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.