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When Product Meets Process | Annie Harrison Elliot

When teaching, I often feel caught between my love of the creative process and the desire for a polished end product. Both are important, but limited time frames to work with students is always challenging. I generally only have 45 minutes to an hour once or twice a week to work with a group of students.

On the one hand, my proclivity is to invest more heavily in the creative process by allowing plenty of time for students to explore their art form unencumbered. On the other hand, I personally feel there is a need for an end-product, which requires focus on performance technique, polishing, and other important tasks. Particularly with the performing arts, I believe if students are not getting a chance to actually “perform” in front of an audience (big or small) they are not really learning the art form fully. Is it fair to cut out the “performance” element in favor of process? I lean towards no. Recently, I was fortunate enough to experience a fantastic solution to the product vs. process problem.

The collaborative performing arts activity I experienced was developed by Christy Robinson, Director of Enrichment at The Children’s School in Atlanta, GA. I am currently working as a choreographer at The Children’s School and we were in the midst of working on the musical There’s a Monster in My Closet.

Production paused over winter break and, when we returned,, instead of rehearsing for the musical in the typical fashion, Christy devised a refresher/warm-up had the students work collaboratively and write a musical scene about what they did during their time away from school.

#Annie Harrison Elliot #dance #ece #young children #Atlanta #Georgia

Freshman Conditioning | Angela M. Gallo

This semester I will have two courses with our freshman. Freshman year of college is always a difficult time but I think being a dance major makes it a little more challenging.

Most of these students have been the ‘stars’ at whatever school they attended before college and it is always a real eye opener to them to suddenly be in a class where they are more like equals to the other students. These students also have a different schedule than their peers in other majors. They take their dance and academic classes all day long and then spend the evenings in rehearsal. They have between 6-8 courses on their schedule while their peers may have four. Their ‘Dance’ classes also contain many writing and reading assignments. They don’t get to just ‘dance all day’ like their peers assume. When they are not working on all of this, they are cross training. They work at least as hard as the athletes but without the respect.

I am most excited to be working with the freshman in the dance conditioning class. Dance conditioning teaches students alternative techniques for training their body. The complimentary approaches of Pilates and Yoga, for example, help them with the alignment with their torso and pelvis and also with incorporating more breath in to their movement. This course also spends a good deal of time focusing on anatomy. For many of these students, it is their first look at the anatomy of the body and how that anatomy can influence their dance and their performance.

Dance conditioning makes visible just how much unlearning and relearning my freshman dancers need to do. Many of these students have come to us with bad alignment habits. As an instructor, there is a fine line to walk and a lot of trust that needs to built up with the students in order to begin to have them make changes to their alignment and the way that they have been training. Much of this work began when they arrived at school in the fall, but in this class we can really focus on it.

#Angela M Gallo #dance #higher ed #south carolina

Creative Listening | Elise May

In many classrooms sitting still and being quiet is the expectation but, to me, it is the death of a class. Certainly, there are times when I need my students to engage in listening behavior, but the key word here is ‘engage’. Hearing is easy – listening takes engagement and practice.

Recently, I was teaching a storytelling unit to a class of third grade students. Each student had to retell a folktale in a minute. I needed to hear all their stories as a baseline. To try to keep them engaged as listeners, I gave them each a simple rubric to fill out; they were to tally how many storytellers they could hear, understand, smiled, etc. It quickly became apparent that these adorable children weren't listening to each other.

Some would randomly check boxes on the rubric, while others creatively doodled. Some started off with good intentions but, after the third or fourth storyteller, would start drifting off. And there were over 25 storytellers in each class! As it became increasingly apparent that these children had no idea how to engage a live audience, I shortened the time each child had for their initial presentation. I was there to teach these students the art of oral storytelling. I realized I couldn't do this without first working on listening skills.

I needed a plan. I had to get the students invested in each other’s stories. I separated the class into groups of four or five. Each group had to learn all of their stories. The narrator for each story had to direct a set of three tableaux illustrating the beginning, middle and end of their folktale. All of the students in the group had to be involved in all the tableaux, even if they were part of the scenery.

