Presidents

I will never teach “President’s Day” the same way! Even at second grade the students know about Lincoln, a log cabin and the penny; Washington as the father of our country. But what do the presidential portraits reveal about the person and the office! Next February I will teach using resources from the National Portrait Gallery and the Smithsonian Institution. Last Friday we were enriched with the knowledge of yet another expert, Ellen Miles, from the NPG. The connections between the portrait, the person and the office were enlightening and fascinating We followed the content with actual doing. We were led in an art-making (self-portrait) lesson with a member of Lesley University’s art education faculty. I REALLY liked this part. I think we should do the art-making more often in this institute, but that’s my bend. It would probably raise the affective filter for some of my colleagues here.

Connections

I am surrounded by history! Yesterday we toured a federal period house as well as the Salem Custom House. Nathaniel Hawthorne worked there.

Also these last two days we have visited museums and have received welcomes and presentations from their education departments. Representatives of both institutions made it clear that they value working with educators and want to make their collections useful to us. Many, including these museums, have great resources in person and online both. Yesterday was the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem and today was the Worcester Art Museum in Worcester. At the PEM we completed activities related to using objects… observe, write, share. At the WAM she told us about the studio wing of their museum and how they strive to make a connection between looking at art and making art. Both are strategies that we encourage using in our Arts LINC classrooms. At the PEM I saw a “Panorama of a Whaling Voyage” (ca. 1860) --- a wooden stage with scrolling screens. It was a colonial version of Kamishibai. At the WAM I saw a Thomas Hart Benton “Corn and Winter Wheat” that will be a good landscape to show my students for during our Field to Table unit. We are seeing works of artists represented in the Picturing America poster sets that many schools across the country received from the NEH. Today we also saw the “real” Paul Reverse silver tea set too!

Connections, connections, connections.

Picturing America Institute

I am participating in a Picturing America National Endowment of the Humanities Teacher Institute this month at Salem State College in Salem, Massachusetts. I arrived on July 4 and it started on Sunday, July 5. It will be four weeks of listening, learning, sharing, observing, participating, and integrating visual art, language arts, and history! We have started off at a running pace! It is wonderful to have the opportunity to work with curricular specialists and others who have worked with integration in different settings. The faculty that has been assembled to lead us through these weeks already has my mind going in many directions. Their expertise both individually and collectively is amazing. I will need to narrow down some of my thoughts for a project, but for now I’m taking it all in and it’s comfortably spinning in my brain! This really is incredible! I’m thankful to have received this opportunity!

Prairie Bliss

Peace

We have a class of practicing and future teachers who are all learning about arts integration into the elementary classroom right now. The focus is the prairie and its' enveloping sense of place. As they are composing their narratives I am writing for the blog. As I/we teach this class I have this uncomfortable feeling. I am not as much in control as I'd like to be. It is a disconcerting feeling but in many ways it is good for me, for this is what I ask the teachers around me to do- get out of your comfort zone and try something else. Stay in this place where you are not in total control and be ok with it. We plan the lessons around the big ideas of integration but the truth is we do not know how it will come out, what will fall flat and will succeed.

This morning we stepped into the prairie in Spring Creek right outside Denton. We spent close to two hours walking around taking photographs. Slowly as time progressed we hushed fanned out and spent time connecting with the surroundings- with photographs as the focal lens. The mood was muted and perfect for sensing and focusing on emotions. We took the risk and the time... Still there is a lot to do to help these practicing and future teachers as well as ourselves make connections and link all of this to actual classroom instruction.

It would be great to examine these experiences as they develop, my guess is that my concerns and feelings are not unique.

Another Denver Airport post: Creative Teachers

We had our end of the year meetings in both sites over the last 10 days, Nebraska and California. As Monique, Nancy and I discussed the energy and immense productivity we saw in the meeting we started recognizing how uniquely creative and collaborative our teachers are. Our approach focuses on key ideas while letting teachers create their units and variations. The idea is that fidelity is to core ideas and not a prescribed lesson. Our principles are about process, thinking and integration. Our teachers have become amazing at using this platform to be creative. Even though grades have created units together the products were often different in meaningful ways. For example all second grades created a stamp as one assignment- but those were not uniform in the classes- showing that kids are creative, not between classroom showing that teachers are creative. More than that they UNDERSTAND what are the key ideas and where they can be creative and create variations that reflect their classrooms, individuality and skill/ comfort level.
As a researcher this has cost me much- and they are constantly aware of the research asking " we don't want to screw up the data". But the results are exactly what we wanted- implementation that is powered by teachers, sustainable, meaningful. For a second there I thought - if I had to retire right now, I would have retired happy.
If we want a creative generation we need to let teachers be creative! For that to happen professional development must provide the space for teacher creativity to emerge.

More Thoughts about Creativity

Before I start I'd like to send a hello to Regina Murphy of Ireland, and invite her to contribute to the blog (let me know and I'll set this up). I never intended this blog to be a one person act and what Regine is doing I find extremely interesting (I'll let her tell about it...).

In my last post I focused on skill as a part of creativity and potentially a filter for measuring "higher order" processes.
The question stays- what is creativity? My understanding is still evolving and this blog seems to be one of the places I do my thinking, so here goes:
Creativity has a strong creative domain component- like expertise in any field it is highly contextualized. If you are a sculptor a painter or a mathematician your deep understanding of your field is part of being creative or it at least a necessary but not sufficient condition. Such domain knowledge is what enables the artist (and I use this term to include anyone attempting to create an art product) to translate a vision, intent to a product. As Mike Jackson explained to me [I am paraphrasing] For me creativity is when I can translate what I see in my mind on the paper, then it is a good product. I care about the process the most, once it is done I stop being engaged.
Yet, people who describe themselves (or by others) as creative seem to be able to carry some of their creativity with them into new domains explore them and finally be engaged with them in full. Looking at the Universal Learning Model that my colleagues and I are focusing on- creativity becomes a multi-dimensional construct that combines several aspects of learning. The first is knowledge of the domain, most important is procedural knowledge that drives the creative process itself. Second is focus- single minded focus of attentional resources (i.e. working memory) to the task at hand. It is the experience of Flow or just extreme focus on the work that is often romantically portrayed. Finally and maybe the characteristic that most often helps the artist transcend a creative genre and learn a new one- Motivation.
The most universal feature of creativity is motivation. Motivation directs attention and allows the focus described above, which in turn leads to learning of new knowledge of the domain and most importantly the process. In motivation I think the most important features are slef-concept, seeing one's self as an artist or creative person. The second is the longing for complete engagement or flow. I think that once you develop Flow, you constantly search for it. And if you cannot find it you look for new domains in which you can re-experience it. Oliver Sacks describes such a case in "The Case of the Colorblind Painter". A desperate search by the artist for the way to rediscover flow probably the experience that ancient artists used to describe as the presence of a muse.
More later