UCDS Spark Magazine #1, Winter 2007 by UCDS

winter 2007

Creating Sticky Curriculum®

radioUCDS A Conversation with Ellen Winner Kites Over Austria: An Artist’s Journey

Welcome to the ﬁrst edition of Spark. In choosing the name, we gave great thought to our mission and dreams for the publication. We wanted to reach out to the committed and creative educators of young children everywhere, sending out our own discoveries and insights in the sincere hope that these small sparks will ignite innovative ideas across the educational landscape.

hat does an excellent teacher have in common with a brilliant scientist, architect, or business leader? We can find several common threads that link each of these professionals to their unique work. Among these might be passion, curiosity, tenacity, and a competency level that makes innovation possible. I’d also expect to find that each person was influenced and inspired by an international network of professionals in their field, people who ask similar questions or tackle similar problems. More so now than ever.

In this Issue

Certainly, our economic and intellectual worlds continue to shrink. Business and information have broken through many of the spatial and economic barriers that have traditionally separated ourselves and our ideas from each other. And as the barriers of geography and culture erode, communication and collaboration are fast becoming a necessity of modern innovation. For a geneticist, innovative research occurring in India is now just as immediate and important as research in the building across town. In one important measure of modern collaboration, it was recently found that the percentage of scientiﬁc papers with international co-authorship almost doubled between 1990 and 2000.1 The world is getting smaller and it’s more and more apparent that the secret to innovation is dialogue and communication, sharing and listening to what works.

BY TEACHERS FOR TEACHERS™

Sticky Curriculum

Spark is published by University Child Development School.

2 3

Paula Smith Head of School

Talknology: radioUCDS Lesson Plan

People Who Inspire Us

Melissa Chittenden Assistant Head of School Teacher Education Center Director

A Conversation with Ellen Winner

Creative Fusion

Editor Jack Forman

Spark Masthead & Publication Design Kelsey Foster Communications & Public Relations Director

Kites Over Austria: An Artist’s Journey

In Each Issue 1 13 14

Contributing Staff Julie Kalmus, Ginger Goble, Jessica Garrick, Brooke Leinberger, Diane Chickadel, Kathleen McKenzie, Leanne Bunas, Kai Toh, Emily Munson

Collaboration has become so vital across so many fields of business and academia that you’d expect to see the same thing happening in education. You may be surprised. Unfortunately, while academic research in education has prospered from professional dialogue, we have not seen this kind of movement towards cooperation between our teachers and schools. Elementary teachers performing one of the most complex and important tasks in society are still, by and large, working in isolation from one another. Schools have not traditionally been organized for teachers to have conversations with one another about what is or isn’t working in their classrooms. Creative teachers do find ways to collaborate. However, with 40 to 50 percent of teachers leaving the profession in the first five years (citing lack of communication and mentoring as major reasons for their departure), it’s clear that more can be done to support them. More can be done to foster this essential culture of collaboration. UCDS has a long tradition of this culture. As a lab school on the UW campus from 1911 to 1981, our faculty collaborated with educational researchers and lab schools across the country to create educational programs that were grounded in the best educational practices of the time. Today, our internal structure is designed to support collaborative work groups across grades and subject areas to design and evaluate our programs. We have also established a Teacher Education Center at UCDS, supported by the Neilson Fund endowment, making it possible to bring educational experts from across the country here to collaborate with us. The world keeps getting smaller.

Greetings from Paula Hot Resources UCDS Mission Statement

As any UCDS student will tell you, to improve, it is fundamental that we listen to the challenges and successes of our peers, and that we share our own. Likewise, by engaging in collaboration with colleagues or in dialogue with educators outside of our school, our teachers take their own teaching to a higher level when they are learning themselves. In order to make successful collaboration possible, it is our experience that school culture must be built intentionally with as much attention to the process itself as to any outcome we want to achieve.

Photography UCDS Faculty and Staff For submission information, please contact Brooke Leinberger at brookel@ucds.org. The editor reserves the right to edit and select all materials.

