A Brush of Courage: Painting the Cholul Mural

Since, however, you walk
through the streets so straight, 
you are courageous, without fault.
- Gabriela Mistral

This is the story of a group of courageous children in Cholul—a small town in Mexico where we live. With the recent student-driven “March for Our Lives” movement, we see young people organizing to try to make the world a better place.  Yes, standing up, speaking, and protesting for a better world is a courageous act, but courage can take many forms. 

In the midst of all the hustle and bustle of the town square in Cholul, there is a door on one of the adjacent walls labeled Educate. Much like the wardrobe in the C.S. Lewis books or Alice’s hole in the ground, this doorway leads to a magical place. In a small classroom, filled with only desks and chairs, children gather after school several days of the week. One of the classes offered here is Text and Movement, a class created by our lab school, Habla, combining the arts with literacy development.

Led by teachers Madeline Beath and Tommaso Iskra de Silvestri, the class explored the essential question, “Who am I in my community?” Every day the teachers posted a question on the board for the students to respond to in their journals when they came in the room. For instance, one question was, “What is your favorite place in Cholul?” Other questions included:

• What are traditions and holidays you celebrate in your family?
• What myths and legends do you know?
• If someone were to visit Cholul, what would you show them?
• What do you think is underneath Cholul? (The Yucatan peninsula is on a thin layer of limestone—underneath are caves, rivers, and underground watering holes called cenotes, which were believed by the Maya to be passages to the underworld.)

These questions led to conversations about favorite parts of the city, traditions, and how they are celebrated in families, and a classroom exploration of Mayan and Yucatecan myths and legends. Students created a map of the city from their own point-of-view. Their teacher Madeline explained, “They don’t think about the 7-Eleven or the market—those places don’t have any meaning for them. Their Cholul is their house and the public spaces where they see their friends.”

The teachers then introduced students to the bilingual book, My Name is Gabriela: The Life of Gabriela Mistral / Me llama Gabriela: la vida de Gabriela Mistral by Monica Brown and John Parra. It is a biography of Gabriela Mistral, the first Latin American writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Tommaso reads Me llamo Gabriela to the students.  Photography by Madeline Beath.

Born in Chile, Gabriela visits many places around the world and this is highlighted with the phrase “I traveled to/Viajé a” with an image of the featured place on each page.

- I traveled to Europe—to France and Italy
- I traveled to Mexico
- I traveled to the United States.

The teachers asked the students the question, “What if Gabriela came to visit you here in Cholul? What would we show her?”

The students began to draw and describe their favorite buildings and sights in Cholul. They drew their houses, the cathedral in the middle of town, carnival tents, amusement park rides, and the park. They also drew pictures from nature: birds, the sun, the and the cenote's entrance in the town square.

Stefany writes about her town, Cholul. Photo by Tommaso Iskra de Silvestri

Luis talks about his favorite places in Cholul. Photo by Tommaso Iskra de Silvestri

In the main town square of Cholul, there was a large white wall extending about 150 ft. The students spend much of their time in front of this wall playing soccer or basketball, participating in community and school events, or just hanging out with their friends. The students asked if they could recreate their drawings on the white wall. Tommaso, a visual artist himself, emphasized the importance of creating a mural that would be cohesive and aesthetically beautiful.  The students began to imagine what a colorful mural in their town might look like and what it would take to accomplish it. 

The white wall. Photo by Tommaso Iskra de Silvestre

Tommaso scanned the students' drawings and combined them into a horizontal landscape of the city. Every image was drawn by the children.

View fullsize

Click on image to enlarge.

Next they had to clean up and repair the wall. Tommaso explained, “At that point there were a lot of weeds that needed to be cut down and the holes needed to be fixed.”

Over the course of the next few weeks, with the help of some visiting high school students, the students from Cholul painted their mural. All of the younger students learned about color theory and mixing colors and they created the sequence of colors that spanned the wall, from sunrise to sunset.

Painting colors from sunrise to sunset. Photo by Tommaso Iskra de Silvestri

The high school students traced the younger students’ drawings of buildings on the wall with pencil (recreating the smaller Photoshop version of the mural). Then, the younger students painted the buildings choosing their own colors.

Photo by Tommaso Iskra de Silvestri

Photo by Tommaso Iskra de Silvestri

Photo by Tommaso Iskra de Silvestri

When I visited and saw the children transforming the wall of the town square, I thought about Gabriela Mistral's first job as a teacher. While she was teaching she was also writing. One of her most powerful poems about children is Su nombre es hoy,

"Many things can wait. Children cannot. Today their bones are being formed, their blood is being made, their senses are being developed. To them we cannot say 'tomorrow.' Their name is today."
 

