’re like, this is . . . When I think about that question, this is, what comes to mind?
Chelsea Bailey: There’s actually two stories that come up for me again and again, and they’re really different ones. Actually, three. There’s three different play stories, play memories. I feel like they—just to get a little meta, I feel like they represent different aspects, like the different ways that children play in Anji. The first one is a memory of making a little, like, nest for myself in our hall linen closet, and I was probably in elementary school at this point, because I would take a flashlight or take all these pillows or . . . It was a linen closet, so I could put . . . it was one of those things where there was, where the first shelf started probably three feet up. I don’t know why. Who knows why the closet was designed this way, but it was a small closet. It wasn’t like a big walk-in closet. It was a small closet, like the size of a pretty standard hall closet, and I would take all of these pillows and all the linens and I would reorganize them into that lower space, into this nest, and I would go in there and shut the door, shut the door behind me, and take a flashlight out and read and do. I had a little secret world in there.
When I think about, for me, that has a lot of . . . There’s magic and depth and meaningfulness and . . . It was like Narnia or something, it was through the looking glass or through the wardrobe for me, so it was a place of really deep fantasy. And it’s funny, because I’ve always been a really social person, like even as a child, I was really outgoing. I think about that now, in how I would balance my intense sociality with this aloneness.
Rebalancing myself and reconnecting, having that balance be with my connection to self. How important fantasy was for me. It was incredibly important. Then, there were other memories throughout my childhood as I got older. I had a really big closet in my bedroom, and it was a walk-in closet. I would take everything out. This is just a . . . I’m remembering, as we’re talking, that there was this theme for me where I would . . . Later, I would take everything out of my giant walk-in closet and turn it into a room.
There were many times, between me and my mother, that were me being asked, told, to clean up my room because everything from my closet was in my room. There were these containing spaces that I would create for myself, and when I was older, I would go into the big closet later, and I would write poetry when I was . . . I was young. It was eight and nine and 10, just coming into that pre-adolescence. I wish I still had that poetry.
The hall closet, the family closet, that was when I was younger, and that was really about reading, but my closet, my bedroom, was much more about, like, my poetry hangout, my Bohemian poetry writing hangout, that, but that does it. This second, this is the second closet that was a different . . . There’s not a play memory that comes up so much . . . There is another play memory that comes up for me, and this comes spontaneously to me when I’m talking about Anji, when I’m talking about children’s play.
These memories frequently arise for me organically, so another one that stands out to me, and this takes place in my backyard, and you may have heard me tell this story . . . We lived in the suburbs. It was Dallas, and it was a nice burb, a nice middle-class suburb, and we had a big backyard. It was probably tiny, but in my memory it’s huge, and there’s a lot of vegetation in it, and it was a pretty typical backyard, and it was mostly grass, and along the edges were bushes and a fence.
There was one corner. It’s far away . . . as far away as you can get from our kid’s play area. It was this area that had all kinds of vegetation. I remember going out there at one point, and again, I’m probably in the middle of elementary school, and I remember finding flowers on this hanging plant, there’s this . . . There was quite a vine.
There’s just these beautiful purple flowers, and they cascaded down, and they were beautiful, and they were . . . When you see beautiful colors in the midst of all this green and brown or whatever, it’s really striking, and just being, I’m so interested. I’m so . . . I felt like I had found this something that nobody else knew was there, and I remember. I would go back.
I would go back to, like, check on, like . . . Like you and your plants. I would go back and check on this . . . I just felt I had found this little magical portal. I felt I had found . . . I felt like it was just for me. I felt like it was “these flowers are so beautiful.” I don’t know if they were fragrant. They might’ve been. But I remember going back. I would go back and check on this plant to see what was happening with it, and then the next time I go back, right in the summer, it has fruit on it. It’s not grapes but it’s some kind of berries, and then it’s cascading with these berries, and I’m just conjuring a fruit. I mean, from the flowers to the fruit, and I’m thinking, “My god. This is so . . .” And I don’t have any sense of food cycles. I don’t. I’m eating Kraft macaroni and cheese. I don’t understand any of this, and so I’m feeling, “My god. How can this get more magic?” Then, I would go back in the fall, and then the leaves would be . . . the fruit had fallen and the leaves would be turning.
Then I go back in the winter, and they’d be bare, but the bare branches were there. This was so magical to me, and I really felt like . . . it felt really personal. It was this absolutely personal encounter with nature and with the cycle of growth.
Jesse Coffino: Growth, change, potential, life.
Chelsea Bailey: Yeah, seasons, all of that.
Jesse Coffino: Conditions, right? Have something responsive to conditions throughout the environment—
Chelsea Bailey: Yeah, it was just . . . I would say that it was about wonder.
Jesse Coffino: It was unfolding according to some.
Chelsea Bailey: Yes.
Jesse Coffino: You witness that or you can even—
See that thing that was supposed to happen, what’s happened, and not know what’s going to happen next.
Chelsea Bailey: Yeah, and feeling that it was . . . that I could understand the pattern of it without somebody telling me what it was. It was probably, and I’m sure I had other experiences of authentic learning, but it really stands out to me as this absolutely authentic experience of encountering a pattern of change and something that had nothing to do with humans. Obviously, it’s something to do with humans, but in my mind, it didn’t.
It wasn’t dependent on me, and it wasn’t dependent on any grown-up in my life. Maybe somebody was watering it. I don’t know. I think it came from my neighbor’s yard. But like I said, the fact that it was all tucked away in this corner was really important, because it wasn’t a part of this. It was this private discovery, this private, and I feel like, now I love those private spaces, the hidden magical spaces in Anji environments, because I have that deep memory of what it means when you discover the magic of something on your own.
I didn’t have to be alone, but I also didn’t need to share it with anybody. Like, the learning could happen without needing to share it with anybody. And to get me out of my very thinky head, which I had when I was a kid too, into this physical, this natural, into nature. Right, from the abstract and the concrete.
