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| Your Brain on Art.
Learning Through the Arts (LTTA) is continually innovating in the field of arts based education and developing creative approaches for learning. LTTA's latest endeavour is to take the experience from its highly successful 20 years of arts of infused learning and expand that to include an enhanced digital delivery component.
We are proposing a prototype of the program to the Calgary Board of Education.
Contained on this blog are the descriptions of the project as it would unfold with over a three year period. We look forward to hearing your comments and perspectives.
Through a year-long connection with an Artist-Educator, on-going collaboration and co-learning with colleagues invested in the same arts disposition, teachers will inspire each other and their students to explore their aesthetic awareness, discover connections between art making and self, life, and curriculum to build a greater understanding of others and the world.
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LTTA Digital Learning Objective
Our objective is to
assist the Calgary Board of Education to inspire, test and establish excellence
within the new Arts Education curriculum. We propose the prototyping of the
first year of a three year, continuous arts discovery and application process
that connects artists, FNMI Elders from our Elder in Residence program and
teachers. The artists and teachers will use an aesthetic awareness in a
specific arts disposition- we will be starting with the many facets of digital
media- to develop meaningful arts exploration activities and engage with students
in the classroom. Co learning among teachers that occur within professional
learning circles will focus on reflection on the arts disposition, weaving in
an FNMI world view when requested by the teachers, learning from each other and
manifesting an arts disposition awareness in daily life.
Goals
YEAR ONE: Through a year-long connection with an
artist-educator, on-going collaboration and co-learning with colleagues
invested in the same arts disposition, teachers will inspire each other and
their students to explore their aesthetic awareness, discover connections
between art making and self, life, and curriculum to build a greater shared
understanding of others and the world. They will explore the foundations of the
art form personally, in co learning situations and with their students.
Keys of a Successful Year One
- Building awareness and stretching our ways of thinking and seeing
- A shared understanding of the FNMI World view and how to bring that perspective in a culturally appropriate way
- Noticing together.
- Share Small things often.
- Tell Stories: success, failure- all stories of experiments within this environment are good.
- Starting with what is known and moving to what is not known. Teach what you know now.
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| Encounters with Aesthetic Awareness and an Artist. |
Phase 1- Curation as
a means of engaging: looking in, considering. One Month.
- Building relationships understanding through curated/informed sharing of resources from teacher to artist educator.
- Developing literacy through curated/informed sharing of resources from artist educator to teacher. This could include FNMI digital resources and Elder stories shared virtually through Skype, or Google hang out.
- The artist as curator as a confident assembler of relevant materials that provide a deeper meaning and context for audiences.
Artist Educator connection:
- The artist educator and the teacher share curated images/examples of artistic expression that fit within the discipline. Artist Educators create their own pinterest pages, links, videos, and suggestions that provide a doorway or window into who they are and their aesthetic.
- The artist educator shares ideas for working with students in a similar way- to help students curate and share through an informed understanding of aesthetic awareness
- The artist educator will meet with the students/teachers to inspire deeper looking and consideration of the arts discipline. And to facilitate sharing among students of their growing aesthetic.
- Collaboration among teachers. Teachers will partner together and share their growing aesthetic awareness and the work they are undergoing with their students.
Teachers will be encouraged to share their increased awareness about their artistic expression in the classroom, outside of the project work, and in living a creative life.
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| Explore existing aesthetic awareness |
Phase 2 - Six to
Nine weeks.
•
Artist
Educator facilitates curation/informed sharing activities that engage a deeper
understanding of the core elements of an arts discipline.
•
Curation
continues with more directed learning
Artist Educator Connection:
•
Artist
Educator shares resources to build the ability to use vocabulary.
•
Artist
Educator facilitates activities for teacher co learning groups:
•
Pairing
teachers within the arts discipline: share one of your curated resources- the
receiving teacher finds the opposite. discuss.
