Over the course of this year, we’ve highlighted a few stories centered around the work of Christina Hnatov, the Academy’s Curriculum and Experience Designer. From her Experiential Learning Voyage in Spain to her co-development of IDEA360: 500 friends but no one to play with, Christina has been spending a lot of time exploring the design skill of “noticing” and its connection to curiosity across many contexts. Her recent travels to Dublin, Ireland, to facilitate a workshop on Noticing as an Act of Possibility during the 5th International Conference of Possibility Studies, hosted by the Possibility Studies Network, were no exception.
Building on ideas she started experimenting with during her class in Spain, her workshop positioned the practice of noticing as a lever for curiosity, inspiration, and disrupting assumptions. She invited a group of about 30 multidisciplinary researchers and educators from around the world into this exploration. The workshop kicked off with a visual noticing walk around the beautiful campus of Maynooth University. During the walk, participants focused on observing details in their surroundings and noting what they were witnessing.
Once the group reconvened, Christina invited them to close their eyes and tune into their other senses, paying attention to all of the layers of sound, texture, and smell that might typically go unnoticed. The 70-minute workshop finished with a twist. Although ethnographic observation is no stranger to the Academy, curiosity peaked when Christina began assigning each educator an animal to embody. People began to take on the form and perspective of squirrels, cats, and even bugs! One participant exclaimed aloud, while crawling on the floor, how surprised she was that the other bug-like noticers were not doing the same!
By adopting new lenses through each activity, participants physically explored their environment with a sense of playful, embodiment they might not otherwise tap into. After each activity, the group reflected on and discussed their experiences; what sparked curiosity, what insights emerged, and what a practice of noticing might look like in their own lives. Many left realizing that even simple noticing practices can unlock creativity, new perspectives, and a deeper sense of connection to the world around them. Christina, in turn, walked away with fresh ideas for continuing to iterate on these and other activities, drawing inspiration from the feedback, conversations, and new connections with the work of colleagues.
In addition to leading her workshop, Christina spent the rest of the week-long conference deeply immersed in learning from and with the designers, educators, and creatives who came together to explore shared themes around creativity, imagination, and possibility. There were so many sessions that sparked new ideas, including designers who partnered with a university to reimagine the future of higher education, a psychologist researching silence as a tool to support learners’ reflective practices, researchers examining how our sense of agency and possibility is shaped by the stories we tell, and filmmakers who converted greenhouses into spaces of creative collision. All of these experiences and the conversations they sparked served as a source of inspiration and new ideas that Christina hopes to integrate into future learning experiences at UMD; particularly around noticing more intentionally, and how the Academy might support others in doing the same.
In the spirit of noticing: What might you begin to notice differently in your space, your work, or your day that could inspire curiosity, insight, or even a little playfulness? If you’re feeling really brave, it might be helpful to take on the perspective of a bug; just for the spirit of noticing through another perspective. 😉