Theory Loves Practice

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DPS teachers joined us tonight as part of their ongoing PDU sessions. Their energy and creativity was inspiring.

We examined COMBINATORY THINKING.

“Of all the mental processes studied by cognitive psychologists, the ones thought to be most relevant to creativity are conceptual combination, metaphor, and analogy.

When concepts are very different, you have to use the more complex strategies (to combine them) and these strategies result in the most novel and innovative combinations. The more similar two concepts are, the easier it is to use the simpler strategies of combining properties and values.”

–Keith. Sawyer, Creativity Psychologist

Einstein’s Technique-Combinatory Play

Erica Richards led us in an ideation exercise based on the book,

How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell

Erica asked us:

1. What do You Pay Attention To?
2. Do a one minute presentation on what do you pay attention to. 
3. Use five Minutes to Prepare for the Presentation.
4. Then, give a “Call for Action!”
5. Then, participants do the call.

HERE’S WHAT WE PAY ATTENTION TO

Katie pays attention to unknown places. She told us how she led a group on a dérive, a practice conceived by the French “Situationists.” Basically a derive is an aimless, stream-of-consicous kind of walking through a place in which you ignore all the official and rational methods for navigating through that place. For instance, the Situationists would use a map of one city to journey through another city. In Katie’s story, she told us how her group flipped a coin every time they came to a corner to know to go left or right.

Katie’s Call to Action: Put yourself in a place you’ve never been and take a photograph of it. Post your photo to #actionfigur3s.

Amy pays attention to a lot of things: positive outlooks, humor in unexpected places, all things botanical and floral, a growth mindset and related books, all things art ed related, kindness in people, sunsets, intuitive and mindfulness practices.

Amy’s Call to Action: Make a humorous picture to give to someone as a random act of kindness.

Dale pays attention to how space and people flow. She thinks about the spaces where she and others work. This week she redesigned a layout in her classroom clay area. She added more tables to add flow and movement.

Dales Call to Action: Pick one place in your life lacking in flow and resolve it.

Christy pays attention to her phone. She was thinking about her phone and she’s addicted to it.

Christy’s Call to Action: Do something unplugged and non-digital.

Rachael pays attention to difficult math because she has been using it in her artwork.

Rachael’s Call to Action: Photograph things that are oblique and simultaneously beautiful, like Where Theory Meets Chalk Dust Flies.

Elizabeth pays attention to gratefulness. 

Elizabeth’s Call to Action: Record how many times a day you thanked someone are they a friend, close family member, or stranger. Collect this data for a week. (see Dear Data)

Jesse pays attention to the lines in architecture….lines that go immediately up and then lead down to the foundation of a building and then what else in the ground underneath.

Jesse’s Call to Action: Imagine what is 20 feet below you right now.

Pat pays attention to faces and bright colors. Emojis!

Pat’s Call to Action: Create an emoji on how you are feeling right now

Anne pays attention to the unfinished projects in her house.

Anne’s Call to Action: When you go to bed at night and you are worried about something, take comfort in the fact that there are four solid walls and a floor and ceiling surrounding you.

Beatrice pays attention to people’s faces when their art is being critiqued in class.

Beatrice’s Call to Action: Be aware of someone’s reaction to the thing you say to them.

Then we looked at ideation resources, that teachers brought.

IDEATION RESOURCES

Abecedarian Gallery sells the Adjective and Media card set by artist Julie Chen

Ideo.org Travel Pack

Design Challenge Box  by The Activity Hub

Your Ideas Start Here by Caroline Eckert

Art Before Breakfast by Danny Gregory

Cooper Hewitt Ready, Set, Design

NEXT MEETING, NOV. 13, WE’LL DIG IN. 

Rachael and Anne will facilitate exercises and conversation about combinatory thinking, the element that is present in so many of the above ideation resources. We’ll examine the ways we combine things in creative thinking: HOW things are combined and WHAT things are combined. We’ll discuss the implications this has on innovation. See you then.

This Wednesday, we spent some time with the CVA’s  Collectivism Exhibit where artists use community, social justice, humor, and beauty to respond to the good, the bad, and the ugly in our world.

For instance, The Tea Project represents experiences of men in Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp, including their practice of intricate, pattern carving on prison-issued styrofoam cups.

Then we continued in the studio making magic wands to help us through the school year.

