YALE-NEW HAVEN TEACHERS INSTITUTE NUMBER 5, FALL 1995

On Common GroundStrengthening Teaching through School-University Partnership

Partnership and the ArtsCHARLES HENRY DEMUTH, I SAW THE FIGURE 5 IN GOLD ,1928

ON COMMON GROUND2

By Thomas R. Whitaker

On Common Ground:Learning Through the Arts

We celebrate the publication of Num-ber 5 of On Common Ground byfeaturing on the cover Charles

Demuth’s poster-portrait I Saw the Figure 5in Gold, a superb instance of collaborationin the arts. This number contains much moreevidence that the arts are closely related actsof imagination. Maxine Greene, for example,when commenting on the powers of meta-phor, refers to Wallace Stevens’ poem “TheMan with the Blue Guitar,” in which an imagederived from Picasso’s “The Old Guitarist”becomes a symbol of poetic activity. In RosaCitlali Zamora’s poem “A Reader, a Writer,” awriter is “a person who paints” and a readeris one “who sees the colorless picture.” As areader of this number you may easily find orconstruct yet other examples. When I firstsaw the Collaborative Quilt of Transforma-tion on which Helen Seigel comments, I wasstruck by how it translates into visual termsthe “transformation” exercises that can helptheater groups discover their unity in diver-sity.

We have taken such collaboration and reci-procity as one of our themes because it leadsinto another: the learning that may occurthrough our study and practice of the arts.Some essays here offer justifications for suchlearning, or ask why the arts are nowadaysso often mistakenly considered “frills” whenwe ought to rank them among the “basics.”Other essays speak of the kinds of learningthrough the arts that university-school part-nerships have attempted and achieved. Andwe also present instances of the art by stu-dents that has emerged from such partner-ships.

A third theme might best be put as ques-tions: If the arts are activities of an imagina-tion that precedes and transcends our “logi-cal” and “factual” discourse, may they nothelp us to re-imagine what we mean by edu-cation? Can they provide us with means ormedia for a badly needed rethinking of edu-cation at every level? If so, can we continueto regard them as separate items in an estab-lished curriculum? Shouldn’t we place themat the very heart of a newly imagined courseof study?

The Essays: Some Connections

• In what ways are the arts central to learn-ing? How can we bring them closer to thecenter of our educational practice? MaxineGreene, Scott T. Massey, and Elliot W.Eisner offer three ways of approachingthose questions. Maxine Greene shows ushow the “metaphor” and, more generally,the “imagination” can orient us toward pos-sibility, toward meanings in our experiencethat we have not yet articulated, and to-ward the realization of community in ourschools and in a democratic society. Forher, metaphorical thought is important tostudents, to teachers, and to educationalreformers who would implement some ofthe principles that John Dewey laid down.Scott T. Massey proposes that the arts are

a fundamental model for knowing andlearning, one that is increasingly impor-tant for the emerging “knowledge society.”For him, the arts constitute a major “sym-bol system” and a field of creative inquirythat should be central to a new and inte-grated curriculum. Elliott W. Eisner exam-ines more closely the reasons why the artsare at present marginalized in our schools.That is so, he concludes, because of un-recognized prejudices about the nature ofthe mind that are ingrained in our cultureand legitimized by our universities. He pro-poses not just a philosophical re-orienta-tion but a significant revision in collegeadmissions requirements.

• How can a university-school partnershipencourage learning through the arts? The

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About the cover illustration: Charles Demuth’s poster-portrait of 1928, I Saw theFigure 5 in Gold, is a response to a poem by his friend William Carlos Williams that wereprint here. Williams has described the poem’s occasion, a July evening when he wasstopping by the New York studio of another artist-friend, Marsden Hartley. “As I ap-proached his number I heard a great clatter of bells and the roar of a fire engine passingthe end of the street down Ninth Avenue. I turned just in time to see a golden figure 5 ona red background flash by. The impression was so sudden and forceful that I took a pieceof paper out of my pocket and wrote a short poem about it.”

Demuth’s painting translates the poem’s verbal images, swift motion, and balanced com-position into a cubist/futurist design. Whereas the poem leads us forward through asentence balanced on its central word, “moving,” the painting pulls us into its space byway of receding figures and convergent lines. Here the image of urban vitality alsoexpands to become a general tribute to Williams and to art. We find “BILL” on abillboard, “carlos” in lights on a theatre marquee, “ART Co” on a store window, and theinitials of both painter and poet at the bottom of the design.

THE GREAT FIGUREAmong the rainand lightsI saw the figure 5in goldon a redfiretruckmovingtenseunheededto gong clangssiren howlsand wheels rumblingthrough the dark city.

FALL 1995 3

Credits: Cover Illustration: Charles Henry Demuth. I Saw The Figure 5 in Gold. 1928. Oil on composition board. 36” x 29 3/4”. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Alfred Stieglitz Collection,1949. Page 2: William Carlos Williams. Collected Poems, 1909-1939, Volume 1. ©1938. New Directions Publishing Corporation. Page 4: Mary Cassatt. The Banjo Lesson. 1894. Pastel on paper.28’’ x 22 1/2’’. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Richmond, Virginia. The Adolph D. and Wilkins C. Williams Fund. Photograph © 1993 Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Page 5: Saroeun Sim. Untitled.Grade 3. 1995. Jackson Elementary School. Santa Ana, California . Page 6: Designed by Hyemeyohsts Storm and Karin Harris. Painted by Karin Harris. Vision Shield . 1972. Reproduced from SevenArrows by Hyemeyohsts Storm. Harper & Row. New York. 1972. Page 9: Olivia Nam. Sombreros. Grade 5. 1995. J.F. Kennedy Elementary School. Santa Ana, California. Page 11: Joseph Wrightof Derby. A Philosopher Giving the Lecture on the Orrery. Exhibited 1766. Oil on canvas. 58 cm. x 80 cm.. Derby Museum and Art Gallery. Derby, England. Page 12: F. Bedford. Moresque No. 5.Plate XLIII in Owen Jones’ The Grammar of Ornament. 1856. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Page 13: Photograph by Erica Baum. 1993. Page 16: Special StudioStudents from Diamond Elementary School. Grades 3-5. Collaborative Quilt of Transformation. 1995 . 44” x 36”. Santa Ana, California. Page 17: Octavio Iniquez. Grade 4. Detail from CollaborativeQuilt of Transformation. 1995. 8” x 8”. Diamond Elementary School. Santa Ana, California. Page 19: Photograph by Howard Englander. Saint Joseph Ballet Company. Page 22: Josef Albers.Encircled . 1933. Woodcut. 9 1/2” x 13 1/2”. Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. Page 26: Natalie Pedroza. Building a Tree House Where We Can Play. Grade 4. 1995. 8” x 10”. Harvey ElementarySchool. Santa Ana, California. Page 28: William Sidney Mount. The Novice . 1847. 29 7/8” x 24 7/8”. Oil on canvas. The Museums at Stony Brook. Stony Brook, Long Island. Museum purchase, 1962.Page 30: Huyva Tanikawa. Untitled . Grade 1. 1995. Jackson Elementary School. Santa Ana, California. Page 32: Sergio Roman. Stop! Save the Whales . Grade 3. 1995. 8” x 10”. Harvey ElementarySchool. Santa Ana, California.

2 On Common Ground:Learning Through the ArtsThomas R. Whitaker

5 Metaphors and PossibilityMaxine Greene

5 The Arts as KnowingScott T. Massey

9 Why the Arts are Marginalizedin Our Schools: One More TimeElliot W. Eisner

From the New Haven Experience:10 Exploring Art, Artifacts, and

Culture in the InstituteJules David Prown

11 LinkagesKent C. Bloomer

13 Learning through DramaThomas R. Whitaker

14 Poetry in the Classroom:The Beecher Experiment

Paul H. Fry and Jean E. Sutherland

15 My FatherNarkita Spearman

17 Student Artwork: CollaborativeQuilt of TransformationHelen Seigel

18 Partnering University Dance andthe Schools

Jill Beck

19 Saint Joseph Ballet’s Programfor Inner-City ChildrenMarty Trujillo

22 The National Writing Project:A University-based Teacher-centered Partnership ProgramJames Gray and Richard Sterling

24 Teachers and StudentsCollaborating as “Makers”Laura J. Roop and Laura Schiller

26 Collaboration as Story BuildingColleen M. Fairbanks

Voices from the Classroom:28 Collaboration from a Teacher’s

PerspectiveSharon Floyd

29 Empowering Students throughthe Arts

Sharon A. Olguin

30 Wrinkle WritingSusan Pearson-Davis

31 A Reader, A WriterRosa Citlali Zamora

ContentsPartnership and the Arts

ON COMMON GROUND4

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Whitaker: the Arts

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cluster of pieces “From the New Haven Ex-perience” offers a provocative sampling.Because On Common Ground was not con-ceived as a vehicle for promulgating theactivities of the Yale-New Haven TeachersInstitute, we have made few references tothem in previous issues. This seems an ap-propriate time, however, to look at selectedseminars that illustrate various approachesto the arts. Jules David Prown describeshis seminars on the analysis of a wide rangeof artifacts as “fragments of history thatembody the culture that produced them.”Kent C. Bloomer tells how he has introducedthe nature of architecture to teachers mainlyfrom primary and middle schools, enablinga variety of interdisciplinary projects, andsetting the stage for collaboration on anarchitectural project in one of the schools.I lay out something of my own educationas a seminar leader, emphasizing how theparticipatory medium of theater can relateto some issues posed by our diverse soci-ety. Paul H. Fry and Jean E. Sutherland thenrecount their experience with a team effortat L. W. Beecher Elementary School,through which a seminar in lyric poetry ledto an international fiesta involving teach-ers, administrators, children, and parents.We also include a poem written by NarkitaSpearman during that project.

• How may works by a group of students becombined in a project that uses photogra-phy, oil pastel, and mixed media collage, andthat provides a vehicle for critical thinking,exploration, invention, reinterpretation, andcollaboration? The Collaborative Quilt ofTransformation created at Diamond Elemen-tary School under the leadership of HelenSeigel, Artist-in-the-Schools in the SantaAna Unified School District, is a strikingexample of such an effort. Helen Seigel’saccount makes clear how artistic, concep-tual, and social values played their roles inthe complex process that produced the quilt.

