I loved our reading this week about Cristina Trowbridge’s work at AMNH. Along with being a movement teacher for kids, my mom also taught museum education with Cristina. Of course I didn’t know the theory behind what she was doing. I just knew how fun it was to go to the museum with her. Freire and Vygotsky, two of the educators I’m drawing from in my education research, speak to the power of social learning. Vygotsky to the zone of proximal development, meaning that when we work on a shared project or task, individuals are able to do things that they wouldn’t be able to alone. Freire also speaks to the greater wisdom that emerges when people’s reflection on lived experience “encounters” one another. I love how Cristina and the Education Department at AMNH use dioramas as an entry point into group observing, reflecting and learning.
Cristina brings in mindfulness and how the experience of social learning at a diorama could translate into growing contemplation in the classroom. I thought it was an interesting way to think about a critical approach to education in the classroom. In so many of the teachers comments, I could see their frustration arising from policies that make learning impossible, which to me are rooted in a racist, economically unjust system. As a community organizer, I’m more familiar with responses to injustice that have to do with collective action towards new laws, policies and choices at the institutional level. What I saw in Cristina’s writing was another type of subversion I hadn’t thought of before; neoliberal educational policies undermine learning because they create this frenetic pace in the classroom that undermines the authentic learning Cristina speaks about. I found it fascinating to think about contemplation as a tool for having more agency over the pace of learning and that slowing down (as I see it a subversive response to the neoliberal pressures to speed up) is a bridge to understanding imperfection as a part of learning. Cristina showed me these links between the pace of contemplation, opening up to imperfection, and engaging in authentic learning.
In terms of my project, I’m planning this week to start some writing I may want to include in my piece about different stories in my mom’s voice she told me throughout my life about her own life and our family history. I’ll also do some writing in my own voice, and I’m thinking that will either be my voice recounting different important moments in my own life or it could be questions I’ve asked myself and reflections I’ve had through this process of care taking, searching for connection, and identity transformation. I may also begin to put some of the fabric on regular computer paper to start testing out different mixes of fabric, paint and words.
Hi Amanda:
When I spoke with Cristina a few days ago, your mother’s name and person was part of our conversation. Cristina spoke so lovingly an admiringly about her without knowing that your project focused on your grieving process and your continuing relationship with your mother. I told her just a little about some of your project, and she was blown away. I hope you don’t mind that you, your mother and your project were part of our conversation.
I appreciated what you wrote about Cristina’s article. You helped me to look at it in a different light, and made it richer for me. As an activist myself who is always creating trouble, it is radical to think about contemplation as creating a breach in the status-quo. Ken Tobin, riffing off of Bordieu and Harold Garfinkle, talks about “habitus revealing itself in its breach.” By engaging in contemplative drawing we could argue that we are creating a breach in the frenetic and calculating modes of the dominating structures (and the people who control those structures) and thus opening up a space for our own transformation.
I am really looking forward to seeing your sketches and the narratives that are part of them. Do you find that process contemplative? Peaceful? Is your feeling-thinking changing as you engage in the process of making? Hooks, Restler, Luttrell all focus on caring and self-caring in their work, and identify caring as a central part of activism. Your work, with your own mark, is part of that movement.