Dr. Frances Rust

Scholar in Residence, The Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, New York University

Date of visit to Anji: July 2014

Interview conducted on: February 8, 2019

Frances Rust: I was there with Chelsea and Peter when we discovered Ms. Cheng. I always tell people how she asked teachers what they remembered about their own play, and then went and created her approach, and her philosophy, and the materials based in Anji, by drawing on those shared stories and recollections.

As for myself, I was very ill as a child and spent a lot of time in the hospital. There were a couple things I remember. I don’t know if you’d think about them as play, but they were very formative for me. I was in the Naval Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland. They didn’t have a children’s ward. I think that was important to the way I was treated. I was a really cute little kid and the only one in that part of the hospital. I was five or six years old. I was like a little mascot. The nurses and doctors would do things like, they would take me into the nursery, they would put a mask over my mouth and nose, and they would let me put the dots on the chart to show the baby’s temperature.

Imagine. Imagine. It couldn’t happen now. It couldn’t. Middle of the night, the night nurses would have lunch, they would bring me into the kitchen in the middle of the night, we’d sit up and I would hear jokes and sort of be part of the “family” . . . 

Then the other thing was that there was a friend of my mother’s who put together this bag of toys or things for me to do. If I ate, I could take something out of the bag. I had these things from the bag to look forward to. 

The last play memory from that time had to do with my mother, who was a widow. She had a very serious beau at this point. He bought me a doll that was almost as big as me. At the hospital, they gave me a little bassinet beside my bed and let me put the doll in there. It wasn’t play in the normal sense, but it was like having the autonomy to make something of the time I had. I never was unhappy about being there.

Jesse Coffino: The thread that I’ve picked up on, and something that, to me, sounds to be in common among these memories, is the sense of love. If you were loved, you felt safe. From teachers and from people in education, they talk about the value of adults taking children seriously.

I’m hearing this, “Oh, I could mark that chart.” Or, “I was hearing their jokes.” Then, with the bassinet, I hear the sense of, you had a responsibility, and I see my daughter with her stuffed bunny, and bunny is an imaginary animal, an my daughter knows she’s imaginary. But it’s the  bunny she’s taking care of . . . she enjoys it and it seems uninterrupted.

Frances Rust: It often makes me think that as teachers—this is what I try and get my students to think about—our work involves finding a way to make each kid feel special. It’s one of the reasons I think that teaching online is so difficult, because that sense of that communication is so hard to achieve.

So, in 2014, I was asked to come to China and do a presentation about play. I called Chelsea and I said, “I’m not doing this unless you come.” She said, “No, Frances, I’ve had enough.” I said, “No, not doing it unless you come.” The people who asked me to come knew her. Okay. Then I said, “There is a guy at WestEd.” Ron Lally. God, I think he’s like genius. I had seen him do a presentation at NAEYC on assessment, and the way he got teachers to buy into the HighScope assessment, genius. So I said, “We’re going to go.” 

Ron at that point was quite ill, so Peter Mangione stepped in instead. We prepared. We did these transcontinental conversations, we put together PowerPoints, I can show you the whole thing. We get there, the guy who’d invited us takes us around to see various places, and you’re, like, nauseous. It’s teachers doing all this stuff.

Then we get to Anji. Ms. Cheng takes us out to this village where they grow bamboo and white tea. We see this amazing school where the kids are walking on barrels turned sideways, in clogs, no less! Climbing trees, hanging upside down on spindly branches. They were walking across the ropes between trees and stuff, and so happy. Oh my god, I was in heaven.

Then, after that little village experience, we gave our talk, and I said, “Why are we giving the talk? Ms. Cheng ought to be up here.” It was in one of those big proletariat halls where there were, like, 400 people, and they were so attentive, but I’m saying to myself and to Chelsea and Peter, “What we are saying is boring. This is awful. What are we doing up here on the stage when the genius is sitting here in the audience?”

The next day, she took us to a much bigger school. There were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of bricks that the kids just laid out on the tarmac or built up with; there were the barrels—the works, the whole thing that we’d seen at the little school. One little girl had broken her arm or her wrist. When I asked, her mom said, “No problem, kids get hurt.” To me, this was not the China that I knew and had experienced. 

Chelsea and Peter just worked constantly from then on to find a way to make Ms. Cheng known. She came once to an NAEYC meeting, in Texas, and I got the president of NAEYC and all to meet her, but they couldn’t “get it.” They couldn’t understand its importance. 

And I remember her being asked, during her first talk in New York, at Bank Street, how she got the local educational authority to back her up, and she said, “I’m the government.” She’s in a unique position. And while she could have used her position to tell people what to do, instead, she engaged them in thinking about what it could be like.