Like high performing professionals in every ﬁeld, teachers today have unprecedented opportunities to network with educators anywhere in the world, to share innovative solutions that will “spark” new ideas. We hope this publication becomes part of your network. Moreover, that you, too, will help us make this world of education a little bit smaller.

p 10 Paula Smith Head of School

Sticky Curriculum

Talknology

by Jack Forman

(or, How We Built an Internet-radio Station and Discovered Ourselves)

t’s Monday afternoon, and a couple of second grade girls are adjusting their microphones, listening to themselves talking as they prepare to press record. “Hellllloooooo!” One says into her microphone, hearing her voice resonate in her headphones, watching the onscreen sound level meters moving. “Hellllllllloooooooooooo! Wow, I’m loud!”’ She turns to her partner. “Okay, I’m ready, are you?” “Yeah! Here we go.” The other girl counts down. “Three… two… one… RECORD!” She uses the mouse to navigate through the software controls. “Hello,” the first girl says. “I am Laura, and this is my partner…” “Margo!” her friend interjects. “And you are listening to UCDS radio!” The girls are creating a program for radioUCDS, the online radio station that students created at Technology. Today’s assignment is to make an “audio lab report,” a recording that describes the discoveries that partners made the previous week at Science. “Today, we have been–” Laura says. “Building bridges in Science class,” Margo continues, giggling. “Yes,” Laura continues. “And we had a mission: to find the best kind of bridge. The best kind of bridge for us was the arch bridge because the suspension bridge was too expensive.” “And too long!” Margo interjects. “And also the bascule bridge was too expensive.” The girls continue recording for several minutes, leafing through their lab journals, reporting on each day’s discoveries, culminating with their experiences building a load-bearing arch bridge out of K’nex.

As the girls continue, a slow pan around the technology room shows that seven other pairs of students are doing the same thing: They’re excitedly thinking aloud into their microphones, correcting one another, listening, laughing, fishing for words, following long, long tangents and yet they still somehow come back to the day’s topic. When they finish, they excitedly listen back, sometimes giggling, sometimes cringing. When they cringe (and there’s really no more embarrassing feeling than hearing your own voice!), the students edit the recording to refine their words. Once satisfied, they save and move their files onto the school server. Soon, these files will appear on the radioUCDS website available for download or as streaming audio. This is radioUCDS. The Technology program at UCDS has worked to find an identity over the years, emblematic of how much different Technology is than other specialty areas. Simply put, there’s a more implicit understanding of what it means to study art or music or Spanish. You create. You perform. You speak. Our specialist teachers take these curricula in exciting, engaging directions. But what does it mean to study technology? Technology is so pervasive in our community, but where do you begin? Do students merely need tutorials on how to use a telephone, a copier, or a computer? Or is there a deeper study of technology than just how to use it? That’s where the radio project came in. The idea for doing internet-radio with elementary aged students began a few years ago when I was teaching in the Early Elementary at UCDS. An exciting component of this program for 3–6 year olds is Literature Circle. Each year, teachers carefully pick

fifteen or twenty books that relate to the school-wide theme. Each week, students take a book home to read with parents, meeting in small teacher-directed groups back at school to talk about what they thought. These conversations are worth remembering. Teachers traditionally take notes during Lit Circles, recording each student’s comments on paper to share with colleagues and parents later. Sitting in these conversations, new synapses literally form before your eyes as students verbally process what the story means to them. But from a teacher’s perspective, it’s an arduous process to be completely present in the circle while trying to accurately capture a child’s language on paper. “Hold on! Can you say that again slowly? I missed it?” To make it easier, I bought a small voice recorder to place in the middle of the circle and capture the action. I hadn’t predicted what would happen next. Kids were immediately enthralled by the idea. “You mean it’s listening to me right now? Can I hear myself? Can I keep it?” A $30 voice recorder pretty much derailed the conversation completely and students spent an hour after Lit excitedly playing the recording back, the voice recorder pressed to their ear. “That’s me! That’s me talking!” Within days, kids were pressing record, telling stories into the voice recorder, playing them back for friends. They carried it into other classrooms to capture “field recordings.” They recorded sound effects, songs, jokes and conversations. Even students who were pre-literate, still building the confidence and motor control to even hold a pencil, were recording and sharing ideas with an audience in mind. The process was contagious. Just as our school uses yearlong themes like “Transformation” or “Strength,” the Technology program seemed desperately in need of a guiding idea. RadioUCDS was born out of our desire to study technology through a singular, exciting application. By narrowing the concept study to internet-radio, students were able to explore hardware and software in great detail with an immediate, practical use. They gained proficiency while using technology to achieve a huge goal: to make internet-radio a reality. Continued >

The Art of the Interview A multi-age lesson plan for early radio-production. The simple act of creating an interview with a partner exposes students to several dimensions of practical technology use, from hardware and software fundamentals to the interpersonal importance of learning from a peer…and it’s fun! The products are priceless—intimate glimpses into the world from a student’s perspective. Below are variations on the idea for your target audience. Enjoy!

