Working with the Moberly school was such a pleasure in the spring of 2020 that I was really happy to be able to extend and build on that work, returning this year for 3 semesters, to share time with 6 classes and create the Gardens of Belonging.
The fundamental core of this work is to create connection. Grounding the kids in their relationships — to each other and to the animals, land and water, that we all depend on.
We worked with my friend, Lori Snyder, who helps take care of the Medicine Garden, located right across the field from the school at the Moberly Arts Centre. Lori is the founder of Earth Awareness Realized Through Health and Company. Two other gardeners - Jacob Fischer- Schmidt (Soaring Eagle school) and Alisha Lettman (Legacy Growers Collective) - also shared their wisdom and playfulness with us this year.
The kids were extremely lucky to have the attention of sometimes 6 adults working with them in our outdoor explorations. A lot of big listening can happen with such intimate groups, especially when you are outside in a garden!
In the fall curriculum “Listening to Trees”, we collected leaves, mapped trees, and learned to write our names in tree typography as we took care of the grounds of the Medicine Garden.
There was a tree that had been hurt and so it was the major project of the fall to clean up and care for this tree which became the wishing tree for the two older classes. The kids took tender pride in the sanctuary that they had created, where they could sit, talk, climb, create and/or just listen to the local hummingbird.
In the winter curriculum “Dreaming Animals”, we thought about the homes of animals and what they ate and needed for safety and survival. Each child chose an animal to draw and learn about. We discussed what their favourite fruits and vegetables were to prepare for the garden planting in the spring and created gratitude jars. The large Douglas Fir had gifted us a huge bough in a fall windstorm, which dried and was ultimately used to make incense cones. Trish’s class also raised and cared for salmon fry and butterflies, who will be released in the garden in late spring. As we head into the spring semester, the youngest kids will be planting and caring for the garden boxes in front of the school.
It has given me great joy to build a studio space where community can connect and create, find their own voices and sources of comfort and happiness as they work with materials that come naturally to them. It is with enormous gratitude that we continue to work together on the traditional unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples.
The vision for this media arts residency was to introduce or deepen students' visual language skills by producing poetry films inspired by the theme of belonging.
We all have an inherent desire to belong and be an important part of something greater than ourselves. This residency aimed to help students connect and reflect on their belongingness while using filmmaking as a tool of engagement.
We used the following questions as exploration on what belonging means:
Who are the important people in your life?
What are things you like about yourself?
Where is the place where you feel more comfortable and accepted?
Students reflected on these questions individually and connected with other students by sharing their reflections and finding commonalities that led them to create one haiku per group. The haiku included parts of everyone’s reflection or concepts that the entire group had in common.
Through various playful hands-on exercises, the students translated the poem into a series of images representing their poetry. Students explored sound design techniques by adding voice-over, sounds or music to their pieces and enhancing them with graphics.
STUDENTS QUOTES
“We were able to record videos with lots of freedom. I like how we had no restrictions and we could follow multiple concepts.”
"I learned how to express my haiku poem in video. I want to know what it is like to be a filmmaker. "
"I learned that art can be shown in different ways with poems, film, chalk and things like that. "
"I learned how to record a video with a steady hand and not to follow an object but to wait for whatever you are recording to come into the frame."