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Some musings on @michaeldoron Historical world building and where the wild things are from tonight’s bed time story. A thread. 1
It all starts in maxes bedroom, or his existing world. Like World building it uses existing schema to build from. Then a few trees start to appear. 2
Once the initial parts of the world sendak adds more trees to maxes world. His sense of period is becoming more detailed. 3
Eventually his world has been transformed. Knowledge of substantive concepts have been fleshed out and detailed knowledge has embellished his room. 4
Having build up a strong sense of the wild things period max has a knowledge rich understanding that allows him to travel into other periods on his red boat. 5
As we are following max through this world building process not only is it becoming more immersive but the landscape is expanding. The picture is literally growing with each step as maxes mental world is broadened. 6
Having developed his historic world. Max is travelling across the oceans of time. With this strong sense of period he can more fully situate himself into the wild things world. 7
But even having built up the world and travelled back in time to understand the period. Max still has to grasp with differences in culture and language. He needs to be more quintin skinner and understand historical discourses. 8
Having spent time understanding what ‘wild’ meant to the wild things he is almost fully initiated into their world. But only when he sets aside his modern values and embraces their culture and rituals as an insider does he fully enter their world. 9
Now max is fully in the historic world. The narrator (or teachers scaffolding) has faded away and max is on his own in the world the image covers the page and he is able to navigate the wild thing land using his own knowledge of the world. 10
So where the wild things are teaches us that building worlds requires: using existing knowledge as a start, slowly building up the details, introducing them to language and rituals as we transport students in and out of years to where the wild past lives. 11
