The Art of Writing

 As I briefly mentioned in my last post, I did not choose education as my first vocation. I took a somewhat meandering path to teaching--one that began with my life as an artist. Before deciding to pursue education, I graduated with a BFA from a well-respected, four-year fine arts university. My areas of focus were fiber arts  (knitting, weaving, etc) and illustration (children's books), and these also happen to be areas of focus within the Waldorf curriculum. Waldorf schools place a great deal of emphasis on the arts--one of the reasons I first gravitated to the method--and the term "arts-infused" is frequently used to describe Waldorf education. As both an artist and educator, I am very interested in ways that I can integrate the arts with the general classroom curriculum. This lead me to read Beth Olshansky's article, Artists/Writers Workshop: Focusing in on the ART of Writing, published in the July 2006 issue of Language Arts.

  In her article, Olshansky explores a modified version of the popular Writers Workshop model of literacy instruction. This modified version is called the Artists/Writers Workshop and includes art and visual literacy as a crucial step in the authoring process. Olshansky writes,

"Artists/Writers Workshop is designed to create a democratic classroom community in which words and pictures are treated as equal and complementary languages for learning." 

The steps of the workshop (literature share/mini-lesson, work session, group sharing) are not changed to accommodate the Artists Workshop, but the content of the workshop expands to include visual analysis of picture book illustrations and the crafting of images prior to writing. Writer's Workshop places emphasis on the importance of materials for children: students should be offered independent access to a wide variety of writing materials, including papers of different shapes, sizes, colors and textures, as well as choices of writing instruments (pens, pencils, markers, crayons...). This choice is meant both to honor students' decision-making in the authoring process, and also to inspire children in their writing. The Artists Workshop expands this idea to give students independent access to high-quality, "professional" art materials, like paints, pastels, and collage supplies.

  I am excited and inspired by the idea of the Artists/Writers Workshop. I feel that this modified model would be effective across the grade levels for a few different reasons. In the younger grades (K-2), children naturally turn to image making as their preferred means of communication. The Artists/Writers Workshop is attuned with this period of child development, offering students the opportunity to craft an image first, and then use that image as an entry point into writing. In the later grades (3-6), I feel that the Artists/Writers Workshop would be beneficial for students who struggle to move words from mind to paper. Creating an image prior to writing allows students to express their ideas visually, and then transmediate those thoughts from pictures into words.

  Olshansky includes several quotes from children engaged in the Artists/Writers Workshop in her article, and I think they speak for themselves:

"Writing used to be hard for me, but now it is easy. All I have to do is look at each picture and describe some things I see. I listen to my words to see if they match with my story and they always do. Now writing is my favorite part of school."   --David, grade 2

"While I was doing the pictures first, words just started to grow and I got more and more ideas to write and I just writ and writ and writ until it was a finished book."   --Kevin, grade 1

"The pictures paint the words on paper for you so your words are much better. The words are more descriptive. Sometimes you can't describe the pictures because they are so beautiful."  --Serena, grade 6 

(Of course, I think I would be remiss if I didn't share with you a piece of my own art--a recent illustration for Number the Stars by Lois Lowry, painted using watercolor and gouache.)

Lights, Camera, Dinosaur!

As a follow-up to my post about Literacy Playshop, I thought that I would write about my experience putting the playshop into action. I recently had the pleasure of conducting a literacy playshop with a colleague  (Catie) and two kindergarten students (Camden and Ella) at a local elementary school. Catie and I arrived with iPad and art box in hand, ready to get to work--or should I say play?

  Camden and Ella's teacher allowed us to use her office as our playshop space, so that we wouldn't disturb the rest of the class during their Daily Five time. We started out by reading a book together so that the students could settle in and feel comfortable working (playing!) with us. After the book, we explained that we were going to make our own movie together, and it could be about anything we wanted. Immediately, Camden chimed in that he had seen a movie recently. It was about dinosaurs, and he could recount every bit of the plot, starting from the beginning. I asked Ella if she thought we should make our movie about dinosaurs, and she agreed. Catie and I then asked what we should use to make our movie: should we use our bodies to act it out? Should we use toys? Should we make our own dinosaurs? Camden and Ella were excited to make their own dinosaurs, and fetched blank paper to get started.