Photo by Tommaso Iskra de Silvestri

The Black Panther and Me: When Students Visually Own the Classroom

As a child I often visited my father’s high school English classroom. The most striking thing about it was his bulletin board. In my elementary school in Indiana, I was used to seeing bulletin boards decorated by the teachers. Before the opening of school they painstakingly prepared a beautifully laid out design with lettering and pictures, perhaps around a particular theme. My father’s bulletin board was different. He let the students bring in practically anything they wanted and hang it—there were layers upon layers of cartoons, comic book characters, and poems. It was a mess, but it was theirs.

When I visit classrooms I often see teacher-prepared bulletin boards, or in middle and high schools, “inspirational” posters that fill the walls. Rather than inspire, I feel like these posters say, "This is school business as usual."

Last summer I heard retired educator Wanda Lincoln speak to elementary school teachers in Vero Beach, Florida. She said, "When we as teachers make sure the room is perfect at the beginning of the school year, we are sending the message that the classroom is ours, not the students." She encouraged teachers, "Begin with walls that are blank—nothing on them at all!"

SmART Schools is an organization in New England that integrates the arts into daily learning. I was invited to visit 6th grade classrooms in the Everett Public Schools in Massachusetts and model what an arts-integrated class might look like. I partnered with one of our teachers at Habla, Tommaso Iskra De Silvestre. Inspired by Wanda's talk, we asked the question, “How can we help students transform their classrooms?"

We wanted to get to know the class a bit before starting so we asked, "How many of you . . .

• know who the Black Panther is?
• have seen the movie?
• speak more than one language? Spanish? Portuguese? Haitian Creole/French? other languages
• like to make things with your hands—paint, draw?

We then introduced the students to kennings. Defined by the dictionary, a kenning is a compound expression in Old English and Old Norse poetry with metaphorical meaning, e.g., oar-steed = ship. 

Examples of kennings (students loved guessing these—find even more here):

• storm of spears—battle
• forest walker—bear
• land bones—rocks
• arm serpent—bracelet
• head forest—hair
• tongue land—mouth

I first learned about kennings from Boston-area artist and educator Regie Gibson. In a workshop we piloted for teachers at the NEAL Teacher Institute, Regie had teachers create Kennings that related to their personal identities. Borrowing the same approach, Students began by brainstorming their own word bank of nouns and verbs. When their papers were filled, they practiced at combining two words to create a kenning representing themselves. In order to create a kenning, we reviewed how to add the suffix "ing" on to a verb to form an adjective (or adjectival participle to use the formal term). We also looked at how verbs can be transformed into nouns by adding the suffix "er." Without any formal grammar lesson, students naturally began manipulating, transforming, and combining words.

Some of the examples students came up with are:

• Panda Sleeper
• Laughing Kitty
• Jumping Singer
• Reading Wolf
• Breathing Books
• Exclaiming Pencil

Mask Making Introduction

We asked students the question, "How do masks both hide and reveal us?" We examined superheroes who are both defined, and hidden, by masks. For instance we know Bruce Wayne was frightened by bats when he was young, and later he adopted the mask of a bat, in order to both confront his own fears and to frighten the bad guys. We asked the students, “What are the characteristics of a Panther?” They answered “powerful, stealthy, quiet, fierce, noble, aggressive.” We then talked about why the king of Wakanda, T’Challa, might be represented by the mask of the panther. 

Black Panther's first appearance in a comic book in 1966.

Black Panther in his latest Marvel movie.

Then, as a class we looked at masks in different cultural contexts and explored how they both hide and reveal us.

Lucha Libre masks from Mexico

Dia de los muertos, Mexico

Symmetrical Mask-Making

We were inspired by Chicago teaching artist Cynthia Weiss's workshop on mask-making and the book think and make like an artist (pictured below). We demonstrated how to simply fold a paper in half, and like Matisse, begin “drawing with scissors.” When the paper is opened it reveals the first layer of a mask. We then cut up more paper in a similar manner and added layers on to the first. We showed how scraps from the table could be added to the masks for three dimensions.
 

Tommaso coaches students while George Washington observes.

Students began to fold paper in half, cut out symmetrical shapes, and create the first layer of their masks.

To create three-dimensional masks, students added layers of additional symmetrical designs. They also glued on scraps left behind after the initial cuttings. 

Students then found blank space on the walls to hang their kennings and masks. They transformed the lockers, walls, and windows into colorful spaces filled with their own art-objects and words.

