My object based learning microteach involved the following objects from my home: a crochet chicken, a plaster cast of my thumb, a piece of obsidian, a square of orange neon perspex, a tiny model of mango sticky rice, a maze game from a christmas cracker.
Session plan: Museum of the future
Warm up (5 min)
- Lay out a selection of objects on the table – none readily identifyable for a particular use. Invite peers to choose the one they feel drawn to.
- Ask participants to explore the object they have chosen using all their senses sight, sound, touch, smell, taste (if they are feeling brave) and movement without speaking for two minutes.
- Ask partipants to pair up and show their partner the things they have discovered about their object, non verbally for two minutes.
Task 1 (5 mins)
Tell peers that I have brought back these objects from the future and that it is, contrary to all expectations, a great place. Climate Change has been solved, war is over, we live in communities of care, the arts flourish, humanity is saved.
Give each peer a couple of note cards. Ask them to imagine their object is in a museum of the future write and to write an explanatory label for it. Explain that the label could contain the following or anything else they think is relevant:
- Where does it come from?
- What is it made of?
- What is it used for?
- Does it have any sacred or magic properties?
Task 2 (5 min)
Curate the museum of the future. Arrange the objects in the space with their labels and go on a visit. Read each other’s stories.
Discussion (5 min)
- How did it feel to imagine the future as positive?
- Did engaging sensorily with the objects ahead of time help you to write your sci-fi labels?
- Did you discover anything that surprised you?
- How much of a difference did this particular selection of objects make?
Feedback and reflection:
- Participants found writing positively about the future challenging, as we are so much more used to dystopian imaginings than utopian ones. Using a text prompt such as Adrienne Marie Brown’s chapter on Science fiction could have helped peers engage with the premise that we can’t make a better world if we can’t imagine it:
Science fiction is simply a way to practice the future together. I suspect that is what many of you are up to, practicing futures together, practicing justice together, living into new stories. It is our right and responsibility to create a new world.
- Spending time physically exploring the objects “dethroned the cerebral over the bodily” as one participant put it, and allowed people to think about the future in an embodied pleasure seeking way rather than a rational fact based way. Perhaps giving students some time to write down some of the things they experienced while exploring the object immediately afterwards could have fed into their museum labels later on.
- Participants enjoyed asking the objects to speak back to us and giving them a voice, separate from ourselves. I would like to read more about puppeteering and giving objects life and a voice, so that I could bring some practice exercises into this section of the session.
Overall I was pleased with how the session had gone, I wish I had put more effort into documenting it and producing more beautiful resources to go with it, ie ready made museum labels would have made the final layout more aesthetically appealing and perhaps made the objective clearer to my participants.
References:
Brown, A. (2017). Emergent strategy. AK Press.