Experimenting and learning through images

In this post I talk about my photographic art practice and how this has allowed me to produce new relationships between myself, other people and the world. I then discuss the role of visual images in artistic experimentation and how this interconnects with the use of visual imagery in pedagogical documentation or inquiry-led learning practices in early childhood education.

Louisa Penfold, ‘Ophelia (Save yourself).’ C-print.

Experimention and learning through images has been a huge part of my life for as long as I can remember. Since I was first taught photography at school (thank you Georgina Campbell) I have experimented with a myriad of photographic processes including medium format cameras, scanners and digital photography. My photos have focused on the relationship between landscape and the subject matter’s psychological world. Creating and thinking through images has allowed me to experience things and learn in a way that could not be done with words. Learning new artistic skills, techniques and concepts has also been important in opening up new creative possibilities for further exploration. Over the years, this process has led to the emergence of new thought processes, feelings, understandings and artistic skills, generating new starting points for further experimentation.

Louisa Penfold, ‘In the garden I have done no crime.’ C-print.

I think that my love of image making and my love of children’s education stems from the same place: a relentless enthusiasm to continuously think and learn through the world in new and different ways. Art has been one of the greatest forces for producing deep thinking and feelings in my life. I would love children to have this opportunity too.

Louisa Penfold, ‘Untitled.’ C-print.

Experimentation and learning through visual imagery is also a huge part of pedagogical documentation. When I take a photo or video of a child’s research process in an art museum, I always consider the lighting, the colours, the composition and wait for just the right moment to press the shutter to try and capture a particular energy, emotion or idea. To me, documenting through visual imagery is an aesthetic process. At other times, it does feel more ethnographic or slightly more removed. Recording. Logging. Taking field notes. Archiving pictures to look back on later. I guess that both artistic experimentation and pedagogical documentation are creative and analytical processes.

I often get asked if I use my own art practice with children. I always say yes and no. The inquiry-led process that drives artistic experimentation is a non-negotiable component of any children’s activity I am a part of. At the same time, I am not interested in doing photography workshops with children. I don’t really know why.

Louisa Penfold, ‘The Dancer.’ C-print… My love for Caravaggio knows no limits

I am not exactly sure how my photographic practice and my work with children is connected but I know that it is. I guess they are related in a way that all things that are incredibly important to an individual are connected. I recently read a quote by the artist and poet Etel Adnan that said, “… my writing and my paintings do not have a direct connection in my mind. But I am sure they influence each other in the measure that everything we do is linked to whatever we are, which includes whatever we have done or are doing.” I totally get that.

The role of materials in children’s learning through art

This post discusses the possibilities of materials and material play in children’s learning through art. I draw on the theories of loose parts and new materialism to argue that materials, including artworks, play an active and participatory role in opening-up divergent thinking and inquiry-led learning in schools, home and informal learning contexts such as art museums.

Why do materials matter?

Materials and material exploration have long been a part of artistic inquiry. Since Frobel’s development of the kindergarten in the late 1700’s, they have also held an important place in early childhood settings. In the 1970’s Simon Nicholson presented the theory of loose parts – the proposition that young children’s creative empowerment comes from the presence of open-ended materials that can be constructed, manipulated and transformed through self-directed play. It is fair to say that material content, including artworks and art materials, hold tremendous possibilities for facilitating children’s inquiry-led learning in new and divergent ways. I consider materials to be one of multiple forces that learning can emerge from in an art museums. Others may include social interaction between people, spatial layout of things and the delivery of curatorial content such as through audio guides or information resources.

As reading and writing are often privileged in school curriculum, experimentation with different materials can provide new opportunities for alternate and aesthetically-driven pedagogies to be produced (check out this blog for how I define pedagogy). This is to say that different materials may encourage different ways of thinking, learning and being. For example, in a previous posts on ‘suggesting as a technique for facilitating children’s learning through art’ I talk about the different cognitive, social, emotional and aesthetic learning pathways that two different materials: plastic cylinders and large paper sheets may present. Whilst the cylinders may provoke explorations around stacking, placing, dismantling, balancing, arrangement and construction, the large paper sheet may suggest gentle movements, swaying, rolling, folding, hiding and enveloping. Through experimentation, the properties and abilities of a material may change, creating new starting points for further inquiry and experimentation.