6th Graders and their Masks

This project with students in Everett, MA was a SmART Schools initiative demonstrating how the arts can be integrated into the daily life of classrooms.

Thanks to my collaborating teacher Tommaso from Habla and to the teachers, administrators, and students in the Everett Public Schools.

The Notes We Leave Behind

There are times when I’m reading books to my kids, when I come across one page, with one phrase or sentence, that takes my breath away. It often happens in many wonderful children’s books that seem to be written as much for adults as for children. Maria Popova on her site Brain Pickings, where she reviews many of these kinds of children’s books, often quotes Maurice Sendak who said, “I do not believe that I have ever written a children’s book. I don’t write for children. I write—and somebody says, ‘That’s for children!’” 

And so it is that when I’m reading books to my children, a line in a book feels like it has been written just for me.

When I read Oliver Jeffers’ latest book to my children Here We Are: Notes For Living on Planet Earth, we came across a page with an expansive view of what appears to be two land masses separated by a body of water. A rocket shoots up towards the sky. A satellite and a UFO are in outer space. Ships, sailboats, trucks, airplanes, and blimps made the scene appear to be one of purposeful travel and commerce. Across the pages are the words:

Though we have come a long way, we haven’t quite worked everything out, so there is plenty left for you to do.You will figure lots of things out for yourself. Just remember to leave notes for everyone else.

Illustration from Oliver Jeffers' Here We Are

Jeffers' words reminding us to “leave notes for everyone else” immediately took me back to my high school years when my father knocked on my bedroom door. I was sixteen years old at the time and he handed me what appeared to be a manuscript—a stack of typed and handwritten pages.

My mother died when I was two years old. In the year she was sick with terminal cancer, she wrote me an extended letter. My father didn’t tell me about it until when I was in high school. He handed me her letter and said “I think you are ready for this.” I read throughout the night. These were her “notes” left for me.

Now I write a journal for my children. I write down funny things they say. I describe activities we do together. I write my thoughts about our family our journey together through life. Why do I write this journal? Perhaps it is partly for myself, to help me remember all the wonderful moments we share. Friends with children already grown often offer the advice to enjoy this time with my children when they are young "because they will grow up so quickly." This reminds me of philosopher Alan Watts’ advice,

The art of living … consists in being completely sensitive to each moment, in regarding it as utterly new and unique, in having the mind open and wholly receptive.

But isn’t it so difficult to live immediately in the moment without thinking about work, to do lists, and responding to emails? Consistent practice and attention is demanded to live fully in the moment with our friends and family.

Luis, my son, and I draw monsters together. We each draw monsters on our own pieces of paper and, after I finish one, he asks me, “What kind of monster is it?” My favorite moment was when he left the paper blank and said, “This one is an invisible monster.” He enjoys turning the trees on our patio into gallery spaces. He tacks the pictures he draws onto the trunks and branches. I write this little moment in order to capture it and place it in a time capsule so that we may live it again and again.

The Gallery of Monsters

Why do I write a journal for my children? I think for the same reason my mother wrote, to leave notes behind, so that we can return to our shared experiences. By reading these moments, I hope they will know me in different ways as they grow older. When I am no longer here, they will still have something of me to hold in their hands. I wonder if this is the motivation why most writers write—to leave a little something behind for everyone else when they are gone.

"Can I Take My Robot Home with Me"?

Robotics courses in schools have been offered now for many years. We'll get into the engineering/coding world of robotics soon. But first let's approach robots from a different lens—through imagination. Seymour Papert was a revolutionary in the educational world of computers and coding. In his book Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas (published in 1980!), he borrows the term syntonic from the field of clinical psychology to describe the kinds of experiences we should foster with students using technologies. Syntonic is when people are responsive to and in harmony with their environments. Recently I've been using this term with teachers in thinking about designing curriculums. When I wrote about creating Imaginary Friends, I pulled from my children's actual lived experiences and the toys they naturally play with at home. Here, again, we are looking at designing experiences with robots from my son's (and I hope other children's) fascination with them.

The Learning Alliance in Vero Beach, FL has a series of summer programs for kids called Moonshot Academies. Functioning outside of the typical school-day, the goal of these spaces is to serve as laboratories for experimenting with ways of developing literacy. The Learning Alliance asked me to come work with their team, Debbi Arseneaux and Fran McDonough, to create two professional development workshops that would inspire teachers as they thought about shaping the academies for the summer. When I first spoke on the phone with Debbi and Fran, I told them about my son's fascination with robots and we wondered if we could dream up a way to bring the literacy, arts, and engineering together in a syntonic experience for 5-8 year old.

Debbi, Fran, and I with newly built robots.

