monograms and intellectual property

The monograms above are the intellectual property of the students who created them and I show them with permission.

Last spring I worked with grade 7 students in Malvern to study commercial logos and taglines, then the students designed their own personal monograms (designs made from the initials of their names) using concepts of logo design.

The students combined learning from the Language and Visual Arts curricula, such as using line quality and limited colour palettes to create unified designs, and investigating logos as a means to communicate and promote messages and values. I taught them the basics of intellectual property law and to see that their own ideas are potentially intrinsically valuable. I showed them how to navigate the steps in the design process in a systematic manner, from determining intention and brainstorming through editing and publication. I also integrated mathematical concepts such as types of symmetry into the design process.

Learning the language of design empowers students to become more media-savvy and to meet their own needs, for example in self-promotion for job-finding and business. Arts-based learning helps to engage students with ideas in the core curriculum through hands-on, concrete learning and creative culminating tasks. It also allows teachers to differentiate, tapping into students’ skills beyond the verbal.

Mathematical Mandalas and Cityscapes

This spring I worked in two primary classrooms, bringing arts-based learning to math and social studies.

I worked with a grade two classroom teacher to develop and teach this unit combining learning from the math and visual arts curricula, using concepts including shape, pattern, repetition, and a limited palette to create a mandala, and investigating the mathematical properties of circles, polygons and patterns. We also viewed and discussed mandalas from various cultures including Tibetan sand mandalas, South Asian Rangoli/ Kolam, European rose windows, Chinese yin/yan figures, Celtic triskelions and more.

The best moment came when a student pointed out to everyone that my shirt was covered in a repeating pattern made of Mandalas. And I had not noticed! Three cheers for student brilliance. (The shirt’s pattern is the intellectual property of the garment designers so will not post a picture, but trust the kid, it was all true.)

I also worked with a grade two-three teacher, developing and leading an arts-based unit in which the students studied urban structures and land use, used their learning to design their own urban architecture, and created a cityscape (or urban landscape). The unit combined learning from the Social Studies and Visual Arts curricula, using concepts including proportion and variety to build a varied skyline, and investigating architecture from various time periods to understand the factors that have shaped our own cityscape.

Spot the hospitals, ambulances, fire station, fire trucks and fire boat, water park, roads, crosswalk, school, commercial centre, residential spaces and more… They even worked to make most of the structures to scale with the people, despite the outsized red bird.

Arts-based learning helps to engage students with abstract ideas in the core curriculum through hands-on, concrete learning and creative culminating tasks. This is particularly important for primary and junior students since they tend to be concrete thinkers and connect best with concepts when they can see and touch them.

Grade 6 students raise awareness about the labour rights of garment workers

Today is Fashion Revolution Day, a day to pay attention to where your clothing comes from and what you can do to make a difference for those who sew it for you. Today, April 24^th 2014, marks the first anniversary of the Rana Plaza factory collapse, the deadliest of many terrible incidents in the garment industry.

Since January I have been working with the grade 6 teacher and students at Hawthorne II Bilingual Alternative school as a visiting artist-educator. As a class, we have been learning about labour conditions in the garment industry, and researching the origins of our own clothing using thoughtful inquiry questions that the students themselves developed. Our work together meets the 2013 social studies expectations for grade 6: People and Environments: Canada’s Interactions with the Global Community as well as visual arts expectations.

The students are spreading awareness by creating a fabric map showing disastrous and exploitive labour conditions in the garment industry. They are using sewing, embroidery and appliqué to create the map, thus learning more about what sewing work is like which connects them to garment workers whose numbers include children and teenagers. See the pictures of their work in progress.

I am so impressed by the insight, caring and work ethic of these students. They are sincerely motivated to make change for the better and I believe that they have that power. The companies we buy from will listen if we send them a message that this still matters, that we have not forgotten, and that we their customers demand that they make profound changes to prevent this from happening again.

To learn more about the issue, read on:

Oui, et…

I’m working in a bilingual classroom using Extended French. It is clear from the students’ inquiry questions (see the previous blog post) that their thinking is way ahead of their ability to express themselves in French. They had to look up new words, phrases, and verb conjugations just to write the French versions, and the results are awkward. Nevertheless I am impressed by the level of functional French that almost all of these students are achieving in class; their teachers have clearly been effective. I give instructions for classroom activities in simple French, repeating and checking for understanding, and they follow very well. In developing their questions the students were struggling to write about abstract concepts as opposed to simple concrete actions, which is really a step or two beyond what they know, yet they were fully engaged and knew how to look up what they needed.

