ALT/space

“Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.” Helen Keller

It was during my Master’s Degree at New York University that I learned of the new a career path called Teaching Artistry. And, after working with various arts organizations around the city, I was offered the position of Curriculum and Publications Manager at the New Victory Theater on 42^nd Street.  It was common knowledge at NYU that the New Vic had the “Rolls Royce” of education departments in the city and a position on their team was highly sought after. The organization as a whole worked cross departmentally in order to get the most of out their programs, including the education team itself.

For me, this new “collaborative” way of working was not only stimulating but liberating; in my previous jobs, in both the UK and the US, I had been a lone wolf. Either I was the only drama teacher in a school or a part-time employee who often felt like an independent satellite.   Either way, I had never felt like I was really part of the big picture or integral to the mission and goals of the organization.  But now this had all changed.

Right away I was introduced to the Teaching Artist Ensemble just as they were about to begin a week of professional training.  Small “Show Teams” had been created, each with the task of creating a pre- and post-performance workshop; these workshops would be taught in conjunction with a show being presented as part of the New Vic’s season. Led by Education Director Dr. Edie Demas, the education staff had recently implemented a collaborative planning strategy for creating workshop lesson plans.

Each step of the planning was based on the same process a company of theater artists would use when creating a new piece of work including research, development, rehearsal and refinement. Using this structure, each New Vic Show Team developed their lesson plans based on the information they had researched about the company and the show, as well as the art form it was exploring.

During planning, each Show Team was asked to think about the intended “spark” of their workshop.  We asked ourselves how, as visiting artists do we plan on capturing each student’s imagination in order for them to be fully immersed in the work? This challenge is amplified when you include the expectations of the classroom teacher as well as the need to represent the artist’s work as intended. And often, this is all in 45 minutes!

In other words — how do we “hook” the kids? In one particular planning session my show team and I were creating curriculum around Hunchback by Redmoon Theater based in Chicago, a play which incorporated mask and puppetry into their production. We decided that each teaching artist team should take in one professionally made mask into classroom. Our objective was to share “up close” the artistry, skill and magic that goes into crafting a theatrical mask and how they have the power to transform the performer on stage.

We built an entire activity around the “reveal” of the mask to the students, including one TA diverting their attention, while the second TA dons the mask and then goes into character. In one particular school we had such an enthusiastic classroom teacher, I asked him to wear the mask and when the students saw him, their own teacher, transformed in front of their eyes – they were instantly caught up in the theatricality of the moment. It was, as they say, an “aha” moment in my teaching practice.

When going into the classroom to deliver the actual workshops, the education staff paired up two artists from the ensemble that they felt would most complement each other’s artistic and pedagogical style in the classroom.  At first, I remember contemplating why I needed a teaching partner. Surely they believed that I could handle the kids and the work on my own? But, after venturing out for my first time as a New Vic Teaching Artist, it became absolutely clear that it has nothing to do with an individual’s abilities as a facilitator and everything to do with delivering a creative and imaginative experience, full of spark and artistry, to the group of young people.

Victoria Row-Traster, Teaching Artist, Royal National Theatre, London, is part of the Primary and Early Years Program developing and delivering arts curriculum that aims to introduce students to theatre through top-quality productions. Prior to this, Victoria worked for five seasons at The New Victory Theater, New York, as Curriculum and Publications Manager, leading the development and creation of the New Vic School Tool™ resource guides. Her teaching experience ranges from early years through to university level, and her focus as a teaching artist is mainly on assisting schools and teachers to bridge the gap between the academic aspects of a piece of theatre and art form it is exploring. Victoria received a Master’s Degree in Educational Theatre from New York University and a Post Graduate Certification in Education, Drama and English from the Central School of Speech and Drama in London, England.  

Also by Victoria Row-Traster in ALT/space:
Taking Away the Chairs
Teaching Artist to Actor Teacher: UK to US and Back Again

When I studied at a fine arts high school, our creative writing teacher, Mrs. Trimm, burst into the classroom one Monday, triumphant: she had knocked down the barrier which kept her from finishing her novel.  That Saturday, she woke to the usual stream of what ifs and false starts, of doubts and disagreements, of urges to burn all three hundred pages of her current draft.  She realized she was worrying the piece to death.  She forbade herself from working on her novel.  She got up, cooked breakfast, steeped tea, soaped dishes.  While she pruned her roses, it happened: the break-through she’d been trying to force herself to have.  Suddenly, the solution rushed to her, and she rushed inside to write it.

Now that I’m a teacher myself, I often ask myself what makes a good writing teacher.  Every time, I remember Mrs. Trimm’s classroom.  I think of the three hours we spent writing each day.  We watched her at her desk, pen poised over notebooks, fingers poised over the keyboard.  We then turned to our own notebooks, our own keyboards.  We had a running joke – leave Mrs. Trimm alone! She’s working on her novel – and that joke taught us how to live our lives as writers, taught us so many things: dedication, discipline, passion, pushing through even when we felt like failures, trying and trying and then trying again.

