Play, Place and the Parkive - Hillsborough Park in 360

In my last blog I described the way 360 content can provide students with a distinct opportunity to experience learning spaces (an early childhood setting) and research data (an episode of play.) In this one, I am staying with a focus on play to share an account of a resource we created when faced with the realisation that we would not be able to take our students on a face to face visit to a local park.

The School of Education has undertaken some internationally renowned studies of children’s play in playgrounds linked to the Opie Archive, led by Professor Jackie Marsh and highlighting this work was the focus of a lecture from a module led by new colleague Dr Aneesh Barai for the MA Digital Literacies, Culture and Education - Digital Culture and Childhoods.

We really wanted to enable students to reflect on the way the design of urban parks shape children’s experiences of play. We chose Hillsborough Park in S6 because it was local to most of us and we had our own memories to draw on when thinking about where to film.

Our Senior Learning Technologist Hadrian Cawthorne guided us in positioning the cameras and tripods. Once you set up, it’s a bit like that moment when you take a photo with a camera on timer, except that the camera is activated from an app on your mobile phone and you move out of shot rather than into it. Hadrian commented:

Staff new to the technology found it easy to use and this really strengthened our conviction of the potential to make content for a wide range of courses.

It’s important to say that we did all of the filming in about two hours with our masks and hand sanitiser at the ready. We had to socially distance ourselves when we were filming, but this actually helped with reminding us to stay out of shot (although I can be spotted if you look closely). I suspect some of the local dog walkers wondered what on earth we were doing hiding behind trees, but this was critical to capturing the spaces without also recording ourselves.

It was so lovely to see a group of colleagues and be out and about and we were quite relaxed about what footage we managed to capture. Maybe if we were doing the same exercise now we would plan it shot by shot, but personally I liked the chance to be spontaneous. We walked around and talked about the ‘secret’ gardens, Tramlines, the library and the large painted ‘No Pasaran’ graffiti on the old toilets and this, of course, led to reminiscences and recollections about childhood which in turn gave us ideas for ways we could use the resources.

For hosting the images this time, we used Google Photos which enabled the students to look at the images from many perspectives and then comment on them. It’s not as curated as the more interactive platforms but it means you can quite quickly create a digital resource which is simple to access and also duplicate for different purposes. Aneesh used the 360 film and images to encourage students to reflect on theories around childhood and space, the idea of the child in nature, and how digital technologies can bring us to those spaces in new and different ways through 360° and immersive technology:

The real value of a resource like this was in bridging the physical gaps between us all so that we could feel closer to a specific landscape, which we could all share views on. I started off the comments on several of the images with critical reflections on children’s use of space, theories of play and childhood, and histories of ‘secret’ gardens, inviting reflections from the students on the readings from that week, as well as on their own childhood memories of outdoor play. This proved to be highly engaging and productive, with some students really bringing out the practical implications of the theories in looking at specific outdoor spaces, how they were designed for children, or how children used them.

Aneesh Barai

I also used the resource in a slightly different way for a lecture for our Digital Literacies in Education module, sharing my own memories of my children’s childhoods in the park alongside short extracts from research papers. I then used a Padlet on maps setting so that the students could create their own biographical accounts with images and also references. The finished result was an international map of experiences of play which helped create connections between the local Sheffield park and those the students had encountered in their own contexts. I think this really helped, early on in the course, to establish that we recognised the need to enable students to connect with each other but also the city they were locked down in. For those not able to travel to Sheffield, it helped to be able to see - in the round.

As we began to plan how to develop this resource further, we came across an advert online asking for contributions to a Parkive:

Age UK Sheffield are transforming The Old Coach House in Hillsborough Park into a dementia-friendly café. As part of this project we are collecting stories, pictures and memories of Hillsborough Park, past and present, to build a new community archive.

Parkive

It felt very exciting to be able to say to the archivist, we have some images and also some memories of the park we can share. The School of Education has real strengths in archival research, with a play observatory currently being led by Drs Julia Bishop, Cath Bannister and Yinka Olusoga. So what started out as a desire to share our research with students in a tangible and engaging way, also became an opportunity to share expertise and contribute to a local community archive. For anyone interested, we are going to go to the park again this year with our 360 cameras and microphones, but also drones (provided by a local resident) and go pros to capture young children’s point of view. We may take a picnic and you’d be very welcome to join us!