The Student Nation

Just discovered The Student Nation (from The Nation). Check it out. Also: resources for the classroom.

$chool Reform

The Nation's Dana Goldstein comments on Obama's visit with Sharpton, Bloomberg, and Gingrich in the Oval Office. If the education conversation right now has two main sides: the Education Equality Project and The Broader, Bolder Approach to Education, it appears as though Obama has chosen his.

What will this mean for the future of public education? Or should I say privatized education?

Little Ones Do Green Art

Via NY Times: At Beginnings Nursery School in Manhattan, students and teachers use discarded items from their Materials Center to create art projects. Every school should have one!

“Every school has its own version of a supply closet, but I don’t think this is the same thing,” said Robin Koo, a studio art teacher at Beginnings.

With thousands of loose objects on display, the Materials Center is organized as precisely as a research lab. Metals, plastics, wood and fabrics each have a designated section. Natural materials overflow from bookcases, including seashells, snakeskin coils and an unidentified animal skull that mysteriously showed up last week in a Pampers wipes box.

Beginnings Nursery spent less than $3,000 to create the center last year after buying the brownstone where it has occupied the two bottom floors since 1984. The bright, airy attic — once an office for the Union Square Greenmarket — was spruced up with leftover classroom furniture and sky-blue paint.

Jane Racoosin, director of Beginnings, said the found objects were used to encourage children to represent their ideas through exploration, part of the Reggio Emilia educational approach that has been adopted by a growing number of American preschools. Teachers stop by the Materials Center every day, with no limit on what they can take back to their classrooms. The preschool has 210 students, ranging in age from 18 months to 5 years.

Teaching Fair Trade

Global Exchange offers a free Fair Trade Cocoa curriculum for the classroom.

Missing Opportunities: Arts and Social Justice

On Community Arts Network, a San Francisco Public Health official offers her thoughts on the connection between arts and social change.

Artists not only document social change; they promote, inform, and shape it. Whether through music, plays, graphics, paintings, songs, films, media, architecture, textiles, jewelry, photography, poetry, sculpture, pottery, landscapes, written word, spoken word, dance – art is powerful. And it is San Francisco’s greatest, most cost-effective missed opportunity. For art is the intellectual underpinning of social change; nowhere is there more potential and more need for art than here and now.

Farewell, Augusto Boal

In loving memory of Augusto Boal, 1931-2009

Rio de Janerio, May 4, 2009:

Brothers and sisters in arms, companions in the struggle

Our beloved comrade Augusto Boal, that tireless sower of seeds, who travelled the four corners of the earth scattering the seed of the Theatre of the Oppressed, is on yet another journey. He set off in the early hours of the second of May. He spent the First of May, May day, in a vigil of solidarity with the workers fighting for a fairer and happier world, a world of solidarity.

He set off on this special journey, for which reason he was not able to be physcially present at any event. But, as was his habit, he lived,, loved and worked to the last drop of his energy, leaving ready (for publication) the new version of his book, The Aesthetics of the Oppressed. He also left express instructions that no event should be cancelled because of his absence. ’Isnt that the very point of Multiplication?“

Yesterday, on the third of May, we held a farewell ceremony . His cremation of his body marked the start of a new phase of the Theatre of the Oppressed, in the physical absence of the Master himself. We wept, we talked, we sang. Celse Frateschi declaimed, beautifully, a passage from Arena Conta Zumbi. We sang a song written bz Nuno Arcanjo. And Cecilia Boal, with all her strength and vitality, told the world that her husband should be remembered as the warrior that he always was. We dried our tears and acclaimed Boal,s leaving.

His body has gone, but not his presence! Probably, this Saturday, the 9th of May, we will ratify his presence with a homage, at the Centre of the Theatre of the Oppressed. We will celebrate the life, the struggle, the productivity, the work of Augusto Boal and the continuity of that work.

