I attended my first meeting about full-day kindergarten in the Spring of 2010, 7 years ago now. In the intervening years, I’ve worked as a classroom teacher in FDK and as a support person for FDK classrooms. I’ve thought hard about the progress we’ve made and the progress we’ve missed as I’ve observed and documented, reflected and refocused. And I have to say that, although there are some shining examples of excellence, our progress, across the province, hasn’t been where many of us would have hoped. We are, in many meetings, still talking about the same issues we were discussing 7 years ago.
Why? Why haven’t we, in spite of our best intentions, been able to move the needle on some of these critical issues in early learning? Why is my daughter still coming home from her second year of Kindergarten with worksheets and fixed-result crafts? How can I possibly be having the same conversations with her teachers that I was having with my son’s teachers in 2012? They’re getting tired of it and so am I (imagine for a moment the delight a teacher feels when I walk into their classroom information night… oy).
I’ve been thinking hard about these questions a lot this year, especially as I’ve been working with the teachers, educators, and artists in our Artists-in-Residency (AIR)(education) program (generously funded by the Ontario Arts Council).
Without exception, the artists working in this program bring an entirely fresh perspective to the classrooms they’re working in. They see things with new eyes. They don’t have the same preconceived notions that many of us in education do about children, their capacities, and the possibilities for learning in the classroom. Let me give you an example.
In one of our schools, we have had an artist working with both a kindergarten teacher/ECE team and a grade 3 teacher. The same artist also worked in the school last year but this is the first time we’ve extended the program beyond kindergarten. She has been in residency, typically spending two half-days per week in each class, for 8 weeks. As the grade 3 teacher pointed out, that’s the equivalent of 9 months of Visual Art instructional time according to the minutes allotted in our board (which are comparable to instructional time allotments across Ontario).
During this time, the grade 3 students have made plaster casts, abstract maps, and clay pots. They’ve experimented with linocut printmaking and copper tooling. They’ve also made their own paper and learned about 3-dimensional drawing techniques. It’s been a rich and rewarding experience for everyone and represents a particularly brave leap for the teacher; grade 3 is a testing year in Ontario and many teachers would be reluctant to give so much time to an Art project.
But we’re here to talk about Kindergarten so let me tell you about the project in that class. Last year this artist worked with the students’ interests and curiosities to create a very detailed 3-dimensional model of a coral reef, including a reef sculpted in wire, covered in plaster bandages, and painted in bright acrylics. This year, the class began working on a few projects to test the water and get an idea for where the students wanted to take the project. They began with the students’ existing fascination with building which prompted tall paintings (à la Holton Rower) and architecture-inspired floor plans and building designs.
I ordered batteries, wires, and LED lights while the artist’s receipts revealed purchases that stretched from one end of the dollar store to the other. The students made a planetarium out of a giant cardboard box, featuring constellations that were wired together and used finger pressure to connect the circuits. They created Mars rovers and a dramatic play centre that featured plaster bandage helmets and moon shoes. They created a cave populated with crystal sculptures. The project went well beyond where anyone would have predicted at the outset. The teacher and ECE reflected:
“It was interesting to observe an inquiry progress through the arts. The children’s questions lead us. I wonder how our project would have looked if we had not used the techniques introduced by the artist?”
And that’s the rub that we’re facing, 7 years in. We’ve tried to adopt Malaguzzi’s broad view of 100 languages without bringing in the translators he used. We are like aliens, fish out of water. We don’t know how to navigate and though we’re trying, gamely in many cases, we keep reverting back to our old languages of reading, writing, and mathematics because there isn’t anyone to bridge the cultural gap for us. The gulf between the culture of school and the culture of childhood remains in large part, I think, because the people who could comfortably stand on both sides of the divide aren’t in schools. We haven’t asked them to come in.
Vea Vecchi, writing in the journal Innovations in Early Education writes:
“In the late 1960’s the decision was made to have an atelier and an atelierista in each municipal infant-toddler centre and preschool in Reggio Emilia. It was a choice that was revolutionary then and now because it changed a conformist way of thinking about education, of looking at knowledge and learning. This choice created a dialogue between social constructivist pedagogy and the poetic languages of the atelier. This decision was actually quite subversive. In a very short time after the original institution of the atelier, the culture of the atelier began to infuse throughout the entire school. The atelier brought certain techniques and certain culture into the school but also had an intense effect on all the aspects of the school.” (Fall 2012, Volume 19, Number 4)
The artists of the atelier are not teachers, just as our AIR artists aren’t teachers. They bring a subversive set of eyes and hands and legs to the classroom and in the upending that occurs, the very nature of what school is changes.
Vecchi writes: “Loris Malaguzzi talked about the atelier as a being an “impertinent atelier.” This is a term that I like very much because it implies that the atelier is a place of provocation. The atelier is a place that guarantees that knowledge and learning are taking place with the mind and the hand as well as rationality and emotions connected.”
Learning with the mind and the hand… learning with emotions. How many of the issues that we talk about in education, be it a better future for learners who identify as Indigenous, a focus on Mental Heath, physical literacy, problem solving, critical thinking, creativity, collaboration are so obviously served by having artists present in schools, active in schools, integrated into schools? How far could we move the needle on student Mental Health if kids had access to an art studio in their schools, if their teachers had access to an artist-in-residency… full-time? How much more creative could we all be if we had the kinds of opportunities that the students and educators involved with the AIR program have had? What a difference it would make to the culture of school if we had fluent adult speakers of the 100 Languages in the building. I think we’re missing out, our kids are missing out, and our society is missing out. Send in the artists. There’s no time to waste.
teachingontheverge 