#Elise May #elementary #theatre #storytelling #new york

Conspiracy Theories at the “Normal” School | Laura Reeder

Art and human development students at Massachusetts College of Art & Design (MassArt), 2013

When I am not on the road engaged in professional development with teachers and teaching artists, I am at a state-funded art school in Boston, Massachusetts working with graduate and undergraduate students who aspire to careers as artists who teach. Our program is called “Art Education” in alignment with traditional art school nomenclature. But, like many art schools, we have multiple pathways for preparing artists to apply their learning as teaching artists, art teachers, community artists, museum educators, artist-educators, engaged artists, artist/researcher/teachers, and artist-activists. There is no regular label for what they will be called when they leave our program. This broad menu of possibilities is intentional because our department encourages students to explore their options and define their work in an always changing world.

Yet, sometimes the students do not find these open-ended options to be helpful. Last semester, after an especially inventive series of workshops on teaching strategies where we studied literacy development[1] through playacting elements in a story, and we studied collaborative learning[2] through choreography and dance, some of my students expressed concern that these playful methods might be too weird to convince parents and administrators that this was effective teaching. This led to a conversation about their identities as artists who teach.

#Laura Reeder #Massart #artsed #higher ed

Seven Good Mermaids | Anna Plemons

My dad, Jim Carlson, used to run the Arts in Corrections (AIC) program at New Folsom Prison (as highlighted in Michel Wenzer’s award-winning film, At Night I Fly). Since the remnants of AIC were finally cut out of the California state budget in 2009, Carlson has been working at the institution as a recreational therapist. This move to mental health services has fundamentally changed the physical space and materials he uses in his teaching practice. In response to the demands of the teaching context—particularly the interplay between mental illness and confinement—Carlson has new students explore drawing through a directed doodling process. The process of doodling provides students with the opportunity to learn about, and employ, the principle elements of art while eschewing some of the intimidating expectations associated with representation.

I do not often get to observe him teaching. Recently, however, I was meeting with an individual writer in the same room as one of Carlson’s visual arts courses and overheard something that has been haunting me since. This particular class was for inmates in the psychiatric security unit (PSU) who have been removed, or “administratively segregated” in prison bureau-speak, from the rest of the mental health services unit based on a serious infraction. PSU is, more or less, the Mental Heath Services version of “The Hole.”

Carlson’s PSU class meets in a small, windowless rooms with eight phone booth sized cages crammed against three walls. The space has an unrelenting echo. It is difficult for inmates to see each other, and the plexi-glass spit-guard on the front of each booth, by design, distances participants from the teacher. Inmates come to class in a chain gang, hands cuffed at the small of their backs. They patiently wait their turn as, one by one, their feet and wrists are unshackled and they are locked into the booths. As they shuffle in, Carlson hands each artist a box of crayons and some print-making paper. When they need additional sheets, he slides them through the gap where the door of the cage does not quite meet its frame.

The night I was there, one particular artist came in loud, shouting at Carlson over the din of cuffs and rusty hinges, motioning him to take the stack of papers he had pressed to his body with his left elbow. Carlson had been gone for a few weeks and this artist was eager to update him on what had happened in his absence.

Artwork by M. Dement | Photo by Jim Carlson

#Anna Plemons #prison arts #writing

The T Word | Jay Albert

This is the final post in our January series inspired by an interesting confluence of December submissions from our contributors around how perceptions of who can and can't make art affect their teaching practice. Enjoy! —Malke Rosenfeld, ALT/space Editor

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Sharing a table with several parents at a school event, conversation came around to my being a music teacher. In the course of the conversation comments came out of a type I have come to accept as inevitable when discussing my field with those outside it. If I had to categorize it I suppose it would be something like this “Talent: those who have it and those who don't.” It tends to crop up in relation to some child or another, my having it as a professional in the field, or poignantly, the adult's perspective that they themselves do not possess this “talent” which is required to make music.