My third memory is that, this neighborhood I lived in or this community I lived in, it was at the edges of this suburban community, they were developing the community. The neighborhood I lived in was developed, and it’d been there for a little while, but a bike ride away was a wonderland of construction sites and so . . . This is probably older elementary school, older elementary.
My friends and I spent a huge amount of time out in those places that were being developed. I spent a lot of time engaged in what was clearly risky behavior, and we were running through this torn-up—basically, these areas that had just been torn up because the houses were going to be made concrete. They were building infrastructure, so there were those . . . drainage pipes. They were everywhere. They were both outside in the ground, and there were actually long stretches where you could run through the drainage pipe underground that’s already been laid. That was very exciting, and then we just ran around with rebar. There are all of these uneven surfaces, and we’re jumping off things and we’re riding our bikes over stuff.
It’s very, what do they call it, motocross or whatever. It was very active. I wasn’t a girly girl. I wasn’t really a . . . I wasn’t exactly a tomboy, but I wasn’t a girly girl, and I was very active, and so there was . . . my friends and I, and it was a mix of boys and girls. We went out there and we did all the things we shouldn’t be doing, but because it was the days of go out in the morning and come back in the evening. Nobody was asking, and the parents didn’t want to know what you were doing, and you didn’t tell them what you were doing unless you got hurt, and then you didn’t want to tell them you’re hurt because you’d get in trouble for doing something dangerous, and so it was this sense of total adventure and freedom and, absolutely, the world of children.
My very clear memory, and Anji Play helped me clarify this a lot—this won’t surprise you—I was very much a provocateur. I would get other people to do things I didn’t want to do, like I would talk, I would say, “You guys try that. Why don’t you try it first? Why don’t you go through the culvert that we can’t see the other end of and then come back and tell me what happens and then I’ll go?”
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Chelsea Bailey: Frances and I had been professors together at NYU and she . . . I left, and she stayed, but then she became emeritus and she went to UPenn, among other things, and so she was the director of education or teacher development, teacher training, teacher development, professional development, at UPenn.
Frances had done these really kind things for me where she had referred me.She would get calls for consulting jobs all the time when we were at NYU, because people, especially for-profit projects or not-for-profit projects, want PhDs at major universities as consultants. Frances would get case calls all the time. She’s very well known, and she would send some my way, and so she sent one my way that was a really interesting project.
I knew it was an important project, and it was doing evaluations and curriculum, and they really loved my work, and because they really loved my work, they referred me to work at the children’s television show WordWorld, and my year at WordWorld changed everything for me, both materially and professionally. And it was the most painful and the most educative year I’ve ever had, because I just learned so much about the corporate world, about children’s television. A whole bunch of stuff changed for me that year, and I also realized that I, for the rest of my life, my job would be . . . It’s going to be telling people. Giving people, how do I say it? Explaining to people why early childhood is important. And that I wasn’t ever going to get to graduate into really having colleagues that I could have a conversation with . . . That my job in this life was to stand up every single day and say the same thing over and over again with clarity. That’s what I learned that year, more than anything else, and I accepted that. I took that on. I accepted that that’s what I was going to do, so I felt this incredible gratitude to Frances, because . . . Even though, yeah, it was that she referred me to this other gig, but in my mind, if not for Frances, then none of this other stuff would have happened.
At that time, I hadn’t seen Frances for years, because she had moved to Chicago for a while and then she was in Pennsylvania, and it was my friend Roberto, who worked at NYU, it was his 50th birthday. She was going to be at the party, and I was going to his party, and I was going to see everybody from NYU, which I wasn’t really looking forward to, but I knew Frances was going to be there, and I put in my mind, really strongly, “I’m going to wish Roberto happy birthday and then I’m going to thank Frances.” I hadn’t seen her for something like 10 years. It had really been a long time. And so I did that and I ran up to her.
I give her a big hug, and I said, “I want to thank you,” and she threw her arms around me and she said, “No problem.” Then, in the next breath, she said, “Do you want to open schools in China with me?” I probably would have said it anyway, but in that particular moment of reciprocity, I said, “Sure.” She said, “What are you doing right now?” I said, “Not too much. My consulting is quiet right now.”
Then, we met with a family from Hong Kong at UPenn, and then it was just this, like, roll . . . The ball started rolling, and because I had the chance to work on the project with these funders, I spent four months in Tianjin and got to work, sit knee to knee, with Chinese kindergarten teachers and principals, with almost no mediation, with no cultural mediation, because the funders just abandoned us to whoever was there.
We barely had a translator, and so it was so, such a very sincere, uncurated experience, and I got to really . . . I introduced this Western curriculum, and I understood what that meant. Again, for four months, I got to understand, in a nuanced way, what that meant to the Chinese sensibility and the Chinese context. Through that, and because I also, I needed help, so I reached out, and I reached out to people I knew who would work in China, in the US, and then they referred me to people.
They referred people to me and then they referred me to people, and then that eventually got to somebody who was connected to a publishing company in China that was looking for Western experts who could do talks in China to kindergarten teachers on the importance of play, and so I started doing that, and then I was asked by this person on behalf of the Chinese National Society for Early Education, connected to Professor Hua, I didn’t know then, but she was the one who organized this conference.
I was asked to bring important Westerners, high-ranking Westerners, and after some interesting shuffles around of who it might be, it turned out to be me, Frances, and Peter. I wasn’t even supposed to go. I was going to find three other people to go, but then it was clear that, for a whole bunch of complicated reasons, I was the best third person to go. I tell all the details of this story because I feel like there’s so many things that could’ve happened even a little bit differently.
