May 2012
7 posts
5 tags
Outer Space Immigrant Stories: Arts & UDL in the...
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...
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Paint Bomb Girls / David Rufo
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...
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Learning The Language of the Visual Arts in Early...
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...
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Photography and Sound Collaboration / Suzanne...
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...
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Wait Time: Communicating Through Puppetry in a...
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...
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Snowfall / David Rufo
I sat at my breakfast table, sipping coffee and watching the snowfall. I’ve always assumed that snow falls, but this time I realized that, instead of a straight drop, the flakes dance their way down doing a sort of bourrée. I focused my attention on a single snowflake from the thousands that were swirling before me. I watched it drift down, float back up a few inches, cut to the right, spiral...
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Making Place Meaningful: Lily Yeh & The Role of...
Lily Yeh is a constant traveler around the globe, working on projects in China, Rwanda, Kenya, Ghana, and Ecuador and many other places. Her ability to develop and manage different art projects in so many locations amazes me. I talked with her about her vision in my previous post Making Place Meaningful: The Role of Folk Art in Community Development, Part I. In that post, Lily shares that her...
April 2012
9 posts
The Movie Companion to Five Ways I Hope To Keep It...
The more I’ve taught filmmaking, the more I want to. To go with my last ALT space posting here is a movie companion project made with students at Ogden Middle School in Oregon City, Oregon. The notes are from where each item manifested live in the classroom. You will find the movie in question at the end of this post.
Make (And Keep) Agreements We started this project with the goal of creating a...
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Round Pegs & Square Holes / Meg Mahoney
Creating a permanent place for the arts in public education requires some adjustment between the two in order to create a fit — a whittling process that usually affects the art more than the public institution within which it’s finding a home. Given the current trends in educational reform, with emphasis on standardized testing, accountability, and data-driven funding, any maneuvers to...
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Residency Writer’s Block / Joan Weber
I am supposed to be finishing the lesson plans for a brand spanking new residency that just got moved up a week because the teacher has been asked to attend a conference. It’s one of those rare situations where I will be delivering one residency to 6th graders and a completely different, completely new residency to 8th graders. I should have started weeks ago. I couldn’t. I was teaching play...
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Teaching Between the Lines / Michael B. Schwartz ...
The dilemma Linda Bruning describes in her recent ALT/space post Funding, Social Responsibility and the Teaching Artist is bouncing around in my head. As Teaching Artists we have to deal with the pressures of controlled chaos in making art with huge groups of people, in complicated neighborhoods, with limited finding and sometime we inadvertently step on funders’ toes. It’s easy to do here in...
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The Thin Line / Amelia Hutchison
Our last lesson was supposed to be great. I had been practicing making paper cranes all morning with the intention of teaching my students at the Baltimore City Detention Center. I had cut bright paper into squares for each man to write a letter to himself at age thirteen on one side and a letter to himself ten years from now on the other. In my mind we’d make cranes from the letters, create a...
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Letter to Mark: Vantage Points / Ardina Greco
Dear Mark,
Thank you for the kind words in your last letter. I was really moved by what you said. From my vantage point, the last couple weeks with Learning Through Art have felt like a momentous blur. I am glad that from the outside the chaos was inspiring. Even though I did think through the sculpture building process, I went into each class with my fingers crossed. You heard the...
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Funding, Social Responsibility, and the Teaching...
This month I had originally planned to conclude my series on Arts in Education: There’s an App for That but, after a recent funding round for arts in education programs, something else is burning to get out and onto paper. If you are like me, much of the work you do is dependent on funding from sources such as schools, foundations, corporation or the government. I don’t think any of us can...
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Power / Malke Rosenfeld
You are nine (or ten, or eleven). You have power.
You think mathematically while you move. You make your own choices about how far to turn and in which direction, what kind of movement to use, where to put your feet, how to combine your patterns and whether to transform your pattern with symmetry.
