Catherine D. Yates
Why are certain stories preserved and told?
What kind of resources are needed to preserve stories?
If you are going to preserve your memories of studying art at CO-OP, how would you go about it? Why are others forgotten?
What is your interest or responsibility in telling stories of your own?
In this unit we will design a scrapbook as an exhibition of personal objects to share with our families and with other students at school. There are many avenues for creating a new scrapbook which is physical, emotional, and tangible. As a class we can find the materials we need for our scrapbook. For example, what paper do we want to use? How can we create a table of contents so that we are inclusive? Important themes that tie us together appear as we work through our stories and poems. We can uncover the stories which need to be told as well as the stories we want to tell. These stories can be real or imagined. It will be important to allow our writing to exist between genres from truth to fairy tales and back; allowing ourselves to include other students in our scrapbook, deepens ties to the project.
After looking at the Romanov Family and Nancy Rolfe’s scrapbooks, we will be able to identify what material aspects of the books interest us. This will lead to research into mapping out our own album. Based on scrapbook examples as well as scrapbooks that we have in our possession, we can imagine our own book. Research and notetaking clarify what we want to preserve.
“Therefore, the way to understand the cause (some aspect of culture) is the careful and imaginative study of the effect (the object). In theory, if we could perceive all of the effects we could understand all of the causes; an entire cultural universe is in the object waiting to be discovered.”5
How often are we aware of our imagination being freed up to curate enriching experiences in a creative and collaborative environment? Jules Prown’s academic, creative methods for investigating cultural objects lead to practical guidelines for teaching us how to uncover what objects are telling us. Teaching students to see the connections between the seen and unseen aspects of an object empowers them. By exploring objects, whether through writing or speaking, students learn to appreciate their lives. “[Prown’s methods] led to a vision of objects as survivors from the past with a tale to tell.”6
Glen Adamson writes, “All the more so if you agree with Prown, as I do, that everyday objects such as chairs and teapots are as compelling to interpretation... as painting and sculpture. I have learned many lessons from [Prown], but ... this is the most important: have faith. Encourage people to look, and then let the art perform its magic.”7 The pedagogy of studying objects opens us up for creative writing, which is the highest level of sharing what we know. Bryan J. Wolfe, a student and friend of Prown, described the excellence of Prown’s teaching by recalling a visit he made to his farm in Vermont “hopping onto—actually, into—the front loader of a tractor that he drove. He then lifted us many feet above the ground, as if we were so many bales of hay, and proceeded to tour us for the next hour through his woodlot and fields. They looked especially magical from our vantage ten feet above the ground. Prown's teaching philosophy resembles that tractor ride: lift them up, open their eyes, ask them to look. It was a classic performance: playful, sure and instructive. And it echoed with remarkable precision his practice in the classroom.”8
Using playful exploration gives students and teachers positive pathways to develop interest in their stories and to see them as important. With this passion and love, work is stronger, sustained, and deep. Helping students choose textual objects, photos and toys to include in the scrapbook will help build connections with scrapbook readers.
Based on a progressive instructional style that emerged from the community of artists at Black Mountain College in Asheville, North Carolina, the textile artist Anni Albers taught an immersive weaving process. This teaching strategy involved ‘listening to the voice of the materials’, which is a step towards hands-on learning, one of the more successful methods for working with the diverse learning needs of students. Following in Albers’s footsteps, students will create something new from old, carefully curated materials. This activity figures into student interest in cutting down on carbon emissions. Repurposing materials is climate activism. Anni Albers viewed cultural objects in a new light, based on exploratory research she engaged in in Mexico. She wrote the following in her essay ‘On Jewelry’ in 1942:
You will be astonished, I think, to hear that the first stimulus to make jewelry from hardware came to us from the treasure of Monte Albán, the most precious jewels from ancient Mexico, found only a few years ago in a tomb near Oaxaca. These objects of gold and pearls, of jade, rock-crystal, and shells, made about 1000 years ago, are of such surprising beauty in unusual combinations of …The art of Monte Albán had given us the freedom to see things detached from their use, as pure materials, worth being turned into precious objects. From the beginning we were quite conscious of our attempt not to discriminate between materials, not to attach to them the conventional values of preciousness or commonness. In breaking through the traditional valuation we felt this to be an attempt to rehabilitate materials. We felt that our experiments could help to point out the merely transient value we attach to things, though we believe them to be permanent. We tried to show that spiritual values are truly dominant. We thought that our work suggested that jewels no longer were the reserved privilege of the few, but property of everyone who cared to look about and was open to the beauty of the simple things around us. Though the so-called costume jewelry has gone in this direction, it is hard for them to trace back the simple elements that are them. We tried to emphasize just this side in our work. We wanted to lead the person looking at our jewels back through the process that brought it about. All things are at their beginning formed in this way of unprejudiced choosing. Sometimes, it becomes necessary again to go back to it to clear the way for new seeing.9
Annie Albers points out: “We have to work from where we are. But just as you can go everywhere from any given point,”10 which I understand as good writing instruction. We can begin anywhere with our writing as another way to build confidence. We can learn to tell our stories through a combination of hands-on activities, like weaving, and Prown’s method of material cultural analysis, which is comprised of description: analysis of content; deduction: sensory, intellectual and emotional engagement; and speculation: theories and hypothesis, a program of research.
The study of an object sets up a strong hands-on path for learning to write stories, teaching us to trust our senses and our intellect at the same time. This process gives us a way to understand and collect knowledge. Reconciling description and memory teaches students to be precise with their narrative voice. This unit is designed to be as immersive as a group retreat. Students and teachers need to follow in the footsteps of not only Anni Albers, but also Booker T. Washington, who taught his students how to bake bricks, then build their school. Building a meaningful scrapbook exhibition asks students and teachers to slow down and to appreciate the rice.
Learning Activities: Building an Exhibition of Object Biographies through Writing Prompts Modeled after ‘The Cabinet’ and Scrapbooks
Critical thinking and writing exercises are steps toward building a student-centered exhibition of personal object biographies, modeled after the scrapbook. By studying the techniques and narrative structures from, for example, “Soviet Central Asia in 100 Objects,” students will practice writing and organizing stories about self-selected objects from their lives. Using an online exhibition as the model, students will use the resources they have access to design their own exhibition. Trying out various writing templates, students will delve into their own history to write about and organize a display of handheld objects telling, the stories in their lives. This exhibit is a contemporary history, a snapshot of student values, loves, and beliefs. By collecting and exhibiting their object biographies, students will learn to appreciate their experiences, their biographies.
There are many options for exhibition-oriented, student-centered scrapbooks or other 3D display projects that come out of place-based learning. Using, for example, a granddaughter’s reflections on watching her grandmother spin wool, found on the website “Soviet Central Asia in 100.”11 The Romanov, Brakhage, and Rolfe scrapbooks can also be used as examples for students.
