Revealing word origami
Staff:
Since I joined the Design graduation course in PUC-Rio I’ve been led
to take my project two in the “barraca”. All of my expectations have
been topped throughout the semester. I could never say it wasn’t
challenging and that I found some difficulties on the road, but those
only made me and my project stronger.
The subject taught by Ana and Vicente consists on accompanying
some teacher from a public educational institution during a certain
period of time and along with her develop a facilitation material to
be used on her class. After watching four different classes I decided
to continue my project with teacher Telma. She teaches portuguese,
math, geography and history. Her class had 27 students, two of them
were carriers of special needs. The class is based on the textbooks
given by the government and on other materials that Telma brought
to help them understanding the subjects, such as newspaper,
drawing, cutting and pasting activities.
As from the set of words that compound Telma’s vocabulary
universe we recognized this theme for the project: “To reveal
the abstract, interacting and transforming the
universe”
From the initial experimentation, we decided we would focus on
grammar classes, to help the students understanding what
means each of them and how to use it on textual production.
After some study on size and shape we got to a ten faces origami
made out of paper overlaid with fabric. On the fold I sewed
some stripes of carpet, where the words folded as an accordion
would be trapped. Each color of the origami corresponded to a
grammar class, as did the words on it. On her classes Telma
uses it as a word library. The children pick one or more words,
classify it and then, alone or in group, elaborate clauses or texts
based on the words they had picked up previously.
Along these months I learned great lessons. The first one was
learning how to leave the present and not the future. I have
always been an anxious person about what was about to come.
During the construction of the prototype I got really nervous
and I couldn’t go further because I couldn’t stop thinking about
the huge amount of tasks I still had to work on. That was when I
had an insight: I need to stop thinking about what’s coming and
start thinking about what’s happening right now, living one step
at a time. The number of tasks didn’t reduce, but I could get to
them with safety and lightness.
The second lesson was to allow myself to dive into stuff. I dived into
the group I was working with, I dived into the present, I dived into
my teachers opinions and advices. I learned how to rely on what
other people was telling me, even though it wasn’t my opinion or
what I thought it was right, and after I relied on them, I found
myself wrong sometimes.
By the end of this passage I had as a result a facilitation material for
Telma’s classes, but I also had something that goes much further
than this. I matured as a person. I started seeing the whole picture
much more clear and simple than I did before. I learned with Ana
and Vicente that beauty and grace are on simplicity, they are
everywhere, you only have to wish for it. And being thankful is much
easier than I ever thought it could be. Those are definitely my
greatest learnings.
I am thankful to teacher Telma for showing me how two very
different stuff can work out just fine together. When I started the
project I realized that we were very different. She is a teacher that
likes to teach on a traditional way , so when the experimental objects
suggested something out of common she wouldn’t use. At the
beginning I felt damaged, thought my project wouldn’t work out my
way. However, as time got by, I realized it really wasn’t supposed to
work out my way. I should be a met between her and me. Since this
point, our differences only made the work richer and stronger. Discipline: DSG 1002
Olívia Rodrigues Pedroni
Olivia.pedroni@gmail.com
Social group:
Telma Feriguetti
telmaferiguetti@gmail.com
CIEP Agostinho Neto
Rua Visconde Silva, s/n, Humaitá. Rio de Janeiro- RJ
Summary:
Class
Professors: Ana Branco, Luis Vicente Barros, Luciana Grether, Maria do
Socorro Calhau