Apr 24, 2008 2:16 PM
Teachers know that one of the most effective ways to stimulate learning by their students is to generate a healthy curiosity and to find ways to get the kids to connect their own life experiences with what they are studying.
Innovative ways to do just that are the heart and soul of the special training offered to educators by the Lincoln Center Institute National Educator Workshop, a weeklong workshop offered every July. The unique aspect of LCI’s approach to teaching and learning is it does so through the artistic process.
Art is placed at the center of the learning experience, an aesthetic education approach that has distinguished LCI over three decades as the educational cornerstone of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. LCI promotes the idea of imagination as a teachable skill and seeks to demonstrate how the exploration of works of art feeds a viable approach to the study of any subject in the curriculum.
Registration for this summer’s National Educator Workshop at LCI is already under way and can be made for the week of July 7-11 or 14-18 [see box for details]. Sessions are designed for teachers of grades pre-K through 12, school or arts administrators, teaching artists, curriculum developers and university faculty.
For Carolyn Kohli, who teaches English at Edward R. Murrow HS, the experience created a new paradigm in her thinking about composition.
An educator for 21 years, Kohli took part in a session last July that focused on performance and visual art and she produced paintings alongside other educators from cities around the country. LCI-trained professional teaching artists guided everyone in encounters with the works. This was followed by rigorous inquiry-based instruction.
“We talked a lot about what we noticed about each work,” said Kohli. Sharing insights provoked deeper conversations about confronting the fear of making art, she said, and about “how to direct our thinking to larger questions, or how simple attention inspires.”
Now, when Kohli thinks of composing an essay, besides grammar and language, structure and design, she sees the elements of organization like colors and shapes of a painting or lines in a drawing.
After the workshop, she returned to her AP English class at Murrow in the fall to post photographs of two writers on opposite walls of her classroom, along with quotes from their works. Henry David Thoreau’s quote, from “Walden,” was “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!” Nathaniel Hawthorne’s, from “The Scarlet Letter,” was “Be true! Be true! Be true!” Students had been assigned to read both books over the summer. When they discussed them in class, Kohli had them gather underneath the photo and quote by which they would choose to live their lives.
“Then I asked them to just notice several things, such as who went into each group, stating only facts: male or female, numbers, hair color, race, tall or short. Then they had to create a group expression that fleshed out each quote.”
Asking questions, making music, seeing plays, looking at paintings with new eyes are all part of the LCI experience.
The use of inquiry-based instruction that is key to LCI’s aesthetic education approach is what Kohli and other educators say they found most valuable.
“All year, I keep going back to … what do you notice? What can you say about this?” said Kohli. The questions push students to rely on their own perceptions, and to express them, she said.
At Manhattan’s PS 183, Wan Ling Fahrer, a music and art teacher, is using similar methods of observation and reflection to fuel the creative process for students.
For her 1st-graders it has led to life imitating art imitating life.
For a social studies lesson about the importance of neighborhood parks in a community, she had the students study 19th-century French painter Georges Seurat’s “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte,” among other works portraying urban parks and outdoor landscapes.
“They talked about what people were doing in the painting, what they do in the park and what they do on Sunday, relating it to their life experience,” said the fifth-year teacher, herself a visual artist whose work has been shown in the city.
After discussing the painting, Fahrer had the students draw pictures about what they do in the park. The next day she took them for a walk in St. Catherine’s Park, near the school at East 66th Street and First Avenue. They used paper viewfinders to look at elements of the park and relate that to what they saw people doing in the painting. Then she had them draw sketches of what they saw people do in St. Catherine’s Park.
“The kids get very excited seeing all the relationships, making connections with what’s going on all around them,” she said. After a third visit to St. Catherine’s Park, she had them write a song about the park to the tune of “The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round.”
They performed the song — which they named for the park — at their winter concert. Fahrer said they were so proud of it she had them record it on a DVD.
- To apply for the National Educator Workshop at LCI, see the link on the UFT Web site, www.uft.org, under Resources for UFT Members. Registration will be permitted until the first day of the workshop, but a $25 late fee will be charged after June 6. Tuition is $525 per session, plus a non-refundable $25 registration fee.
- Lincoln Center Institute founded one of the new small high schools in the city school system. It’s called the High School for Arts, Imagination and Inquiry and is located across the street from LCI on the Martin Luther King Jr. HS campus on Amsterdam Avenue.
- LCI started 32 years ago working with just 50 teachers in 11 city schools; during the current 2007-08 school year, it will have worked with more than 4,000 educators and 260,000 students nationwide.
- The National Educator Workshop has recently grown to be international. In 2008, it is being hosted by Queen’s University in Canada and the Arts Centre in Australia.
- LCI bestows its “Imagination Award” on schools that employ imagination in their curricula and practice (applications available at www.lcinstitute.org after May 15).
- LCI offers consultancies to city schools that want a taste of its aesthetic educational approach without a long-term commitment.