Radiococo Broadcast #37
The more I do the less I know
In my last broadcast, I mentioned I would have updates after starting my workshops this month. I was so excited to finally work with the kids after weeks of planning and feeling so restless from not having contact with the kids. Something I am still not used to after teaching weekly coding classes for 3+ years prior to starting this MFA programme.
Before I talk about the workshops, I have to share a bit of context about this group of kids I am working with. They are 10 to 12-year-olds in a fritidsgård in the suburbs of Gothenburg. A fritidsgård (literally recreation/leisure garden) is basically a youth centre for young people to hang out and participate in various activities after school like ping pong, crafts, video games etc. From what I understand, it is mostly municipality funded, and the types of activities vary across different facilities. Some places have pool table, sewing machines, and even a recording suite if kids want to record their own podcasts! In a fritidsgård, kids can choose what they want to do and are never pressured to take part in planned activities if they don't want to. Their after-school time belongs to them and they decide how they want to spend it. An almost foreign concept in Singapore, where tuition/ enrichment is a multibillion-dollar industry and is often seen as a means to excelling academically.
I planned to figure out what a small group of 10 to 12-year-olds wanted to show the world in an exhibition and learn how to create said exhibition together. I started with the idea of collections (something most of us have in common with museums) and chair, because the Röhsska Museum in central Gothenburg boasts a large collection of chairs ( I also love chairs) and it was a relatable everyday object that could start the conversation about museums and their collections.
Turns out this group of kids don't really care about chairs as much as I do! We started with an exquisite corpse drawing game, and the prompt was to create a chair for the final creature– how would a creature with 3 wiggly legs sit comfortably? What about a creature with a looooooong torso? Most of them lost interest after the drawing activity and didn't really care for the creature they ended up with. More than half of the kids left, and of the 6 that remained, 4 of them spent the rest of the time trying to draw the perfect Hello Kitty because they didn't like the creatures.
Some thoughts on this workshop flop:
Using cardboard to make something 'functional' like a chair felt too intimidating.
Sitting down to make something might have felt too much like a task, especially when they are in a place where they can choose how to decompress from school.
Since they already had their own social groups, some kids were very influential and if one decided that this was not an activity worth doing, the rest of the group would follow suit.
The cardboard chair I made as an example set the bar too high:
I have a lot of work to do entering as an outsider into their little community, and building trust takes time, even if I don't get to see the same kids at every session. This was a flop in that it didn't go how I expected, but it provided so much information for me to work with, which I have been waiting for since the planning phase.
We did end up with a couple of chairs, but not quite the collection I had in mind.
A few days after this workshop, I ran another one in another suburb, this time in a culture house where I had to recruit the kids. This meant that the kids who came knew we were going to be doing some craft and working towards an exhibition. We didn’t draw creatures this time but focused more on making a chair that they want to add to a museum’s collection. Similar to the first group, the results varied widely, one of them created a flying chair with brakes and a whole navigation dashboard, another made a chair for her teddy bear, and another started making a chair but then decided it would be a tossing game instead.
What a reminder of how children are not a monolith, and just because the exquisite corpse drawing and cardboard making worked with a different group of kids last summer, success was not guaranteed when repeated (_:
Thank you for being here, I hope you are sitting on a comfy chair!
This month’s play-list
A Wikipedia of known unknowns, oddly assuring?
James Bridle’s project that has lingered at the back of my mind for weeks now
Minesweeper meets sudoku meets battleships. I was hooked for days, be warned!
I wonder what chairs hello kitty would like! Haha this made me laugh