We went and we gave our talk, and you’ve heard me tell this before. We gave our talk, and we gave a very 101-level talk, because I had given talks in about 10 other cities, at that point, all over China, and I’d spoken through translation with professors and teachers and students about what play meant, from their point of view, for young children, and I felt like it was pretty introductory. It was a pretty new idea. And then I spent four months in Tianjin working with people on this exact idea.
I may have made presumptions, but I clearly . . . I did make presumptions. So, the next day, they were very polite. There was a thousand, it was a conference in Anji with a thousand teachers, and that was in July of 2014, and then the next day, we went and saw the schools. What’s so interesting about my memory of seeing the schools that day—because we saw two schools. We saw Jiguan and we saw another school where we’ve been to again, but I can’t remember the name of.
My memory, first of all, when I first walked into the yard, the outdoor space, it just felt different than anything I’d ever felt. There was just this sense of freedom. We know this. You know what I’m talking about. There was that sense of freedom, but it was so jarring. Because now I’m used to it. I still love it. I still, every time I go to Anji, I just, every muscle or cell in my body relaxes, and I feel like I’m home when I’m in the schools.
At that time, it was jarring in a good way, because it was so different than what I was feeling in the US or I felt in other parts of China. Here’s what’s interesting about my memory. I have no memory of Frances and Peter being there with me. They just evaporate. Everything evaporated. It wasn’t like we were talking to each other.
The other memory that I have, and this is actually frequently the case, is that I don’t remember having a translator. I don’t remember having an interpreter. I don’t remember speaking with Ms. Cheng directly, and I guess that’s a sign of a decent interpreter or a deep connection, right? Again, you’ve heard me tell stories. First I see all this stuff going on outside, and then the school has three rooms. I’ll be going to the next room, and it’s all pillows and books, the whole room. It’s not a classroom, though. It’s like a lie-around-and-read room. Who has that? Who does that at the school, right?
Going back to my memory of my secret Narnia closet space, this is the idea of having this pillow-filled room with books. It was so relaxed. That’s part of what I felt. There was such a lack of tension. Then the next room was an entire room filled with, the words I’d use were, these rough-hewn blocks. I thought they were cedar because they have this incredible smell. They were all fresh and they weren’t finished. They were really rough.
Some of them were just pieces of log, teeth-like, big branches. Some were shaped like blocks. It was just a room of baskets with that. Again, the idea that you get a room that was only that. I mean, there are places in the US where you see that, but it’s rare. It’s really rare. Then, the next thing I saw was this . . . It was like a breezeway. It was like a hallway, an opened outdoor hallway, that had what I know now are play stories, and then the pictures of the kids.
The photographs, they were actually . . . I think they were Xeroxes of photographs. Then that’s when I lost it. Because this was, this documentation that was clearly, that had this Reggio feel, but I knew it wasn’t that, because it wasn’t . . . Well, first of all, it didn’t look like original documentation, but also, it was, it didn’t feel formal. It didn’t have that formalism. I’ve seen enough derivative curriculum to know what it looks like when somebody is trying to use somebody else’s curriculum.
That feeling that I had when I first walked in, it was like that feeling of being shocked by this . . . The joy that I saw in the risky play, and then the sense of ease and just care in the book room. Then, that going to the magic of me discovering that one plant in my backyard, the natural, being able to encounter natural materials in that way. The respect. There’s so much respect for children and how much space and the number of materials. All of that was built into it. Respect was built into everything.
Then, seeing these images and the documentation to . . . It wasn’t just respect at that point. It was bearing witness to what was meaningful and important to children and reflecting on it, and that is just a whole other level of teaching. That’s rare. That’s rare in any instance, and that’s why today, in a conversation with the leader of a large network of Head Start sites . . . I said a couple of times . . . that there’s these pieces of Anji Play that people have no idea that are there, that are more important than the parts that they’re seeing, more foundational, and are so rare to see. When I saw the documentation, I started crying. I want to cry now. I knew that this was profound and important. Like I say in my story, in this story, my memory is that I grabbed Ms. Cheng by her shoulders, and then I shook her and said, “Who created this?” Of course, I didn’t, and I’m sure I didn’t do that. That was my emotional state, and I did say, “Who created this?” Then, like, in a half of . . . Then in the next breath, I said, “You. You created this.” She said, “Well, yes, me and a few other people. Yes.”
That’s when I turned to the person who was organizing my . . . this trip for me. I said, “I don’t care how I do it. I have to come back here as soon as possible, and I need to stay for three to four weeks.” I was able to get myself back in October and stay. I was actually in . . . I was in China for four weeks, but I was in Anji for . . . Because that was . . . I paid my way by giving more talks. That’s when I got . . . I observed and I had . . . Bobo, he was my translator and my interpreter, and which was . . . It was so, I don’t know, like stumbling. I just stumbled into this really magical place, and I didn’t know at that time that I was the second person to spend time there, or that we had been the second group of Western visitors. I didn’t know about Renate [Dr. Renate Zimmer] at that point. I actually found out it was . . . I was visiting all these different schools, and I was interviewing Ms. Cheng, and interviewing teachers and principals. I was up in her hometown, Zhangwu, and I see this picture of this white person in the principal’s office. I said, “Who’s that?” Then, they said, what do they call her, “Qimoer” I said, “Who is Qimoer?” It was really clear that she was a visitor.
When Ms. Cheng—and I have such a clear memory that when Ms. Cheng, with Bobo translating, the 25-year-old who had done his master’s thesis on Virginia Woolf, Bobo was translating for me, and when we were at Shuangyi and I was sick as a dog, I had terrible parasites, and it was a . . . It was still hot, I remember I’m dripping with sweat, and just interviewing her about this. It’s really clear when she . . . No, when she tells the story it is about how they first started with the games and the toys [false play].
