This is my last week writing and fundraising for Spot.us, and I've had such wonderful discussions and interviews reflecting on the workshops in California that I wish I could write an entire article about each one. Each of the educators who I collaborated with has a different concept of the most constructive way to further develop the curriculum, which is exactly the point; this kind of critical pedagogy has succeeded when it can be both appropriate and appropriated in the varying environments of its participants. Each student group can and should conform the lesson to their reality and to their interests.
True to their popular education theology, I got to sit down for an interview with not one, but three of the teachers who I had worked with at Aprendamos in August. We had one of the most informative conversations I've ever participated in about the ideals for an educational system where children love to learn and, as importantly, learn to participate in a loving community.
One of the practical goals of Aprendamos is to make digital media useful in their working class community through education. While we were working on the tree sculpture at Aprendamos, other class groups were practicing filming, and they captured some of our process as they learned some framing strategies. A short clip is attached, and the larger Voces Moviles project is online at http://vozmob.net/
Posted by Rebecca Glaser on 10/26/10
The driving concept of the On the Move workshops is to build a community of learners, replacing conventional teacher-student relationships. As the lucky teacher involved in this model, I have been learning so much. In India I had the opportunity to research cultural art forms as a crucial part of creating situationally appropriate lessons, and San Francisco is equally saturated with artistic culture that I wish I had 9 months to investigate.
A prime example is the Precita Eyes Mural Arts Center, a community-based organization based in the Mission just a dozen blocks away from the site of one On the Move workshop. Precita Eyes offers art classes and mural tours in the Mission District to explore local history and culture, and since 1977 has been collaborating to create many of the gorgeous works of public art throughout San Francisco. Balmy Alley, its narrow 2-block length lined with astonishing murals, has long been a major attraction for students and visitors interested in the unique culture of the Mission.
The nearby elementary school where I facilitated a workshop is also deeply integrated in the local community, providing Spanish immersion education to the entire student body and an innovative afterschool curriculum focused on "service learning". This is another progressive pedagogical approach, where teams of students work together for several months to identify a social problem, develop a plan to address it, and implement their project design. Not surprisingly, the deep-rooted tradition of mural arts in their neighborhood has slipped onto the school grounds. Each of their colorful walls expresses a story of this community's traditions and a new generation exploring their cultural environment. The image attached to this blog post is one example of these murals, and the articles below show a couple more :
http://www.noevalleyvoice.com/2009/November/Schl.htm
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/sfmoms/detail?entry_id=56549
Posted by Rebecca Glaser on 10/19/10
As I move from actively facilitating workshops in San Francisco to processing and trying to comprehend my results, I'm finding so many interesting dimensions of this story that I have to keep reminding myself of the central question I set out to ask. How do young people experience migration?
The array of responses I received to my workshops are not going to congeal into any kind of unified response, and I never expected them to. Children's understandings of migration, travel, and immigration echo the contending conceptions of adult society : I ran across strong emotional associations, experienced travelers and wistful future adventurers, well-informed cultural commentary and total lack of insight into other ways of living.
My biggest challenge now is to decide what aspects of the energetic discussions, the distinct social scenarios, the concepts, and the classroom management to incorporate with this twisty tale of artistic workshops gone mobile. My notes roam around my experiences in India, the rest of the United States, and San Francisco, from pedagogical theory to data-driven foster care programs, from neighborhood demographics to global exchanges, and from traditional art forms to contemporary school psychology. As the community who I'm writing for, do you have any input? Is there a particular theme or topic that really got you curious about this article, or that you feel is absolutely critical in a discussion about the ways migration impact school-age populations?
If you have a thought to share, send me an e-mail at RebeccaH.Glaser@gmail.com
Posted by Rebecca Glaser on 10/06/10
I finished it off with glitter glue. It was a compulsory final touch for the tiger-striped box filled with 3rd-grade stories, modeled after the Rajasthani Kaavad that I use as the centerpiece of my workshops. A Kaavad is a wooden box, carved and brightly painted by skilled artisans, that is traditionally used by traveling storytellers in northern India to illustrate their tales. The front of the boxes open with highly decorated doors, like a small theater of large epics. When I bought my piece, I spent the day with a family who has made these boxes for generations and learned about each stage of the process - read about it here.
My workshop in San Francisco's Mission District reunited me with a class of previous students, and produced a collective art project unlike the previous banyan trees. This time, we made our own Kaavad of personal travel stories with the added opportunity for tiny self-portraits, because a Kaavad holds tiny likenesses of the main characters tucked in its center. I got to decipher images of plane flights and boat rides, visits to family in New York City and Los Nogales, weddings under blue skies and ninja skirmishes.
