9th graders in Harlem:
5 classes on Tues/5 classes on Thurs with 2 different teaching partners - this 12 week art program was designed to complement a freshman elective called Foundations, focused on supporting student transitions from previous environments into high school - and particular skill building in relationships. The school saw a need for a certain kind of skill development and did the work to make it real.
Initially students were interested in me and my presentations, but disinterested in the act of making. I added an extra brainstorming day to each of my projects - which was not originally built into the program - and found that to be a really important/successful addition. A lot of students initially froze and needed the support of an adult and a quality of curious attention to help break through internal boundaries around communicating their thoughts and feelings - a practice I understand needs to be built through time. Student output and intention was drastically different from beginning to end of this residency. A lot of disengaged students woke up in our process together - and I too got to practice a lot of things that I have mostly just done in rooms full of consenting adults that trusted me.
The program has been considered a huge success and will be extended next year on the condition that it is me doing it. The content teacher and I are already planning to build our curriculum together so the groundwork I am laying for students to build skills around knowing how to engage with themselves/their identities and utilize their sense of self as a resource for how they engage with the world can be embedded more deeply and across multiple disciplines/expressions.
This is currently going to be a second semester program, and even though this company pays me the least of everyone I work for - I will be reserving this time block because this has been the most developing experience I have had as a teaching artist thus far. The support in the structure of the existing elective, the way the school wants to be seen, and within the classroom via my partner teachers allows for the work I am doing to fully manifest in a way that I can begin to actually build on.
Puppetry with a Yeshivah School, Brooklyn - 4th and 5th graders in afterschool
My experience of afterschool generally is that all the sitting and being told what to do all day creates a burst of excess energy and wanting to play (processing their day - moving is one way we process everything) so I generally am trying to figure out the appropriate container that meets students where they are at energetically while also having a gentle direction. I do not believe that afterschool is about 'teaching' in a filling them with information sense. I was very unsure of what to expect with this group, and was pleasantly surprised to find an excitable but engaged body of students who were very excited to make things and try new stuff out. Everything I have brought to them they have jumped into in different ways, and when they start destroying it all, I know it is time to move on. This is a very industrious, skillful group and due to a large number of siblings, their communication styles are generally relegated to screaming everything to try to be heard over each other - so I get to skill build ways of setting limits and a tone within a community environment that does not mirror my experience - but also does not undermine their expression or way of being in a judgmental way. I am learning a lot here, and the adults in the room with me are also so open and receptive to what we are doing, we are exchanging curriculum ideas while they also craft alongside the students.
A lot of social justice language/curriculum I have seen that engages with the concept of Community talks about it from a distance, or has students name theirs - without talking about what it means to be with others in that way, or more importantly - to do the work of building community in an embodied sense. Here, and also with my Harlem 9th graders - there is a clear sense amongst the young people that if they need support, they can reach out to me, because they know I am available in that way - non judgmental, curious, listening and letting them tell me what they need/where they might be stuck. "I" am a stand in for any adult, it isn't about me, as much as them having an experience of being able to trust, of being able to ask for support and receive it - having that experience is what helps us learn how to also give it later in life, and how to look for that quality in other relationships. This is what building relational capacities look like - not SEL checklists. And especially at this Yeshivah school, I am having the most concise feeling of community being built, of all of the places I am working at. Me getting to have this experience helps me learn what needs to be in place in less receptive environments for something like this to emerge.
I very much hope I get to do this residency again next year.
Every year I choose a theme to focus my practice for the entirety of that year - it helps focus me around something I'm trying to understand better via student response to the question, as well as give my curriculum a sense of direction. My theme/question this year was "What kind of world to we want to live in together, and how do we build it?". I have been researching and leaning in to things like Afrofuturism as a reprieve from dystopian/colonizing approaches to the future as dictated by sci-fi/cyberpunk commentary on humanity - trying to find places to imagine together, to play, to create joyful contexts. Across the board, in every burrough and in completely different school settings, students have communicated a kind of consuming fear and hopelessness about what is ahead of them, whether it be what feels like a pre-scripted life path with no room for deviation (to deviate seems to be taught as failing by schools rn), or the looming climate/economic collapse that the Pandemic highlighted - the sense of there being no resources left when they become adults. A few students directly told me they wished they could go back to the shut-down, being alone in their rooms with the whole world passing them by - or straight up not wanting to look into the future at all, even to imagine themselves there.