Then when she says, “We realized we weren’t doing it right,” then I said, “Why?” Then she said, “The children weren’t happy.” I said, “Well, they look happy in the pictures.” She said, “No. Look at their eyes. Their eyes are not smiling, right? You know this.” I start to get this butterfly feeling in my stomach. I said, “What did you . . .What did you do?” She said, and I think I asked, “Did you read a book?” She said, “We realized we didn’t understand play.” I said, “What did you do? Did you read books about play?”
She says, as politely and deftly as one could, just says, “You’re an idiot. Of course not, we didn’t have those books.” That’s the wrong answer, right? It’s a wrong question to ask. That they remember their play as children and watched the children play, and that’s with everything. That’s when I started to cry, in those interviews, that’s when I started crying. I was on a little kid’s chair, and I remember falling off the chair, falling over, because that’s when I know. That’s the moment.
In the same way that the moment is when I see the documentation and how it’s layered on top of all these other . . . basically acts of respect towards children. Then, when she says, “We watch children play.” There’s no way she could have hidden. Like there was nothing, there was nothing hidden in the story. Even if there had been other support or help, or whatever . . . That methodology is foolproof. I mean, I don’t know if it’s foolproof, but it is the methodology, right? I’m told this story, and I started to sob. I just basically burst into tears. Bobo says, “Why are you crying?” He doesn’t understand what’s going on at all, and I say, “Well, she’s a historical figure.” That’s all I could get out. That’s what came out of my mouth, because it was . . . I knew it’s historical significance. After she said it, after she told me that story, I asked her very explicitly if other people would come, and what help they had, and she said really not . . . that they really did it on their own.
Professor Hua didn’t start coming until what, like, 2012 or 2013? It was pretty late. Then talking to the teachers, in the level at which they talk about things, how they talk about children, it was so sophisticated. That’s when I said, “Okay. I want to take this to the West.”
The first thing that happens is that I have to come up with a plan. I have to get permission from the local Anji government. But Ms. Cheng doesn’t believe that the West needs it. That’s what happens. I said, “This is better than 90% of what’s going on in the West.” I’m going to say, now, I’m going to raise it to 95, maybe even more. I said, “It’s better than 90% of what’s going on in the West,” and she doesn’t believe me. We’re at Jiguan. We’re sitting around the conference table. Lily is there, the other principals are there, and she doesn’t believe me. I explained to her why, what part of . . . I basically explained to her the difference between what she’s doing and what other people are doing. I explained to her the pieces that are similar to Reggio, similar to other things.
Then I explained to her that mostly we’re not . . . there’s no scale. We have idiosyncratic programs like Bank Street College School for Children or other . . . or the Boston School, or Play Mountain Place, or you have these idiosyncratic single models, but they really aren’t models that are scaled, and that most people aren’t doing Reggio, the way Reggio was intended, fully doing Reggio, even though more people have access to Reggio or are doing Reggio.
It’s basically, I break it down for her, exactly why what she’s doing is . . . will help other people in the West particularly. Once I convinced her of that, I said, “You need to write a plan.” I don’t know. I can’t remember, actually, if I felt there is some urgent need to write a plan or I was told I needed to write a plan. I can’t remember. It feels like some . . . My memories, my emotional memories, some combination of those two things.
Then it’s a holiday, and I really . . . Over the fall holiday, since the schools are closed, I want to go somewhere by myself. I want to go in my Narnia closet so I can write and focus, and write this, and this is a beautiful place, I want to go someplace beautiful, and it’s a beautiful place. I don’t want to be in the hotel in town. I want to get out in the mountains. There was this whole thing about them convincing me, me convincing them to let me go somewhere alone. It was very difficult.
We figured it out. We figured out how to do it, and it’s hilarious because I’m there for a week, seven days, by myself. Every single day, somebody drives an hour and half or two hours, whatever it is, to visit me. Finally I say, “You have to leave me alone or I’m not going to be able to do . . . I do need a day by myself to write, just one day by myself to write this.” Finally, I get left alone for a couple of days. I make a lot of Chinese grannies cry because I’m eating alone.
Anyways, I write this plan, and then Ms. Cheng . . . and then somebody who spoke English, and who was involved in another part of the local government, also helped, and was friends with Ms. Cheng, and helped me make our strategy, because she was going to be my interpreter. We come up with this whole plan. We go over the plan. We go over the plan. We go over the plan for how we’re going to present it to the local county government head. I spent all this time preparing, and really a lot is going into making this thing, and we go, and it’s actually in that we meet Principal Zheng in the conference room at Fenghuang Shan, at her main school. I do this whole thing. It’s really formal. And then the head of the county, the head of education for Anji County, who, I think there’s been two or three of them since then, I make my whole pitch, and he says, “Okay, I agree.” He doesn’t ask any questions. Afterwards, I say, “Okay.” We say our goodbyes. We take our formal picture. Then I ask, “What happened? Why was that so easy?”
Then somebody says, “Ms. Cheng had already done the play memory, had done play memories with him before.” He had already been very moved and was very supportive of her work. Of course, there’s no downside for the Anji County government to do this, right? Then I leave. Actually, before I leave, I start reaching out . . . My first strategy is that I reach out to all the people I know who are in influential positions who would love this.
I’m telling you a lot of it was intuitive for me. I just knew who would love this, and I knew that they were in positions of influence. I think a nice way to say it is that I reached out to people who were going to really appreciate this. People in the field who would really appreciate it.
I reached out to these people, and I just started sharing photographs with them. I started saying, “This is incredible. You have to see this.” Then the next thing that happened, I can’t remember the order of it, the next thing that happened, maybe, that Ms. Cheng . . . That was October. I think the next thing that happened was, Ms. Cheng came to the US and went to NAEYC.
And that’s when you got involved. Ms. Cheng goes to Los Angeles to give a talk at the Pedagogical Institute. That was about 60 people, but it was the very first time she had given the talk in the US.
