Process vs Product

This is a piece I wrote for my preschool newsletter but the topic is relevant here!

I like to think about the meaning of words that people in a particular field use repeatedly. I call it jargon because the people in the particular field have an agreed upon a meaning so don’t have to define their terms constantly. However there is the danger that the words used over time lose their agreed upon meaning and nobody really knows exactly what anybody is talking about. One of the best practices I learned from my highly impractical and non-lucrative philosophy degree was the necessity of defining terms.(or at least attempting to define them)

In the early childhood and the art education worlds we often use the terms process and product. We agree that for young children process is more important than product. This sounds simple but I don’t think it is. I think it deserves an ongoing conversation.

What does valuing the process over the product actually mean?

Children are constantly making things. The something that they make is a noun. It exists in space. It is a product. The making of the thing takes time and action. The making is a verb. It is a process.

But can we separate the two? In any process of making there is always a something. There is a material that is real, has properties that direct and limit what that maker can do. The maker is changing the material somehow but only to the extent that the physical properties of the given material allows. For example we spent many days this February making floating sculptures/boats to test in the water table. We used sponges, styrofoam, tape, straws, pipe cleaners, string, toothpicks, popsicle sticks and plastic bottles with lids. We used scissors and hole punches. What was the process?

Children attempted to combine materials to make something that resembled their idea of a floating thing. What were they faced with? What has to happen to put pieces together into a whole? How can I put a straw and a meat tray together? Which materials can bend? Which materials can be pierced? Which materials can do the piercing? The plastic tape did not have a dispenser like the familiar scotch tape so how do you cut a piece off? What materials can be cut and which have to be used whole? Very few of these questions were asked out loud but children acted upon the tape, styrofoam, pipe cleaners and with experimenting learned the answers. Children watched each other. So the process became a series of problems to solve in order to make the product.

What was the product?

The products that made it to the water table were varied - straw rafts, styrofoam and toothpick two or three tiered structures, meat trays with taped straws, bottle submarines. Children changed direction midway. Many parts of things were abandoned or incorporated into something else. Testing the craft was the highlight for some children even though the making took much more time. This was an activity that showed very clearly that the end product wasn’t the point (there remain many unclaimed pieces in the classroom!)

However the evolving product was very important to the process. Without that there would be no mission, no direction, no sequence to the process. The goal was the making of the thing! Here is the important idea about children’s products. They are souvenirs of a process that can’t communicate a true picture of the evolving forms in that process. The sequence of problems and the ensuing experimentation is what is important to children’s learning.

A useful way to think about children’s art or general making of things is a conversation between maker and material. A child acts upon a material and the material talks back. The child modifies the action. The material again gives feedback. Positive experiences in art result from happy, playful conversations. We can be surprised at the feedback! We can be curious about what a material will let us or not let us do. Children can have an initial vision of what they want to make and then realize it is not going to happen with that material or that action they are trying. Choose another material, try another action.

Whatever the end product the process has been the learning experience!