It boggles my mind how universal this perspective is. I have heard the same tone, the same assumptions from individuals for many years. As to the source of such perspectives I can only speculate although I have learned of an alarming number of instances where an educator has informed some child that they “cannot sing.” It seems apparent to me that many individuals have years of practice envisioning themselves as “non-musicians.”

#Jay Albert #Cleveland #Ohio #Music #guitar

What Young Children Can Do | Annie Harrison Elliot

This is the third post in our January series around how perceptions of who can and can’t make art affect their teaching practice. Enjoy! —Malke Rosenfeld, ALT/space Editor

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I teach young kids, but at some point I realized my assumptions were getting in the way. The reason I teach very young children in the first place is because I believe strongly in their capabilities and creativity, but at the same time their age was limiting how I was thinking about teaching them. Once I adjusted my thinking from “what are they too young to do,” to “what they can do,” my teaching process became much more fulfilling.

I decided to challenge myself by encouraging my three year old drama students to participate in a scene or at least a “scene-like-structure.” I racked my brain on how to approach this in the classroom. “Are they too young for scene work?” I wondered. In the traditional way, yes. A 3 year old is not going to do a scene analysis of Romeo and Juliet. I thought about how we had begun our dramatic learning earlier in the session with one-word story circle with pass the sound games, and by acting out fairytales and fables as a group. Through these games, they had begun to understand (at their learning level) concepts of beginning, middle, and end, as well as narrative structure. I felt we were making progress, but I also felt like somehow they could be doing more. I needed to ask myself again, “What can they do?”

In order to create a scene-like-structure, I decided to bring in two non-working cell phones to drama class. I set up two chairs in the stage area of the classroom and the students took turns being the audience and the actors. The students who were the audience decided on what character each actor should be, starting with “mommy,” “daddy,” “grandma,” or the “family pet.” Then we decided that “mommy” would call “daddy” on the phone and talk about ______________. I would invite the students to come up with the topic of discussion and fill in the blank. Then the two actors would call each other on the “phone” and voila! An improvised scene! The concreteness and familiarity of the phone -call served as an effective vehicle to introduce the concept of dialogue. Each of the students had previously witnessed their parents and other adults having conversations on the phone, so they could actually utilize their “own experience” to make a scene. This allowed them to translate their own powers of observation about the world into an art form.

Over the next few weeks, I gradually took away the cell phones and, over time, the students started creating more complex scenes with a wider variety of characters and topics.

#Annie Harrison Elliot #dance #early childhood #atlanta #Georgia

Throwing Cake at the Wall | Bonnie Gabel

I have spent my life learning to be a good collaborator. I create performance work together with groups of people including actors, dancers, visual artists, musicians, and writers. As a director of devised work I facilitate collaborative processes with adults all the time. When I work with people I know we use a process we have developed over the course of the past few years, but we also try all different things. We sometimes talk about throwing cake at the wall and seeing what sticks; it’s not a clean process. Collaboration is messy; it means fights, and feelings sometimes getting hurt. It means stepping back and trusting that the group knows the right direction, it means letting the story come organically instead of trying to force it.

This year I have been working with Ms. Hoke, a third grade English teacher at Andrew Wilson Charter School in New Orleans, to devise radio dramas with her students. The students have been working over a course of ten weeks in groups of six to create an audio drama from scratch. They designed their setting as a group, created a storyboard as a group, choose music and sound effects as a group, and even wrote a script as a group.

I spent a lot of time talking about character voice, and how music can create mood and tone. Ms. Hoke taught the students about logical advance of events in a story. We carefully scaffolded the creation process so that the writing would not overwhelm the students. But on day one problems started arising. We asked the students to work in their groups to pick the setting of their story and draw it as a group on a huge piece of paper. We asked them to go around and share their ideas, and pick the one the group thought worked best.

When we gave the signal to begin everyone started talking at once. When the din subsided some people’s ideas had been put down and students were devastated that people weren’t listening to them, and frustrated that they had to go along with ideas they did not think were as good as theirs. Most groups were at a stalemate, fighting over what to draw instead of drawing. Ms. Hoke and I realized that we needed to scaffold more than the writing process if our students were going to be successful in the project. We were going to need to teach collaboration. I was terrified. After all, I feel like I am still learning lessons about collaboration-- how was I going to teach it to my students?

