Can
We Overcome Our Modern Habits of Teaching, Learning and Designing? |
| Two of my projects with children, one in the early 1980s and the other in 2004, will lead to a comparison between the shift that I have made from a modern to a postmodern enactment of teaching and learning. In the earlier project, I initiated an educational model that brought together planners, politicians and public school children in Portland, Oregon. An air-inflated geodesic dome constructed by public school children displayed their visions of a “kid-friendly downtown.” Their drawings became the data source that planners used to initiate policy and development incentives geared toward incorporating spaces and activities for children within the Portland downtown. In a recent project, I worked with a fourth grade teacher and children in a Washington, D.C. public school. Children created an air-inflated “body bubble,” as part of a science unit that intentionally challenged the modern paradigm of scientific objectivity. Activities that enabled children to talk about, write about, and create art about their bodies in the first person “I” voices, were woven into their science curriculum. My recent work with children attempts to engage children in a process of transgression from the modern. In the case presented, transgression from a scientific vocabulary that privileges mind over body, and higher objective knowledge over second-class personal and artistic knowledge. In my presentation I will explore how the writings of Richard Rorty have helped me reinvent myself as a teacher through the use of a transgressive vocabulary that challenges old notions about knowledge, teaching and learning. |