Friday, January 13, 2012
Planning updates!
Stephanie and I met up last week and worked out a lot of details
needed for our planning sheets for CAPE. I think I'll post here some of
that planning stuff and I'll come back to defining a teaching artist
later. Here are some screen shots of our planning docs! Click the images to see them larger.
Friday, January 6, 2012
Wednesday, January 4, 2012
What is Design Seminar?
I updated the left sidebar with CAPE's description of this program we're participating in, but I've also spent a good long while thinking about what the program means to me on a more personal level.
Full disclosure: I work for CAPE in another capacity- as a research assistant- and so I've been exposed to CAPE's language, ideas, and practices for longer than many of the other Design Seminar participants, and I'll be the first to admit that exposure, which has and continues to complement my academic and personal research in arts education, has me feeling so prepared and so excited to take on the additional role of "teaching artist". Since last spring I've experienced a degree of jealousy toward the artists whose in-classroom work I've been observing and recording as a researcher, because the ideas and the projects they get to explore with their teaching partners and students are so interesting and innovative and worthwhile, and their impact can often be seen immediately, right there in the moment. Also, I'm a big fan of collaborative work/art/play but I spent many, many months working in isolation on my thesis; seeing people similar to myself (and incredibly different!) getting to teach and learn the way teacher-artist pairs do made me genuinely pine for such a project and voila! Such a project is in the works.
So within the boundaries of "such a project", I hope Stephanie and I will be able to work with each other and our students to develop and address Big Questions that have broad implications for all our lives starting right this moment. I also hope we can model for our students what collaborative learning/teaching/making/doing/asking/exploring can look like, in ways they can understand and articulate. On top of all that, it's been a long time since I was free to focus on my own art-making and I'm kind of out of practice... I hope to find fresh inspiration and motivation through working with a class full of young people and their very energetic teacher, Stephanie.
Full disclosure: I work for CAPE in another capacity- as a research assistant- and so I've been exposed to CAPE's language, ideas, and practices for longer than many of the other Design Seminar participants, and I'll be the first to admit that exposure, which has and continues to complement my academic and personal research in arts education, has me feeling so prepared and so excited to take on the additional role of "teaching artist". Since last spring I've experienced a degree of jealousy toward the artists whose in-classroom work I've been observing and recording as a researcher, because the ideas and the projects they get to explore with their teaching partners and students are so interesting and innovative and worthwhile, and their impact can often be seen immediately, right there in the moment. Also, I'm a big fan of collaborative work/art/play but I spent many, many months working in isolation on my thesis; seeing people similar to myself (and incredibly different!) getting to teach and learn the way teacher-artist pairs do made me genuinely pine for such a project and voila! Such a project is in the works.
So within the boundaries of "such a project", I hope Stephanie and I will be able to work with each other and our students to develop and address Big Questions that have broad implications for all our lives starting right this moment. I also hope we can model for our students what collaborative learning/teaching/making/doing/asking/exploring can look like, in ways they can understand and articulate. On top of all that, it's been a long time since I was free to focus on my own art-making and I'm kind of out of practice... I hope to find fresh inspiration and motivation through working with a class full of young people and their very energetic teacher, Stephanie.
Tuesday, January 3, 2012
Note to self
I'll do this from time to time, post a note to myself when I think of something I can't do right this moment but don't want to forget. This time:
"What is Design Seminar?"
We should try to answer that question now, in a few different ways, then address it again at the end of this first year, maybe?
"What is Design Seminar?"
We should try to answer that question now, in a few different ways, then address it again at the end of this first year, maybe?
Questions I'm curious about...
Some of these questions are adapted from concerns I developed while researching and writing my thesis during 2010-2011. They were initially developed from the perspective of a budding academic with the loftiest of goals for community arts space and youth empowerment, and I'm excited to have the chance to explore them within the very standardized structure- in terms of power dynamics, rules, expectations, etc- of a public school classroom.
1. How can classrooms in CPS schools be inviting, comfortable, democratic spaces for students and teachers?
2. What happens to classroom dynamics when behaviors, lessons, and traditional authoritative hierarchies are recalibrated?
3. How, as an adult learner-educator, can I engage young people in a way that clearly respects their lived experience and areas of personal expertise and welcomes them into our shared space as also learner-educators?
4. What happens when young people help create the rubrics by which they will be assessed (by themselves, their peers, and their classroom teachers)? Will they understand/embrace/reject that degree of responsibility and autonomy? How will we assess what is happening?
These are just a few on the list. Has anyone out there in CPS or other public school or community systems explored these things with their students lately? Any ideas/tips?
1. How can classrooms in CPS schools be inviting, comfortable, democratic spaces for students and teachers?
2. What happens to classroom dynamics when behaviors, lessons, and traditional authoritative hierarchies are recalibrated?
3. How, as an adult learner-educator, can I engage young people in a way that clearly respects their lived experience and areas of personal expertise and welcomes them into our shared space as also learner-educators?
4. What happens when young people help create the rubrics by which they will be assessed (by themselves, their peers, and their classroom teachers)? Will they understand/embrace/reject that degree of responsibility and autonomy? How will we assess what is happening?
These are just a few on the list. Has anyone out there in CPS or other public school or community systems explored these things with their students lately? Any ideas/tips?
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