ALT/space

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 into a vortex, and finally disappear on to a blanket of white.

It’s a curious experience to observe a single flake. Watching the blowing mass can have a disquieting effect, whereas following a single flake of snow is an enchanting experience; joyful, and revelatory. This observation brought to mind the ways children create. Together, children seem to move as a swarm. Many times adults fret that they might collide or blow off course if we do not constantly intervene and shepherd them along. In my fourth-grade classroom, I have witnessed the myriad ways children whirl, pivot, and spin their creativity. One minute they are engrossed in a solitary artistic exploration and the next minute they are excitedly sharing their creation with a group of friends.

A student, whose name begins with a W, created a personal logo using Cheerios during math class. Snack time usually coincides with math and in this instance, Cheerios cereal provided a convenient expressive/graphic material.

For my contributions to ALT/space I would like to posit, reflect on, and respond to the question, “In what types of creative endeavors will fourth graders take part when allowed agency in the elementary classroom?” This past school year, for example, the artistic exploits of my students proved that even the most mundane materials such as pushpins and Cheerios could be used to create compelling artworks. Since September, my students’ self-initiated creativity has produced a number of unorthodox works from wrapping items in masking tape creating thickly cocooned enclosures to hurling paint-filled paper pods onto rolls of stretch paper. The self-directed creativity of students provides opportunities for teachers to learn from their students’ authentic art-making [10] and during this past school year, I have learned much.

References
[1] Gehrke, N. J. (1979). Rituals of the hidden curriculum. In K. Yamamoto (Ed.), Children in time and space. New York: Teachers College, Columbia University.
[2] Freire, P. (2005). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum.
[3] Edens, K., & Potter, E. (2001). Promoting conceptual understanding through pictorial representation. Studies in Art Education, 42(3), 214-233.
[4] Brooks, M. (2005). Drawing as a unique mental development tool for young children: Interpersonal and intrapersonal dialogues. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 6(1), 80-91.
[5] Siegesmund, R. (1998). Why do we teach art today? Conceptions of art   education and their justification. Studies in Art Education, 39(3), 197-214.
[6] Kindler, A. (2003). Visual culture, visual brain, and (art) education. Studies in Art Education, 44(3), 290-296.
[7] Andrews, B.H. (2005). Art, reflection, and creativity in the classroom: The student-driven art course. Art Education, 58(4), 35-40.
[7] Beghetto, R. A. (2009). In the search of the unexpected: Finding creativity in the micromoments of the classroom. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 3(1), 2-5.
[7] Roberts, T. (2008). What’s going on in room 13? Art Education, 61(5), 19-24.
[8] Rufo, D. (2011). Allowing artistic agency in the elementary classroom. Art Education, 64(3), 18-23.
[9] Rufo, D. (2012). Building forts and drawing on walls: Fostering student-initiated creativity both inside and outside the elementary classroom. Art Education, 65(3), 40-47.
[10] Grube, V. (2009). Admitting their worlds: Reflections of a teacher/researche
on the self-initiated art making of children. International Journal of Education & the Arts, 10 (7). Retrieved April 24, 2009, from http://www.ijea.org/v10n7/.
__________________

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 

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 need to search for her inner voice and her cultural roots continuously motivates her to make art with people. As an artist, she feels the responsibility to “awaken others’ creativity.”

Lily Yeh. Photo Credit: New Village Press.

With a singular focus on promoting justice with different communities, Lily feels at home no matter where she is in the world. Her work indeed awakens creativity, myself included. For a long time I have struggled to position my place between my interest in folk art, my background in classical Chinese music, and my current practice as an artist, a college professor and a museum educator. A conversation with Lily has given me fresh resolution to find connections between my past and present, and perhaps for my students in the future.  Here is a little more of what I learned about Lily and her work during my phone conversation with her:

Broken Place as Open Studio
From an unsettling immigration journey, then a cultural clash between traditional Chinese art and contemporary American art, Lily Yeh turns these seemingly fragmented pieces of her life into a powerful force for meaning making and mending. She calls broken places her studio – turning disenfranchised communities into her canvases, using people’s stories as shapes and colors, and their talent and imagination as the art-making tools like brushes.

