open air schools

the book as a space-time sequence

learning with objects

touch and tactility

school furniture

the weight of words

caring by/for nature

mending (the social fabric)

embroidery (colonization?)

the art of instruction

the order of things

hands doing things

learning with/from the more-than-human

the personal is political

quilting - women and domestic art

fishermen knits - narrative patterns
showing connection to place

how can we measure or document this?

meaning making

gathering knowledge

what is meaningful?

how to share? what is legible?

hands doing things

to learn is to care?

to care is to be open to learn?

care = value

care = value

tacit knowledge

situated knowledge

embodied knowledge

gathering knowledge

what do we consider knowledge?

to whom should it be legible?

to become aware of your place

in what speed should we gather?

who decides?

"How to see? Where to see from? What limits to vision? What to see for? Whom to see with? Who gets to have more than one point of view? Who gets blinded? Who wears blinders? Who interprets the visual field? What other sensory powers do we wish to cultivate besides vision?" (587)

Haraway, Donna. (1988). "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective." Feminist Studies 14, 3: 575-599

how to become aware of relationships?

the networks and their scales?

to see is to care?

what does it mean to care?

form follows function

project: dandelion

what senses do we use?

deep time

encyclopedia

'The power of the word which makes the existence of the thing appear and disappear by the simple declaration of it's name'
Jaques Derrida, Mallarme 1974

to create a sense of place

to try to understand is to care?

to value, despite differences,
is to care?

tracing

(poetic/ critical nature)

fluxus inspiration

systems thinking?

objects carrying meaning

the value of objects

there is nothing like 'things': everything is connected

'The atoms of our body, as well, flow in and away from us. We, like waves and like all objects, are a flux of events; we are processes, for a brief time monotonous'
-Carlo Rovelli

“We are made up of the same atoms and the same light signals as are exchanged between pine trees in the mountains and stars in the galaxies.”
-Carlo Rovelli

“Quantum mechanics extends this relativity in a radical way: all variable aspects of an object exist only in relation to other objects. It is only in interactions that nature draws the world.”
-Carlo Rovelli

systems thinking?

to whom?

researching

gathering knowledge

sharing your findings

how do you share your findings?

what tools do you need?

what do you want to research?

can we do this collectively?

how can this collective activity work as a catalyst to think about our personal lives and relationships?

talking about our values using 'mending' as a vehicle of thought/talk

how can this collective activity work as a catalyst to think about our personal lives and relationships?

talking about our sense of place using 'rooting' as a vehicle of thought/talk

'people who do not observe, can not converse'

'The rhythm of developing a physical skill can embody ritual; gestures between people can embody the informal social triangle; using minimum force can embody response to those who resist or differ.'
-Richard Sennett

'show rather than tell'

there is no 'other'

who decides?

what is my role/position/aim?

making aware of relationships?

facilitating the process of becoming aware?

listening, caring, giving space to grow?

guiding by asking questions?

“We need to produce situations in which children learn by themselves, in which children can take advantage of their own knowledge and resources… We need to define the role of the adult, not as a transmitter, but as a creator of relationships—relationships not only between people but also between things, between thoughts, with the environment.”
-Loris Mallaguzzi (Reggio Emilia)

‘Understanding without imagination is doctrine without growth. And without growth, what chance is there to engage the complexity that bounds us?’

‘How learning a word sharpens the eye and changes the vision’

‘It is such a foundational act, to give name to. And with names, often, they are — call them portals to love and care; we rarely care for what we cannot name.‘

‘A connection with nature allows us to see the roots that sustain and explain everything around us.’

‘If we wish to notice more, it is a good idea to slow down; and noticing more will itself tend to make you slow down. This is true whatever you focus on.’

‘Better perceiving is the necessary starting point to different ways, to creative changes in personal and collective decision making and lifestyles.’

‘It is possible, then, that one crucial ingredient in the shift from space to place is writing - a process of recollection, distillation, and communication - which somehow, in retrospect, transforms space into place, or at least completes or solidifies that transformation. In other words it may be the stories we create that enable the transformation of space into place, rather than simply our experience. As Doreen Massey suggests, places are collections of stories (2005: 130), and one way of telling those stories is by writing them down.’

all things are impermanent
all things are imperfect
all things are incomplete

-wabi sabi values

‘Attention without feeling, I began to learn,
is only a report. An openness — an empathy —
was necessary if the attention was to matter.’

‘Walking is a psychological way to connect one’s self or community to site, land, city and neighbourhood. And it’s a way to connect to one another.’