Here is what we hope our wands will do:

• Stores my and everyone’s back-to-school energy to be accessed later in the year when my enthusiasm drops.
• Protects myself from the unraveling of myself…collecting myself back together again.
• Controls organized chaos
• Takes in and transforms the BS and spewing out Sass in return
• Keeps me centered and balanced with a cocoon of hidden chakras .
• Keeps my year calm and nice
• Gets me through the semester to send out softness to the world
• Continues good things to happen and keep things light and airy.
• Maintains an all-seeing eye to watch my students in the classroom, the good and the bad.
• Makes windows in my classroom (not the software, but the ones with glass and sunshine)
• Makes my 8th graders fun and innocent (which they are not!)
• Keeps me from getting attached and knowing that everything is going to be OK
• Captures time with a spinnin’ globe

See you next month, October 9th, for more magic!

Happy Summer!

We met in Erica G.’s beautiful garden for our first Scramble Scrabble Dinner and ate our synthesis: savory, alcohol-infused popsicles, versions of tacos with coffee, ashes and flan, herbed cakes, pasta concoctions, etc.

Katie read about gathering and we thought about what gathering means for Theory Loves Practice.

See you in September!

Hooshing

Tonight, we picked up a thread that Rachael started a while ago. Remember curating the refrigerator? Katie lead us back into the art of J. Morgan Puett, a self proclaimed Master of Entanglement. We watched videos, talked, and prepared for a Scramble Scrabble Dinner.

Mildred’s Lane is Puett’s creative space in Pennsylvania where people gather to critically engage with every aspect of life, e.g. arranging chairs, cleaning toilets, curating the refrigerator….what Puett calls  hooshing. Puett explains, Every aspect of life is a rigorous engagement with the banal…an artful experience. So at Mildred’s Lane, we make that a creatively, charged practice. Being is the practice.

Hoosh (hōōSH), v.

1. A practice of conceptually charged arranging, cleaning.
2. The stylistic activation and conceptual engagement with one’s environment.

In the Art Assignment video, Sarah Urist Green, reminds us that Puett’s practice comes from the legacy of Fluxus, particularly Alison Knowle’s Make a Salad, a performance piece where the artist takes something insignificant and domestic and elevates it to the realm of art.

This gets at Ellen Dissanayake’s definition of art. People deliberately make something special. She explains, what artists do, in their specialized and often driven way, is an exaggeration of what ordinary people also do, naturally and with enjoyment – transform the ordinary into the extra-ordinary. Remember Ellen? She was the keynote speaker at the CAEA conference a couple of years ago.

Talking it Over

What makes a salad as a salad different from a salad as art?

How is Mildred’s Lane different than just having a nice house?

Intention.

I’ve been thinking about hospitality….art as hospitality.

Yea. My work really is about gathering people together….the art is the intentionality of the gathering. I’m intentionally creating spaces for people to gather. I know I’ve mentioned this book before, The Art of Gathering: How we Meet and Why it Matters, Pyra Parker

This is what teachers do everyday.

How is the art of the dinner different from my mother giving dinner parties? How is it different from pre-feminist work?

Again. Intentionality.

Not just intentionality. It’s also different because this is about cultures of power. We use the same forms as the 1950’s housewife, but we do the decision making. The power comes out of that act of deciding to do it or not doing. You do it as a specific stance, an act. Not because it is expected of your role.

Like Cupcake Feminism?

Like teaching? 1950’s teaching  vs. 2019 teaching as a conceptual art practice?

Teaching as a social practice.

Even though I believe this why do I fall back on art as defined by what European and American males did in the last century?

My art practice is my teaching. It’s my painting too. Erica’s does this amazing gardening and flower business. The other Erica’s gathering people for intentional creative work. Why does it have to be one or the other? Who makes that rule?  It’s all. There needs to be a space where everything can belong.

Like you’re at a party and someone alludes to your teaching and says, Are you still making your art?

Uh. Yea.

But we default in our minds to the practices of the European art salons and the New York galleries. Why?

Sigh.

Challenge the Dish!

In order to plan a scramble scrabble dinner, you need to follow this Algorithm (sort of). The important thing is to challenge the dish by being outrageous and not falling back on old cooking knowledge. The more naive and impulsive recipes, the better.

Each person writes their full name and then writes food or food processes from the letters in their name.

Then a large paper or cloth is set on a table and everyone writes one of their words.

Everyone moves in one direction to a new word and fits in one of their words like the game of scrabble.

The movement keeps happening until the table is full of little scrabble letter puzzles.

Everyone goes back to their original word and uses the word groupings to create a recipe. They write the recipe on the paper and draw a picture of it.

Everyone moves around the table adding more and more ideas for new recipes at each scrabble letter picture.

People choose the recipe they want to cook for the dinner.

A final menu is assembled.

A dinner potluck date is set.

We will have our Scramble Scrabble dinner on the second week of June. (probably in Erica’s flower garden). If you would like to scramble scrabble with someone to create your own recipe, do. Then join us June 12 at 5:30. We will send out the location soon.