Early Elementary Using handheld voice recorders, students work in partnership to ask a teacher questions about their lives. Objectives: To create a short interview recording that students can listen back to. Skills Practiced: Using simple hardware, using a microphone, asking questions, listening. Continued on page 5 >

The ﬁrst step of creating radioUCDS happened before school was in session. For the project to be successful, there needed to be a space conducive to teamwork and, frankly, fun. Our technology lab was a small, crowded room, packed with seventeen individual computer workstations (one for each student). Although every other classroom at our school includes a space for group conversation, the collaborative process that drives so many of our curricula, this feature was strikingly absent. I removed half of the computers. The idea was students should work together in partnership, sharing strengths and challenges to build on each others’ technology experience. The space soon enabled our collaborative processes. In terms of materials, this project came together relatively inexpensively. We inherited eight relatively new Macs, each with headphone and microphone jacks within. This was lucky: although computer prices continue to drop as speed and memory improve, the cost of starting from scratch with eight new computers would have been signiﬁcant, in the thousands of dollars. The remaining costs were relatively easy to stomach. I purchased a full class set of microphones ($10 each) and headphones ($5) and eight more handheld digital voice recorders ($30 on the web). For less than a $500 investment, we suddenly had eight fully functioning recording stations and eight mobile recorders, all we’d need for the bulk of the radio project. Next, software choices. The workhorse of our program was a freeware application called Audacity (http://www.audacity.sourceforge. net). This multi-platform program records CD quality audio in real time with a surprising list of soundediting features and multi-track

recording. Our Mac systems came pre-loaded with the Apple programs iTunes and Garage Band, also invaluable to students. iTunes is a file management program that allows students to create play lists and burn them onto a CD. Garage Band is a simple music program, pre-loaded with different instrument sounds and effects, allowing students to create entertaining looped songs. Many other free recording applications exist on the web, particularly useful for students beginning the recording process. Once students arrived in September, each age group quickly got into a rhythm of learning new technology skills as they created radio shows about things other than Technology itself. Students in the first and second grades used software to record poems they’d memorized in classes. As they intently recited each line, they learned how to use a mouse to press buttons on the screen, record and play, fast forward and rewind. Soon, these technology skills were second nature. Kindergarteners and pre-Ks used voice recorders and microphones to interview adults from the school administration. As they learned about the Head of School’s favorite colors and foods, they also learned how a microphone’s placement affects sound, how to record and listen back. Students learned how to use technology, but by doing something they already do so well: again, asking questions and exploring. Students in the third, fourth and fifth grades performed an old-time radio play, complete with sound effects, then listened back and edited the product. Going a step further, some students even added a behind-the-scenes commentary, explaining the story events or their process further.

By the first month of school, kids had amassed over twenty hours of audio recordings and it was time to share it with the greater community. A colleague suggested we look at a company called Live365 (http:// www.live365.com) to stream our audio over the web. Hearing that we were a school, the company generously donated a 50-user password-protected website where our families could log on and listen to their kids’ work. We also launched a radio homepage on our school’s website where families could read about the program and download featured tracks each month. Kids excitedly shared their recordings with family and friends. When they returned to school, a funny thing happened: they chose their words more carefully, attended to finer details, experimented with performing. The introduction of an audience, even one that was merely perceived by students to be listening, suddenly made each student a more eloquent spokesperson for their own corner of our school. As a teacher, it’s so exciting to hear a child fumble for words, then express their thoughts with newfound, remarkable eloquence. It’s fascinating to see curricular discoveries take on new meaning as students share their thinking with a perceived audience. Moreover, it’s gratifying to hear back from colleagues that students seem to have a greater understanding of how computers work, how to find files, how to save and edit their work in the classroom setting. As we re-defined technology not as an area of study but a TOOL for studying other things, we discovered something much more exciting in the process: ourselves. You can too. s Jack Forman has a BA in creative writing from the University of Washington. He has been a UCDS teacher for 9 years, and is currently a classroom teacher in the Elementary level.

