Movement, freedom to choose, exploring together and on one’s own, perhaps discovering something we do not yet know what it is… These are our starting points as we prepare the room and select materials to meet five pupils and their teachers at Kroksbäck’s adapted school, within the development project En elev – en föreställningsvärld (One Pupil – One World of Impressions).

We are now beginning the second process of the development project. The first was carried out this spring in collaboration with Valdemarsro adapted upper secondary school. The encounters there resulted in sensory journeys built around tactile and visual expressions, or tactile and auditory expressions. Closeness, slowness, and the search for reaching one another within a shared communication bubble of questioning and responding characterized those meetings. All of us around the pupil tried to relate as one body – as mediators of the materials’ different possibilities for sensory experience and relationship-building with the space.

At Kroksbäck, the conditions in the pupil group are entirely different from those at Valdemarsro, reflecting the breadth of differences among pupils within adapted schools studying subject areas and, at higher ages, individual programmes within adapted upper secondary school.

At Kroksbäck, all pupils are fully mobile. All have access to visual impressions. Interests, individual rhythm, and energy differ greatly, as do approaches to time, new places, and new people.

Our first week at the school was preceded by meetings with the class teacher, visits to the school where we briefly entered the classroom to greet the pupils and their assistants. The visit gave us a sense of the spatial conditions. The class teacher, Hanna, shared more detailed insights about each pupil’s interests, abilities, and challenges. An information letter about the project was sent home to guardians together with a consent form regarding image publication. We are still awaiting responses; therefore, there are currently no images of pupils included in this post.

With this background, we worked internally to shape the structure of the first week. We sought breadth in our material choices – engaging different senses, balancing the small and intricate with the large and explosive. We looked for materials that could be explored in terms of both function and form, sorted or divided, that invite movement and amplify the experience of one’s own movement. The selected materials were photographed and filmed in short sequences and sent to the school as preparation for pupils who might benefit from it.

• Water bags with filters in warm and cold colour tones, blue, turquoise, red, orange, silver, gold and filled to different extents with varying weight in warm and cold water.

• Tubes in different colours and sizes that can be moved, bent and waved for an extra resonance of one’s own movement. Some tubes can be pushed into another tube. They can be scraped, filled with something that rolls or that flows down through the hollow space. One tube contains a chain with ends that stick out and on which the tube can be pulled.

• Rescue blankets in different pieces that crinkle and shine in gold and silver and that respond to changes in the light.

• Spaghetti which consists of drapery threads, mostly in white and with some coloured threads in red, pink and yellow. The threads are leftover material. Here in unprocessed form.

• Wooden sticks in roughly equal sizes. Unprocessed.

• Beach balls from the forest in different sizes.

• Chimes in metal tubes that we have borrowed from a previous production.

• Tissue paper lit inside a bag with holes.

• Small fabric bags with rice and grains that provide some weight.

How the materials should be laid out and in that way presented has been a question to take a position on and we land in presenting everything in the room but hidden in bags or in coconut fibre bowls with an extra bowl as a lid.

How we should relate to the students we need to understand in the meeting with the students. Of course we bring a lot from previous experiences. The difference here is that we meet one student at a time. How do we do that? How do we go about approaching, trying to establish a relationship, create curiosity for the moment, the materials, us and an expectation of what can arise? The sense of wonder that we seek but can never force. Here the students have full freedom to leave the room if they do not want to stay.

The first week we meet four of the class’s five students. They come in one at a time together with one or two educators. We have the room with the materials and each other. The time is mostly up to the student, how long they have the energy and want.

Our first meeting lasts for almost an hour. The moment contains a lot of laughter and the student tries their way through the materials. Some in a slightly quicker contact. Another student approaches the room and us by hugging and pushing. A kind of creating of relationship through physical contact with our bodies as well as with the materials. What surprises the educators the most is one student who otherwise usually has a very short attention span in terms of time. They want to stay for a full 20 minutes and then come back again for a while. Another student does not want to leave their own classroom. Here we try to approach the student where they are in the classroom. Then we of course do not have the same conditions to work with the light. The student in the classroom is clear about what they want and sometimes slowly goes into an activity and sometimes directly. At times there are small laughs. But at what? We do not know.