‘To participate is not to walk into but to walk with - where ‘with’ implies not a face-to-face confrontation, but heading the same way, sharing the same vistas, and perhaps retreating from the same treats behind. It is the physical attitude of bodies and their spatial arrangement that suggests something of their relational attitude. Walking alongside becomes a means to negotiate a flow - of conversation, of movement. Moreover, it becomes symbolic of an ideal type of relation, where moving together, shoulder-to-shoulder, conveys the potential for mutuality, parity or equality.’

‘If we wish to notice more, it is a good idea to slow down; and noticing more will itself tend to make you slow down. This is true whatever you focus on.’

‘In a world dominated by mass production and consumption, craft engages us directly with material, form and function. Wide acquisition of haptic skills and an understanding and appreciation of materials helps challenge over-consumption as the experience of making a wooden box or a clay pot awakens the sense of an object’s value.’

‘Engaging with traditional craft and local materials engenders a deeper sense of place and heritage. Often our towns and cities are where and how they are because of craft based industries using local resources. Engaging directly with materials can help rebuild connections to the natural world and challenge our loss of affinity to nature, what writer Richard Louv calls nature deficit disorder.’

the path is made by walking

‘Barbara Adam draws attention to how time is socially organized so that the ‘when, how often, how long, in what order and at what ‘speed’ are governed by implicit, embedded ‘norms, habits and conventions’ about temporality (1955: 66). These cultural norms shape spatio-temporal conformity and consistency, soliciting the development of, often unreflective, everyday, weekly and annual routines, life-cycle and life stage conventions, as well as attitudes towards the past and future. At present, such doxic assumptions are being challenged, shaken up by the advent of accelerating climate and environmental change, inspiring a reconfiguring of the temporal perspectives through which humans imagine the past, present and future, and consider time from divergent angles and at different scales.’

As teachers we try to participate in the process of empowering people to be the artists they are. […] As artists we work every day. We make our own lives every day; we care for our family every day. It is hard daily work, this creative process. But it is also greater than personal. We are asked to care for others as well – helping them to create their lives as we were helped.
– Corita Kent

to care with

to care about

to care for

'through making we make ourselves'

alternative learning spaces?
every space offers a space to learn

'the world is made of stories, not of atoms'

'in relation to'

interactions

processes

a sense of place: belonging

teaching through material

‘Engaging with traditional craft and local materials engenders a deeper sense of place and heritage. Often our towns and cities are where and how they are because of craft based industries using local resources. Engaging directly with materials can help rebuild connections to the natural world and challenge our loss of affinity to nature, what writer Richard Louv calls nature deficit disorder.’

'If education is about caring for the world we live in, and for its multiple human and non-human inhabitants, then it is not so much about restoring them to presence, so that we can attend and respond to what they have to say'
-Tim Ingold

'restoring to presence'

Progress means simplifying, not complicating

inspiration: bruno munari

facilitating the possibility of becoming aware?

the teacher - the gardener:

showing not telling?

and how do i carry that role?

slow down

notice more

minimal use of language to communicate?

how can this collective activity work as a catalyst to think about our personal lives and relationships?

talking about our sense of place using 'walking' as a vehicle of thought/talk

to care with

to walk with

to live with

to learn with

is there such thing as functionalist pedagogy?

things that fit

belonging together

symbiosis?

project: mending

collaboration with sanne vaassen
using yarn dyed with local plants

soil 'aarde'

tending to, facilitating the optimal conditions for growth

'setting the scene'

the role of instruction

awareness of environment

Memory is a physical construction. While memory is normally associated with the cognitive functions of the brain, I argue that memory’s connection to time imposes its existence onto physical space as much as it does onto cognitive space. I am always fascinated by the idea that the starlight we see today is in fact old light cast out from a time existing simultaneously in the past, present, and future. The star’s light began in its present, a past to us when we see it in our present, which is the star’s future.
-Jake Skeets

“Today, whenever I see sunlight shine through lenses or glass, I am reminded of that moment in that classroom when I learned that, because sunlight takes 8 minutes and 20 seconds to reach the earth, the things we see are in some way a part of the past. Pasts, presents, and futures exist simultaneously.”
-Jake Skeets

past present future

found within every'thing' we encounter?

project: rondje stadionpark

collectively walking a not-yet-existing path to create meaning

countermapping

gathering situated and embodied knowledge through walking and conversing

project: taskforce fashion

project: gardening

seeding

‘Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.’
-William Morris

meaningful?

what is my 'indigenous knowledge'?

grandma's garden, herbal cures, hunting trips, the smelly kombucha in the closet, fermenting and perserving food that we couldn't eat or exchange

decolonizing nature?

