Walking, Storying, Tracing

We walk and meet a dead squirrel and a one-footed goose. We add Banana Tree, and traces of stolen bananas. We add their stories and photographs to our map of fabulations. A story of a spider trickles from home or maybe from another classroom. Spider comes to live on the map. We walk, and pumpkin-eaters come back into the classroom with us. We learn that moving with stories requires a particular pace: slower, punctuated by longer pauses to give pencil and hand enough time to move with the character. More layers, papers torn, prints of small running shoes. We walk, tell stories and map them. 

If we take seriously Doreen Massey’s (2005) proposition that “any serios recognition of multiplicity and heterogeneity itself depends on a recognition of spatiality”, then mapping provocations such as these may force “into the imagination a duller recognition of the simultaneous coexistence of others with their own trajectories and their own stories to tell”. (p.11) The stories told by and with children do not feature human children or map animals as “indicators” or recipients of “human concern” (Shotwell, 2016, p.85); neither are their imagined creatures friends to humans.   

Massey, D. B. (2005). For Space. SAGE. 

Shotwell, A. (2016). Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times. University of Minnesota Press.