Revealing word origami




Staff:
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:

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
Class
Professors: Ana Branco, Luis Vicente Barros, Luciana Grether, Maria do Socorro Calhau

e-mail: anabranc@puc-rio.br

Versão em Português