After placing the last sparkling touches, I got to spend some time with the 2nd grade class and discovered something wonderful. Two years ago, I had a student who almost never spoke. She would answer questions with a word of English in a tone that echoed her mother's Spanish, and she would draw quietly during choice time. She drew beautifully, and the process completely absorbed her attention. Observing her, I began to think about the way arts facilitate self-expression and saw how many students follow a similar process, and eventually began developing curriculum based on the concept. She didn't show up when I started this workshop, though, and I assumed she'd moved away like several of my previous students. Then, after placing the last sparkling touches, when I stepped into a 2nd grade classroom and saw a familiar face hidden underneath a long ponytail, my eyes popped. I asked after reintroductions if she still loves to draw, and she told me with a single word of English that she does. That, at least, is no surprise.
Posted by Rebecca Glaser on 09/21/10
This past Thursday, I began a workshop in San Francisco's Mission District with a particular group of third graders. When I first moved to San Francisco, I worked at an afterschool program teaching the kindergarten class as they entered an entirely bilingual (Spanish & English) public school. It was because of this class that I noticed the especially enthusiastic way that multi-lingual learners respond to art projects and decided to apply for funding to study the connection. It was because of this class that I realized the impacts of child welfare systems on individual mental health, and became interested in the therapeutic potential of alternative schooling. This class was the reason I decided to make learning Spanish my first priority and pitched a writing assignment that would send me to Central America for 6 months. I landed in Guatemala City a few days after celebrating the 2008 election in Duboce Triangle, and haven't attended a day of afterschool since.
While I was away, the kindergarten class had a year of first grade and a year of second, and most of them were available for afterschool on Thursday. When they spotted me, they stared. While they were staring one of them asked who I was, suspiciously, and when I told them they gasped. Then one boy stuck out his arm, pulled up his sleeve, and had me check out the scar from his broken arm. We all had a lot to catch up on.
Third grade students are very different from kindergarteners, but as people they had changed less than I was expecting. The children who had always wanted to talk, wanted to talk about Indian culture. The children who always wanted to grab reached for the storytelling props I brought with me, and the children who preferred laying down for stories stretched out on the rug when I started speaking. But now they read like third graders, and scoured the Indian comic books I brought along for proof that I knew what I was talking about. When I go back for our next session, the discussions are going to be lively.
Posted by Rebecca Glaser on 09/13/10
The On the Move workshop series contradicts contemporary organizational practices on a very basic level. The paradigm for effective social and educational justice work that I have most frequently encountered in India and in the United States is replicability. A curriculum, pedagogy, or technique is often considered worthwhile only after being successfully implemented in several sites. However, the objective of this workshop series is environmental specificity, with the potential to accommodate widely ranging demographics, numbers of participants, grade levels, and scheduling styles. If any two sessions produce too similar an interaction, I view that as a failure in communication. In a workshop with the principal intention of eliciting creative and inclusive self-expression, it's a fatal flaw.
This is not easy to express in an introductory proposal, and teachers and administrators are understandably puzzled when I first approach them. Luckily, the coordinators of two programs where I had previously worked in San Francisco have been very receptive and communicative about the specific interests of their student groups. This week, we're finalizing a workshop project incorporating weaving practices at Graze the Roof, an educational rooftop garden at Glide Memorial in San Francisco's Tenderloin district. In this case our final sculptural piece has to survive in an outdoor learning space, so we chose fabric instead of paper as our primary material and incorporated one or two techniques I learned from the handloom weavers of Pochampally. During my upcoming workshop in the Mission District, I'll not only be reconnecting with former colleagues but also with my students who are now moving into third grade. I'm sure I've never faced a more intimidating reunion, and I can not wait to step into that classroom.
Posted by Rebecca Glaser on 08/26/10
I collaborated with a summer education program called Aprendamos last week to present the second workshop in the "On the move" series with 60 kindergarten through 5th grade students. In the workshop curriculum, I am drawing tremendously from progressive educational theories that reposition students and teachers as mutual learners, and popular education is one of the most dynamic contemporary approaches. Aprendamos (http://www.idepsca.org/aprendamos) is an educational branch of the Instituto de Educacion Popular del Sur de California (Popular Education Institute of Southern California), and last week was my first experience engaging with popular education on an organizational level.