Ms. Hoke and I started throwing cake at the wall. We added extra steps to every lesson. We made “compromise” a vocabulary word and talked about its meaning before every class. We started talking about strategies that can help us come to a decision as a group, instead of just thinking that a group decision would happen.

Sometimes the results were beautiful. One group in our first class of third graders decided to combine their ideas for a setting to come up with something better. One eight-year old wanted to do a story set inside of Popeye’s (a fast food chicken joint), the other wanted to do a story set inside of an octopus. They decided their final setting was an octopus inside of Popeye’s. I had to trust the process as much as they did so I let them go with it. What came out at the end was a hilarious story about a group of people who go to Popeye's only to have the whole restaurant eaten whole by a very hungry (and very giant) octopus. (You can listen to it at [email protected] if you want, it’s great.)

Sometimes things were still…messy. Personality conflicts arose and I ended up routinely taking students out of the room to talk them through what to do when they felt like they were not being heard, or when they were having trouble listening. I learned that I could coach a student through a rough spot individually, but that it was also important for them to learn the skill of stepping up to be heard when they needed to be heard, and stepping back when they needed to listen. It was okay that things got a little messy, as long as at the end of the day every student was proud of and invested in what they had made as a group.

#Bonnie Gabel #new orleans #louisiana #kid smart #audio drama

Who is Art Really For? | Debora Broderick

Here's the second post in our January series about can't, not, and aren't in relation to art making and teaching. We had an interesting confluence of December submissions from our contributors; completely independent of each other, four of our writers sent in a story on this theme of limits. Two more to come later in the month. Enjoy! —Malke Rosenfeld, ALT/space Editor

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I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about why so many of my students are quick to emphatically tell me, “I am NOT an artist.” For many of my students, (high school seniors enrolled in a one year exploratory teacher preparation program), the artist/non-artist dichotomy prevails, and there seems little room for the liminal spaces in between. But why is this? How did my students land here—so certain in their state and fate as non-artists? In encouraging my students to embrace an arts integrated pedagogy in their future classrooms, I’ve been forced to recognize and acknowledge their anxiety about making art and facilitating arts-based lessons. This has left me pondering a question that kept surfacing throughout the year: Do you have to be an “artist” to make art?

This seemingly simple question would appear to have an obvious answer: No! Of course you don’t have to be an “artist” to make art! A passing glance at some of the work my students have produced confirms this answer (image below). But in talking to my students over the course of the year, and trying to figure out the why and where of this question, a few things have become clear to me: this is a complicated question tied up with students’ identities and perceptions about what counts as art; and just because we tell students they don’t have to be artistic or artists to participate in art experiences doesn’t make it so. If students don’t feel some level of success and pride in their work, they tend to give up—and with art class available to “give up” or drop once they hit high school, art becomes the outlier, only available to those with “talent,” and it rarely makes an appearance in any of their other classes.

Academy students' individual & collaborative silk-screen projects

So why is it that so many students give up art? Artist and author Lynda Barry (2008) suggests we are all plagued by what she calls “The Two Questions”—the questions we ask ourselves when judging our own artistic work: “Is this good?” and “Does this suck?” These are questions Barry argues emerge as we age and as we begin to judge our work as an object rather than as an experience.

#Debora Broderick #philadelphia #pennsylvania #arts integration #high school #preservice teachers

Investing in Artists | Elise Gallinot Goldman

This is the second in a four-part series illustrating the work happening at KID smArt in New Orleans, LA featuring both teaching artist and administrative voices. There's a new post every Monday this month. Read the first post in this series here and don’t forget to put ALT/space in your feed reader so you won’t miss a thing! —Malke Rosenfeld, ALT/space Editor

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Through the years that I have worked with KID smART and, especially in the last eight years, I have come to understand one truth that guides my work--the best use of our resources is investing in artists.

