The Blanket Game

The Blanket “game” was a wonderfully enlightening experiences

Build up (potential to adapt it into the experience of others? The embodied experience has potential to show most perspectives).

The blanket game is a perfect example of embodied learning through experiencing space. The first element that I learned from within the experience is the size of the room. It feels much larger when the tables are moved, showing that a place occupied has its percieved potential lowered. If you percieve a place as full then changing it for your needs would be easier.

Placing out the blankets and standing on it led me to believe that the blankets would be folded and “push us off”. That made the initial purge from disease a bit more surprising despite previous knowledge of the transmission of disease across the Pacific being a cataclysmic event. Whether or not someone would get more from being a part of the first purge and seeing the rest from the sidelines or staying within for longer is something I can’t rightfully say. Seeing the experience from the outside I think was more interesting than being within, since seeing the others trying to maneuver through the instructions gave more time for me to reflect. Consecutive reductions in the ‘people’ and the ‘land’ symbolically give an experience of what is lost, though it seems blunted compared to what it could be. Giving a more visceral experience of the loss and its slow and consistent grinding down of culture could be a far more horrifying thing to depict, though the experience is designed for children in an experience they don’t have much reason to ‘opt out’ of. Since even some fellow teacher candidates had significantly powerful experiences then this level might be enough for what is intended.

A meme taken from reddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/distressingmemes/comments/15i6pyr/all_going_to_waste/)

The experience of embodying the experience of a people group with an activity rather than the simple narrating of the experience or providing writings of those experiencing it seems to be a great idea. It’s likely possible to use this to show other experiences of land loss. An example from English history could be the enclosure of common land into private property or the experiences of conquered peoples everywhere. It might be more difficult for experiences that have some time between their persistence and the present, but it would seem possible.