Question Finding

Erica Richards lead us through an ideation exercise about finding a BIG question to investigate. Here is what we did:

Draw quick sketches of art you have made in the past, things that interest you, or take a walk and sketch things that grab your attention.

Talk with your friend about your images and have them look for connections, themes, and patterns. Your friend records these on translucent sticky notes on top of the images. Add more to your web after talking with your partner.

Turn  your most intriguing observation into open ended questions.

Ask one of the questions “why” three times to dig deeper and discover your true wondering.

Revise into one final question. 

Here are some of our final questions:

What is worth protecting?

Can magic sustain you?

Why do we communicate the way we do?

Why do I always think I’m never doing enough?

How can we tell stories about ourselves through pattern and environment?

How can I transform a difficult topic, using art to inspire?

How can you take your immediate surroundings and make a temporary work of environmental art?

How can we explore deeply and see ourselves in our environment?

Can painting about domesticity  be a talisman against the Trump era?

Can interactive, transient community create artist-matter and carry it away, come back to the source, and be validated?

Happy New Year! We started with what inspired us over winter break and went from there. Here are some of the things we shared with each other.

 Joy Harjo, poet

This is Not A Book, Jean Jullien

Tales from the Inner City, Shaun Tan

Stitching Rites (Colcha embroidery), Suzanne MacAulay

The Unsteady Hand    Creative engagement for those with Parkinson’s

PROJECTS

Art Shoppe: The community donates and gathers discarded objects. Students transform them through art via thematic strands: robots that fix problems, mischievous alter egos, imaginary worlds. Christy Loher, Brown Elementary, Jesse Bott, Brown Elementary

A study on posing (Kehinde Wiley): Clay action figures pose in a way that symbolizes beliefs. Aimee Burke, Prospect Elementary

Bookmaking as a vessel to contain images: portraiture/anthropomorphized animals, inspired by Julie Buffalohead, Angel Estrada, Thorton High School

Bookmaking as a way to solve creative problems combing content to 3D forms. Heidi West, Thorton High School

3 dimensional word wishes. Students build them and take them into the world. Jody Chapel, Arts Street

Empathy Dolls  (Art Assignments Object Empathy Dianna Spungen  Elizabeth Stanbro, Young Vision

Draw a “normal” picture, make it weird, then make it weirder, then make it weirder, and so on. Send the picture to artist, Alexandra deBenedictus. She alters it more and sends it back. Then the final drawings are made into a collaborative coloring book. Inspired by Mark Ryden.  Jenny Drake, King-Murphy and Carlson Elementary

Your Daily Diary: Using Lynda Barry’s prompts from Syllabus with students, Erica Gonzolas GALS

.

RESOURCES that emerged from our discussion

Portraits that Aren’t a Portrait (Enabling Artistic Inquiry, Juan Castro)

Pop Surrealism

Superflat  and Takashi Murakami,

Art Hives  : An archive of local artists

Hollis Sigler; narrative artist

 Up-cycling salvage yard 

Tom Killion’s prints

QUESTIONS
How do you help students who struggle to represent their identity?

How much do we dictate? What happens when you release that control?

How do we think (and draw) with our hands?

How about one of your classes creates art about content and the other class designs a book form to embody it?

FEATURED ARTIST

Curtis Santiago (Infinity Series) Social Justice Miniature tableaux

Here are some of the teacher projects and ideas that we talked about tonight.

PROJECT SHARED: IDENTITY ARTIFACTS (Jenny Drake)

Jenny’s students investigate time and cultural artifacts. She first brought “a bunch of junk” from home and told the student that these artifacts were being curated by experts in Denver. They discussed the meaning and definition of “artifact.” Then they investigated Motels of the Mysteries by David Macaulay (PDF Summary). Students were challenged to make an artifact that represents who they are, so when someone 200 years from now comes along, those people will be able to use the artifact to learn who the student was. The challenge was to communicate their identity in an authentic way, so that their identity wouldn’t be misinterpreted 200 years from now. Students used different media, including soap carving.

JENNY’S QUESTION TO OUR GROUP AND THEIR RESPONSES: How can the ideation process be more robust for this project?

Ideation Exercise Idea: “Playful Excavation” Place obscure objects in a box of sand for student archeology groups to discover. From the mysterious artifact, students ask questions, infer meaning, and write a story about it.

Ideation Exercise Idea: Take an everyday object and answer the prompt: If someone found this 200 years from now, what would they think it was? A fun resource could be: Viral videos of children exploring cassette players.

Ideation Exercise Idea: Archeologists explore trash heaps. What is in our trash reveals our lives. It may be interesting to ask the question, if someone saw in your garbage, what would they find? What would it say about you? Could you do a garbage investigation in the school?