The active role of materials in art practices and learning

In the arts, different materials such as paint, clay, paper, resin, fabric, wood or plastic can be experimented with in a myriad of ways. In art forms such as dance, live art and socially engaged practices, materials may be slightly more abstract such as the human body, sound, participants and society. I believe that art materials are not just a tool for self-expression or a thing for children to manipulate; they are an active and participatory force in the production of learning and knowledge. For example, check out this lovely video by visual artist Shirazeh Houshiary in which she talks about the active role of materials in her practice:

I really connect with this, especially the comment: “… they are not representation of the form but a pulsation of the form. I am not interested in painting. I am not interested in the processes of making in the conventional sense of representation. I am trying to get into how something works. This process has taught me a huge amount about who I am, which is surprising. It a process of learning for me more than anything else.” The paint and paintings are active, participatory and dynamic in the artist’s creative experimentation.

Art materials as an invitation to experiment

Material play has the ability to encourage emergent thinking processes, allowing children to produce new understandings as well as experiencing the world from multiple perspectives. However, materials also have the ability to be used in static and predictable ways that shut down creativity and divergent thinking. Whilst I do love Instagram feeds and craft blogs that share ideas for children’s art activities, I am cautious that these may unintentionally encourage imitation and fixed ways of using materials with children. This may then reduce the ability for experimental thinking and practices to emerge.

The challenge to me – and everyone working in learning settings with children – is to keep experimenting, keep questioning, keep venturing into the unknown and the yet-to-be-discovered of art, play, materiality and pedagogy.

I am sure many of you have really interesting insights on this topic and it would be lovely to hear them. Why is children’s play with materials important to you? What are your favorite materials to experiment with?

Further links

The Institute of Making at the University College of London has a great online material library – perfect for anyone who likes to nerd out about different material forms: http://www.instituteofmaking.org.uk/materials-library

My friend Nina Odegard has written a brilliant article on children’s learning with recycled ‘junk’ materials. Nina formally ran a creative recycle centre in Norway: http://www.academia.edu/14201590/When_matter_comes_to_matter_working_pedagogically_with_junk_materials

Professor Pat Thomson, Nina Odegard and I recently did a conference symposium on children’s material play. Check it out: https://louisapenfold.com/2017/12/06/childrens-learning-with-new-found-and-recycled-stuff-symposium-at-aare/

Here is the link to my blog post on Simon Nicholson’s theory of loose parts: https://louisapenfold.com/2016/05/23/simon-nicholson-on-the-theory-of-loose-parts/

I also love the book ‘Encounters with Materials in Early Childhood Education’ by Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, Sylvia Kind and Laurie Kocher.

The Children’s Sensory Art Lab with the Slow Art Collective at C3 Gallery, Australia

This post looks at the Slow Art Collective’s ‘Children’s Sensory Lab’ (January 8-21, 2017) at C3 Gallery in Melbourne, Australia.

Last week I visited the Children’s Sensory Art Lab at C3 Gallery in Melbourne, Australia. The lab was created Dylan Martorell and Chaco Kato from the Slow Art Collective – an interdisciplinary artistic group dedicated to exploring creative practices and the ethics of environmental sustainability, materiality, DIY culture and participation. The collective describe ‘slow art’ as:

“… the slow exchanges of value rather than the fast, monetary exchange of value. It is about the slow absorption of culture through community links by creating something together and blurring the boundary between the artists and viewer. It is a sustainable arts practice, not an extreme solution; a reasonable alternative to deal with real problems in contemporary art practice.” (Slow Art Collective website)

The Sensory Art Lab featured six different material environments spread out over the C3 Gallery space. These included a dedicated room for babies and toddlers, a giant loom and an archery area where children could shoot arrows at drum symbols (pics below)! A commonality between the activities was a focus on art making or aesthetic exploration through art. The Lab had an endearingly D.I.Y feel to it. Many of the materials were either recycled or everyday items being used in unfamiliar ways, giving a slightly eclectic and ingenious atmosphere to the show.

