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.

1. Cry Freedom: Autonomous Opportunities for Personalised
Engagement
Paula Jackson

2. 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

3. URBAN AIR
On the in-breath
it’s made of gutter soup
and small change
gone particulate
and burnt offerings.
On the out-breath:
leftovers from
above and body heat,
and body moisture,
even scraps of body, outside
itself at last, cells
set free and on fire.
Jo Shapcott

4. 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?

5. Schools without walls

6. Vittra symbol
Laboratory Mission Control Moon Surface The Cave
Planet x
Laboratory Mission Control occurs through interaction with the environment
Piaget: human development
Moon Surface The Cave Planet
PGCE trainee teachers as co-researchers
Working to their strengths

8. 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

9. 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

10. 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

11. 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

12. 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?

13. Timeline of transformation

14. 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?

15. 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

16. 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

18. Invitation
•
Transformation Exhibition
10 November 2012 – 22 December 2012
The New School House Gallery
Peasholme Green
York YO1 7PW
United Kingdom
www.schoolhousegallery.co.uk
p.jackson1@yorksj.ac.uk