  I ran into periodic snags during the playshop when attempting to engage Ella in the process. She is a sweet, but very shy child, and is usually hesitant to get involved. When I invited her to join Camden in drawing dinosaurs, she balked. Thinking for a moment, I drew upon a strategy we learned for teaching early literacy: shared writing. Except in this case, I suppose it would be shared drawing (and this is where my training as an artist comes in handy!). I let Ella choose a marker color for our dinosaur, and then started drawing the head. Occasionally I paused and asked, "What comes next?" When Ella supplied the answer, I would hand her the marker and let her fill in that part, and she would hand it back to me. In the end, I drew the head, arms, and body, and Ella draw the eye, tail, and legs. She then colored in the paper dinosaur puppet.

 With setting and characters drawn together, and the plot hashed and re-hashed by Camden, we were ready to get filming. Then we hit snag number two: Ella felt too shy to participate in the puppetry, and no amount of cajoling could convince her to play. I then filled in as the other dinosaur characters with Camden, and Catie filmed the movie with her iPad. Ella did finally agree to be the "button pusher" on the iPad, and we were happy that she accepted a role in our playshop.

  Our finished film shows the elements of movie/story literacy that our students are familiar with: characters, setting, plot, dialogue, sequencing of events, protagonists and antagonists, humor, rising conflict and resolution. When we asked our students if we should name our movie, like writers name books, Camden offered the tile "Eat the Dinosaurs," a play on the title "Meet the Dinosaurs" (he insists this is the movie he watched, though we can't find evidence of its existance).

 Camden and Ella seemed to enjoy engaging in the literacy playshop, as I imagine most children would. Catie and I agreed that we were concerned about the feasibility of having 25 kindergarteners successfully utilizing iPads to film their movies. I can see the literacy playshop model working especially well in late first grade and second grade, when students have longer attention spans and better fine motor skills.

 Finally, how does literacy playshop meet my trifold standards for education?

•  Head: check, showing all the literacy knowledge I listed above
•  Hands: check, lots of moving, touching, and making going on
•  Heart: check, the students enjoyed playing/storying, and were able to incorporate elements from their existing interests.

A triple threat, and something that I envision myself using in my future classroom.

Literacy Playshop

Within the last few weeks I have read an interesting text about integrating play, literacy, and new media in early childhood and primary grades classrooms.  Literacy Playshop is a curricular framework developed by Karen Wohlwend that empowers children to draw upon their existing knowledge of popular media and use that knowledge to create multimedia productions. With a vision of literacy that is becoming increasingly popular amongst education researchers, children are not simply "writing" or "reading" in literacy playshop. A better verb might be "storying"-- developing characters, settings, and plots through the use of drawing, writing, acting, filming, and more. Children in the literacy playshop often start with a narrative or character that they are familiar with from popular media franchises, but with time the story will evolve to include problems and solutions from the child's imagination.

 I will confess that I came to the literacy playshop with some hesitation. Those familiar with Waldorf will know that the philosophy takes a strong position against giving children early access to technology, such as television and computers, and encourages parents to distance their children from popular media franchises. With  characters that seem to be designed more for adults than children, how could I disagree? Take one glance at the cast of Winx Club, a television show popular enough to boast a recent series of Happy Meal toys, to see what I mean:

 Yikes. Pass me the wooden play food, stat.

 Not exactly something I would want my six-year-old daughter emulating. Dr. Wohlwend, though, asserts that banning children from partaking in popular media is a privileged perspective. To be able to offer children alternative toys, one must be able to afford them, and for many families this is not a possibility. She also believes that educators should allow children the opportunity to share their knowledge of popular media franchises within the classroom--children often have deep wells of knowledge about their particular interests (often cartoons, etc), but few chances to express that knowledge. I can't disagree with that, and I do believe that teachers should honor their students' experiences and interests. A child who is struggling in traditional academic areas may be able to speak about his passions with startling depth, if only given the chance.

 At the moment, I am straddling both sides of the popular media fence, but I suppose my stance is this: Parents should be encouraged to be knowledgeable about the content of the media their children engage with, but ultimately the decisions that they make for their children and families are theirs alone. As a teacher, my job is to make sure all of my students feel included and respected. Therefore, I cannot ban popular media items/discussion from my classroom, though I should educate myself about the franchises my students are exploring, as some may not be appropriate for classroom consumption.

What do you think about popular media in the classroom? Have you ever conducted a literacy playshop in your class?