Radio Lesson Plan, continued Key Questions: Why would you run an interview? Why is it important to know how hardware works? Why is it important to work as a team? Lesson Plan: Brainstorm as a group what important questions students would like answered from a teacher or administrator. We thought of ideas such as “Do you have any pets?” “What’s your favorite food?” and “Why are you a teacher?” Next, partners experiment with plugging a microphone into their voice recorders, checking to see if microphones are turned on, plugs are inserted into correct jacks, voice recorders are turned on. Travel to a school administrator’s ofﬁce and take turns asking questions. Students should take turns holding the microphone and voice recorder, asking questions and listening to the answers. This process should be quick, 3-4 minutes, or enough time for each student in the small group to ask a question. Listen back to the interview in partnerships, then talk as a group about what students heard. How did it feel to work with a partner? Was it easy or hard to hear the interview? Why? Were the answers surprising? Do you feel like you know this person better?

First and Second Grades Using Audacity, partnered students interview each other about their summer vacations. Objectives: To work in collaborative pairs to use software to achieve practical ends. Skills Practiced: Using the fundamental features of software, to create radio content, to work collaboratively.

Key Questions: What should you think about before pressing record? What do the buttons mean? How do you know if the software is working? How do you know when you’re done? Lesson Plan: Brainstorm interview topics with the full class, including a few ideas of probing questions students can ask of each other, then demonstrate the process in a quick interactive tutorial. Instruct students that they should create a five-minute program in which each partner asks and answers questions and students take turns using the keyboard and mouse. When finished, they should save their files on their computer’s desktop. Students work in partnerships, using Audacity to record as the instructor moves from station to station asking questions and offering suggestions. Once finished recording, students listen back to their work. While listening, students are encouraged to think critically, assessing the quality of the recording, the questions and answers, how this program will be perceived by an audience and whether it is worth saving. Once finished, students listen to a few of the completed interviews as a full group, then share observations.

Third, Fourth, and Fifth Grades Using Audacity, students record an interview about a school subject. Objectives: To record, edit and save carefully constructed interviews on the server. Skills Practiced: Using deeper software features to capture then

refine an interview, using a remote server to save files, thinking critically about another area of school study. Key Questions: How do you formulate questions to pursue an interview topic further? How can you assess then refine the audio product? What purposes could an interview like this serve? What’s appropriate for the radio audience to hear? Lesson Plan: Students decide as a group what scholastic area they’d like to interview their partners about, selecting based on the criteria of what would be the most valuable to learn from each other and for an audience to hear. As a group, students listen to a demonstration interview and think of ways to improve it such as adding, deleting or rearranging sections, increasing or decreasing volume or applying effects to improve message delivery. In partnerships, students brainstorm questions about the curricular area (in Science, perhaps the experiments they’ve recently performed, personal strengths and challenges, etc.). They then record interviews and listen back to their production. Then using editing tools, create a tightly constructed interview, reminded to do so to improve the audience listening experience. Students save on a server, navigating through directories to properly store their work. If time permits, students move in partnerships to another group’s workstation to listen and evaluate the power of their work. As a full class, students share observations about the interviews’ strengths and shortcomings.

People Who Inspire Us

A Conversation with

by Jack Forman

Ellen Winner

Ellen Winner likes to talk about kids and we like to listen, scribbling notes furiously. She visited UCDS in September, presenting her work on giftedness and the psychology of studio arts in children, speciﬁcally the similarities between young thinkers and grown artists. Ellen is Professor of Psychology from Boston College and also Senior Research Associate from Harvard’s Project Zero. Simply put, she is about as close to actually being inside the brain of a four year old as is conceivable. Her visit was a whirlwind study on Project Zero, the famous research arm at Harvard University whose mission is “to understand and enhance learning, thinking, and creativity in the arts, as well as humanistic and scientiﬁc disciplines, at the individual and institutional levels.” She presented research that led to her 1996 book Gifted Children, and her current study of student learning in studio art environments. Here’s an excerpt of a conversation we had with her. We were very, very impressed! What inspires your work? Well, I can talk about what and I can talk about who. I would say one of my big inspirations was Piaget. I’m inspired by his work and his insights into children’s minds and it’s what got me interested in studying developmental psychology. Another person who really inspired me was Rudolph Arnheim, a great psychologist of art, still alive today at over 100. He wrote a wonderful chapter in his book Art and Visual Perception called “Why do Children Draw That Way?” trying to explain the oddities of children’s drawings and showing

