510Bridge Collective

SF-Oakland Bay Bridge old and new spans side by side

On December 2nd I will be heading to Half Moon Bay for the Big Ideas Fest http://www.bigideasfest.org/fests

I'm heading to Big Ideas with 510BridgeCollective, a group of arts educators from the Alameda County Office of Education. We'll be at the conference to address the following Understanding Goals:

1. How can we collectively influence, expand and bridge our programming to increase our connections within and beyond Alameda County?

2. How can we individually think big and think beyond our current understanding of teaching and learning?

3. What can we learn about collective impact from this experience and what can we bring back to our communities?

4. How can we more effectively use social media in our work?

The 510BridgeCollective and The Big Ideas Fest offer opportunities for me to further investigate the meaning of collaboration and community engagement.  So much of what I do is collaboration. As a teaching artist there is no other way to function. I'm in constant collaboration with my students, classroom teachers, with fellow artists and educators. But is it "community engagement"?.

While I'm at the conference I will continue to ask my specific question around education and collaboration:

"If we're to have integrated, inquiry based education, how do we move educators (teachers, administrators and policy makers)  from a mindset of isolation and competition to one of collaboration?" 

Three artifacts coming soon...

A draft of three artifacts for the Kenny Lake School project

A description of my artifacts

This is my first draft of my three artifacts for our rubics cube.

My particular project question is:

How can an interview-based educational theater project inspire a school district to adopt policy that will grow the inclusion of the arts in its academic classrooms and increase the arts-based instructional capacity of its teachers?

In December 2012-January 2013, I’ll be leading an interview-based theater project at Kenny Lake School in Copper River School District in Alaska. How can I design a process and products with the goal of increasing the long-term presence of the arts in the school district’s staff skills, in its curricula, and in its policy?

Artifact #1 (text): We will endeavor always to learn from and be guided by those we work with.

This text is drawn from Bill Cleveland’s Partnership Commandments at the Center for the Study of Art and Community. I choose this text because it inspires me to maintain the perspective of a learner and a visitor as I prepare to visit Kenny Lake. It’s one month until my first school visit in mid-December, and I’m feeling some frustration with the administration there for their lack of communication with me as I attempt to plan a deep, intentional residency. This text reminds me that I can choose to attempt to see the situation from their perspective: they are busy working to serve their students, and they have the students’ best interests in mind. No matter the hurdles I may continue to encounter through this project, I can learn from and be guided by the administrators, teachers, and students in Kenny Lake.

Artifact #2 (image): Blackburn Mountain and some of the people of Kenny Lake.

I created this collage with images from the internet. I have never spent time in Kenny Lake before. The landscape photograph both surprised me and made me feel excited to go there. It also reminds me that I’ll be brand new to the community when I arrive. The other images in the collage are snapshots of people in Kenny Lake--people with insights and challenges I hope to encounter carefully and respectfully along with the students in this project.

Artifact #3 (gesture): Holding up a mirror to myself.

This still-frame image captures my gesture of holding up a mirror to examine myself. The image is inspired by two quotations which I hope to remember over the course of the Kenny Lake School project:

“Reflexivity provides me with the opportunity to attend to how my personal biography informs my ability to listen, question, synthesize, analyze, and interpret knowledge throughout the...process” [McIntyre, Alice. (2008) Participatory Action Research. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.]

“Finding our feet, an unnerving business which never more than distantly succeeds, is what ethnographic research consists of as a personal experience.” [Geertz, Clifford. (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.]

These two quotations--and the corresponding mirror gesture--remind me to pay attention to the personal nature of interview-based work like this Kenny Lake project. I aim to take time to analyze my personal position while I engage in interviews; to consider how those interviews and their artistic products might resonate with me on a personal level; and to keep steady in spite of the ongoing challenge of ‘finding my feet’ during the process.

Creating these artifacts has served as a helpful way to develop a sort of meta-analytical and -creative view of this project and my place in it. During this G1 semester at Goddard, I’m discovering how all of my personal and professional work incorporates intercultural encounters and self-reflection and -discovery. I’m learning how to articulate these as I move forward; these artifacts are another attempt at this. As the Kenny Lake project takes shape, I expect that I may revise these artifacts, change them, or discard them in favor of new ones.

More questions than answers

3rd grade students experiment with watercolor

I've been wondering what is the difference between collaboration and community engagement? I'm having a hard time figuring out my direction within this Collaborative Learning experiment. I'm involved with a large network of teaching artists. We come together in many ways; to share best practices, to focus on arts education advocacy and to offer support to each other. I don't know if this is collaboration or community engagement? Both or neither?

According to Wikipedia
Community engagement refers to the process by which community benefit organizations and individuals build ongoing, permanent relationships for the purpose of applying a collective vision for the benefit of a community.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_engagement
Collaboration is working together to achieve a goal.^[1] It is a recursive^[2] process where two or more people or organizations work together to realize shared goals, (this is more than the intersection of common goals seen in co-operative ventures, but a deep, collective, determination to reach an identical objective
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaboration

If these definitions work then yes, both. Any thoughts?

University students work on color mixing and painting lines

Recently I attended a  conference on Common Core State Standards. The conference brought together teachers and artists from 8 counties in California to develop performance assessments. The new standards are suppose to bring "more depth, less breadth" to education and testing.

