Isobel Griffiths

My theme on ‘citizens of nature, citizens of a borderless world’ opened up many opportunities to get creative when designing workshop activities for the students.

I found it was best to provide these ideas in the form of a short PowerPoint so that all the students involved in the workshop would be able to check they knew what they were doing if at any point they were confused. I decided it would be in the interest of the students to provide an activity which everyone would enjoy and would provoke critical thinking around the theme whilst also avoiding the ‘school-like’ aspect of learning.

My main activity was to design a card/drawing of a feature of nature which the students came across or experienced in their everyday lives; it was useful to hand out colouring pencils for this task too so that they could feel motivated to get the drawings finished in time. We would then swap drawings with another person and redesign their drawing but taking away any human borders that appeared (e.g., if a student drew a flower pot, their partner would redraw the flower but without the pot). Each of the schools really engaged with this activity and I found that giving them less time would limit distractions.

 It was easier to interact with the students when they were sat in groups of 2-4, and it helped me to understand their drawings by walking around and discussing with them individually, not in front of the entire class. This activity was also largely effective for students who felt they did not have someone to partner up with, as drawing can be therapeutic for some- these students did open up when spoken to individually.

What I found during the course of the three workshops is that some students did not draw imposing human borders in the first part of the activity which then stumped them for the second half.

A possible way to improve this would be to suggest that any student who did not draw borders could have borders drawn in when they swapped with someone else. I did test this improvement in the final workshop, and it was a significantly more successful session than the previous two. Other, smaller, activities which I included in the PowerPoint ranged from group discussions to large class mind maps- most of which we ran out of time to do.

For future sessions, I would suggest starting with the mind map activities (which I did for 2 of the sessions) so the students can understand what is meant by the terms ‘nature’, and ‘borderless’; but also, so that the workshop leaders/teachers can understand how knowledgeable the students already are on the subject. For one of the sessions, we managed to include a group discussion at the end which became very beneficial for the conclusion of the session and feedback. Overall, the workshop can be improved on by cutting down activity times but ran very smoothly nonetheless!