Emergent Curriculum! Who Knew?

So, I'm reading various articles about arts and education, which I do all the time, when I come across this term "emergent curriculum." Doesn't that sound scientific and important? Well, it's the term for my teaching methods - I just didn't know it. It's always fun to find there's a big term with lots of syllables in it for something you've been doing for a long time - years, even.

I use jumping-off points, brainstorming, and projects-made-up-on-the-fly to teach. In fact, I pretty much never know how a class is going to go or what we are going to make.

This does not mean, however, that we just go in there and the students do whatever they want and there is no structure or teaching going on. It just means that I look for where the energy is in the class and go with it. Then, using that, I engage the group in projects and exercises that have that energy as the raw materials. What you get in return is lots of interest, great ideas, and fabulous humor. And a class that is engaged because they are making the work their own.

For example, if I am teaching a class on cartooning, I may have the group brainstorm ideas for superheroes or superpowers or bad guys, and then guide them in creating stories. Students will almost always have something on their minds, like a movie they've just seen or a particular animal that they like. That stuff will come out as we brainstorm, or as I see what the students are doodling on their papers. Those are jumping-off points. My job is to ask them about their ideas, and get them to tell more, and then show them lots of ways to get their developing ideas out where they can be seen. What does the superhero look like when it shoots its laser rays? What sort of sidekick do they need? Where is their secret headquarters? Would a story or idea work best as a movie poster or as a graphic novel? How is the narration going to work?

In one class, we created a mini-comic in which kitchen appliances battled food. There were super powers, and sidekicks, and complicated relationships. There was also an ultimate battle. Every person in the class contributed pages, or character sketches, or story ideas. Then we copied it and stapled it together and everyone took a copy home. It was fabulous.

So anyway, the term for this is apparently "emergent curriculum." So now you know. And I do, too.

Cracking Good Inventions, Gromit!

Are you in or near London? Might you be soon?
If I were, I would check this out: "Wallace and Gromit Present a World of Cracking Ideas" at the Science Museum. What a great way to get interested in inventions! I mean, we could all use some techno-trousers, don't you think?

Being Correct vs. Being Truthful

There is a difference between being correct and being truthful.

Being correct means doing something right. You do a math problem correctly. You spell a word correctly. You measure something correctly. You drive down the street correctly.

And, you answer the questions on a standardized test correctly in order to get the best score.

Knowing how to do things correctly is like having a toolbox. And that toolbox is used for telling the truth.

If you know how to do calculations correctly, then you can tell truths about our world, like what it takes to get a rocket to the moon or how fast a population of animals is declining. Sometimes this gets you in trouble, like if you are Galileo.

If you know how to write correctly, you can make yourself understood when you tell stories or write poetry or report the news. Lots of people have gotten in trouble for telling the truth in their writing. Mark Twain would know about that.

If you know how to operate a movie camera correctly, you can use it to get the shots you need to make your movie.

So, being correct and being truthful are connected. Even though it's not that exciting to sit there and get some questions correct on a test - if doing those problems correctly lets you do something that matters to you, to do something that is true, that's exciting.

This is where the arts come in.

Art is telling truth about who we are and how we see our worlds - real and imagined. There are many media, from painting to comic books to movies and sculpture and more, that we can use to do this. So when we train in a particular medium, we are learning how to do it correctly so that the sculpture stands up or the painting lasts or the graphic novel shows the scene as we want it to appear or the carving in the pyramid remains visible.

The great thing about the arts, though, is that there is truth from the beginning. The way a person makes marks on a paper has truth in it, about that person and how they make marks. The way a person dances is very individual, even if it's clumsy or silly or robotic. Sometimes that's a truth we'd rather our date did not reveal.

So, the arts are about releasing the truths that we have within us. This is incredibly important to young people, who need to be seen and heard and understood and who can often feel ignored by the grownup world.

So while it's important to discover truths outside of us through the sciences, it is also important to release the truths within us through the arts. The two are inseparable. We should teach our kids to do things correctly, but we must also teach them that it is their right to tell the truth.

Instant Clipboard

Rubber bands are such a great thing. Put one around a piece of cardboard and you've got an instant clip board. Holds the paper down, even holds your pen if you want. Put a rubber band at either end if you want to protect the paper from flipping around or getting blown in the breeze if you go outside.






For cardboard, we generally use the piece that's left over after you use up a pad of paper.

I love making art portable because I don't have any one place that I draw, and I notice my students don't either. Sometimes they draw standing up or lying down. So much of drawing is getting involved in what you see, so it's good to be able to go see things. I'm putting together a mobile studio for myself, I'll post that once it's presentable.

Losing Our Sense of Place

Can a newspaper be a place? How about an album cover?

Lately we've fallen in love with the power of translating everything into bits and bytes and sending them all over the world. This is indeed a great trend, and I love the fact that media are becoming an on-demand thing. TiVo rules.

However, ones and zeroes are not the only way to interact with the world. The thing that's getting lost in all this is a sense of place.

I've been reading a lot about how newspapers are going away, how they are going online, how their business model is dead, and all this. And I agree, the paper is no longer meeting up with people's expectations of news. I'm also not enthralled with the dead tree thing, but that's a separate issue. As a cartoonist, how we get media is really important to me. I love the fact that people all over the world can see my work, at any time.

The thing is, though, a newspaper is like a series of rooms full of content. The articles are placed around, and some have pictures, and some have big headlines, and they are arranged physically in a way that makes sense. Not by keyword, but in real space. Editors do this.