As a program director and manager, I have always believed that decisions should be made by the people who will be living with the repercussions. Since we started investing in training our artists and building their skills and capacities, I feel like this is truer than ever. Our organization works in a transitional and complex environment. So much is different from school to school and classroom to classroom. Organizationally, we are driven by our flexibility and responsiveness to our individual schools and teachers and it is impossible to do that from behind an administrator’s desk. Our artists are our lifeline to the teachers and kids we serve and they know best what they need to do their job well and to make the work relevant and powerful for our schools

In New Orleans we have a fractured public school system. Since Hurricane Katrina, our public school system has transformed into an almost exclusively charter system. Currently, over three-fourths of the 90 public schools in the city are charters and 84% of our students are enrolled in charter schools[i]. We have also seen a great influx of new, young classroom teachers coming through alternative certification programs such as Teach for America and TeachNOLA. These teachers have passion and drive but sometimes lack the experience, tools, and knowledge of student culture that could make them truly effective. In the years after Katrina we found that often KID smART teaching artists were the most experienced educators in a school.

We realized that we could help build the capacity of the classroom teachers with whom we worked. We started the Arts Experience in Schools (AXIS) program in partnership with local arts organizations to create an opportunity for classroom teachers to come together and learn arts integration strategy. We brought together teachers from around the city together with a consultant from out of state. These monthly sessions helped teach our teachers how to develop arts integration strategy in their own schools.

After the first year we realized that our own team of artists, who were already working in residency in the schools, had the potential to lead these workshops just as powerfully and with the added bonus of having already established relationships with the schools and teachers.

We also realized that over the long run, paying for someone to train our artists in how to create and present workshops would not only build artist skill and earning potential, but cut that consultant budget by over 75%. We would have better trained, local artists leading workshops and being paid presenter fees and at the same time save the organization money by taking travel and hotels out of the budget.

#Elise Gallinot Goldman #New Orleans #Louisiana #Kid smart

Making New Ideas | Jeff Redman

Our second January series here on ALT/space was inspired by an interesting confluence of December submissions from our contributors. Completely independent of each other, four of our writers sent in a story relating a can't, not, or aren't in relation to art making. This is truly the beauty of ALT/space for me -- how our stories of teaching practice are at once unique and related at the same time! Enjoy! --Malke Rosenfeld, ALT/space Editor

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There is a point in any drama workshop, no matter if it is a single session or nine weeks long where I hear a familiar phrase. I hear it from adults and children alike, middle to high school. It is uttered when we are doing improv, when we are brainstorming, when we are developing a story or a character or a movement sequence. It can surface when the only instruction I have given is, “you can do anything in the world you want, but you must do something”.

“I can’t think of anything.”

I love this phrase! I used to hate it, thinking it was the death of the energy in the room, but now I look at it as a challenge because I know this is when my job really begins. After all, generating ideas is essential to creation and students will never be able to move forward if they “can’t think of anything”.

A while ago I had a new group of eighth graders starting their drama exploration. It didn’t take long for someone to say it. It came out during an exercise where they were each to take the lead at some point in creating a simple movement that the rest of the ensemble was to support by matching the leader. It was a simple beginning ensemble exercise that came to a screeching halt when the action froze and the next student in sequence said, “I don’t know what to do.”

Creativity doesn’t magically happen. John Cleese of Monty Python fame delivered a lecture on the process of creativity in 1991 that has recently resurfaced on the Internet in which he says that creativity “is not a talent, it is a way of operating.”

In the drama classroom it is all about a way of operating. Giving students the tools with which to invent and develop ideas. Making time, giving space, and encouraging a willingness to be open to anything. I encourage them to try different approaches because I know without a doubt that they absolutely can think of something to do. The drama room is a laboratory with the space and time for ideas to be born.

One way I create space and time for ideas is with an exercise that goes by many names-- creative visualization, guided imagery, dramatic imagination--but I just call it “play time”. As children this kind of activity was just part of the way we operated when we had free time, but as we got older it became more difficult to squeeze it into our busy schedules. In the drama room, the exercise is rekindled.

