Adapting My Role As An Artist-Educator
Normally, as an Artist-Educator for Progressive Arts Alliance, my job is to develop and teach creative, hands-on projects that coincide with my partner teacher’s curriculum. It’s always a collaboration between the teacher and myself to create these projects, but this time it was a little bit different.
In August, our Artistic Specialist approached me about an opportunity for a new type of partnership. Usually we are given our schools and assigned grade levels after they’ve already been discussed and set in motion by the administration ahead of time. This time, however, I was a component of the entire process from initial meetings to implementation. I was heavily involved with this process because it involved a new school, teaching new content, and a new end goal. I wouldn’t be partnered with a core-content teacher, but, instead, with the art teacher. In addition to teaching the students, I’d be teaching the teacher.
Why does an artist need to teach an art teacher?
Miles Park Elementary School has a master plan: to make themselves marketable and to stand out from the other elementary schools in the Cleveland Metropolitan School District. One way they plan to do that is to advance and broaden the scope of the arts program to include digital mediums for their older students. Their art teacher has a lot of ideas — almost too many, in fact — especially coming from a tactile fine art background. They needed assistance not only learning this new curriculum and techniques in the realm of digital arts, but also they needed exposure to tools they’ve never had at their disposal. So, obviously, that’s where Progressive Arts Alliance came in.
As the resident animator in our artist cohort, I was the obvious choice to tackle these goals with them. However, I learned the classroom layout would be much different than my usual structure and set up. Instead of me focusing on the final project and techniques and Mr. Paden focusing on the curriculum, in a way, I had to teach both. I also had to be in constant communication with Mr. Paden to help the students and himself see the correlations and connections to what he was already teaching. Rather than having 10 sessions to complete the project in its entirety with the kids, I had 8 classroom days and two professional development days one-on-one with Mr. Paden. I came in every Monday morning first period and taught the first period class and Mr. Paden the next step in the process. He then taught that same lesson to his second period class. Both groups worked on what we went over all week, until I returned the following Monday.
In some ways this gave us a lot more time to work on these projects, and in other ways it gave us less. I hoped that when I wasn’t there Mr. Paden was confident enough to continue nurturing the project, but also not burn the kids out on it. From drawing techniques to industry pipelines and schedules, the students were learning new digital art skills and also how they would use them in a real world setting if they chose this career path.
We started learning techniques for developing concept art for 2D game design, which students will code in Scratch for their final product. After learning the workflow, game mechanics and elements of design and concept art, the hope is to move that knowledge into creating their own board games. They can use digital tools and maker technology (such as the 3D printers and laser cutters) next semester to prototype and manufacture physical playable games. I’m interested to see — as these residency programs and relationships progress — how this will impact Miles Park and Mr. Paden’s approach to creating projects and experiences for the classroom. I’m looking forward to working with them again, and helping these students take their animation projects to the next level.