• What roles may dance programs play inschool partnerships with universities andartistic groups? Jill Beck and Marty Trujillooffer two quite different answers, each em-phasizing social as well as artistic values.The Dallas/Fort Worth project that Jill Beckdescribes, initiated by the Dance Division

at Southern Methodist University withsupport from the U.S. Department ofEducation’s Fund for the Improvement ofPostsecondary Education, involved un-dergraduates, graduate students, and fac-ulty at the university level, partnershipswith the schools, after-school programs,and the development of a multimedia CD-ROM. Here dance was approached withina context that includes history and geog-raphy, and with attention to a variety ofanalytical and performance skills. TheSaint Joseph Ballet described by MartyTrujillo might seem more narrowly focusedupon dance training, but it too is con-

cerned with wider issues. Making its homein a Latino enclave in downtown SantaAna, the Ballet is supported by partner-ships with school districts, businesses,and the communities themselves, and acrucial link to the University of Californiaat Irvine. Its aim is to provide dance train-ing to inner city youths “as a means ofpreventing delinquency, building self-es-teem, teaching new skills, and ultimatelychanging their lives.”

• Several other essays deal with the art ofwriting and its relations to learning andliving. Even though “writing” has alwaysbeen recognized as a “basic” subject, theteaching profession has long failed to

grasp its fundamental relation to learning.James Gray and Richard Sterling set forththe specific response to that situation bythe Bay Area Writing Project and describeits transformation into the National Writ-ing Project. They make clear how the Writ-ing Project has encouraged the prepara-tion of teacher-leaders, turned teachers intowriters, and promoted teacher research.And they offer it, finally, as a model ofteacher-based reform. Laura J. Roop andLaura Schiller, teacher-leaders in the Na-tional Writing Project, amplify this accountby sharing their own experiences. Each ofthem lets us see how the process of writ-ing poetry can become both an occasionand a metaphor “for making and revisingour professional and personal lives.”

• Colleen M. Fairbanks, also concerned withwriting as occasion and metaphor, ap-proaches this matter from another angle.She describes her work for the Universityof Michigan’s Center for Educational In-novation in facilitating collaborations withthe schools that were aimed at the explora-tion of literacy, teaching, and teaming. Herown teaming with Kathie Smith, an Englishteacher at Saginaw High School, led to across-age and cross-school project inwhich the writing and reading of storiesopened up larger questions of the narra-tive forms of our lives—for both the stu-dents and the teachers. Colleen Fairbankshas therefore come to see collaborationitself “as a kind of lived story.”

• Susan Pearson-Davis, moving from narra-tive to drama, offers a yet more expansiveversion of that kind of story. She recountsthe history of Wrinkle Writing, which be-gan with her directing of a stage adapta-tion of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinklein Time, developed into a relationshipbetween the University of New MexicoDepartment of Theatre and Dance andelementary and secondary language artsteachers (building there on the RioGrande Writing Project), and resulted inan intergenerational project that includes

MARY CASSATT, THE BANJO LESSON, 1894

FALL 1995 5

Metaphors and Possibility The Arts as KnowingBy Scott T. MasseyBy Maxine Greene

he fuse may be slow because of the ways in which the imagi-native capacity has been ignored. In the many educationreports that have appeared in recent years, imagination plays

no part. In plans for cooperative work among teachers and profes-sors, the stress is on pragmatic issues: standards, disciplines, bench-marks, approaches to assessment. The exclusion of metaphor andimagination from projects for reconstruction cannot be due to a lackof acquaintance with literature and other arts. Old dualisms, oldoppositions seem to persist when education is talked about: thesubjective is opposed to the objective, the affective to the cognitive.People feel compelled to use the flat language of the social scienceswhen they make proposals about youngpeople, especially those different fromthemselves. They try to be cool, empirical,“objective” when deciding how diverseyouth ought to come together, to be initi-ated into a common world. The manage-able and the predictable become important,not the unmeasurable and the merely pos-sible. We might recall Wallace Stevens andhis rendering of that metaphor for imagi-nation—the “blue guitar”:

They said, “You have a blue guitar,You do not play things as they are.”

The man replied, “Things as they areAre changed upon the blue guitar.”

And they said then, “But play, you must,A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,

A tune upon the blue guitarOf things exactly as they are.”

Those who demand a rendering of “thingsexactly as they are” often assume an objective reality that can andshould be precisely captured. To use imagination is to summon upan “as/if”, to look at things as if they could be otherwise. This doesnot deny firm evidence of what is “real” and “true.” It does, how-ever, enable us to break with the one-dimensional vision, to looktowards what might or what ought to be. Clearly, this is troubling tothose who seek the comfort of the familiar. For others, however, itsignifies an end to submission to the taken-for-granted, to what hasseemed inescapably “given”: the “bell curve” rendering of humanintelligence; the inevitability of poverty; the tie between materialsuccess and merit. It often takes metaphorical thinking to breakwith old certainties in this way, whether we realize it fully or reflecton what it means.

“The Possible’s slow fuse is lit by the Imagination.”Emily Dickinson

he inclusion of the arts in the new national goals and stan-dards provides an excellent opportunity to reinvestigate therole of art in the process of learning. More than simply

achieving—at last—admission into the pantheon of the “basic” schoolcurriculum, the inclusion of the arts in the national standards is aninvitation to teachers, specialists, artists, community leaders, andeducation reformers to look more carefully at the arts as a form ofcognition.

For the arts have significant structures which are often neglectedin favor of so-called “affective” qualities. The arts are a powerfulsymbol system, like that of number and language; they are multi-

sensory and engage multiple forms of in-telligence; they employ distinctive, non-linear forms of thinking and problem-solv-ing; and they create some of our most pow-erful forms of symbolic communication.

Indeed, new understandings of knowingand learning, and even new economictrends, are coming together to support theidea that the arts are a fundamental modelof knowing and learning. Far from beingperipheral to the basic business of learn-ing and knowing in school, the arts em-body processes of thinking and learningthat are central to the new types of“knowers” needed for the emerging“knowledge society”. Viewed from thisvantage point, the arts may not only joinother subjects in the “core” curriculum, buttake a central place. In this essay, I wouldlike to sketch some of the reasons for thisclaim.

Economic changes are perhaps the mostobvious factors reshaping education at the

present time. It is now a commonplace to note that American schoolsare still basically organized on an industrial model developed in thelast century to prepare people to work in the industrial economy. Anew economic order is now emerging, however, and this economicorder is based on information and knowledge, not on materials andmanufacturing. Aware of this, American corporations have taken aleading role in insisting on restructuring schools to adapt them tothe needs of the emerging “knowledge” economy and society.

In The Work of Nations, Robert Reich argues that whatever one’sjob title may be, there are now only three job functions that areeconomically meaningful—routine production workers, in-personservice providers, and what he calls “symbol analysts.” Symbolanalysts are the new workers of the knowledge economy, who create

TT

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SAROEUN SIM, UNTITLED, 1995

ON COMMON GROUND6

Scott T. Massey is Founding President ofthe Leonard Bernstein Center for Educa-tion through the Arts in Nashville.

value through the analysis of symbols (information), the addition ofdesign, and thecreation of new ideas. According to Reich,the work of the symbol analyst is the enginedriving the new emerging global economy.

The kind of skills needed by symbol ana-lysts are quite different from the skills neededby the workers and managers of the indus-trial era. The “new basics” being demandedby the new economy are skills that are cen-tered in design, communication, and learn-ing. Walter Wriston, former CEO ofCitibank has written, “information is the newraw material of wealth and opportun-ity...sorting out opportunities from an over-whelming flow of information is now theprime responsibility of any good manage-ment” (The Decline of Sovereignty). In otherwords, the ability to learn, to discern pat-terns, interest points, and other qualities ofcreative design are key skills for the infor-mation age.

From this brief sketch, we see that eco-nomic forces connected with the emergingknowledge society are creating a need for a“new basics” for schools. These new basicsare not simply higher-order thinking skillsbut different order thinking skills. Theseskills relate to communication and design—to creating value through the creation ofmeaning—and this is at the heart of the cre-ative process of the arts. Also fundamentalin this new economic order is the ability tocontinue to learn—to love learning—andagain, the creative process is a basic modelfor continuous, highly-motivated learning.

Reflecting on learning carries us into thenext area to look at new understandingsabout the nature of knowledge.

For at least the past 400 years in the West,we have entertained the view that knowl-edge is stable, sequential, provable, and fi-nite. Sir Isaiah Berlin has given a succinctstatement of this viewpoint in the TheCrooked Timber of Humanity. Accordingto Berlin, we have believed that “a) to allgenuine questions there is one true answerand one only...b) that the true answers tosuch questions are in principle knowable;

and c) that these true answers cannot clashwith each other...according to some theyform a logical system each ingredient ofwhich logically entails and is entailed by allthe other elements” (p. 209). This view ofknowledge has provided the framework forthinking about schools and curriculum.

Contrast with this view our new under-standings of knowledge as a dynamic,changing system. Instead of speaking of“knowledge”, in fact, it might be better tospeak of “knowing”. This emphasizes the

on-going activity involved. Instead of see-ing knowledge as a sequentially constructedbuilding based on a foundation of “basic”truth and knowledge, we are now realizingthat knowledge is a dynamic and ever-ex-panding field. The process of knowing, like-wise, is not a passive storage of informationand skill, but an active, creative process.Even in math and science—the old bastionsof stable, building-block knowledge—wefind evidence of continuous rethinking, re-drawing of conceptual lines, and creative

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Massey: The Arts as Knowing

DESIGNED BY HYEMEYOHSTS STORM AND KARIN HARRIS, PAINTED BY KARIN HARRIS, VISION SHIELD, 1972

FALL 1995 7

large-scale revisions of the type describedby Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scien-tific Revolutions.

In other areas, cognitive psychology is re-vealing to us more about the role of the mindin the active construction of knowledge andexperience. We are just beginning to un-derstand how dynamic the relation betweenthe knower and the known truly is. Infor-mation theory and complexity theory are alsoadding to the picture with powerful new toolsfor understanding systems that are notsimple, linear systems. Learning and know-ing are themselves examples of complex,non-linear systems, and we are just now be-ginning to have the conceptual tools to un-derstand them appropriately.

The educational “bottom line” to all thesenew understandings about the nature ofknowing is that the old academic categoriesabout subjects and about curriculumconstruction no longer make sense. Thestudent of today faces a vast universe ofknowledge that is not only larger in scalethan that of the past, but is also in a stateof dynamic change. Knowledge is grow-ing exponentially, theories are continu-ously reshaped, and cultures and disci-plines are intersecting and interacting in newand unpredictable ways. It no longer makespractical sense, nor is it intellectually soundto approach the curriculum as we have inthe past.

Ernest Boyer recently said in this journal,“The truth is that the old academic boxes donot fit the new intellectual questions. Someof the most exciting work going on in theacademy today is in the ‘hyphenated disci-plines’—in bioengineering and psycho-lin-guistics and the like—in what MichaelPolanyi calls the ‘overlapping academicneighborhoods.’”