Guiding the students into relaxation and breathing, they center themselves and open their minds. Focusing inward on their body sensations and breathing patterns takes away stress and enables them to think beyond their own personal insecurities. Once we have spent time getting into the proper operating mindset the imagination takes over and they are open to possibility.

#jeff redman #Bangladesh #middle school #theatre

Getting It Right | Sophie Johnson

It's a New Year with lots of fabulous new stories for ALT/space! Generally, in this space we share multiple smaller stories of individual practice that, over time, create a multi-dimensional picture of the contributor's teaching personality and approach. But what if we did the same thing with an individual organization? This is the first in a four-part series illustrating the work happening at KID smArt in New Orleans, LA featuring both teaching artist and administrative voices every Monday this month. Don't forget to put ALT/space in your feed reader so you won't miss a thing! --Malke Rosenfeld, ALT/space Editor

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I have unique task for a teaching artist: I am supposed to work with a group of fourth graders who have particularly intense behavior struggles to improve their overall classroom behavior. While arts integration is generally used to help students access core academic content like math, science, and reading, our class employs visual arts integration to target social emotional objectives – like being able to express oneself, and working safely and successfully as a group. Particularly, I work with students have characteristics of depression and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and we use advanced visual art techniques to tap into coping mechanisms and self-acceptance.

For our first class together, I asked the kids to compose self-portraits. They were supposed to use elements of collage and pay special attention to the shapes on their faces -- triangular noses, circular pupils, and lips shaped like bows. This was an introductory activity to get us acquainted with supplies and artistic concepts, building up to some larger, full-scale art pieces that would incorporate a variety of media and techniques.

For the most part, this was a calming and engaging project. Fourth graders in New Orleans have to take high-stakes standardized tests, which makes fourth grade a year that everyone cares about, and simultaneously dreads. As a result, fourth grade teachers necessarily give their students lots of test prep; filling lessons with bubble-in answer documents and daunting packets of worksheets. The students making self-portraits that day seemed generally grateful for the momentary respite from right answers and ScanTron pages. I say “generally” because there was one noticeable exception. I’ll call him Justin.

Justin -- a short nine-year-old with big, square-shaped glasses, tightly-cropped hair, and endlessly skeptical facial expressions -- started his self-portrait several times, but he never got very far. He cut out a large, brown oval out of construction paper for his head. He ripped up the large, brown oval immediately after cutting it out. “It looked like a potato,” he said. “My real head is no potato.”

#Sophie Johnson #New Orleans #Louisiana #visual art #art smart #elementary #special education

Deep, Rich, Wide & Timeless [2013 ALT/space Retrospective]

ALT/space is about the work of artists who teach in schools, communities and prisons. ALT/space contributors advance the teaching artist field by writing specific, concrete, and powerfully personal stories about what they do and how they do it.

2013 on ALT/space gave us a deep, rich, wide, and timeless swath of stories about teaching artist practice. To celebrate the New Year, let's take a look back at some of the most evocative and relevant ALT/space stories from the past year.

As you read, I ask you: How can you ignore the deep expertise and passion for art and learning evident in these posts? Some question, some observe and ponder, some struggle, but ALL show the power and impact teaching artists have in schools and communities everywhere. Please consider your role in advocating for the teaching artist field and the work we do by sharing ALT/space with others. I also encourage you to consider adding your own stories to the mix in 2014.

Happy New Year!! --Malke Rosenfeld, ALT/space Editor

______________________________________ January brought us Working with Children on the Asperger-Autism Spectrum by Holly Adams. This is perhaps the best, most nuanced piece of writing I have read about working with students on the spectrum. Holly's expertise in this area is applicable to all classrooms, arts-based or otherwise.

In February Ryan Conarro wrote a highly nuanced and helpful post about what it means to collaborate with teachers. Read his thoughts in Listen to Your Teacher. This is a must read.

In March Alison Holland wrote Taking My Daughters to Work which highlighted the struggles of balancing family with a freelance lifestyle. I hope 2014 brings more discussions like this one.