Your choices are good, especially when they take time to perfect.
You can enjoy the...
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Letter to Ardina: On the Rocks / Mark Dzula
Dear Ardina,
How have you influenced me as a teaching artist? We do so much together; it is difficult to separate the strands of our lives. Maybe it isn’t so hard, though. We do have a little Bert and Ernie between us: you, more Bert and me, more Ernie. Still, this approach feels too reductive. There’s plenty of Bert-ness in my would-be Ernie.
Recently, I helped you mix cement in a classroom after...
March 2012
9 posts
3 tags
Teaching Artist Development Studio Part 3:...
After everyone in TAD Cohort 1 finished teaching in their various Chicago Public Schools, each group of two teaching artists presented their work to the entire group, as well as guest art education administrators. Alyssa and I had a good time working with the students in our two-session workshop we called “Exploring Borders Through Visual and Physical Language” in Molly Myer’s AP Human Geography...
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OMG Van Gogh Blocked Me on Facebook! / Chio Flores
I recently tried an approach to teaching art history that involved social media. This approach showed how social media, which has become so central to many young people’s lives, can be harnessed to achieve a rich and interactive learning experience that can change students’ attitudes to self-directed research. Students were encouraged to engage with the material through identities created in and...
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Making Place Meaningful: The Role of Folk Art in...
In my Arts and Community Development class this spring semester, we are centered on the study and application of the principles of community-based art through four A’s: Asset-based (drawing the existing strengths of the community), Accessibility (creating an open and welcoming space for creating), Alliance (building collaboration and supportive networks), and Activism (promoting social change)....
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Ages Of Art / Shaqe Kalaj
Traditionally, visual art classes and exhibitions are segregated by age groups: young children, preteens, teens, and adults, for example. But I’ve wondered what would happen if these groups could be brought together using the same teaching techniques, possibly even exhibiting their work together?
Currently, I’m the artist-in-residence for Art & Ideas Contemporary Art Gallery & Studio in...
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“I Am…” / Amelia Hutchison
“There are no clocks here.”
This is how one of my students started his free-write today. He told me his mother had been a writer, that she had been put in a mental institution. She kept writing. That’s what kept her alive.
This man was clearly a writer too. He asked me what time it was and almost didn’t believe me when I said it was 2:30. Until today I never thought of knowing the time as a...
Teaching Artist Development Studio Part 2: Design...
Editor’s Note: This is the second of three posts by Suzanne Makol detailing her experience in the Teaching Artist Development Studio. TAD Studio is funded by the Fry Foundation, supported by a wide range of arts education organizations in Chicago, and run under the auspices of CCAP at Columbia College Chicago.
For Part Two of TAD Studio (find Part One here), we jumped right in to designing...
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Becoming a Story-Listener / Kali Ferguson
I have worked as a teaching artist with groups of all ages. Some of my most recent residencies have been with pre-Kindergarten teachers and their students through North Carolina Wolf Trap Education Institute for Early Learning through the Arts. My goal in this program is to use the performing arts to enhance the children’s interest in books and to pass on music, storytelling, and theater...
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Kindling the Spark / Meg Mahoney
I’ve been honored to be a contributor to the TAJ online exchange of ideas since last August, even as I’ve felt sort of odd-man-outish. Being a certified dance specialist, located in one school for the past fifteen years, my context is quite different from itinerant teaching artists, especially in the most recent (and most stultifying) educational environment. I’ve lived the conflict inherent...
Five Ways I Hope to Keep it Real / Billy Miller
The more I’ve taught filmmaking, the more I want to. So this past year I dove into Teaching Artistry headfirst. Outside work at Caldera I source my own classes, design my own curriculum and push the boundaries of what — and what size class — makes successful student film. What I’m learning helps impart better lessons. So here are a few notes where I’ve found my own classroom voice ring...
February 2012
11 posts
4 tags
Between Space and Learning: Lessons from Hong...
