How would school books look like if children designed them themselves?

Shibboleth

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01.10.2026

Homographs Exhibition Ex Ospedale dei Bastardini, Bologna, IT

How would school books look like if children designed them themselves?

Starting from this question, Shibboleth developed a long-term collaborative project investigating the real desires of children regarding their learning resources, beginning with the textbook. This inquiry evolved into the research and publication of Thesaurus of Child Ecology. Conceived as a vocabulary of relations, this volume serves as a masterflat for anyone seeking to rethink how learning resources are structured, designed, and utilised. By exploring the physical forms and active behaviors that a book can elicit beyond passive reading, the project fundamentally flips the script on who holds the authority to design and who is expected to learn.

Overview

The methodology driving the Thesaurus of Child Ecology does not emerge from a vacuum. It dialogicly responds to a rich history of radical, child-centered educational theory that seeks to dismantle authoritarian structures in learning:

Célestin Freinet (Invariants Pédagogiques): Freinet famously asserted that children do not tire of work that matches their life needs, and rejected the passive textbook in favor of the school printing press. He viewed the classroom as an active workshop where children print, edit, and publish their own texts to make sense of their world.
Paulo Freire (Pedagogy of the Oppressed): The foundational Brazilian thinker critiqued the “banking model” of education—where students are treated as empty accounts to be filled with adult deposits. Freire championed dialogue and problem-posing education, where the learner’s immediate reality becomes the raw material for critical consciousness.
Ivan Illich (Deschooling Society): Illich called for the complete dismantling of institutionalized schooling, which he argued commodifies knowledge and bureaucratizes human thought. He advocated for “learning webs” or temporary, self-organized networks that match learners with peers and resources on their own terms.

Education

The Thesaurus of Child Ecology functions as an open generator for multidisciplinary learning. By intersecting the concept cards (Names), historical texts (Things), and physical prompts (Uses), schools can deploy the following modular courses. Each unit shifts the student from a passive consumer of information to an active producer of material culture.

Micrography Course: The Invisible Landscape

This unit bridges ecological observation with historical printing techniques. Students use magnifying tools to explore the local ecosystem, gathering biological specimens, soil fragments, and plant structures. They then translate these micro-observations into dense text-landscapes or intricate patterns, learning how scaled perspectives alter our understanding of environmental data. The course merges scientific observation with graphic design, showing how small-scale natural systems echo larger environmental patterns.

Marbled Papers Course: Liquid Geologies

Focusing on the fluid dynamics of water and color, this course introduces children to the traditional art of paper marbling. Students experiment with surface tension, viscosity, and chemical resistance to create unique geological and hydrological maps on liquid canvases. Beyond the artistic technique, the workshop serves as a tactile entry point into discussing water pollution, river currents, and the delicate balance of aquatic ecosystems, turning every sheet of paper into a unique study of fluid ecology.

Cyanotype Course: Sun-Printed Archives

This workshop utilizes one of the earliest photographic printing processes to create a solar-powered botanical archive. By treating paper with light-sensitive solutions and placing local flora directly onto the surface, students use the UV rays of the sun to develop rich Prussian blue photograms. This unit eliminates the camera to connect children directly with the landscape, teaching them about solar energy, chemical reactions, and the preservation of seasonal memory.

Camera Obscura Course: Inverting the World

Students transform their physical classroom or a portable enclosure into a large-scale optical device. By sealing windows and introducing a single pinhole aperture, the outside world is projected upside down and backward onto the interior walls. This spatial installation serves to deconstruct the mechanics of vision, human perception, and architectural space. It encourages students to reconsider how they view their immediate surroundings by quite literally flipping their perspective on the environment.

Extinction in Animals and Places Course: Mapping Absences

An investigative unit that looks at ecology through the lens of what is no longer there. Students research extinct or highly endangered species alongside disappearing local landscapes, architectural heritages, and habitats. Rather than relying on passive memorization, children map these absences through speculative cartography, creative writing, and soundscapes. The course teaches history and ecology as deeply intertwined narratives, prompting children to think critically about preservation, memory, and environmental accountability.

Photographic Novel Course: Visual Ecosystem Narratives

Students become authors and directors of their own ecological stories using sequentially arranged photographs and text. Participants draft scripts based on environmental conflicts, local myths, or relationships between humans and non-humans within their neighborhood. They then photograph these narratives using still images, block out scenes, and edit the final layout into a short graphic publication. This unit synthesizes literature, photography, and environmental activism into a single, cohesive medium for self-expression.

SHIBBOLETH
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