#Holly Adams #Ryan Conarro #alison holland #chio flores #Anna Plemons #kate plows #jeff redman #J.E. Johnson #Victoria Row-Traster #Angela M Gallo #meghan zanskas

Planning for Play | Meghan Zanskas

As an artist I find pleasure when playing around in the studio. As a teacher, I have long wanted to afford my students the same sense of creative freedom within the classroom. As a researcher, I’ve decided to see what happens when I try giving them that freedom.

Keri Smith’s book, How to be an Explorer of the World, begins with a set of instructions: How to use This Book. I have found that this six-point list lends itself very well to art education. It’s the last two that I like the best and use the most: number five, “Treat everything as an experiment,” and six, “Start with whatever makes you feel a twinge of excitement.” (Smith, 2008).

I kept these two instructions in mind when planning a recent lesson for my third grade artists. When inviting them to create, I wanted my plan to be less about what they would make and more about where they would start. I had a seed of an idea, something that gave me that twinge of excitement, so I decided to use Keri Smith’s advice and give it a try. I wanted to invite them to play during art class, without the goal of a final product in mind.

This wasn't entirely new for me. I've been reading a lot about the importance of play and freedom in student learning, and trying to implement it in my teaching. Being an elementary school art teacher, I’m in the exciting position to impact the art experiences of over 600 students. Peter Gray says play is, “perhaps the key to repairing our broken education system – returning joy, fun and excitement to learning and education,” (Gray, 2013). In a chapter of The Learner-Directed Classroom, George Szekely says that “Play is where art begins – in life and in an art class,” (Jaquith, 2012). With these statements in mind, and permission from Keri Smith to follow the twinge of excitement, planning for play has become my main mission in an effort to connect students’ school experiences with the important work of child’s play.

I started small, trusting that the kids would take the project wherever they needed it to go; and they did. After all, who doesn't like to play?

#Meghan Zanaskas #Maryland #elementary #visual art

Teaching Art History through the Visual Culture of Contemporary Film | A. A. Sieunarine

I have been teaching a foundation course in Art History at Boricua College for two years. Although all the students live in New York City, home to a plethora of art museums and galleries, getting them to look at art seemed like an arduous chore. After many lectures and slide shows I realized this method had lost its effectiveness. As I entered through the majestic grand entrance way and staircase of the prominent architectural structure of the college (Audubon Terrace, a landmark early-20th century Beaux Arts/American Renaissance built in 1907) I thought about finding a way to connect the old with the new. How could I paste the past visuals of old histories, art and artifacts within present human existence and help my students connect it to their contemporary world?

To start, I identified contemporary films that integrated the art and artifacts of ancient cultures with the present day. As an experiment, I showed the memorable ending of the film Tess of the D’Urbervilles that displayed the ancient megalithic ruins of Stonehenge, commonly believed in Thomas Hardy’s time to be a pagan temple and an ancient burial site. The visual imagery of Tess laying on the ruin, and the sun emerging thoughtfully behind her, created a moving contemporary visual of a pre-historic monumental past.

#A. A. Sieunarine #art history #NYC

Exquisite Corps(e) | Laura Reeder

Creating a corpse to work as a corps.

Doing arts-based professional development in lots of different places has presented one consistent, universal challenge: How can we explore complex, pedagogical ideas when our art-making materials must be simple enough to pass through airport security? While this is not a deeply critical concern, it does mean that adult students work with materials that have led to outdated “school art” (Efland, 1976) stereotypes being reinforced. I have seen too many hearts and rainbows made by default when grown-ups are frozen by child-oriented tools.

When confronted with those old limitations of markers, paper, and glue-sticks, I have used an Exquisite Corpseparlor game as an exercise for unpacking contemporary teaching and learning ideas with a wide range of professional development communities. The resulting outcome has been an increasing army of grownups who remember that playfulness still has an intellectual role in their serious work.