Teamwork too has been a challenge, so I have worked with the students to develop some strategies to keep conversations productive, share work equitably, and stay on task. To help both their French and their teamwork I adapted a game for them that I learned at I-Think (The Rotman School of Management’s education initiative developing creative problem solving), titled “Yes, and…” – or in my version, “Oui, et….”  (This is also used both in theatre as an improvisation technique, and by progressive businesses to help with teamwork.)

In the game, one person starts a story then everyone in turn adds on a sentence starting with “Oui, et….” No-one may to shoot down or contradict the previous person, so that the experience is one of listening to and building on what the previous person said. The idea is to promote constructive conversation with an imaginative element. The students found this challenging yet fun, which tells me it was in their Zone of Proximal Development. We may just play it again!

Coming soon: mapping our research – art that makes a difference.

It’s bilingual, it’s intercurricular, it’s transformative, it’s the Super Unit!

I am currently volunteering in a grade 6 Extended French classroom. It has been such fun to brainstorm and design a unit with this teacher! One half of the expectations are from the Social Studies 2013 curriculum: Canada’s Interactions with the Global Community, and one half are from the Visual Arts 2009 curriculum.

I began by bringing the students a shirt I own from a major brand, then I told the class about the Rana Plaza factory collapse in Dhaka, Bangladesh, where my shirt may have been made. 1129 workers were killed there in April 2013, after being forced to work even when cracks appeared in the building where eight stories were built on a frame engineered to carry four. This was the deadliest incident in the history of the garment industry, which has a poor record globally including in North America. I played a video interview with a survivor, a fifteen year old girl, for the students. Then I asked the students, Why did this happen? Am I in some way responsible for what happened? What questions do you have?

Next, the students looked up the geographic origin of one item of their own clothing and added an orange label to our world map, showing us at a glance where their clothing came from. They then developed questions for inquiry about this clothing, using a bilingual Q chart to create level 3 and 4 questions. Thus began a unit investigating our personal connections to the global clothing trade, which will culminate in representing our findings on a map made of recycled textiles, and taking action on the issue.

where our clothing is made

Bilingual Q chart for developing good inquiry questions

Students’ questions – and yes, I know that the French is imperfect but the concepts are there!

questions

questions

The students have now formed teams to select a region and research clothing production in that region. They have uncovered a world of unfair labour, but also of hope and change. I asked the students to brainstorm and set goals for the unit, and their initial ideas are to start a petition, write letters, share information at a school assembly, and raise funds. One student suggested that everyone in the class make it their goal to consider what they buy so that we make a difference ourselves, which I feel is a wise place to start. I will help them to narrow down and meet their goals, and will give them encouraging examples of what individuals can do so that they don’t succumb to cynicism. I want them to discover their power to make a difference, be it ever so small. Our topic is hard-hitting, but well suited to this class in a school which has a focus on social justice.

Ambitious? Always!

Circles in Silk

This fall I worked with Diasporic Genius for six weeks to plan and coordinate a slate of classes promoting creativity as community-building skill, culminating in a harvest festival.

As part of this series I led a group making silk banners for the festival. I challenged myself to combine instruction with artistic direction – which felt like a more “bossy” take on teaching than usual, since I am usually deliberately hands-off when teaching people to find their own artistic voices and make their own creative decisions, giving them time to make and transform mistakes. While we kept focused on the goal, I believe I succeeded in giving the participants enough space to enjoy the creative process, learn new artistic concepts and techniques and  build confidence in their own skills.

The participants were a lively group of women originally from Pakistan, the Philippines and Bangladesh, both  beginners and participants with considerable skill in fashion and textile design, henna painting, watercolour painting, and teaching. We shared tea and snacks during an icebreaker in which we introduced ourselves and talked about things we are grateful for – a subject I initiated to get us working with the “thanks-giving” theme of the festival, and because this is a great way to find common ground in a cross-cultural group. I find it effective to focus on commonalities rather than differences when priming a group with divergent skill levels, cultural backgrounds and English comprehension levels to collaborate creatively.

I challenged the women to create together right away, asking them to pair up with someone they did not know to draw circular mandalas ( my variant on an exercise introduced to me by B.Ed. art instructor Hillary Inwood.) They rose to the challenge with beautiful thoughtfulness and diplomacy, and when a few new women joined our group while others were absent, we developed a protocol for adding to a piece which other people had originally designed, in the spirit of “offering help” rather than “interfering.”

making a mandala together

two of four groups

These sketches became the basis for banners made with serti-painted silk. Serti-painting is a demanding technique since you cannot erase; once you make a mark, you are committed to working with it whether it was intended or a “mistake.” I use this to challenge students to think of “mistakes” as “happy accidents” (which I too had to keep in mind when, despite my extensive dyeing experience, there were some glitches in the steam-setting).

