As I get ready to
go to Istanbul on a Fund for Teachers Fellowship and professional learning
experience, I am deep in thought about how I can use this experience to further
the role of art education in our K-12 schools.
The project has been named Istanbul: A Mosaic of Meaning. I’ve been
thinking about and preparing for this experience for months now and the
creative side of my brain has thought of quite a few mosaic projects for
elementary art students and also secondary students.
I think the real
meaning in this experience, however, is cultural. How can students grow because of my
experience? That’s the real question.
It’s a deep, thought provoking question.
It can be very complex, if I let it, or it can be fundamentally simple.
Which approach is the correct one? Well, I don’t think anything simple really
allows for a lot of growth. We find
growth in the moments, activities, events, and thoughts that challenge us. So,
as a teacher this tells me that the curriculum I write and the activities that
follow this trip need to be challenging.
But what are these challenges and how do I relate them to elementary art
curriculum? To secondary art curriculum?
In this blog post
I am going to try to summarize the overall challenging points I will focus on
post-fellowship:
1. West Meets East: The Internet, social media, all
things technological have made our world so much smaller than it used to
be. The fact that logistically the east
and the west are halfway across the world from each other are probably the most
logical reason why our cultures are not as known to each other. One goal of
this project will be to introduce western students to eastern, or middle-eastern,
culture, history, geography, and the arts. This will be achieved through: a)
Filming of videos and video clips. b)
Photography of both traditional tourist types of attractions and historical
monuments, but also the every day life of the Turkish people of Istanbul and
the “common things.” 3) Art curriculum
written with a social studies, math, language arts, science, and technology
integration, which has the goal of connecting Turkish art forms with a story,
either historical of contemporary. Curriculum written will have the goal of
introducing western students to eastern life.
2. Sagacious Not
Stereotypical: Higher-level thinking will be encouraged as students explore the
similarities and differences of culture.
As often happens in any culture, the media influences opinion that
develops between the east and west.
Students will be encouraged to examine their sense of self and place and
how they coexist in the world with others who have differing religious,
political, and moral or ethical views. This will be achieved by using the
Twitter hashtag #sagaciousstudents; a social media forum where students and
others can share hopefully positive information about the east and west; about
middle-eastern culture and western culture. An example would be someone
Tweeting a short description of a food or showing an image of public art, etc.
3. Mosaic
Mastery: Through a variety of projects,
inspired by the middle east and the Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman empires in Istanbul,
and also by contemporary, modern day Istanbul, students in K-12 will be explore
a variety of mosaic projects through curriculum written as part of this
fellowship.
4. Encouraging
Earthly Empathy: Through efforts
associated with West Meets East, Sagacious Not Stereotypical (#sagacious), and
Mosaic Mastery, students will be encouraged to learn empathetic skills which
recognize that each human being on our planet has purpose, has something to
offer to the world, should be respected for similarities and differences, and
is a product of their environment. When
students of any age and from any region, country, or continent learn to respect
“life” the world will be a gentler place. Art offers a unique venue to explore
thoughts and feelings in the educational setting.
Research:
Urie
Bronfenbrenner (1917-2005) was born in the Soviet Union, immigrated to the
United States when he was six years old with his family, and was an American
developmental psychologist. He is most known for his Ecological systems of theory regarding child development. His research
brought much attention to the environmental and societal influences on child
development. His research on the microsystem and the macrosystem indicated that
students may live in a microsystem, but they are greatly affected by the larger
world around them in their classroom, their school, their community, their
neighborhood, their country, their world, and so on, their macrosystem. He felt that prior to his research developmental
psychology mostly studied children in strange environments in strange studies
by strangers. His lifelong work focused
on the student’s direct environment having the biggest affect on the child’s
development. Bronfenbrenner helped
establish the Head Start Program for the federal government in the mid-1960’s.
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| Urie Bronfenbrenner |
Keeping
Bronfenbrenner’s theory in mind, students that experience the curriculum and
activities associated with Istanbul: A Mosaic of Meaning will have opportunity
to broaden their microsystem, expand their own macrosystems, and grow in their
knowledge and understanding of the globalsystem. I have spent a lot of time in
my life with artists in every field of the fine arts-band, choir, theatre,
dance, and the visual arts. One
commonality that I find among artists is a large percentage of us are soulful,
heartful, caring people who respect the similarities and differences in others, and who are always challenging themselves to be better. The microsystem, macrosystem, and global system all directly influence art making.
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| Bronfenbrenner's Ecological Child Development System |
We’ve learned
that art making is the perfect ecological system for expressing our humanity;
we are not machines of science, technology, engineering, and math as the STEM
movement would have us explore. We are living,
breathing, feeling, emoting individuals full of steam, STEAM, just add art to
STEM. It’s impossible to have any
educational discipline without art. Think about that for awhile. Right now,
where you are sitting reading this, you are surrounded by art of some kind.
Maybe it is the industrial design of the computer you are using, maybe it is
the architectural design of the building you are in, maybe it is the flora and
fauna surrounding you as you read this and the landscape design, or maybe
there is a painting hanging on the wall where you are working and reading. The
list goes on. You get the point. Even today I read an article that reported on
medical students being asked to draw the human body in an effort to more
closely understand it. You get the point.
Istanbul: A
Mosaic of Meaning will connect the life of the student and educators
participating in it with the globalsystem and how all of humanity fits into it.
That may be a bit philosophical, but, oh yes, art and philosophy are also great
partners. Dr. Suess might have said it
best in The Lorax, “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is
going to get better. It's not.” There is
always room for improvement, and globally that just couldn’t be more evident. We
grow as human beings when we challenge ourselves. I’m definitely challenging
myself on this Fund for Teachers Fellowship, simply because it is halfway
around the world from home. As a teacher I know that if I don’t challenge myself,
ultimately, I won’t be able to challenge my students. When my classroom is an assembly line of
production, rather than an inventive laboratory of learning the mosaic of
meaning is pretty simple. When the
classroom challenges us, all of us, the mosaic becomes epic, much like the
beautiful mosaics in the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. Epic education. That sounds
like a great goal for a Fund for Teachers Fellowship. Art is much more than art. Art has a unique ability to give meaning to our global existence, celebrate our similarities, and unite our differences. And we end up with something beautiful (hopefully) to look at, too!
