CFE Day 9: Art in the Garden Curricula Activities, Workshop Planning

 With Susan no longer with us as she prepares for her VIA train trip across Canada as the in-"train(?)" musician, Saul was with us to go through the latter half of Dr. Dustin Garnet's list of possible "Art in the garden curricula activities". 

The first activity involved creating a "map" of the garden, but by invoking not just the sense of sight, but smell, hearing, as well as feelings and memories. This made the experience very personal and variable for interpretation. Indeed, the resultant maps everyone drew were quite different, even though we were all describing the same space! Some people relied heavily on the emotions and experiences they felt at various points, some people focused on the sensory experience, and many people did a huge mixture of all ideas. One major curricular connection we made with this activity was the social-emotional aspect of self-reflection and sharing, and we all identified our own ways to implement it in our own specialized teachables.

Fig 1: A collage of everyone's maps! (Being completely honest, writing this a day late, I don't remember who's was who, only that mine is the bottom-most one...)

The second activity was to create a collage of colours found in the garden. Everybody was assigned a colour that they had to try and find somewhere in the garden, then sort their materials in some way that made sense to them. The colours assigned were red, blue, yellow, white, black, pink. Everybody did a great job finding objects with their assigned colour, except for myself who had a huge struggle trying to find naturally black objects. This was a great learning moment as I realized how much black there was in animals, insects, and synthetic materials, but almost non-existent in plant-based nature. As a collective group, we saw that most of the colours we found were not ever in one single hue, but in a continuum of colours in one big spectrum.

Fig 2: Collage of our collages

Then, we bid farewell to Saul and thanked him for such an incredible experience as our teacher of the garden! It wasn't a hard goodbye as we would still see him on Thursday for our test run day and the workshop itself, but with the work parties officially over, it was quite the moment of realization that our CFE time was coming quickly to an end.

Lastly, we spent some time planning for the general itinerary of our upcoming Saturday workshop! With materials and tasks distributed, and a proper game plan, we called it a day at 1:30 and headed into the weekend!

Fig 3: Tentative outline and to-do list!