Boyer goes on to say, “During the comingdecades, we will see a fundamental reshap-ing of the typology of knowledge as profoundas that which occurred in the nineteenthcentury....And wouldn’t it be tragic if a nine-teenth-century curriculum design continuedto be imposed on schools at the very timescholars were redefining the structure ofknowledge for the twenty-first century?...Wouldn’t it be exciting, as we move toward

the next century, if we would start to rethinkthe nature of the new knowledge that relatednot to the last century but to the coming cen-tury? How can we organize knowledge in away that seems to make it relevant and pow-erful for students in the days ahead?Wouldn’t it be exciting if both kindergartenteachers and college professors could viewknowledge using understandable categoriesthat would be newly integrated and wouldspiral upward in common discourse?”(Summer 1994, p.11).

This reshaping of the “typology of knowl-edge” that Boyer speaks of will include thearts. The arts will be repositioned in thenew intellectual landscape. The opportu-nity now exists for the arts to reexaminethemselves as a form of thinking and know-ing, and to assume a central intellectual rolein schools of the knowledge society. The

arts as a creative process provide, I believe,a unique standpoint for the construction ofa new curriculum that addresses the new “ba-sics” of the knowledge society and is true tothe “new typology of knowledge” to whichBoyer refers.

I would add to Boyer’s list of tantalizingquestions, Wouldn’t it be exciting to includecreative artists in the process of reshapingschools? Wouldn’t it be exciting to designways to incorporate the arts and the creativeprocess of art-making into new, non-sequen-tial curricula that are created proactively byteachers and students? Wouldn’t it be ex-citing to rethink the nature of learning sothat the creative, constructive process thatwe now see to be the basis of knowing wouldbecome dominant in the teaching and learn-ing process in schools? Wouldn’t it be ex-citing to shift our focus in schools from“knowledge transmission and storage” to“knowledge understanding and creation”—from knowledge acquisition to generatingand creating knowledge?

Looking at knowing as a creative, con-structive process leads us to consider howthe arts themselves may be viewed as a formof knowing.

To look at the arts as a fundamental formof knowing and learning is to look at thearts in a different way from that usually ac-cepted. Of course, the arts may be ap-proached validly from many different per-spectives. On the one hand, the arts may beviewed as a formal discipline or training tobe given to develop individual, specializedtalents. Programs that give a primary valueto performance skills focus on this approach.In addition, the arts may be viewed as his-torical artifacts that figure in a special his-tory—the history of art; they may be viewedfrom the point of view of the many forms ofarts criticism as the data for critical analysisas works of art; and they may be viewed as

data and examples for the many differ-ent theories of aesthetics that have beendeveloped.

On the other hand, the arts may beviewed as a symbol system—like lan-guage and numbers are symbol sys-tems—that has been created as a modeof knowing. Number systems have been

created to help us describe certain featuresof the world that are invisible without num-bers. Language is another symbol systemthat has been created to help us delineatefeatures of experience and the world. Artis-tic symbols are another symbol system—non-verbal and non-mathematical—that de-marcate otherwise invisible features of theworld and our experience. Symbols act likethe contour lines of the map-maker to de-lineate features of the world. They stabi-lize, fix, give direction and meaning to the“blooming buzz” of experience. A subjectcomes to know through the act of creatingand manipulating symbols in the mappingof experience.

From this perspective, the arts are a majorsymbol system and a basic form of know-ing. A work of art represents an artist’s at-tempt to map some experience in forms thatcapture the essence of the experience andcommunicate it to others. The artistic pro-cess, then, is seen as a continuous process of

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The old academic categoriesno longer make sense.

ON COMMON GROUND8

(continued from previous page)noticing, symbolization, re-attending, andrevision.

At the classroom level, viewing the arts asa symbol system and form of knowing/learn-ing would involve students in their own pro-cess of noticing, creating, viewing works ofart, reflecting, and documenting their ownprocess of experience and discovery.

Perhaps the best way to conclude is with aflight of fancy. Lynn Olson has written in arecent issue of Education Week (November2, 1994) that “reformers not only have toreach large numbers of schools and teach-ers and citizens, they must also changepeople’s fundamental conceptions of whatgood teaching and learning look like.” De-veloping this vision of how new schools willlook is perhaps the most difficult barrier toreal school reform. The changes comingfor our economy, our society, and our schoolsare hard to visualize. But looking from thevantage of the arts, let us imagine whatschools could be.

Imagine schools in which works of art andother “worthy objects of study” are madedirectly available to students as rich andchallenging primary source materials foractive investigations. Imagine multimediaand telecommunications making these re-sources available instantly across time andspace for young people in schools. Imaginethese rich materials being the “gateways”or “anchors” for integrated curricula thathelp students make connections among ideasand disciplines. Imagine an on-going se-ries of aesthetic experiences permeating thelearning process and motivating curiosityand discovery. Imagine schools in whichteachers and students collaborate in the de-sign of the curricular projects and investi-gations that spiral out of the rich sourcematerials of the arts. Imagine schools inwhich student work is itself regarded as a“work of art”—that is, student learning isgrounded in creative inquiry, then artfullyrendered into Process Portfolios that tell thestory of the learner’s journey with power andbeauty. Imagine schools that support reflec-tion and real intellectual growth for theirfaculties, and which support students in re-flecting on their own work and growth.Imagine schools that have broken the glass

walls between the school and the commu-nity to become centers of learning throughwhich artists, artworks from cultural orga-nizations, researchers, academic leaders andother experts from science, math, history,business, etc., flow.

The Leonard Bernstein Center, a nationalresearch and development center that usesthe arts and technology as a new approachto learning, is working to refine visions likethis, and to translate such visions into real-ity. Beginning with a five year researchproject in one K-6 public school (the EakinSchool), the Bernstein Center is now in thesecond stage of design for its school pro-grams. Ten public schools—from K-12—are involved in a two year project to developconcrete models of reform shaped by theCenter’s five core strategies. Experts in mathand science from Peabody College ofVanderbilt University, artists from local cul-tural institutions and universities, top stafffrom Metro Nashville Public Schools are allinvolved in planning and design for this project.

At the school level, each school has a De-sign Team of teachers, parents, and the prin-cipal who work to develop the overall planfor the school. Each school also has a Fo-cus Classroom that receives weekly in-classconsultation and support from Artistic De-sign Consultants from the Center. From thistwo-year project, a national network of like-minded teachers and schools will be initi-ated, with model curricula, assessment tools,models for the use of art and technology,and models for teacher professional devel-opment and reflection drawn from the workof these ten schools.

Leonard Bernstein knew the power of thearts to reach people and to stimulate learn-ing—he embodied and symbolizes thispower. The Bernstein Center represents amagnificent opportunity to transmitBernstein’s educational legacy into a livinglegacy for our schools. The new economicforces of the knowledge society and the newunderstandings of knowledge support a cen-tral role for the arts in learning. LeonardBernstein is the perfect symbol for catalyzingthese forces into a coherent vision and ac-tion. The Bernstein Center is dedicated tothis mission.

Massey: The Arts as Knowing Whitaker: the Arts(continued from page 4)

the professional development of teachersof playwriting, a portfolio competition andspecial workshops for their students, aperformance troupe for teachers who wantintensive immersion in drama, and theshowcasing of short works written and per-formed by students who have been in theperformance troupe. This story comes fullcircle with Pearson-Davis’s noting of theunexpected benefits that the collaborationhas brought to faculty and students at theUniversity of New Mexico in several pro-grams.

• The two pieces in our department “Voicesfrom the Classroom” sum up a number ofour continuing themes. Sharon Floyd setsforth her revitalizing experience, as ateacher of writing, in projects led by theUniversity of Michigan’s Center for Edu-cational Improvement through Collabora-tion. Sharon A. Olguin describes her workwith artist-teachers who were committedto the view that the arts can inform thestudy of other subjects, raise the students’self-esteem, and develop their critical think-ing and creative abilities.

• Finally, the poem by Rosa Citlali Zamora,an eleven-year-old from Albuquerque,New Mexico, succinctly traces writing andreading, painting and seeing, to their rootsin our shared imagination.

The Images: Some Perspectives

The images in this issue remind us that artis a scene of collaboration and learning. Thecover and center-fold on which I’ve alreadycommented, The Figure 5 in Gold and theCollaborative Quilt of Transformation, maysuggest the range. Along with the quilt wereproduce on page 17 a detail by OctavioIniquez of Grade 4 that constitutes one mo-ment in the process of imaginative transfor-mation.

Elsewhere in these pages we juxtapose thework of professional artists with that of stu-dents. Maxine Greene’s allusion to Stevens’“The Man With the Blue Guitar” might havecalled for Picasso’s rather sombre old guitar-ist, but we have chosen instead, for pages 4and 5, two refreshing images of music that

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FALL 1995 9

Elliot W. Eisner is Professor of Educationand Art at Stanford University.

hat one must make the case that stu-dents should be given significantopportunities to work within and to

experience the arts is itself a telling com-mentary on our conception of education oron our values. Yet, almost ceaselessly thatcase must be made—and more often thannot unsuccessfully. When push comes toshove, when budgets are to be cut the artsare among the most likely candidates.Given the fact that we build palaces to housethem, erect concert halls to hear them, con-struct theaters to see them, pay performersof the arts fortunes to provide them, whythe discrepancy between our out-of-schoolbehavior and our in-school priorities?

One reason that we seldom entertain is thatwhile we believe the arts to be important,they are simply not well taught in school.Most elementary teachers know little aboutthe arts and often trivialize them in theirclassrooms. Parents sense this and vote withtheir feet; they want their children engagedin more substantive experiences in school.

There may be some truth to this scenario,but it is a scenario that applies as much toscience, foreign languages, and math as itdoes to the arts. Why then, if the arts arenot unique in the level of quality with whichthey are taught, are they so vulnerable tobudget cuts and so low on our educationalpriorities?

One reason is that the arts are not regardedas useful—pleasurable yes, useful no. Nowutility is a notion that needs analysis. Somethings are useful because they help you dothings that are valuable—like getting intocollege or a fine university. For college ad-mission, arts courses have no such utilities.In fact, courses in the arts are liabilities foradmission to some selective universities. Forsome admission committees high transcriptsthat list courses in the arts reveal that theaspiring candidate avoided “solid” coursesand instead opted for what I suppose couldbe called “gasses”. Other universities, in-cluding my own, eliminate arts course grades

TBy Elliot W. Eisner when the committee calculates grade point

average. A high school student who aspiresto be a practicing artist and who receives Agrades in all of his or her arts courses re-ceives no credit for those courses when com-peting for admission, but woe be the samestudent who gets a C in physics. And ironyof ironies, the same university that ignoresgrades in the arts at the high school levelconfers degrees in the arts for students onits own campus.