Artificial Intelligence

As I mentioned in an earlier post, my three-year-old son became fascinated with robots and I began to pay more attention to the role of robots in our lives. All of the leading technology companies host annual developers conferences where they discuss the future vision for new technologies they are researching. At the Facebook conference, Mark Zuckerberg explained that in ten years Facebook's three primary areas of interest will be augmented reality, artificial intelligence, and connectivity. He and his team then laid out technologies where, in myriad ways, our intelligence will be blended with artificial intelligence (Pokemon on the phone is an early example of this augmented reality—digital creatures in your camera appear in your real environment).

In May 2017 Google noted a similar shift moving from a focus on mobile devices to artificial intelligence.

And just this week Apple joined the fray.

New York Times writer Thomas Friedman in his book Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations looks at how jobs in our world are changing and what job opportunities will be available in the future. He describes the concept of intelligent assistance as,

we use artificial intelligence to improve the interfaces between humans and their tools with software, so humans can not only learn faster but also act faster and act smarter.

A key example Friedman gives is from farming. When we imagine milking a cow we might have a quaint image of a person seated on a stool with a bucket. A New York Times article he quotes from 2014 tells a different story.

Something strange is happening at farms in upstate New York. The cows are milking themselves. Desperate for reliable labor and buoyed by soaring prices, dairy operations across the state are charging into a brave new world of udder care: robotic milkers … Robots allow the cows to set their own hours, lining up for automated milking five or six times a day— turning the predawn and late-afternoon sessions around which dairy farmers long built their lives into a thing of the past. With transponders around their necks, the cows get individualized service. Lasers scan and map their underbellies, and a computer charts each animal’s “milking speed,” a critical factor in a 24-hour-a-day operation. The robots also monitor the amount and quality of milk produced, the frequency of visits to the machine, how much each cow has eaten, and even the number of steps each cow has taken per day, which can indicate when she is in heat.

In the future almost every job will require workers to interact seamlessly and fluidly with artificial intelligences. Exploring robots from various perspectives in the classroom is the perfect opportunity to create a syntonic experience for children that connects their natural fascination with robots to the kinds of technological shifts we are seeing in the larger society. 

Big Ideas, Essential Questions, and Texts

When we design experiences in classrooms, I often like to begin by looking for a meaningful and beautiful text. As we planned our robot curriculum we started with a series of books about robots. There were four books that stood out for us a the K-3 grade level. Three of the books about a robot and a child(Boy + Bot, Doug Unplugged, and Clink)  picked up the theme of "imaginary friends." We also liked the DK book because it is an informational text with extensive descriptions of real and imaginary robots, the kind of books kids often spend hours pouring through all the information.

For the workshop we decided to focus on Clink, a story similar to the classic children's book Corduroy—a rusty robot waits in a store for someone to buy him. What we particularly liked were all the examples of different kinds of robots and their various purposes.

and we loved the illustrations!

Next we talked about possibilities for the big idea and essential questions for the workshop. Jessica Ross from Harvard's Project Zero had just been to Vero Beach presenting on maker-centered learning. Since many of the teachers had attended her workshop we wanted to link our workshop with the ideas she's already introduced. In Jessica's presentation, teachers went through various "thinking routines" that could be used in maker spaces. One thinking routine she presented was called Parts, Purposes, and Complexities and another Imagine If (you can download the thinking routines here on the Agency by Design website). We decided to look at robots through the lens of "tools" and came up with three possible essential questions.

What is a tool?
How do tools work and how do they help us?
How can tools impact our lives?

We repeated an activity Jessica did in her presentation. We gave each table a tool (pencil sharpeners, hole punchers, staplers, toasters etc.) and asked them to sketch it, label its parts, and then discuss the purposes of each part. They then imagined ways to improve its function or aesthetics.

To further enter the idea of tools and robots, we watched a clip from the television show The Jetsons (from 55 years ago!) They considered in groups:

What tools from the Jetsons have become a reality today?

In groups, teachers then considered how our tools we be different 55 years from now in the year 2072.

Building Robots

After reading the book Click, we built our own robots. Previously, with similar projects, we've encouraged a series of drafts before the building process begins. For instance, sketching the robots, giving the robot personality traits (see again the Imaginary Friends post), and even writing monologues from the robot's perspective. 

I'd been reading this lovely book Loose Parts about the need to just give children the open-ended opportunity to create with various related objects.

