How can we build lasting relationships with nature?
This project was designed and piloted as part of a studio in Map-Making at Srishti Manipal Institute, and guided by Dr. Mohan Seetharam, who is a Geographer, Geospatial Analyst and Planner, and Educator. The course explored the process of map-making using QGIS, while also questioning the politics and ethics of map-making as an exercise for data gathering and presentation.
This project explored the question of building connections with nature through active participation in a natural environment. Here, participation refers to sensory, emotional and cognitive participation. Maps become a tool, along with art mediums (like photography and drawing) and the act of walking + observing, to measure, in spatial terms, what elements of landscapes/terrains create specific experiences in a group of primary to middle school children. The findings lend themselves to a larger pedagogical research towards programs in environmental education, catered to audiences of the young-adult and adult category.
The workshop was designed for a landscape located within a 1km radius of my participants’ residences. This was to lay out that one doesn’t need to go out to a forest or distinct landscape to find wonder in nature. Since my participants were between 3rd and 6th grade in school, with only one participant in 10th and one in 2nd, it seemed vital to my process to use their innate curiosity and encourage them to walk and explore a lake-bed which was located right behind their house.
The pedagogy of the workshop was sensorial and experiential and used map-making and storytelling as a tool to reflect on and remember the experiences from the landscape. Given that these kids were mostly from an upper to upper-middle class background, with parents in largely capitalist, less-eco-centric careers, it was important for me to use their experiences as triggers for speculations of what could happen to a landscape that they immerse themselves in?
A collective map co-created by the participants, reflecting on the walk and the experiences in the one hour they were given to free-walk the landscape. My intervention was to only encourage them to think beyond colouring the landscape based on what they saw, and to include stories of what they did to define the space.
Visual stories which were created by the participants divided into three groups. They were asked to imagine the collective map as smaller stories, which had to bring in the stories and experiences that they had as they explored the lake.
The workshop was conducted over 6 hours split into 3 sessions of 2 hours each, distributed across 2 days. Although most of the participants knew each other before the workshop, I was able to notice a growth in the level of camaraderie in terms of a rise in their capability to imagine experiences that they could have together — evident from the nature of the stories which ranged from life-lesson-learning, to fully imaginative. Each of the stories were incidents that the kids could not imagine happening without the other; each participant had a clear role in the stories that were developed. One month after the workshop, the child who was the most annoyed by the outdoor exercise asked me when we were doing the next trip — which was an extremely rewarding question to be asked!