The reason for the marginalization of thearts is, I think, related to a deeply, but tac-itly held conception of mind. It is a concep-

tion of mind that is rooted in Plato’s view ofhuman enlightenment and in the legacy ofthe Enlightenment on our conception of ra-tionality. For both Plato and Descartes itwas mathematics that was closest to God; toreally know, one had to free one’s self fromthe senses and, instead, address what is ab-stract, general, and timeless. The arts bycontrast, are concrete, particular, and timely.And to make matters worse, they are emo-tional! Genuine understanding dependsupon detached objectivity and it is such un-

derstanding for which the schools are re-sponsible. In short, their contribution to en-lightenment is marginal at best, at worst theyare misleading. And, in any case, they havelittle to do with rationality.

To make the arguments I have made is notto suggest that educational policy is madeby people who consult Plato or Descartesbefore deciding what knowledge is of mostworth. No, the problem is much deeper.These prejudices regarding the nature ofmind are so ingrained in our culture thatthey are not recognized for what they are,and should there be any doubt, the univer-sity legitimizes them, thus playing a majorconservative role in constraining the possi-bilities of schooling.

Imagine, if you will, the consequences onthe secondary and even the elementaryschool curriculum if by some magic admis-sion to selective and not so selective univer-sities required a portfolio of paintings, avideo tape of a dance improvisation, a col-lection of poetry, a film of an acting perfor-mance, or a tape of a recital. I dare say thatif admission to college required such sub-missions there would be a riptide throughthe grades that would flood even the kin-dergarten. What if, to continue this mindexperiment, the S.A.T.s were also excizedof their multiple choice items in languageand math and instead assessed actual per-formance in the arts. Where then would thearts be among our educational priorities?

The deep point that I am making is thatthe place of the arts in the 108,000 schoolsin America is not likely to significantlychange without a re-conception of whatschools are for, what it is that nurtures mindin all of its splendid manifestations, and whatuniversities themselves must change to open,rather than to constrain, the education of ourchildren. This is a tall order, but it is neces-sary. Without a re-vision of the possibilitiesof mind and the potential of schooling weare likely to continue to fiddle with thechrome of education while employing amotor that does not have the capacity to getus where we want to go. The time has cometo look under the hood.

Why the Arts are Marginalized in Our Schools:One More Time

OLIVIA NAM, SOMBREROS, 1995

ON COMMON GROUND10

middle, and high schools who teach SocialStudies, History, Art, English, Spanish, andFrench (language teachers of a cultural/his-torical bent experimenting with materials forinstruction) have enrolled in my seminars.The first two were entitled “Art, Artifacts,and Material Culture” and “Time Machines:Artifacts and Culture.” The seminar I gavemost recently on “The Family in Art andMaterial Culture” was structured around theanalysis of images of the family and, to alesser extent, objects of everyday life. Em-phasis was placed on key stages of familylife—birth, childhood, marriage, parenthood,aging, and death.

With the emphasis on methodology, theseminars seem to have been particularly use-ful to teachers in developing practical as-pects of their teaching lesson plans. Each

class meeting focuses on the analy-sis of a single object. In seminarmeetings we analyze museum ob-jects, but the teachers are encour-aged in developing units to sub-ject everyday materials to the samekind of close analysis. Their stu-dents in turn can do the same thing

with pictures in magazines, family snapshots,or items of everyday life around them. Themuseum is used not as a treasure house thatcontains sanctioned objects of beauty andvalue, but as a training ground for learning toextract understanding from things. This af-fective way of learning works for non-literateas well as literate students, and offers oppor-tunities for students who may seem back-ward to excel through visual acuity or cre-ativity in executing projects in the curriculumunit.

Units developed in the material culture semi-nars promise an extraordinary range and va-riety of classroom experiences. They haveincluded “The Native American: Throughthe Eyes of His Mask with a Special Focuson the Indians of Connecticut”; “ComicBooks: Superheroes/heroines, DomesticScenes, and Animal Images”; “New Haven:

I have offered three seminars in the Insti-tute, all of which have had a similar theoreti-cal and methodological underpinning.1 Themethod, in brief, derives from the conceptthat all artifacts—that is, all human-made ob-jects, including works of art—are fragmentsof history that embody the beliefs of the cul-ture that produced them. They are things thathappened in the past but, unlike other his-torical happenings, continue to exist in thepresent. They can therefore be re-experienced,affording a special mode of non-verbal, af-fective access to other cultures and to ourown. Pedagogically, this provides an oppor-tunity for making other times and other places,other ways of life and thought, more compre-hensible to students, including those whohave difficulty absorbing verbal information,or who are immediately dismissive of culturesdifferent from their own. It also enables young

people, including those who lack verbal ormathematical skills, to extract informationfrom things about their own culture, whethertheir family, their community, or their social,religious, or ethnic heritage. Four out of fiveschool children in New Haven are from mi-nority groups, and units on African, Hispanic,Pre-Columbian and Native American culturesare usual, along with more traditional unitson historic Anglo-American culture.

In my seminars, we use close analysis ofobjects as a means of understanding culture,not only to absorb factual historical evidencebut to dig beneath the surface to find uncon-scious expressions of cultural belief. It in-volves application of a simple methodology.Teachers from New Haven elementary,

Exploring Art, Artifacts,and Culture in theInstitute

From the New Haven Experience:

By Jules David Prown

The Yale-New Haven Teachers Insti-tute was established in 1978 as a jointprogram of Yale University and the

New Haven Public Schools. A fundamentalprinciple of the Institute is that the curricu-lum is initially generated by the school teach-ers themselves. Yale faculty are then invitedto offer seminars in areas of teacher interest.Individual teachers propose topics they willdevelop in seminar as curriculum units andteach the following year. In response, Yalefaculty seminar leaders fine-tune the plannedreading and discussions to fit the interestsof the accepted participants. Com-pleted units are subsequently pub-lished and made available to otherinterested teachers in the schoolsystem (and teachers elsewhere byrequest).

The seminar leaders from the Yalefaculty bring greater subject matterknowledge and expertise; theschool teachers bring much greater practicalclassroom knowledge. The seminars are col-legial undertakings conducted in an atmo-sphere of mutual respect. In working in a col-legial way with school teachers, we Yale pro-fessors—more than seventy-five of whom,mostly senior faculty, have been involvedwith the Institute in its fifteen years of exist-ence—learn much about the craft we pro-fess, about what it means to be a teacher. It iseasy to teach Yale students—give them theright materials and ask the right questionsand they teach themselves. In the Institutewe become aware of the extraordinary ac-complishments of dedicated New Havenschool teachers who work in environmentsthat are often not conducive to learning, andwe learn from their sensitivity and respon-siveness to the needs of individual students.Like all teachers, we learn through teaching.

Jules David Prown is Paul Mellon Professorof History of Art at Yale University.

1Described in my article “Mind in Matter: an Introduc-tion to Material Culture Theory and Method,” WinterthurPortfolio, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Spring 1982), 1-19, (reprintedin Robert Blair St. George ed., Material Life in America,1600-1860, [Boston: Northeastern University Press,1988], pp. 13-37).

All artifacts can be re-experienced,affording a special mode of access to

other cultures and to our own.

FALL 1995 11

Its Ships and Its Trades, 1800-1920”; “TotemPoles of the North American Northwest CoastIndians”; “Mexican Culture Taught Throughthe Aztec Calendar”; “Body Exterior—TheLanguage of Contemporary Fashion”; “ToysAre Us”; “Cajun Music: The Voice of theCajun Family”; “Family Life among theAshanti of West Africa”; “The Heritage andCulture of Puerto Ricans”; “The Inuit Family:A Study of its History, Beliefs, and Images”;and “New Haven Families: Artifacts and At-titudes, 1770s to 1890s.” Through the use of

LinkagesBy Kent C. Bloomer

The accumulated knowledge of thearts and sciences is a cultural legacythat ought to be the public property

of a modern society. Yet recent educationalpractices have promoted a condition ofhyper-specialization and a professional se-questration of cultural wisdom. In the some-what strident words of Christopher Lasch,an emergent “Aristocracy of talent . . . lacksany acknowledgement of reciprocal obliga-tions between the favored few and the mul-titude. Although they are full of ‘compas-sion’ for the poor, they cannot be said tosubscribe to a theory of noblesse oblige,which would imply a willingness to make adirect and personal contribution to the pub-lic.”1

Architecture is a case in point. Althoughmany architects do have compassion for livesof city dwellers, the study of architecture isvirtually non-existent in primary schools andtreated only occasionally in secondaryschools. Coursework in architecture is verylimited as an introductory subject in colleges,only to flourish as a highly professionalizedfive-year bachelor’s or three-year master’sprogram in approximately a hundred schoolsthroughout the United States. Ironically, thiselite educational system may be over-pro-ducing the number of professionals whileavoiding an immense constituency of per-sons who are affected every day by a worldof rooms, buildings, streets, monuments, andurban places, the conditions of which go beg-ging for some form of lively public discus-sion. In fact, the nature of architecture, likemusic, can be taught as an open subject ofinquiry rather than as a closed professionaldiscipline at any level of education from kin-dergarten onward.

I led three seminars about architecture,mostly to primary and middle-school teach-ers, within the Yale-New Haven TeachersInstitute. All of the teachers taught custom-ary subjects such as English, mathematics,

Learning from Things

Our schools train students to retrieve andtransmit information in abstract form, wordsand numbers. Little instruction is offeredin the interpretation of objects, which alsoembody information and are sources ofknowledge. In “The Orrery,” painted in1766 by the English artist Joseph Wright ofDerby (1734-97), an elderly man instructsa group gathered about a mechanical ap-paratus that reproduces the orbital move-ment of the planets. Two of the adults con-centrate on his words, one taking notes; twoothers seem lost in their own thoughts asthey stare into the device; three children

JOSEPH WRIGHT OF DERBY, A PHILOSOPHER GIVING THE LECTURE ON THE ORRERY, 1766

gaze with fascination at the orbiting plan-ets and the hidden source of light that rep-resents the sun. The eyes of the onlookersecho the glowing orbs of the planets. Illu-mination is what this picture is about; it isan eighteenth century image of enlighten-ment as well as of The Enlightenment. Un-derstanding is transmitted through words—spoken, written down, preserved in booksas seen to the right; absorbed emotionallythrough feelings, reverie, reflection; andlearned from the direct examination of amaterial object. The orrery presents thefacts of the solar system, but also opens themind to larger speculations about the mys-tery of the universe and its creation.

(continued on next page)1Lasch, Christopher, The Revolt of the Elites, New York,N.Y.: W.W. Norton & Co., 1995, pp. 44-45.

objects and a systematic method of objectanalysis, such units can stimulate and directstudents’ ability to use their senses, espe-cially their abilities to see; to overcome inhi-bitions and respond emotionally; to reflecton the meaning of their sensory and emo-tional experiences; to express themselvesorally and in writing with clarity and preci-sion; to make value judgments and decisions.The curriculum units are intended to convertthe theory of the seminar into the practice ofthe New Haven classroom.