The Learning Alliance had just moved into a new office. Every day I was there working, new boxes would arrive and the packing materials were piling up. As Debbi, Fran, and I sat together planning this event I mentioned how I didn't want to use any fancy materials to build the robots, stuff that teachers wouldn't have the budget or time to buy. Debbi looked at the pile of boxes and said, "Let's just use all of that!" We collected boxes, plastic wrap, styrofoam, envelopes, cardboard (added tape and scissors), and hauled it all to the school, Vero Beach Elementary, where we were leading the workshop. 

We asked the teachers to just grab materials and build a robot. No planning. No brainstorming. Just do it.

In after-school professional development workshops, teachers sometimes bring their young children with them. We were lucky that one of our teachers Ataaba Patterson, brought along her seven-year old son, Gavin Patterson. We invited him to make a robot and he quickly joined the teachers collecting supplies for his robot.

Watch Ataaba and Gavin making robots in the workshop below.

I love it when this happens in workshops—when children, after school, voluntarily put down their iPads or smart phones to join in the workshop. When this happens we know we have created a syntonic experience.

At the end of this day we asked everyone to leave their robot in front of their chairs. The entire room shifted to a new robot. After hearing what the original creator had in mind (function etc.), each person worked to improve someone else's robot. In this sense the robots became a collective project for the room. We shifted several more times. Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education (CAPE) founder Arnold Aprill  came up with a term for this process: displacement. Arnold defines displacement as "transmutation through different media and through different creators." We do this when we might want to move students towards collaborative creation and working together in a larger community.

At the end of the workshop, teachers returned to their original robots and gave them a name and function.

Writing Robot Stories

Given that the second half of the workshop the next day was only two hours, we didn't have time to fully write robot stories, so instead we chose to focus on making a book cover and creating a narrative life for our robots.

We took black and white photographs of the robots and printed them out on a regular printer (again, using only the resources schools have quickly available).

Using the book jacket cover for Click as a model, the teachers created a cover page with a title for their story, a blurb on the jacket that hinted to the overall story, and a diagram of their robot's parts and purposes.

Teachers told the stories of their robots to each other and then a few volunteers told stories to the entire group. 

Gavin said his robot's job was to protect a city. I asked him which city, Vero Beach? He said no, "to protect New York City."

He then asked, "Can I please take my robot home with me?"

Gavin with his completed robot

Coming soon: Kinesthetic Coding and Bringing Real Robots to Life!

"Ohm, Ohm Ohm": The Imaginative World of Children's Play

Luis, my three-year old son, is at an age where he transforms everything into a robot. Captain America becomes Robot Captain America and attacks the other action figures with a menacing “Ohm, Ohm, Ohm.” I’m in constant anticipation of being turned into a robot “Daddy, you’re a robot . . . Ohm, Ohm, Ohm.” At times a wake up in the morning to a Luis Robot starting at me with arms outstretched “Ohm, Ohm, Ohm.”

I recently visited Vero Beach Elementary School in Florida as part of some work I was doing with The Learning Alliance. When I went into a room designated a Maker Space, given my full immersion in robots, I gravitated towards a group of students programming tiny robots moving across a piece of paper.  The principal of the school, Cindy Emerson, shared a student’s enthusiasm for Ozobots in a tweet:

Unbelievable #ozobot student engagement @verobeachelem #vbecodes #vbevibe @tobintweets7 pic.twitter.com/BXxPvaHErx

— Cindy Emerson (@Emersizzle) April 19, 2017

I believe that deep learning in the classroom is linked directly to deep engagement. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi explains that when we are engaged in a complex task we enter a state of "self-forgetfulness" or "flow." Programming a robot, and coding in general is not easy. It requires having the end in mind before the task is begun. It requires thinking forward step by step to arrive at a future that is only imagined. And yet even with the youngest of students we see them fully involved in this complex cognitive task.

Watching the students at Vero Beach Elementary reminded me of Reggio Emilia schools. The city of Reggio Emilia has some of the most innovative preschools in the world. Loris Malaguzzi, one of the founders of the Reggio schools, explains a core concept of the Reggio education philosophy:

What children learn does not follow as an automatic result from what is taught. Rather, it is in large part due to the children’s own doing, as a consequence of their activities and resources.

When I’m playing with my own children I listen to their interests and then build the imaginative world of play with them from these original impulses. We apply the same principle at our own school, Habla in Mexico. Every year I meet with our teachers and ask what they are planning to teach this year in their classrooms. One of our teachers, Tommaso Iskra De Silvestri, once told me, before the school-year started, “I don’t know what we're going to do yet. I need to meet the students. I want to know what they are interested in and we'll build the experiences from there.” 

