The Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute

We have taken such collaboration and reciprocity as one of our themes because it leads into another: the learning that may occur through our study and practice of the arts. Some essays here offer justifications for such learning, or ask why the arts are nowadays so often mistakenly considered "frills" when we ought to rank them among the "basics." Other essays speak of the kinds of learning through the arts that university school partnerships have attempted and achieved. And we also present instances of the art by students that has emerged from such partnerships.

A third theme might best be put as questions: If the arts are activities of an imagination that precedes and transcends our "logical" and "factual" discourse, may they not help us to re-imagine what we mean by education? Can they provide us with means or media for a badly needed rethinking of education at every level? If so, can we continue to regard them as separate items in an established curriculum? Shouldn't we place them at the very heart of a newly imagined course of study?

The Essays: Some Connections

• In what ways are the arts central to learning? How can we bring them closer to the center of our educational practice? Maxine Greene, Scott T. Massey, and Elliot W. Eisner offer three ways of approaching those questions. Maxine Greene shows us how the "metaphor" and, more generally, the "imagination" can orient us toward possibility, toward meanings in our experience that we have not yet articulated, and toward the realization of community in our schools and in a democratic society. For her, metaphorical thought is important to students, to teachers, and to educational reformers who would implement some of the principles that John Dewey laid down. Scott T. Massey proposes that the arts are a fundamental model for knowing and learning, one that is increasingly important for the emerging "knowledgesociety." For him, the arts constitute a major "symbol system" and a field of creative inquiry that should be central to a new and integrated curriculum. Elliott W. Eisner examines more closely the reasons why the arts are at present marginalized in our schools. That is so, he concludes, because of unrecognized prejudices about the nature of the mind that are ingrained in our culture and legitimized by our universities. He proposes not just a philosophical re-orientation but a significant revision in college admissions requirements.
• How can a university-school partnership encourage learning through the arts? The cluster of pieces "From the New Haven Experience" offers a provocative sampling. Because On Common Ground was not conceived as a vehicle for promulgating the activities of the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute, we have made few references to them in previous issues. This seems an appropriate time, however, to look at selected seminars that illustrate various approaches to the arts. Jules David Prown describes his seminars on the analysis of a wide range of artifacts as "fragments of history that embody the culture that produced them." Kent C. Bloomer tells how he has introduced the nature of architecture to teachers mainly from primary and middle schools, enabling a variety of interdisciplinary projects, and setting the stage for collaboration on an architectural project in one of the schools. I lay out something of my own education as a seminar leader, emphasizing how the participatory medium of theater can relate to some issues posed by our diverse society. Paul H. Fry and Jean E. Sutherland then recount their experience with a team effort at L. W. Beecher Elementary School, through which a seminar in lyric poetry led to an international fiesta involving teachers, administrators, children, and parents. We also include a poem written by Narkita Spearman during that project.
• How may works by a group of students be combined in a project that uses photography, oil pastel, and mixed media collage, and that provides a vehicle for critical thinking, exploration, invention, reinterpretation, and collaboration? The Collaborative Quilt of Transformation created at Diamond Elementary School under the leadership of Helen Seigel, Artist-in-the-Schools in the Santa Ana Unified School District, is a striking example of such an effort. Helen Seigel's account makes clear how artistic, conceptual, and social values played their roles in the complex process that produced the quilt.
• What roles may dance programs play in school partnerships with universities and artistic groups? Jill Beck and Marty Trujillo offer two quite different aswers, each emphasizing social as well as artistic values. The Dallas/Fort Worth project that Jill Beck describes, initiated by the Dance Division at Southern Methodist University with support from the U.S. Department of Education's Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education, involved undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty at the university level, partnerships with the schools, after school programs, and the development of a multimedia CD-ROM. Here dance was approached within a context that includes history and geography, and with attention to a variety of analytical and performance skills. The Saint Joseph Ballet described by Marty Trujillo might seem more narrowly focused upon dance training, but it too is concerned with wider issues. Making its home in a Latino enclave in downtown Santa Ana, the Ballet is supported by partnerships with school districts, businesses, and the communities themselves, and a crucial link to the University of California at Irvine. Its aim is to provide dance training to inner city youths "as a means of preventing delinquency, building self-esteem, teaching new skills, and ultimately changing their lives."
• Several other essays deal with the art of writing and its relations to learning and living. Even though "writing" has always been recognized as a "basic" subject, the teaching profession has long failed to grasp its fundamental relation to learning. James Gray and Richard Sterling set forth the specific response to that situation by the Bay Area Writing Project and describe its transformation into the National Writing Project. They make clear how the Writing Project has encouraged the preparation of teacher-leaders, turned teachers into writers, and promoted teacher research. And they offer it, finally, as a model of teacher-based reform. Laura J. Roop and Laura Schiller, teacher-leaders in the National Writing Project, amplify this account by sharing their own experiences. Each of them lets us see how the process of writing poetry can become both an occasion and a metaphor "for making and revising our professional and personal lives."
• Colleen M. Fairbanks, also concerned with writing as occasion and metaphor, approaches this matter from another angle. She describes her work for the University of Michigan's Center for Educational Innovation in facilitating collaborations with the schools that were aimed at the exploration of literacy, teaching, and teaming. Her own teaming with Kathie Smith, an English teacher at Saginaw High School, led to a cross age and cross-school project in which the writing and reading of stories opened up larger questions of the narrative forms of our lives for both the students and the teachers. Colleen Fairbanks has therefore come to see collaboration itself "as a kind of lived story."
• Susan Pearson-Davis, moving from narrative to drama, offers a yet more expansive version of that kind of story. She recounts the history of Wrinkle Writing, which began with her directing of a stage adaptation of Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, developed into a relationship between the University of New Mexico Department of Theatre and Dance and elementary and secondary language arts teachers (building there on the Rio Grande Writing Project), and resulted in an intergenerational project that includes the professional development of teachers of playwriting, a portfolio competition and special workshops for their students, a performance troupe for teachers who want intensive immersion in drama, and the showcasing of short works written and performed by students who have been in the performance troupe. This story comes full circle with Pearson-Davis's noting of the unexpected benefits that the collaboration has brought to faculty and students at the University of New Mexico in several programs.
• The two pieces in our department "Voices from the Classroom" sum up a number of our continuing themes. Sharon Floyd sets forth her revitalizing experience, as a teacher of writing, in projects led by the University of Michigan's Center for Educational Improvement through Collaboration. Sharon A. Olguin describes her work with artist-teachers who were committed to the view that the arts can inform the study of other subjects, raise the students' self-esteem, and develop their critical thinking and creative abilities.
• Finally, the poem by Rosa Citlali Zamora, an eleven-year-old from Albuquerque, New Mexico, succinctly traces writing and reading, painting and seeing, to their roots in our shared imagination.

