Classroom Teachers | module 3

Get Arts Powered with Classroom Teachers

In Arts Powered Schools, classroom teachers create Arts Powered Learning using the following four strategies:

strategy 1 l ACT AS CRITICAL THINKERS
strategy 2 l INSIST ON STRONG, MUTILEVEL CONNECTIONS
strategy 3 l TEACH THAT THE COMMUNITY IS A CAMPUS
strategy 4 l KEEP ARTS POWERED LEARNING ALIVE AFTER THE UNIT IS OVER

PLUS, Tips for Arts Powered Teaching

strategy 1 l Classroom Teachers Act As Critical Thinkers

PS 144: Col. Jeromus Remsen in Forest Hills and the Queens Museum

Arts Powered Partnerships demand a lot of classroom teachers—planning meetings, training sessions, schedule adjustments, and rethinking the curriculum. They also require that teachers be critical thinkers. An excellent example is the long-running partnership PS 144 has with the Queens Museum, which celebrates the culture of this New York City borough. The museum’s building was created for the 1939 World’s Fair, a centerpiece of urban planner Robert Moses’s master design for New York City. Moses was a brilliant and extremely controversial figure: He created an unprecedented amount of parkland, for instance, but he also bulldozed neighborhoods, leaving urban blight in their wake.



When the museum’s curators started planning an exhibit honoring Moses’s legacy, its staff approached PS 144 about creating a Moses-inspired Arts Powered Unit. But many of the school’s teachers were unhappy about the prospect, as they had strong personal memories of how Moses’s grand plans overrode the will of their communities.   

► PS 144 4th Grade Teacher Elizabeth Spears: 

Nevertheless, the teachers sat down with museum educators to grapple with possibilities. When the back-and-forth ended, they had developed a unit for fourth graders about the pros and cons of urban redevelopment focusing on Moses and New York City. At its core, the unit was about critical thinking, and the planners realized that the preliminary discussions had enhanced the curriculum and made it more complex. 



They decided that the key idea should be urbanization—how a city grows and develops—and that this would be an important opportunity for the students to work with ideas and think about values. They also saw it as a chance to break out of a textbook approach to social studies by using sources like maps, Google Earth images, and historic photographs.
 



The unit combined a study of Moses’s projects with discussions about the future of the school’s neighborhood. The students and teachers wrestled with one of the ferocious debates of the last century: whether to save old, crowded, quirky neighborhoods or replace them with modern, efficient high-rises, roadways, and bridges. Along the way, they realized that core of the debate wasn’t as much about heroes and villains as it was about human decisions and how they unfold. “[It was] about choices that get made and how communities have to live with them ever after,” PS 144 Arts Coordinator Lois Olshan observed.
 

Part of the students’ work was to create three-dimensional aerial representations of various Moses sites and exhibit them for other students, teachers, families, and the museum staff. They also visited the museum and its fabulous 10,000-square-foot city panorama. The overall experience was Arts Powered Learning—and its impact is likely to last in countless ways. 

 

 

► PS 144 4th Grade Teacher Elizabeth Spears:

                       
              RFK Jr. Bridge (formerly Triboro)                  Major Deegan  Expressway                                 Shea Stadium                                                                                
                    

 

strategy 2 l Classroom Teachers Insist on Strong, Multilevel Connections

One hallmark of Arts Powered Learning is an emphasis on interdisciplinary thinking and working. In Arts Powered Classrooms, teachers insist on strong, genuine connections between the arts and other academic content areas. They know that just singing a song about community helpers does not lead to deeper understanding of how cities work; instead, they use maps, history, and data. They won’t settle for a drama project where the literacy component is writing a thank-you note to the performers. They want more—and they work hard to make it happen.

The value of strong interdisciplinary units of study is that they
• Make meaningful connections made among disciplines
• Promote in-depth learning (such as discipline-specific vocabulary, strategies,
   and standards for quality work) in each discipline
• Show students how connections between disciplines have applications beyond
   the immediate project
• Engage students in learning through the artistic processes of creating, performing,
   and responding
• Provide opportunities to show students examples of similar interdisciplinary work
   by professionals or other students
• Allow student work to be assessed in ways that acknowledge its multiple aspects
 
 

Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School in the South Bronx

At Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School, classroom teachers have had a sustained partnership with the Studio Museum in Harlem. This partnership has produced a series of interdisciplinary units that help young people to read a range of complex written and visual texts at a level that prepares them for the rigorous New York State Regents exams in world history and English/language arts. For example:

• A unit on the Greek tragedy Medea was complemented by mask-making and performance
• In a unit on Elie Weisel’s Holocaust memoir Night, the class also studied the elements of  graphic design and
   created mixed media paintings that featured powerful visual metaphors. Click here for a video on the process
   and art of Night with general education students. Click on photo above right to see the artwork
   and artist statement of a student from a Fannie Lou Hamer special education class.
• Students analyzed the origins and consequences of Latin American revolutions using contemporary political
   comics from Africa
   (click below for an in-depth look at the "Revolution Comics" unit and student outcomes, part 1 & 2):
  

                            

 

strategy 3 l Classroom Teachers Teach That the Community Is a Campus

In Arts Powered Schools, inquiry is a 24–7 enterprise. Classroom teachers engaged in Arts Powered Learning teach their students to think of their communities as living books, museums, or performances. 

