Introduction to origami Journalling with Ellie Clewlow

Arclib Conference 2024, Newcastle University. Wednesday 10th July pm.

Introduction to origami Journalling with Ellie Clewlow – Practical session where we learn how to do origami journalling using unwanted books and paper and reflect on how we can bring these techniques into our sessions with our students.

Traditionally, Arclib conferences start with a practical workshop on Wednesday afternoon, and I always look forward to these enjoyable haptic learning workshops, always engaging and useful. They also help delegates to relax, meditating by doing, and getting to know each other and catch up before engaging into two days of intensive conference activities, where many will be also presenting. The origami journalling workshop was lovingly led by Ellie Clewlow, a member of The NewBridge Project,  Ellie is a paper artist and former archivist and historian who “works with unwanted books and paper, using traditional craft techniques such as origami, weaving and quilting, to explore ideas of place and identity, time passing and community.”

Getting to become proficient at creating sections of our origami journals, forced most of us out of our comfort zone, an unusual activity for most, that encouraged us to use different parts of our brain, but brought much satisfaction once mastered, and we all made a few secret journals. They look like a concertina building, and one can open them up, write on the inside, and fold them back creating a house of secrets, or a house of knowledge… Because we are architecture librarians, we were asked to make the front and back cover representing a house, but it could be a box, a door, a spaceship or anything at all.

Stages of origami journal making. One can write on the inside creating a concealed journal.

I thought all along how to introduce this activity in library sessions for our students, and to what end, and found that there might be countless instances to use origami journalling/notetaking. For the main MA information literacy, for instance, we can start with a short origami journal making, leaving it to dry while we carry on with the session and picking it up as a playful assessment tool where the students will write on each segment what they have learnt in each part of the session, perhaps passing it around and each student will read someone else’s notes and then comment with their own.

For the PhD’s we already have sessions on notetaking, mind-mapping and journalling, they are partly run by one of the candidates who will share their favourite journalling tools, like Journey and Notion, and I have a part-time candidate who is also a former MA student who has been leading an amazing session on sketch-noting for the past 4 years, which looks at methods and techniques but also at theories of teaching and learning and memory. Origami journalling can be introduced as part of these sessions in the context of learning by making, perhaps as a tool to better retain information.

At the 2019 Conference in Venice, we narrowly missed starting with an origami workshop by Mexican artist bookbinder Mireya Badillo, where we would have made an origami travel folder to keep tickets and other paper essentials, and a booklet for note taking to be housed in the larger pocket of our origami folder. Unfortunately for technical reasons it didn’t happen, so I was really glad we had an origami workshop this year.

Would you be introducing origami journalling/notetaking in your work? What would you be using it for? It would be great to share ideas.

Report by Carla Marchesan | The King’s Foundation