STORYTELLING, OUTDOORS, PLAY, MOVEMENT, COMMUNITY, AESTHETIC PROCESSES

REGION: Southern Denmark
MUNICIPALITY: Vejle
PROCEDURE: 2022
DAILY OFFER: Spruce farm

Snow story: Spruce farm (2022)

We are three daycare centers that are used to doing cultural activities in different ways. We are located in a city with a seminary, music festival and RemidaCenter, which is a very active city considering its size.

We would like to take this as a starting point and see if we can create something where we and children across Jelling inspire each other and give us some new angles on play, art and experiments. So our wondering in relation to that is:

- How can we collaborate across daycare centers together

- How can we expand opportunities for play and art

- How can this be done through a narrative that we create together

- What play and educational activities can be done around making up and telling a story together

- How can we bring other art forms into storytelling

- How can we build community around storytelling

- How have you experienced the co-creation between artist/cultural educator/cultural school teacher, educators and children and possibly researcher?

It's been a wild ride, with a lot of fun times and also great lessons on what works and what doesn't.

We've managed to create a community around the project that has lasted all the way through, even if there were things that didn't work out quite as we had planned.

The children have contributed input to the story we all experienced along the way and they have been able to recognize their own input.

We also made a book out of it, although that wasn't the most important thing, and two songs were written as well.

- How have children's perspectives been expressed/included?

The children adopted the idea immediately and started contributing ideas right from the start, and if they weren't included in the next chapter, they were asked when they would be included.

The children were also very curious about what the children from the other institutions had come up with.

So it has become the children's games and it has become the children's story.

And last but not least, we managed to organize a bike race in the monument area in Jelling, which was not a cycling competition, but a joint bike ride.

- Do children play different games and with different people than usual?

So far, we can see that the children are talking a lot about the whole story and are interested in playing with bikes, which was an important part of the project. Whether this will continue, we don't know yet.

- How do pedagogical staff act differently than they did before PlayArt?

Whether it's acting differently, we don't know, but we are currently very interested in doing something similar again. So that indicates that we've taken some of it to heart already.

- What has it been like to work with action learning?

Very interesting, although it can also be difficult to do this across institutions. But the action learning approach helps to ensure that we play and experiment, rather than creating special learning programs where the children have to learn about a specific topic.

- To the artist/cultural mediator/cultural school teacher, if present: What have you gained from participating in PlayArt?

He has been very enthusiastic. Especially the willingness to experiment along the way. It has also given him the opportunity to unfold the possibilities of storytelling to new areas and to a very large scale.

- What are the pedagogical staff still/now curious about?

We remain curious about working together across daycare centers.

We are also still interested in experimenting with the children.

- How will you use art, culture and aesthetic processes in the further process?

The goal is to continue working with the many different forms of art and culture. Preferably in a new collaborative project where we can also involve the school in Jelling.

- What points for attention should we take forward?

That we remember that it must also be able to work in everyday life.