116/365 Find Something Interesting, Ask Questions

oppression/liberation

On the pavement of a running and biking path are two images left by an anonymous stencil artist. The first is a profile of a woman wearing a hijab. Slightly lower and to the right of this image is another painted, stenciled image of what could easily be a rendering of an image of a mid-twentieth century pin-up girl.

Below the woman in the hijab is a single word “Oppression?” and below the pin-up girl, “Liberation?”

While some might see these images and bemoan the defacement of public property, in reality there is much more to be found in this small stretch of sidewalk.

This is a quarter’s worth of deep curriculum here that could push the most precocious students to challenge their beliefs about the world.

  • What is public property?
  • What does it mean to be liberated?
  • What does it mean to be oppressed?
  • How is gender defined across cultures?
  • How does your view of the world influence your understanding of how other people live?
  • What does art do?
  • What should art do?
  • Who decides the value of art?
  • When might it be acceptable to break the law?

The questions are potentially never-ending. They should be. Good, thoughtful teaching and learning is a process more generative of questions than hard answers.

In the schools we need, the world provides a curriculum rife with opportunities for questions, and the people within these schools recognizes these opportunities for what they are and could be.

This image on the sidewalk need not come packaged in an aligned, approved, and adopted curriculum. It need only come from an individual who has developed the habit of mind that allows, “Hmmm, that looks interesting,” to be followed by, “I’ll take a picture of that and see what we can do with it.”

In the simplest of terms, this process is probably perpetrated by classroom teachers. At least at first, this is likely the only way to cultivate such curiosity (especially given the educational and curiosity neglect many children face in schools). Given time, though, this will become the culture of the classroom. Given more time, it will become the culture of the school.

Most importantly, given space, this will develop an understanding that neither classroom nor school is defined by the walls of a building or a designations outlined by a district.

For any of the questions listed above, the only materials necessary for diving down the rabbit hole of inquiry is a device to capture and share the image and then not much else. If the questions are being asked in a school with wi-fi access and a “bring your own device” policy, excellent. If it is a school with access to 1:1 computers, superb. A computer cart or lab? Tremendous. A library within the school or down the street? That’ll do nicely.

In the same way that schools must learn to follow questions and allow them to generate more questions, they must consider resources as generative as well. After, “What are our questions?” teachers and students must ask, “How will we find answers?”

Some spaces with over-abundant resources and close community ties will find the process easier to navigate. Those schools with limited access will find it more difficult. What experience has shown and what can always be relied on is the fact that a good and worthwhile set of questions communally generated can overcome however easy or difficult the process may seem.

If students need to find answers, they will find them. This will not change the difficulty of the process in the most isolated schools of Appalachia or the poorest of urban schools. It will, however, make that difficulty surmountable.

A camera and the openness for questions. From there, it’s hard to imagine anything standing in the way of learning.

4/365 Let’s Learn to Draw

If you, like me, are as enamored with pretty much anything RSA Animate brings to the web or have had the pleasure of being at a conference facilitated by my friend Stacey Weitzner, when you’ve probably had the thought, “I wish I could do that.”

Making my way through the ole “ETC” folder of PDFs I’ve been meaning to read for longer than I’d like to admit, I finally read Brandy Agerbeck’s Brandyfesto (and you should too).

I’ll offer you three reasons to read it rather than pulling it apart for you. At 26 pages, it’s a brief read.

  1. While teachers are often heavy in the linguistic and logical/mathematical intelligences to make their way to the front of the classroom, we’re often pledging to bring other intelligences to our teaching and our students’ learning. Agerbeck goes one better and asks her readers to try their hands at developing their kinesthetic intelligences.
  2. Quote 1: We get far too hung up on product. It’s only one part of the whole. Build a practice you enjoy. Do the work. Do the work some more. Observe and admire your progress. Develop that challenge you. The product will follow.
  3. Quote 2: As a noun, I listen to conversation and look for its shape.

I know more has been written on the art of graphic facilitation, but this was the first piece I’ve read that asked me to join in as I considered its place in learning.

Agerbeck’s Brandyfesto brought up two thoughts for me:

  1. I wish I could do a brief “book club” examining it with a team of teachers.
  2. I can’t believe how much I missed as a classroom teacher in not asking my students if I had any graphic facilitators in the room.

What do you think?

One of my favorite RSA Animate videos:

If a picture’s worth a thousand words, isn’t art class more valuable than reading?

A few weeks ago, some friends and I visited Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art. I did there what I do each place I’m asked to view contemporary art. I looked at each piece for a few seconds, read the accompanying artist’s or curator’s statement thoroughly, and then looked back to the art thinking, “Oh, that’s what they meant to say. Of course!”

This is my way with contemporary art.

It is not, in any way, how I encounter printed words.

In middle school, reading a textbook, I skipped the graphs, the charts, and the tables. I read the words. I’m not sure why I thought those other pieces were there. Filler, maybe?

It’s worked out pretty well so far. Being able to read and manipulate text is the lingua franca of school and the wider world.

Yesterday, I found myself arguing for the opposite. In my Digital Humanities course, I tried to push and pick at people’s thinking around the necessity or sanctity of text.

My thesis is this: Information is equally imperfectly served through transmission via text as through transmission via graphics.
Images, though, don’t have equal footing when we think about reading and literacy. The two terms ellicit images of words, phrases, sentences – verbage.

But they don’t need to, and I’m starting to wonder if we’re not doing ourselves and our students a disservice by putting the premium on the ability to read text.

We lose not only the ability to create and read images, but the comfort and habits of mind that accompany this way of seeing the world as well.

Though the gallery was utterly silent on my trip to the ICA, each image was screaming with the artists’ ideas and commentary. I just had no tools for how to read and understand their language.