Errant baskets

When an itinerant school’s garden goes in quarantine, errant baskets are set in motion.  Errant baskets carry curricular propositions that help to continue ongoing conversations in the garden. The baskets travel to each of the participating families carrying artifacts and materials to help children engage with such propositions. After a couple of days, the baskets return to the teacher who, through a process of pedagogical interpretation and curricular ideation, reorganizes them. Then, the reorganized errant baskets travel again, only that this time they also carry stories, artifacts and explorations created by all the participating families.  

Errant baskets iterate movements not only to continue the curricular conversations generated in the garden when children are physically isolating, but also to allow for these conversations to be nourished by each families’ engagements and speculations.  In this process, through photography, notes and videography,  families experiment with the pedagogical practice of documenting, which keep traces of the experiences with the errant basket’s propositions. These traces then are shared with the teacher who interprets them and makes decisions that will help continue the already activated curricular processes.

Woven baskets, made of different natural fibers, are of great importance in Andean lifeworlds.  Baskets are made of specific shapes according to what they will carry. There are baskets used to hold produce, others to wash white corn, others to carry cloths, and small ones specifically made to hold eggs.  Baskets are an intimate part of the lives of Andean women and are often carried in the same way children are: on women’s backs and held by a long piece of woven fabric. The errant basket is inspired by the beauty, specificity and co-dependency that we find in the histories held by woven baskets in Cuenca.

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