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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…
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Mapping
This classroom is found of their walks. The two educators and their preschool students walk regularly, several times a week and often twice daily, throughout the neighborhood. In the classroom there is a printout of a satellite map, with a blue path weaving through, marking streets. The map is accompanied by photos of locations known to children: paths, pond, puddle, fallen tree; these fit onto the larger map. All rectangles are plastic-wrapped for longevity. How might we move, pedagogically, past the regulatory technologies that view place from cosmo-colonial position of a satellite, condensing its depth into a layer of pixels? What materials might we invite to evoke (and to keep) the…