In order to be a good writing teacher, you have to be a good writer.  By “good,” I don’t mean talent, or some ineffable quality like “genius.”  As Mrs. Trimm told us, talent will only get you so far.  Talent won’t sustain you through night-long boxing matches with doubt, or with a mailbox brimful with rejection slips.  Discipline and dedication, however, will. 

If I want to teach my writing students anything, it’s how to keep writing: how to keep the pen sliding across the page and the fingers punching the keyboard, even if you feel like your talent has failed you.

When I walk into the classroom, I think of Mrs. Trimm.  She taught us by showing us, every day, how she did what she did.  The best thing she could do was to treat us like equals, like writers.  I try to do the same.  It isn’t always easy: opening up to a roomful of strangers about your deepest worries and struggles, your dark hours of wavering confidence, writing along with them and reading to them what you wrote, even if you know it’s awful.  It’s enough to make the strongest writer pause at the door of the classroom.  Then I realize that’s exactly the position my students are in. I think of Mrs. Trimm, and how I learned the most when she shared the most, how at those moments she was probably feeling vulnerable, too. 

I take a deep breath.  I walk in, ready to sit and write with a room full of people who will, for the next hour, not be students, but writers, just like me.

 Emma Bolden’s chapbooks include How to Recognize a Lady (part of Edge by Edge, Toadlily Press), The Mariner’s Wife (Finishing Line Press), and The Sad Epistles (Dancing Girl Press).  She was a finalist for the Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s First Book Prize and for a Ruth Lily Fellowship.  She is an assistant professor of Creative Writing at Georgia Southern University.  Contact Emma  www.emmabolden.com  www.theyawp.com

Also by Emma Bolden in ALT/space:
Five Ws and an H: An Exercise to Help Students Explore Their Identities as Writers
Burning the Box: A Teacher Does Her Homework
Share and Share Alike: The TA as Artist Studied
The Teacher’s Nightmare: Or, How Modeling Can Make a Class a Dream
Facing the First Day: What a Writer Can Learn from a Lump of Clay
Giving Voice to Silence: The Poetry Block Exhibit

As a teaching artist, as a human being, I would be lying if I did not say I would love to travel the world, to depart to unknown places to infuse my work and to share my art. There are a host of warm hearts in Sweden and France I would treasure meeting. 

But I am an artist confined physically by concrete, steel and electric wires for 35 years. Sometimes teaching artists must stay put by choice or circumstance, yet their hearts, minds and spirits must still travel.  Somewhere I read you don’t have to travel the world to know the hearts of man.  These days I am not even able to travel past the bars of my own cell.

An officer told me today that a pair of geese came up to the art room fence, honking for me this morning, as loud as fog horns – their voices echoing throughout the corridor. But I will not be there today, at least not physically, because we are on lock-down for I do not know how long. There was a riot yesterday, on the big yard, between some black and brown prisoners.

I will not be allowed out of the cage to run my classes, commune with the birds, or breathe in Mother Earth. So, I focus on the teaching artist fellowships I have through the mail. I have only a few correspondence fellowships with students now, because snail mail has become almost obsolete.

Thus, on this lock-down, I’ll mainly read and ponder books.  I’ll cultivate new ideas through my studies, writing and meditation. I’ll give my spirit, heart, mind, and soul fodder to create lessons in the moment, like jazz. The lessons will come out when needed in the future. Tomorrow will bring what it brings.

I’ll paraphrase something Rilke wrote in Letter to a Young Poet: There are endless paths and things inside us – place, stories, poems and songs.  There are memories in our hearts, bodies and souls that we can naturally draw upon to teach art and transcend structures.

Art, I think, must be personal, and at times very personal.  I believe my art must show personal for others to both see inside themselves and feel their own flow, and travel internally to unknown depths.  Everyone has their own way of seeing things, and the arts, by being personal, allow or inspire others to be aware of that fact.

When I ponder Rilke or Langston Hughes they inspire me not to imitate them, but to be more of myself through my own inner travels.

Note from the author: This piece was inspired by Whose Reality? by Malke Rosenfeld, and Linda Bruning’s The Road and its Reality.
 

Spoon Jackson has been in the art world and in prison for over twenty years.  He is an internationally known poet, writer, actor and native flute player.  His poems are collected in Longer Ago and have been featured in films, plays, articles, books and music suites.  He has won four PEN awards.  He is featured in two films by Michael Wenzer, At Night I Fly and Three Poems by Spoon Jackson, which won awards in five countries.  Spoon does not have any fancy degrees; he mentors youth and young at heart from life experiences and realness.  He knows that inspiration is organic.  His newest book By Heart, was co-authored with Judith Tannenbaum and published in 2010.  Contact Spoon at www.realnessnetwork.blogspot.com or www.spoonjackson.com

Also by Spoon Jackson in ALT/space:
Moving Past Hostile Classes
Deadlines
Pockets of Light

ALT/space online is six months old!  During this time we have been diligently producing monthly posts and, here at the half-year mark, I am noticing an interesting shift.  All along I knew we were working hard, but still I am surprised how quickly we have moved into new, interesting, thought provoking and generative terrain.  What’s exciting about this, to me, is that we are forging this new territory simply through regular written reflection (and some really great pictures…)

 From Shaqe Kalaj’s post By Foot.