In my teaching in schools and museums, I often find myself circling back to the idea of “space” – how people learn in both formal and informal learning spaces. This interest probably came from the lack of space in my hometown, Hong Kong. With over seven million people now living in a land of less than five hundred square miles, Hong Kong is one of the most densely populated areas in the world. I...
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Alone We Can Do So Little / Victoria Row-Traster
“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 42nd Street. It was common...
3 tags
Try and Try to Try Again: What Good Writing...
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...
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My Reality / Spoon Jackson
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...
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Happy Half-Birthday, ALT/space! / Malke Rosenfeld
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...
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From Museum to School: Adapting Models of Teaching...
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...
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Reply to Mark: 3rd Graders Make Plans for Outdoor...
Dear Mark,
I always enjoy reading your updates and seeing the progress of the students I spent time with last year. It’s amazing that they are venturing into an exploration of aesthetics!
My students and I were eager to return after the holiday break to check in on the sculpture installations that we placed in the garden two weeks prior. The weather hadn’t been too extreme, but the sculptures...
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Arts in Education: There’s An App For That, Part...
I have turned into a techno geek. Thanks to my recent course work in online teaching and learning at Bemidji State University, I have discovered the power and possibility of using technology in teaching. It can make the work more accessible, add dimensions I didn’t think possible and bring the arts to students in remote places.
In a recent residency in a small community in South Dakota, we...
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Too Much to Ask: Dance Without Music / Meg Mahoney
Alimah and Farihah are my students. They’re both cheerful, attentive, kind, lively, quick, and participatory. Alimah, a first grader, is shy, but she’s a great partner for anyone in the class. Any student, boy or girl, calm or wildly off-task, gets their work done when paired with her, because she can be on-task and have fun at the same time. Her sister, Farihah, is in second grade, and she’s...
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Letter to Ardina: 4th Graders Make Aesthetic...
Dear Ardina,
As January began, we found ourselves right in the middle of our residencies at PS 48. With ten classes over and only ten left, what do you notice developing in your students? I am excited to see our projects’ groundwork bear fruit. At the beginning of the year, I instituted a five-minute independent work period at the start of every class when students do whatever they want. I have...
6 tags
The Blue House / Carol Ng-He
Last December I traveled back to my hometown Hong Kong for the holiday. Feeling nostalgic, I decided to embark on a journey to tour places that I had not visited before on previous trips. My visit to the Blue House, however, went beyond merely touristy site-seeing; rather, it gave me the opportunity to think more deeply about the interdependent relationships between urban planning, sustainable...
January 2012
11 posts
4 tags
Five Ws and an H: An Exercise to Help Students...
WHAT: The journalist’s six cornerstone questions. An idea I had one day: what if those questions were flipped inward and then outward? What if I had my students ask themselves how those six questions relate to their lives as writers? An exercise. An inquiry. A way for students to explore who they are as artists. A way for a teaching artist to introduce herself to her students. A way for...
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Outer Space Improv: Arts & UDL in the Classroom,...
Part Five: Generating Dialog and Actions for Fictional Characters
Building on the students’ growing confidence with acting, I was eager to employ dramatic improvisation as a “writing” activity. Or as a colleague of mine puts it, “writing on our feet.” In addition to writing and drawing, improvisation would provide another way for the students to engage with story...
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Taking Away the Chairs / Victoria Row-Traster
Upon reflection, I recently discovered that the challenges I faced at the beginning of my career as a classroom teacher ultimately prepared me to become the Teaching Artist I am today. It was during my first teaching post as a drama specialist at a high school in the North of England. I had just earned my post-graduate certificate in education and I was eager to embark on my new, shiny profession...
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By Foot: Engaging Youth with Performance Art /...
There’s nothing like inspiring and engaging the students whether inside or outside a classroom– in fact it’s essential. So last summer, when I started a visual art performance project on the streets of my community, I wanted to engage youth and adults first-hand in my process. I wanted to surprise passersby and stop them in their tracks. I wanted them to ask me: “What are you doing?” or simply...
