Final Blog Post

Hello everyone! I am sorry I have not updated this blog in a while, but I wanted to come back in and share my final thoughts :)

My time as a shadowing teaching artist with Upstream Arts has come to a close! My final class was yesterday, on Wednesday. It has been such an amazing and extremely educational experience. I feel like I came into the classes with technical experience, such as how a classroom generally runs, how to relay information to students and how to make sure everyone is working, sort of basic teacher stuff. I was almost a little worried that some of what I learned might be kind of redundant. However, Upstream Arts taught me so much about other sides of teaching, that I didn’t even expect to learn. In our sessions, the focus was yes, on making art, but even more so, about the process of making art and how that act can help us understand, process and convey our emotions. In a lot of my experience, art making is the end goal, but in this context, art making was a means to an end, which was something totally new and different to me. I’m so used to the product of art classes being something nice to take home to the parents, and the fact that the products of these classes were emotional skills was something totally new and mind blowing to me. I always knew that art was a way to express yourself and process things, but I feel like I didn’t really understand the power of that until lately. 

I was so lucky to be in a position where I was, in a way, both a teacher and a student. Because of how precise the curriculum is at Upstream, I was not able to teach my own lesson there, but instead did it outside of class.Because of that, I mostly focused on observing the teachers and assisting with demos. Because I was slightly more in the background, I got to participate in several of the activities as both an instructor and a participant, seeing how class functioned from both sides. I was able to see and feel firsthand how the kind, caring and fun nature of the staff affected the students mood and my own. I got to feel how fun or cathartic the activities were, and also learn from the other teaching artists how they were specifically engineered to be that way.

I am so grateful to have been placed at Upstream Arts. Everyone who I worked with was so wonderful, kind and understanding. It has been a hard year for everyone, and the folks there always made sure to check in with both the students and the other members of the staff to see how they are doing and if they needed anything more today than normal. I felt genuinely supported by everyone who I met there, which was an amazing feeling. I really hope that I have an opportunity to work with everyone again, and I would fully encourage anyone with a similar opportunity as myself to do it. Thank you so much to Julie, Elle, Matt, Christian, Abby, Greg, Akiko, Phyllis and everyone else who I had the opportunity to work with over the course of my stay there. And of course, thank you to my professor Aki, who suggested I work there and continuously supported me throughout the semester :)

Week 8 Journal

This wednesday, my wifi was not working, and because of that, I was unable to join the class that morning! However, I was still able to finish up working on the diptychs for the upstream arts show! I am happy that I got them done and was able to help out!

For the Thursday class, I was in my old bedroom at my mom’s house in Des Moines, which added a fun extra layer to the experience. This week the focus was on showing characteristics through movement, and identifying how movement could be used to complete and convey physical and mental tasks, solo, or with a group! We went through many activities, including:

 -deciding what animal we felt like today, and showing how we could embody that animal with our movements

-showing how we do tasks together and conducting those tasks

-using our body to represent sounds others were making

I thought these activities, especially the animal one, were really interesting because of how they allowed people to both become more in touch with themselves by finding an animal they connect to, while also embodying, relating to and taking on an entirely different being. It was a good way of being outside yourself while still being grounded. It was also very fun to pretend to be a salamander, and trying to represent that while standing up! This week was a little more trying in terms of people wanting to volunteer and wanting to participate when being offered the chance, but many people still do, and many more participated when everyone was encouraged to do something at the same time all together. I still think my favorite part of the class was watching everyone act like the animal they felt like.

Teaching Artist Journal 2

This wednesday I had a google meeting with the team of lovely people who are teaching the class that I am observing/interning! There are 5 people, the leader Matt, Chrisitian the moderator, Greg and Akiko who are the TA’s and Phyllis who is the ASL interpreter. All of them were extremely kind and supportive, and it was amazing meeting them. We discussed the basic form of the open enrollment class that is going to happen tomorrow, as well as just generally getting to know each other better (although they already knew each other pretty well). I was unable to have my camera on because they forgot to send me the link earlier, so the meeting caught me totally be surprise and I was fresh out of the shower with a really messy room! But tomorrow, I am going to attend both the class and the pre class meeting, camera on, so they will actually get to see me then. I also filled out and sent away the forms needed for my background check, so that is exciting!

On thursday morning I attended my first upstream arts class! We had a pre-class meeting on zoom with Matt, Christian, Akiko, Greg, Phyllis and myself to go over what was gonna happen and any special considerations we should take. This was an open enrollment class, about movement and expressing emotions. Performance based work is not something I am super familiar with as a primarily visual artist, but I was very excited to learn something new. After figuring out some technical difficulties with zoom, we concluded our meeting and started the class. There were maybe 20-30 people attending, not including the upstream arts staff. There were people across a wide range of ages, types of disabilities, and level of experience with upstream arts classes, all of which were taken into consideration by the staff. It was really useful having so many people, because it made it so everyone's needs were met. As we participated in a variety of movement based activities, it was very open to anyone at any level of mobility could participate, and care was taken to ensure that those leading the movements were audio describing what was happening so the blind students could understand as well. The instructors did a great job of balancing the activities as a group while also spotlighting individual participants who could bring their own unique style and perspective into what we were doing. A lot of it was using movements to describe emotions, so one of the leaders would prompt everyone to do some sort of movement with their body, and have that movement reflect an emotion (example: how would you move across the screen if you were sad, or happy, or surprised?). Then after demonstrating, they would spotlight individual people and how they were doing it specific to their own personalities and abilities. They also called on specific people to suggest their own movement and emotion prompts. Everyone mirrored each others versions after doing their own. The team at upstream arts did an amazing job facilitating community in a digital space. It was a fun, welcoming environment where it was clear that everyone felt free to be themselves without fear of judgement or failure. I am very much looking forward to shadowing more of this class, and eventually participating more in the demos as well!

Teaching Artist Journal 1

Last week, Julie from Upstream Arts and I met over Google Meet on Thursday and had our first discussion! We opened with why I was interested in Upstream Arts, and my past experiences. Julie then explained to me more about the program, and how I could fit in there, both in terms of schedule and as a person. I came to the meeting with less information about what I wanted out of this program than was ideal, so Julie gave me some tasks to figure out 2 more goals that I wanted to accomplish in this program, and familiarize myself more with some of their classes and offerings, through their website and the curriculum I was emailed!We also discussed how the residency would work on a technical level. Placed there as an intern, I would not be the one teaching the classes, because of how precise their lesson plans were, but I would shadow their teaching artists and assist them with 2 classes, both of which would be happening once a week, every week. I would also help to prepare their online gallery show, using different software to prep the work to be posted on their website. Teaching the two lessons would have to happen outside of the Upstream Arts curriculum, so I need to figure out where, when and to whom I will be teaching this lesson. I am thinking maybe it would be best to teach one online and one in person, to people who are already inside my social distancing pod. I also need to have a background check complete on me, which I have no worries about. Later on in the week, Julie emailed me, and confirmed that I would be working with Upstream Arts, and the days on which I would be observing the classes. I am very excited to work with the organization as a whole, but also with the teaching artists I will be working with and learning from in the coming weeks.