how many of the oddities in children’s drawings were very similar to the oddities in great artist’s work who were not striving towards realism. He really opened my eyes to the psychology of a child’s art. I’m inspired by studying the artistry in children. I’m an ex-artist. Some people say you can’t be an ex-artist! But I really don’t have time to do art any more. I study the arts in children and that inspires me and keeps my love of the arts alive. You talk a lot about the charm of a four year old’s artwork but you also study it from a critical, clinical perspective. Is it difﬁcult to look at a child’s art this way? I love child art. I think it’s beautiful. I’m steeped in the modernist tradition. But I’ve also been able to step back and do research about it. So for instance, one of the things we asked was whether a child who draws in this charming expressive way can actually perceive aesthetic properties of artworks, such as expressiveness. And can they deliberately inject expression into their works, making them happy or sad, or are these properties accidents that adults perceive to be intentional? You’ve talked about the study of how kids can use metaphor at early ages, that this isn’t accidental play, that there’s some determined choice in what they’re doing. How does that relate to art? They are similar. I would argue that kids aren’t completely unaware of what they’re doing. One four year old we studied looked at a streak of skywriting and said, “Look, the sky has a scar on it.” This is a lovely metaphor, and it is not a mistaken use of language, but a deliberate metaphoric one. When making a metaphor, children are breaking the rules of language and they are doing this on purpose. Continued >

Ellen Winner is Professor of Psychology at Boston College, and Senior Research Associate at Project Zero, Harvard Graduate School of Education. She received her Ph.D. in Psychology from Harvard University in 1978. Her research focuses on learning and cognition in the arts in typical and gifted children. She is the author of three books: Invented Worlds: The Psychology of the Arts (Harvard University Press, 1982); The Point of Words: Children’s Understanding of Metaphor and Irony (Harvard University Press, 1988); and Gifted Children: Myths and Realities (BasicBooks, 1996), which has been translated into six languages and was awarded the Alpha Sigma Nu National Jesuit Book Award in Science. She received the Rudolf Arnheim Award for Outstanding Research by a Senior Scholar in Psychology and the Arts from the American Psychological Association in 2000. She is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association (Division 10, Psychology and the Arts) and of the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics.

In memory of

John Neilson UCDS parent, John Neilson loved ideas; those he found in literature and those he gained through a deep appreciation of world culture, math, science, art, music, philosophy, and physical excellence. In 1999, at the age of thirty-eight, John lost a hard fought battle against non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. In honor of John’s life, The Neilson Fund endowment was created. Through the Teacher Education Center at UCDS, we use this endowment to create and share programs that offer children access to big ideas. John was an inspiration to us in life and we dedicate this, ‘People Who Inspire Us’, section to him.

Ellen Winner, continued

They know that the line in the sky is not really a scar. They know that the wastebasket that they’re stepping into isn’t really a “boot,” and you can tell that because they’re laughing. And if you ask them, what this object is really called, they can tell you. We have evidence that they’re deliberately making metaphors. They are playing. When children make art they are also playing. Like artists, they don’t necessarily care about realism. Instead they are

“mucking around” and exploring just like artists do. I think the young child shares something with artists both with drawing and in language play. And you’d probably ﬁnd it in music, too, though I haven’t studied this. There might be something playful about how children invent songs, not worrying about getting them exactly right. As children get older, say around 8, 9, and 10, they become pretty self-critical and that can be very constraining. Now instead of exploring and playing with the rules, they want to get things “right.”

Is part of that their intent? When kids play, it can be silly and random, leading to surprises. Are kids suddenly sitting down with an idea in mind? Is that what’s so constraining? You are asking whether the older children who are drawing in the more literal style are actually starting out with a plan, thinking to themselves that they are going to achieve something specific that they have in mind. Whereas the younger children who draw less realistically and more playfully are just taking it as it goes and don’t know ahead of time what they’re going to do and following the flow of what they’re doing. I don’t know the answer because this has not been studied. But I think it would be very interesting to get children to talk aloud as they’re painting or drawing and see whether you could find that the four year olds change their plans as they go in reaction to what they’re doing, whereas the eight year olds or ten olds might say “this is what I’m going to do” and not deviate from their plans. That would be a great study that you could do here. It seems like being an artist could be mortifying. People look at the work and try to look for meaning, intent. When an artist thinks about all the dimensions that it will be perceived in, it becomes a lot more difficult.