My favourite activity was the loom, a simple concept with high creative potential. The design of the weaving apparatus encouraged social interaction between people making textiles, opening up the possibility for new connections between people, materials and things.

Below are some pictures from the show. The collective also have a great website featuring all of their projects. Check it out:  https://www.slowartcollective.com

The ‘audible touch space’ – an area designed especially for children aged 1-2 years and their carers. Babies and toddlers were able to touch the silver triangles that had motion sensors connected to them with pre-programmed sounds

I loved this giant ‘archi-loom.’ The Slow Art Collective did a spectacular version of this at Art Play a few years ago.

A bucket of material off-cuts, ribbons, wool and thread

The archery area – children could fire arrows at the drum symbols, making loud bangs of sound

In this activity, children could make paper basketballs then throw them at the drum kits.  Each snare drum (I think this is what they are called?!) was set at a different pitch, making different bass notes as the balls hit them.

NGV Triennal in Melbourne, Australia

This post looks at the National Gallery of Victoria’s slick new ‘Triennal’ blockbuster exhibition, including the gallery’s dedicated children’s space ‘Hands on: We make carpet for kids.’

I have spent the past few weeks in my hometown of Melbourne, Australia escaping the bleak English winter. During this time I have been fortunate enough to break up my thesis writing with beach swims and time with family and friends.

Last week I headed into Southbank to checked out the National Gallery of Victoria’s new contemporary art exhibition, Triennial. The exhibition is the first of what I presume will be a series of exhibitions held every three years that aim to showcase ‘the world of art and design now.’ The day I visited, the gallery was absolutely heaving with visitors young and old. I had actually never seen so many people inside an Australian art museum before. It was great to see the gallery so full of life.

The Triennial features an array of new modern and contemporary artwork from around the globe. There are also a bunch of newly commissioned, super slick, very Instagram-able installations including Kusama’s ‘Flower obsession,’ Ron Mueck’s ‘Mass,’ teamLab’s “Moving creates vortices and vortices create movement’ and Alexandra Kehayoglou’s beautiful ‘Santa Cruz River.’ The show is ambitious, polished and lively.

Pictured: teamLab ‘Moving creates vortices and vortices create movement’ (2017)

Yayoi Kusama ‘Flower Obsession’ (2017)

Ron Mueck ‘Mass’ (2016-2017)

The Triennial’s dedicated children’s space, ‘Hands on: We make carpet for kids’ (2017) was comprised of four parts: a colourful wall where children could stick on triangular velcro pieces, a ‘maze challenge’ where children could poke pieces of rope through a plywood wall, an area where children could stick styrofoam pool noodles onto wooden knobs and a floor activity where children could make patterns using colourful wooden triangles (pics below). At first glance, the space looked immaculate. Lots of colours, beautiful wall-mounted installations for children to look at. The space was packed with young families who all seemed to be having lots of fun. It was also really inspiring to see the gallery making such significant financial investments in children’s activities. There appeared to be a gallery staff member stationed at each section greeting people and sorting materials.

At the same time I felt like something fundamental was missing from the children’s activities. While in the space I began to consider what exactly it is I love about art and learning. To me, the arts and education have allowed me to continuously think about and connect with the world in new and different ways. Artistic experimentation has allowed me to produce new relationships between myself, other people, ideas and the world around me. Looking at the children’s activities, I felt like there were limited opportunities for children to engage in deep artistic and creative experimentation. For example, in the rope activity, children were presented with small pieces of the material all cut to the same length. An instruction sign told people to put the rope into the holes. What children can and cannot do is nearly entirely pre-constructed and fixed.

I am really interested in children’s learning environments that are designed to encourage creative experimentation and are responsive to what emerges from this. For example, selecting materials based on their ability to transform (for example, clay has the ability to change form through adding or removing water), introducing art tools, equipment, artistic techniques or different conceptual resources that could encourage people to extend, challenge and complexify their thinking through art over time.

At the same time, everyone seemed to be having fun and perhaps that is the most important thing. Also, due to the sheer volume of visitors, the gallery may not have been able to cope with children spending more than two minutes on each activity.

The NGV Triennial is a fun museum experience. There are also some incredible artworks in the exhibition. High-brow theme park or contemporary art show – you decide!