At this point in the summer, the students in this program are already deep into the process of deliberating on their personal and community stories, and last week were addressing the theme of "identity". Conceiving our art project as a sculptural illustration of their identities added unexpected dimensions to my questions about migration. An important aspect of the epic story I begin the workshop with, the Ramayana, is its role in Indian cultural identity. The students at Aprendamos were uniquely situated to discuss that aspect of the narrative, to make comparisons with their own cultures, and above all to ask incredible questions. Many of them were particularly interested in the division between truth and invention that compose a legend, and as bilingual learners, were enthralled by hearing examples of different languages. In keeping with the collaborative process of popular education, they helped me to clarify fields of inquiry that I should incorporate in this article and particular questions I should ask of my workshop participants in the Bay Area this week.
Posted by Rebecca Glaser on 08/09/10This week, I'm spending my mornings at a community center called CARECEN in Los Angeles, a few blocks from MacArthur Park. An organization called IDEPSCA, the Instituto de Educacion Popular del Sur de California (Popular Education Institute of Southern California, http://www.idepsca.org/), uses this space for their summer programming serving 60 local primary school students. Aprendamos, or Let's Learn!, was originally conceived as a family literacy program and the summer curriculum includes academics focused on English literacy and math. Each week is composed around a theme such as community or family, and the schedule includes multi-media, physical activity, and arts. I'm facilitating the arts component of their "identity" week with my workshops.
Last Monday, I walked into the center and sat down to talk with the Program Coordinator. The structure of Aprendamos is formed from many levels of interaction between the principles of popular education on which IDEPSCA is based, and the conventional educational system of LA public schools. A very literal impact comes from the shift in the academic calendar this year. Previously, schools in this area were functioning on a cyclical, year-round schedule that was implemented to ease classroom overcrowding. A new school building will open this fall, and all the students will attend for a typical 9-month academic year - but this summer, one portion of the student body is tossed into a double summer vacation. Along with the scarcity of local summer programs and the accessible fare structure, this filled the program within minutes of registration opening. In the hour or so that I spent at CARECEN last Monday, we were interrupted at one point by a group of unsupervised neighborhood children asking to be allowed into the largely academic summer program.
A more comprehensive effect of this interaction is the curriculum, which employs popular education to prepare students for the challenges of test-centric schools. Popular education is a model of pedagogy that realigns the relationships between teacher, student, and social environment in an often explicitly political effort to promote a unified and non-oppressive community. In practice it depends on consistent dialog, cooperation, and compromise between all the participants to learn from each other. So far, working with the students and dedicated teachers is impressive and the atmosphere of discussion makes 4 or 5 hours each morning of organizing, explaining, building, and reconceiving - strangely - energizing. I'm looking forward to the rest of the week, meeting the final two class groups, and finishing our "community identity" sculpture before I travel north to the Bay Area.
Posted by Rebecca Glaser on 08/04/10
The "On the move" workshop series is built out of active collaborations involving participating organizations, educators, and students; the past few weeks have been spent hammering together the supporting infrastructure. This is now the first project of the Sphoorti Foundation within the United States and in that context, this is also an experiment in non-financial methods of lending support to existing educational organizations. Funding is a consistent challenge for both arts education and programs targeting low-income students - predictably - and efforts to raise money should be paired with practices that minimize the resources required.
The Sphoorti Foundation USA exists to provide additional support towards educating underprivileged youth, extending the reach and impact of the children's home in Andhra Pradesh, India. Providing financial support to other institutions could easily overwhelm the relatively new structure of Sphoorti and prevent the organization from fulfilling its current obligations. In this case, dedication to cross-cultural equality in educational opportunities can be pursued by, well, collaborating. Over the course of these workshops, one of my intentions is to illuminate effective strategies to diversify the basic components that support education. For example, what unique lessons might come from a journalistic approach?
I'm looking around for successful models of education-focused collaborations that share skills, spaces, participants, or other non-financial resources in innovative ways. If any come to mind, please list them in the comments section of this pitch.
Posted by Rebecca Glaser on 07/27/10
I've just wrapped up the first workshop of the US-based series that is leading steadily towards my series this August in the Bay Area; this one ran for five days at the Oberlin Early Childhood Center in Ohio. We built a tree that soared upwards of 5 feet tall, towering over the 3 to 5 year old children who illustrated their travel stories to hang down from the branches. A full description of this curriculum is online here, and I'll be sharing more details and artwork as I receive the documentation for permission.
Posted by Rebecca Glaser on 07/04/10