Loris Malaguzzi describes the approach in Reggio schools:

. . . our schools have not had, nor do they have, a planned curriculum with units and subunits (lesson plans) . . . These would push our schools toward teaching without learning: we would humiliate the schools and the children by entrusting them to forms, dittos, and handbooks

The Reggio schools build experience from the interests of the students, “every year each school delineate a series of related projects, some short-range and some long. These themes serve as the main structural supports, but then it is up to the children, the course of events, and the teachers.”

Similar to my last post, where we looked at curriculums based on Imaginary Friends, next we'll look at ways to build interdisciplinary classroom experiences centered on robots combining imagination, literature, and technology.

For further reading about Reggio schools:

Ozobots

My Imaginary Friend

A Child and a Doll

The most iconic of toys is the doll—it's survived for centuries and taken on numerous forms. Even when a child doesn't have one they will often make a doll for themselves out of natural materials. When I think about the "toys of the season" in the past, what comes to mind are the rushes at shopping chains for dolls every holiday season from Cabbage Patch Kids in 1983, to Beanie Bears in 1995, to Hatchimals last year. Over half of the "sell out" toys since 1983 were dolls. Most other best selling toys consisted of technology: play consoles, tablets etc. Only three other toys since 1983 were in another category (the Koosh Ball in 1987, a Razor Scooter in 2000, and Beyblades in 2002).

The theme of a child taking care of his/her friend runs through children's literature—a child in a deep relationship with a doll (Corduroy, The Velveteen Rabbit, Knuffle Bunny), an animal (Winnie the Pooh, Curious George), or other types of friends (Puff, the Magic Dragon, The Giving Tree, When the Moon Forgot). 

Ollie's Odyssey

I was asked by The Learning Alliance and The Indian River School District in Florida to design a K-12 professional development experience for teachers around the Performance Cycle. Over the course of the year the theme for our professional development had been "The Hero's Journey." I knew I wanted to work with the opening lines of The Odyssey for the middle and high school teachers (a text I'd worked with before—see one of my previous posts here). I thought maybe I could lead the same experience for elementary, but I woke up in the middle of the night knowing that, especially for K-2 grade teachers, it wouldn't work.

Thinking about The Odyssey, I grabbed a book off my daughter's bookshelf Ollie's Odyssey. 

Ollie's Odyssey

By William Joyce

Since I was teaching the opening of The Odyssey in the secondary workshops, I thought it might be interesting to focus for elementary teachers on the first chapter, "Lost and Found," where a young boy, Billie is born with a hole in his heart. His parents wonder, "Billy has a hole in his heart. Will he be all right? He must be." His mother sews a doll for him,

It looked like a teddy bear, but for reasons that Billy's mother could not explain, she had also given it long ears that were vaguely rabbit-like. So it wasn't really a bear or a rabbit; it was something all its own.

At the end of the chapter we find out that Billy will be just fine. As he wakes up, his doll, Ollie, awakens to the world as well.

Hands and Intelligence

In our work with The Learning Alliance, we've been increasingly exploring the idea of maker or studio spaces within classrooms. Maria Montessori writes that "the hands are the instruments of man's intelligence." Our students in schools, of every age group, have much too little time to make things with their hands. Time is taken up with testing, preparing for testing, remedial reading approaches, computer-based assessment programs (like i-Ready where students are essentially filling out worksheets on a computer). If what Montessori says is true, then our students are getting less intelligent day-by-day in most of our schools.

I wanted to create a hands-on, maker experience for the teachers. Many of the teachers at the elementary school level organize their classrooms around Learning Centers—spaces where students can work, often independently, on various projects. When visiting schools, one of the issues I'd seen with many centers is that they are not connected to the rest of the curriculum. There will often be one center where a teacher is reading a book with students (and often not a very rich book), another where students are working on worksheet-related tasks, and another where they are working on literacy programs on a computer (I haven't yet seen a computer-based reading program that has qualities that I would say are actually valuable for literacy development beyond simple phonemic awareness and decoding.) To summarize, in my experience, most centers are organized around remedial work that is awfully dull.

The Movie Trolls and Felt Scrapbooks

While I was thinking about the design of this workshop, I was watching the movie Trolls with my kids. In Trolls, the main character, Poppy makes scrapbooks out of felt. "Felt" is actually the material that inspires the aesthetic of the movie and the opening is a stop-motion action sequence. Artist Priscilla Wong (studio pictured below) describes her process using felt in an article on NPR.

Felt characters in Priscilla Wong's studio. See the article here.