A Time to Celebrate

  As a pre-service elementary school teacher, I often find myself reflecting on my own elementary school experiences. What I have observed about my memories is that they aren't usually about a specific moment or conversation. They're more ambiguous--a feeling of what it was like to be seven or eight years old in a rural public school classroom. I find that most all of my fuzzy memories revolve around the seasonal activities that were taking place during various parts of the school year. The change from summer to autumn is especially strong in my memory. I remember clearly the feeling of a chilly, drizzly October day in second grade. The windows might be dark and covered with trailing droplets, but inside the classroom was warm and cozy. Autumn brought with it the smell of crunchy leaves on the playground, autumn poems and crafts in the classroom, and the always exciting change of the classroom bulletin board (in October, our names were written on die-cut leaves. In November, turkeys.). The essence of autumn culminated for us in the Oktoberfest festival, a yearly celebration that drew the entire town together for a parade and events that celebrated the harvest time and our German heritage. Soon after, we would begin to focus on Thanksgiving, and not long after that, Christmas and winter time.

 And so my childhood memories flow in a cycle from one year to the next, dotted with Valentine boxes and songs from winter concerts. It's not unusual for memory to be tied to seasonality and celebration. Festival life has been an anchor for humankind for thousands of years, providing a way to mark the passage of time and to form community bonds. In her article Community Celebrations as Ritual Signifiers, published in 2002 in Visual Arts Research, Deborah L. Smith-Shank outlines the important role that celebrations play in the lives of children. At their most basic level, celebrations provide a structure for our lives. Their ritual behaviors (such as blowing out birthday candles) and annual repetition give children a sense of expectation and safety. Additionally, the cyclical nature of celebrations allow us to simultaneously reflect on previous years' memories and anticipate future ones. Our shared experiences and anticipations bring us closer together as members of a community. Smith-Shank writes,

"Community celebrations are an important socializing force, not only for newcomers to a community but also for children. Through their participation in community celebrations, children learn to participate in the construction and the consumption of their cultures. They learn social expectations. They learn to delay gratification."

  Delayed gratification is quite often met with negative reaction in today's world of instant information and communication. It is, however, something to consider seriously. Delayed gratification gives us the opportunity to anticipate. It teaches children that the future holds things worth looking forward to--the special days that mark our shared existence.

Aside from their importance in providing children with a sense of time, place, and belonging, Smith-Shank writes that celebrations function as unique points of inquiry:

"[Community celebrations] can help us by answering significant questions about our histories, our communities, and ourselves. These rich storehouses of local legend and culture can provide us with information about history, art, family life, ecology, heritage, and ethics."

  When observed through this lens, celebrations are seen as an important form of literacy for children. They provide children with the opportunity to examine some of life's biggest questions: Who am I, where did I come from, and how am I connected? What does this ritual say about me? What does it say about us?

  Because celebrations are such crucial avenues of meaning-making for children, it troubles me how few opportunities for celebration I observe in schools today. I see almost no examples of celebrations that include the larger community, comprised of the entire student body, parents, siblings, and others. Slightly more often I observe celebrations that take place within an isolated classroom, such as a Valentine's Day party, but the type of celebration that I see taking place most often in elementary schools is one that is based on academic achievement, such as "Accelerated Reader (AR) Parties." These celebrations are part of a reward system for students who achieve a certain level of proficiency in an academic program. By their very nature, academic reward celebrations are conditional and exclusionary: children who do not meet the required level of proficiency are not permitted to attend. What are the implications of a childhood in which our participation in the celebrations that root us in time, place, and identity are not guaranteed? By excluding children from celebrations, what message are we sending them about their place in a community?

  Many educators have eliminated celebrations with cultural or religious origins from the classroom in an attempt to prevent children from other cultures from feeling unrepresented. Educators may also fear the reaction of parents who might disagree with having a child exposed to ideas and traditions from other cultures or religions. Although this elimination may be well-meaning, it has a negative effect on the classroom community: a group of students who possess a rich variety of experiences have fewer opportunities to share them. A formerly multicultural group is left cultureless. Instead of eliminating multicultural celebrations, teachers should make an attempt to include traditions from each student's culture, creating an atmosphere of safety and respect, where empathy and understanding is cultivated.

Celebrations are incredibly important to the life of a child: as structure, history, community-builder, and point of inquiry, celebration should play an active and vital role in curriculum. Educators should allow students the opportunity to experience celebrations that involve the classroom community, the school community, and the greater community around them.