This is an example of reading promotional activities for children and young people in Thailand. I chose to review Museum Siam's exhibition and treasure hunt game in a Thai famous temple and point out how these activities help introduce one of the ancient forms of Thai poetry to the young generations.
The article is part of the International Master's Programme in Children's Literature, Media, and Culture, "The Promotion of Reading" Major (Barcelona Pathway). I personally participated in this activity of Museum Siam many years ago and was very impressed. As a Thai literature fan who once attempted to write a secret-code poem for Mother's Day, I was very eager to see the exhibition and join the poetry-hunt. I hope you will find this activity and also Thai poetry interesting as I do.
The Ancient meets the Young
Connecting children with a distant past may be challenging but worthwhile, as cultural heritages from those times are valuable sources of experience and creativity applicable to their life.
In this writing, I use Museum Siam’s Secret-Code Poetry Exhibition (ถอดรหัสกลอักษรไทย, 2018) to show how an exhibition re-connects Thais (10 yrs. and over) to a 190-year-old art exhibition in Phra Chetuphon temple and combines arts abilities in visualizing, appealing senses and stimulating imagination, to promote Thai ancient poetry reading.
Wonder what the secret-code poetry looks like?
Here are some examples:
One of many secret code poems at Phra Chetuphon temple
and how to read it.
Stone inscriptions of poetry and illustrations at Phra Chetuphon temple.
One of the most elaborate secret code poems in an old scripture
and how to read it.
About the Temple Where We Did the Treasure Hunt...
With 1,431 stone inscriptions of poetry installed for public education, Phra Chetuphon temple became the hub of Thai ancient heritages since 1830.
The overview of Phra Chetuphon temple.
As visual arts can help readers visualize and comprehend the written content (Carter, 2007), artistic artifacts e.g. paintings of foreign cultures, human-body diagrams and Thai-yoga sculptures have been used, either accompanying the poems or placed separately as decorative items, for visitors to learn from.
Secret-code poetry is one of the hardest literature to read and visualize, which explains its decreasing readership nowadays. To revive the temple’s poetry collection, Museum Siam organized an indoor exhibition with an ancient-time royal court decoration, a place where scholars used to meet, to generate audience’s excitement to read poems. Here, arts functioned in appealing to children’s senses (McCloud, 1994) and putting them in the role of old-time nobles. Role-playing made them learn history with emotional engagement and empathy, favorable to learning enthusiasm, comprehension and memorization (Turner-Bisset, 2005).
Museum Siam activities in Phra Chetuphon temple.
Gamification also takes part in reading promotion here. The samples of secret-code poetry were arranged from easy to difficult and displayed with clues for children to decipher. Game-like activities like this generally stimulated enjoyable, active engagement in children to reach the goal (McRainey, 2016). Decoding the poems, children had to actively read unfamiliar literature, which could inspire them to read out of their comfort zone, search and read more ancient poems, or even try to write new ones. Afterward, children went out to hunt poems and match them with art pieces at the temple. While looking for the right poems, they got to read several poetic plaques, shared literary knowledge and felt proud for understanding the poems and solving puzzles.
This example shows that with the three artistic strengths and the help of games, a present-time exhibition could promote a near-extinct form of poetry reading. More importantly, it gave children a fun time to read and explore cultural heritages, which could be a catalyst for their life-long cultural learning.
Thai yoga sculptures in Phra Chetuphon temple.
Mural painting of foreign people and cultures in Phra Chetuphon temple.
Reference
Carter, J. B. (2007) ‘Introduction- Carving a Niche: Graphic Novels in the English Language Arts Classroom’, in, Carter, J.B. Building Literacy Connections with Graphic Novels. Illinois: National Council of Teachers of English, pp. 1-25.
McCloud, S. (1994) Understanding comics: the invisible art, 1st HarperPerennial edn, HarperPerennial, New York, N.Y.
McRainey, D.L., Russick, J. & Askews & Holts Library Services 2016, Connecting kids to history with museum exhibitions, Routledge, Abingdon, Oxfordshire.
Turner-Bisset, R. & ProQuest (Firm) (2005) Creative teaching: history in the primary classroom, David Fulton Publishers, Abingdon, Oxon.
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