I have a doctoral student who is studying, I won’t tell you the city that she’s working in, but she’s studying the way a mandate in special ed has unfolded. One of the things that’s fascinating is, there is this moment in this process where the office of special education sends out two directives. One is that, when the mentors visit the schools, they need to write a log with the teachers with whom they are meeting. This means that nobody lies about what happened. The other piece is that, I think it’s once every other week, the mentors must come together, they will come together and talk about their work in the schools. 

Well, you can imagine, at the very beginning, everybody is saying, “Oh my god, this is more paperwork, we’re never . . . and more meetings, and we’re going to hate it.” Well, they love it, in part because they’re in charge of what gets written down. There’s not a rubric there. To the meetings, they’re bringing actual, honest to god, issues that they’re facing out there in the schools. What happened was, they started accepting this mandate to push special ed to come under greater local control, and they’re informing the district and reshaping its way of dealing with the schools.

Then a new superintendent comes in, and he says, “I don’t like special ed.” All of this goes away. The buy-in goes away. That is one of the things that, over time, I saw in my own dissertation: leadership is critical, but leadership has to enable people to buy into the vision. Without that, you can kiss it goodbye. Everybody’s used to mandates from above, and they will subvert in every way they can because it’s not theirs. 

In my mind, that is part of Ms. Cheng’s genius, that she has invited them to tell her what made Anji Play look different, their own deeply held experiences of play. Entering those schools in Anji felt to me like the schools I started. My schools were for children ranging in age from three to six—all in the same class.

For two of the three hours, my kids were making decisions about their time. I really had developed this from my knowledge of Montessori’s work and a breadth of ideas from the British Infant School and others—all ways of thinking about creating the classroom as a play space. I just set it up so that children could really play and then go outside and play too. There was no plastic in the equipment we had outside. It was aluminum, but light, so, you know, you could set up the climbing apparatus any way you wanted. I had a zip line in the woods, but it wasn’t at a school. It was at a local synagogue that was in the woods.

So when I get to Anji, it felt completely familiar. Montessori’s notion of creating the environment for what you want to have happen was alive and well there. Enabling children to take responsibility for their time and the teacher to be an observer. I am convinced that the engineers and architects and scientists of China are going to be coming from this place, from Anji. 

This was not my first trip to China. I had set up a kindergarten program with Chelsea. This is how I knew China. I had set up with Chelsea . . . a family from Hong Kong approached me at University of Pennsylvania and asked me to set up a kindergarten in Tianjin, at Tianjin University. They wanted to develop this first one and then develop a hundred all over the country, like a franchise. I said, “This is not a good idea,” particularly when I went to see it. 

I also have photos from our trips there. The rooms were set up . . . first of all, they would take a small room, put 15 kids in it. They’d have another room next door where the kids could sleep. Everything was done in this one small room, and even though they set up areas, nobody ever used those areas. The teachers handed out everything.

I was full of admiration for the teachers. Three hours a day, they’re “on,” and somebody’s serving the kids and toileting them, and then the kids sleep, and then they have another hour or so, and then the kids go home. Everybody’s doing the same thing. You give them a bucket of, I don’t know, pattern blocks, and everybody will get six, and you build with your own six. You don’t build together. 

Chelsea and I changed that . . . We repainted all the rooms, we got new furniture. She can tell you about this. Chelsea wrote curriculum. The thing that was fascinating to me was the work of a colleague of ours, that we’d known from NYU, who didn’t speak a word of Chinese, who came to implement the curriculum in the kindergarten: Michele Reich. Michele did amazing stuff, amazing, and what the kids did in science and math was amazing, but the whole infrastructure was pushing against what we did. When I came in June or May to see the very end of it, I saw some of the same things I’d seen when we first came to visit the school: In March, when we’d got the new furniture finally in the room, don’t you know, trash is starting to appear on the shelves, because, as one teacher said to me, there ought to be something on a shelf.

The kids loved the new space and the teachers joining them on the floor in play. I’d never seen Chinese teachers really sit on the floor and watch what children were doing and be part of it. I could say to them things like, “If you’re halfway nice, kids do want to be with you. Don’t feel like you’re losing control. Just sit on the floor with them, they’ll do whatever it is you ask them to do.” It was remarkable for Chelsea and me to see the changes. 

I am so admiring of Chelsea. We would work on the curriculum, but she would just write, write, write, write, and get everything organized. I was like, “I have a job and it isn’t writing curriculum.” Anyway, we finally put that to bed, but it was years. Really, it was years out of her life. 