You’re bringing in something in psychology called theory of mind—thinking about other people’s minds and thinking about other people thinking about you thinking about them. Until about age four children do not do this. But certainly they do it in elementary school. And if you start to think about what someone else is going to think about what you are thinking, you can become paralyzed. But it’s also a very sophisticated ability. Four year olds don’t do this. Three year olds certainly don’t do this. Maybe this “lack” is liberating—not to care what other people think! And those who have this uncontrollable appetite for making art can power through that, or maybe not even consider it to begin with. Someone who has a “rage to master” in art will not care what others think. This is one of the signs of a very gifted child. Belief in oneself. Willingness to go against the grain. Following one’s own passions. Speaking of which: What are you going to study next? I’m involved in three research projects that I’d like to continue and extend. One is the study of thinking skills in the visual arts. Teachers College Press is going to publish our book on this topic, co-authored with Lois Hetland, Shirley Veenema, and Kim Sheridan. We’ve shown now that teachers in the visual arts are trying to teach a broad range of cognitive and perceptual

and motivational dispositions (e.g., observation, envisioning, exploring, persevering, etc.). The next thing we want to investigate is whether students are really getting better at these kinds of dispositions. And then, if they really are getting better as a function of art training, do these skills stick and then transfer to other areas of the curriculum? Does the student who has learned to see with new eyes in art class bring these skills into the science lab, for example. A second question we are looking at, with my graduate student, Thalia Goldstein, is whether drama experience leads to greater ability to adopt other people’s perspectives and whether it leads to greater empathy. Finally, with Gottfried Schlaug and Andrea Norton, I am looking at music training’s effects on cognitive and brain development. We are looking at how the brain changes in response to instrumental training; and we’re going to look back at our most musically talented kids after five years of music training and see if prior to training we can find any brain markers for talent in their MRI brain scans. Do you have any advice for parents and educators? The most important things that parents need to consider is they should get their kids in an educational environment where their kids are challenged and I think that’s really happening here. If you have a child who is very precocious in one area, don’t be surprised that your child is not that precocious in everything. Don’t be surprised if your child is quite uneven in abilities. Don’t be surprised if your child has a gift in one area and a learning disability in another. This kind of unevenness is commoner than you might think. Parents call me all the time asking what they should do for their gifted children. I tell them to find other kids like theirs to play with. At this school I think that kids will find other kids like themselves— they’re really lucky to be here. I’m going to tell parents who call me to move to Seattle because there are so many school choices here for advanced kids! This is a very unusual city in this respect. Listen to your children and try to figure out how they are thinking and realize how fascinating

their thinking is. Really watch, and ask your kid questions. You’ll be amazed. Listen to the question your child asks. Gareth Matthews, a philosopher at University of Massachusetts, wrote a book called Children and Philosophy. I think you’d love it. He writes about the kinds of questions children ask and he shows how these questions are similar to the most profound questions that the great philosophers of the ages have asked. It’s the little kids who are asking those questions: they’re not afraid to ask them. The older ones have become more inhibited. It sounds like the more playful and warmly open to crazy questions and crazy ideas that parents and teachers can be, the more that they’re encouraging creative thinking. Absolutely. Be playful! Don’t worry about right answers. They’ll get there when they’re ready. You have to model the kind of intellectual behavior you want your child to have. One of the things we know is kids who are very talented come from parents who engage in very structured leisure. They’re gardening, they’re reading, they’re sewing, they’re doing things productively. The parents are modeling it. We know this from a fascinating book by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called Talented Teens. s

For more information about Ellen Winner’s work go to: http://www2.bc.edu/~winner/ A simple web search will yield her many child-focused publications in the areas of language, giftedness, visual arts, and more. You can download some of her articles from her website. We highly recommend you read more.