Part of the shift involves the expansion and diversification of ALT/space and the individual TA stories it presents.  Over ten new contributors have joined our original group from August 2011 and are competently adding to our library of stories of TA practice.  

Some of our new contributors are also new TAs, in the first year, or less, of their chosen profession.  Despite this, or maybe because of it, they are already making contributions to our field.  The addition of these new ‘new voices’ is part of our vision for ALT/space, including Amelia Hutchison’s post Art Behind Bars, and Suzanne Makol’s reflection on her participation in the Teaching Artist Design Studio.


From Mark Dzula’s Letter to Ardina: 4th Graders Make Aesthetic Decisions.

Our geographical reach is expanding as well.  In addition to U.S. contributors from fifteen different states, we have gained three more, from Canada, the United Kingdom and Peru.  This is the first step in creating what I hope will become a truly three-dimensional collection of narratives about what it means to be an artist who teaches.   

From Carol Ng-He’s post The Blue House.

Finally, since the turn of the New Year I’ve been flooded with stories from well-established TAs, including posts from Chio Flores and Emma Bolden, illustrating new approaches to teaching.  I think this particular subject has endless, and deep, potential as a writing topic.  The willingness to entertain new methods and attitudes (or, more likely, to invent such methods) points to the very nature of our work and to the nature of the creative arc that guides our practice as both artists and teachers.


From Ryan Conarro’s Really Worth Something.

In another six months our inaugural contributors will be wrapping up their time with ALT/space.  I can only imagine how much I will miss reading about their work on a regular basis.   Because ALT/space is structured on a six- to twelve-month commitment, we will always be in need of new voices.  If you are interested in adding yourself to the mix, please do not hesitate to contact me.

And, as always, we welcome your voice, experience and perspective in other ways as well.  You can respond to individual posts or by staying in touch through the Teaching Artist Journal Facebook page.  We hope to hear from you!

Malke Rosenfeld is a percussive dancer and teaching artist who has performed and taught across the U.S., Canada and the United Kingdom.  An expert in Cape Breton step dance and American old-time clogging, she is the founding member of the Celtic music group Cucanandy and spent two years touring internationally with Footworks Percussive Dance Ensemble, which included the London run of Riverdance.  Malke has worked in educational settings since 1997.  A creative, playful teacher, she specializes in math/dance integration with a focus on creative problem solving, increased rhythmic competence, and the satisfaction of self-expression.  Her current program is Math in Your Feet.  Contact Malke  Malke’s blog

Sometimes you don´t know your teaching practice has changed until you´re confronted with a different environment and audience. I recently changed gears from teaching in a museum to teaching in a school and the transition has been a radical experience for me as a teaching artist.

In February 2011, I moved back to Lima after spending ten years in New York as a teaching artist working in museums and developing my own artwork. I was offered a position in San Silvestre School, a British, private all-girls school with the goal “to provide an integral education based on the best aspects of the British and Peruvian educational systems….”  Coincidentally, it´s also the one I attended all my school life, and considered one of the most prestigious schools in the country.

I now teach high school students studio art, the IGCSE University of Cambridge program, the International Baccalaureate (IB) Art Program and Art History. Although so different to what I’d been doing, it also seemed a perfect opportunity to apply and adapt all I’d learned in New York to a completely different setting, especially in art history.

Before moving to New York, I worked in a different British school in Lima where art history was part of studio arts.  I taught the subject using what I then considered an interesting approach, looking back though, it was mostly linear. This methodology would not be enough in my current teaching.

In New York I worked interpreting art with museum visitors, engaging diverse audiences in looking at and contextualizing artworks and objects. Now, however, when faced with teaching art history as a subject to young people in a school setting, without the context of the museum (objects, artworks and through these, the presence of artists) it felt isolated, arid, bland. I’m a firm believer in teaching from my passion, that as I teach I become a learner myself; the dissatisfaction I felt using a traditional practice became a challenge.

At San Silvestre, art history is offered as an elective course not part of the IGCSE program which students follow in Forms III and IV. The course is intended as a connection to the arts for students with an interest in the subject but who do not necessarily want to make art or consider themselves ‘creative enough’.  When I met my students however, they had a perception of art history as a boring subject. Or so they thought.

In a standard art history course students ‘look at’ artists and their practice in much the same way that zoo visitors look at animals: isolated from their environment, without actual objects or a direct artist connection. This lack of connection led me to find other ways to teach what the syllabus requires while at the same time encouraging students to think like art historians and be inquisitive about the process of creating art, building connections with their own lives and humanizing the artists being studied.

When teaching in a museum, the direct experience of engaging with artworks created an immediate interest in the students and prompted them to ask questions. The physical presence of a drawing or a painting, an installation, a video that you experience with your senses is crucial.  What could I do, without the presence of actual artworks that would help students understand how artists think and why they make art?  Most importantly, why should they care? 

Student displays. To the left, museum of Japanese mandalas and to the right, ‘awana’, museum of Paracas (Peruvian pre-hispanic) culture which showcased the influence of this ancient culture in modern Peruvian art.

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