cry freedom: autonomous opportunities for personalised engagement (by paula jackson)
DESCRIPTION
This demonstration addresses ways in which we can begin to consider starting points for rearticulating the goal of education today. It argues that in an age when billions of facts are at students’ fingertips through the internet, the central goal of education should focus on learning how to think and how to be curious, rather than learning how to remember facts. Furthermore, by encouraging teachers to transform their environments of learning into interactive and immersive creative spaces, where inter-disciplinary learning and play are intertwined, the demonstration argues that students will assimilate a wide range of personal, if unpredictable, learning opportunities. The demonstration includes film footage from the initial research project, ‘Fly Me to the Moon’, which explored how children engage with their environment by transforming the learning zones of a school into a lunar landscape and allowing the children freedom to interact with this creative space. Here children had access to both traditional ‘play’ materials (card, paper, sticky tape) and new technologies (audio recorders, video, cameras, animation), and were offered opportunities to reflect on their experience by looking at films of themselves ‘in process’. Building on the findings of ‘Fly Me To The Moon’, the post-demonstration discussion will explore the potential for reapplying the key themes to new learning environments -eg museums, galleries, and non-school contexts. The aim is to continue to develop this practice-based research to investigate the themes of offering choices to students, holistic and immersive inter-disciplinary environments, personalised learning and opportunities to learn through creativity.TRANSCRIPT
Cry Freedom: Autonomous Opportunities for Personalised Engagement
Paula Jackson
5 minute task
• Considering the senses….’But a whiff of perfume, or even the slightest odour can create an entire environment in the world of the imagination’ (Bachelard)
• Why develop children’s brains at the expense of the rest of their bodies – with the body being given a passive role in the learning environment?
• Present a version of the poem with an emphasis on one of your senses
On the in-breath it’s made of gutter soup
and small change gone particulate
and burnt offerings.On the out-breath:
leftovers fromabove and body heat,
and body moisture, even scraps of body, outside
itself at last, cells set free and on fire.
URBAN AIR
Jo Shapcott
The Creative Environmental Space
• What spaces engender or inhibit creativity?
• What is the nature of the architecture of a creative space?
• What will the creative spaces of the future look like?
Schools without walls
Laboratory Mission Control Moon Surface The Cave Planet
Vittra symbol
Piaget: human development occurs through interaction with the environment
PGCE trainee teachers as co-researchers Working to their strengths
Laboratory Mission Control Moon Surface The Cave Planet x
Learning SPACES
● 5 zones – importance of choice● Allowing children the space to be children – move freely● Children constructing their own meaning within the space
– creating their own environments…● Giving meaning to a space● Transform environments of learning into interactive and
immersive creative spaces
Freedom & opportunity
• Children given freedom to interact with the creative space. • Children offered opportunities to reflect on their experience by
taking & looking at films of themselves ‘in process’.• Importance of process• Importance of play - using a mix of traditional ‘play’ materials
(card, paper, sticky tape) and new technologies (audio recorders, video, cameras, animation
• Freedom to adapt and personalize their learning environment
curiosity
• Central goal of education should focus on learning how to think and how to be curious
• Curiosity and creativity should be celebrated• Inter-disciplinary learning and play are intertwined
The Thinking environment
• Freedom to choose• Opportunities for play - for self-directed, autonomous
and collaborative play• Opportunities for open ended approaches• Opportunities to think• Opportunities to concentrate on process rather than
outcome
Transformation: NEW RESPONSES… exploring BOUNDARIES…
At the heart of Transformation is the exploration of a very specific artistic idea: how does art – be that sculpture, poetry, or the blurred boundaries in between – transform experience and convey the joy of a single moment?
Timeline of transformation
Transformation residencies
• Transforming the creative environment
• Studio as nexus of collaborative research
• 6 artists, 2 weeks, 1 room • No output expectations,
freedom to think, create, perform, research, explore, gather material, share
• e-learning tools provide wider context – website, blog, Flickr, Twitter etc
• STUDIO = CLASSROOM?
The Poetics of Space Gaston Bachelard
• We inhabit space physically, but we also construct and respond to imaginary, remembered, dreamt and collective unconscious spaces
• Classrooms can be reimagined by children• Virtual learning walls, virtual pinboards, discussion groups, photo streams
etc extend the space
• ‘The world is large, but in us it is deep as the sea’ R M Rilke • ‘Space has always reduced me to silence’ Jules Valles L’enfant
Modelling Transformative Change
• As an interdisciplinary artist my interest is in creative play, collaboration, research, and the importance of processes - whether analogue or digital
• This approach is a potential model for open-minded thinking in education – encouraging collaborative, autonomous and immersive personalised learning, thinking and doing
Invitation• Transformation Exhibition10 November 2012 – 22 December 2012The New School House GalleryPeasholme GreenYork YO1 7PWUnited [email protected]
• Supported by The Jerwood Foundation and Arts Council England