Project time-travel: reflections on learning by revisiting childhood school projects

This chapter is an investigation into the nature of the project as it relates to learning. The author reads through childhood school projects and writes in the first person about the sensations and thoughts which arise. The insights gained are in turn affected by the experience of grief and loss and their concomitant disruption of time, the time-travel of the title, brought about by the death of the author’s mother just prior to the writing of the chapter. Taussig’s anthropological writings about keeping notebooks, research into the art of the project and authoethnographic writing, specifically the delay identified by Andrew Sparkes between somatic experience and the ability to find a voice to express it, form its theoretical context. Its main findings are implicit rather than stated given that it is an original piece of creative writing as well as an investigative study into projects. It demonstrates that the difficulties brought about by loss in finding a voice with which to write can be overcome if writing is used to steer a way through painful experience. The author shows how the process of writing acknowledges physical and emotional experiences of life events and how they are directly involved in learning and are inseparable from it.