The collaboration between Árvore design students and Miragaia students lasted only one month and a half (including the Spring break). Accordingly, having in mind the schedules of two groups, LoCY team was aiming to encounter as many possibilities to meet and exchange, and work together. This was the hardest challenge in the whole process – the time and place allocated when both groups are available to meet at least once per week. Even if we managed to meet two times, the weight of the workload mostly fell on design students. They turned to be the carriers of the project since:
/ Miragaia students were on the last year of their elementary education and they couldn’t join our sessions because of the after class tutorials with a school staff (within program TEIP – Territórios Educativos de Intervenção Prioritária [Educational Territories of the Priority Intervention]).
/ Árvore students found more suiting to work in their Graphic Design Workshop classroom in which they had all conditions they are used to work with; an environment in which was harder to include Miragaia students because of the reason explained afore and because of the process of obtaining permissions from the guardians/parents.
/ While for Miragaia pioneers this was volunteer work, for Árvore students was much more: it was a curricular work and they would be graded for the performed task, therefore their sense of responsibility was greater and they invested much more time into finalizing the creation process.
Consequently, after accomplishing of having two definitions for the same concept and exchanging the ideas of how Miragaia school and community is somehow similar, yet different, the next stage was to learn a bit more about illustration and before going to drawing/designing illustration, design students were invited to make a visual map so that they could more easily weave different collected data:
/ Comparing tangible and intangible documentation of the Miragaia and Árvore schools (local, school, people, students);
/ Comparing and merging the two definitions of the two students from two different schools;
/ Make a visual brainstorming with the examples provided by their teacher Raquel Morais and found online;
/ Go back to the images found in the handout Pioneers’ tool for the civic terms and concepts;
The most interesting observation made by students and their work in progress, that came out so clearly, was that there was a difference in output made by these two groups:
/ Miragaia pioneers (students) wrote their definitions strictly based on their personal experience and the things they live through on a daily basis;
/ Árvore students were more close to constructing their definitions influenced by abstraction and already existing definitions, but still filtered through their own way of understanding it.
Some of the outcomes of this experiment are shown in the images below.
© Olga Glumac 2016
How to cite this article: Glumac, O. (2016). Visual mapping and sense-making. [LINK Retrieved: insert date].
Lab of Collaborative Youth 