The Faces of Spaces for Possibility: 2014-2015

"It's Not Just Art: A Complicated Conversation with Teachers"

SAVE the DATE

“It’s Not Just Art: A Complicated Conversation with Teachers"

Opening reception: Thursday, May 22^nd, 2014 from 6:00-10:00 p.m.

Exhibition dates May 22-May 26

Firecat Projects

2124 N Damen Ave

Chicago, IL 60647

What are our preconceived notions around the role of the art teacher within public education today? How can we better understand the complicated and rich teaching practices of teachers within the art studio and core content classrooms? Why do we need art teachers? Who are these art teachers (as teachers, as artists, as people)? Who is witness to their evolution? What does it mean to say, “oh, it’s just art?”

Since 2011, Arts at the Center at the Center for College Access and Success at NEIU has been working with a group of dedicated art and content teachers in the Chicago Public Schools using Lois Hetland’s Studio Thinking Framework as a lens for critically examining their teaching practice and understanding student thinking. This is an adaptive, thoughtful and responsive community committed to learning from and sharing with each other. The group draws upon each other’s expertise and responds to changes as they emerge in the classroom, across the District and within their teaching practice. As a University program, we are a hybrid of educators, artists, researchers and ethnographers that fosters artistic thinking within an academic setting. Collectively, we are working through and working towards a deeper understanding of the nature of artistic thinking processes.

We are inviting the public into a dialogic conversation around our teaching practices. This conversation strengthens our work. Students’ learning is expanded when teachers become self aware of their own practices. A new understanding is created through this rigorous conversation. We invite you to come and participate.

Studio Thinking Teacher Exhibition Preparation

On October 28, our learning community came together to collectively imagine, dialogue and envision possibilities for our upcoming Teacher Exhibition. The Exhibition provides the opportunity to tell your stories as art teachers and teachers who use the arts by highlighting the intricacies, the in-between spaces, the essences, and the complexities of your daily practice in and out of the classroom. This is your narrative to tell.

From "Learning to Love You More"

The clip below, "Maxine Greene on Teachers College: Its People and History," served as a spark to our idea generation for the Exhibition. In this clip, Greene discusses the ideas of being "wide awake," imagining possibilities, embracing others and various perspectives, being awake enough to be enraged to resist, and other wonderful ideas. 

These are some of the ideas the group generated. We should continue to revisit these ideas as we move through the year. What else do you want to say? What else should the Exhibition entail? What don't you want the Exhibition to be about? We encourage you to imagine possibilities and share them with the group as they come to you.

As Kate and Matt listened to your thoughts and reviewed the conversation, these are some of the emerging questions we are hearing as a way to tell your story:

What do you wish you were teaching?
What are you not teaching?
What do you think others think of you?
What can't you leave at school? What do you bring home with you?
What do you bring into the classroom from home?
How does your vision of teaching compare to your lived experience?
How do you transcend the times and think of new methodologies?

Navigating a Learning Community

Hi Everyone,

As we approach our next PD we thought a review of some factors set forth by Lois for creative learning, innovative practice and sustainable models was worth revisiting. This is a time when you might be questioning what are my next steps, what do I need to do? We'll reference these guidelines throughout our PD. We find them really helpful for guiding our process.

Drawing by Gail Geltner, www.gailgeltner.com

 

Professional Learning Community: Stay in regular touch, virtually and f2f, with explicit intentions (make your goals public) and with actions linked directly to those intentions (focus) and with regular checks to see what you’re learning and how, by comparing what you’re doing and learning to your intentions!

Professional development focused on student learning: Research is clear that PD that builds community and is focused on student learning is what is effective.

Assignments/Accountability: Agree to stay with it; understand that others depend on you; participate; make explicit commitments to regular meetings, experiences; conversations, and explorations/investigations/inquiry. 
Seek a question of importance to you and pursue it: Teacher action research is a powerful source of teacher learning and satisfaction, and a powerful counter-force to the despair and exhaustion that’s permeating the atmosphere of schools.

Make Learning Visible: share your successes, failures, and process; use video documentation in the classroom and as a way to reflect; visit each other and talk about what you see; look together at student work to see student minds as they develop; make “thinking walls” and post your understanding goals to make your purpose visible to all in the learning community (students, teachers, parents, colleagues, administrators, visitors) and keep it in the front of all your minds.

Drawing by Gail Geltner, www.gailgeltner.com

Exposure/Contact with Contemporary Artists and Art: Familiarize yourselves with and use Art21 and other videos of artists and artworks; read blogs and periodicals and websites; go to museums and galleries and artist talks – with and without kids – and talk about art; invite artists to visit your class; go to visit artists in their studios and on the street; make your own art regularly; watch TED talks on arts.
Keep Making at the Center: Dedicate 60 - 75% of learning time to students actively making work; link all non-making learning and activity tightly and directly to making; do mid-process critiques often, keep them short, do more early in the process when ideas are still flexible; offer mini-DLs on new processes; Give students choice and make assignments roomy so students have to/get to make lots of decisions (thinking!).

Track uses of the Studio Habits: Use Studio Habits to analyze your students’ work and working, your lessons, your courses, your own art-making, your viewing of work of professional artists, your viewing of videos and texts of artists talking about their working and work; and your students’ uses of Studio Habits to do all these things.

Use the habits yourself to see how they benefit you: Teachers need to take the time they need to become fluent in thinking with the habits. Use them to reflect on many different contexts (what you and others see, what you and others do, what you and others make, how and what you and others teach) and share your observations and questions and tentative conclusions.