Art — An Alternate Learning tool during Lockdown
Bhoomika is my niece, 6 years old in March 2020 when lockdown started. She had just finished her 1st standard exam and was about to start the second standard class. On any typical day, her day starts at 6am. After she comes back from school around 2.30pm; she sleeps for an hour and plays for minimum of two hours in her housing society complex with other children.
While she wasn’t missing much of her school and teachers in initial days, she was surely missing her society friends and the playground. She will look outside from her window and often say to her mother “why there is no one outside mumma? Can’t we ever play? When this lockdown will be over? And many other questions”. We were just three in Bhubaneswar while her father was away in Delhi, her grandfather who stays with them had gone to his native village in Odisha.
Image 1: View from our window
To engage her, we made a timetable together. She made for her and I created mine. We had planned ample time for reading storybooks (which I had gifted her much before the lockdown, but she had read very few due to the pressure of her daily school life schedule). While she loved reading, but her interest in sketching and painting often made her drop reading before finishing and start painting.
That was the time when a friend had come to Bhubaneswar from Dhanbad and couldn’t travel back due to cancellations of train. So she continued staying with us. Priyanka, my friend is a graduate from NIFT and a post-graduate from NID. She is a fantastic artist and she noticed Bhoomi’s art skills. While she engaged Bhoomi with her artwork by giving her a cue to draw something, we created a cozy space for her to read. One of the reasons for us was to get rid of her nonstop questions on coronavirus. Few such questions were — why does coronavirus look round? Why everyone is so scared of it? If it’s not visible, how doctors knew its round? Can you buy a microscope for me to see? When my father will come? How he will come from Delhi? Can we go by scooty to bring him from Delhi (to Bhubaneswar)? How Mayra (her younger cousin who lives in Munich couldn’t return due to lockdown) will go to Germany? If she can’t go, where will she study — in the village or in Bhubaneswar? Can she come and stays with her, so that they both can play together and many more.
Image2: All four of us created this space with our old duppatas and called “Bhoomi’s art gallery”. She was told to read there and get the idea to draw new sketches. Later, she hanged those sketches there too.
The most viewed scenery was this water tank during those four weeks of the first lockdown including the pre-lockdown week. We had hardly come out of our two-bedroom flat on the third floor. We spent our evenings on the terrace. The same building was newly occupied with few families. So it’s mostly us on the terrace, watching the sunset, reading books, Bhoomi playing with her bat, skipping rope, or just walking directionless within a constrained space. Some evenings we sang, slept there, asking Bhoomi to count stars.
A series of snaps capturing her painting and the final product. She uses ice-cream cups for this activity. At home, we segregate wet and dry waste. We give dry waste to the vendor instead of a waste collector. So she ended up using some of them.
While she lived in a typical rectangular apartment, she drew her house as an independent colourful house. How malls had been an important part of her life that she didn’t forget to draw which was far away from her place. The other important place that she didn’t forget was her school and the greenery around her society.
She also loved lockdown. She wakes up whenever she wanted, she can draw, colour even by laying off on the floor, taking enough breaks in between. There were no rules. I wish if our classrooms give such safe spaces to children to express themselves, to be the way they are without worrying about discipline or approval. Then, they will surely own that space, take ownership of their learning process, and participate actively.
The lockdown, no access to the playground also made her creative, mischievous, thoughtful. She was constantly negotiating with the time, people, and the indoor spaces. She started helping her mother in works. She completely took over the task of morning Pooja. She spends a good amount of time to flower the idols and praying with a loud voice, putting small notes for us (refer image 9)
She will sleep over her new friend while she does yoga (image 10). She will keep putting notes for us at different places like small notes displayed from the window about asking someone to dance with her. We also don’t miss these moments and capture them. Sometimes she will stop sketching and start dancing till she gets tired. She is a student of Odissi classical dance. She missed her dance classes. So she would dance by watching youtube video. She gets some motivation by watching Priyanka doing yoga. But when she does, she does with absolute perfect postures. So she challenges us to do like her. And we run away from her as we know we never will be able to do like her (refer image 10)
We had subscribed ‘flinto’ to do science experiments. She chooses what she wants to do. Some day she spends time to do experiments from her flinto box (her experiment on volcano explosion is captured in one image 12).
