Playing with Clay

 Playing With Clay

Just today when I was asked to pitch in as a supervisor for a sculpture practical assessment, I couldn’t help being transported to my childhood spent in a small town in Ethiopia. As little children we used to play with clay, making all kinds of shapes, human beings, animals, and anything that came to mind. Of course, those were days when we did not have the internet or cable TV.

Necessity is the mother of invention, and so we expatriate kids would learn to improvise, and make our own toys out of wire paper, and clay. Various educationists have talked about the need to create a proper environment to nurture creativity, out-of-the-box thinking, or even the so-called ‘experiential learning’. What we don’t realise is that these experiences always existed, more so in the past when we, as children played with clay, lengths of wire, and scraps of paper.

Enter the internet age, and lo and behold, we are now focusing on virtual experiences. Instead of actual clay, we have virtual clay and instead of actual wire, we have virtual wire. While no doubt, actual clay has been replaced by less messy and reusable plasticine or ‘doh’, its texture and ‘feel’ can never be replicated by other substitutes. While the importance of virtual learning experiences cannot be ignored, especially in times of uncertainty caused by calamities, one cannot, however, offer them as permanent replacements for actual, authentic learning experiences!

Educationists of great repute have been talking about ‘expeditionary learning experiences’, or for that effect, ‘experiential pedagogy’, what they are doing is merely affirming how important it is to offer learners an authentic learning experience. The childhood experience of playing with clay, making toys, climbing trees, or even treks and hikes, expeditions, and outbound learning cannot be replaced by learning from the computer screen. Unfortunately, learning from the screen cannot pass for authentic learning and it is not much better than rote learning or even learning from lectures.

What is missing in today’s pedagogy is an authentic experience of learning by doing, learning by trial and error, or even learning through our five senses. The tactile ‘feel’ or even the olfactory experience, is missing in today’s learning experience in school classrooms. The incorrect use of AI and ChaGpt has exacerbated the matter still further. In an age where everything is on the internet, students have become less curious, less interested in exploring things, they have become more complacent, more gullible, and more prone to accepting everything they are being served on the internet.

Creativity has taken a hit because of a reliance on technology that dishes out ready-made solutions and answers and it is also because learning experiences in the classroom cater to only two senses, namely the visual and the auditory! Pedagogy that caters to only two sensory organs cannot be effective in any way. Human beings have more than two sense organs and education needs to stimulate more than these sense organs. Some of the greatest discoveries of important principles, theorems, and even inventions of machines took place because of an experience involving not just the visual or auditory sense organs, but also the tactile and olfactory sense organs. The story of the apple falling on Newton, the Chemistry teacher telling you that Hydrogen Sulphide smells of rotten eggs, or even the Forensic Scientist telling his students that Cyanide smells of Almonds cannot be appreciated unless the students know how it ‘feels’ to be hit by an apple, or for that effect, to gag on the smell of rotten eggs!

What students in most schools around the world lack is immersive, real-world experiences, experiences where students learn from expeditions, and the study of interdisciplinary compelling topics. It is so easy for a student of the Science stream to profess ignorance about an English language topic or for a student of the Arts Stream to show ignorance about the structure of the Benzine molecule! It is unfortunate that in this world of AI, ChatGpt, the internet, and technology, our students have become so limited to their subject specialisations that they are helpless when confronted with real-life problems that might arise from a lack of understanding of other subjects.

Success cannot be measured by the scores a student might get in an entrance exam or even the scores one achieves in a summative assessment. Success depends on wider achievements and experiences that a learner might gain throughout his life not just limited to the time spent on the laptop or for that effect doing an online assessment.

The joy of collaborating with others, the joy of interacting with others, role-playing, gaming, participating in a team activity, working with clay, and making toys out of waste materials cannot be substituted by the number of hours spent online or onscreen. You need much more than the jingles, tones, and applauses while playing an online quiz to stimulate the creative juices in a growing child’s mind. How can you not appreciate the concept of acceleration, velocity, momentum and friction if not by sliding down a chute in a water park? How about learning about the principle of buoyancy and viscosity if not by swimming?

The reason why I titled my article, ‘Playing with Clay’ is because I very strongly believe that an authentic learning experience depends on the sensation in your hands, the joy of seeing a figure taking shape in your hands. Nothing can beat the experience of creating something, the joy of seeing a work of art taking shape through your efforts. By art, I don’t suggest that everyone should create a clay model of Icarus, rather, it would be a good idea for a student of Biology to create a clay model of the human heart, or a Chemistry student to make a clay model of Rutherford’s atom. There could be various other creative projects that could enhance the joy of learning and it is these that need to be explored by educationists all over the world.