Hi All....
I just read Arlene Goldbard's article called Higher Ground: Community Arts as Spiritual Practice. In the narrowest sense, my spiritual practice is a specific kind of Buddhist meditation called Vipassana. In English, this practice is called Insight Meditation. The practice consists of sitting still and following the breath for about 20 minutes or more each day. The purpose of this is, in part, to help you wake up to what's happening inside you and around you in everyday life. In other words, instead of getting caught up in the story you're telling yourself, you watch the story unfold in your mind without getting entangled in it, without buying into it. You also of course watch your sensations and emotions to monitor what's happening. Again the purpose is to wake up and to see your thoughts and feelings for what they are: thoughts and feelings. In this way, you liberate yourself from being caught in the dream your mind is fabricating and you have a choice. You're not operating on automatic pilot anymore, you're able to step back and see it for what it is and then make decisions that are in keeping with your ethical and moral values.

As I have mentioned previously, I have a lot of trouble letting go of things. And so its very difficult for me to do this practice because it involves letting go of thoughts and feelings, detaching from them, and seeing them rather than being enmeshed in them. I think producing art is somewhat like this as well because in order to make art, it is necessary to let the process tell you what to do at least to some extent rather than imposing your will on it.

For me I think this is difficult because I am afraid of the unknown, I want to control things, I want to know what's coming next, I want to shape what's coming next. But how do you control what is uncontrollable? How do you control the creative process? The very nature of the creative process is that it depends on a process that is greater than you are. And so the more you try to force your will on it, the less you accomplish. But of course there needs to be a balance between letting go and exerting some measure of control. I find this very tricky.

For me, doing community arts work is a lot like painting. I have to let go in the sense that I have to open to ideas that seem on the surface to me as simply wrong-headed. Why are they wrongheaded? Because they came from people I don't have all that much respect for, or they deviate in good measure from what I envisioned at the outset. I want to hold onto this vision. It's mine and no one else's! The problem with this is that if I stay in my own mind, in my own visions, I'm not opening to the visions of others, I'm not opening to something new. And as a result, I stay stuck.

In teaching this course for example, I wrote a syllabus. And my tendency is to stick with this syllabus because its mine and I'm the teacher. So how do I listen to you, my students, and open up to new ideas and to ideas that deviate from my original vision without losing complete control? The irony is that if I am too rigid I lose the opportunity to build something that really works, that comes from a collaborative vision. For me at this point, my challenge--is this spiritual?--is to strike a balance between following my own vision and letting go enough for the vision to change and grow with your input.

Hope this makes sense....
Wendy

Blog Entry 2: Describe your work in relation to Transformational Learning as described in the article titled Transformative Learning Theory: Theory to Practice by Jack Mezirow.

In my blog entry for this week, I’d like to focus on how my practice as an art teacher fostered autonomous thinking. I think there are many ways my community based art program in Arlington encouraged autonomous thinking since I saw the production of art in itself as essentially finding one’s voice or developing a personal artistic style. This contrasts with conventional art education methods in which students engage in projects that are for the most part teacher-directed.

As I say, there are many ways that I encouraged autonomous thinking but in this blog entry, I will focus on only one aspect of the program. In collaboration with other teachers, artists in the community and parents, I developed a component of the program devoted to sketchbooks. But how can kids understand what to do with sketchbooks unless they are given specific assignments? Won’t they just doodle or scribble on each page and swiftly turn to the next? I had to figure out how to present the sketchbook idea without dictating what students were to do since that would defeat the whole purpose of the sketchbook idea. 

 

As a group, the teachers, artists, parents and others I was working with, came up with the idea of having artists in the community show the children their sketchbooks and describe how they used them. So we had several artists show their sketchbooks and talk about how they used the sketchbooks.  We also invited advanced art students from Arlington High to show the students their sketchbooks and describe the experience of keeping a sketchbook and what it meant to them. 

The artists and high school students fascinated the elementary students. Not only did they learn a variety of ways to use sketchbooks, but they also saw modeled, how to talk about their work and its development over time. The elementary students actually became self-reflective. Eventually they learned to present their own work in the same way.