Some days, She dresses up and dances Odissi whenever she wants. Some days she makes bracelets for her younger cousin sister to gift her when she will visit her. she also makes clothes for her doll from colourful papers. she uses glue, staples to cloth her doll instead of stitching whici is quite creative and thoughtful.
One day, she did a painting of her lockdown life with help of Priyanka. She made a sketch of her family. The usual image of her home though has images of her and her parents. But lockdown had made her think to reconsider what a family can be. She drew all four of us (her mother, aunt — me and her aunt’s friend — Priyanka) and mobile where she made video chats with her father.
During lockdown she watched ‘Ramayan’ with her mother. So it was obvious to make a sketch on Ramayan and she made it. What surprised me was her selection of character to sketch. She didn’t choose Rama, she chose ‘Sita’ to sketch and just wrote Rama’s name for her sketch. I didn’t have any conversation with her to understand, maybe the women around her made her consider a woman as the main character of her story.
She published a storybook at www.storyweave,org about her experience in finding out my spectacles which I often misplace and she ends up searching for them. When Bhoomi relocated to Bhubaneswar from Delhi after completing her nursery, she got admission in senior kg as per age. She had not studied Odia at all. In fact she didn’t know even speaking. What a journey for her — from speaking to identifying to writing. Writing: not just alphabets, but sentences in just two years. And finally writing a story and publishing it digitally. An incredible journey!
Read her story at: https://storyweaver.org.in/stories/141467-my-aunt-s-spectacle
The story she wrote was on me. As I am growing old, I am becoming more forgetful. Every day I misplace my spec and Bhoomi will end up searching them. When I will call her loudly from another room, she often answers me “did you lose your specs again”? And, then she will complain to her mother saying that she ends up doing more work as she is the youngest with keeping her hands on her forehead.
Image 16 is a sketch that Bhoomi made with help of Priyanka. She used watercolor to make this beautiful. Though I wasn’t present in their conversation, I could interpret how life was for her before the lockdown. When her school closes for the day, one can find the rush and huge traffic outside the school gate which is maddening. I had gone to pick here for few times. This kind of situation, are a few instances when I feel good about the students of government schools. The kind of autonomy, freedom, agency that government school students have, and exercise is a daydream for private school students. We also get to know her to wish to have a car as her friends have and her parents don’t have. So she had written ‘my family car’. So the competition to own and show of family wealth in private schools even among first standard students is humungous, which is stressful to the young kids.
And we didn’t forget to celebrate. The first day after a few weeks, when Bhubaneswar had no corona cases (just for a day), we came out to celebrate our happiness. The bakery shop inside society was open. We had ice-cream and soft drinks. Our celebration was not just for the city not to have any COVID patient; it was also for acknowledging the resilience capacity that Bhoomi demonstrated in those difficult days. She learned and made us learn many lessons from her. While many times, I was down, mentally distressed, felt suffocating; this child kept us on our toes and made us alive.
It made me reflect and document my learning. How learning spaces can alter our perspectives, how our constraints can bring out creativity and new energy are few of my reflections on this process.
Pranay manjari Samal, works with Edifice Charitable Foundation. Edifice Foundation is an initiative of Edifice Consultants Private Limited. She is CSR Head and looks overall operation of foundation. Edifice Foundation runs three programs: Out-of-school, In-school & After-school programs. They run site school for construction migrant workers children to address dropped out issues, create learning centers in Government schools in Bangalore, and run community learning centers in the urban slum to support government school students after school hours. She has studied M.A.Education from Azim Premji University during 2013–2015.