ON COMMON GROUND12

Bloomer: Linkages(continued from previous page)and social studies, while a few also taughtdrama and painting. None had ever inves-tigated architecture in a classroom setting,but they soon understood that their own “sub-jects” provided some fundamental means ofobserving and analyzing aspects of publicbuildings and places. And our subordinatetopic, architectural ornament and publicmonumentality, engaged everyone’s interestsand expertise.

Several of the teachers, who were engagedin multi-cultural studies, studied the typicalplans of a mosque and the rhythmic patternsin African flat-pattern ornament. The plansof the mosques demonstrated the architec-tural power of decorated walls positioned toface towards Mecca and thus to define thedomain of a people. Examples of Africanflat-pattern ornament also drew attention towalls as architectural tablets for culturalexpression. In many African traditions theimportance of a decorated doorway to pro-claim the rites of entry, possession, and exitillustrated the architectural power of athreshold. A drama instructor dramatizedthat liminal condition in local Americanarchitecture by asking his students to writeand perform a play that included construct-ing a familiar front door on the stage as aprincipal character in a dialogue.

A mathematics and social studies teacherfocused on the capitals upon the Greek col-umns gracing the entrance of her agingNew Haven school building as ancient fig-ures descended from the myths that flour-ished at the dawn of western society. An-other mathematics teacher employed lo-cal church steeples as vehicles for under-standing proportion and the relation ofbuildings to the human body. Her studentswould measure their own bodies and then,by counting the number of bricks or clap-boards commensurate with their bodyheight, they would deduce the size of achurch steeple either by direct observationor by overlaying “body units” upon a pho-

teacher, librarian, and media expert who wasabout to be appointed Director of LibraryMedia for all of the New Haven publicschools. Several months after the seminarhe invited me to come look over a crampedlittle library room in a local elementaryschool. Derry, school administrators, po-tential donors, a library consultant, and I metin what appeared to be an ordinary class-room overstuffed with books, furniture, andcramped spaces for reading and instruction.At our next meeting I included some gradu-ate students from the Yale School of Archi-tecture. At this “extended” seminar, theschool’s principal presented a wish list thatincluded a bowl of fish as an important pro-vision for the library. Objections to the fishas frivolous in light of the library’s desper-ate needs faded when the principal explainedthat the young students might benefit fromseeing a colorful and watery sign of lifeplaced within the interior wall so as to bevisible from the long, dark, and windowlesscorridor. The idea of the fishbowl createdthe theme “fishing for knowledge.” Otherwalls were broken open as doorways to ad-ditional space in adjacent storage and coun-seling areas. Several Yale students volun-teered to build and contribute new furnitureembellished with wave patterns reminiscentof the sea. Money, computers, rugs, and lightfixtures were donated by banks and localindustries with mounting enthusiasm. Thefirst phase of the library improvement andexpansion was completed as scheduled.

We need more such “linkages.” Forms ofknowledge now sequestered in graduate pro-fessional programs can quite easily be ex-perienced and basically understood by oth-ers, including the very young, if there is adirect and creative connection between in-dividual teachers from both graduate and el-ementary schools. While the professionallyeducated played an important role in our“extended” seminar, so did the “amateurs,”who came to realize that a small architec-tural project could be as celebrative as it waspractical. Surely our public architecturewould be more exciting and pervasive if itwere linked to a constituency cultivated inthe subject.

From New Haven:(continued from previous page)

tograph. Besides providing the studentswith tools of measurement and subdivi-sion those exercises alerted the class to thearchitectural profiles and civic dimensionsof their hometown.

Another teacher, combining instruction inartwork and ethnic history, persuaded hisstudents to construct an immense model ofthe ancient Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán. Herolled out a piece of paper approximatelyfive by twelve feet on the classroom floorand asked everyone to construct individualmodels of pyramids, houses, palaces, or riv-

ers to be pasted onto the paper rug. It didnot matter that the students produced hutsthat were occasionally bigger than pyramidsand rivers that might turn out to be smallerthan the sidewalks—or that most of theirfamilies were from Puerto Rico rather thanMexico. What mattered was their collec-tive production, from a hodgepodge of dia-grams and photographs, of a dazzling modelof a lost city that could be rolled up like arug and taken from one schoolroom to an-other as a proud display of their architec-tural knowledge and achievement.

One of the seminarians, Bill Derry, was aKent C. Bloomer is Professor (Adjunct) ofArchitectural Design at Yale University.

F. BEDFORD, MORESQUE NO. 5, 1856

FALL 1995 13

Learning through Drama

Thomas R. Whitaker is Frederick W. HillesProfessor Emeritus of English at Yale Uni-versity. (continued on next page)

Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, and tothe thematic and stylistic variety in GeorgeC. Wolfe’s The Colored Museum. Then,supplementing our scene-work with writtencomments on characters and pages from adirector’s notebook, we entered internationalwaters: Eduardo Machado’s The FloatingIsland Plays, Derek Walcott’s Dream onMonkey Mountain, Wole Soyinka’s TheRoad, and Percy Mtwa, Mbongeni Ngema,and Barney Simon’s Woza Albert! The highpoint of this stretch came with Woza Albert!—a satirical/apocalyptic play, composedthrough improvisation, about Johannesburglife under Apartheid. I led two people in areading and a walk-through of Scene 1, andthen asked them to improvise the scene. Then

I divided the group into pairs, ask-ing each to select a scene, find ananalogous action or situation intheir New Haven experience, anddevelop an improvisation basedon that local material. We per-formed the “improvs” in se-quence, with often hilarious andsometimes poignant results. OurWoza Martin! included an inter-racial team engaged in a drive-byshooting and a collective visit toGrove Cemetery to invoke the res-urrection of African-Americanheroes.

As the teachers completed theircurriculum units on such topicsas “Multicultural Theater in Mu-

sic,” “Drama and African-AmericanFolktales,” and “The Role of the African Play-wright as a Griot,” we rehearsed four longerprojects. Two teachers directed scenes fromLorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun andWolfe’s The Colored Museum, while I di-rected scenes from Machado’s Broken Eggsand Walcott’s Dream on Monkey Mountain.The cast for A Raisin in the Sun was African-American; that for Dream on Monkey Moun-tain, by a reverse twist, was European-Ameri-can (a theatrically trained teacher and I); andthe casts for The Colored Museum and Bro-ken Eggs were racially mixed. In our final(and celebratory) performance it was the long

provisational Drama,” and “‘Come Alive’Social Studies” to “The Amistad Affair: Prob-lem Solving through Theater” and “ActingUp in Contemporary Law.” One of them, BillDerry’s “Melting Pot Theater: Teaching forCultural Understanding,” offered a plan forseveral classrooms to create a play about alienexplorers who encounter the cultures ofPuerto Rico, Russia, and Ghana.

As seminar leader I learned a good dealfrom that experience. In 1993, therefore, Iproposed that another group focus directlyon “Twentieth-Century Multicultural The-ater.” Now I had an additional objective thatI chose not to make explicit: Could theseteachers from different racial backgrounds(six African-American, four European-Ameri-

can, one Latino), some of whom seemed com-mitted to their own traditions, become a co-herent theatrical group? Could their role-play-ing of cultural diversity lead to a realizationof their own deeper unity? And could ourtheater exercises and games help us to movetoward the necessary trust, reciprocity, andopenness to change?

It was worth a try. Along with our theatergames and improvisations with “open”scripts, we started walking through scenesfrom David Henry Hwang’s As the Crow Fliesand other scripts from Misha Berson’s an-thology, Between Worlds: ContemporaryAsian-American Plays. We then turned toproblems of character and action in August

ABy Thomas R. Whitaker

few years ago I proposed to a semi-nar on “Contemporary AmericanDrama” in the Yale-New Haven

Teachers Institute that we proceed as a the-ater workshop or amateur repertory group.Only if we “inhabit” the scripts in that way, Isaid, could we discover their full theatricalmeanings. To our group of common read-ings we would add theater games, improvi-sations, and several stages of rehearsal. Theteachers agreed, hoping with me that ouradult work, with exercises developed by ViolaSpolin and Joseph Chaikin, and with playsby David Mamet, Sam Shepard, NtozakeShange, Wallace Shawn, Christo-pher Durang, and Jules Feiffer,could prove applicable to theirclasses ranging from kindergartento 9th grade.

So we played “Passing and Re-ceiving,” “Molding the Object,”“Part of a Whole,” “Mirror Exer-cise,” and Open Theatre games inwhich behaviors are passed fromone to another, transformed, andthen passed on. We tried “open”scripts to which the actors mustbring their own definitions of char-acter, situation, and subtext. Andwe did lots of scene analysis. Aswe went along, we explored withthe help of James Luse from LongWharf Theatre some scenes from Shange’sFor Colored Girls Who Have ConsideredSuicide When the Rainbow is Enuf. One ofour final projects was part of Feiffer’s GrownUps, which I directed with two different casts.I was particularly struck by the ways in whichan Asian-American and an African-Ameri-can teacher allowed themselves to enter intoattitudes and body-language appropriate toFeiffer’s Jewish family. “Non-traditional cast-ing” seemed a way to discover communityamid diversity. The teachers’ curriculum unitsranged from “Recipes for Playmaking,” “Im-

FROM THE SEMINAR ON “TWENTIETH-CENTURY MULTICULTURAL THEATER,” 1993 (LEFT TO RIGHT:CAROLYN WILLIAMS, JEFFRY FARRELL, TRISHA TURNER, GERALDINE MARTIN,

NICOLETTE PERRAULT, JOYCE BRYANT, AND GERENE FREEMAN.)

ON COMMON GROUND14

Whitaker: Learning(continued from page 13)concluding scene from Broken Eggs thatmost fully realized my tacit objective for theseminar. Machado’s rather Chekhovian playabout an alienated, nostalgic, and dysfunc-tional family of Cuban exiles in California ismuch concerned with the failure of commu-nity, the need to meet each other across thesocial and psychological distances we havecreated. The play ends ambiguously, withrecognitions of chronic escapism and addic-tion, a weary acceptance of the past, and avery tenuous hope for the future. But it re-quires of its actors a group-work that hadenabled us to complete our own movementtoward a multi-racial community. For us Bro-ken Eggs had indeed made a theatrical om-elette.

