Residency 1-Whittier Elementary School-Jane Swatosh (6hrs)
This week at Whittier, I continued to help students with the editing process of their written chapters. I worked one on one with students, reading their work with them, and helping them with grammatical errors, sentence construction and layout. They had started writing out their own fictional stories based on the historic events they had researched prior. I was really impressed by the way students had imbibed their research. I think the three-step process of reading, summarizing and creating their own narrative reinforced the learning. In math, they continued to work on geometry. Some were self-motivated, others found the work challenging and were quite distracted. If they were confused about a question or a process I sat with them individually and tried to help them understand the process so that they could find the answer themselves. I found that drawing something out, or visually showing them what the question was really helped them understand what they were being asked.
I’m really enjoying working at Whittier with Ms. Swatosh. It is impressive to see her give individual attention to each student in a class of thirty children.
Residency 2-Minneapolis Institute of Art-Angela Olson and Natalia Choi (9.5hrs)
This week was my first week working at Mia. I worked at the Toddler Tuesday event with Teaching artist Akiko Ostlund and on Sunday I worked Family Day where the theme was Jazz. On Tuesday with Akiko we did collage with the toddlers. Though only three or four families showed up, we had an exciting class, and the kids loved all the colorful and shiny and textured paper that Akiko had brought for them to use. Akiko interacted with all the children encouraging them, and showing them examples of what they could do.
On Sunday at Family Day, I worked largely in the studios. The activity planned was abstract painting and while listening to jazz music, inspired by Wassily Kandinsky. A simple activity, it worked well for the continuous flow of people of various ages visiting the event. I loved seeing all the families come in and sit down to paint; mothers, fathers, grandparents, toddlers, pre-teens. An inspiring but also tiring day, by the end of the seven hour day, I felt myself beginning to slow down, and was not able to actively interact with the visitors. Given the winter weather warning, there were relatively fewer visitors to the event than usual, and yet it felt like a lot. It gave me a good understanding of how much it helps to keep the art-making simple in order to cater to a large population.
Something that I noted working at the Mia was the abundance and high quality of material. This makes a lot of difference to the work that is made, and seems to make people more excited about what they are making.
Shadowing-Upstream Arts-Masanari Kawahara (5hrs)
This week I shadowed Masa on Monday class with his students from EPIC (EPIC is an organization which does Day Training & Habilitation for Adults with Disabilities.) and on Saturday at his Visual Memoirs class. On Monday there were 7-8 adults who came in from EPIC for Masa’s class. We started class with a couple theatre based warm up exercises, including a game called orchestra. The students really enjoyed it. Masa’s energy and passion for these exercises is inspiring and contagious, and I thought it was a great way to start the class. We did two main drawing exercises in the class; drawing with two hands at once, and partnering up and drawing on the same page together, one person following the other. Masa encourages his students to stick to the plan, but also gives them the freedom to do what they want. What stood out to me was that often the most creative results were when students interpreted the instructions in their own way. For example, one student, when drawing with two hands, instead of creating one image with both hands, drew two separate identical images, one with each hand.
On Saturday, Masa started the class with a self-portrait (every class starts this way), then went on to the main exercise, which was called Drawing Jam. As part of this exercise students pick out a number of occupations, and then go about quickly drawing what they think people in these occupations look like. Each person passes around their paper and as a result, each ends up with drawings from the whole class. Students enjoyed seeing each others drawings and learning from one another. Something that came up was that students wanted to learn more technical drawing skills, such as depth and perspective. Masa acknowledged this and decided to include it teaching some technical skills in the next session. It's a pleasure to watch Masa interact with his students and cater to their needs as well as push them to try new things. He creates an atmosphere of comfort, where students feel safe to share ideas and be not judged.
