In this short piece I reflect upon some of my thinking about how an interpreter/educator may encourage people to open up and be receptive to significant environments.
Activated & Activating Spaces
I am interested in our current understanding of past people, places and events and I am always on the lookout for ways to improve my work as an educator/interpreter, working in significant sites.
We can invest places with meaning. The knowledge that a specific event took place right where you are standing connects you with it, making it a different - and significant - place for evermore. However, it is not just about what we/I bring to a place/space; it is also about encouraging a group to be receptive to the environment which surrounds them. In short, then, we may activate spaces and be activated by them.
Listening to Spaces
This receptivity to surroundings does not just happen spontaneously however. In our hustle-bustle, bean-counting, word-obsessed (hyphenated!) contemporary culture, people are often not at all comfortable with slowing down and 'listening' to a space. Furthermore, so many educators talk too much, focusing only on facts. I think we miss so much by adopting the 'chalk-and'talk' approach.
A statue of St Benedict, stands outside Norwich Cathedral (see above). He carries a book on which is written the word 'Ausculta'. This is the first word of the Rule of St Benedict, the regulations which governed the priory of that monastic order, and it means 'listen'. A thousand and five hundred years after he first offered this as a starting point we can learn from his counsel.
Working alongside Saul Penfold and Jill Napier from the Norwich Cathedral Education & Community Learning departments, I have been developing educational experiences for school groups, which aspire to facilitate 'listening' within the cathedral.
In doing this we suggest a degree of stealth. For instance, we have had some really positive results from walking the labyrinthe in the cloister garth at the outset of the tour. To give an example, it might be that we prime the experience with a discussion about pilgrimage. Or perhaps we might have done a brief guided visualisation, asking learners to close their eyes and follow the sound of a bell into silence and think about the monks processing on their way to one of their eight daily services in the cathedral (the Hours). We ask them, then, to walk in silence, keeping order as they journey through the labyrinthe.
So we pass from an imaginative exercise to processing (ie learning by doing) in silence. This is proving to be an interesting meditative tool, transforming the behaviour of, say, groups of hitherto disengaged teenagers. In my opinion, this approach is entirely transferable to adult and Family Learning.
Another interesting idea is to stop the group as they walk the labyrinthe, and say, 'You're walking in someone's dream.' Intruiging (sic. can't spell the damn word!) statement, don't you think... we leave them dangling for a short while, and then - reveal. The woman who designed this labyrinthe, Jane Sunderland, had been wrestling with ideas for her creation, but just couldn't find 'the answer'. Couldn't, that is, until one night she woke up having dreamed about the shape we're now walking through. You could extend this notion of tangible things coming from inside people's heads. It's another way of looking at the everyday; seeing it afresh - realising the wonder that is there if we could but see it.