I am sometimes asked why university pro-fessors would want to lead a seminar forteachers. For me the answers have emergedfrom seminars over the years on such vari-ous topics as “The Process of Writing,”“American Fiction,” “The American Musi-cal,” and “Contemporary American Poetry:Expanding the Canon.” We hope, no doubt,to be of service to the teachers and studentsin our inner-cities. We may see a chance toexperiment with fresh subjects or pedagogi-cal approaches. And we welcome the oppor-tunity to discuss our subject and our craftwith other adults. But very soon we alsodiscover that these teachers need a kind ofprofessional development that acknowledgestheir ability to plan their own courses of learn-ing and teaching—and that challenges themto carry such plans to completion. In the endwe find such a seminar to be exciting andinvigorating for all of us. We learn from eachother in often surprising ways—about oursubjects, our approaches to teaching, andthe opportunities for community in what isoften an alienating environment. For me thatseminar on multicultural theater, which re-quired us all to risk ourselves in creating acommunity of role-players, brought to thoseanswers a new clarity and a palpable force.

Poetry in the Classroom:The Beecher Experiment

in fact they hewed more closely to the an-nounced issues of the seminar (pictures,places, and people) than did most of theircolleagues. So diverse were the units apartfrom these four that I decided to rename myvolume of units (Volume II, 1994) “Poetryin the Classroom: Incentive and Dramati-zation.” Nearly all the units produced bythe teachers in this seminar were excellent,but I recommend reading those of theBeecher team in particular as models of theway in which the ecphrastic, regional, andsocial specificity of poetry can bringmulticultural teaching to life in the class-room.

Francine Coss used early Americanhornbook verse, especially illustrated Alpha-bet Rhymes, to teach her kindergartners boththe alphabet and the rather stern yet kindly-disposed virtues inculcated by such rhymes.Geraldine Martin devised a “counting train”(uno through diez) to teach the geography,daily lives, and social practices of the an-cient and modern Mexicans (Mexico isone—uno—country, for example, but it hasharbored three—tres—ancient civilizations,etc.): and each number-coded lesson wasillustrated and augmented with poems writ-ten by Mexican adults and children. PatriceFlynn’s challenge was to emphasize the un-familiar in Japanese culture, and for thispurpose, in addition to haiku and otherforms, she chose poetry written and com-piled into books by Japanese school children.Jean Sutherland, finally, worked with tradi-tional folk verse (jump rope rhymes, fieldsongs, wedding poems) to illustrate the lan-guage and values of her students’ nativecultural tradition. I hope this brief summarywill give some sense of the ingenious andexhaustive research efforts undertaken by allfour teachers. Apart from some of JeanSutherland’s materials, I the poetry profes-sor had never encountered or even knownof the poetry (published in pleasing Englishtranslations yet languishing unread and outof print) that the Beecher team’s curricu-lum units make available.

And then came Fiesta Day. FrancineCoss’s children, in early American headgearand enunciating at the top of their lungs,

Paul H. Fry is William Lampson Profes-sor of English at Yale University. JeanE. Sutherland teaches fifth grade at L. W.Beecher elementary school in New Haven,Connecticut.

From New Haven:(continued from previous page)

ne pleasant spring morning thisyear, Yale-New Haven Teachers In-stitute Director James Vivian and

I attended a gathering called “InternationalFiesta Day” at the Beecher School in NewHaven. We had been invited because thefour teachers presenting the event had at-tended my Summer 1994 Teachers Instituteseminar called “Poems on Pictures, Places,and People.” These teachers, Francine Coss(K), Geraldine Martin (l), Patrice Flynn (3),and Seminar Coordinator Jean Sutherland(5), had applied for the seminar as a “team”intending from the outset to work toward aFiesta Day. They hoped to emphasize thediversity of human cultures for the benefitof their students, nearly all of whom areAfrican-American. Coss wanted to preparea unit on the American Colonial Period,Martin on ancient and modern Mexico,Flynn on Japanese culture, and Sutherlandon African-American traditions. Their hav-ing joined forces, both in the seminar andin an interactive, cooperative approach toteaching in their school, was envisioned bythe Institute as a prototype for future groupprojects.

I think the experiment was a wonderfulsuccess at every stage. My first response,though, when I saw the applications, wasskeptical. I wondered whether poetry wouldreally prove necessary or even useful as theteachers’ plans developed; and I wonderedwhether a “team” with its collective aimscould contribute the focused individuality ofperspective on weekly topics that is neededin a seminar of twelve persons. But I sawright away that my doubts were unjustified.Not only did poetry prove to be an unforcedand natural point of focus for the curricu-lum units these four teachers prepared, but

OBy Paul H. Fry

FALL 1995 15

seminars as a team, the Beecher group metto discuss possibilities. Our idea of using po-etry as the basis for studying Colonial Ameri-can (kindergarten), Mexican (first grade),Japanese (third), and African American(fifth) culture was born. A key objective ofour team was to encourage interactionamong pupils and teachers across grade lev-els, with an eye toward involving other staffmembers. Parental involvement was an ab-solute must.

In our Yale seminar, a group of twelveteachers studied and discussed poetry whichwas primarily far beyond our pupils’ grasp.At the same time, we developed our indi-vidual teaching units geared to our particu-lar grade level, but motivated largely by ourseminar experiences. Throughout, we metindividually with Professor Fry, who pro-vided comments and suggestions on the vari-ous stages of our unit writing. Indepen-dently, the Beecher group met regularly,checking their progress as a team.

During the school year that followed, ourteam’s writing was put into action. First,we developed a schedule for teaching mate-rial and staging culminating events and alsoplanned for cooperative activities acrossgrade levels. Individually we began teach-ing our material to our pupils as we had pre-scribed in our own units. Some of our mostsuccessful lessons involved two classroomsworking together. My fifth grade paired upwith first graders. Together each couplewrote and illustrated a poem patterned aftera short Mexican piece presented by the firstgrade teacher. Fifth graders taught first grad-ers hand games based upon traditional Af-rican American rhymes which, after beingpresented at our festival, became a school-wide fad.

For that festival the parents planned,shopped for, prepared and served an over-whelming buffet of food representing eachof the cultures the team had covered. Par-ents also sewed costumes, taught a Mexicandance, wrote and presented a poem, providedmartial arts entertainment during the buf-fet, and some, including a hundred year oldgrandmother, were honored in personthrough their child’s original poem.

recited a book of alphabet rhymes, each re-sponsible for a letter and holding up the per-tinent picture. Focusing on poetry through-out, Geraldine Martin’s Counting Train inserapes and white blouses recited and sangpoems chorally, with interspersed solos.Patrice Flynn’s class did relatively little withthe poetry they had been studying but choseinstead to stage a short Noh play about thewedding of a princess and a commoner for-bidden by the cruel king on earth but cel-ebrated among the stars. And JeanSutherland’s fifth graders, boys and girls insome cases nearly six feet tall, recited po-ems they themselves had written in praiseof parents, caregivers, and friends singledout from the audience. Many were in tears,and one poet was so overwhelmed that shejust stood with her aunt, unable to speak aword. The event lasted nearly the entiremorning (we adjourned for the food of ourcultures), but all the teachers, administra-tors, children, and parents were spellboundto the end, hardly aware that time was pass-ing.

My Father

My father was very handsome.My father was thoughtful and lots of fun.

My father was very nice,He loved to play games and shoot dice.

My father was a big kid.Anything I asked him to do he did.

My father was very light-skinned,Not too fat, not too thin, just right.I think he never liked to see me fight.

My father had nice curly hair.When I needed him, he was always there.

My father tried to teach me lots of stuff back then.One thing was to swim.

When anybody messed with me, it didn’t bother me because, back then I knew I had my father.

By now I think you know,he’s gone.His memory will stay with me very long.

My father, Nathan Spearman,passed away July 31, 1994. I will remember him always.

Narkita Spearman

Narkita Spearman, who is now twelveyears old, began to write poetry last yearat L.W. Beecher Elementary School.

“Icried, but inside I felt proud. Ithought everybody was crying sad-ness, but they were crying happi-

ness. To me the assembly was very impor-tant not because I was in it but because allfour classes worked hard and did well.”

These words, written by one of my fifthgrade pupils, typify the reactions of children,parents, staff, and other guests lucky enoughto experience our festival of culture throughpoetry. This was a combined production,the culminating event of curriculum unitswritten and taught by four L.W. Beecherclassroom teachers representing kindergar-ten, first, third, and fifth grade. As mem-bers of the Yale-New Haven Teachers Insti-tute, we had been enrolled in Professor PaulFry’s seminar, “Poems on Pictures, Places,and People.”

The idea of working as a team started abouta year and a half before the final program.Since the Institute’s steering committee hadencouraged school colleagues to apply to

By Jean E. Sutherland

ON COMMON GROUND16

SPECIAL STUDIO STUDENTS FROM DIAMOND ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, SANTA ANA, CALIFORNIA, COLLABORATIVE QUILT OF TRANSFORMATION, 1995

ON COMMON GROUND16

FALL 1995 17

Helen Seigel is Artist-in-the-Schools inthe Santa Ana Unified School District inSanta Ana, California.

Student Artwork: CollaborativeQuilt of Transformation

his quilt image was created bytwenty students (grades 3-5) at Dia-mond Elementary School who are

participants in the Special Studio art pro-gram with artist Helen Seigel. Together thestudent artists and the professional artistworked to construct an image that would beboth visually stunning and conceptuallychallenging. Each student was photo-graphed in three positions: receiving, observ-ing, and giving an object. Next, studentsused oil pastels to design a wall and floorbackground, applying their knowledge of ba-sic color theory and pattern. They voted toalternate warm and cool colors on thewalls and to be free to choose their owncolors for the floors. Conceptual plan-ning discussions included issues such ashow to work together successfully as agroup. Inherent in this process was theestablishing of guidelines or rules for ev-eryone to follow. Equally important wereopportunities for free expression by eachindividual member of the group. Aftergluing the photographs onto the com-pleted backgrounds, students gathered toplan the objects which they would bepassing on to one another. With thegroup seated in the configuration of theactual artwork, Ms. Seigel “handed” theworld to Marta Navarro (top left), whopicked it up, transformed it first into abaseball (considering its round form),and then into a balloon. Her neighbor (tothe right), Isidro Montoya, took her balloonand changed it into a circular frisbee, andthen into a dog (for its conceptual connec-tion). This pattern continues throughout thepiece, each student receiving something, re-interpreting and reinventing that object,making formal or conceptual associationsas they worked. Students used colored pen-cils and markers to draw their objects. Theyhad to carefully consider the scale and posi-tion of each item so that it would fit intotheir hands. Upon completion of thesemixed media collages (oil pastels, colored

TBy Helen Seigel

pencils, markers, and photography) the tech-nology of color copying was employed tounify diverse textures into a harmonious andmagical blend.

The resulting “quilt” of giving and takingnot only demonstrates the students’ mastery ofart elements, design, and techniques, but alsoillustrates how visual art is a powerful vehiclefor critical thinking, exploration, invention, andcollaboration.