PROJECT SHARED: WHAT MAKES CULTURE? AND WHO DECIDES? (Laurie Edmonstone)

Everybody has a culture and even though sometimes seems like you don’t at first, it is there. Students started with a mind map. First of all what is a mind map. Tangent! The episode on mind mapping with Good Mythical Morning Youtubers…two dudes who do a show on really interesting stuff like, “Will it Shoe?…making shoes out of books, meatloaf, etc” or “Will it corndog?…hybridizing corndogs with other things, like sushi. Check them out.

We digress.

Back to the project. As students “mind-mapped” their culture, they researched what others say about their culture: What do the so-called experts have to say about their culture?, What does google images have to say about their culture?, etc.

Then they moved into personal identity, looking at artists who address identity in artworks: Alessandra Ross, Kip Omolad, etc. This project is just beginning.

PROJECT SHARED: ALTERED BODY (Jesse Bott)

Jesse’s 5th grade project integrates with human body curriculum from other classrooms. Students made body alterations based on the prompts, “If you could change anything about your body, what would you do? Would you alter your body for a belief? Enhance it for any particular reason?” Students brought their research about what they learned about our bodies and what they know about themselves. Students came up with alterations to run faster, jump higher, extend further, become a strength-protector, and morph into the natural world.

SKETCHFOLIOS

This led to a conversation about student sketch books. Because Jesse noticed that students needed to look at more than one research page at a time in their sketch books, he came up with a   “sketchfolio.” This is basically a 17″x11″ piece of paper quarter-folded to make a pocket. Students make one sketchfolio per project to keep track of and access their process drawings and research.

INTEGRATION

 That moved into a conversation about integration. What are the issues around this?

TIMING and TIME Do your schools give you time to collaborate with other disciplines or do they expect you to find the time on your own? There is a problem in the timing. Sometimes you find out what other teachers are doing and the collaboration is too late.

ART-TEACHER-IT-UP Educating your classroom teachers is an issue. What do you do when other classroom teachers want to collaborate but their idea for the “art project” is inauthentic and thin? You take the suggestion and then, as Jenny says, you art-teacher it up.  Here are some examples from Jesse.

• Teachers requested an integration with a butterfly study. The art teacher bypassed the usual elementary school-art-style project and had students use their knowledge of butterflies and other insects to create hybridized new creatures. The 3D work was displayed in Mark Dion-esque boxes, like an old, natural history display.
• Teachers requested a multi-cultural art project e.g. Chinese Lanterns. The art teacher bypassed this offer and partnered with another teacher who was game to for students to create art based on a rich investigation in the symbols of their own culture and community.

CRAFT

This led to a conversation on beauty and craftsmanship. How do you show classroom teachers  the lack of learning and the inauthenticity of a weak art project idea, while still honoring their need to have pretty artworks for the halls?  What can art teachers do to help kids think deeply, yet still build media skills? How can you scaffold for smart student art work that is also beautiful?

DOCUMENTATION OF STUDENT THINKING

This led to a conversation on documentation of student thinking in the hall. One art teacher only shows process in the hall, no final products. Documentation as a Reggio Emilia practice shows the process along with the final product. How do you compose the documentation board in a way to shows both?

GETTING HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS TO OWN THEIR RUBRIC CRITERIA

We swayed to a conversation about rubrics. Laurie shared how she gives students overarching categories like “idea” and “execution.” Then she tells students about the project and media and asks them, “How would you fail at them?” Students envision how they would fail. Together students and teacher created the “beginning” or low bar column for the rubric. From that bad list they move to the better work.  “Let’s make the good end.” Finally after the basic criteria column is written, Laurie leaves the last “Exceeds Expectations” column blank, intending for students to fill that in if they think their finished work does exceed expectations, going beyond the minimum expectation. Written with students.

Another effective High School assessment strategy: Laurie posts the final grades of a project, omitting the students’ names. For instance: Period one’s ceramic project had 5 A’s, 9 B’s, 3 C’s, 5D’s. That way students can privately see where their performance is situated within the entire class score. This gives students confidence and reassurance as well as a wake up call.

FYI, Susan Brookhart is Anne’s go-to scholar when it comes to meaningful rubrics.

S. Brookhart Misconceptions about Rubrics

TEACHING ABROAD!

Laurie sold her house and is moving her family to China for two years to teach art in Shanghia via Teaching Nomad.  If you have questions about international teaching, reach out to Laurie via the TLP email group.

Finally….over Thanksgiving break, go see the Tara Donavan show at MCA! Several teachers tonight raved about it.

See you in January!