Teaching Corita
Part II: ‘More than enough to work with’
by Suzanne C. Schmidt, Ph.D.
In this series, I reflect on a Creativity and Social Justice class I developed and taught in the Justice, Community & Leadership program at Saint Mary’s College of California from Spring 2020 to Fall 2022. Students in the class studied visual artists who make art that addresses a variety of urgent issues, from gender segregation in employment (Faith Ringgold’s “For the Woman’s House”) to the global struggle to access clean water (LaToya Ruby Frazier’s “Flint as Family”) to the undervaluing of domestic and maintenance work (Patti Maciesz’s “Bill the Patriarchy” and Mierle Laderman Ukeles “Manifesto for Maintenance Work.”)
In their excellent guide to creative expression, “Learning by Heart,” co-author and former student Jan Steward describes how Corita’s assignments were notoriously demanding. Kent believed that the role of teachers was to empower students, and she accomplished this through epic assignments: “For 10 minutes a day look at a plant, write about the plant for 15 minutes, do 10 drawings a day of leaves and foliage and 10 drawings of the whole plant” (p. 33) or “Use a finder, cut 100 4x4 sections of photos from a magazine. Find 25 poems and place them with the photos. Make a book. Look at the book again in two weeks and write three lines on each page about the connections, visual and poetic, that were made” (p. 106). Steward recalls that the assignments were “not meant to overwhelm, but to offer more than enough to work from” (p. 9). Ultimately, “Her nonstop, red-eye-special assignments tore away at preconceptions, exhausted the self-conscious approach to art and led us finally, open and hopeful, in new directions” (p. 6).
Teaching in the wake of COVID, students had experienced any combination of immeasurable loss; spiked anxiety; full-time work and full-time classes; attending online classes in the middle of the night from remote time zones; and/or caregiving responsibilities for parents, grandparents, children, or siblings. With this awareness, and experiencing some of this myself, I did not seek to overwhelm but to adapt to our new way of being in the world. In my 3rd iteration of this class, I gave a midterm called “Fail.” First written as a low-stakes homework assignment, I promoted it to the course midterm in an effort to encourage experimentation, to push students outside of their comfort zone, and to offer “more than enough to work from” as they would revisit earlier work for their final creative intervention.
Inspired by Corita’s approach, here is the prompt:
Fail, a midterm.
Make a plan to do three tasks. Anticipate that you will fail in at least two of your attempts. Bonus points for attempting something that may fail spectacularly.
Prewrite: What is your plan?
Action: Carry out your three tasks and document them in some way.
Presentation: Present your failures to the class. Share: What did you do? Why did you select these tasks? How did you do? Describe the question or problem that inspired your plans. What are three points of reference for your failures and how did they inform your plans?
Reflection: What happened? What did you learn? Assess your failure: Did you fail Spectacularly, with Excellence, with Gusto, Outstandingly, in a way that Exceeded expectations, Acceptably, Poorly, Dreadfully? Describe what you would do differently next time.
Honestly, the midterms were disappointing. My students’ submissions produced mediocre failures as the students, and I collectively agreed that they had played it safe. However, the aftermath of this failure of a midterm produced the best examples of student-motivated revision that I can recall in my 16+ years of college teaching. Using their midterms as fodder, students repurposed their failed failures into spectacular final projects. In the midterm, students held onto their self-consciousness and fear of failure. They also produced a “prelude to the next project” (Kent & Steward, 10). For instance, in one student’s midterm, she planned to crochet a sweater, complete her first oil painting (her grandmother’s hand-me-down paints) and finish a quilt block that we began during class.
Savannah’s reflection on the oil painting demonstrates her learning:
“My oil painting turned out to be so much more work than I expected and didn’t even end up meeting my high expectations of what it should look like. Starting out, I sketched out four different famous artworks depicting women, then decided to change one of the choices to better fit my theme. Because this switch was so late in the process, I ended up wearing down the canvas in that particular spot with the eraser and pencil marks. When I eventually painted that area, the oil paint didn’t flow as well as it did in other places, and made the painting uneven. Along with this, I wasn’t satisfied with any of the faces in the painting, since they all had improper proportions and didn’t resemble the actual famous paintings enough for my standards. Choosing oil paints for this project instead of acrylics was also a mistake and part of the reason this project ended up failing. I am more knowledgeable with acrylic paint, which would have made this painting much easier and more familiar to complete. The oil paints were very difficult to work with, both because they were extremely thick and because they take an extremely long time to dry. Sometimes the latter issue is helpful (when mixing colors or redoing a portion of the painting), but it gets very bothersome when you accidentally smudge the paint or get it on your hands constantly. Overall, this project failed in a way that exceeded my expectations.”
For her final creative intervention, Savannah repurposed the painting project and attempted it again in digital art, a technique with which she is more familiar. Her guiding question pondered the longstanding impacts of the exclusion of women in art. She wrote, “What happens when women have been represented (from a male gaze) without adequate opportunity to create their own works?” She retained the eight triangle format, a nod to Faith Ringgold’s “American People, Black Light” and “For the Women’s House,” which we discussed in class. In her digital art version, the nameless and faceless women from history who lacked the same opportunities as men to compose, paint, study, and write, are animated into contemporary icons of the ongoing fight for gender equality: Ruth Bader Ginsburg (supreme court justice), Malala (activist and author), Amanda Gorman (activist and poet), and Kamala Harris (vice president of US).
Research suggests that an educator’s modeling of risk-taking, creativity, and innovation directly correlates with their students’ adoption of these values. Corita Kent and Jan Steward’s Learning by Heart specializes in creative risk-taking and experimentation. This is why I built my class around the text. Visit the education and engagement space in the forthcoming heroes & sheroes exhibit at SMCMoA, which will offer more reflections on Kent’s ongoing legacy of social justice and art through interactive and hands-on activities, offering visitors “more than enough to work from.”
Notes:
“We believe that being a creative and innovative risk-taker as a teacher is synonymous with teaching creativity, innovation, and risk-taking as an entity. Given this synonymy, we argue it is impossible to teach the entity of creativity, innovation, and risk-taking through a predictable, linear, and formulaic pedagogy. Rather, a pedagogy that actively models creativity, innovation, and risk-taking simultaneously teaches students the very essence of said principles, regardless of the subject matter.”
Cho, C. L, & Vitale, J. L. (2019). Using the Arts to Develop a Pedagogy of Creativity, Innovation, and Risk-Taking (CIRT). Journal for Learning through the Arts, 15(1). http://dx.doi.org/10.21977/D915130132 Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1sh4d82m p. 5
