action-research

been finalising the schools ‘deep learning day’, where children will be undertaken some field research. They will then be taking this back to school to compile and place in their specially created containers.

The crucial question I’d like them to bear in mind is, are we looking at manmade or a nature landscape; i.e. would you classify Dartmoor as a theme park, or as a wilderness?

On their walk around the tor they will have to undertake various tasks. They will find artists situated at waypoints along the way who can offer help and guidance to undertake these tasks.

can’t wait now – just hope the weather is not horrendous!

Planning is all coming together! got some great schemes developed with geography and the art departments. Really coming together. & great to see cross curriculum work with everybody sharing ideas to fully develop this project.

can’t wait now until our deep learning day going out to Dartmoor with the children.

I worked with 30 children from South Dartmoor Community College; together we collaborated on creating on mapping their emotional landscape.

Seven maps were created in all and were the product of a course – Emotion Mapping – I helped devise in consultation with the art and media depart at the school.

The idea behind the ‘Emotion Map’ was as an embodied memory-trigger for recounting events that were personally significant for them. Our map would record the apparently trivial conversations and events of our everyday lives and allow us to see them all simultaneously. Together we’d explore interpretative and subjective aspects of mapmaking.

Small teams working collaboratively during their art class created these maps. They started by agreeing their teams and deciding on the area they would concentrate on mapping. Over the weeks they then drew, discussed what to include and the nature of a curve in the road and how best to represent a roundabout, they rubbed out, stuck things on and re-drew their maps. We met for 1 hour a day, every week for 5 weeks.

The children choose to map towns along the A38 (Ashburton, Heathfield, Newton Abbot, and Buckfastleigh); Exeter Rugby ground; Exeter Centre; Tesco’s; a Bike Trail; and Bovey Tracey.

Their maps were then digitised and re-drawn in Illustrator by myself. Where I altered things; adding details and amending fine points. I then designed a layout and look for the maps to tie them together. This digital file was then taking back to school for further fine tuning and approval by each group.

The goal of the course was for the children to work both individually and collectively in excavating narratives of people, places, events and artefacts, representing the emotions, opinions and desires of local people and then create their own maps from all of the information they’d collected. The course explored the interpretative and subjective aspects of mapmaking. Our map would record the apparently trivial conversations and events of our everyday lives and allow us to see them all simultaneously. Recounting events that were personally significant for them.

The children jumped into the project, coming up with ideas that I’d not enticpated like creating 3D maps. I had ideas about the kind of map we would create, but it all transmogrified into something else which turned out great. Making these maps with the children reminded me what fun it is to make maps

This project reflects my strategy of attempting to engage the social, cultural and natural histories of specific sites and territories. And uncover the unique characteristics that determine a sense of place.

See the maps we created and read more at http://tinyurl.com/6aje4f4

I am very much focusing for the next part of the project on listening as an active participation within a space.

Taking a few of the exercises I did with the school last year and building on these. Combining them with ‘sounds of the seaside’ a sonic survey I undertook last summer (http://tinyurl.com/4uuhy3r).

I’d investigated how our trips to the seaside are usually described in visual terms, ‘oh what a lovely view’. But it is often our sense of hearing that defines our experience of being beside the sea. From the quiet sounds of the waves lapping on the beach, to the sound of families laughing together, I find the sounds we hear enthralling.

The idea for the school work is to encourage the children to concentrate on the act of listening. Listening to our space, our environment.

I found last year that young people who entered this space led to concentrating more deeply on perception, on their individual perception.

Hopefully this will lead them to a deeper exploration of the senses. We will then use drawing, writing, photography, and of course sound, to record their sense of place.

Well I am back on the planning stage discussing possible ideas with the school and daisi.

This time i’ll be working with art and geography. The geography dept really liked the maps we made last year and are interested in pursuing my ideas around google earth and using GPS.

This time I’ll be working with the whole year group of 300+ children. But to start off we are going to involve 30 children in the inital planning. I will meet them for three sessions to develop our inital ideas. It is great to see the school willing to experiment in this way and I’m really looking forward to it.