A series of movement and drawing “experiments” that help participants notice non-verbal communication cues and reflect on turn-taking in fluid and ambiguous situations. I conducted this activity with a class of 5th graders and a class of 6th graders at Gardner Pilot Academy in Allston, as well a group of 7th grade students for Harvard’s Project TEACH’s elective activity. I piloted this activity with my classmates in the Arts and Learning practicum at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
I was inspired by Graham Yeagar and Elisa Hamilton’s Drawn Together project at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Their method involved partners standing on separate sides of a clear panel, drawing a prompt. The partners must create the drawing together, with markers tip to tip on separate sides of the glass without speaking to each other.
I found that the project was an interesting exploration of the push and pull nature of unspoken communication. How do we know when someone is inviting us to lead when they’re not speaking? How do we overcome the stillness between stopping and starting again?
I hope that the absence of sound in this experiment heightens our awareness for all the other ways we notice and observe each other in the collaborative process. These collaborations are happening all the time, be it a verbal agreement about dishwashing, or a drawing of a frog.
I designed Play! Sense! Respond! as a learning experience to prompt participants to meander on these ideas of non-verbal communication cues and turn-taking in ambiguity.
In partners, I ask participants to follow each others’ movements without assigning a “leader”. I prompt them to move only specific parts of the body at a time, e.g. hands, face, arms, legs.
We then reflect and discuss the question “How did you know which way to move?”
Discussing this question opens the door to start thinking about different types of communication we might use beyond verbal.
I created three variations of Drawn Together:
Each experiment is 3 minutes long, and then we discuss our findings, reflecting on what was easy/difficult in comparison to previous experiments, what surprised us, and what we noticed about leading and following.
At the end, we do a gallery walk and an overall reflection.
A student, when asked about whether they did things like this in art class at school:
At school we just do art, we don’t do experiments.
After prompt 2, students noticed that, though one person had more “information” than the other, they both “led” throughout the drawing process. Sometimes knowing more than the other person doesn’t mean a situation becomes less ambiguous, we still need both people to be paying attention to each other to create something together.
After prompt 3, some students expressed that having the same prompt felt easier, whereas others thought that it was more difficult. This opens the conversation to consider how our mental representations of the same prompt (e.g. dog) might look different so, even though we have the same input, the perspective and approach might still be varied (e.g. I want to draw the head of a dog with floppy ears, while my partner is thinking of the profile of a dog sitting).
Participants drawing in tandem
Blackboard of all the things participants say during our discussions
Compilation of things people have drawn together
I laser cut and built cardboard frames that can open and close via magnets. These frames house a thin sheet of acetate that participants draw on using liquid chalk. The liquid chalk is easily washable, in the case that the acetate sheets need to be reused. The frames keep the acetate sheet standing while the participants engage in the activity.
Setting up the materials for participants