ALT/space

Part Six: Creating Fictional Narratives

As I shared in my last post, an improvisation activity with my classroom of third graders proved to be a highly engaging and productive tool. During this activity the students eagerly shared observations, ideas, and suggestions for additional character actions and dialog. These were then transcribed onto boards to be used for later reference. At the close of the improv activity, the students had also written or drawn scenes that would serve as the “middle” of their own stories.

Now the students were ready to craft complete stories with a beginning, middle and end. This connected directly to their English Language Arts (ELA) curriculum, and helped them practice sequencing skills in story writing.

First, I shared examples of beginnings, and then I instructed them to create a beginning. I continued to encourage individualized choices, making their stories unique. Then I challenged them to create original endings, other that “then the alien ate him” or “then she woke up”. To help with brainstorming, I had students discuss and share ideas for different endings. The teacher transcribed these onto the board, providing the students with options for comprehension as well as ideas for their stories.

The students were allowed to write or draw their stories, giving them options for expression. Most of them chose to do both. For the special needs students, we transcribed their story ideas onto the board so that that could copy them. The ESL students were given the option to write their stories in Portuguese or English. To the ESL teacher’s surprise, they all chose English.

A particular challenge that I had was to show the students ways to show a progression of time in their sequential drawings. For the written stories, we emphasized transition and time words such as one day, then, later, finally, etc. I needed to provide pictorial equivalents for these. So I showed them how to draw the sun, moon, and clocks, all indicators of specific times. These examples were left on the boards for the students’ comprehension and reference.

 All of the students eagerly worked on their stories and shared their ideas with each other, while the teachers and I continued to do transcriptions for the students with special needs, as well as extra listening to help the oldest student select his “best choices” for the story.

With our journey nearing the end, we closed the residency with a sharing session in which students volunteered to read their stories to the class. We also “published” the students’ work in a photocopied booklet, which was kept in the classroom library for all students to read.

This teaching experience left an indelible impression on me. In my next and final installment, I will reflect on the students’, teachers’, and my own learning.

Richard Jenkins is a published cartoonist, illustrator, and author currently living in Oklahoma. Since 1997, he has worked prolifically as a teaching artist, engaging students in story and image making though cartooning. Richard is also an arts & education consultant, training educators across the country in Arts Integration and in using Arts & UDL to engage learners of all abilities and styles. He is a Teaching Artist Fellow for VSA. And, Richard is the co-author of “Comics in your Curriculum,” an arts integration manual for elementary educators.  Currently, Richard is hard at work on two books. His latest graphic novel, a horror story entitled “Toil.” And a second as yet untitled teacher’s curriculum book, focused on engaging ELL and disabled students.  Blog: www.studiohijinx.blog.com  Website: www.studiohijinx.com

Also on ALT/space by Richard Jenkins:
Outer Space Improve: Arts & UDL in the Classroom, Part Five
Outer Space Customs: Arts & UDL in the Classroom, Part Four
Outer Space Immigrants: Arts & UDL in the Classroom, Part Three
Engaging Diverse Learners: Arts & UDL in the Classroom, Part Two
Arts & UDL in the Classroom, Part One: Meeting Diverse Learners

Six girls sat atop a large canvas drop cloth they had spread out inside the doorway of our fourth grade classroom. They had developed a technique for making what they referred to as “paint bombs.”

To create a paint bomb they poured viscous blobs of school-grade tempera paint onto an 8½ by 11 inch sheet of copy paper, gathered up the four corners so it resembled a giant Hershey’s Kiss, and affixed it with masking tape. The paint bombs were carefully placed in a box and carried outside to the soccer field. The girls then climbed to the top of a small set of bleachers and hurled their paint bombs onto a large piece of stretch paper rolled out on the ground below. The effect was cathartic. As the paint bombs exploded and splattered onto the bright white paper the girls shouted: “Whoa!” “I made the biggest splat!” “Woo!” “They’re literally bombs” and “Look how awesome that looks!”

The paint bombs were made during a time we referred to as Media/Shop/Studio. Each week during the 2011-2012 school year two hours were set aside for students to engage in self-initiated creative explorations. During Media/Shop/Studio students were allowed to use and explore a variety of digital devices like computers, iPads, and Flip Cameras, or engage in more hands-on activities such as woodworking, sculpture, or painting.

Resurrecting Joan Mitchell
As an artist, the exuberance of the paint bomb activity evoked for me the persona of the 20^th century abstract expressionist painter Joan Mitchell. Although Mitchell manifested a “rage to paint,” her milieu was the mid-twentieth century “male dominated art world” [1]. Mitchell “often felt overshadowed or marginalized in the competitive and male dominated group of New York Abstract Expressionists” [2].