Exquisite Corpse was named by Surrealists in the early twentieth century as a working metaphor (and drinking game) for synthesizing playfulness and individual ideas with assigned structures and multiple voices. A single piece of paper is folded into three or four sections. A head, body with arms, legs, and feet is drawn or collaged onto each section and it is passed along so that each part is completed by a different person, and a final corpse or body is created. The flexibility of this simple artistic structure has provided a dynamic form for many professional development situations.

Creativity Corps

Pre-service, undergraduate teacher “corps of creative corpses”, Syracuse University.

I played Exquisite Corpseas a game with education students who were trying to let go of fears about creativity and picture making. The final corps of corpses, or body of bodies, was thrilling because each individual was off the hook for creating something perfect on their own. The emphasis moved from their individual abilities or perceived disabilities and toward their shared roles in the work. Each individual was hunting actively for the parts that they contributed to different bodies. They could not believe that they created something so unique in fifteen-short minutes. This set the stage for a semester of fearless explorations and new ownership of creativity in their future classrooms.

Critical Thinking Corps

#Laura Reeder #MassArt #visual arts #professional development #New York #Massachusettes

How Older Adults Learn Choreography | Judith Sachs

I like to show my 80-year-old dancers examples of performances on YouTube in order to inspire them for the work we’re about to tackle. They are typically incredulous that they can see all that movement on my tiny iPhone screen and also of the opinion that “all those twists and turns are fine, but I’m not 25 any more like you!” (I am 66.)

I learned my choreographic technique from training with Mark Morris’s Dance for Parkinson’s format. The idea is to help my students feel like they are graceful, limber, and accomplished, even if they can’t stand up.

When Morris first thought about crafting dance classes for people with Parkinson’s Disease, he went back to his own choreography to see what he had done that might be possible for non-dancers to recreate. Seated dancers can convey a great deal of what the whole body can do (the mourners in a semi-cirlce in Morris’s “Orfeo ed Euridice,” for example)—so I always start my dancers with chairs to make them feel secure, even if we end up standing behind them or moving away from them.

Building muscle memory in an older dancer takes time and patience. Students have to be able to imagine the move before they do it. I both show and tell the group what to do (speaking the instructions about a half-second before I demonstrate the step); I use motivating language to get them to try something new; I convey the sequence of a phrase (what comes first, second, or third); and I talk about the musicality of it (“this is a long, slow step so you can take your time and breathe here”). I then put the steps to music and indicate how they go together.

The Dance for Parkinsons training gives TAs tools that help to chunk up the phrases and teach them one at a time. My strategy is to evoke common images, like “picking up your grandchild,” “sweeping crumbs off the table,” or “stepping out of a bathtub” or (my personal favorite) “helicoptering your hand until the propeller falls off.” I teach it first, with no music, and then, as I play my iPhone or ask my accompanist to start on the downbeat “…and-a 5,6,7,8,” I lead the dancers through the phrase and count it out to supply the rhythm.

Most of my classes meet only once a week, which means that any changes I make in the choreography once I have set the dance have to be very simple. It’s hard enough to remember steps and sequences of movement when you’re 20—imagine how tough this is at 80. What I typically do is build a choreographic vocabulary made up of a few very distinct patterns. Then when I want to alter something or add a few nuances, my students are more likely to catch on. I find that the leaders in the group will go over the latest details with their companions during the week when they get together for coffee or a card game and this reinforces the changes.

They often want to discuss what is going to happen in the dance (as though they were ticking off items on a shopping list) before they actually do it, just to be sure they understood me. We’ll have a discussion about which moves come in which place and when they change. Then we’ll run through. I try not to stop them because I feel the sequence and build of a dance is something the dancer learns from doing over and over. Also, stopping is frustrating. Once they’re on a roll, I want the momentum to carry them!

In the video that follows, the dancers knew that I had studied with Alvin Ailey in the 1960s and had a feel for his choreographic style—several of them had seen “Revelations” when the professional touring company came to Philadelphia in recent years. I stripped down one of the songs in the suite and made this a dance that they could perform physically and which also meant a great deal to them spiritually.

#Judith Sachs #older adults #Dance for Parkinsons #philadelphia #pennsylvania #dance

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