While my thesis fieldwork took a technical hiatus this weekend while I was away in Wisconsin, I have enjoyed mentally processing my own exploits as place-based activities. For instance:
I arrived a the family lake cabin to find the swimming dock, for lack of a better phrase, all f-ed up. My analysis is that the water level in the lake rose so fast (no doubt during some recent storm) that the wooden dock floated up, lifting the dock legs off the bottom of the lake. As the water level regressed, the dock was set back down, somewhat askew. Generally, one would have their dock out of the lake by mid-October, if for no other reason than the water is cold, and a human person must get into this water in order to uproot the dock legs from the mud and the much below. Tempted though I was to let this be someone else's problem, the possibility that one or two fishermen a week may have floated passed and snickered at our expense, was not a bearable blight on the Franke family name. Also, in the words of so many Double Dare contestants before me, I was motivated to "take the physical challenge!"
So, I wriggled into ye ol' hip-waders, and had a fine time wrastlin' the whole dock, section by section, out of the lake. Some sections were locked together with a little pin thingy. Some of the legs were no longer upright. Some posts wouldn't detach. Some posts fell off and began drifting away. Having no memory of how the pieces of the dock fit together in the first place, and finding that the water was in fact much deeper than usual, keeping my head and arms above water, and thus keeping the lake water out of the waders was no easy task. A few strained muscles and one hip-wader leak in the rear end, and the situation was resolved. Dock saved. Family name rescued from local ridicule. Thesis lives?
This is exactly the type of physical, place-based problem solving that I think art education can help teach. Not that this dock situation was a particularly amazing feat, or particulary art-related, but I believe that somewhere between me wanting to give up, and me finding success, lies elements of my own art education. It has to do with assessing the situation, having a confidence in your own physical abilities (including knowing when the job is too big), figuring out how things work, and then working toward a solution. I believe that art making is a great way to develop student's ability to think and act simultaneously, and to do so creatively. In the best case, these creative acts stem from the physical world of students' lives and are thus "place-based experiences of art making," a term that recurs in my thesis.
Also, I got to tour a cranberry bog where they were harvesting the berries. A very place-based activity. These guys love it so much that apparently they take vacation days from their other jobs to come harvest cranberries every year. I'm telling you, we all benefit from physically engaging with place.
This gentleman just hopped over the floating corral buoys to start raking the floating cranberries up the green conveyor into the truck. Cool!
Returning from life in the woods with 10-year-olds is a rough transition. I spent last week in just such an alternate reality, which was lovely, both in its own right, and for its difference from the day-to-day goings on in my office, which are all-consuming unless you are forced to take a break. Four days in the woods will do anyone a world of good. Four days with 10-year-olds makes it magical if you let it.