Unfortunately, this bias persists in our twenty-first century classrooms [3] and “gender equity remains a problem in schools” [4]. Recent studies have shown that math and science are identified as male dominated subjects and the arts as female domains [5]. But even within the arts, gender stereotypes exist which diminish the importance of women artists and how their artworks are perceived [6]. Gender stereotyping has also influenced “the formation of gendered styles in children’s drawing” [7].

Yet at the same time, the arts may be used as a “platform to communicate” [8] and as a way to empower students. According to Wagner-Ott, a postmodern approach to art education disrupts traditional barriers and opens up avenues to “engage in classroom discourse at a deeper level” [9]. Growing up in an age influenced by the postmodern aesthetic, the six girls had no problem initiating the paint bomb activity. They devised the concept, gathered supplies, and began production without having to wait for instructions or attend to “narrowly prescriptive theories” [10]. My role as a teacher was to make sure they were safe, offer logistical advice, and then step out of the way and allow their self-initiated creativity to unfold.

Coda
After the last paint bomb had been tossed, I helped clean up scattered bits of paint-laden paper and trekked back to the classroom with the six girls, leaving the painting out to dry in the bright afternoon sun. Once the students left for the day, I returned to the soccer field. As I attempted to transport the painting back to the classroom I soon found that the weight of the dense puddles of coagulating paint caused the paper to tear and shred.  Realizing the futility of this effort, I decided to dispose of it in a nearby trash bin. I felt guilty making this decision without first consulting the girls but knew it would provide a good future lesson on materials and techniques.

The following morning as the students arrived I was surprised the girls did not inquire about the painting. But a week later at the start of the next Media/Shop/Studio, I saw the six girls, now with two boys in tow, joyfully traipse out to the soccer field paint bombs at the ready.

References
[1] Livingston, J. (2002). The Paintings of Joan Mitchell. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art.
[2] Prouty, L. (2011). In Context: Untitled. In Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Evening Auction (pp. 98-101). New York: Sotheby’s.
[3] Owens, S., Smothers, B., & Love, F. (2003). Are girls victims of gender bias in our nation’s schools? Journal of Instructional Psychology, 30(2), 131-136.
[3] Tiedemann, J. (2000). Gender-related beliefs of teachers in elementary school Mathematics. Educational Studies in Mathematics, 41(2), 191–207.
[4] Garber, E. (2003). Teaching about gender issues in the art education classroom: MyraSadker Day. Studies in Art Education, 45(1), 56-72.
[5] Hill, C., Corbett, C., & St. Rose, A. (2010). Why so few? Women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Washington, DC: American Association of University Women.
[6] Keifer-Boyd, K. (2003). A pedagogy to expose and critique gendered cultural stereotypes embedded in art interpretation. Studies in Art Education, 44(4), 315–334.
[7] Tuman, D. M. (1999). Gender style as form and content: An examination of genderstereotypes in the subject preference of children’s drawing. Studies in Art Education, 41(1), 40-60.
[8] Pennisi, A.C. (2006). Voices of women: Telling the truth through art making. The Journal of Social Theory in Art Education, 26, 85-104.
[9] Wagner-Ott, A. (2002). Analysis of gender identity through doll and action figure politics in art education. Studies in Art Education, 43(3), 246-263.
[10] Gude, O. (2004). Postmodern principles: In search of a 21st century art education.  Art Education, 56(1), 6-14.

David Rufo is an artist/teacher/researcher working on his PhD at Syracuse University in Art Education. With seventeen years experience as a general classroom fourth grade teacher, David’s current research interest is the self-initiated creativity of children in a child-centered environment. In addition to being a full-time teacher, David is also an adjunct instructor at Syracuse University where he has created and taught a course titled, Art Educators as Contemporary Artists. His most recent article titled, “Building Forts and Drawing on Walls: Fostering Student Initiated Creativity Inside and Outside the Elementary Classroom,” was published in the May 2012 issue of the peer-reviewed journal, Art Education. His current paintings incorporate watercolor, ink, and antique letterpress to examine children’s literature. Contact David

Also by David Rufo in ALT/space:
Snowfall

The teachers and I, acting as a facilitator, at Christina Kent have been exploring the Reggio Emilia philosophy since 2010.  The use of “art” for children in our practice is a departure from what many teachers are taught, and challenges many assumptions about the use of art in early childhood classrooms. 

In my experience as an early childhood art educator, many teachers are confronted with the dilemma of creating a balance between allowing for free expression and product oriented art projects.  Some believe that young children should be given lots of materials at once and then told to “have at it.”  For some children, this is confusing and they are unsure of what to do when given this much freedom.  On the other side of the spectrum, children are given limited materials and shown samples of what their project should look like when finished.  This approach is often called cookie cutter or product centered art.  The challenge for teachers is to find the space in between where children are allowed to experiment while still given some structure. 

