Just the act of getting 150 young people up onto the Dartmoor tors was an important aspect of surveying the landscape as they have proceeded to use their senses to survey this landscape. Our ‘survey’ focused on a particular place – Dartmoor. Being in the landscape and experiencing it directly has given us some rich data.
The young people all buckled down and did the tasks, recording all in the notebooks – these look great & will be a great resource. What they proceeded to record, all in quite diverse ways, concentrating on the different aspects of Dartmoor, was impressive. It was very good having a range of people deliver the tasks, as they all did it in their own individual way. This has helped the children record the landscape in dissimilar ways.
Hopefully it will lead onto the kids to think through the subtle things they value most about Dartmoor and reflect on the communities we belong to, as they all live close to Dartmoor. With future sessions allowing the children to expand and alter their understanding of ‘public space’.
The project is building on my continued engagement in the social, cultural and natural histories of sites and territories. With the children investigating the sites historical and geographical nature, as well as its possible future uses this will, optimistically, allow them to touch on notions of kinship and belonging as well as those of property and ownership so connected to the meaning of ‘public space’, or ‘common space’, in the English language and in Anglo cultures.
With them merging this research with their descriptive writings, which has pulled in their subjective, emotional response, to this place, has exciting possibilities. And I feel there is rich mileage in this work and thinking ahead of a workbook of activities, this could be set out in a series of class sessions, but still allow for flexibility around different schools and places. I’m very excited to see the end archival ‘product’, but a little scared to the amount of material they are recording (x 300 children!).
The afternoon went very well, with them working on the tasks. There was some difficulty in that the cameras did not come back to John (for the photo to be downloaded onto the system) all at the same time. But there was some great writing and some great photos – be difficult editing down into a manageable archive. We agreed to leave the children’s notebooks in school to aid them in future lessons. But they will be typing up some material from their notebooks and then the school will email me this.