In the picture above, David, a second grader, describes his sketch of a rocket blasting away in a starry sky with planets on either side of the rocket and the sun almost at the tip of the rocket’s nose. David is wearing a green and white striped shirt and holds the sketch at an angle so that he can see the sketch while describing it and so that the class can see it as well. He has a serious expression on his face but seems to be enjoying the spotlight.

I will include one student’s series of drawings to explicate how valuable this experience was for the students. The student’s name is Justine and her artwork really blossomed when she had the opportunity to develop her own themes and style. 

  Here is Justine’s self portrait completed at the end of the fourth grade. As Justine pointed out to me, the tiny face just under the small sun icon at the top, and just above the center of the spiral, is Justine. It is a miniscule face peaking out from above the whirling line of the spiral. The face is very small compared to the rest of the picture. There she is in the center of this powerful, vortex, being pulled into its force field but resisting its power, hiding, and trying to sustain a sense of her bearings. In fact, Justine’s self portrait is a graphic portrayal of the fear of becoming known and of the desire to hide that Carol Gilligan and her colleagues describe so vividly in girls who are Justine’s age. According to these developmentalists, eleven year old girls often do hide, and unfortunately often disappear in a psychological sense when they realize that what they have to say is not welcomed in this culture. This self portrait dramatizes this developmental threshold in which girls unconsciously decide either to become who they are or to hide. You will remember the Carol Gilligan article and how the girl began to hide her answer when she understood that what she had to say was not understood by the interviewer. 

In the sketchbook pages, that follow, notice the complexity, the detail, and the fullness of each piece that reiterates the sense of bursting energy reflected in the fourth grade self portrait. There is the sense of a mythical world infused with a kind of energy that is almost supernatural or magical. The world and nature are alive with power, with purpose, with mystery. And the fear of this world and this energy, that was so intense in the fourth grade portrait, have been transformed in these drawings, into a sense of wonder, almost awe, at the immensity and complexity of it all. In Kieran Egan’s developmental scheme, this sense of awe would be equivalent to “Mythic understanding”, a sense of the mystery, magic, and power in the world and in the self. 

The picture at right is of Justine's drawing of mountains and goats. The sun is a bright yellow with rays of deep red and blue. The sky is mostly yellow with other colors mixed in. The goat in the center is closest to the viewer, and the goat directly to the right of that central goat seems furthest away. There is an impression that space goes on and on: that what we see is only part of what exists. Furthermore, the entire picture has the feeling of energy moving through it that is reminiscent of Justine’s self portrait. Yet while the mood of the self portrait, executed with little color, is somewhat frightening and sad, the tone of this drawing and the ones that follow are filled with color, light and hope. The world of Justine’s art more generally, is alive with color, energy and feeling. 

This one Justine calls “Mountain Sky”. And again, there is the feeling of energy coursing throughout the surface of the drawing and of the solid mountains down below holding their ground. The drawing has a freedom of expression about it while at the same time evinces a great deal of control.  Is it ominous? Is it portending? It seems mysterious to me and as if some excitement hovers beneath its surface. Some godlike voice echoes commandments behind the picture.

 

This image explodes with the excitement that I sensed under the surface of the previous drawing. It is filled with color and with shapes. Justine points out how long it took her to draw all those little stars in the background.

“I made hundreds of little dots for stars. The picture is my idea of what space might look like if you were traveling at the speed of light

or passing through a black hole.”

 

 

This drawing has greater depth and complexity in that the birds and fish are moving at so many different levels in reference to the picture plane. The image seems to exude a sense of mystery at the energy and excitement and complexity of the world in all its activity. One can almost hear and smell the ocean and the sky meeting, and the fish and birds splashing and crying out as they play and reach out to one another.

 In this drawing two cats are climbing into a fishtank with fish, large and small, and with a black and shite cat in the center. The water is a deep green. The fish are many different colors. The picture has a lightness and humor to it that was not evident in the previous pictures. The bursting energy that had such an explosive quality to it, is now contained. What does this mean? I wonder if Justine would be able to articulate progression of her series. Unfortunately at this point, I don't remember. However, it seems obvious that the opportunity to develop her own ideas through drawing, surrounded by a caring community, triggered a change from feeling overwhelmed by an explosive energy to being part of it, to being joyful.