Creative Fusion

by Jessica Garrick

KITES OVER AUSTRIA: An Artist’s Journey

s the saying goes, you can’t take the artist out of the art teacher. I’m both of these things: I’ve taught art at UCDS for years but I’ve been making art much longer than that. This connection in me between artist and art teacher is absolutely essential to my teaching. To reinforce this connection, I regularly invite working artists to our school to work with our students. Developmental psychologists constantly remind us of the importance of creating an enriched environment for children, the value of carefully considered food for thought. I believe exposing students to as many different experiences

In memory of

Lowell Hovis November 5, 1929 to April 24, 2001

Lowell had a lifelong love of both math and the arts. His ﬁrst love, however, was teaching, which he did continuously for 50 years. Lowell was dedicated to UCDS and enriched our community in so many ways. He shared with each of us the childlike enthusiasm for daily discoveries and the wonder of the world’s complexity and beauty. With this section, ‘Creative Fusion’, we hope to honor and perpetuate Lowell’s interests and talents.

as possible adds to their wealth of knowledge and feeds their natural curiosity. Bringing in an artist to talk about their art and explain what they’ve done and, better yet, giving kids a chance to work with them directly is a very instructive opportunity. This is the story of just such a collaboration I had with a visiting artist and the exciting yearlong journey that followed. I first met Austrian kite artist Anna Rubin in spring of 2004 as a visiting artist at UCDS. The Drachen Foundation, a Seattle non-profit educational group that promotes knowledge about and through kites, sponsored her visit to the United States. Knowing we have a commitment to inviting artists, Drachen contacted our school and helped us invite Anna to teach some of her kite making techniques to our students and teachers. She worked with our kids to their great delight to create elaborate Shibori dyed and elliptical face kites. Our kids were highly involved in the process, focused and excited. Being a working artist you’re constantly learning more about your own art. New ideas. Different materials and techniques. This then adds to your teaching because your craft is more refined. You simply have more to offer your students. As a result of Anna’s visit to UCDS, a conversation between Anna, Drachen, and myself began to sow the seeds for future work together. We discussed the possibility of

me visiting and working with Anna in Austria. I worked with UCDS to take time away from my teaching schedule to attend the workshop (this is the value of working at a school that values and encourages professional development!). Simply, this was an amazing chance to work with an artist and bring her expertise back to our school. In March 2005 I traveled to Vienna, Austria to participate in a kite-making workshop taught at the Academy of Fine Arts, a workshop developed by Anna. Participants in the workshop consisted of art students of the Academy of Fine Arts studying to be art teachers and myself: an art student turned art teacher. The students were mostly from Austria and Germany and the workshop, normally taught in English, was conducted entirely in German. I have a limited German vocabulary. But the students knew a little bit of English and we communicated through broken phrases, demonstration and drawing. Using the language of art we learned about each other, our art and ourselves. Over the course of three days, we created several different types of kites: a Shibori dyed kite, the Good Luck Dragon kite, a self-portrait kite, small bowed kites, and a number of mini kites. As part of our experience Anna shared her technique for splitting bamboo into spars that provide the structure of the kites. Continued >

Kites, continued

Participants also constructed hot air balloons from tissue paper. Following this enriching experience, I taught the design and construction of the Good Luck Dragon kite to 3rd and 4th graders upon my return to school. The students used Masa paper to cut the shape of the dragon’s head and tail. They then designed faces using tissue collage and painted the tails of their dragons with acrylic inks. Students learned about kite structure through the placement of the bamboo spars and how to attach a kite’s bridle, which holds the ﬂy line. What’s remarkable about all of this is kids had an instructive artistic experience by using very simple materials—masking tape, paper and bamboo sticks. That’s it: it wasn’t mysterious. Kids heard the ideas and learned the techniques and they found they could build these amazing kites themselves. It’s what’s so productive about opening your classroom to an artist’s ideas. Along with their work, they share what has taken them a lifetime to build, the unique way of thinking about the art that they have created. They illuminate the study of art in a whole new way, turning simple materials into revolutionary products. I think visiting artists in turn are learning from the students. They’re not just coming in to do a lesson. Their interactions with the kids are great experiences for them and they learn as much as the kids. They’re making discoveries about materials and techniques and how to teach their craft. Inevitably, it all leads to things that will work into art lessons, what I’m teaching to kids here. s Jessica Garrick has a Bachelor of Fine Arts and Master of Arts, both from the University of Montana. She is the Art Specialist at UCDS where she has been teaching art to kids for 10 years.