Then to Dallas, where we visited a Head Start program. Peter was able to set up visits to Head Start of Dallas. My sister showed up and explained . . . “My boss told me . . .” The Head Starts were overseen by my sister’s department at the Department of Health and Human Services, and when she told her boss that her sis was in town with this Chinese delegation that was visiting one of our sites, her boss told her to get over there because it was important. When my sister walked in, everybody feels really scared, because before my sister did disaster preparedness response, she was a compliance person. Everybody got really nervous when she came in. My sister and I are both in pictures with Ms. Cheng at the school in Dallas, which is really sweet, and then Bank Street was the end of that trip.
Jesse Coffino: That was the first time I met Ms. Cheng, I was her interpreter, and Qing and Frances were in the audience.
Chelsea Bailey: Yeah.
Ms. Cheng and I had a really fun time together. It’s really hilarious. I tormented her in the . . . what do you call the . . . the vendor room, because I kept taking her to different vendors . . . I introduced Kodo Kids to Ms. Cheng. I said, “This is somebody you should know.” I didn’t ever see this stuff before, but I was like, “Of all the materials in this entire place, they’re doing it right.” What’s funny is that I was looking for Cas. I was looking for Cas’s stuff, and I couldn’t find it. I think they had changed the design, and I remember I actually saw the . . . Because it went from the rounded design to the angle design. They were, like, way back in a corner, and it was a really small . . . Kodo Kids had, like, a massive area. Cas had this little tiny area, and I thought, “That’s not it,” because it’s angled instead of round.
We could have connected with Cas that much earlier. It took us probably . . . I think it took us another few months. I took her to Red Leaf Books. I took her to the Reggio booth, we did meet Chris, and I showed Chris pictures of what she was doing.
So we are sharing Ms. Cheng’s work, her experience, and the first thing was to make connections, to have other people who would be spokespeople for her. To introduce this through existing lines of communication . . . I thought there had to be people who I knew who would really understand this. And some people, they really did, and some people, they did, but they didn’t, and some people just outright were a hard no.
That was my strategy. To introduce Anji Play as the significant curriculum in as clear . . . with the same . . . I’m having trouble telling the words. I wanted to convey, in whatever I said, that profound experience of encountering Anji Play, that Ms. Cheng was positioned that way. I wanted to share that with the world, because I knew that if we shared that with the world, the feeling of Anji Play, then we wouldn’t have to convince anybody of anything because people would want it.
Yes, and one of the things that I want to mention before we move on to the more future, the more recent past, is a conversation she and I have, I think, on my . . . it’s either my second or third visit, it might have been my third, where she said to me, “Okay, I’m . . .” She said herself, “I’m responsible for China, and you’re responsible for sharing Anji Play with the rest of the world.” I said, “Okay. I agree to that.”
Then, there’s another shift. That might have been the first time. I mean, that might have been my first visit. I mean, my second visits were when she gave me permission to share it. Then, I feel like it was before she had been to the US, or maybe she’d been to the US, where I explained to her that children . . . that we have true play in the US, but then it’s only available to some children, and this outraged her. Because as we know, true play . . . Ms. Cheng very much views that true play is a basic human right. It was the equivalent of denying a hungry person food or shelter, which we do here also. That’s when she said about herself, “I will make sure that every child in the US has access to true play.” There were these two shifts, or these two moments, that were really important.
Now, when I think back to initial reactions, it’s funny, because I used to talk about this a lot and I haven’t talked . . . I’m recognizing that I haven’t talked about this in a while, so I think we’re past initial reactions because of the work we’ve done to get it out there. There were people . . . there was a litmus test. Ms. Cheng has a litmus test, which is, do you cry when you go to Anji? I passed that test, you passed that test, but . . . in the US, most of the people were not going to cry because they weren’t actually feeling it, they weren’t experiencing it.
But really, the test was, I’d show people pictures. I would describe it to people, I would describe the context of it, and I would show people pictures. You could feel people slip into that state of awe. They would get very still and very quiet. We’re very jaded. I think people in the US, generally, are jaded because we have everything. I mean, we have . . . There’s so much of everything, and we have this illusion. Remember, this is 2014, so we still are thinking good things about ourselves, and the cracks hadn’t started to show quite as much.
You would feel people, and people thought that we already were in the pinnacle of whatever we were doing, and we’ve got this, and they felt confident in their expertise. Nobody was really calling out the field of how crappy things had gotten for children because of accountability movements and how every single person who’s in the field is culpable. I mean, it’s complicated, but we are all culpable because this is our field.
What happened? Showing people these pictures, it’s like they would slip back into their deepest memory of play. It would trigger, it would throw them back into those, into their own childhood, but it would also catapult them back to why they entered the field in the first place. It’s the second one that got really tricky, because, depending on how far away people had gotten from that and how deep in they were in the systems that moved away from that . . .
There were a few . . . Here are the reactions that I would get: “This is great. We’re already doing it,” and “We’re doing it really well, and I’m happy to sort of be allies, but we’re not interested in doing this.” “We’re interested in doing this but we’ll be allies, we can be comrades,” which is fine. I think it’s incorrect that people are already doing it, because it’s its own thing, and it’s like I say, you can agree with Montessori, but that doesn’t mean you’re already doing it, or you can share some philosophical points of view with Montessori, it doesn’t mean you’re doing it.
There was that reaction. There was a reaction that was, I think, we have some people who it just didn’t affect. Those are mostly people who weren’t in early childhood, and you had experiences with that showing this to people early on, in all the conversations we had about that early on. It’s just, what does this mean to anybody? They say, “Kids are playing. Yeah, whatever.” There was this, not affected by . . . People who were . . . You had to be inside . . . You have to have it already in your life, and so it had to already matter to you. The lives of children had to already matter to you.