It will not be easy to follow our Master, Partner, Friend and Comrade in the Struggle. But what has ever been easy in the trajectory of the Theatre of the Oppressed?

Ethics and Solidarity will be our foundations and our guides. Multiplication will be our strategy. And our goal will remain the mounting of concrete social actions to bring about the transformation of oppressive realities.

Viva Augusto Boal

Barbara Santos, 4 may 2009

CTO Rio

Childhood, Art, & Healing

"If we want to look at children's drawing with pleasure and profit, we must first silence our wishes and requirements about form and content and gratefully take what they have to offer... The arm is the maximum freedom of the child, their free choice of expression according to their mood.... Everything must be left to the child. At most, they should be given a subject, an impulse." -Friedl Dicker Brandeis

Today, I was browsing in a book store and came across Art, Music, and Education as Strategies for Survival: Thereseinstadt 1941-1945.

This volume collects six new essays spanning a variety of disciplines, as well as memoirs and related source materials, on the history and the arts of the Theresienstadt ghetto from 1941 to 1945. The book was assembled with the cooperation of the Jewish Museum in Prague, the Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., the Leo Baeck Institute in New York, and others.

Featured throughout the book is the work of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, a multitalented Bauhaus artist, who produced work in theater, architecture, textiles, graphic design, drawing, painting, and sculpture. In 1934, Dicker-Brandeis was arrested by the Gestapo for anti-Fascist activities and fled to Prague, where she taught art classes for Jewish refugees. In 1942 she was sent to the Theresienstadt ghetto. While there, she secretly taught art to the children, gifting them with the tools for the expression of their fears of hunger, disease, and death within their midst. Dicker-Brandeis and thirty of her students perished in the gas chambers of Auschwitz in 1944. Before she was shipped out, however, she hid thousands of works of child art within the walls of Theresienstadt, preserving for posterity a powerful and enduring indictment of the horrors of genocide.

The story of Dicker-Brandeis and her work gives me chills. Her insight on childhood & art is eloquent and rich:

“Why do adults want to make children be like themselves as quickly as possible?… Childhood is not a preliminary, immature stage on the way to adulthood. By prescribing the path to children, we are leading them away from their own creative abilities and we lead ourselves away from understanding the nature of these abilities.”

Play!

A new study from the Alliance for Childhood: Crisis in Kindergarten: Why Children Need to Play in School.

New research shows that many kindergartens spend 2 to 3 hours per day instructing and testing children in literacy and math—with only 30 minutes per day or less for play. In some kindergartens there is no playtime at all. The same didactic, test-driven approach is entering preschools. But these methods, which are not well grounded in research, are not yielding long-term gains. Meanwhile, behavioral problems and preschool expulsion, especially for boys, are soaring.

View the 8-page summary.

It's a great resource for drama educators!

Other books on play that I recommend:

• Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art by Stephen Nachmanovitch
• Deep Play by Diane Ackerman
• Dorothy Heathcote: Drama as a Learning Medium by Betty Jane Wagner

Issue of Rethinking Schools focuses on Duncan

The spring issue of Rethinking Schools focuses on Arne Duncan. There's also "Silenced in the Classroom," an article on the Kahlil hibran International Academy in Brooklyn, and Deborah Meier's "Reinventing Schools That Keep Teachers in Teaching."

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.

April: Happy Poetry Month

I've been reading Jonathan Kozol's Letters to a Young Teacher (which I highly recommend). He references a Yevgeny Yevtushenko poem that I find to be quite beautiful and profound. In today's schools, we often "choose" not to approach particular subjects or even affirm or believe that the troubles our students and their communities face a real and legitimate. Perhaps these are lies of omission. Something to think about...

Lies

Telling lies to the young is wrong.
Proving to them that lies are true is wrong.
Telling that god’s in his heaven
And all’s well with the world is wrong.
The young know what you mean. The young are people.
Tell them the difficulties can’t be counted,
And let them see not only what will be
But see with clarity these present times.
Say obstacles exist they must encounter
Sorrow happens, hardship happens.
To hell with it. Who never knew
The price of happiness will not be happy.
Forgive no error you recognize,
It will repeat itself, increase,
And afterwards our pupils
Will not forgive in us what we forgave.