Visit to MONA in Hobart, Australia

This post features reflections on my recent visit to The Museum of Old and New Art or MONA in Hobart, Australia. I discuss the ‘O,’ a custom-designed mobile experience for museum visitors that replaces traditional wall-mounted interpretation texts.

Last month I travelled to Tasmania to checkout MONA’s latest exhibition, The Museum of Everything. The show features an array of works by artists who ‘fall outside the confines of the art world proper, the work of ordinary people, working far from the cultural metropolis’ (MONA website, 2017). After visiting MONA for the first time in 2014 and LOVING IT, I was super excited to return to see their new stuff.

MONA is the lovechild of David Walsh, a professional gambler and art lover who opened the museum in 2011. Built underneath a cliff-face that overlooks the River Derwent, the museum has exhibited an array of controversial and thought-provoking art including Patricia Puccini’s Skywhale, Egyptian mummies and a giant cloaca (poop) machine. Yes, you read that correctly.

The MONA building was also designed to naturally flood as the River Derwent rises over the next 50 years. When questioned about this in a 2014 Guardian article, Walsh said:

“It will be an evaluation of whether it has actually achieved anything. If everyone says, ‘Ah f*%$ it, let’s leave it – let’s just let the ground floor flood,’ that would be a good result because it would mean whatever the structure or system that makes choices – which I assume will be someway democratic in 50 years – has expressed its opinion.”

I feel like this quote somehow embodies the museum’s ethos. Regardless, MONA has been a monumental success for the Tasmanian tourism and the Australian art world.

At the museum, there are no wall-mounted texts in the galleries. Instead visitors are given a mobile iPod devise containing a custom-designed audio-visual app called The O. As people walk through the galleries, the O uses a wireless positioning system to locate artworks in close proximity. The app features content such as curator’s discussion of works, artist interview, music and David Walsh’s rambling thoughts. Each artwork features three levels of content which can be grouped into:

“Art wank’ (look for the cock-and-balls icon, you can’t miss it); ‘Gonzo’ (Walsh and curators go Hunter S. Thompson on yo’ ass); ‘Ideas’ (little chunks of info, for those with a short attention span); and interviews with artists… Once you’ve visited the museum, you’ll be able to continue using the O app at home. Like Tinder, but with more art and stuff.” From the MONA website.

Visitors can also select whether they ‘love’ or ‘hate’ a particular artwork (check out the pic above). Whilst walking through The Museum of Everything I used the O continuously. I tried out the object summaries, curator’s wank, Gonzo and ideas. I found the title ‘curator’s wank’ kind of misleading as the content was pretty standard and straight forward curatorial information. There were certainly more personal references and a much more conversational tone to what you would normally have on wall-mounted exhibition texts but overall, I wouldn’t say the ‘curator’s wank’ was fundamentally different to anything I had experienced previously. Or maybe this is because ‘wank’ is the standard talk in galleries, lolz.

I absolutely loved the room with Pat Brassington’s photographs in it! Above: ‘Curiouser and curiouser’ (2017)

I really enjoyed the ‘ideas’ option on The O, especially the music tracks. I always listen to music while walking through exhibitions and it was cool to have someone else’s thoughtful selection of beats to guide thinking in new directions. I also found the music encouraged me to connect more emotionally with the art.

The thing I loved most MONA was that it encouraged me to make and explore relations between myself and art from outside the traditional thinking of major institutions. As I live in England, a country that seems to have such a class system and establishment, it felt refreshing to experience art from a new and fundamentally different perspective.

Further Links

The Art Processor website goes into the geeky technical make-up of The O here: http://artprocessors.net/projects/mona/

 

What does pedagogy mean?

In this post I discuss my understanding of the term ‘pedagogy’ and the ability for the process of documentation to act as a critical thinking tool to reconsider the assumptions, beliefs and practices that shape a learning environment. 

