Listen while walking: explore the park on your own path with this soundscape of human and more-than-human voices and discover it through its sounds.
Background Voices: #DaylightingTheClassroom with KLO Middle School at Fascieux Creek
This piece has been created by the Eco Leaders of École KLO Middle School working with Interdisciplinary Eco Artist, Shimshon Obadia. Asked to explore and discover the members of their more-than-human community, listen to how these students have used a digitized mix of sounds, their own thoughts, and conversation to explore the more-than-human natural world all around them, right here.
***
The implementation of eco art at École KLO Middle School has aimed to cultivate the students’ inspiring passion for their natural environment. The mandate of this research project has been to use eco art to re-envision education and the role of the natural world in school curricula. Using methodologies ranging from place based poetry, such as is featured in the above sound art, all the way to applied drama, a non-traditional performance style which allows its audience direct participation and engagement, we have developed a series of eco art projects designed to do two things: 1) to bring attention to the students’ ongoing struggle to restore the formerly concrete-covered wetland on their school grounds which connects to this same creek, and 2) to help the school begin to create an outdoor creative art space that can continue to serve the needs of the Fascieux Creek wetland habitat and inspire future generations of students of this place (starting with the adoption of this creek). Through such a unique resource, these and future students will be helped to negotiate the disappointments and obstacles of bureaucratic intransigence and will continue to develop what some might say is their “birth-right”: to learn from and steward the natural world right here at Fascieux Creek Wetland Park.
– Shimshon Obadia, Interdisciplinary Eco Artist.
For more from Shimshon Obadia, visit www.ShimshonObadia.com
