By Georgia Clark
Someone had mentioned in one of our earlier workshops exploring
the theme of ‘Primary Schools’ that they remembered ‘drawing a house and a tree
and a sunshine repeatedly’ at primary school. We began this week’s session, the
last of the summer ‘prepping’ workshops, with a group activity exploring this.
‘Was there something that
you drew or wrote often when you were at Primary School?’
A3 sheets of drawing paper were lain out on the tables tempting
our childhood doodles; horses, paradise scenes and Thunderbirds 2 were some of
the images that adorned a line of rope strung up to accommodate our remembered
drawings. We listened in as each person explained the story behind their
drawing, rekindling the supportive dynamic of attending to and being curious
about each memory that had been enjoyed in previous sessions.
Some of the drawings
revealed stories of activities shared with siblings, begging the question of
whether or not these drawings were actually done at Primary school. To alter
the direction slightly, we talked about specific memories of drawing and creating
done in the classroom.
Memories of art lessons
echoed around, one where a primary school art teacher asked the children to
copy paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe sticks in my mind, and we wondered aloud
about the intention and purpose of these activities: Why did the teachers ask
us to do this? Some answers were ventured; it’s about finding different ways
for people to express themselves; to develop craft and motor skills. We
collectively mused and considered our memories from new angles, seeing if we
could intuit different meanings.
With a dynamic change in
energy we were all up and working in partners to ‘sculpt’ each other into
different shapes. At first we did this by physically moving the other’s limbs
with our hands, and then we did it without touching the other person but using
the same motion, as if a force field separated your hands and their body but
carried the intention. We stepped back after each round to admire the room’s
diverse statues.
This was a warm up for the
next exercise – ‘strike
a playground pose’ - bodies
frozen running, playing, roaming and chatting animated the room. We broke up
into four smaller groups and brought the still shots to life to create a short
sketch. After watching these back in a group we were directed in replaying our
sketches at the same time, so that they overlapped with each other, creating
the first group sketch of the summer. A frisbee was being flung around in one
corner of the room as someone fell over in another and play sword fighting
traversed the space. We performed this several times, the instructions varying; ‘this time, do it as
if your over acting at being a child’, ‘this time, like you’re actually an
adult’, ‘make everything seem as if it’s the most important thing in the world
this time.’
It was our first piece of
theatre as a group; a taste of what a performance might look like once all the
elements of our investigation have simmered together, infused with nuances of
how our primary school persists in each of us, as well as how they are
experienced today; the recipe concocted out of the rich ingredients collected
in this ‘foraging’ process.
A short break was welcome
after our exertions in the playground; we re-joined after five minutes to meet
the next task of offering up ideas and thoughts which would inform some
preliminary interviews and meetings on the subject. We began by considering in
small groups what each of the following would want children to be by the end of
primary school, some of the responses are in italics:
Industry - good production
worker, good with hands, compliant, literate, numerate
Government - respect for other
people, pass Key Stage 2
Secondary schools - good behaviour,
confident, well-balanced, inquisitive
Our children - happy, able to
cope, to be a child and have fun
‘Us’ - ready for secondary
school, critical thinker, caring for others, have encountered diversity and
difference
This would be the final workshop of the summer, they will resume
in September and in the meantime myself and perhaps some others will carry out
some interviews, or ‘meetings’, with people that have worked in primary schools
and with those that went to primary school locally or abroad, to scope out what
these meetings might look like and harness some material to play with in
September. I was grateful that a final task would harvest the groups’ ideas of
what they would like to ask people if they were the interviewers…
Some questions for a teacher, governor, retired teacher, dinner
lady, caretaker or current student:
How do you deal with
trouble?
What made you choose a
career in teaching?
What is your favourite
subject and why?
How many keys have you got?
What food do the children
hate most?
What do you think of the
exclusion policy for primary school students?
And with that the final
prepping workshop drew to a close. It’s been a great
summer - join us next term!