Vest Pocket Playground. Credit: Playscapes.com

‘Pedagogy: the principles, practice or profession of teaching.’ Collins Dictionary

‘The subject of children is not static or the same in every era because both the culture and society in which they form change very rapidly. Pedagogical and psychological knowledge should therefore always be open to channels for listening and interpreting and avoid becoming filters that are too short-sighted or opaque for reality to pass through.’ Vea Veechi 

I remember having a conversation with a teacher-friend five or six years ago in which I distinctly recall saying, ‘I will never use the word pedagogy. I have only ever heard pretentious people say it in convoluted ways. The last thing the world needs is for the language and meanings of education theories to be presented as high-brow and inaccessible’.

Fast forward to last week. I was giving a talk to a group of architects on pedagogical documentation as a tool for learning and change in art museums. The first question asked after the presentation was, ‘this may sound silly, but what exactly does pedagogy mean?’ My mind flashed back to the conversation from a few years ago – gah!  I had become everything I thought I would never be… a person who uses the word pedagogy. How did this happen? Well, let me explain.

Prior to starting my PhD, I often used the words ‘learning’ and ‘education’ to describe the different processes happening in the art museums where I was employed. A few months into my doctorate I realised that these words were limited when trying to consider the wider context of children’s experiences. I then started reading up on different meanings and understandings of pedagogy. I found many of these surprisingly useful in expanding my thinking around children and art. Now I use it all the time, including in my blog title. I sometimes cringe to think that it might come across as pompous. At the same time it is the correct word for what I am trying to think more deeply about.

My current understanding of the term has been influenced by the definition provided by Thomson et al. (2012) in ‘The Signature Pedagogies Project.’ In this, pedagogy is described as the ‘shaping of the learning environment as a whole’. It is viewed as the combination of teaching methods, curriculum, assessment practice and how these are created into patterns of interactions, actions and activity in a particular context.

This description emphasises the ‘relationships, conversations, learning environments, rules, norms and culture within the wider social context’ (Ibid, p.8). It implies that pedagogies consists of intertwining connections between both people and things in a specific social, historical, political and cultural context. This also suggests that such forces are not fixed but rather constantly changing, recombining and multiple.

Siraj-Blatchford (2002) extends on this through stating that it is the quality of interactions between a learning environment’s components that give significant insight into the depth of early childhood education experiences.

Questions relating to a learning environment’s pedagogies could be as follows:

• What are the concepts and content being taught?
• How is this being done, for example what are the methods?
• What learning strategies are being produced by learners?
• How do we know that learning is taking place?
• How do all of these forces come together at different moments to shape how, what and why a learner learns?
• What are our assumptions and beliefs that shape such understandings of learning?

I personally do not believe such questions are reserved for formal education settings and that museum teams can also benefit from continuous critical thinking around these ideas. The process of documentation can support such investigations when used by teams as a mean to consider, challenge and transform the assumptions, beliefs and understandings that shape a learning context. Many of these assumptions are formed and maintained implicitly and therefore require active debate, visbility and questioning from multiple perspectives to explore the complexity of practices. Or as Lenz-Taguchi (2009) describes, the process of documentation becomes a pedagogical one when it is used as a tool for learning and change. This then allows for the production of new theories, ideas and alternate ways of thinking about early childhood education discourses and practices.

References

Lenz-Taguchi, 2009. Going Beyond the Theory/Practice Divide in Early Childhood Education (Contesting Early Childhood). Oxon: Routledge.

Siraj-Blatchford, I., Sylva, K., Muttock, S., Gilden, R., & Bell, D. (2002). Researching effective pedagogy in the early years (REPEY). London: HMSO.

Thomson, P., Hall, C., Jones, K., & Sefton-Green, J. (2012). The Signature Pedagogies project: Final report, Culture, Creativity and Education.

Vecchi, V. (2010). Art and creativity in Reggio Emilia: Exploring the role and potential of ateliers in early childhood education, London: Routledge. p.49

Thinking through making

This post introduces Tim Ingold’s concept of thinking through making alongside the work of three contemporary artists: Takesada Matsutani, Tino Sehgal and Katharina Grosse.

Film still from Eric Minh Swenson’s film ‘Takesada Matsutani’ (full clip below).

The title of this blog is borrowed from Tim Ingold’s text ‘Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture’ (2013). In this, he explores the idea that the thought processes of makers and the materials they use are in a continuous process of correspondence and becoming with one another.

