Co-Designly Practice, (CDLY P) case study 5:

Coronavirus, a crisis of relationality:

 

When Covid 19 seemed not very important and distantly phantasmic, the class decide to design a "wash your hands with

soap" campaign. We make iridescent and NHS, nitrile blue glove handprints, but leave a mess with contagiously multiplying

little fingerprints everywhere – in scatter pattern over the classroom door, along the length of two corridors, and across the

toilet walls. “WOW!" (shrieking). "Everywhere we touch is live blue virus!” (G., 6) 

 

The class discuss playing with the "instant electric shock" office photocopier. Making photocopies of their hands, they delight-

edly compare their differing hand gestures, shapes, and faint, criss-cross tracks of palm lines. K., 5. suggests they “make every-

thing different by sticking tiny goggly eyes like germs and viruses on the tips of our photocopy fingers". Such a simple gesture

gives sentience to our now replicated, viral hands, and even our blue splurges of glove come alive in a defamiliarised, alarming-

ly self-conscious way. We add various texts like “Sayhuri says: Now Wash Your Hands!” Wheat-pasted in the toilet block, the

following day, they are gone, but they make an impression: P., 5 runs through the playground with his arms held high, skipping,

shouting joyfully “Sayhuri says I must wash my hands!” “Sayhuri says I must wash my hands!”
 

 

Children need to feel reassured; by feeling empowered, proactive, and constructively helping.

March 20th, 2020

                                                                                                                                                                                                      

A pause, still life, prolonged isolation in Lockdown, social distancing, and stifling masks profoundly alter our phenomenological

sense of (Heidegger’s) Dasein, “being in the world.” Yesterday, school felt somewhere else entirely, set-apart children held their

arms tense at their sides, small hands protectively shielded in pockets. We barely move, even to speak, subdued and submissive,

not ourselves, outside of ourselves, looking and watching care-fully. One-by-one we disappear momento mori. This Corona is

isolating and existential. It cordons-off everything we know and understand is essential to learning; child-centric joy, play, haptic physicality, and heuristic creativity. The children at home on Zoom appear freer, happier and bring bursts of sun, interrupting

laughter, and familial character into the hollow, disinfectant, taped-up, shut-up classroom.
 
In a place where children hesitate to talk, go to the toilet, drink, eat, or cry – how to broach our ossified, child-centric fear, isolation

and paralysed (locked-down, locked-in) still-ness? We cannot function as anything resembling our happy school. Subsequently,

school is not 'school' anymore; learning pedagogy cannot be as we know it.  ​

June 1st, 2020

 

 

Since Co-Designly Practice is a socialisation of knowledges, using Co-Designly Sēnsī (sentience – sense-certainty – sense-

making) seems even more relevant in the context of Covid 19 – a crisis of relationality. This new chasm between us literalises the incommensurability that (always) exists between phenomenologies. “The embodiment of incomprehensibility; indeed, impossi-

bility – everybody lives from the self, even though that self never exists”, as a separate, circumscribed, bounded self. 

 

Being outdoors, social distancing, opening windows, careful hand hygiene, and wearing protective face masks is doable; practical

and pragmatic. As an intuitive mode of engaging, how then could Co-Designly Practice re-establish communal interaction, renew collective purpose (stride) and enactivity? Perhaps this new spacial distance in our social tissue could be liminal – a place of multi-

valent potentialities or possibly imaginative reverie? This notion of live (lived, living) space (in tissue, social, and embodied) builds

on interrelated concepts such as the khôra, the plane of immanence, the monad, and the heterotopia. Something that echoes Felix Guattari’s revolutionary call for "a different use of pre-existent elements, of behaviour or representations, in order

to construct another life surface, or another affective space, laying out another existential territory”.

 

How then can we broach “our ossified, child-centric fear, isolation and paralysed (locked-down, locked-in) still-ness?” According

to The National Education Union, “The DfE should accept that the 2020/2021 school year is not education as normal. In addition

to consolidating pupils’ learning, there needs to be a focus on the recovery of confidence in learning and re-engagement into

the life of their school”. And that we need to acknowledge the possibility of trauma and anxiety experienced by pupils and impacts

on engagement, self-esteem, and behaviours.

 

CDLY P could be the pedagogical structure and bond we embody and enact, a sort of protective Hélio Oiticica Parangole of poss-

ibility, whereby set-apart distancing is reframed as egalitarian, uniform equidistance and intersubjective entanglement. In Seilschaft

(rope team or roped party) climbing mountaineers are tied together by a safety rope and move in supported unison and collective momentum. How then could this Seilschaften, in-between bonding space be Co-Designly activated?