You had to be connected to either the internal or external kind of kid world. If neither of those is true for you, then it’s just not . . . There’s no meaning in it for you, really. There’s that group. Then there’s the group who get it. Like I said, you’ll feel them slip into that kind of wonder, that state of awe, and there’s a profound shift. It’s like something that got buried inside of them has been opened up. Those are people who are almost immediately devotees, really committed to the cause. “What can I do? How can I be involved? Tell me more, where do I sign up, how do I do this. I’m going to start it tomorrow.” Those are the people we really work with. I mean, those are . . . They number in the thousands now, it’s thousands and thousands. It’s thousands and thousands of people. Then there were people in the field of Early Childhood that were really angered by it. Like I said, I mean, I can’t say why people are angry, but my . . . And I feel like it’s presumptuous for me to say, but I will anyway. It appeared that they were threatened by what . . . or there was everything from . . . I mean, within this fourth category of outright rejection, there were people who range from “No, we’re good” to “Hard no. We’re good,” or kind of an aggressive “We already do this,” to really aggressive words.
There’s a fifth category. But let me finish with the fourth category. It was confusing to me. I lost friends over it, bizarrely. Why would this make you angry? How could this possibly make you angry? But it seems to do that. The fifth category, which is funny . . . I can add this category now because we’ve been doing this longer . . . are the people who are like, “Great! How do we monetize what you’ve done?” They just see it as a—
Jesse Coffino: An opportunity.
Chelsea Bailey: Right, because we haven’t come into this as a business, we are not thinking about how to monetize this and are actively working to sustain this work. We don’t fit easily into any category. And so, people motivated by greed might see us as weak leaders, that we aren’t pushing the growth and sharing of these ideas with an eye to the potential profits that they see as existing.
So those are my categories.
Jesse Coffino: I think there’s a subcategory, which is . . . There’s the devotees. You have also said that there’s people for whom it’s an urgent matter, there’s an urgency or there’s deep sense of almost . . . Not existential but—
Chelsea Bailey: Very personal.
Again, I have a conjecture. I think that, within the field of Early Childhood education, which is a massive field, right, which is a force . . . It’s organized and it’s a force. There’s a lot going on there, there’s a lot of money, there’s a lot of politics, there’s a lot of policy, et cetera, et cetera, and a lot of lives are impacted. Within the field, I’m on one of the far ends of the bell curve in terms of being willing to take risks and choose ideology or a position over stability.
On the other end of the bell curve are the absolute bureaucratic formalists, and within those people, there are those who can be very power-hungry. I would do anything for children on the one end of the bell curve. I mean, not everything, because we tend to look out for ourselves, too, but the needs of the child are our prime and foremost consideration, and I’m willing to take risks for that. On the other end of the curve are people who are protecting themselves. That’s how I’m going to put it.
So, in the middle, there are all these people who were part of the field and following the structures of the field and following . . . Some are innovators and leaders and some are the good . . . Follow this mainstream, and some are collaborative and some are not. I think that the people for whom this is urgent, they are people who have, either in the past, or who have now come into the field and stayed in the field and made a commitment to the field that is beyond whatever’s happening in the field at that moment. The lives of children and just how we think of childhood itself are primary.
They’re willing to put themselves in an uncomfortable position in order to pursue that for the greater good, we could call it. They are actors of and for the greater good, and there’s a lot of people like that in early childhood, thank goodness. People in education, period, like that. People for whom it is a moral imperative.
One of the things that I actually don’t talk about publicly is the work that I’ve done with the teachers in Anji, because I don’t want anybody to misunderstand what it was. You know that one of the things that I have purposefully done is make myself a quiet presence. I mean, and not quiet presence generally, but I want to be a promoter and a supporter. I want to be more behind the scenes, unless I absolutely have to be in a leadership role, because I don’t want any misunderstanding.
I get nervous about you speaking for that reason, too. What I did was . . . I think it was that second time I went back, when I stayed for those three weeks, I said, “You know, I’ve done observation and reflection stuff with teachers for a long time, and I have a few tricks of the trade, some things that I figured out that I . . . Would you be open to me sharing those with your teachers?” “Of course,” Ms. Cheng says. “Of course,” she says, “Yes, please.” Because she is so open.
I went back . . . I think it was January. I think she was here in November, and I went back in January because . . . I was there in January, and that’s when she asked me to work every day with 100 teachers, every afternoon for three weeks, Sunday and then start on Monday morning. I did it, and basically, I just taught them qualitative research methods and more stuff about objective observation. I just want to tighten up their . . . I just gave them support around practices that they were already doing, and they were so sophisticated.
It really was like working with advanced master’s-level students. Really, really high level of reflection and observation practice. I’ve never worked with master’s-level teachers, master teachers, who were thinking at the level. I mean, I don’t do Reggio stuff. I’m sure there’s master teachers who do Reggio documentation, who have a sophisticated thinking, or Montessori teachers, and we’ve met them. The fact is that it was 100 teachers, and they weren’t all at the same level, but it was really high, it really was high. That was an incredible joy.
I brought up the concepts of cause-and-effect experimentation and . . . I mean, I can’t believe I just threw this idea out to see if they could generate a hypothesis about what the children are hypothesizing, and they have mastered that. I mean, and I really talked to them about it for one afternoon, and that’s how it was. It was just, “Hey, here’s this idea,” and they would just take off with this incredible level of sophistication.
I would come back a couple months later and they would . . . they would have built out this amazing system around this one idea we had discussed . . . I guess, basically, I was planting seeds, and really, the main work I did with them, the intensive work I did with them, was about objective observation and descriptive observation. I went back a bunch of times. I think I counted it. It was eight months, over two years.
Jesse Coffino: In that time, up until today, you continued that relationship with teachers, right?