Hot Resources The Drachen Foundation

Thomas Friedman, The World is Flat

http://www.drachen.org/

http://www.thomaslfriedman.com/

Art Specialist Jessica Garrick’s international kite experience was facilitated by this Seattle non-proﬁt. From their website: “The Foundation develops workshops, curriculum, and touring exhibits about the art, science, history, and cultures of kiting; supports selected projects and special events; publishes books and an online journal and newsletter; operates a website, funds kite research globally, archives kiting materials and kites, operates the Drachen Study Center in Seattle and sells original kite kits, publications, and materials through its online store.”

“Foreign Affairs” columnist at The New York Times, Friedman writes in The World is Flat about the effects of technology and communication on world culture and economy. As UCDS head Paula Smith also observes in this issue, Friedman draws the connection between how we collaborate on a global level and the enormous changes that are occurring in India and China as an effect.

StoryCorps http://storycorps.net/

Ways to Integrate Artists into Your Classroom Artists are approachable! Sometimes I run into somebody and I like what they’re doing with their art. I introduce myself and ask them if they’d be interested in talking about their art. Most of the time they’re intrigued by it. Most people love talking about and showing their art. Find an artist you like and ask them if they’re interested!

The radioUCDS project was partly inspired by StoryCorps, a grassroots non-proﬁt aimed at capturing and archiving audio interviews across the country. The group sends mobile recording booths around the country and invites family members, friends, colleagues and collaborators to enter and record their own story. The results are intimate snapshots of life from unique perspectives. Many archived interviews are available on the site, inspirational and instructive!

Project Zero at Harvard http://www.pz.harvard.edu/ Now in its 39th year, Project Zero’s mission is to understand and enhance learning, thinking, and creativity in the arts, as well as humanistic and scientiﬁc disciplines, at the individual and institutional levels. Their principle investigators include Howard Gardner (his theory of multiple intelligences ushered in a new wave of thinking about thinking in the 1980s), David Perkins (teaching for understanding), Ron Ritchhart (intellectual character development) and, of course, Ellen Winner. 1

Find funding! Many arts organizations, such as the Washington State Arts Commission (www.arts.wa.gov), offer annual educator and artists’ grants. Think ahead and apply in advance! We’ve funded many of our visiting artists through a rebate program (www.escrip. com) our school subscribes to. Artists charge varying fees for a day in residence but we’ve found it to be very affordable. A single day’s visit can completely reinvent a curriculum!

SourceForge.net http://sourceforge.net/ SourceForge.net is the world’s largest Open Source software development web site, hosting more than 100,000 projects. The site boasts to have the largest collection of open source code and applications available on the internet. Technology Specialist Jack Forman found several Freeware applications within the SourceForge collection to make the radioUCDS project possible.

From Greetings from Paula: Wagner, Caroline and Leydesdorff, Loet, Network structure, self-organization, and the growth of international collaboration in science, 2004, University of Amsterdam, http://users.fmg.uva.nl/lleydesdorff/cwagner/collabnets.pdf

UCDS Board of Trustees Ofﬁcers Bill Nicholson, Chair Eric Fahlman, Vice Chair Jan Chiles, Treasurer Nan Garrison, Secretary Members at Large Andrea Lieberman David Bolin Elana Lim Greg Headrick Janet Donelson Julie Petersen-Dunnington Kelly Webster Mark Leahy Sally Revere Tina Podlodowski Ex-Ofﬁcio Members Chris Pothering Joelle Harrison Kim Steppe Paula Smith

University Child Development School 5062 9th Ave NE Seattle, WA 98105 206-547-UCDS (8237) Fax 206-547-3615

The UCDS Mission University Child Development School is centered around the lives of children and is dedicated to the development of their intellect and character. We actively encourage, and the school everywhere reﬂects, the process of joyful discovery that is central to meaningful and responsible learning. Teaching is individualized and responsive to the talents of each student, and the curriculum is rigorous and integrates the concepts and skills embedded within the major disciplines. Our students are chosen for their promise of intellect and character and are selected from a crosssection of the community. Our faculty members are leaders in their ﬁelds, supported in advancing their studies and encouraged to share their knowledge widely. In pursuit of these ideals, and in recognition of obligations beyond the school itself, we strive to be an innovative leader in education, serving as a model for others.

www.ucds.org

UNIVERSITY CHILD DEVELOPMENT SCHOOL

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