Understanding Goals and Planning

Description of our service-learning project:
Noval and Art Ed 2 students will work with Emeryville teacher Sara Stillman and her high school students, Emeryville artists and a public art advocate and planner, to create a walking tour of Emeryville’s public art for students and develop curriculum that looks at how art in the community helps it citizens to explore the connections between art and community, public life in Emeryville and how public art reflects the city.

It is difficult for Emery students to get to museums and galleries to see art in person. This project will create a unique process for students to be able to see and explore first hand the work of Emery artists and public works in their own neighborhood. CCA students will develop and implement the curriculum with Emery high school art classes and we will hope to be able to publish this curriculum for other Emery teachers to use with their students. Some of the guiding UG’s of Sara’s class that we will address in this project are:
-As artists how can we communicate with others?
-As artists how do we solve problems?

We are still developing the specifics of the project which will not fully unfold until the Art Ed 2 class starts and students can begin to brainstorm ideas based on Emery Secondary students and teacher needs.

It has been a good reflective exercise to begin planning this class and to really think about the best way to lay out the ideas of the class as it has been established in the past and think about the goals in terms of community service. These goals may be revised as we begin our process:

ACADEMIC LEARNING
1. How does my art making inform my practice as an educator, and how does art education inform my practice as an artist in the world?

2. How can artists use their art practice to understand contemporary life and influence shifts in society through their teaching and learning?

3. What do teaching and learning look like, and what are best practices in teaching?

Questions/Notes: These are the UG’s of the class – but implicit in them are ideas around service learning (UG2) and artist process (UG3) – both part of the Engage mission for CCA students. See Studio Learning and community goals for more specifics.

STUDIO LEARNING
1. How can I use SHoM as a studio tool to help inform my own artistic process, thinking and learning and that of the students I teach?

2. What elements are necessary for developing meaningful, mindful arts curriculum?

3. How can we turn my knowledge and mastery of art tools and process into successful curriculum?

Questions/Notes: Still working on these…need to flush them out more but this is a start…

COLLABORATIVE/COMMUNITY LEARNING
1. How and why is art useful in learning about a community’s culture and values?

2. How can we inspire and empower each other to lead through artistic learning and practice?

3. What is the value in the work we are doing together?

4. What is the connection of art to the community?

5. Why do we need public art to tell the stories of Emeryville or any other community?

INTER- and INTRA- PERSONAL LEARNING
1. As artists how can we solve problems?

2. What are the values and ideas I believe in and how do they apply to my teaching practice as an artist and how to they apply to the community I am working in?

3. As artists how to we communicate our ideas with others?

4. What are the stories we want to tell through our art practice, teaching and working collaboratively?

Questions/Notes: Some of the questions above might be posed to the students at Emery Secondary as part of this project.