I see the learning of materials as a language just as one would acquire a new written language. This is done in stages.  First, children learn what a material can do by experimenting and becoming familiar with its properties.  The learning of a material and its properties is like learning new words.  Children learn that each medium has a different voice or speaks a different language.  However, the exploration of the material is not an end in itself.  Afterwards, children apply the material to communicate their understanding of the world around them.  The result is not only the exploration or the product, but also the processes by which children chose to express their ideas.

I asked Christina Kent teacher Amber how she approached teaching children to use the art medium of paint.  Amber has a background in the visual arts and approached teaching children to paint similar to her own experiences with the medium.  First, she said that she set some parameters and then allowed children to have freedom within those parameters.  “I allow children to break some of the rules within the parameters to learn in their own way how paint can be used.” 

For example, recently she gave children two colors of paint and asked them to discover what they could do with those two colors.  As a result, children learned new colors and created new names such as “PB&J Purple, Purple Eyes, and Monster Red.”  Amber also described how children are learning literacy, social, and fine motor skills while they are negotiating their own learning through exploration of a medium. 

In our work, children’s visual interpretations are collected and studied as parts of documentation that reveal their growing understandings of an interest that is studied in the classroom.  Amber’s next challenge is to have children apply this new-found knowledge of colors to their interest in moths that have infested the Albuquerque community.  Amber is extending their interest by asking them to create their own interpretations of the moths and their colors.  I’ll be writing about this project in my next post.

Gigi Schroeder-Yu began her career in education as an art and drama teacher in elementary classrooms in Arizona, Wisconsin, and Chicago. She completed her masters degree from the University of Arizona and is currently pursing her doctorate degree in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of Illinois at Champaign Urbana.  For she several years has assisted with the implementation of the Reggio Emilia Approach while working for inner city programs in Chicago, central Illinois, and Albuquerque, New Mexico. Currently, she is a professional development provider for Christina Kent Early Childcare Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico.  They are implementing collaborative professional development through the study of children’s interests and the use of documentation protocol.  Contact Gigi

Also by Gigi Schroeder Yu on ALT/space:
Where Do the Dinosaurs Live?
The Business of Studying Children’s Interests

This past fall I worked with teaching artist Nick Jaffe in a Peer to Peer exchange program at Marwen, where I teach photography to middle school students after school. It was a valuable program where we visited each other’s classes, made observations, and had in-depth conversations about our particular approaches, ways to improve/innovate, and about teaching artist work in general. Aside from getting a better understanding of how we work, it also gave us the idea of getting our students to collaborate in their art making process. Conveniently, we would be teaching the same night of the week during the winter term.

I was teaching a 6-8^th grade darkroom photography course that involved making photograms and using hot lights to take pictures indoors (due, at least in part, to the fact that Chicago winters can be brutally cold and there would be no sun in the late afternoon). Nick was teaching a high school sound art class, in which students used recorded and appropriated sound to make their own compositions. We wondered what would happen if our students were exposed to each other’s art making.  Because we wanted to leave the potential collaborations open rather than forced, Nick and I decided to approach it as a multi-media exquisite corpse of sorts, and see how far it went.

It made sense for my photo students to go first in the collaboration because we would be making photograms early on in the class. (A photogram is an image made without a camera, usually by placing objects on photo paper in the darkroom and then exposing it to light. Man Ray is an artist well known for making photograms.) Photograms tend to be abstract and dreamlike, so we thought they would work well as inspirations for sound (or other) artwork. After the second week of making photograms, we invited Nick’s sound art students to take a look at our work so far. They were then invited to choose a photogram if they desired to use it as inspiration for a sound piece. A handful of Nick’s students chose to go for it.

Sound art student Mehak Haleez made a piece inspired by this photo by student Gustavo Reyes. Mehak’s sound piece picks up on the mysterious floating body in Gustavo’s photo by incorporating echoing voices and slow creepy guitar.

After a couple of weeks of Nick’s students working on their sound pieces inspired by photograms, I shared one the sound works of student Kenaya Howard. The photogram piece she worked from was made by placing string on the photo paper. The photogram image is high energy; some parts have a denser amount of string, making those parts lighter than others since they block out more of the light from hitting the paper. Kenaya’s sound piece did a good job of mirroring the texture and erratic nature of the photogram. For me, listening to it resembles the intensity of a windy day in the city.

I gave my students the option of using a sound piece by any of Nick’s students to then make a photograph, but no one pursued it. I think there are several reasons for this. My photography students were middle schoolers, while Nick’s high school students were more mature and more able to make independent decisions like this. My class was also more physically sporadic: one week students were making photograms, the next they were photographing lighting setups, and the next they were making traditional photographic prints from negatives. This hectic atmosphere gave less time for long-term projects, since they were experimenting with such different aspects of photography.