We stretched silk over the mandalas then added gutta outlines.

outled Urdu

gutta outlining resembles henna painting

shining gutta on lustrous silk pongee

Tagalog and English

sisters

motif derived from shells on the beaches of Bangladesh

wheat, sun, hearts, flame

adding dye between the gutta outlines

careful work

ready for steam setting

The banners have Bangla, Urdu, Tagalog, Arabic and English expressions of gratitude written on them, plus paisley motifs (symbolic of mangoes), shells, sunburst and other symbols of plenty. The circles are symbolic of unity and community. The silks shone and floated in the sun as community members belly danced, told stories, drummed and sang on the festival stage.

almost complete

four cicles

floating in the wind, glowing in the sun

four full-sized banners plus central signature panel – on display beside festival stage

Thanks to Diasporic Genius and the program participants for allowing me to post their photos!

P.S. The classes also included Bellydancing, Afro-Cuban Hand Drumming, Creative Pathfinders for youth, Story Circle for adults, Folk Singing and Fabric Banners. The instructors are well-known performing artists including Roula Said, David Buchbinder, Joaquin Nunez Hidalgo and Brenna MacCrimmon.

More Mosaic

Here are some smaller mosaics created by family and friends of all ages. They include all kinds of found bits, even working clocks. We “made” glass beads by pasting clear glass blobs to magazine pages then cutting out the beads – if you look carefully you will see names in multicoloured lettering within. We will mount these on the wall and keep adding as people visit. The frame is a slice of terracotta pipe, filled with plaster – which swells an d breaks the terracotta so we switched to grout.

The first few contributions!

detail

detail

Tough Mama: A Symbol of Power and Protection

A gorgon (or Medusa) on the outside of a building is a warding figure and a symbol of female power from ancient Greek mythology. Her dynamic pose suggests flight or fight.

I love to reinterpret archetypes from ancient art by hybridizing them with new materials and ideas. In the final mosaic, the gorgon looks to me like she’s curling her wings or showing off her biceps in a display of strength. The prettiness of glass and ceramic combined with mirror shards and chains underlines the in-your-face look; mirror pieces have long been used in many cultures to ward off “evil,” and chains as accessories are all about a “tough” look. To me, human displays of power are much like watching an ape beat its chest, so behind this piece there is both fun, and a serious thought about the need for women and girls express their strengths.

Here is the gorgon (photographed from an odd angle) sitting for a week or two to cure the grout before we install her. Her eyes and hair are still to come.

As I worked several children got involved in different ways, cracking china, cutting glass, making beads and creating their own mini-mosaics. I was easily able to coach them safely through the more risky processes. While the mosaic process demanded time, it did not demand precision and there were many possibilities for improvisation and innovation, making it a great medium to work with at any age from 6 up.

Gorgon

It all began because my mother asked for a pique-assiète mosaic wall like this one that we saw in Istanbul in 2010:

…and my father created this out of a slice of a tree he had cut for firewood, a humpback whale vertebra he was given by whale biologist Jon Lien, plus accessories:

…which made me think of this painting I made years ago:

… which was inspired by this, the Gorgon from 580BC, on the pediment of Artemis temple in Corfu:

And then it began. All summer at intervals I have worked on a mosaic gorgon to go on the wall of my parents’ sun room, in collaboration with both of my parents and various itinerant children. I have enjoyed the process very much and though it is time-consuming, pique-assiète mosaic is simple and enjoyable – so to my future students, mosaic is now on the menu!

Next post: see the mosaic in progress and read why the gorgon was the right image.

Paper Inventions

a detail of the presentation I used to get students started

Last week I visited my first practicum classroom (grade 6/7) and led the students in making paper sculptures. The challenge I issued was to make a free-standing sculpture and use up all the paper they had, discarding none, which is quite open-ended. It went reasonably well but not amazingly, in that the students were not all succeeding in making the sculptures stand up, and some were not sure what to make – so I revamped the lesson and re-taught it, this time for a grade 4/5 gifted class. It went wonderfully the second time; first, I taught them to make a couple of types of pedestals, plus they got the concept and invented their own. Second, they are such a bunch of divergent thinkers that I didn’t have to push for them to create artwork that was individual and exuberant.

School is out for the summer but I may be back with more classroom adventures during I-Think’s Summer Institute.