Young Special Studio artists (grades 3-5) atHarvey Elementary School brain-stormed to-gether to make a list of things that they couldnot do without the help of others. Then they

each selected a theme which they would de-velop into a piece of art. Individual studentscould invite up to four other students to partici-pate in their work. Acting as directors, stu-dents advised their peers as to how they mightmost successfully pose to communicate theiridea. Photographs include the student artistand his/her “actors.” Students then combinedthe resulting photographs with colored pencils,markers, oil pastels, and magazine images tocreate evocative mixed media collages. Finally,the collages were turned into color prints whichseem to make their fantasies appear to be real!

These pieces are truly mixed media worksas they combine art materials, mass mediaimagery, drama, and student collaborationto yield striking, original statements.

OCTAVIO INIQUEZ, DETAIL FROM COLLABORATIVE QUILT OFTRANSFORMATION, 1995

may lead us to think about teaching. MaryCassatt’s The Banjo Lesson suggests a de-sirable intimacy in the teaching relation. (In-deed, a study for that painting is entitled TwoSisters.) Saroeun Sim’s untitled work comesfrom a 3rd grade class at Jackson ElementarySchool in Santa Ana, California, whereHalinka Luangpraseut is Artist-in-the-Schools. This image renders the linkingpower of music through a guitar that com-pletes the evident circle of friendship andalso the formal design. We have continuedthis theme, shifting both instrument and gen-

der, with William Sidney Mount’s The Nov-ice, on page 28, a painting that again un-derstands music to bring teacher andlearners 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 SantaAna. Its bold design, with a hidden life inthe averted figures and a radiant sourcebeyond the mountains, seems to under-line Elliott W. Eisner’s comments on amarginalized vitality in our schools. NataliePedroza’s narrative collage, Building aTree House Where We Can Play, on page26, comes from a 4th grade class at HarveyElementary School in Santa Ana, whereHelen Seigel is also Artist-in-the-Schools.Its images and its medium harmonize withColleen Fairbanks’ account of collabora-

tion as “a lived story.” On page 30 we haveincluded an untitled piece by HuyvaTanikawa from a first grade class at JacksonElementary School, which offers a delightfultension between the centered and the eccen-tric. And the back cover features SergioRomano’s Stop! Save the Whales, whichcomes from a 3rd grade class at Harvey El-ementary School. Its title explains the shout-ing boy and the sea-mammals below, but thetotal design is a joyous image of youthfulquest in the context of both nature and soci-ety—and an instance of the role that art edu-cation can play in that quest.

(continued on page 30)

(continued from page 8)

Whitaker: the Arts

ON COMMON GROUND18

Jill Beck is Dean of the School of the Artsat the University of California, Irvine.

n 1994, the Dance Division at South-ern Methodist University moved to es-tablish collaborative partnerships with

schools in the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex.The impetus was a desire to help remedythe isolation of the university from theschools in its community, and to devise aninnovative model that would achieve someof the national goals for Arts in Education.With the assistance of funding from the U.S.Department of Education’s Fund for the Im-provement of Postsecondary Education(FIPSE), a three-year program was initiatedthat linked the close study and practice ofdances to inquiry in areas of social studiesand humanities, including history, culturalstudies, geography, and gender.

The project began with the selection of sixpopulation groups that are important to themetroplex population, three of which wouldbe the focus of research and pedagogicaldesign in Year 1: Mexican, Cajun-French,and Vietnamese. Experts in dances fromeach culture were invited to SMU for inten-sive workshops with undergraduate andgraduate students. The undergraduates,working in teams with faculty or graduatestudents, researched contextual informationabout the dances. What societal classesdanced? Why and where were the dancesperformed? What currents of internationalinfluence do the dances reflect? What be-liefs or values do they reveal or express? Inanswering such questions, university stu-dents were engaged both in gathering in-formation related to the dances they werepracticing, and in analyzing the dances tofind points of intersection between that in-formation and its artistic/cultural expression.

Initial partnerships with the schools wereformed to share the materials and approachof the international study units. Some ofour initiatives welcomed children and teach-ers to SMU, and others launched SMU stu-dents and faculty into the schools.Children’s Workshops were held at the uni-

IBy Jill Beck versity, for groups of 50-200 children, with

a focus on perceiving and discussing mean-ing in performed art. Deaf and hearing-impaired students represented about 25 per-cent of the participants in the Workshops,and they excelled in “reading” the visual lan-guage of dance, in interpreting meanings ofcomplex sequences of physical expression.SMU professors worked with teachers todevelop preview guides and questions thatteachers could use to prepare students forthe Workshops, and review assignments(such as writing the story of a dance) as fol-low-ups to the visits.

In another type of link, after-school pro-grams were formulated with area teachersfor grades 4-6 and taught by undergraduateand graduate student teams. These programsintegrated dance study with practice in abili-ties measured on the yearly TAAS tests(Texas Assessment of Academic Skills) andendorsed in the National Standards for Artsin Education. For example, children readmaps to locate places and patterns of hu-man migration; they learned to apply suchspatial concepts as counter-clockwise, asym-metrical, and the four cardinal directions.They memorized existing dances, createdoriginal dances embedded with their ownintent and meaning, and documented dancesin the symbolic language of dance notation.They performed for their families and teach-ers, becoming increasingly comfortable withspeaking, explaining, dancing and problemsolving in public.

Teachers noticed positive changes in somestudents’ self esteem, and in their readinessto participate more actively in their otherclasses. Principals were pleased that the newdance program demonstrated awareness ofimportant existing educational goals, andwere impressed by the facility of dance instimulating inquiry in a wide array of sub-jects. This feedback will be crucial to theSMU dance program’s future in the schools;in the coming years dance is projected tobecome an element of regular social studiesclasses. Dance in the schools will of coursebe less likely to be cut when budgets become

tight, if it is integrated in mandated curricu-lum.

Graduate students and faculty at SMU alsoturned their attention to the development ofcomputer software that would preserve onmultimedia CD-ROM all the research theyhad done on the context of the differentdances, yet in a format that would allow fu-ture students to continue to work creatively.We have settled on an interactive softwaredesign that has two main approaches tolearning. The Main Road is a narrative spinethat takes the learner through the history andcultural background of the dance understudy, linking it to important information inthe social sciences and humanities. Withinthe Main Road, key words are underlined.When clicked on with the computer mouse,these words open up various resources intext, graphics, dance notation, audio, maps,slides, and video. The data within the MainRoad are beneficial to learners who preferlinear learning but may wish to diverge froma strict path of study to fulfill their curiosityin particular areas. The second environmentaccessed by the interface is the ResourceRoom. A collection of “bins” of audio, vi-sual, and text materials, it is a vehicle forfree exploration of any topic on which thestudy unit touches. A key concepts indexfacilitates the location of sources of infor-mation. A workbench area enables studentsto compile and organize their own portfo-lios of materials on a given theme. In con-sultation with teachers, one of the impor-tant tasks in Year 2 will be adapting the CDunits for students of different ages.

The FIPSE project has proven the appli-cability of much university research to K-12 curricula. It also demonstrates the ap-propriateness of the university communityturning its attention to greater communityproblem solving, the rewards for which havebeen a renewed excitement about learningand a pride in education as a vehicle for so-cial progress. The SMU/Dallas/Fort Wortharts partnership is an important step in en-visioning and implementing the vertical in-tegration of education.

Partnering University Dance and the Schools:Toward the Vertical Integration of Education

FALL 1995 19

Marty Trujillo is a volunteer with theSaint Joseph Ballet in Santa Ana, Cali-fornia.

Saint Joseph Ballet’s Programfor Inner-City ChildrenBy Marty Trujillo

ne of the more demoralizing as-pects of growing up in a poor com-munity is the impoverished view

of the world it presents. Miracles occasion-ally occur, however, when individuals areable to reach into those communities, inspirethe children who live there, and offer themthe time and encouragement to expand theirknowledge and appreciation of the world andtheir place in it. The Saint Joseph Ballethas been inspiring the children of OrangeCounty, California, for 12 years, and it hasbeen able to be a source of inspiration be-cause of its partnership with local school dis-tricts, businesses, and the communitiesthemselves.

An example of this partnership is theBallet’s long-standing relationship with theUniversity of California in Irvine. DanceProfessor and internationally known chore-ographer Donald McKayle serves on theBallet’s Board of Directors and is currentlyproducing a work involving both the Ballet’sdancers and his own college students. UCIalumna Gina Lo Preste is an assistant in-structor for the Ballet. In many cases, theseteachers are the first college graduates thechildren have known outside the classroom.

The Ballet is the largest organization inSouthern California offering quality artsprogramming to children from low-incomefamilies as an after-school and summer ac-tivity. The Ballet, which makes its home ina Latino enclave in downtown Santa Ana,emerged from a highly successful pilot pro-gram originally funded by the AhmansonFoundation back in 1983. Its goals havebeen simple and direct from the start: toprovide dance training to inner city youthsfree of charge as a means of preventing de-linquency, building self-esteem, teachingnew skills, and ultimately, changing theirlives. The children participating in the Bal-let perform to music that reflects a multi-tude of heritages, including, in many cases,

Otheir own. The beauty and grace that resultfrom discipline, teamwork, and hard workare displayed through the troupe’s perfor-mances, which have become fixtures on theOrange County arts scene.

Under its Artistic Director, Beth Burns,the Ballet offers a variety of programs. Be-sides its year-round dancing program, itbrings week-long dance workshops to el-ementary and intermediate schools in thepoorest neighborhoods of Santa Ana. Thispartnership not only strengthens the troupe’s

ties to the community by drawing more low-income children into its year-round program,it also helps to assure the arts will remain acomponent of the public school curriculum.

Early last year the Ballet’s Board of Di-rectors also established an Advanced Train-ing Scholarship Fund. The scholarship pro-gram enables low income “graduates” of theBallet to attend college and continue theirdance training. They awarded the first twoscholarships last year, and two students—the first in their families to receive a collegeeducation—are attending the North Caro-lina School of the Arts with the aid of this fund.

The Ballet derives its mission from itssimple goals, but its impact transcends this.The DanceFree Weeks program is evaluatedannually to ensure its effectiveness. Com-ments offered following the most recent out-reach concluded that the “wonderful” pro-gram had “excellent” instructors who gave“children who have difficulty academicallya chance to excel in something else.” Thecomments also noted that the program in-creased the students’ “awareness of move-ment and professional dance,” as well asincreasing self-esteem and helping to createa positive school atmosphere.

In its eleven years of service to the com-munity, the Ballet’s activities have reachedmore than 23,000 Orange County inner cityyouths. The statistics are telling: Ninety-six percent of the Ballet dancers are fromlow income families. A typical dancer comesfrom a family of five whose average monthlyincome is $1,000. At least 92 percent of theparticipants represent the Latino, AfricanAmerican, and Asian communities of SantaAna and neighboring cities. Since 1985,the DanceFree Week workshops have beenpresented to more than 19,000 students, withseventeen hundred participating in Octoberof 1994 alone.

