Facilitator speaks
Bangalore based Lekha Naidu, theatre practitioner, educator, arts administrator, and photographer, who has assisted Flow team in delivering quite a few programmes in the city, shares her thoughts on implementation of museum education outreach workshops at MAP (Museum of Art and Photography) and the value she sees in arts education.
Resonating on the same frequency as Flow…
My interest in working with children and my exploration on how to enhance their experience of learning, works well with programmes run by Flow. The idea of making learning holistic and fun for children and providing their teachers a masterclass on how to enable such a learning is what excited me the most. In the four programmes that I have assisted with, my learning as an individual and as an educator has expanded enormously.
Thinking behind designing and scripting Flow programmes…
I appreciate the thought and attention that goes into the design of each programme. It is a joy to behold the creative output at the end of each session. I also appreciate the time limits set for each segment, because it makes facilitation more focused. For someone like me, who can get carried away easily, a staged, time-bound programme script is quite useful. But I would recommend extending the workshop hours, as once I am in throes of it, I feel there is much more to say and do.
Role of cultural learning in education…
I think cultural learning should be the foundation for every child’s education. In a country like ours, without a collective definition of ‘Culture’, the awareness and knowledge of history and the arts, processes of making meaning and working through various interpretations may be the most important aspects of this learning that one can introduce to a child, at least, this is what I have increasingly come to believe in my own practice.
Challenges of engaging young learners…
It is always a challenge to disengage learners from a certain classroom situation of ‘correct answers only’ and rewire them to a space where it is okay to make mistakes. Communicating the relevance of maybe looking at a painting is also a challenge. Another challenge for me has been my struggle to break down concepts, specific works of art and sometimes philosophical and artistic notions and abstractions, to a level that can be easily understood by young people that I work with.
Museums shaping the way learning is delivered in formal and informal systems…
Museums can become an active participant in the education system and can shape school curriculum and not just be a one off outing. They could become a more welcoming space with regular programming for learners, where along with their educators, young minds are encouraged to explore connections between artefacts they see in a space and histories and facts they learn about in their text books.
Experience of conducting the Flow workshop on Movement and Gestures at MAP
As always, it was enriching but also full of surprises. Surprises, because of the varied levels that learners came from and how one had to adapt quickly to a new situation each day (Flow invited schools that ranged from goverment to private and learners were between the ages of 7–11). Even within each section, there was a wide variety, it was a challenging exercise to impart the same script to a varied learner base. I appreciate the room for improvisation that the design of the workshop provided, thanks to which, I was able to deal with certain ideas that I would have otherwise fallen short on words for.
