Technical Classes

The Technical Classes [5 different groups] have an interesting set of challenges. These students are not in an academic stream; literacy is weak, unpracticed and seems to generate much anxiety. Time with these learners was limited and attendance was inconsistent.
A friend suggested I make a Hero Book. I had participated in a Hero book workshop a few years ago. The Hero book had been presented to me as a process by which a personal history is honoured, blockages and restricted areas explored and a sense of future anchored. Its a bit like taking a personal inventory.
The book can be worked in stages, suitable for the erratic nature of these classes. It also introduced techniques and approaches which could make playful attitude toward literacy. Writing was done with scratchy dip pens with black ink - no rubbing out! The ink made splodges and smeared, acting out the difficulty with writing and allowing it to be ok.
There was no specific chronological order creating of the books and different classes did different things
    

These covers where made by cutting and layering different sized cardboard circles, hammering holes through the layers with a nail and hammer, stitching through these layers and then drawing concentric bands of colours to fill the negative spaces.

The triangle covers were developed by drawing equilateral triangles with the aid of compasses. An anachronistic process in our contemporary technological age, but exercises fine motor control and practical applications of geometry.

The multi shape covers used cardboard cut outs which had been used for a rubbing technique in a previous exercise: The shapes are placed under paper, rubbed with a black wax crayon. The shapes are then filled with inks, the wax resisting the fluid medium.

The central pages explored fears, the plan was to make a mask of the thing that we were most scared of, but time ran out. When we came to stitch the pages into the covers, it required making holes by hammering nails down the centre fold, right through the faces of what we were scared of. It seemed to be a kind of ritual exorcism of the fears !

Collage pages of things that make us happy