Anyhow, I’d seen enough of China to know that what I was seeing in Anji was almost like a secret. It was, like, so beneath the radar that you wondered whether you should tell anybody about it, because it was so good. I know there was a professor who came from East China Normal and saw it, and he started to cry because he recognized what he was seeing. He was a very old guy. But I know there were other people who came from other universities, and also from East China Normal, who were like, “What is this?”

I think, in many ways, what’s happened in Anji coheres with Montessori and the notion of preparing the environment so as to enable children to develop autonomy. I have been in Tianjin, I saw kids doing the typical stuff of getting in each other’s way, grabbing stuff. In a way, getting little bits of attention for each other, but this is the only way they knew to get it, and it was always sub rosa so that the teacher didn’t see it. 

What I saw in Anji Play is what I experienced in my own schools. I never had discipline problems. Children were making choices. I was never saying no to them. The environment was shaping what they would go on to next, and, as I told you, Montessori’s notion of those cycles of learning was at work. 

The cycle of “work,” according to Montessori, goes like this: They begin the day with familiar activities, work through false fatigue, then their real work of the day begins. Nobody was getting in the way of their doing that cycle. They were making choices about what they were working with. In the second part of the day (the “real” work time), the three- and four-year-olds would be in the block corner. People would say to me, “Don’t you limit the number of kids?” The kids never were that many in the block corner. There’s too much else going on in the room. Too many other things that you want to see and do, or that you’re deep into, but when you’re there, deep into, and you’re working with other people, it’s not always that you’re working alone. That’s possible, but not likely. The choice of task determines what you do. 

To me, Anji Play coheres with Montessori. It also coheres with Dewey’s and Kilpatrick’s notion of project-based learning, although I don’t think it’s what Kilpatrick wrote about. I think it’s much more the Deweyan notion of the good teacher. Dewey talks about the good teacher being somebody who apprehends the “soul life” of the classroom. To paraphrase, he says, “You can teach people to do discipline, you can teach them to do content, but not this piece of getting how people are relating to each other. They have to learn to be in the moment.” And with these environments I saw in Anji, there is no ceiling. There is no limit to what can be known and done in them.

Jesse Coffino: With Montessori, there’s a more embedded outcome in material. How would you see the relationship between those two conceptions of materials?

Frances Rust: I think that most Montessorians limit themselves to the way Maria designed the material, but times change, and other materials encourage and support the learning of similar concepts. Take, for example, the golden beads. They were too expensive for me to buy, so I used Cuisenaire rods. Later, I used, they were Dienes blocks. You might know Dienes blocks, but to me, they are not as satisfying as Cuisenaire rods, which look beautiful and which felt so good to handle. Both were basically using Montessori’s approach to math. I think Montessori’s math stuff is genius.

One of the things that I understood almost immediately when working with kids was that there were some basic concepts you want to get across to them. Then you let them go. They can do incredible stuff. For example, you take a piece of equipment like the red and blue rods. As you hand them to a child, or have the child pick each one up, they get a physical as well as cognitive understanding of long and short. The “one” rod fits between your hands easily. Your whole body knows that “10” is the longer one because your hands and arms have to stretch to hold it. Then, if you set all the rods down on the floor—I mean, after you’ve named this “one “and “10,” or one, two, three, the whole thing—and then you put the numbers beside the whole thing, the child has the sense of 10 being bigger than one, etc. 

Okay, that’s a framework within which to function, but what if you set them down as a maze or a spiral? Starting with the smallest one in the middle. Then the kids start to think about, “All right, what comes next?” without you saying, “This is sequencing.” What if you found the middle of each rod and made a pinwheel? You don’t find those in any of the Montessori books, but I have watched kids doing this. The mathematics was built into it, and they’re developing it. I think it was just getting going here.

Every program I’ve ever created for teachers’ professional development grew out of my Montessori training. The notion of looking at what you’re doing, keeping track of what you’re doing, seeing what the impact is. Inquiry is built into everything that I do. All of my teacher ed programs have had inquiry at the core. The notion that I often talk about with my students, and now with the teachers that I’m working with in Brooklyn, is, we’re getting better at this work. And so anytime I give a workshop, and even in my writing, I always mention Anji. I pull out the pictures of the schools we saw, for anybody who will listen. I show them this because I’m like, “This is what we ought to be doing. This is the way we ought to be preparing teachers.”

When I think of the quality of teaching in Anji, again I’m reminded of Montessori and Dewey. It’s much like Dewey: it’s creating, it’s enabling a responsible citizen to emerge—a caring human being. I think that that’s what our profoundest wish has to be: that we enable the development of good people.

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