 

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I worked onsite throughout the Covid 19 pandemic – from June 1st until the end of the Summer Term and into September. After a

difficult first week, we settled into a manageable routine. We conducted discursive, entangling CDLY P projects into the “différantal” between microscopic organisms, bacteria, viruses, and spores and "grasped" and situated the “very scary” coronavirus. We ex-

plored types of fungi and compared our various fungi spore prints; the legend of King Arthur, The Lady of the Lake and her

Excalibur (measuring social distancing with our magical swords); designed enchanting heraldry for shield designs; wrote about

castle sieges and the lockdown of Troy; the burnt-out, mythical Phoenix; Lewis Carroll’s visceral poem The Jabberwocky and made Jabberwocky masks; closely observed monstrous insects and a locally endangered stag beetle with magnifying glasses – sketch-

ing “minibeast tanks" in "exoskeleton armour;" Impressionist painters real-life gardens (sitting in and painting our school meadow);

and designing and sewing comforting teddies. Our practice had a distinctly symbolic, adaptive rigour, offset with tangible, emotion-

ally reassuring outcomes (swords, shields, castles, masks, meditative natural environs (flora and fauna), teddies, etc.). Analysing

Class 2's choice of subjects from the DfE curriculum, they were resiliently adapting their schoolwork to holistically support their

immediate psychological and emotional needs and wellbeing during a global, collective crisis.
 
Coined by D.W. Winnicott in 1951, “Transitional objects are self-chosen – a child’s first “not-me possession” – a blanket, teddy bear, pacifier, or doll. The reliance on such objects is rooted in sensorial elements that lessen the stress of separation while they soothe

and comfort the child”. Later, the first day back of the Autumn Term Class 2 tentatively but unanimously asked to make drawings

of their teddies “to have with us on the wall”. (F., 5)

A few weeks later, we settle into our “bubble” and discuss Lockdown. The children feel “tired of always washing our hands”, miss

“being very, very LOUD and running about all over the place, stuck in my flat at home” and “miss making a big mess everywhere!” 

 

The last three days were awash with rain and storm debris and everything is muddy. Class 2 (age 4-6) decide to use mud as paint

with fallen branches, sticks, leaves, hands, shoes, even “our muddy pet's paws at home!” We research elemental earth paintings

like those of Richard Long and Andy Goldsworthy and look at clay and soil pigments used in primal, Upper Palaeolithic cave paint-

ings. We write about an anthropological Children's Encyclopaedia entry describing Aborigine children learning to be highly sop-

histicated trackers. They use animal tracks to identify species, hunt, and track wounded prey (sometimes for days through challen-

ging terrain by themselves). We experiment, making a very long print of my car tire and wobbly bike in the school car park and with walking shoe scuff prints. The following day we bring in muddy cat, dog, bird, and hamster paw prints to add to our research data.
 
We put on our overalls, go into the little garden at the back of the playground with a ream of A3 cartridge paper and get very messy digging, painting with mud and making ever more mud with watering cans. Tim, the Caretaker is blasting leaves about with a noisy

leaf blower - so we can be super noisy and messy. Again, the children are restoring some sort of inner, emotional equilibrium or

empathic release – by direct contact (earth) with nature, getting their hands dirty in mud, making muddy footprints and diving into

leaf piles. K and J turn a small, low table into a stove and lay out “a mud feast for everyone”, whilst others are busy rushing about

with "mud prints at the mud printing factory”. Some prints are brought inside for drying; others are left out in the rain so that we can observe further, ephemeral mud-rain patterns. Outdoors, rain-improvisational and messy anarchic (primal, abject, and symbolically scatological), it was a positively cathartic exercise in flow and forgetting about Covid for an afternoon. Our brown-silty Rorschach interpretations were hilarious. 'You have to meet your audience halfway' (at around 1-2.5 years old in pre-linguistic limbo, embody-

ing the sensitivity and variety of tacit communication that, for example, exists between a mother and child. Peirce's semiotic; our un-derstandings reverting back to the Greek sēmeiōtikos (observing) “observant of signs.” At home time, the children delight in show-

ing their outputs to bemused parents; “This is what you learn at school?!” (How to be child? Find joy? Support child mental health

and wellbeing? De-pathologise the obsessive-compulsive doxa of Coronavirus prevention?)
 
Eighteen months later, the daily news is just as expansively grey and worrying. In discussion about newspapers, the children felt like

they wanted to shield and protect themselves from the news. We talked about making tin foil hats but instead made subverted Japan-

ese Warrior (“worrier”) helmets, made out of and reclaiming “the worry newspapers.”

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Unequivocally, Covid 19 setback the Early Years Foundation and Infants developmentally. This is reflected in pervasive letter reversal, whereby letters and numbers are back-to-front, upside down, and/or transposed. Is this mirror writing, visual processing issue corr-

elative to increased screen use? 

 

Our CDLY P research uses multi-sensory sense-making (Co-Designly Sensi (CDLY S)) – moving from sensory awareness (sentien-

ce) to sense-certainty (forensics) to sense-making. Physically enactive, experiential, and heuristic – we create material and art-

iculable forms, e.g. visual-haptic-phonics. In findings, our CDLY S increases sensory, perceptual awareness and ameliorates (and possibly counteracts) the mirroring 'flatness' and lone isolation of online, screen learning.

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