Nick and I were happy with what came out of the collaboration, and like I mentioned we didn’t want it to feel forced. One of the unexpected aspects that came out of it was how the students naturally had a desire to see how students in the other class worked in that particular medium. My photo students observed and learned from how the sound students worked, and listened to their sound pieces. Some of Nick’s students checked out the darkroom process and even made a few photograms themselves. In the future I would love to try out more collaborations like this, and see if we could push them even further, especially if there is a common theme that would help tie the mediums together even more. But even without a specific theme, I love the idea of having an open door between two studio art classes and seeing what happens.

Here is a link to the sound pieces, which include those students that collaborated with the photo students: http://vimeo.com/39115616

Suzanne Makol is a teaching artist at Marwen. She is also an editor at Composite Arts Magazine, which is available as a free download at www.compositearts.com. She received her bachelor of fine arts in photography at the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2011. Suzanne enjoys photographing small treasures that may go unnoticed.

Also by Suzanne Makol on ALT/space:
Teaching Artist Development Studio Part 3: Completing the Circle
Teaching Artist Development Studio Part 2: Design Cycle
Teaching Artist Development Studio Part 1: Fall 2011

It was early December. Outside, a steady wind was whipping snow into curling drifts around the school building. Inside, it was silent. I was in the 3T classroom at Akiuk School in the Yup’ik Alaska Native village of Kasigluk. The students were sitting quietly at their desks, each with a puppet  lying on the tabletop in front of them. I’d asked a student a question. And I was waiting. The student was reticent to speak in front of his peers. I encounter such diffidence regularly among Yup’ik young people, at all age levels. Each time, I find myself struggling to nudge students to take risks while at the same time acknowledging their cultural and personal boundaries. So there I was, unsure of what to do next, with the student seated quietly before me. I was waiting.

Akiuk School is part of the Lower Kuskokwim School District, based in Bethel, Alaska. The district hosts a strong arts integration program called Project Pilinguat  (“to create” or “to make”). This is my sixth year visiting Akiuk School. If you come to the school in late spring or early fall, when the river is still open, you’re met by someone at the Kasigluk airstrip who leads you to a small flat-bottom skiff with an outboard motor. You find a place to sit among your bags and the gas and oilcans, then ride the mile or so down the Johnson River to Akiuk, where the school is. It seems like nothing surrounds this place but flat green tundra and great blue sky. A string of power lines stretches off across the lakes and ponds toward the next village a few miles away.

In cold-weather visits like this December trip, that boat is replaced by a snowmachine.(The school has a yellow machine; the principal likes to call it “the school bus.”) Suitcases and supplies—along with mail and cases of soda pop and anything else that might have arrived on the plane with you—are heaped into a plywood sled hooked to the machine. You hop in the sled as well, or on the backseat of the machine if you’re lucky and there’s room. It’s a bumpy, cold ride along the river, where small willow trees have been drilled into the ice every twenty feet or so to help drivers stick to the trail when wind or a storm kicks up.

The driver of the boat or snowmachine is usually a school maintenance staffer. Sometimes I get a ride from the village airline agent, who spends her day listening to the VHF radio scratching in the corner of her kitchen, waiting for the next plane to approach so she can drop off cargo and pick up bags of mail. These jobs are some of the few sources of cash income in most rural Alaska villages. Other community members who get paychecks include the post office clerk; the cashier at “the Native store,” the general store owned and operated by the local Native corporation; and the staffers at the city council and tribal offices. Some communities have a village police officer, too. Many people subsist on hunting and fishing for food and animal skins, as their predecessors have done for generations. Nowadays, grant funds and subsidy checks help families with the cost of fuel, guns, and other amenities like fleece pullovers or fresh milk.

Meanwhile, at the village school, young people are learning content driven by mandates from the U.S. Department of Education in Washington, D.C. Sometimes, what they’re learning doesn’t seem to have direct application to life in the village. There is a slow-growing movement to increase the corps of Yup’ik teachers in this region; usually, though, the teachers are outsiders, as am I.

For my December visit to Akiuk School, the bulk of my baggage consisted of plastic bins stuffed with puppet-making materials—dowels, fabric, foam balls, glue, and more. This year in Project Pilinguat, I’m focusing on puppetry work with students and teachers—leading in-class puppetry lessons to support academic instruction, as well as designing and rehearsing student puppet performances for the district-wide arts event in Bethel coming at the end of the school year.

At Akiuk, I spent a fair bit of time with the “3T” students—children who are 3^rd-grade aged, in a classroom where the teacher’s attention is on transitioning them (hence the “T”) out of Yup’ik-language-only instruction and into English-language instruction. This process of shifting students from Yup’ik to English immersion becomes a necessity for the administrators of the school and the district, beholden as they are to Department of Education mandates, because students begin taking state standardized tests in the 3^rd grade. From here forward into upper grade levels, students will attend classes in the tested content areas in English, and Yup’ik class will become a “special,” like P.E. or music.

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