Sensing the School
Exploring the physical and experiential connection between child and school environment.
Introduction
Dr Becky Shaw’s (Sheffield Hallam University) initial work for the Odd Project focused on trying to experience the point of which the child and the school environment ‘touch’.
The term ‘touch’ includes reference to physical touch between bodies and environment, as well as a more expanded notion of touch: the ways that the environment makes, and is made by, experiences.
The setup
In the first year of research, Becky and children from Year 5 at Alma Park joined together to become a research team.
The team used stethoscopes, tuning forks, close-up cameras and cable cameras to explore how they related to the school building.
The project
The process began by using the instruments to explore areas in school where the children thought they might have felt odd or sensed ‘oddness’.
However, the children rapidly became more curious about what the instruments could ‘do’, recording unexpected and unusual aspects of the building.
Becky and the children focused on what happens when humans, spaces, objects, textures, sounds, and apparatus interact; and what actions, feelings and sensations arise.
The instruments generated different movement and gestures, required different relationships between children and, also a different physical ‘contact’ with the surface of the school.
The groups became ‘shared, collective rolling bodies’ that moved across the usual segregation of space and time in the school day.
For example, when using a cable ‘endoscopic’ camera, one child had to operate the camera while the other aimed and poked the lens, so they became one human/technical camera form.
Some children were especially drawn to the stethoscope and perhaps how it enabled them to be alone in listening.
The tools weren’t always used conventionally. The children were led by how they might move and perform with them, not simply what they could see or hear with them.
The ‘professional’ and special nature of the instruments seemed to help the researchers attend differently to things.
The listening instruments offered ways of ‘touching’ the surface of the environment’ (Shaw & Holmes 2019).
The sound instruments used vibration to understand the surface of school as something oscillating, where the children and the building mutually affect each other.
The cable camera dipped into recesses and holes, but these were not experienced as ‘hidden insides’- but rather the folds of the shared surface.
Quote from Shaw and Holmes
We aim to document the curiosities evoked when an education researcher observes this emerging interrogation of the meniscus of material, artist and children’s bodies and the school becoming blurred, almost becoming-imperceptible; a process of incessant de/re/constructing skin and surface, insides and outsides, holes, rips, sinkings and punctures.
Reporting the project and other streams
Becky and Professor Rachel Holmes presented Sensing the School at the American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting and British Educational Research Association Conference in 2019.
Contact us
Contact us
If you have any questions about Sensing the School, please contact Professor Rachel Holmes.