Here are my notes from our conversation with Bill:

RUBICS

Pay attention to the disconnects

1 – distance learning with own standards

2 – study group re: how do people collaborate across distance

Finding common ground? What are our common goals? How much common ground do we need to collaborate?

We don’t need each other to do our work.

Opportunity to learn from each other

Our work should reflect the disconnect –

What value can we be to each other to continue collaborate with each other?

Some way forward to feel motivated.

The blog - what is it good for?

Lean into/re-imagine the blog

Ryan & Chanika How do you engage institutions? (Bill can help, has experience)

Small group collab over long distance can be hard. What would have made this better? 

I need my energy focused on my own practice

Can art circumvent policy?

In the essay Codeswitch: The Transborder Immigrant Tool by Amy Sara Carroll in the book Somatic Engagement, Petra Kuppers, Editor, Caroll describes her collaboration with Micha Cardenas, Ricardo Dominguez, Elle Mehrmand, and Brett Stalbaum to create the Transborder Immigrant Tool (TBT), a device that uploads poems onto cell phones that provide coordinates to survive the treacherous border crossing between the U.S. and Mexico leading people to safety sites. Her collaborators have dubbed it "engaged poetics" as paraliterary and a G.P.S. as a "global poetic system." "Mary Pat Brady describes the US-Mexico border as a 'state-sponsored aesthetic project.'" In response to TBT, Carroll has received hate mail and death threats.

Carroll states,"TBT is a wager that we must codeswitch in the face of the enjambed politcsaestheticsethics of everyday US and Mexican anti-education, anti-research, anti LGBTQ, anti-immigrant, anti-Latin!, anti-Muslim...sentiments, masquerading as public policy.

Global Questions/Global Connections

Candy Chang’s Ted Talk shows how a provocative question can stimulate people’s hopes and dreams and create a common ground simply by asking people to publicly share what they would want to do before they die. The question was originally posted on a house in New Orleans and then provided people space to fill in the blank with their chalked responses. The popularity of the project blossomed into kits for others to create their own wish list at other sites globally. You can check out her other  projects here.

A collage of engagement with community & collaborators in Kenny Lake, Alaska

Hi Rubics,

Here is some documentation of my engagement with the community of Kenny Lake School and Copper River School District as I'm preparing to embark on my artist-in-schools residency there and to explore my study question for our group.

I chose to share this with you as a collision of images and information, a quick collage, rather than outlining my correspondence and research in great detail. The information and inspiration I've found exist in my head more like this collage than in a clean, organized format.

The images and text here include:

• emails between me, Copper River administrators, and Kenny Lake teachers.
• Historical research about the Kenny Lake community, from web resources.
• Images from a google image search of "Kenny Lake, Alaska."
• Information from a 2012 Alaska State Council on the Arts report about the situation of arts education in three focus school districts, one of which is Copper River.
• Information from "On Thin Ice," a 2009 report from the Alaska Arts Education Consortium, outlining both successes and challenges in current arts education policy and action around the state.

My most recent correspondence from the school was from the principal yesterday (Monday 12.03). Her comments are a good reminder to me to enter with a mindset of openness and readiness to improvise!--

As you’ll soon find, our community is fairly spread out and we’ve been experiencing very cold temperatures already (-30s, -40, nearing -50’s) so seeking out interview type candidates could be challenging as to getting them here to participate.  Just something to think about and plan well in advance for.  We’ll do all we can to make it happen in encouraging those wanted to help make this the most positive time for all involved.

Thanks,
Ryan

From goal to intention: Reframing my project question

Hi Rubics,

I am re-writing and reframing my project question for the Collaborative Learning Experiment:

How can I facilitate an educational theater project with the intention of generating experiences, events, and artifacts that may help change school district policy?How can I prepare for, implement, evaluate, and document an interview-based educational theater project so that experiences, events, and artifacts from the project may inspire the school district to consider new policy that can grow the inclusion of the arts in its academic classrooms and increase the arts-based instructional capacity of its teachers?
The changes are small but significant: I am shifting my focus away from a goal (to change policy)--which is an expectation for someone else--and toward an intention (to strive to create the conditions for potential change)--which is a resolution for myself.

As you know, I’ve been feeling frustrated in recent weeks with delayed communications from the administrator at the school district where my residency begins in one week. In my last packet response, Bonnie, my advisor, challenged me with this question:

How  might  you   reframe  the  project  to  be  something  that  operates  simply  on  shared   terms  and  within  the  acknowledged  reality  of  too  little  time?    Are  your   expectations  realistic  given  what  you’ll  have  to  work  with?    In  short  term   projects,  I  think  parachuting  can  be  best  avoided  when  you  enter  with  humility   and  in  a  spirit  of  learning  (as  you  are  describing)  and  without  an  assumption  that   you’ll  have  some  large  impact.    Perhaps  that  implies  an  improvisatory  method,   more  so  than  something  preplanned.
She also quoted one of my own statements from my packet cover letter: I said that in my frustrated correspondence with the district, I was
recognizing  my  tendency  to  want  action  on  my  own  terms.
I was struck by reading my own words, repeated back to me in her response. Someone who ‘wants action on his own terms’ doesn’t sound like a person I’d be particularly interested in collaborating with. That statement is even more surprising given some of the other work I’ve been doing this semester--analyzing and critiquing different models of collaboration in professional theatre production. I’ve been criticizing the lack of collaboration in a production I was recently involved in, and I’ve been working to articulate my own values for co-creating. But confronted with my own language about this educational project, I realized suddenly that I might be losing sight of some of my own values because I’ve become focused on achieving my ambitious goal of making change. Bonnie called my attention to this troublesome development.

I considered some of the words she used to describe my approach to this project (some of which I was using, too), like “expectations” and “impact”--in a word, “goals.” Phillip Moffitt writes (in an article Bonnie gave to us at residency): “With goals, the future is always the focus: Are you going to reach your goal? Will you be happy when you do? What’s next?” (Moffitt 2003) The original question I articulated for the CRSD project is not only outcome- and future-oriented, it’s also contingent on the engagement of other people whom I don’t know very well and with whom I don’t have a long history.

I’m reframing this question to focus on “setting intentions...not oriented to a future outcome”: “You set your intentions based on understanding what matters most to you and make a commitment to align your worldly actions with your inner values” (Moffitt 2003).

The Beginner’s Guide to Community-Based Arts (Knight & Schwarzman 2005) has been helpful as I’m preparing for the residency, too. In its chapter titled “Contact,” about initiating project plans with a community, it suggests some strong reflective questions:

What assumptions might you have about a community and its people?
What common goals do you and the community share?And one suggestion:
Be as honest and as open with yourself as you are asking others to be.
I hope that the teachers I’m teaming with at Kenny Lake School will give me a chance to share my ideas and will listen openly and with optimism. I need to give them the same opportunity if this is to be a true collaborative process.

Coincidentally--or not?--as I first started the reframing of my question, I heard back from Tammy at the school district office. Communication is now off and running with Kenny Lake School teachers and staff. I’m one week from my first day at the school, and I feel that we’re in a good place in terms of the timing of our planning. This weekend, I sent them a proposed content focus for the residency; now, I’ll wait to hear their ideas for other possible directions we might go. We’ve also scheduled a planning meeting when I first arrive in Kenny Lake. I’m eager to go to the school and, as best I can, to keep my focus on the discoveries, detours, and surprises that will inevitably come our way.

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?"