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The Power of a Hula Hoop / Meg Mahoney
Early in my first months of teaching my students with Autism, I discovered that hula hoops held a special power. One day at the end of class, we’d been working hard on structured activities with variable success: lots of cajoling of individual students, with them alternately joining and wandering away from our activities. Exhausted, I needed a break, so I passed out hula hoops. Suddenly they were...
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Art Behind Bars / Amelia Hutchison
Today is my nineteenth birthday. If someone had told me a year ago that tomorrow I would be on my way back to the U.S. to begin my second semester at the Maryland Institute College of Art, I wouldn’t have believed them. If that same person had told me that I would spend my Fridays leading art workshops with twelve men in the psych ward of the Baltimore City Detention Center, I would have told...
7 tags
Teaching Artist Development Studio Part 1: Fall...
Editor’s Note: This is the first of three posts by Suzanne Makol detailing her experience in the Teaching Artist Development Studio. TAD Studio is funded by the Fry Foundation, supported by a wide range of arts education organizations in Chicago, and run under the auspices of CCAP at Columbia College Chicago.
In 2011, I made the transition from teaching assistant to teaching artist. From...
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Where Do the Dinosaurs Live? / Gigi Schroeder Yu
There are very few early childhood classrooms that never approach the topic of dinosaurs. The children at Christina Kent Early Childhood Center are not unlike other preschool age children when they became curious about these creatures. And, if you browse through early childhood curricula, you are sure to find a wide range of preplanned activities and approaches for studying dinosaurs.
In...
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Together We Thrive Mural Project / Michael B....
January 8, 2011 started out like any other day in sunny Tucson, Arizona. The old Pueblo was abuzz that morning, the mild winter drawing annual snowbirds and festivals. A few hours later multiple gunshots at the “Congress on Your Corner” would shock and tear local social and cultural fabric and shake our national identity. U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords, a Tucson local, and...
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Moving Past Hostile Classes / Spoon Jackson
In 1988, after I performed Pozzo in Waiting for Godot before international audiences at San Quentin State Prison, my confidence and belief in myself as a poet, artist and human being rose and flowed with inspiration like a thawing creek in spring. I wanted to share openly and freely whatever gifts I have as an artist and, hopefully, inspire others to share their gifts.
I became a teacher’s...
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Binding Books, Binding Community / Carol Ng-He
The goals I have for the students in my Arts & Community Development class are four-fold: 1) to gain an understanding of the historical development of art activism, particularly in Chicago, and connect the history of activist movements to the present; 2) to engage with an existing organization and/or community in the city to explore the use of art in addressing social issues; 3) to develop...
December 2011
10 posts
4 tags
Burning the Box: A Teacher Does Her Homework /...
Where are you going, where have you been: though they’re widely known as the title of a harrowing short story by Joyce Carol Oates, those eight words describe exactly what I want my students to think about in their last assignment for my class, the self-reflection: where they have been as writers and where they are going, where those two roads intersect, and what they’ve learned from a...
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Festival Circuit / Billy Miller
For Your Consideration: Young Caldera artists take a run on the fall festival circuit in two of the Northwest’s finest annual exhibits in student film. As a mentor embedded in all this festivus, I submit the following:
Outside Bend, Oregon’s Regal multiplex, we’re queued up clear into the parking lot for BendFilm’s Future Filmmakers’ Festival. All these young filmmakers, parents and audiences...
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Reply to Mark: 3rd Graders & Site Specific...
Editor’s Note: This post is in response to Letter to Ardina: 4th Graders and Re-Contextualization
Dear Mark,
Teaching artist work is full of challenges and I empathize with your choice to keep the Cattelan piece as your key artwork. I also felt that Cattelan’s work made connection to the project my students would be doing. Since my students will be making site-specific sculpture I felt...