DIPLOMA PROJECT PROPOSAL, 2010
Project Brief:
To provide an experience for children, in fields like Water, Air and Earth keeping in touch with their school curriculum and syllabus that will be challenging, creative, provocative, and a stimulus for further work done in and out of school with the help of an integrated activity kit on the subject. How can you make learning meaningful and fun for children?
Scenario:
Schools today are going through change where learning and education is concerned. But this change is a one sided change. NCERT textbooks are being redesigned to make learning holistic for the children but teachers are still not being able to keep up with this change. Children need to be taught differently in an integrated way in order to make it a holistic success. Teaching today still is at its rudimentary level, schools and teachers are still not open to the idea of practical learning, outside the classroom. Children at their foundation years should be taught the tool of interactive literacy. They should be able to interact within subjects in order to make them fun and this will help their imagination see possibilities. Children today are so stressed with marks and doing well that they have forgotten to have fun. From the beginning like class 3 or 4 we are conditioned to think that marks are the most important thing, as a result children end up mugging up subjects and forget the importance of understanding it. And the pressure builds up each year and at the board level a lot of students end up doing drastic things to themselves like committing suicide. If a child is nurtured at a young age to think that having fun with learning is important than later they can apply tools like this to other courses.
There is also a need or a device to make these interventions happen in a DIY sort of way without the dependence of a facilitator or a teacher.
Need:
- For children to expand knowledge and know possibilities beyond classroom.
- To understand themes and spaces in an interactive manner. (e.g.- Water, air, earth)
- For the child to get introduced to other tools of learning like narratives and - stories, interventions, colour and drawing, role play and movement.
- To nurture, innocent mind of a child in a creative and more stress free way.
- To make a child understand at the foundation level that there is more to school and learning than just learning by rote and marks.
- To build knowledge through “though, word and deed”.
- To build the confidence of a child.
Research Questions:
- How can you make learning “Integrated?”
- How can you make learning fun and meaningful for the child?
- The relevance of today’s teaching system.
- How well a child can adapt to these tools.
- My role as a communicator.
Approach and process:
Materials and Resources:
- I will be interacting with theatre personalities that have already been working in this field such as Barry John, Lushen Dubey, Maya Rao and Vivek Mansukhani.
- Studying the NCERT social science textbooks and going through their chapters relating to Water, Air and Earth.
- Books like Learning with Theatre- Edited by Tony Jackson.
- Process – an improvisers journey- Marry Scruggs and Michael.J.Gellman.
- Howard Gardner- Theory of Multiple Intelligences.
- Centre for the arts, Delhi
- Dilip and Beatrice, Theatre teachers at Bluebells school, Delhi
Product:
This project has three levels and each level will have a different learning to me as a designer, and I have chosen to work with Bluebells school, Delhi as they have a theatre person called Dilip already working on some of these aspects with children.
LEVEL1:
Interacting with students with workshops designed within curriculum and games relating to the themes chosen. Enhancing the teaching experience. This stage will be video documented and made into a step-by-step process guide.
To combine syllabus themes that intermingle and do workshops and events with the children. Teaching them plants, rain water harvesting, pollution and other related topics to the themes chosen and how it helps us and how its getting scarce and the steps they can do to prevent this. In the workshops we use theater as a tool, along with other tools like movement, sounds and practical interventions. These workshops would involve planning and interacting with students on a one to one basis keeping in touch with their school curriculum and syllabus.
LEVEL 2:
Based on the workshops I do with the students I will come with an activity kit on these themes. The kit would be beneficial, as it would have a tangible object stemming from the workshop.
The kit would have a board game, a book narrative that is based on these workshops, a t-shirt and some activity things like seeds, and a water canister also a CD with a step-by-step guide to the workshops. As a Graphic Design student I could design this integrated kit so that either it can be put out in the market as a activity kit or it can be given to schools to use with children. I t can further be proposed to companies like Funskool, Scholastic.
With this kit I want to establish fun and interesting learning.
LEVEL 3:
In this level I am working with interventions where the school and children can together organize an event for other’s to see what they have done, something like a fair so that other schools can adopt the same approach. The school will also have a volunteered water squad, air squad and earth squad. Which will do time-to-time interventions on these subjects.
Target Audience:
I am working with class 3 and 4 students of the Bluebells school, Delhi. But I am trying to reach out to all the other schools too.
Tools:
- Theatre tools- role-playing, Concentration, narratives and story telling.
- Movement, sound, art
- Field trips and interventions
- Films
- Drawing as a medium of expression
- Interdisciplinary participatory interaction and interventions
Learning outcomes:
- Planning workshops and participatory interventions
- Understanding the innocent mind of a child and dealing with them
- Putting two different mediums together cohesively.
- Holistic approach, a complete package.
- Working with different mediums.
- Different Design principles in different spaces.
- Combination of thought, word and deed.
Personal Statement:
When I was in school I always found classroom learning very boring and mugging up point less because in the end you don’t even enjoy class or retain the subject learnt. So, I used to make up my own interesting ways of learning either by drawing or signing or by acting out parts in front of the mirror and by doing this I found it easier to retain things as I had fun learning and understood the subject better. I decided to take this forward as a Visual communicator because it was an interesting space to combine mediums and process to come up with a final outcome of a kit.
19.06.10