Chelsea Bailey: I have. I have. Now, it’s like I don’t usually do a three-week thing. I did a one-day thing with them, and I always . . . I take the stance, and I don’t always know how Ms. Cheng feels about it or how the teachers feel about it or the principals, but I try to take them to the far edge of where I think they are. I don’t hold back, and I don’t take them . . . I don’t push them a little beyond where they are or move the needle a little further. I really try to find the far edge of where they are.
The last time I was there, I introduced this idea . . . I’ve introduced some pretty far-out ideas, and I feel like it’s not because I want to be far out, it’s because I think they’re capable of, really, advanced thinking.
Chelsea Bailey: The last time I was there, I introduced this idea of two levels of looking at children’s learning, and that was the idea of functional learning, which is all that academic learning and child development stuff, and then deep learning, which is . . . it’s shorthand for, what is the experience or meaning that the child is having, and then being able to create a gap or a sense of difference between all the measures that we have for children, the fact that there’s a gap or can be a gap between all the measures that we could think of for children and what’s meaningful to the child about that experience.
I don’t know, maybe it won’t matter to them and they won’t get any traction, or maybe it’ll work for them. Lilly [Sheng Yi, principal of Anji Jiguan Kindergarten] seemed excited about it, and other people seem to not get it.
Jesse Coffino: What are the changes that you’ve seen in the last, what, four and a half years?
Chelsea Bailey: Well, what I would say is that, there’s a greater percentage . . . well, first of all, there’s all the environmental changes, the continued development of the environments, the continued development of the physical materials, right? That’s absolutely happened. I would say that, when I worked with those 100 teachers, that was over 10% or, it was not 10%, it was 100 of the 700 teachers and principals. Now, the number of . . . Actually, I’ve asked the principals this question.
The number of that percentage of people who really understand it, who get it deeply, is much greater. That 10%, basically, 10% was about the number of people who could enter into high-level conversation about what they were doing.
It was interesting. When I first started going to Anji, the indoor spaces were still, I think, what they had been like before. They hadn’t really been working on indoors, so they had really beautifully developed outdoor spaces, and beautifully developed, like, mezzanine, in-between spaces, the indoor/outdoor spaces, and they hadn’t really developed the indoor spaces yet. They had already started to change materials on the inside to more open-ended materials.
It still felt really like teacher-owned space. That would be a good way to say it. So what I’ve seen is, I’ve watched them basically clean, empty out, the classrooms, and reintroduce materials and designs back into them. Now, they have indoor spaces that reflect the outdoors, the same . . . The indoor spaces are a reflection of the same principles and the pedagogy and philosophy that inform the outdoor spaces, and these indoor spaces are now very, very much child-owned. I certainly didn’t help them with that at all. They did that on their own. It developed naturally from their practice and from their school leadership and Ms. Cheng’s leadership and vision.
And what’s fantastic about that is that they were able, using the model of an ecology, to extrapolate outdoor spaces and indoor spaces from outdoor spaces. In terms of teacher practice, part of the changes to indoor spaces has also lead to changes at the level of teacher practice. As the indoors becomes more oriented towards the child, the teacher also becomes more oriented towards the child. . . . I would say they were in early stages of really understanding . . . the early stages of exploring the reflection piece when I came in 2014.
And that was the reason that I was working on observation and reflection, so that they could strengthen that place you’re . . . the facilitation of the place you’re in peace. That was really the meaning behind all of that. Over these four years, four and a half years, they have really developed a very sophisticated practice and built out that play sharing piece. I just dropped in at this time. The teachers knew the whole approach wasn’t done in 2014.
When I dropped in, and that day happened to be at the place where they were really working on play sharing, and that’s what they have continued to work on this past four years. Now, even in the past year or so, they’re continuing to explore, and so that conversation I had with them, this last time I was there, about deep learning versus functional learning, was about . . . The reason that we had that conversation was because we wanted to . . . We were talking about play sharing.
In terms of play sharing, if you have an orientation towards functional knowledge, then you’re going to orient those facilitations towards functional knowledge. Every teacher has orientations towards functional knowledge, because we all have to tell other people about, we all love to talk about kids, and we have to tell parents about kids. If you’re in the US, you have to tell the government about kids. I’m arguing for it, and I’ll see where it goes: having a parallel system of discussing functional learning and discussing deep learning.
That’s why you have those things in your back pocket to talk to people about learning who need that, but then the teachers can also have conversations internally, and hopefully externally, about what is actually meaningful to children. What’s cool about that, Jesse, is I believe that in that, we’ll be able to blow the ceiling, like, just blow the lid off of what’s actually happening for children.
The first time I . . . or the second time I went back, that’s my first deep . . . a three-week trip, I knew right away that Anji needed their own assessment. It’s not that they needed a new assessment. They need their own assessment, because they were providing children with the opportunity to express, to pursue interest, and express experience and insight that was beyond the typical categories that we provide for children. Assessments are containers that describe children’s experience. Of course, assessment is almost always, in educational settings, matched with the experience . . . the containers of experience they were creating, providing, to children. What that meant is if you were . . . if you took the parameters, if you expanded the parameters on the experiences, you were . . . the opportunities you are giving children, then you necessarily have to expand the parameters.
I should say, if you don’t expand the parameters, you’re going to be . . . you’re going to have no way to describe the complexity that you just provided children the opportunity to have.
What is happening in Anji is that you’re giving . . . you’re opening it up. You were not having an assessment-driven experience. You were opening it up to a child-determined experience, but the assessment was so . . . you had to narrow that complexity down into the existing categories, and the categories are pretty broad in China. I mean, they’re broader than they are here, so it wasn’t that hard for people to do that. The idea of having an assessment, which is one of the things that I had been . . . As you know, I’ve been thinking about that for the last four and a half years. What are we going to do with the assessment? How are we going to get it? I’ve had all these strategies for how to do that, and one has been, “Let’s find an assessment that already exists.” That seems good, and we explore that, and we hit limits to that right away.
