About Us

RIVET's story is one with many ebbs and flows but throughout, its unifying thread is one of friendship and collegiality rooted in a shared love and respect for children and provoked by a curiosity about the world they invent and inhabit. We are a group of Early Childhood educators - teachers new to the profession, teachers in their professional prime, teachers of retirement age who remain engaged in the pursuit of knowledge about children and their processes of meaning making. Some of us participated in RIVET's early days that culminated in a traveling exhibit that shared our findings about children in the natural world and in their Vermont communities. Many of us continued to work together within and across our professional (and often personal) contexts in the years that followed the exhibit's retirement, but it wasn’t until 2017 that we met again under the umbrella of RIVET 2.0 to investigate children and trees in relationship. We spent several years meeting in person to discuss research related to trees as social agents while also sharing and discussing observations of interactions involving children and trees and reflecting on our documentation’s pedagogical implications. We are currently working on a manuscript to share our findings.