Ingold argues that creativity emerges from within an ongoing, improvisational process between makers, materials and other non-human things such as tools and the physical environment. These non-human play an active role in influencing the thought processes of the maker and vice-versa. The creation of objects and learning transpires from within complex and reciprocal relations between these forces.

This suggests that new objects and artefacts such as artworks, are not produced from humans projecting ready-made thoughts onto the materials as this approach “… leaves out the very creativity of the processes where both things, and ideas are generated. They (the new objects and artefacts) are generated on one hand in the flows and transformations of materials and on the other hand in the movement of the imagination and the sensory awareness of the maker… (Ingold, 2012).” Artworks become moments of materialised intensity that work to constitute a much larger, expansive and continuously interconnected network of relations. Through this, Ingold challenges the premises of what creativity is and how it is produced.

How does an art museum differ from an art studio in relation to the production of ideas, meanings, artworks and culture?

How do artworks and materials ‘speak back’ and influence the thought processes of humans, and vice-versa?

Does the role of the ‘material’ change when it is not a physical thing, such as in performance, sound or live art? If so, how?

References

Ingold, T (2012). Thinking through making. Presentation from the Institute for Northern Culture ‘Tales from the North.’ Viewed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ygne72-4zyo

Ingold, T (2013). Making: Anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. Oxon: Routledge.

 

Bruno Munari: “inventor, artist, writer designer, architect, illustrator and player-with-children”

This post explores the work of Italian artist, Bruno Munari (1907-1998). Munari was a self-proclaimed ‘inventor artist writer designer architect illustrator player-with-children’ (The Independent, 1998) whose creative practice intertwined with the educational philosophies of Jean Piaget and Maria Montessori. 

“It hasn’t always been easy for me to make people take me seriously. I play with children. And, in a society such as ours, anyone who plays or works with children runs the risk of being thought eccentric.” Munari

“Understanding what art is, is a (useless) concern of the adult. Understanding how you do it instead, is a genuine interest in the child.” Munari

Bruno Munari was a man whose work could never be defined. He created and invented prolifically across mediums and methods diverse as paper, painting, sculpture, toys, photography, film, education, fine art and graphic design. The quirky objects, furniture, books, pictures and workshops he created encouraged learning through tactile, physical and kinaesthetic play. Whilst Munari’s work is often associated with the Italian Futurist movement of the 1920’s, he also drew heavily from Surrealism’s vibrant pallets and the Bauhaus’ geometric forms. Munari’s uncontrolable inventiveness led him to create outlandish bodies of work including an entire series of useless machines and an equally brilliant succession of ‘useless’ unreadable books.

Munari encouraged children to learn about the world through touching and playing with materials and things. Possibly one of his most well-known interventions was his Tactile Workshop series. In these Murani in worked with groups of young children to experiment with touch as an exploration of material’s properties and artistic concepts. Documentation of these workshops can be found in his appropriately named publication, The Tactile Workshops.

Below is a selection of Munari’s experiments run with children. These clips are in Italian but are quite straight forward even with a limited understanding of the language… and are visually rich and interesting to watch. Divertiti!

Further links

MunArt A website (official or unofficial, I am unsure!) dedicated to the work of Bruno Munari

MEF Museo Ettore Fico’s ‘Bruno Munari; Total Artist’ exhibition website. The exhibition was presented from February 16 – June 11, 2017. Scroll down the webpage to view installation images from the show.

Carl Rogers on learning to be free

This post explores Learning to be free, a piece written by the late American humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers. The chapter was written in 1967, two years before his well-known ‘Freedom to Learn’ was published. Learning to be free explores the notion that human ‘congruency’ and curiosity serves as a catalyst for growth, empathy and understandings between oneself and the world. Rogers argues that these emerge from interconnected relationships between an individual’s freedom from things and freedom to choose and be.

What is the meaning of freedom?

How does an individual learn to develop inner freedom?

What is the role of teachers in supporting student’s processes of learning to be free?

These existential questions form the core of Carl Roger’s inquiry into the complexity, contradictions, assumptions and ethics of developing inner freedom, a process he believes can be used construct meaningful, authentic lives in which individual’s reach their highest potentialities.

