Thursday, April 16, 2009

Get this book: Studio Thinking

Studio Thinking: The Real Benefits of Arts Education is a great book for any arts educator (across disciplines). Created by Harvard's Project Zero, The Studio Thinking Framework includes 8 Habits of Mind:
  1. Develop Craft
  2. Engage & Persist
  3. Envision
  4. Express
  5. Observe
  6. Reflect
  7. Stretch & Explore
  8. Understand the Art World

Lucia Brawley on Arts Education & Social Justice

Luci Brawley has a great article on Huffington Post about arts education: Mordecai's Metamorphosis: Why Arts Education is a Matter of Social Justice and Why it will Save the World.
My musician friend, Derrick Ashong - who was born in Ghana, raised between the U.S. and Middle East, went to Harvard, and now speaks internationally on the nexus of art, justice and peace - says:
People often forget that at it's heart, artistry is human communication taken to the highest possible levels. The power in art lies not only in its ability to inspire, but also in its capacity to expand the boundaries and quality of other forms of communication. The truly educated person does not consume art as a mean of diversion from the world but rather as a tool for learning how to better engage it.
Check out Part 2 of the article as well.

Voicing Pain: Students at a Queens School Talk About Immigration

Students at the International High School work with Judith Sloan, creator of “Yo Miss! Teaching Inside the Cultural Divide” and EarSay to create a performance piece based on the immigration experiences of their families. (See the full NY Times article.)

Sandup, 14, said speaking his lines made him proud. “It feels like I’m telling the public how I’ve been struggling,” he said.

He pointed to a favorite line: “My homeland screams, ‘Don’t forget me!’ My new life says, ‘Come and get me!’ ”

He said he and other Nepali teenagers spend a lot of time speaking English and having fun, not thinking much about what their parents went through to bring them here.

“I don’t want to forget,” he said.

Teens Re-Writing America Through Poetry

Brave New Voices documentary series on HBO follows teenagers creating and performing their original poetry in this teen poetry slam championship. On the HBO website you can watch the first episode and see performances of the teens' amazing works. B. Yung of Team New York City writes:
I can't stomach being whipped or stripped because of the color of my skin so every time I write a slave poem my paper bleeds.
More and more, I think poetry is such an amazing and liberating tool for expression and a great entry point to creating theatre--particularly physical theatre and movement pieces.