I hope this series of drawings by one student brought to life how autonomous thinking might be encouraged by one aspect of a community arts program: the sketchbook project.

Ethic of Justice and Ethic of Care in Relation to Community Arts

Hi Everyone,
The first blog assignment is to comment on the ethic of care and ethic of justice perspectives and how they relate to my community arts work.

My understanding of the ethic of justice perspective is that it is based on an assumption of the self as separate; in this view, communities are comprised of many separate selves. The ideal here is that each person has equal rights and that no one ought violate the rights of anyone else. So in the case of the Heinz dilemma, Jake sees it as" sort of like a math problem with humans". He addresses the question: what's more valuable, life or property? And he answers that life is more valuable because the druggist can  get his money later from rich people with cancer; but Heinz can never get his wife back because each person is different so Heinz cannot replace his wife with a different person. Therefore the only logical solution is for Heinz to steal the drug.

In my community arts work, some of my reasoning was based on the ethic of justice perspective. I felt that my own rights as an art teacher were being violated and that the subject I taught was being given less than equal treatment.

I include the picture at left of a self portrait by a first grader to illustrate the power of children's art and its value, not only for the children but for anyone fortunate enough to view it and be moved by it. This first grader was new to the school. She was black and poor, a Metco student who was bussed into this predominantly white upper middle class school community. She seemed sad and lonely and her self portrait captures this beautifully. The figure is on the left side of the page superimposed on a light green background streaked with black thick jagged lines emanating from a large red-orange, sun-like shape.  The face is a large oval painted brown with two black shapes indicating eyes quite high on the forehead. Red tears stream from the eyes leading to a small smudge indicating the nose. The mouth is a black line with red spots on either side. The body is a blue rectangle with brown arms coming from the shoulders. On the girl's shirt is a red heart in the center with an X on it. What does the X mean? What does the portrait mean? It is almost impossible to put it into words which is precisely the point. Children's artwork expresses what is beyond words. It comes from a different and perhaps a deeper place. And to trivialize this work is to trivialize the inner thoughts and feelings of a fragile and vulnerable population. In including this picture and describing it, I am trying to bring to life the feelings underlying my motivation as an art teacher.  

When I began teaching in Arlington, I was assigned four entire schools and was responsible for the art education of about 1500 students. In addition, in most of the schools there was no art room so that I moved from one class to the next with materials piled high on a cart. To add to this situation, my classes were back to back, each class allotted only 30 minutes. By the time materials were distributed and instructions given, students had only a very brief period to work on projects. To make matters worse, there was no time between classes and the schedule often involved moving from one end of the school to the other end with no time to accomplish this.

I applied to the doctoral program at Lesley in part to provide some meaning to my life outside of my family. I had really given up trying to make my work as an art teacher meaningful. I was just going through the motions at work doing the best I could but felt there was no way to really improve things.

However, as I related in the seminar class, I had noticed that there were gender differences in the styles and topics of children's drawings. And I was fascinated by this. In the doctoral program I started reading feminist literature on development and gender differences and then became immersed in feminist and postmodernist philosophies. Both philosophies posited a new and different concept of the self as being part of a web of relationships rather than being separate.

These philosophies gave me the idea to solve my problems at work. I reached out to the community and it was like magic. Everything fell into place and the program that had been static and meaningless become exciting and dynamic. Furthermore, I was no longer alone in my struggle but had an entire community behind me. Together we were able not only to transform the program but also were able to gain more power because the entire community was watching what was going on.

Hence, my initial motivation for developing the community based art program was to rectify a situation that I had felt was unjust. Obviously, it was unjust not only to me as an art teacher but also to my students who had so little time to do hands-on art projects and so little exposure to art history, aesthetic understanding, and all facets of visual art that I might otherwise have presented. I must say that reaching out to the community was a huge move for me out of the darkness of isolation and bitterness and into the light of community and joy. But the initial motivation arose in part from my sense that my own rights and the rights of my students had been violated.

However, I could use the ethic of care perspective to tell the same story with a different emphasis and a different set of players and responses. So my conclusion is that I can assume both perspectives and I suspect that most people can. As to which one is more dominant for me, I really am not sure. In fact, I think for me at least, its often a mix of both perspectives that motivate my thinking and actions.

Wendy