Lund University’s Cultural Forum for Art and Science has, for the second time, awarded seed funding to teachers and researchers who wish to integrate artistic perspectives into their work. Here is a blog post from one of the projects that received funding in the latest round.
Art Galleries, Public Gardens, and Place-Based Creative Writing: A Collaboration between Lund University and Edinburgh Napier University
Place-based creative writing invites students to write from their lived experience of place, engaging with the communities and environments in which they are situated, both indoors and outdoors. Place-based education is a form of educational practice that moves teaching and learning beyond traditional classroom settings and emphasises the connection between learning and the embodied experience of being in a physical space (Gruenewald & Smith, 2014). Previous research has also shown that grounding climate discussions in local environments helps to improve climate understanding. In this collaborative project, researchers at Lund and Edinburgh aim to explore the role of creative writing and literary studies in place-based education, asking how creative writing activities might further deepen our engagement both with art objects indoors and with plants outdoors. Together, Barbara Barrow (Associate Professor, English Studies, Lund) and Ellen Turner (Associate Professor, English Studies, Lund) will develop and lead place-based creative writing activities for English literature and teacher training students at Lund’s Skissernas Museum and Botanic Gardens, while Sam Illingworth (Professor of Creative Pedagogies, Edinburgh Napier University) will lead parallel excursions with students to Edinburgh’s Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and Royal Botanic Garden. These activities will invite students to read and reflect on selected examples of contemporary, published writing about gallery spaces and public gardens, to visit those spaces, and to respond to them through their own original creative writing.
Our aim in leading these activities is to incorporate local arts and cultural institutions into our literature classrooms, while also fostering students’ creativity through prompts that invite reflection on their encounters with specific plants, design elements, and art objects in gardens and galleries. In taking up these activities, we hope to explore how place-based education can enhance our discussions of literature about visual art by contemporary authors like Zadie Smith and Nick Hornby. In the art galleries, students will read both Smith and Hornby and then spend some time describing and writing about an art object of their choice. We are also very interested in how outdoor excursions to natural spaces might contribute to the goals of sustainability education; to investigate this, we will invite students to engage with Louise Glück’s Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry collection, The Wild Iris (1992), in public garden spaces, and to compose and share their own poems. This work, we hope, will contribute to scholarship on the role of creative writing and literature in place-based education and sustainability education.
Barbara Barrow, Associate Professor in English Studies at the Centre for Languages and Literature, Lund University
Ellen Turner, Associate Professor in English Studies at the Centre for Languages and Literature, Lund University
References:
Gruenewald, D. A., & Smith, G. A. (Eds.). (2014). Place-based education in the global age: Local diversity. Routledge
Comments