SWISP Lab Residency: Dr Angela Molloy Murphy

Extending the HAK.io: Remixing a SWISP inspired provocation for Early Childhood Inquiry and Project Learning

Inspired by the SWISP Lab x SGB Carbon Mediator workshop in India recently reflected on in a SWISP Lab blog post, I came to my Inquiry and Project Learning workshop the following day and invited my Unimelb MTeach students to remix and extend the ideas shared in that workshop in the context of inquiry and project work with young children (0-8).

I introduced Prince and Felder’s (2007) concept of Inquiry-Based Learning (IBL) shared in the SWISP post: “Presenting students with a specific challenge, such as experimental data to interpret, a case study to analyse, or a complex real-world problem to solve” (p. 14).

With this definition in mind, I shared the University’s Estate Master Plan with the students; in particular how the Parkville campus had been surveyed for optimal human traffic flow and overall use.

In a SWISP inspired provocation, I asked the students to take a walk as an embodied, site specific inquiry (See PlayTank Collective, et al, 2022) of the Parkville campus, paying special attention to more-than-human assemblages, movements, and flows (Molloy Murphy, 2020) that may have gone unnoticed in the campus development plan. I asked,

What more-than-human beings, energies, legacies, atmospheres, and so on, are detectable on the Parkville campus? Let yourself be “called into connection” (Rose, 2017) by one of these.

How is this element recognised, supported, or subverted through built and natural environments? Should this element be taken into account in future plans for campus development? If so, how? If not, why not?

What role do Wurundjeri people, relations, and ways of knowing come into play when we are learning with the Land on Parkville campus?

For this small-scale experiment (Cameron, 2015) we used walking as our method, our way of encountering the world through investigation or inquiry.

I asked them to create a walking protocol, as in HAK.io 4: Walking (See HAK.io: becoming scicurious together), adapting the HAK walking method card below for our own context.

Thinking with the conceptualisation of ‘doing data’ as learning to pay attention, I invited the students to multimodally map their data with MIRO as the digital platform for this collective work.

One group made a “smell map” of their walk, while another attended to the affect of wind movements in a particular corridor. They recorded aural events, and used photography to show felt impressions from their walk. We felt aware of lively Aboriginal relations to this Place and wondered together how we might better attune to Country whilst on campus. We closed with a discussion of the creative pedagogies and practices we enacted through this inquiry, and how we might engage very young children in inquiries using some of these approaches. A few of our speculative wanderings from this experiment can be seen below:

References

Cameron, J. (2015). On experimentation. In K. Gibson, D. B. Rose, R. Fincher, (Eds.), Manifesto for living in the Anthropocene. New York: Punctum Books.

Molloy Murphy, A. (2020). Plastic City: A Small-Scale Experiment for Disrupting Normative Borders. 4(1), 14.

PlayTank Collective, Healy, S., Mayes, E., Flynn, A. & Edwards, A. Entering into Sympogogies. Cultural and Pedagogical Inquiry, 14 (1), pp.166-188. https://doi.org/10.18733/cpi29658.

Prince, M., and R. Felder. 2007. The many faces of inductive teaching and learning. Journal of College Science Teaching 36, no. 5: 14–20.

Rose, D. B. (2017). Shimmer: When all you love is being trashed. Arts of living on a damaged planet, Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, edited by A. L. Tsing, H. A. Swanson, E. Gan, and N. Bubandt, G51-63.

SWISP (2023). https://blogs.unimelb.edu.au/swisp/2023/08/01/hak-io-becoming-scicurious-together/

University of Melbourne (2023). University of Melbourne Estate Master Plan. https://www.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/4713611/FINAL_Estate-Master-Plan-Brochure_JUL23.pdf