When it comes to the materials we have with us, we can note that they arouse interest to different degrees where some have greater potential to hold attention for a longer time and others become objects for an exploration that ends after a short time:

The tubes are liked by several. They are in some way stubborn and have a will of their own which perhaps makes them exciting. The things inside are sometimes noticed and sometimes it is the movement of the tubes itself that is interesting. A bent U-shape that goes in front of and behind the body or is thrown around here and there. Fun with the tube and the bead chain that could be pulled back and forth. A difficult task to put the chain back into the tube again. To scratch on the surface of the tubes, how it sounds and vibrates. That the tubes can be put into another tube and that the stopper for the beads inside can be removed.

The rescue blanket qualities where a lot happens also catch the attention. It is nice to handle. Can be thrown up in the air, pushed, torn apart, crumpled, make a lot of sound and large movements. Several students could keep going for a long time.

Water bags with filters arouse wonder when lamps shine on them. The interest in the lamp sometimes continued to other lamps up in the ceiling for example. A pleasant feeling to lie with the hand on the bag and rock the water and also hit the bag. To do it together was good. A long-term activity. Also to have the bag on oneself, in the lap or on another part of the body.

The spaghetti pieces of thread drapery were lifted up and released, thrown around a bit and spread out but do not seem to give a sufficiently strong effect. We needed to present the threads.

Forest sticks could be moved so that they make a sound, thrown, dropped so that they make a sound. Quite fun but not sustained and recurring.

The beach balls could be thrown far and rolled far. Fun when they come back and that they go so far away. Continued for a while but how much do we want to roll balls?

Small yellow weighted bags seem to give a sense of something familiar, perhaps they gave a sense of security it seemed but more as a certain distracted activity while the thoughts were somewhere else. But they can also be thrown which is always fun.

Suitcase with holes with white tissue paper and lamps that shone out through the holes. The students showed some interest in seeing what was in the suitcase and when opening it, more interest in the lamps than the paper. Not many sought it out.

The chime tubes we forgot the first day. The second day we did not really experience that they had the clarity to begin and end as we had hoped. When they were used in this context, the sounds became a bit too sharp and the object a bit too difficult to handle.

The coconut fibre bowls themselves, in which some materials are presented, partly hidden, are materials with some potential. They can be set in motion. Thrown without anything happening, risk breaking. One can look through them. They can be placed on the head as part of a new costume.

The importance of the lighting in the room becomes clear. It is what creates magic and a difference from the everyday classroom environment. Perhaps it is what awakens the curiosity that becomes the incentive for the students to enter the room? Some students at times seem to sink into the lighting as a whole of the room, a place to land in. Sometimes someone pays attention to a specific point of light for a longer while. The importance of the lighting in relation to the attraction of the materials cannot be missed. Nor can the additional movement that the light creates with the changing colours and shadow play when the objects, such as the tubes, are explored together. To be and become in the middle of the light with the shadows extending the body and movement out into the room, toward the walls around, toward the wall.

During these days we meet the students for the first time. We wait as much as possible for initiative from each student. The question of how we relate as a group is something we return to in our reflections.

How do we work as a group now when there are so many possibilities and much that can happen and when we are not in the same way as dependent on each other? What paths are there? Wait for the children’s initiative? Imitate? Surprise? Introduce the materials in different ways?

How do we relate to each other to create a focus? Is it sometimes better that only one of us is in communication with the student? How can the other take over or introduce something new? Support without disturbing? How can we complement our different energies in the meeting with the student?

What also becomes clear during our first week is how the accompanying educators relate in different ways. Someone wants to show and help the student very concretely with what is expected, but steps back after a while. Someone sits to the side the whole time without interacting at all, but has chosen that for clear reasons. Someone is very close to their student both mentally and concretely and adjusts a lot what is allowed and not. Someone is a bit at a distance but is present and observing without interacting.

We ask ourselves what instructions we give and need to give to the accompanying educators when the students are so different?

In our preparations for the coming week, we also discuss how this format can be developed further. Perhaps we always need to meet the student at least twice to create the best conditions? Perhaps we need to make sure that the educators get an experience of the materials within the possibilities of the room and the moment together with us? What elements differentiate this moment from others within the school’s time and space as well as other spatial and temporal frames within Kollaborativet’s format gallery with the shared intentions of creation and co-creation, experience and possibilities to express oneself?

photo: Johan Danielsson, Meike Deppert