While at the conference I was thinking about these questions around engagement, community and collaboration in terms of classroom teaching. I decided to ask people at the conference about these ideas. The conversations were dynamic and passionate. I asked people "If we're to have integrated, inquiry based education, how do we move educators (teachers, administrators and policy makers)  from a mindset of isolation to collaboration?" I wish I had done a better job of recording the conversations but here are the snippets I wrote down.

"What is the purpose of public education? To make better futures for ourselves, others and the planet. This requires working together."

"It's about Collective Impact. If we're to make policy change - how do we come together for a shared vision?"

"It's about Private Property - What if we abandoned it? Think about intellectual free space - our minds are public parks."

"What are the dispositions that become part of a life time (teaching) practice? and how is art a part of inquiry, collaboration, etc... in learning?"

The Bus to the Future, a project of Columbus, OH as part of Finding Time: Columbus Public Art 2012

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Since I do not have a car, I use the COTA (Central Ohio Transit Authority) bus system regularly. The bus lines, schedule, and accessibility often determine my appointments and activities. I first noticed The Bus to the Future public art installation while waiting for a bus on High Street at a bus stop labeled below with the sign, “equal opportunity.” It seemed ironic and made me think of inequality when you are car-less which impacts your ability to access job opportunities, social activities, and access in general when you live in a city that is dominated by cars and with limited public transportation.

 

The new bus stop labels are a part of The Bus to the Future public art project, conceived by the German collaborators, Martin Keil and Henrik Mayer, who call themselves Reinigungsgesellschaft, which means "The Cleaning Society” in German. They were commissioned by the city of Columbus as part of Finding Time: Columbus Public Art 2012 in conjunction with 200Columbus the Bicentennial. The duo profess that their work is an "artistic venture at the point of intersection between art and society." Other bus stops are labeled on High Street, a main street of downtown Columbus and Broad Street that intersect High.  Other phrases include: “cleaner air,” “remaking the city,” “demographic change,” “renewable energy,” “reduce dependency on oil,” “reduce emissions,” “cleaner water,” “power of diaspora,” “job creation,” “public space,” “car free care free,” “community needs,” and “to the unknown.” Large posters at bus shelters declared, “Explore Transportation Diversity,” “Social Inclusion,” “Liveable Communities,” “Local Potential, ”Redefine Freedom,” “Health Point,” “Bicycling Benefits,” and “Reduce Speculation.”

 

What I noticed next was that the signs were in English and that the focus was the use of language rather than images. This does not acknowledge the diversity of the constituency that uses the bus that includes international students and immigrants.

 

As part of their research, Keil and Mayer rode the COTA bus from one suburb to another for three days and spent two weeks to conduct interviews along the bus lines. This culminated in a workshop where they asked, “What would you call your bus line to take you into the future?” The goal of the workshop was “to spur community thought and discussion on creating sustainable options in and around Columbus/Ohio and other cities in the world.” As a result of the interviews and community workshop, labels were collected and then displayed on bus stop signs and shelters.

 




 

A letter from Kerala: “We will endeavor always to learn from, and to be guided by, those we work with.”

Saturday night, November 3, 2012

Dear Constance and Chanika,

Up late here in Kollam, Kerala, southwest India, after our full group phone meeting for the Collaborative Learning Experiment. That dog is still barking outside.

I’m reflecting, after our phone conversation, on the helpful idea that these are all intercultural encounters--my martial arts training here; my collaboration with you; my work in Alaska schools in general and in Copper River School District this coming winter specifically.

I’m frustrated at the moment with Tammy, the administrator from Copper River Schools who is my liaison for the artists-in-schools program. I wrote to her a little over a week ago with a barrage of ideas and questions that come from the strategies I articulated in my study question--things like planning to arrange student meetings with the regional school board; engaging teachers and students in deeper documentation strategies; etcetera.

As I said on the phone, I’m recognizing my tendency to want action on my terms. I wrote to Tammy and now, unfairly, I’m expecting her to respond immediately.

I’m also critiquing more and more the limitations of this school arts project, through the lens of Alice McIntyre’s Participatory Action Research, a resource I’ve been examining of late. I am excited by McIntyre’s definitions of true participation and collaboration. I aspire to those. And I’m also thinking about the Partnership Commandments Bill gave us at residency (such as “We will go slow,” and “We will only enter into partnership with those with whom we have a mutually defined interest”). ...I relish the idea of a project that’s not “parachuting in,” but in many ways, this project with Copper River District is in danger of being just that. I have only two weeks there at the school; I’ll arrive in the afternoon the day before Day 1, without enough time, perhaps, to even meet all of the teachers whose classrooms I’ll be working in--much less to sit and mutually define our interests together.

...So basically, as the project draws nearer, I’m beginning to see some of its (potential) shortcomings or pitfalls. I think I have to remember that the positive outcomes might be harder to anticipate, in a way. I shouldn’t despair, just yet.

And with this framing of the intercultural quality of our exchange--mine with Copper River Schools; mine with my teacher here in India; mine with you two--I feel positive about keeping my attention on the last Partnership Commandment: “We will endeavor always to learn from, and to be guided by, those we work with.”

Thanks for working with me, teaching me, guiding me...and for listening to this late-night ramble.

Ryan