Pat Carini and the Prospect Archive of Children’s Work

Abstract

One of Pat Carini’s great accomplishments is the collection of children’s visual, written and other work that became the Prospect Archive of Children’s Work, now housed at the University of Vermont. This article recounts the story of the archive—a long collaboration with Prospect colleagues, teachers, and others—from its beginnings in the 1960s through today. It suggests that the collection of children’s work and the collaborative descriptive processes developed to study it inspired and informed Pat’s thinking about children as makers not only of works, but of themselves and the world. In turn, these ideas fed into her advocacy for an education that recognized this capacity in all children and, beyond education, offered an expansive and democratic vision, much needed today, of humanness.