The Images: Some Perspectives

Elsewhere in these pages we juxtapose the work of professional artists with that of students. Maxine Greene's allusion to Stevens' "The Man With the Blue Guitar" might have called for Picasso's rather sombre old guitarist, but we have chosen instead, for pages 4 and 5, two refreshing images of music that may lead us to think about teaching. Mary Cassatt's The Banjo Lesson suggests a desirable intimacy in the teaching relation. (Indeed, a study for that painting is entitled Two Sisters.) Saroeun Sim's untitled work comes from a 3rd grade class at Jackson Elementary School in Santa Ana, California, where Halinka Luangpraseut is Artist-in-the-Schools. This image renders the linking power of music through a guitar that completes the evident circle of friendship and also the formal design. We have continued this theme, shifting both instrument and gender, with William Sidney Mount's The Novice, on page 28, a painting that again understands music to bring teacher and learners into the same charmed group.

Olivia Nam's Sombreros, on page 9, comes from a 5th grade class at John F. Kennedy Elementary School, also in Santa Ana. Its bold design, with a hidden life in the averted figures and a radiant source beyond the mountains, seems to underline Elliott W. Eisner's comments on a marginalized vitality in our schools. Natalie Pedroza's narrative collage, Building a Tree House Where We Can Play, on page 26, comes from a 4th grade class at Harvey Elementary School in Santa Ana, where Helen Seigel is also Artist-in-the-Schools. Its images and its medium harmonize with Colleen Fairbanks' account of collaboration as "a lived story." On page 30 we have included an untitled piece by Huyva Tanikawa from a first grade class at Jackson Elementary School, which offers a delightful tension between the centered and the eccentric. And the back cover features Sergio Romano's Stop! Save the Whales, which comes from a 3rd grade class at Harvey Elementary School. Its title explains the shouting boy and the sea-mammals below, but the total design is a joyous image of youthful quest in the context of both nature and society and an instance of the role that art education can play in that quest.

Other kinds of images also come from learning situations: on page 11, The Orrery, a painting that Jules Prown has used as an example of learning through material objects; on page 12, Moresque one of the patterns that teachers were studying in Kent Bloomer's seminar on architecture; on page 13, a photograph depicting a moment in our New Haven "improv" on Woza Albert!; and on page 19, a photograph of two young dancers from the Saint Joseph Ballet.

Finally, two images in this number, one drawn from European-American modernism and the other from a Native American tradition, point both to adjacent essays and to our larger concerns. Josef Albers' woodcut Encircled, on page 22, is a subtle instance of how lines and spaces can generate linkages, volumes, and dynamic process a metaphor, if we take it so, for the collaborative movement itself. And the symbolic sheld designed by Hyemeyohsts Storm and painted by Karen Harris, on page 6, evokes the understanding of the Plains People (set forth in fascinating detail by Storm's narratives in Seven Arrows) that art is a shared questing and teaching, a way of knowledge that leads us into the great balancing harmony of a universe that includes the entire family of the Earth's creatures.

Back to Table of Contents of the Fall 1995 Issue of On Common Ground