Folk Art Builds
This approach led Lily to found The Village of Arts and Humanities that was incorporated in 1989, with the focus on inspiring people to be agents of positive change through providing opportunities for self-expression rooted in own culture. Later in 2002, Lily took her art practice to an international level and found another organization, Barefoot Artists, Inc., which works with poor communities around the globe practicing the arts to bring healing.  

Over time, Lily’s work has evolved from a simple summer public art project, inspired by the traditional Chinese aesthetics, into a full-scale community development programs that address universal human needs. Her concern is not only to transform the communities’ physical environment, but also to support the “physical, emotional, educational and economic well-being of the people within the community,” as well.

Lily’s work proves how art can go beyond object making. In her work, I see that art is about the creativity in making connections of the past to present, turning the old into new, jointing the broken into wholeness, building each other up, and helping each other make sense of the world of today.

Growth of Smallness
At the age of 70, Lily Yeh’s voice is soft yet energetic. She recommended I watch a trailer of an upcoming feature film about her Dandelion School project – a metamorphosis of a dilapidated factory on Beijing’s outskirts into a vibrantly designed school with Chinese folk art for children of migrant workers. And I did. In this five-minute clip, I was touched by the spirit of togetherness between the artist and the students, and the contended expressions on the children’s faces while making the mosaics for Dandelion Middle School.

Lily concluded our phone conversation by saying, “Listen more, talk less. Show more warmth and concern. Give help.” The Dandelion School project has touched so many lives — the project scope is grand and involves the participation of the entire school, yet it was started by small acts.  Making place meaningful begins by taking one small step at a time. Artists in community lead with a servant heart and a mindful purpose.

Carol Ng-He was born and raised in Hong Kong. Graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with MA in Art Education, she is a Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist and art educator. Carol has worked at Silk Road Theatre Project, Chicago Teen Museum, and Housing Opportunities For Women. Currently, she serves as Education Director at Intuit: The Center for Intuitive & Outsider Art, and is an adjunct faculty member at Columbia College Chicago.  Contact Carol  www.carolnghe.com 

Also by Carol Ng-He in ALT/space:
Make Place Meaningful: The Role of Folk Art in Community Development, Part 1
Between Space and Learning: Lessons from Hong Kong’s Museum of Education
The Blue House
Binding Books, Binding Community
Picking Up the “Unfinished Business”
Becoming a Teaching Artist
Art & Justice for All
The Outsider is In: Teacher Fellowship Program at Intuit

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 four-minute movie that promoted Ogden Middle School and the agreement to “RESPECT the space, tools and each other.” The students were a revolving cast of characters from Ogden’s Middle School Matters class that provides extra homework and academic support. Three students, Cody, Connor and Aisha, were there every session with other kids coming in if they had completed their homework and the ones who transitioned to good academic standing making the final movie. Fun filmmaking was a good incentive. And fun, we did have.

 Balance Planning With Spontaneity
The hardest part here was fifty-minute class sessions, or, not a lot of time to do much filmmaking. With only nine sessions, I really had to pare back what we did in order to make the work as much of theirs as possible. We did that by focusing on what every kid seems to love — filming. Whether it’s in front of the camera or behind it, putting kids to work on their own crew never ceases to engage. Since Connor was a ringer behind the camera, I was able to let him explore the equipment and his skills while focusing the others on interviewing each other and capturing still images, where there’s a lot more leeway.

 Read Widely
For this, I introduced the work of Andy Warhol as a template — a fine artist who loved advertising and never differentiated between the two. The goal was to promote Ogden to prospective students. Yet that didn’t deter students from some cinematic storytelling. Through their different impressions of the school, we were able to explore band, lunchtime fun, the outdoor classroom and the project’s meat — who their favorite teachers were and why.

 Exercise Ambition
While our time together was limited, our project ideas were not. With steam, we were able to get more into camera operation and sound capturing, as well as delve into what was working with students and what outside talents and interests they possessed. The subject could have been dry, yet was given life by students’ ideas, experiences and dreams. Although there wasn’t time for them to edit the piece, they did review their stills and footage and identify some best work. We even did a session in Final Cut Pro early on so they could see how sequences are put together from moving images, sound and text; they can now look at media with a different set of eyes despite not having a chance to get into the editing.

