Spring 2022
Robinson worked with the Year 6 ‘Galaxy Class’ at Drayton Park. An initial group of 30 child
ren participated in learning how to work with fieldnotes, then 16 of those students carried on with ‘anthropology lunch club’.
During lunch club, the children were introduced to:
anthropology – defined as the study of what it means to be human, a discipline that is about asking better questions rather than finding the answers.
hierarchy – a system in a particular group of people which denotes their rank in terms of power, prestige and/or knowledge (as one student reflected – “deciding who is superior”)
ritual – a set pattern of behaviour which is performed repeatedly; these can be linked to spirituality/belief, but we spoke specifically about everyday rituals
We went outside to the playground to watch the other yrs 5 and 6s play. Students were encouraged to sketch or map the ways that the children interacted during the limited time we were outside (about 20 minutes). Several students produced really interesting diagrams of the whole playground. In the space of such a short time they were able to capture relationships, roles, hierarchy, social dynamics, behaviours and emotions as well, and mostly entirely legible to an outsider’s eye. It was fantastic how attentive to detail and how completely the children threw themselves into the mapping and how excited they were to share with Robinson and their teachers. In Drayton Park’s photovoice project the children (aged 10-12) raises interesting and complex notions of nostalgia, alienation, and collaboration.
What would you like to change?
“We decided that we would make the older kids and the young kids mix more. Because when I was younger there was always a thing about the old kids being big and scary, feel big and scarier, [but] when you’re older and, um, the younger kids feel little and cute. And then when you’re little you don’t feel little and cute.
You feel very big.
And I think the reason we decided: because it would help the school a lot more by creating, not really alienating all the kids because it’s quite divided even without coronavirus and even before Coronavirus, it was still quite divided and be better to, to get rid of that divide.…coming up with this idea was that key stage two and key stage one, they, they have such different ideas. Not only are they different, individuals in that group, but just a whole different year set colliding.” (Two Yr 6 Students,11yrs)