Kenny Lake Stories - Copper River School District Artist-in-Schools Residency Week 1, December 2012

Hi Rubics,

I hope you guys have been enjoying great holidays!

Posting now about my progress on my community arts project in Kenny Lake, Alaska, and my experience during week 1 of the project in December 2012. 

Loading up the car in Anchorage to make the drive to Kenny Lake

Bin full of food for the week, including some fresh fruit for the teachers!

On the 4.5-hour drive from Anchorage to Kenny Lake on December 9th:

• Long beautiful drive, gray sky, gray road, gray mountains

Matanuska Glacier from the highway

• Stopping at ‘The Hub of Alaska,’ at the junction of the Richardson Hwy and Glenn Hwy, for gas and a coffee. Asked the clerk how far to Kenny Lake. 40 minutes, she said, I’m from there. Oh, I said, I’m going to work at the school. Oh, you must be the artist. So you know, then. Yes, she said, I saw it in the newsletter. ...Her name is Stacy, kids are jonathan, logan, and alexis. Actually Alexis is Stacy’s husband’s granddaughter, older son from a first marriage, but Stacy calls her her own. ..I liked this whole story, in the Hub of Alaska with my cup of weak coffee, my first welcome to Kenny Lake.

'Hub of Alaska' gas station in Glennallen

• From Glennallen, good radio signal--”keeping the christ in christmas.” Long straight Edgerton Hwy drops down down from the plateau, dark gray ribbon in a gray landscape of snowed-on forest and tundra. Sign in a yard: ‘Get US out of the United Nations. $5 info packet.’ Seems to be  libertarian streak around these parts. I might just buy one of those packets.
• Met Dave Wellman, owner of Wellman’s B&B.
• At school, setting up my equipment and space before Monday morning’s first session, Katie the custodian was all ready with names of interviewees. ‘Roy Britten’ -- ‘A salty one, you need at least one.’ 
• Teacher Rylee’s story of taking her teaching job, just last year--it’s all in! I think our theme, ‘What Makes Kenny Lake Home,’ is going to work very well here.

A friendly sign on the drive down the Edgerton Highway

A brief outline of the structure of my residency week: 

• Over the course of the 6-day residency, we completed interviews with 17 Kenny Lake residents.
• Working with 3 upper elementary classrooms and their teachers: 2nd/3rd grade; 4th/5th grade; and 6th grade.
• Monday sessions: building basic drama skills; exploring the experience of conducting interviews
• Tuesday sessions: building basic drama skills; defining ‘ethnography’; beginning to create interview questions
• Wednesday: Story Circle with five elderly residents of Kenny Lake
• Thursday and Friday sessions: classrooms interview additional interviewees, one or two at a times; identify ‘statue moments’ [performable actions, images, and feelings described in the interviews] which may be part of our script; continue to explore drama skills
• Thursday evening: dinner and planning meeting with three host teachers, discussing structure of the upcoming play script as well as a set of goals and intentions between now and late January

Facilitating a Story Circle with elder community members from Kenny Lake

6th grade students create performed statues from interview moments.

Notes from meeting with Copper River School District Staff Development Director (Tammy) about the state of arts integration in the district (Wed 12.12.12):

• This is the 2nd artist-in-schools residency in Kenny Lake’s remembered history (first was jewelry/metal-smithing)
• CRSD is part of New Visions grant from Alaska State Council on the Arts and the Department of Education - this is year 4 of 5 years
• Developments because of New Visions program include:
• Increasing arts residencies
• Being creative with design of residencies
• A fine arts credit requirement for h.s. graduation (next year’s grads will be the first to graduate under this requirement)
• In hiring interviews, asking prospective teachers about arts integration & possibility of teaching arts courses in schools
• Bringing in community members to fill some arts instruction (ie Kenny Lake music program)
• Adopted K-8 visual arts curriculum (with details about integration)
• Use e-learning programs to fulfill arts graduation credits (right now, art appreciation and art history courses)

• Tammy’s concerns:
• Increasing equity--old schedule was such that elective arts courses were only available to ‘smart’ kids who had more free periods
• Demonstrating to board and school administrators that arts don’t take away from the ‘requireds,’ but rather add a more well-rounded experience to student instructional time
• What’s next with the New Visions program? Can we show our progress/success and disseminate to other rural Alaska districts?

My considerations based on week 1; on my meeting with Tammy; and on my questions from the Collaborative Learning Experiment:

• This remains a really ambitious project. I have a lot of work to do simply to realize our artistic and educational goals, before even beginning to do the work of documentation and advocacy necessary to fulfill my attentions for the Collaborative Learning Experiment.
• This is a healthy school environment, with engaged and enthusiastic teachers, students, and community members. The complexity of this project would probably present more challenging obstacles in a situation with more already-existing problems.  
• This school and district already include many strong arts education initiatives, and many allies of the arts in schools.
• With that in mind, my renewed focus for my CLE question comes from one of Tammy’s stated concerns: Demonstrating to board and school administrators that arts don’t take away from the ‘requireds,’ but rather add a more well-rounded experience to student instructional time.
• How can I document and share this project in a way that supports Tammy in her goal?

• Considering Bill’s questions, after our most recent phone meeting of the Rubics Group:

Are you trying to change the curricular policies  of a school district 

OR 

Are you trying to help a small community of teachers discover new and effective ways to advance student learning?

Question: How does a short encounter have lasting impact?   Thought: The most enduring aspect of your project is the harvest of teacher interviews .  Question: How can you use the harvest of interviews to produce a conversation among teachers that has ripples long after you are gone? 

• My project question is: “How can I facilitate an educational theater project with the intention of generating experiences, events, and artifacts that may help change school district policy?” So I’d say, Bill, that I’m attempting to move toward changing curricular policy. The distinction I made before, though, is that I’m not so much setting the goal of making change immediately with this single project as aiming to provide ‘experiences, events, and artifacts’ that may help district stakeholders to make change. ...I’m accustomed to keeping my focus “limited” to student and teacher engagement in my residencies, so this focus on advocacy and policy change feels like it pushes me to go further in my work.
• The interviews we’re harvesting are from the community, about community life, not strictly from teachers--though teachers are interviewed! I think those interviews are great and lasting resources, but they may not serve the exact function you’re imagining since they’re beyond the topic of school policy.
• I like this phraseology, “produce a conversation among teachers that has ripples.” What this inspires me to consider is how I can plan to use my time most wisely when I return to the school to collaborate with teachers, to share the ‘artifacts’ with them that I’ve created, and to invite them to converse about their dreams and goals and strategies.
• Specifically, I’m expected to offer a teacher workshop during my next visit to the school. Typically, I design workshops that offer ideas for using drama in the classroom. But perhaps for this residency I can plan a more ‘macro’ workshop session, in which I share documentation with teachers and ask them to brainstorm about their intentions and next steps. 

Kenny Lake Mercantile

Finally...

I thought we had a refreshingly honest group phone meeting on December 20th. I still feel the same challenges I felt before: at this point, my engagement with the Rubics group--and with this blog--feels obligatory and ‘extracurricular.’ I don’t need to post this to the blog in order to fulfill my obligations or my artistic intentions. It feels like more work. I hope that you--Chanika, Constance, and Bill--will take the time to respond to all of these ramblings. Those responses alone help these blog posts feel more meaningful. And I’ll continue to ponder how we might deepen the value of our collaboration, and/or how we might be more successful with such a collaboration next time.