One of my Programs paid for me to attend Face-to-Face, an Art teaching based conference put on by NYC Arts in Education Roundtable - and I def had some deeply illuminating experiences. Misty Copeland was the opening speaker, and there was a moment when she was asked by an audience member when she first found her voice as a dancer - and said it wasn't until she was asked by Prince to freestyle to a song, after years of training and moving up through the ranks as an extremely skillful dancer - he was the first person to invite her into trusting herself enough to move like she felt (Misty talking about collaborating with Prince) - and here is the tender space where my frustration with everyone's ideas and language about art are embedded. Some people/schools/coordinators sell a residency etc around the idea that students are learning marketable skills, and art for successfully engaging in capitalism is the literal opposite of learning art as resistance/liberation. Often teachers are telling students that art is supposed to be relaxing, that when we come in it should be fun, a break from work etc - the opposite of discipline, and art IS literally a discipline, is extremely effortful and the topic of social justice is inherently uncomfortable and requires a huge skillset of holding that discomfort in a group setting and being prepared for all the ways it might manifest - but no one is doing the nuts and bolts work of making sure we grow those skills to do the work even as teaching artists. All of this, from top to bottom is disjointed and none of the expectations I'm being given meet the needs of what I am actually in the room with.
Becoming aware of circumstances that hold someone back in society at a mass scale first and foremost comes with a measure of grief. At what point are we creating circumstances for students to skill build around experiencing grief? How do we scaffold lessons about the reality of what some of us are facing that can hold a sense of hopelessness or overwhelm that will come up for many of them, but without losing students in it completely? What do we actually want students to learn - and what kinds of real world responses can we show that are clear and effective? I have subbed classes teaching poetry about community and in every class at least one student gets overwhelmed and shuts down/sheds tears because the prompt inherently negates their experience of being held/supported or not by what they are being told IS their community. Lots of students have already learned to ignore anything that doesn't feel positive, a coping mechanism passed down from their caregivers - which waking up to the actual reality also threatens. So many of us are not given opportunities to learn how to hold the fullness of our experiences in a way we can functionally process - ESPECIALLY in historically unsupported communities - that not being able to hold grief and fear and anger and joy etc without being overwhelmed will get in the way of being able to make use of liberation when it does come. To make use of support functionally, without fear or hoarding, when it does come. Arts curriculum that doesn't begin with an intention before developing the practice to support that intention is just going through motions. When the portraits being done by a teaching artist with different groups of students look the same, year after year - what is anyone learning? The world is changing. What young people experience and need are changing. Hopefully we are growing and changing too - or we will just be in the way of progress.
I asked Misty Copeland a question as well. She has started a Bronx based dance program with just a few partnerships, and my question was comparing pre and post pandemic student responsiveness - I mentioned what I am perceiving as a 'resistance to effort' post pandemic and when I said that phrase, an 'mmmm' sound rippled quite clearly through the audience, I watched her notice and heard a note of panic when she told me she couldn't speak to my question because her program was too new - and one of the programs I was there with also talked about that emphatic audience response after that Q+A concluded. Someone even walked up and offered me a job at their program because I named that quality. It feels like there is a shift away from Work for the sake of Work, but also a frustration or confusion from adults that our young people are resisting the methods that reinforce capitalism. It feels like the people at the forefront of student voice and social justice based art also don't quite know what to do when the status quo is in the process of shifting. The narrative has not caught up with reality. If we are the arbiters of this new landscape - what resources are available in this slower paced, lowered productivity zone? How do we work with what is in front of us, without judging them for not being something else? How do we shift not just our expectations of the students, but also the expectations of our funders/partners for what student output looks like? For me the biggest fear is that there is not curiosity or joy in the making - even Play is necessarily effortful, but effort has been so incentivized that everything seems to require a prize or a grade to be considered worth doing - how too can I allow that to be true without being too frustrated to engage gracefully with it?
I think next year my teaching practice/question will be 'What are our Resources?". I failed in a lot of ways this year - but I don't like that word. Because I approach every residency as a question about what is in the room and how I might get more skillful at working with it, even the failures are hugely impactful on my developing teaching practice. Having Programs that I work for that are willing to acknowledge that sometimes things don't work, and that its ok, that I won't be punished are hugely important to supporting my ability to grow and learn - and I am so grateful for that right now. I understand that for some people this is merely a job and the frustration I feel about what I consider an inherent responsibility for anyone working with developing minds is a waste of my energetic focus. The ability to let it pass through me without distracting me from my intentionality is a skill I too am trying to build - and the more I connect with supportive, like minded people, the less space I have to worry about the gaps I see around me. I need to assess those gaps so I can address what I can, but do I need to carry the weight of the impacts and implications of those things so deeply?
After this year, I am going to overhaul all of the things I have taught previously - my sense of what is possible has drastically shifted since expanding into so many other burroughs and art modalities. I'm still not quite ready to write my teaching manifesto - but I am going to really lay out an architecture for my intentions before entering into the next school year.