There are growing debates around school curriculum that are premised on the understanding that children are ultimately not free. Constraints such as standardised testing, pre-set curriculum, mass media, cultural norms and class systems limit what an individual can and cannot do, feel and think. Taking these beliefs one step further, these forces fundamentally shape what people will become in the future. Rogers advocates for the need to explore individual contextual complexity and create learning situations that emerge from this.

Rogers believed that humans are naturally curious being eager to learn about themselves and the world. He also believed that forces in modern society, such as mass media, cultural norms and the expectations of others were preventing individuals from creating lives that are authentic and meaningful to oneself. To counteract this, he developed the theory of human-centred psychology that advocated for individual’s need to explore and construct their unique and subjective feelings, goals and understandings. These can then be used to inform the decisions that shape their lives and connect with “the experience of freedom to be one’s self” (Ibid, p.47).

According to Rogers, this process then holds the possibility of individual’s gaining greater awareness of themselves, other people and the world around them, creating more independent, confident, creative and spontaneous beings. In schools, learning can more readily happen once a student accepts and connects with their internal feelings/beliefs/understandings and acts in a way that is in alignment with these. This self-actualising process is what Rogers termed ‘congruency.’

So what exactly is this inner, subjective and internal freedom? Rogers believed that it was one that:

“…enables a person to step into the uncertainty of the unknown as he chooses himself. It is the discovery of meaning from within oneself, meaning which comes from listening sensitively and openly to the complexities of what one is experiencing. It is the burden of being responsible for the self one chooses to be. It is the recognition by the person that he is an emerging process, not a static end product.”

This comes from:

“… movement from as well as movement towards. From being persons driven by inner forces they do not understand, fearful and distrusting of these deeper feelings and of themselves, living by values they have taken over from others, they move significantly. They move toward being persons who accept and even enjoy their own feelings, who value and trust the deeper later of the nature, who find strength in being their own uniqueness, who live by values they experience. This learning, this movement, enables them to live as more individuated, more creative, more responsive, and more responsible persons” (p.49). 

This suggests that freedom is not just emancipation from particular external forces but also freedom to do and choose. Deep consideration is then given to what needs to happen in a learning situation to support student’s ability of learning to be free. Feelings of empathy, curiosity, the role of the teacher as facilitator and a display of teacher’s ‘real’ emotions are explored as key conditions that construct exciting, meaningful learning for students. Rogers believed that learning is a deeply personal, social, emotional as well as an intellectual process – an understanding that also premises his broader theory of human-centred learning. The conclusion is drawn that in order for exciting and meaningful learning to occur, learning environments need to be constructed so that students have:

• access to the appropriate psychological and technical resources;
• the opportunity to explore real world problems;
• the ability to learn alongside educators who also show acceptance and empathy towards themselves and others. The teacher is therefore a facilitator of learning and growth.

Teachers therefore rely on students to initiate learning that is meaningful to them –  a process that requires trust and patience. I really connect with Roger’s conceptualisation of learning as a continuous process that takes into consideration the all facets of human experience (emotional, social and intellectual), something that his contemporary John Dewey also advocated for. For 1960’s America, this proposition was well before its time. Roger’s greatest contribution to human knowledge is possibly also the simplest – be yourself, whilst also being empathetic towards others who may have different understandings, feelings and beliefs about the world to you!

References

Rogers, C (1967). ‘Learning to be free,’ in Rogers, C & Stevens, B, Person to person: The problem of being human. Real people press, Utah. p.47-66.

Rogers, C (1969). Freedom to learn: A view of what education might become. Merrill Publishing Company, Columbus.

 

Isamu Noguchi’s whimsicle playscapes at SFMOMA

This post is coming to you from sunny California! I absolutely love this part of the world. Yesterday I visited a very fun ‘Noguchi Playscapes’ exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition explores the sculptural playscapes of Japanese-American artist Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988). This post presents some of the key artworks and themes from the show including the role of public sculpture in bringing art and creativity to everyday living.

An image from the exhibition at SFMOMA

“Noguchi’s desire was to bring fine art into the context of everyday living. His lifelong involvement in the design of playgrounds and “play sculpture” stemmed from this ideology and belief in the educational potential of sculptured forms for physical use by children” (Larrivee, 2011).

