Clay ecologies: Field notes

Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw

CLAY FORCES US TO THINK

October 17, 2016

Clay arrives in a large, rectangular, cardboard box. I carefully pull it out and place sliced small slabs on the large canvas that covers half of the classroom. A group of curious children gather around the clay. Clay is quickly transformed. Rolled into various sized balls. Carried in tiny hands. Flung and thrown onto the canvas. Rolled, pinched and stretched. Jumped on. Foreheads and footprints are pressed into it.

Forms emerge: long and thin snakes, baskets that transform into nests. Eggs, large and minuscule. Lots of stories that invite the children to share ideas, to become more and more engaged with the specificities of clay.

‘We need more nests!’, two children exclaim. With more nests on the canvas, eggs become hatching birds, snakes become worms, worms become food for baby eggs. Birds hatch. We wonder with the children if the classroom will become a space for caring for the baby birds.

New and related stories continue to emerge: Bunnies hatch from the carefully moulded eggs. Educators ponder. We stay with the trouble that this chunk of clay brought to us.

Clay forces us to think. Children become, as philosopher Donna Haraway would say, “writers/thinkers/makers” who “remake worlds” through their clay stories. We are reminded that clay is a new participant in the classroom.

As air and clay interact, some children notice that clay becomes harder and harder to work with. Water makes clay soft and squishy again. Have the children notice this change? How might we invite the children to attend to these subtle transformations?

Clay is able to slow things down in the classroom. It invites the children to follow its unexpected movements as it interacts with hands and feet, with canvas, with floor, with air. In this ‘clay ecology’, the production that is going on has a life of its own.

What does this clay ecology demand from us?

NESTS AND EGG MAKING

April 6, 2017

Our clay exploration intensifies as children declare that we are going to ‘make nests’. Children gently learn how to shape the clay, what the clay needs to move, how the clay responds, where to press, how to push. The focus, though, is on the nests themselves.

We make nests: big nests, small nests. Each single nest has a story, a place, a protagonist. Each child shares her or his story as a nest is finished. Stories about the squirrels in the playground. Stories about the geese that try to find shelter in some of the children’s backyards. Stories about the cardinals that stay in the city during our cold winter. There are also stories about nests for dragons, nests for snakes, nests for bears, and nests for moose. So many nests. It seems as if the children never get tired of making nests.

Yet, it is not just about the nests. The nests need eggs, a child announces. How to make eggs? We show the children how to make eggs by placing a piece of clay in between the palms of their hands. This is not small task for little hands! Yet, it is the excitement to make more and more eggs that keeps the children going. We count the eggs we make. We carefully decide where each single egg will be placed. Which nest will want this egg? Which egg will want this nest? It matters. The children are meticulous about placing the eggs. They are also precise about the eggs’ shape and size. When they ask us (educators) to make an egg, they provide detailed instructions on what egg they exactly want.

GIFTING A NEST

April 7, 2017

After several weeks of nest and egg making, we (educators) decided to surprise the children. We met to make nests. We became fascinated with nests – as much as the children have.

Our clay nests are received with great excitement.  The children continue to make nests and discuss the possibilities for each nest.

We decide to study nests and project images of nests in the classroom during nest making time.  More stories, more animals join the inquiry as the children connect their nest making to the nests projected on the wall.  Even a wasp nest is added in the classroom.

NESTS IN THE CITY

April 8, 2017

A walk to the park delivers!  The city’s squirrels and a group of geese join the inquiry.  After children leave a nest besides a tree, a squirrel approaches to check the nest out.  Picking up the clay nest, the squirrel moves the nest to the other side of the tree. The children and the squirrels are now in a dance of communication.  Paying attention to each other’s movements, we become aware of each other.

A child is interested in leaving a nest high up on a tree for the squirrels.  She has noticed that the squirrels assemble their nests in the forks of tall trees.  How to get there?, she asks.  Another child suggests that we watch how the squirrel climbs.  “May be,” he says, “we can learn from them”.  We stop every time we spot a squirrel climbing.  We observe. We pay attention.  We slow down.  The squirrels, though, are fast.  They move up or down the trees so quickly that the children are having trouble grasping exactly how they do it.

Then there are the geese who flew into the park right at the time we were carefully placing the clay nests.  A child guests that the geese came into the park because they saw us with our nests.   “They are hoping to nest in one of our nests”, she says.  May be.  Why not?  After all biologists remind us that urban geese use human-built structures during nesting season… .

The geese sparkle much conversation in the classroom.  An educator tells the children about two geese who take care of their nest in a courtyard where humans have been prohibited to enter.

A few weeks after our encounter with the geese, a child announces that he was going to make eggs with clay (not nests) while the other children continue to diligently make clay nests to take to our next walk.  About half an hour later, an educator sees the child sitting in a corner of the room with approximately 10 large eggs on his lap. Not knowing what was going on, the educator invites the child to join the rest of the group in nest making.  Immediately, the child responds that he can’t.  “I’m nesting,” he says.

MAKING AS MODALITY OF WEAVING

April 14, 2017

In our nest making inquiry, we are inspired by Ingold (2000) who reminds us that “the forms of artefacts are not supposed to have their source within the human mind, as preconceived intellectual solutions to particular design problems” (p. 340).  In our inquiry is not the children who are always in control of what will happen in their nest making process.  The children are always open to what might emerge from the assemblages that are created.

Thinking with Ingold (2000) as we make nests, we might say that:

“[A nest] comes into being through the gradual unfolding of [a] field of forces set up through the active and sensuous engagement of practitioner and material. This field is neither internal to the material nor internal to the practitioner (hence external to the material); rather, it cuts across the emergent interface between them. Effectively, the form of the [nest] emerges through a pattern of skilled movement, and it is the rhythmic repetition of that movement that gives rise to the regularity of form.”