I thought back of an experience teaching artist Debbi Arseneaux led in a classroom last year. We were modeling arts and literacy classes in schools. Teachers would give us the text or curriculum they were working on and we'd create a series of classes with their students that demonstrated how the arts could be woven in meaningful ways into the fabric of their classroom. On one visit we were given a story about a boy and his horse from the Wonders textbook. The problem with the story is that it is about four pages long with absolutely no action or conflict. The boy wakes up, takes care of his horse, goes to school, returns home, takes care of his horse, and goes to sleep.

We thought, "What can we do to excite students about this story—what experience can we build around the text". I thought about my daughter and how she likes to take care of her dolls, much like this boy takes care of his horse. I also remembered one of those best-selling toys from 1997, the Tamagotchi—a digital egg on a keychain that the user cares for as it hatches into a pet. 

After reading the story, Debbi asked the students if they were to have their very own pet, what kind would they want, "Anything is possible!"  The students couldn't stay sitting on the floor as their hands shot into the air and they leapt to their feet. She explained that we would create our pets after lunch and the students couldn't stop talking about their pets through the lunch period.

There is a reason so much of children's literature is based on a child and an animal. Children are taken care of by their parents, and they practice these same behaviors on their own dolls and animals. It is their way of imitating adult behaviors and having a sense of agency and control over their own imaginative worlds.

Traditional and Contemporary Art Making

With the first chapter of Ollie's Odyssey I modeled many multi-sensory reading activities with the teachers (see the full workshop documentation of the workshop here), the part of the workshop I loved the most was the ending. After reading about Billy's friend Ollie, teachers envisioned what their imaginary friend or "favorite toy" might look like. Using the character profile inspired by the 52nd Street Project, teachers created a world around the character and first practiced with a pencil sketch (download the character profile and sketch template here: My Imaginary Friend Template).

The teachers then began to use felt to construct their imaginary friend. A teacher asked me, "Do I need a background?" I left the process very open-ended. I purposely didn't give the teachers a template because I wanted to avoid the Thanksgiving-Hand-Turkey-Syndrome where all the products look exactly the same. 

Teachers' Imaginary Friends

These were some of the products the teachers created.

Teachers made their friends using multi-colored felt, Elmer's glue, and scissors—the simplest of supplies. At the end of the day we stood in a circle and introduced our friends to the larger group. We then explored how stop-motion animation apps can be used to bring the characters to life and to build stories around them (Stop Motion Studio App in the itunes store).

Although it was a remarkable morning, I was struck by the comments of two teachers who were leaving the experience. They commented that this is exactly what they want to do in their classroom—yet the state-mandated tests are coming soon. "We aren't allowed to do projects like this. We have to get our students ready for the tests." They then told me they thought it was time to retire from teaching as they walked to their cars with their imaginary friends in hand.

Collecting Curiosities

"What do you really love about this book? What are the big ideas?" 

In collaboration with The Learning Alliance, I was working with a second grade teaching team at Beachland Elementary School in Vero Beach, Florida. They had planned a unit around fossils and they wanted help with designing a final project. At the table were three teachers from Beachland as well as museum staff from the Vero Beach Museum of Art. The museum had recently received support from Quail Valley Charities to build deeper partnerships with the schools by working directly with teachers on curriculum design as well as bringing students to the museum. 

The teachers explained they were focusing on rock, soil, and how fossils were formed. They noted the specific standard they needed to address—the Florida Earth and Space standard that asks students to "Describe how small pieces of rock and dead plant and animal parts can be the basis of soil and explain the process by which soil is formed." We then looked at the essential question they had developed:

How does being inquisitive lead to great discoveries?

We loved the words "inquire" and "discover" in their essential question, so we knew the final project had to in some way involve actually discovery. They explained they were focusing their unit on two texts.

Stone Girl Bone Girl: The Story of Mary Anning of Lyme Regis

By Laurence Anholt

The Fossil Girl

By Catherine Brighton

Both stories are biographies of Mary Anning who collected fossils with her family and sold these "curios" to the wealthy who visited the seaside resort area where she lived. She made many extraordinary discoveries including the first ichthyosaur skeleton. This idea of "found curiosities" reminded me of a teacher institute we hosted five years ago at Habla called "A Cabinet of Wonders." We based the institute on the idea on the wunderkammer—also known as a "cabinet of wonder," a room, closet, or cabinets where individual collectors during the Renaissance assembled remarkable objects from around the world.

"Musei Wormiani Historia", the frontispiece from the Museum Wormianum depicting Ole Worm's cabinet of curiosities. Source: Wikipedia.

