The After School Club
Curious qualities of time and space.
Introduction
Dr Becky Shaw (Sheffield Hallam University) and Dr Jo Ray worked together with volunteering children to construct a space and time that was part of school, but beyond the curriculum.
They invited the children to be in the school building but with a different purpose.
Background
The After School Club (the Curious Club) was inspired by hobbyist clubs that bring people together based on shared interest and enthusiasm, rather than focusing on an outcome or end point.
Building on work that was started as part of ‘Sensing the School’ by revisiting unusual tools and technologies, the intention of The After School Club was to allow interaction between people of different ages to develop through collaborative, meandering practices.
The research draws on writing which suggests an argument that experiences or events resist interpretation, but children’s and researchers’ actions ebb and flow like a malleable form.
These ways of being intimate dissolve edges and standard frames of performance and identification, potentially enabling encounters that can ripple from children and researchers to carers and school staff.
The project
Seven workshops were introduced by Becky and Jo.
The workshops were based around particular activities, but were adapted and influenced by all of the participants.
There were roughly two broad directions of work.
One involved sound and the movement between body and building.
The other involved the theme of ‘skin’ - or at least some kind of meniscus - that either separates, joins, or fragments one world of understanding from another.
Participants thought about the ‘skin’ of the school building using large prints of close-ups of the school building, hiding in them, projecting with them and on to them.
The first sessions invited children to explore listening instruments.
In comparison to Sensing the School, the project expanded the repertoire to include a parabolic microphone that physically displaces the source, so that participants’ bodies literally sounded like they have moved.
Key moments of listening generated perceived spaces that participants were ‘in’ mentally together.
An early session involved playing hide and seek, and this seeded principles that rolled out through the other sessions, such as eye contact, negotiating the camera, disruption, and displacement.
Often activities begun were changed and became re-purposed by the children.
The frames, limits or understanding of the activity proposed by Jo and Becky were also re-framed or re-purposed by the children.
Quote
The listening and recording devices, the games and activities we undertook changed how we interacted with the space and one another. We experienced feeling close through a range of processes; making, listening, seeking, hiding, inhabiting. A potential for empathy, communality, and attunement to space and atmospheres arose through processes that included sensing and making sounds, making dens and wearable forms that we could hide in, hiding from and seeking with one another.
Conclusion
In December 2020, Becky and Jo presented their work at a seminar hosted by Sheffield Hallam University’s Space and Place research group. Becky and Jo reflected on schools being a ’haunted’ space, as well as the experience of time(s) in school.
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Shaw and Ray (2020)
“We have spent much time thinking about the ways that the material substance of school generates and interacts with children’s experiences, curriculum and school ‘time’, and we have noted how some materials literally move between home and school such as the food packaging donated for craft; or stages of the day evoke transitions, such as ‘carpet time’.
“As such, the home comes to haunt the school, as also do the material remnants of both educational pasts and futures, and their related political aims and atmospheres. Additionally, children themselves bring ghosts to school: ‘jiin’ or ‘zombies’ under the ground in the playground, and ‘bloody Mary’ in the bathroom. By their culture, and their expressive play, children co-create the haunted school by what they bring from home, from the heartland of their identity.”
Their abstracts, Asynchrony in the After School Club (Shaw and Ray 2020) and School Has Never Been Modern (Shaw 2020), were accepted for Childhood and Time Conference, Tampere University (Finland), which was postponed due to COVID-19.
Contact us
Contact us
If you have any questions about The After School Club, please contact Professor Rachel Holmes.