Looking for meaningful children's books?

The Jane Addams Childrens Book Awards are given annually by the Jane Addams Peace Association to children's books that promote peace and social justice. It's an excellent list of books. I know I often have trouble finding children's literature with a social justice foundation.

One book that caught my eye:

Poems to Dream Together=Poemas Para Soñar Juntos, written by Francisco X. Alarcón, illustrated by Paula Barragán, and published by Lee and Low Books, Inc., has been named an honor book in the Books for Younger Children category. In nineteen short and heartfelt poems in Spanish and English, Alarcón encourages and inspires us to dream alone and to work and dream together, as families and communities, in order to make our hopes for a better world come true. The stylized paintings of Paula Barragán colorfully extend and interpret the theme.

Awesome Resource for Lesson Plans

Check out Educators for Social Responsibility's Connected and Respected: Lessons From the Resolving Conflict Creatively Program, an elementary curriculum on conflict resolution and social and emotional learning.

Chekhov on Love & Theatre

“The essence of our profession… is to give. What is it that we in the theater give? … We give our body, voice, feelings, will, imagination – we give a form of pulsating art to life itself; we give it to our characters and we give it to our audiences. Nothing, absolutely nothing remains for us save the pleasure of having given pleasure. And yet it is only by this miraculous process that our love grows and our talent is fulfilled and replenished."

The World Becomes What You Teach

On Leaving the Theatre

Do not leave the theatre satisfied
Do not be reconciled
Have you been entertained?
Laughter that’s not also an idea
Is cruel

Have you been touched?
Sympathy that’s not also an action
Corrodes
To make the play the writer used god’s scissors
Whose was the pattern?
The actors rehearsed with care

Have they moulded you to their shape?
Has the lighting man blinded you?
The designer dressed your ego?

You cannot live on our wax fruit
Leave the theatre hungry
For change

Making Room for Hope... The New York State Literary Center

Check out the website. The founder and leader of this organization, Dale Davis, is truly a force in the teaching artist field. The work of the youth and young men in correctional facilities with which NYSLC works is moving, strong, and breathtaking....

I Want To Write
By Miguel

I want to write to turn insanity into clarity,
write to a convict on death row
and have tears roll off his cheeks.
I want my words to reach the inner
chambers of a frozen heart and let it thaw.
I want to write to a woman who has seen it all
and had enough hardships and turn them into soft voyages.
If I could, I would write to life and
let it know
it's playing a novice while it's a pro
in a game only itself knows.
I wish I could write to who I was four
years ago
to say: take it slowly, cuz if not...well you already know.
I want to write words to express
all of the stress you gain from such a test
of having your freedom taken away
by no other than yourself.
I want to write for help but I'm scared of
the one who will send it.
I want to write to a young mother
to let her see how much harder I made her
stay here,
but still she WILL reap the benefits
you can only gain from having kids.
I just want to write until carpal tunnel takes
over my wrist...and hard,
and I'll either become left handed or the
loudest man
to say what I have to say
because the world is my stand.
I want to write...

What I Have to Say
By Rodney

I apologize,
I apologize
for leaving my loved ones behind.

I am a young Black man who has been in the system too long.

I was searching.
I was searching.
I was searching for freedom,
but I never found where it was at.
It was lost.
Will I find it?

Somebody has to hear my story.

Service-Learning and Human Rights Guide - Free!

Human Rights Education Associates has published Human Rights and Service-Learning: Lesson Plans and Projects. The lesson plans touch on five human rights topic areas: environment, poverty, discrimination, children's rights to education and health, and law and justice. The full text is available for free in a pdf format. It's very detailed, with some interesting concepts, lesson plans, and activities to pick and choose from.