“The playground, instead of telling the child what to do (swing here, climb there), becomes a place for endless exploration, of endless opportunity for changing play. And it is a thing of beauty as the modern artist has found beauty in the modern world” Isamu Noguchi (1967).

Noguchi Playscapes revisits the work of pioneering artist and landscape architect, Isamu Noguchi. The exhibition presents a myriad of Noguchi’s designs, sketches, models and archival images used to construct his sculptural playscape. These colourful, quirky and even downright wacky works explore his ‘vision for new experiences of art, education, and humanity through play’ (SFMOMA website, 2017).

Noguchi strove to create public spaces that sparked imagination through people’s interactions with different forms, surfaces, textures and shapes. Children’s play served as a creative and experimental process for engaging with these spaces. The role of sculpture in the urban landscape allowed for Noguchi’s playscapes to bring together the powerful combination of aesthetics, functionality and human’s ability play.

Noguchi believed that: “sculpture in the public realm is an aesthetic and cultural tool capable of reconciling social inhibitions and individuality. This shaped his vision for the democratisation of art, leading him to devise outdoor play structures that encourage creative interaction as a way of learning” (Noguchi Playscapes, 2017).

Noguchi also understood “creative play as a way of learning about and participating in the world, emphasising imagination, especially that of children, given that they represented the future that would be rebuilt by the fractured postwar society” (Garcia & Larrivee, 2016).

Isamu Noguchi’s design for the U.S Pavilion Expo from 1970. © The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, NY. Image: sfmoma.org

Playscapes such as ‘The U.S Pavilion Expo” (1970, pictured above) bring together re-moulding of the earth with sculptural play equipment. I found designs that were devoid of equipment such as ‘Play Mountain’ (1933, pictured below) particularly thought-provoking. In the absence of swings, slides and see-saws, the design proposed moulded and hollowed earth that created slopes for rolling, sliding and sledding down.

Noguchi’s ‘Play Mountain’ (1933). Cast 1977. Bronze. Image: noguchi.or

Children’s experience in the playscape would therefore be driven by physical exercise such as running, jumping and climbing over the organic forms and geometric shapes of the earth (Larrivee, 2011). ‘Play Mountain’ was a radical proposition for children’s play in 1930’s New York with nearly all public playgrounds being produced from mass-constructed, pre-designed equipment. The design was unsurprisingly rejected by New York Parks Commission and never realised into an actual playscape.

I was surprised to discover that only two of Noguchi’s public playscapes were actually realised in his lifetime – one in Kodomo No Kuni park in Yokohama (this was torn down one year after it was built) and the second in the Piedmont Park in Atlanta, Georgia (pictured below). Out of all the wacky models and sketches of playscapes featured in the exhibition, ‘Piedmont Park’ seems one of the simplest and least extravagant. Perhaps it was also one of the more straight forward and least risky designs to build. Fed-up with government bureauracy, Noguchi chose to work the rest of his career on largely private commissions liaising with architects, musicians and theatre designers as a way of escaping the restrictive health and safety regulations of creating public play spaces (Larrivee, 2011).

Noguchi Playscapes is on display at SFMOMA from July 15 – November 26, 2017. You can also visit The Noguchi Museum in Long Island City, New York to view a more comprehensive body of work by this amazing artist.

Art. Play. Children. Pedagogy. will be on holidays for the next couple of weeks. The next post will make its appearance on Friday September 1, 2017.

Piedmont Park park, Atlanta. Built 1975-76 from basswood. Image: hermanmiller.com

References

Garcia, M & Larrivee, S (2016). Isamu Noguchi: Playscapes, RM/Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo; Bilingual edition.

Larrivee, S (2011). ‘Playscapes: Isamu Noguchi’s Designs for Play,’Public Art Dialogue, 1:01, pp. 53-80.

Noguchi, I (1967). A Sculptor’s World. Tokyo: Thomas and Hudson. pp.176-177.

Noguchi Playscapes (2017), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, July 15 – November 26, 2017.

SFMOMA website (2017). ‘Noguchi’s Playscapes,’ SFMOMA website. Viewed August 14, 2017.