I looked at a whole bunch of different assessments, and because Peter had been involved in the development of DRDP, and he and Ms. Cheng talked about adapting DRDP, or using DRDP, in China or for Anji Play, we tried that out, and Qing came over and she got trained in it. She went back and she taught it to the teachers there. By the time I got there, I realized the teachers didn’t . . . It didn’t make sense to them.
And, fascinatingly, I would say that the DRDP is very much concerned with minutiae of developmental details, and the Chinese guidelines are concerned with broad areas, and so that was one of the . . . It was inside-out from one another. A part of it was functional, a part of it was cultural, but it was too big of a . . . it was too specific, and it was going from the detailed to the general, rather than from the general to the detailed.
Jesse Coffino: And with the DRDP, we had the . . . the oldest kids on that measure are our American kindergarten ages, which is six years old or five years old, and the oldest kids in Anji, based on my untrained perspective, seemed well beyond those measures.
Chelsea Bailey: So we’ve tried to find a ton of people who wanted to develop this. I’ve been trying to find a partner to develop it for a long, long time. We didn’t get any traction on that. And so finally, recently, after many, many different attempts, we decided to, you know, step out on our own, partially because we had been thinking about this. We have been thinking about it for four years. We’ve been observing this for four years. We’ve been thinking about assessment. We’ve been thinking about looking at, you know, we’ve had . . . When we worked with programs that have all of these accountability measures, we, yeah. We encountered some . . . We had basically had been test driving a few . . . a whole bunch of different ideas around assessment. We finally decided that we are just going to try it, to do it ourselves.
Well, then, we, because it’s usually you and me, it’s a “we,” we called in my dear friend, Dr. Lisette Garcia, who has a PhD in developmental psychology, and has specific expertise in qualitative mixed methods, mixed methodology around assessment and evaluation, so mixing qualitative and quantitative methods.
So we have two working groups. We have many working groups. But the two we have of relevance here are the video analysis working group, to understand . . . a group to create a vernacular for teaching people video analysis, using the same methodology that they are using in Anji, an approach that I worked with them to develop in Anji, and so that was . . . We’re developing working on a consistent methodology around video analysis. It’s a working group of people who know Anji Play well and have been to Anji, that we can work well with or are working well with. And then the other group is a working group around the development of the assessment. It’s the early days of the development of the assessment, and the idea is that we will do this, create this tool, this working model of the tool, and then take it to China, and have them test it out and give us feedback on it. And it would not be a valid tool if it couldn’t be used outside of Anji Play as well. And the interesting challenge and idea is that it can be used in any setting, school, non-school, China, non-China, anywhere in the world. I think that that’s, you know, I’m just thinking of this now, you know, we had so many educators in the US who are concerned about culturally relevant pedagogy. It’ll be interesting, and I think that’s why things start to go in all these directions, because they’re trying to . . . It’s a pluralism, and it’s trying to account for everything, which is not possible. With this tool we’re trying to do something that’s general enough, broad enough, universal enough . . . but not reductive. It’s an important assessment innovation.
My real goals in this work are to have Ms. Cheng’s work remembered and known, remembered and canonized, and to have her known, have her be recognized, be in history books.
In the first instance, I want Anji Play to be known because it’s a . . . it has value to the world and value to children. I want it to be known, and I want it to be known well and correctly. I want a legacy. I want her to be a legacy of this educational approach that will continue on for hundreds of years. That Anji Play be in the canon of educational approaches. And it has . . . and part of that, a subset of that, is that it moves the needle.
It’s exactly looping back to where we started, which is, Anji Play offers a model of a particular view of children that is deeply generous and respectful of capacity in such a way that it can change people’s minds of not just how they interact with children, but how they interact with each other. I feel like it has an important contribution to make to the world.
And you know, we have . . . Despite that, because of, let’s say, because of the distances between places and . . . historically, the distance between places and the slowness of communication, and the cultural and linguistic challenges of translation. There is not an integration of Western . . . What have been thought of as Eastern and Western points of view and between the East and West period.
The way the world has been set up the last 500 years is that the West is the one who’s writing the script for the whole world, including . . . education, so global education has been strongly influenced by Western colonial imperialism.
Jesse Coffino: Childhood is really where that story of who we are as people, or as communities, or as cultures, or . . .
Chelsea Bailey: Absolutely. Childhood is the formation of culture.
That’s absolutely true. The West has not had the benefit of the influence of the East. It hasn’t, and the West is at a critical turning point in terms of how it’s . . . how the definition of culture, and behavior and humanity, how those are getting defined.
Because we now have this moment where the certainty of the West is faltering, and the approaches and the strategies of the West are not . . . the . . . what’s the word I’m looking for? The efficacy of these strategies, of Western strategies, is faltering. They are running out. The East has a whole different sort of approach to, in China in particular, to sustainability. Of culture, of ideas, as well as, you know, physically, as well as intellectually and everything else.
So it is really important to me that Ms. Cheng, as a Chinese woman, breaks the legacy, interrupts the legacy, offers an alternative direction in the legacy of Western thought, because the people who have defined Western early education—and it has its own history distinct from primary education and it’s much more closely tied to philosophy itself—the formation of culture, the formation itself, that has been defined mostly by Western men. I mean, Maria Montessori, she is one of the only . . . what’s the word? Counterexample. Reggio Emilia . . . I mean, Malaguzzi is remembered for Reggio Emilia. Malaguzzi is the name associated most closely with Reggio. So again, you have Montessori as this complete outlier in terms of being a woman. So, to have this woman who is rural, who comes from rural China, to set, to have a powerful influence in the direction of the future of educational thought, is important to me.
And then I think that maybe there have been others. Maybe there have been other women who were in these places in the world . . . Maybe there have been people like that in the past, and their amazing ideas were lost because they weren’t protected and promoted. And so I see myself not as a promoter of work, but as a guardian. It makes me cry.