IS 259: William McKinley Intermediate School in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn

If IS 259 had a school T-shirt, it might read “New York is my campus, 259 is my school.” Though this Brooklyn middle school is almost an hour’s train ride from Manhattan, its students are growing up in the heart of things in large part because their teachers use the arts to help them become citizens of the entire city. 

In their first year at the school, sixth graders dive into a humanities-based curriculum that combines social studies and English/language arts. As in many other schools, they start in the ancient Near East, moving on to Egypt, Africa, Rome, and Asia. But while more traditional classrooms might march through the textbook, one civilization per week, these students come face to face with the living cultures of these civilizations through Arts Powered Learning. As part of a long-term partnership with Symphony Space and the Creative Arts Team, the humanities teachers have reorganized their curriculum, calling it, “Making Connections Across Time” to incorporate the performing and visual arts of the traditions and nations that they study. 
 

                 

“We think about our work with Symphony Space as introducing our students to primary source texts. The visiting artists are performers on the world stage, bringing the music, dance, and theater from China or India or Africa, and not as long-ago, 'BC' stuff. but as the cultural traditions that influence many of the families in the school and neighborhood. They offer our kids a way to read and interpret them: the symbols, the meanings, and the traditions.”

As is always the case with Arts Powered Learning, IS 259’s curriculum is designed to have an impact long after the unit is done.


  ► IS 259 6th Grade Social Studies Teacher Anthony DeBenedetto:

With this foundation, the students were ready for what Tom Buxton, an English teacher, and Roma Karas, a visual arts teacher, had in store for them in sixth grade. Beginning in 2005, the two teachers began a series of mural projects that, four years later, took up the entire third floor of the building and were travelling up to the fourth floor. The murals’ theme was New York as a city enriched by the cultures of everyone who had arrived on its shores; their visual inspiration was the 1930s, especially Art Deco, jazz, and movie palaces. Using reference books and the web, students documented how buildings throughout the city drew on the styles, icons, and mythology of Egypt, Greece, and Rome. The students also studied the music of George Gershwin as well as movies and paintings of the 1930s, creating a lively portrait of the city’s pulsing life at that time.

► IS 259 8th Grade English Teacher Tom Buxton:

And there’s data to back up Buxton’s observations about the connections between the arts and improved performance. New York City Department of Education data shows that the students who had been working on the murals for the previous three years improved their English/Language Arts grades. The data also shows that students who worked on the murals who were English-language learners scored in the 90th percentile of standardized tests and that the lowest-performing students who worked on the projects made more gains than the citywide average.

strategy 4 l Classroom Teachers Keep Arts Powered Learning Alive
 

In many traditional residencies or partnerships between an artist or cultural organization and a school, gaps can happen. An artist visits, a performance takes place, but the next day, it’s back to business as usual. In Arts Powered Schools, however, teachers and students keep the learning alive and the conversations cooking.

PS 144: Col. Jeromus Remsen in Queens

PS 144 has a partnership with the Guggenheim Museum’s Learning Through Art program, through which practicing artists work with New York City public school teachers to create art projects that will help students examine ideas related to their curriculum. 

The school’s second graders started by looking at landscapes and cityscapes at the museum. Teaching artist Aimee Mower introduced them to art techniques and concepts while showing them how to develop an array of visual observation skills. Back at school, working with their art teacher, the students selected a specific scene in Forest Hills, and, using bold tempera colors on large-format paper, painted what they had observed.

The classroom teachers then asked students to hone a different visual skill: envisioning the future. In connection with their science and social studies curriculum, the children added clear plastic overlays to their original paintings and redesigned the scene to show changes that could make important differences immediately as well as in the future. Based on their study of the environment, the students recognized the importance of planting trees, creating parks, providing safe walkways for animals and people, and having green buildings.

In a less well-thought-out program, the learning could have shut down when the paints were put away, but because Arts Powered Learning was in effect, it didn’t happen that way.

► PS 144 Second Grade Teacher Jennifer Sussman:

In addition to learning more about science, social studies, observation, and painting, the students also developed community-building skills.

► PS 144 Second Grade Teacher Jennifer Sussman:

“I see this work as giving them the tools to do anything for the communities where they live in the future. They don’t have to be an artist, but this is a way of making them critical thinkers in life. The project really helped them to be better citizens with each other; they came to see the classroom as a community. And it gave them a vocabulary. You’d hear them saying things like, “I’d like to build upon what so-and-so said” and “Can you tell me more about that?” The old “yes-no” answers began to slip away. It drew them together and spread to other parts of their day, other classes. It’s my job not to let that become something that belongs only to the Guggenheim projects.”

Tips for Arts Powered Teaching

 At each of case-study schools (PS144, Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School, IS259) classroom teachers made lists of how they pursue the four Arts Powered Teaching Strategies. Some items turned up on everyone’s list, some were particular to the grades taught.
 

 Giving Student Work A Place Of Honor
PS 144 POP ART SELF-PORTRAITS INSPIRED BY ANDY WARHOL
 

You can read more about PS 144 in the School Overview, Progress Report, Quality Report and the Annual Arts in School Report at the New York Department of Education website.
 

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