If you look at the Huffington Post online, the only way they have to work with space is to make font sizes really really big or put stuff closer to the top. Or maybe add a picture. It's nowhere near as rich an environment as a physical newspaper. There is, frankly, less information there. It's data more than information.

There's a physicality to reading a newspaper, or a book. Leaning on a wall or holding onto a handle on the train home. Or walking into a bookstore. Bookstore owners, like editors, have a voice and a set of priorities. You can tell what they are about by looking at their front tables. There's physicality to picking up a vinyl record and reading the liner notes or looking at the cover - or, if you can believe this, unfolding the full-size poster from inside. That's retro.

I always cringe a little when I see a new computer program designed to help kids draw. There are things for animating kids' art, making stories, all kinds of things. I am sure many of these are wonderful.

But they miss the physicality of holding the pencil, of smearing charcoal, of moving the paper to just the right angle or moving to a place with different light. No matter what fabulous things are going on on the screen, it is still a screen. And the child is still moving a mouse. Sitting in a chair.
I am very excited about our new on-demand world, and I love interconnectedness. But let's keep it integrated with the dirt world. It affects how we think. We need to help ourselves and our kids interact with physical space. They do it naturally.

My husband thinks in three dimensions. He lays out his ideas in the air with his hands, one after the other. My daughter dances while she talks. We've all heard the jokes about people who can no longer speak if you hold their hands still.

We are physical creatures, and our brains crave that dirt world. I look forward to a time when our bits and bytes can integrate better with it. The Kindle is kind of a good start, I think. I've made a couple of books for it, so people can read them on their Kindle or iPhone as they move around in the world. I hope that intersection grows tremendously in the future, so we can have interconnectedness and a sense of place at the same time.

World Savvy and Burton High

I'm really looking forward to how this project is going to come out. Katina Papson at World Savvy contacted me awhile ago, about a graphic novel/storytelling project she is working on with Eric Chow at Burton High in San Francisco. My job so far (that's me at the board) has been to give the world's fastest demo on comic layout over lunch break (note huge bag of m&m's in the foreground). 30 or so students are writing about their immigration experiences. My message to them was: First figure out how you are writing your story, then lay it out on the page. After that, don't be afraid to erase, move stuff around, or even cut it out and glue it somewhere different. Cartooning can be such a non-linear and pliable medium!
Looking at their work so far I was struck by the number of airplanes and airports I saw - that moment of leaving home looms so large. Anyway, they are working on their writing, and I'm hoping to help them get through the layout/drawing portion of the project in the next week or two. If I can get permission I'll show some of their work here!

Nice Article at Art Junction

I like this article about kids and drawing at Art Junction, because it's about how deep the need to draw goes, how drawing is a unique and core means of human expression, and it's NOT about how to get your kid to draw something nice to put on the wall. It also has some really good ideas for what to do to encourage drawing in your family. Love that.

Oh, and I also like the quote from the artist Francis Bacon on the side of the page: "If you can talk about it, why paint it?" -- exactly.

Postcards All Over Everything!

At the afterschool center we've set up a postcard exchange with another school - so we've been making tons of art to send them. Here are a few of the cards. It will be cool to see what we get back!
This took some thought - I decided finally to just have the kids put their name/age/grade, and then to put them all together into one envelope, rather than trying to address them all individually. There was much confusion over addresses and postage, which was detracting from the artwork part of the project. Plus, well, stamps look like stickers and this is not a good thing. So, off goes our first batch. Yay!

I just love this.

Here's something that wouldn't have been possible before things like YouTube...

Kids do this sort of thing as their full-time job - mashing things together.

It's amazing how well these various clips go together - with a whole lot of editing of course. It's important not to forget how huge the role of the editing is here - editors make a video or movie into what it's going to be. So next time you see a show or movie you like, thank the editor.

What's Holding Your Brain Together?

I've been thinking a lot about molecules, because they help me visualize thinking and learning... There are these different atoms, and they are bigger or smaller, and they stick together or they don't, and... stay with me.

Here's a sketch of 8 kinds of intelligence (sort of borrowed from Dr. Howard Gardner), as a molecule. In this example, all the intelligences are the same size:



But if you think about yourself or someone you know, you'll probably notice that one of these seems to fit the best. It's kind of the center. Many people have strengths in a lot (or all) of these areas, but there's usually some basic starting point. For me, that is in the visual/spatial area. For my daughter, it's all interpersonal. My son, verbal.

So then, maybe the molecule starts to look like this:


Now the bits are different sizes, with maybe one big one and a few mediums and some smalls.

But then, they stick together, don't they? So then it starts looking like this:



But there's still something missing - the connections. I think that your center, or preferred way of thinking, acts like a passport to the other areas. It's like glue, holding your thinking together. So then you get something like this:



Where things are connected together in various ways - some areas are bigger, some bonds are stronger -- depending on who you are.

This is nothing new - there's been a ton published on learning, and connections, and learning styles, and all of it. But this exercise helps me clarify how best to approach teaching art - because when I teach it's not that I'm just hanging out in the visual/spatial atom, it's that I'm communicating visually with people who have all sorts of configurations in their brains.

Drawing addresses all of these - movement, logic, space, self-expression, self-examination, nature, story, rhythm.

That's why I draw with different people differently and why drawing jams, where people get to shape what goes on, are so healthy - as opposed to saying, "Here we are in visual-land and I'm not too good at that, can't wait until I can escape..." when trying to complete some sort of a project and make it look right.

Ken Robinson says we shouldn't have subject areas, we should have disciplines - because that frees us up to deal with kids who think better while moving, or who hear music in everything, or who make everything into a connection with other people...

This all makes me want to stick together styrofoam balls with toothpicks.