•
Forward
elements of the arts discipline and ask for responses: I love it. I like it. I
hate it. Why?
•
Eg.
create a value line of examples of an element of the arts discipline (example,
music/tempo)
•
The
artist educator will meet with the students/teachers during this time to
inspire, generate enthusiasm for the art form and show how students and the
teacher can begin to connect the arts discipline to self and life and
curriculum. An important element of this
phase is nurturing classroom culture. The artist educator is a mentor for arts
and for the connection between arts and education, curriculum. Our FNMI Elders can partner alongside the
artist, teacher, and students virtually through digital resources if an FNMI
theme is woven into the project.
- Share your experiences within the teacher to teacher pairing and the artist educator experience.
- Share your experiences that you've completed with your students.
- Set out a task for the next phase: artist-educator create new teacher professional learning partnerships with the goal that these new teams will create a layered project.
- Ask your students to find three examples of excellence within the arts discipline. This will act as a test of teacher and students knowledge. Translate new informed ideas of excellence into the extended arts vocabulary.
- Report on results through a check back with artist educator.
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| Cultivating and enlarging creative experiences. |
- Teacher refines arts creation experiences with advanced techniques. The focus will be on understanding and combining tools/foundational understandings.
- Deconstructing the arts discipline.
- A meaningful integration of the arts discipline within a personal context, a supported experience with their teacher professional learning partnership, and the facilitation of an arts discipline experience within the classroom.
- Artist educators facilitate activities that explore, through hands-on experiences, foundational aspects of the arts discipline.
- Building literacy of doing the art form in a laboratory format. Through exploration, that ideally integrates digital resources (though recognizes the limitations of the classroom/school technology): Four to Six foundation-exploration assignments.
- Artist Educator is in the classroom to support the teacher during this phase for at least one classroom period.
Teachers participate in a Co Learning/sharing gathering to sum up the projects to
explore their experiences and learning prior to leading the students in the
arts experiences that they've been exploring on their own. Through partnership
discussions, facilitated by the artist educator, they share and examine how
best to explore the work with their students.
Teachers as creators
of curatorial projects.
Teachers participate in a second co learning/sharing gathering to explore
personal projects and/or classroom projects. During this session, we look to
teachers to create partnerships with others based on interests and ideas. These partnerships could include adding in a
FNMI support worker or cultural teacher from school district to the team to
bring in a localized FNMI perspective.This is the beginnings of visioning
special projects.
The teacher’s
voice and the expression of that voice through the arts disposition will be an
important part of year one and the process of exploring those same activities
with his/her students will be a means of digging deeper.
Optional and Recommended: Teachers Co Learn in a
laboratory intensive.
Germinating creative
endeavours is the focus. We anticipate this is a week-long exploration in a
multi-disciplinary setting with open exploration alongside a master artist as
mentor. The teacher will be encouraged to challenge their awareness of the art
form, examine the systems and processes and then turn the art form structure
upside down and re-create. This is the beginning of visioning a year two
project.
For students, teachers observe
that the arts can:
• Lead to deep learning, increased student
ownership, and engagement with academic content;
• Provide a variety of strategies for
accessing content and expressing understanding;
• Create learning that is culturally
responsive and relevant in students’ lives;
• Engage students in 21st century skills
including creativity, innovation; and imagination; and
• Develop empathy, awareness of multiple
perspectives and cultural sensitivity to others.
For teachers, encounters with art, art making and artists:
• Provides hands-on experiential learning
through arts-based professional development that engenders engagement in the
creative process that mirrors the process teachers’ students
will engage in;
• Allows teachers an avenue for providing
dynamic and creative instruction to facilitate deep learning;
• Enables teachers to differentiate their
instruction to meet the needs of all learners;
• Provides pathways for culturally responsive
pedagogy, which recognizes the cultural backgrounds and individuality of all
students;
Rejuvenates
teachers who were on the verge of burnout and renews teachers’ commitment to teaching[1]
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