One of the things that Sara mentioned to us when we starting our planning conversation was that it was really hard to get her students out of the classroom to see art. There was an issues taking almost 40 students on public transit with out much support and there was the cost of doing this as well.
Sara had been in touch with the Emeryville Public Art Committee about working with students in her classroom and had started a visiting artist program with some of the local Emeryville Coop ceramic artists, who are working in her middle school classed, but she has wanted to forge some other connections with her high school students to the art in Emeryville.
My students picked up on this and we started to explore the idea of creating a walking tour of Emeryville Public Art to help introduce the students to the rich public arts program in their neighborhood and to get them out to explore these community art resources. We began to work with Public Art Commissioner Sharon Wilchar (our project outside expert - image above) to help us learn about and plan the tour we would take the Emery students on in March.
So we went on a tour ourselves, lead by Sharon, of the local art in the neighborhood of Emery Secondary, visited artists studios at the Emeryville Artist Coop and CCA students conducted interview with Emery artists:
This is such a wonderful learning layer in your project, not only are your students getting the experience of designing curriculum and teaching, but 'understanding art world' --learning about public art. I am looking forward to hearing more about how Emery students liked the public art tour. Did it stimulate some good discussions about public space?
ReplyDeleteTrena, one of the things that really hangs teachers up in using real, contemporary art and artists in their teaching is that they don't KNOW the contemporary art and artists working now or locally. For people whose lives are immersed in art, it almost seems impossible, but it's important to realize that teachers really need help if we expect them to connect to the world of practicing artists. I love the modeling in this project of bringing in an expert to teach the student-artist-teachers, who can then pass that information along to the Emery students. Again, simple, but brilliant in the direct way it handles what is a killer problem to many efforts to teach from the contemporary.
ReplyDeleteContemporary and LOCAL, in the students' backyard!!
ReplyDelete