We realized that these cabinets of wonder were the original source of today's museums and suddenly all the pieces of the unit elegantly fit together. Students will comb the beaches of Vero Beach looking for "curios." In a similar way that rocks and fossils tell the story of our earth, the students will ask questions and make inferences based on their objects: What are the stories they tell? Similarly in the museum students will look for "curios," objects that interest them from the collection. They will also learn from museum curators how museums are shaped—how do curators make decisions around what to include and what to leave out?

Finally, with the help of museum education staff, student will work to build their own "Cabinet of Wonders,"—the objects the students curate tell the story of the community where they live. The students' cabinets of wonder will be exhibited in the museum.

This is when curriculum planning is most exhilarating—when we mine the texts in search of underlying themes and ideas. We are indeed looking for the curios that might lie just beneath the surface.

This opportunity for teachers work collaboratively together was a result of the unique partnership between The Learning Alliance, an organization dedicated to literacy across the community, the Indian River County School District. and the Vero Museum of Art.

Make it Your Own: Marking Up Text

"We're all about marking up text" a principal at an elementary school in Florida explained to me. "This is our main focus this year," she emphasized.

I'm not sure when, as a student, I first began marking up text. Probably in college since we were explicitly told we weren't allowed to make any marks at all in our public high school books that were on loan. Somewhere along the line I learned to underline the parts of the book that are important, to circle and look up words I didn't know, and to write comments in the margins. One of my teaching colleagues John Hanlon was a master book-marker-upper. He always used a fine black pen. His underlines were neat and clear. His writing in the margin, crisp and legible. After working with John I always strove to mark up books as well as he did.

It seems these days in schools many teachers are teaching their students to mark up texts, usually following a complicated set of instructions. For instance one reading program encourages us to:

Invite students to “mark up the text” as they read a selection by circling unfamiliar words, highlighting/underlining key ideas, and writing notes and questions. Margin notes made by readers include: questions, predictions, connections, key ideas, and discoveries. Encourage students to create their own Comprehension Codes for types of responses, such as “PCs” for personal connections or “D” for discoveries.

A grandson of a colleague of mine came home with his book full of post it notes and said to her, "Grandma, why don't they just let us read the books!"

Now I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with marking up text. I actually think it is a critical skill for students to have to succeed academically. My wife when she was getting a PhD had a handful of highlighters she used to indicate different ideas of the text. Looking at her books it's difficult to find words that aren't highlighted. However, I do believe that, like many reading strategies, we often have a "one-size-fits-all" approach and we require all of our students to mark up the text in the exact same way. 

This week I was in Boston offering an ArtsLiteracy workshop for Boston Public School teachers. I'd heard about a literacy and arts project led by artist Tim Rollins. In the 80s in the South Bronx he taught a course in a public school that incorporated art making with reading. He, or one of his students, would read books out loud while the rest of the class created works of art in response to the literature. The students named themselves K.O.S. (the Kids of Survival) and eventually they founded an after-school program and became internationally known for their work.

Tim Rollins and the K.O.S.

I came across some of the ways in which they turned pages into works of art.

Black Beauty The Liberty, Tim Rollins and K.O.S, 1990-1

Origin of the Species (after Darwin), Tim Rollins and K.O.S, 1990-1

The word "comprehension" is derived from the Latin word comprehendere which means to "seize" or "grasp." Comprehension should then be an almost physical act of "grasping" the meaning. 

In Boston we were reading the opening lines of Homer's The Odyssey. Instead of first having a formal discussion about the text, I wanted teachers to experience "grasping" the text. Each teacher had the first few line of The Odyssey on a piece of paper. I shared with them Tim Rollins and K.O.S.'s work and then gave the simple instruction:

Mark up the text, using any tools you have, in a way that is visually and intellectually pleasing to you.

Here are some examples of their work.

After the teachers created their images, we grouped in trios and each person spoke for one minute about how they marked up the text. We then had a general conversation about their ideas about their interpretations of the text. I never offered my own ideas about The Odyssey. Canonized texts in our world today can be problematic from gender or cultural perspectives, particularly The Odyssey. Marking up the text in this way allowed the participants to argue, criticize, celebrate, analyze in ways that were important to them. They took the text and clearly made it their own.

Update

I returned to the Boston Public Schools to offer another workshop. Myran Parker-Brass, the Executive Director for the Arts for BPS, asked me to lead the "Marking Up Text" experience for a new group of teachers. This time we used key scenes from Homer's Odyssey. Based on how the first group did some cutting-up of the text, I changed the directions a bit adding what is in parentheses below:

Mark up (or cut up, or bend, or fold) the text, using any tools you have, in a way that is visually and intellectually pleasing to you.

Here are some of the results.

Land of the Lotus Eaters, Example One

Land of the Lotus Eaters, Example Two