My thesis is about Place. It is about how children come to understand their physical place in their own world. It is about how I think an increased understanding of place will help children to see how they occupy and affect space in their lives. My hope is to show that physically creative acts (art making, for instance) are an important way of teaching children to engage with their world, and to develop a stronger understanding of place.
My fieldwork is designed to seek data about students understanding of place through two case studies. One study revolves around the aforementioned mapping work. Maps are clearly about place, and thus provide direct, if creatively limited data for analysis. The second study is based around a creative sculpture project that uses materials from, and is completed at a specific place. The sculptures will provide far more abstract data about place, but may provide stronger data about the physical acts of creativity that interest me.
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This is a collage map of Chicago I made for Social Theory
class. The collage process itself was exploratory and physical. The choices I made about materials (all from local papers and magazines), and where to place the outline of the city, and how to include the flag imagery, brought me to a new understanding of the place that is Chicago.