Embrace Technology
Hopefully, the finished product attests to how it has never been easier to film, edit or share a real movie. Marrying desktop technology to our universal love of the art form can communicate powerful ideas and build real connection, just like at Ogden Middle School.

For over two decades, Billy Miller makes media — writing for magazines such as Esquire, advertising for the likes of Levi’s and Nike, and writing/producing television for the major networks and feature films. To him, there is nothing more rewarding than mentoring and making movies with young people through Oregon schools and the non-profit Caldera.  Contact Billy

Also by Billy Miller in ALT/space:
Five Ways I Hope to Keep it Real
Festival Circuit
The ‘Off’ Season
Transformers

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 maintain the arts in education bring up some good questions:

What are students actually learning? How do we know they’re learning it? How does arts instruction support other or lifelong learning? What kinds of data can we develop to prove learning and transfer?

The process of answering these questions – of assessing student learning – is one of the steps toward shaping the round peg of arts education into the square holes of public education. However, it’s essential to answer them without sacrificing the core qualities that humans gain from their artistic endeavors: expression of self, creativity, passion, and vision.

Which is to say it’s April, and I’m thinking hard about teaching and learning in a comprehensive, sequential dance program – because it’s assessment time in dance class! I need to gather data on what my students know and can do, without them feeling the discomfort of having their creativity squeezed and shaped to fit a particular mold.

This week, for spring vacation, I scored students’ performance assessments. Our dance program includes all students from kindergarten through fifth grade, at a rate of about one hour per week.  Instruction consists of lots of creative movement, improvisation using the basic vocabulary of movement (categories of space, time, energy, body), choreography, and cultural dances from around the world.  

The performance assessment that students complete in fifth grade asks them to choreograph a solo dance based on either a poem or a piece of visual art, perform it for videotaping, and write briefly about their movement choices. The assessments are scored in three categories of Creating (choreographing a beginning, three different movement phrases, and an ending), Performing (performing their dance without interruption, with clear energy and space choices, and maintaining their focus), and Responding (explaining movement choices for three ideas or images from the poem or art).

Results from these assessments provide plenty of data concerning the first two questions above: “What are students actually learning?” and “How do we know they’re learning it?”  I know it because a performance assessment asks them to do it: translate ideas into choreographed movement, perform their dance with confidence, and explain their ideas. And I know they’re learning because the results are generally good. But the results also provide plenty of fuel for reflection.

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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 6^th graders and a completely different, completely new residency to 8^th graders. I should have started weeks ago. I couldn’t. I was teaching play writing then, not social studies.

And, now I have writer’s block. It sounds strange to say that I have residency writer’s block. Maybe it happens because I’m a procrastinator at heart and my creativity builds as the deadline looms. Maybe it’s just an excuse to play more Spider Solitaire, but I’m afraid that writer’s block is one of the steps I have to go through when I commit my thoughts to paper. I think that “writer’s block” is the right term because I believe that writing residencies is very creative. And, like other creative pursuits, such as playing a role on stage, I have a “process” that I go through when writing a new program.

So, to celebrate my writer’s block, I will look away from what I should be doing right now in order to explore how I do it. My fingers are crossed that this will help me get back on track and meet my deadlines again in a couple of hours. There’s time.

As a teacher-trainer, I talk about curriculum and lesson plan writing as forms of creative writing. There’s a way to bring a student along the educational path you place before them, replete with interesting diversions and challenges. I ask teachers and teaching artists to think of the Aristotelian-based concept of the 5-act structure when writing curriculum.  It really works.  The teacher becomes both playwright and director.

Act I – Exposition. In Act I, the audience is introduced to all the characters and concepts that they’ll be working with for the rest of the play. As audience members, we begin to make decisions about how we feel about these things right away. (Good writing will often flip the audience’s ideas on their heads by the end of the play, however.) This act has to grab the audience’s attention while also giving them lots of critical, but perhaps dry, information. We learn the who, what, where, when and how through dialogue and action.

In my new “play,” (aka the new residency) the content is the Constitutional Convention and the characters are the men that were in attendance. For my Act I, I will introduce the characters through a little suspense and mystery. I have created (am creating) a fact sheet on each of the attendants of the Constitutional Convention. Students will draw characters at random. No one will have the same character. In this case, exposition will happen as the students digest the research material in order to complete a character worksheet about their individual historic figure.

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