Why am I telling you all this? It’s a project pitch, not a biography.

I used to believe that school was meant to be boring, textbooks and powerpoints are how we are supposed to learn and that it was me that had the problem for not being able to translate these. But the more I spoke to people post school, the more I found people that said the same thing. Come this summer I was trying to come up with topics for this module when I thought:

 

If I could have experienced those art case studies from school in a scenographical way, I likely would have had a much better connection with the class.

 

This theory is supported by and article entitled Learning by Doing and Learning Through Play: An Exploration of Interactivity in Virtual Environments for Children, which states that:

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"Current thinking about how learning takes place emphasizes the constructivist approach, which argues that learners must actively “construct” knowledge by drawing it out of experiences that have meaning and importance to them [Dewey 1966]. Participants in an activity construct their own knowledge by testing ideas and concepts based on prior knowledge and experience, applying them to a new situation, and integrating the new knowledge with pre-existing intellectual constructs; a process familiar to us from real-world situations. The individual continually constructs hypotheses, and thereby attempts to generate knowledge that must ultimately be pieced together." (Roussou, 2004)

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Though this article was largely based on VR experiences, It does also look at our wider relationship with learning. It supports my theory because it tells us that we need to experience and actively participate in our learning experience, not passively observe it through a PowerPoint.

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With that, my research topic was chosen, an opportunity for me to experience art in a way that would have inspired my younger self, not frustrated him.