'you can't kill a weed'
-grandma, dealing with a covid-19 infection (aged 86)

'relationship is the foundation of dialogue'

why am i reading about american indigenous knowledge, researching and mapping neighbourhoods, meeting people, when i don't even know my own grandmother and heritage that well?

project: baking bread (online)

learning with/from the more-than-human

making a sourdough starter

learning about bacteria

how can this collective activity work as a catalyst to think about our personal lives and relationships?

talking about hygiene and the importance of bacteria, using 'sourdough' as a vehicle of thought/talk

gardening workshops in collaboration with centre for nature and environment centre
in schiedam 2021

week 13: soil and worms
week 16: seeding
week 20: traveling seeds
week 23: (on)kruid / weeds?
week 26: bees
week 36: from the allotment
week 40: harvest festival

to learn with

to live with

'telling the bees'

add fermenting?

look into other myths and rituals

why do we document and share findings?

(students) making a zine

'reclaiming our food is reclaiming much more than our food. It’s reclaiming this huge set of relationships that ultimately connect us to the land and to the biological web that we are part of.'
-sandor katz

'in the cultivation of microorganisms on our food—which is what we’re doing in fermentation—we use the same word, “culture,” to describe the community of bacteria that turn milk into yogurt that we use to describe language, belief systems and the totality of what we’re trying to pass down generation to generation.'
-sandor katz

'In our human societies, this idea of protecting the purity of our society against the contamination of outside ideas is, well, it’s been weaponized really. The way people project fear of the “other” has been such a theme throughout human history. With all these metaphors that we’re picking up from fermentation, we can look and see how they have been applied in our society and our culture and our politics.'
-sandor katz

https://emergencemagazine.org/story/fermentation-as-metaphor/

herman bread?

archiving

time travel through memories

" The garden of [ Froebel's ] Kindergarten was not only a symbol, it was an essential means for the physical, intellectual, social, and emotional development of the child. Not only were there flowerbeds, heb-beds, vegetable patches, fruit trees and bushes which were planted and tended by all, but each child had his own little plot of land for which he/she was responsible. To learn from the environment around the school was important, yet it was equally important to teach children to care for this environment". A Child's Work By:Joachim Liebschner, pg. 39.

'Froebel's gardens included many lessons in them. The children observed the plants, the wild & domestic animals that were in the garden. They dug the earth, they sowed, watered, weeded, cared, and reaped their reward. The garden was tied to the kitchen, with the harvested goods included in the daily meal or in an Occupation. The lessons also included art, botany, farming, forestry, geography, geology, history, mathematics, science, stories and zoology.' -Froebel Today

'the laws of nature are also the laws of education' -froebel

'My educational method offers to its pupils from from the beginning the opportunity to collect their own experiences from things themselves, to look with their own eyes and to learn to know by their own experiments, things and the relations of things to each other, and also the real life of the world of humanity.' -Froebel

archiving

specimens?

archiving nature

legibility?

strategies for conservation in a post-colonial era?

project: (local) plant based design

buying a flower at the shop and collecting local plants on the way there. creating a wearable object to celebrate the end of the school year with the neighbourhood

collaboration with 'kore'

natuur-orde

a new ritual

ask her about rituals?

'Everything that is in the heavens, on earth, and under the earth is penetrated with connectedness, penetrated with relatedness' -Hildegard von Bingen

'We shall awaken from our dullness and rise vigorously toward justice. If we fall in love with creation deeper and deeper, we will respond to its endangerment with passion.' -Hildegard von Bingen

october, 2020
laying on my back in a forest, in silence, i stared up at the tree tops. holding my hand in the air, i noticed how the lines on my palm resemble the network of the branches above.

how can this collective activity work as a catalyst to think about our personal lives and relationships?

talking about value, locality and the gift,
using 'weeds' as a vehicle of thought/talk

hildegard von bingen

hildegard von bingen has been considered by many in europe to be the founder of scientific natural history in germany

anna atkins is possibly the very first woman photographer and almost certainly the first person to publish a book with photographic illustrations

anna atkins

herrad von landsberg

hortus deliciarum is the first encyclopedia that was evidently written by a woman

rituals

giving thanks to the land

light, warmth, crop and harvest

the first crop

master's documentation

why am i documenting?

who is my public?

what is legible?

to whom should it be?

what does this mean for the form of my graduation documentation?

gathering evidence?

for whom?

what do i want to tell or show?

epistemology

depot

'the objective world is, it does not happen. only to the gaze of my consciousness, crawling along the lifeline of my body, does a section of this world come to life as a fleeting image in space which continuously changes in time.'
-herman weyl

sonobox