ALT/space

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.

You can have fun and work hard at the same time.

You can be the one who usually gets sent around the building ‘for laps’ because you can’t focus in class, and yet, in this case, you are the one who makes up the most fantastical, awesome pattern ever.

You marvel at how fast an hour goes. Where does that time go?

It goes into your feet.

You have agency over your body, your brain, your ideas, and your learning.

Now that is power.

Photo credits: Ryan Richardson

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

Also on ALT/space by Malke Rosenfeld:
The Other Half
Whose Reality?
Divided Loyalties
Teaching Below the Surface: Harnessing the Power of Tape

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

Read More

One thing that impresses me about the writing on ALT/space is the sheer scope of the stories collected here.  Even in what are still the early months of occupying our online habitat, a widely drawn picture is emerging from multiple personal narratives about teaching artist work and realities. 

On the one hand, there is Spoon Jackson, writing expansively from the limited physical space of incarceration.  On the other hand, Michael B Schwartz speaks eloquently and in great detail about an all-inclusive restorative community arts approach.  In between these two perspectives are the stories of Linda Bruning (who tells of what she learned working on the reservations in South Dakota), Carol Ng-He (with a story about Outsider art and its use in urban classrooms) and Meg Mahoney (focusing in on two boys and their contribution to an end-of-year performance), all of whom have their own special ‘zoom lens’ setting to describe and illustrate their teaching artist practice. 

However, the work of these, and other, contributors is only one half of the ALT/space picture.  The other half is YOU, the reader — your responses, insights and work. 

Maybe you are following cartoonist Richard Jenkins’ series of posts detailing how he uses brain research and Universal Design for Learning to reach all learners in his classes.   Or, maybe, the correspondence between husband and wife visual art TAs Mark Dzula and Ardina Greco has caught your eye.  Perhaps you subscribe to the blog using an RSS feed, read every post, and find that the sheer diversity of experiences shared in ALT/space has illuminated aspects of your own TA practice. 

As you read ALT/space we also hope you will choose to respond, either here  or on the TAJ Facebook page.  You can share your thoughts, questions, or observations in a number of ways: in reply to specific posts, on our Facebook wall by posting links, photos or mini-stories of your own work, or even by becoming an ALT/space correspondent.  

I sincerely hope we hear from you!   Please don’t hesitate to get in touch with me for any reason!

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

Also on ALT/space by Malke Rosenfeld:
Whose Reality?
Divided Loyalties
Teaching Below the Surface: Harnessing the Power of Tape

Linda Bruning and I were in the middle of an interchange about the first draft of her recent post, The Road and its Reality.  I thought it was a great piece from start to finish, but something was bugging me, and I could not put my finger on it. 

“I think you make your point clearly enough — working teaching artists have to travel, but I’m not sure that’s always the case,” I wrote her.   

I used to be a traveling TA.  I was a roster artist for both the North Carolina Arts Council and the South Carolina Arts Commission.  I would leave my home in Carrboro, NC and drive long miles to a sandy, inland SC elementary or middle school, or to a similarly sandy, coastal town, or to somewhere in the middle of a long stretch of empty road, or to the top of a mountain.  So, as I read her story about what she does to stay sane and productive while working on the road I was really able to relate.

 
Photo Credit: MarMont Photography

The problem was, though, that I didn’t think this was the case for all TAs and I told her so: 

“My current reality and those of other Indiana TAs is much different…I basically agree with you that if you are working as a TA you are usually traveling, but I guess my point is that I’m not sure that your traveling reality is the same as someone who has work in a more urban area.  TAs who live and work in Indianapolis may not be more than 45 minutes away from home when they drive to their work.”

“Your e-mail got me thinking,” she wrote back, “we have vast differences in the experiences of the teaching artists across the nation, be they opportunities to work, the kind of work they do, their experience in the field, and the support for the arts in the schools.  After reading your comments I realized the TAs in Alaska have to fly to where they are teaching and end up staying not in hotels but in the school itself. “ [See Ryan Conarro’s post, Like a River.]

“TAs in rural South Dakota,” she continued, “have a commute of 45 miles one way from the nearest hotel to the one room school.  (A friend of mine), a TA and poet in Montana, leaves her home in September and doesn’t return till December then leaves again in January and doesn’t return until May. Perhaps it would be interesting to do a fact finding mission about what TAs experience.”

Attached to that e-mail was Linda’s second draft. 

“I like the rewrite very much!” I said.  “It is perfectly pitched as your reality.  I think the role of ALT/space is to eventually get correspondents from all those places you mentioned, and have them write their stories and realities and add them to the big picture of what it means to be a teaching artist.”

So, whose reality?  One TA’s at a time, that’s whose.  ALT/space is here to present individual stories from a personal perspective – whether other TAs can relate to them personally or not.  From miniature portraits of our work comes the truth of our own reality.  And, over time, the universals will become apparent. 

If you want to share your reality and your work with us, please consider contributing your stories or leave a comment in the comment section of this or any other story here on ALT/space.

We look forward to hearing 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.  She developed her current program, Math in Your Feet, in 2004 with math specialist and classroom teacher Jane Cooney.  Contact Malke  

Also on ALT/space by Malke Rosenfeld:
Divided Loyalites
Teaching Below the Surface: Harnessing the Power of Tape