Margie's+Homework

Hi Gang, I can't believe three weeks have passed since our meeting - but here I am on New Year's day making a good start to 2010 by doing my homework. Regarding question one - "What's already being done": My input concerns Theatre-in-Education where an abundance of activity is happening through partnerships between schools and theatre companies all across the country in many different contexts. I think it’s great that the teaching artist profession is as respected and evolved as it is today. It’s great that artistic skill and content are being taught more for their own sake while also being employed to activate other content areas. It’s great that “artists” and “teachers” are working together in partnerships and learning from each other about their distinct disciplines. However, as happy as I am about this evolution of our field, I am equally saddened by the reality that our artistic pedagogy is not permeating the main stream education establishment in any significant way. So I guess instead of writing about what is happening in Arts Education, I am writing about what’s not happening. I see very little work being done on the relationship between artistic practice and teaching practice. We can all easily agree that all teachers – regardless of their content areas - need to be writers, designers, composers and performers to be effective in their classrooms. But how are we equipping them with the application of these allied artistic crafts to their core artistic craft of teaching. Don’t get me wrong. I do see artistic pedagogy is happening in many classrooms in many contexts – however, more often then not, it is being employed by an intuitive gifted artistic “teacher” who is figuring it out for him or herself. Regarding question 2 – “Ideas to design two courses”: Course 1: __Artistic Pedagogy__ – available to any teaching student from any department – focused on the investigation between teaching practice and artistic practice. I already have a model that explores the relationship between Aristotle’s Poetics and Hunter’s developmental lesson (I think I figure out how to attach the document.) This method is being used by the Roundabout Theatre Company as the focus of their professional development work with teachers and with artists. Regardless of whether they come from the theatre or education side of the aisle, experienced teachers take to it like fish to water because it gives them vocabulary for what they have figured out. For novice teachers/teaching artists, it works as a shortcut to understanding teaching theory. When the anticipatory set is examined as an inciting incident or scaffolding is examined as rising action, the concepts come alive in a more immediately applicable way. I am sure that there are aspects of each artistic discipline that have similar correlations to teaching practice. A course that explores each of these would rock. Course 2: __Master Works:__ Also available to any teaching student from any department this course would involve the creation of interdisipliunary units of study organized around the creation of master art works. The Aesthetic Education program at Lincoln Center has done some work on this – where the work of art becomes the text for study from the context of each relevant content area. However – when students are asked to //create// a master work of art by applying each relevant academic discipline, this concept really rocks. If I can find it I will upload my 9th grade interdisciplinary curriculum for staging Antigone. The work of designing sets and costumes, interpreting characters and staging the drama was preceded by a four weeks of “transdisiplinary” learning in the classroom – classic literature in English, ancient civilizations in Social Studies, geometry in Math and the physics of machines in Science – as the pre-production. Transdisciplinary curriculum mapping is the most evolved of Heidi Hayes Jacobs’s methods – it uses the creation of a collaborative project to galvanize the related curriculum topics – but when the creation of a work of art is used as the project, this work really takes off. I am imagining a course that asks student teachers to work in teams to create works of art - a mural, musical composition, drama, dance, video documentary – while connecting each with the curriculum standards from each discipline that are address in the research and development phase of their project. Type in the content of your page here.