The true success of the program lies inthe kids themselves. One child, 14-year-old Liz Lira, who has been with the Balletfor three and a half years, credits her danc-ing with helping her remain focused uponher studies. “When dancing,” she says,“I’m focused more on what I’m doing, soin school, I’m more focused on what I’mdoing. When performing, you may be ner-vous at first because you may think youmight mess up or fall, but once you haveperformed and you see that people likewho you are and not what you did or do,you feel very confident in what you dobecause no matter what, your friends inthe company are there for you.” The hoursof preparation, the desire to achieve, thewillingness to participate—these all con-spire to assist children become more as-sured, more creative, more human.

ODETTE MOLERO AND FLOR DE LIZ ALZATE REHEARSE APAS DE DEUX FOR THEIR LAST SAINT JOSEPH BALLET PER-

FORMANCE BEFORE CONTINUING DANCE TRAINING ATNORTH CAROLINA SCHOOL OF THE ARTS.

ON COMMON GROUND20

We do realize that a metaphor enables usto understand one thing better by likening itto what is not, as in the case of the blue gui-tar. Poetry still is the source of the best ex-amples. Here is Muriel Rukeyser writingabout breaking through boundaries, doingunexpected things with space:

After the lifting of the mistafter the lift of the heavy rainsthe sky stands clearand the cries of the city risen in dayI remember the buildings are spacewalled, to let space be used for livingI mind this room is spacethis drinking glass is spacewhose boundary of glasslets me give you drink and space todrinkyour hand, my hand being spacecontaining skies and constellationsyour facecarries the reaches of airI know I am spacemy words are air.

As in so many other instances of metaphor,we are enabled to move from one state ofthings to another, to reach through the walls,the glass towards the possibility of “skiesand constellations”—and do so by an imagi-native act.

An obvious response, certainly from thosewho want things “as they are,” is to ask whatthe “blue guitar” or a “hand being space”literally mean. But there are many whomake the point that a metaphor does not saywhat it means; since the meaning of it is thetransformation it brings about in the listeneror the reader. “Metaphor,” writes G.B.Madison in The Hermeneutics of Postmo-dernity, “performs an existential function inthat it provokes a change in the way we viewthings, it brings about a transformation inour thinking.” The intelligibility of the blueguitar or the hand being space lies in itspower to effect a change in attitude, direc-tion, and at length understanding.

If meaning, then, is an event or a happen-ing, it may be a generator of choosing on

the part of the participant—the reader or thelistener. This does not mean, however, thatmetaphor is not linked with language or thatthe unexpected perspectives it may open arenot due to unexpected usages of words. Thecenter of language may well be the meta-phor; and it is language that has the capa-bility of provoking changes in our ways ofthinking, knowing, seeing. One of the thingsthat makes metaphor so important to thediscourse about education is that it can makevisible and palpable particular phenomena,those so often submerged in categories. Itmay well be that attention paid to literatureand the several arts, not simply as compo-nent parts of new curricula, but as occasionsfor experience on the part of those engagedin observing and reform, can release ways ofseeing that go beyond the language of report.

An attending to metaphor can effect newconnections in experience, disclosing newconfigurations to the mind. We find out, asMary Warnock has written in Imagination,“that there is always more to experience andmore in what we experience than we canpredict. Without some such sense, even atthe quite human level of there being some-thing which deeply absorbs our interest,human life becomes perhaps not actuallyfutile or pointless, but experienced as if itwere.” To enter into considerations of ateaching activity, a classroom project, a writ-ing program with such a feeling of interestand absorption is quite different from enter-ing in from a vantage point of expertise or apolitely distanced “friendly criticism.” En-ergized, in a matter of speaking, by meta-phor, we may be able to think in terms ofuntapped possibility.

Metaphor also has to do with empathy, thecapacity to look through another’s eyes.Metaphor, writes Cynthia Ozick in Meta-phor and Memory, is “a shocking extensionof the unknown into our most intimate, mostfeeling, most private selves....” She goes onto talk about the important “power of con-nection,” and of the continuities metaphorcan create. It takes a metaphor, she tells us,to transform memory into a principle of con-tinuity in experience. “Through metaphor,”says Ozick, “the past has the capacity toimagine us, and we it. Through metaphori-

cal concentration, doctors can imagine whatit is to be their patients. Those who have nopain can imagine those who suffer. Thoseat the center can imagine what it is to beoutside. The strong can imagine the weak.Illuminated lives can imagine the dark.Poets in their twilight can imagine the bor-ders of stellar fire. We strangers can imag-ine the familiar hearts of strangers.” Thishas relevance, clearly, for all sorts of rela-tionships within institutions and in class-rooms as well.

Empathy is not to be viewed as a mode ofintuitive identification. More important isthe beginning of authentic dialogue cued toa sense of the being of the “stranger.” Noth-ing is gained by fusing with another, wroteMikhail Bakhtin, the Russian thinker andlinguist. It is better, he wrote, for the otherto stay on the outside “because from therehe can know and see what I cannot see orknow from my vantage point, and he canthus enrich essentially the event of my life.”Our present interest in multiple perspectivesmay be seen as a way of enriching the eventsof diverse private lives. Classroom commu-nities require an inclusion of plural vantagepoints: those of children, adults, newcom-ers, scholars, neighborhood representatives.There need be no identification; but thestranger’s vision, if opened by imagination,can expand and widen the worlds of thosewho have been present since their begin-nings. Similarly, if dialogue and authenticconversation take place, the stranger or thenewcomer can be gradually moved to attendto others’ stories, to apprehend through oth-ers’ eyes the world she/he is expected to join.In many ways, for university people as wellas school people, it is a matter of enteringinto others’ narratives in order to grasp howthey construct their realities. Only when thisis understood, can the questioning be pro-voked on the part of learners, the question-ing with which learning begins.

A rich example of the powers of metaphorcan be found in Toni Morrison’s novel, TheBluest Eye (1972). Pecola Breedlove, anunloved Black child made to believe she isugly, yearns to have blue eyes, pretty blueeyes. She thinks that “if those eyes of herswere different, that is to say beautiful, she

Maxine Greene is Emeritus Professor ofPhilosophy and Education at ColumbiaUniversity and the founder of the Centerfor Social Imagination.

(continued from page 5)Greene: Metaphors and Possibility

FALL 1995 21

herself would be different.” Her mother andfather would be different. “Maybe they’dsay, ‘Why look at pretty-eyed Pecola. Wemustn’t do bad things in front of those prettyeyes.’” Unable to see her own beauty, shewants to look like Shirley Temple. Claudia,who tells most of the story, hates blue-eyeddolls when she is young and tries to dismem-ber them. Ashamed at last, her hatred turnsinto “fraudulent love.” And then, “It was asmall step to Shirley Temple. I learned muchlater to worship her, just as I learned to de-light in cleanliness, knowing, even as Ilearned, that the change was adjustmentwithout improvement.” It would appear thatthere are few more potent ways of relatingto the hopes and sufferings and misconcep-tions of young people like Pecola—strang-ers to many university people, strangers totheir own teachers, who may need to beurged at last to imagine.

To respond to a renderinglike this is quite different thanresponding to any social sci-entific exposure of racism orunfairness. It is different, too,from looking at photographsof lost children on city streets,stunned adults unable to inter-cede. We achieve somethingresembling empathy, something that mayopen the way to a dialogical relationship.We are continually reminded of the way inwhich the modern consciousness exists in apolyglot world. The only way to pay heed,it may follow, is by attending to the multiplevoices sounding in ourselves as we try tolook through unfamiliar perspectives at aworld shared with so many we do not know.If we can perceive all this by means of meta-phor, if we can grasp the edges of deficiencyand desire, we may be moved in new waysto repair.

Arguing for the need to turn towards the“possible” by, at moments, altering our lan-guage, arguing also for more attention to thearts, we might summon up some other signsin the wind. There is, for example, MikeRose’s Possible Lives, subtitled “The Prom-ise of Public Education in America.” Need-ing to go beyond the overly familiar, he says,we need an altered critique, “one that does

not minimize the inadequacies of curricu-lum and instruction, the rigidity of schoolstructure, the ‘savage inequalities’ of fund-ing but that simultaneously opens discursivespace for inspired teaching, for courage, forachievement against odds, for successfulstruggle, for the insight and connection thatoccur continually in public school class-rooms around the country.” His book is anaccount of conversations in intimate visitsto schools across the country. Escaping someof the bounds of literal, discursive speech,he is able to link a recognition of what ismissing to the space of what might be.“Imagine you’re the CEO...,” he writes.“Imagine you’re the owner of a house in EastL.A. and you’re losing it to a redevelopmentproject.” And then, speaking of a discour-aged teacher imagining what might be asshe watches the children walking in the door:

“They’re the difference. They’re eager.They’re capable. Sure there’s a challengeto reach a drug baby, the special ed childwho’s mainstreamed, the second languagespeaker...so you work at it.” A pause, andthe teacher says, “And it takes desire.” Thatis one of the points of metaphorical language:it is propelled by desire; it evokes desire.

Mike Rose realizes that public educationis forever unfinished, like the democraticcommunity itself. He sees schools wherewhat John Dewey called a “we” and an “our”are emerging, where the consequences ofcombined action are perceived and becomean object of desire and effort. Dewey knewthat consciousness of this sort has alwaysbeen enhanced by encounters with the arts.“The function of art,” he said, “has alwaysbeen to break through he crust of conven-tionalized and routine consciousness. Com-mon things, a flower, a gleam of moonlight,the song of a bird, not things rare and re-

mote, are means with which the deeper lev-els of life are touched so that they spring upas desire and thought. The process is art.”The making of community, for him, like theopening out of public education, dependedfor him on the arousing of desire, on a con-sciousness of possibility.

Deborah Meier, in The Power of TheirIdeas, speaks of the importance of imagina-tion in the lives of children, leading (amongother things) to the kind of imaginative playthat leads to friendships and “the ability toimagine the world without oneself at its cen-ter.” She rightly says: “As we eliminate fromour schools and from children’s after-schoollives the time and space for exercising theircreative imagination and building personalties, we’ve cheated our children and our so-ciety in a far more critical way than we’reinclined to understand.”

I argue as well for an ex-ercise of creative imagina-tion on the part of teachers.If their language is informedwith metaphor, they aremore likely to break whatPaulo Freire calls the “cul-ture of silence,” in this case,the culture that marks somany bureaucracies. Freire

describes the development by Brazilian peas-ants of a “critical discourse” that may be-come a way of remaking their world. Theybegan perceiving that the better world towhich they aspired was being anticipated intheir imagination. It was not a matter ofidealism, Freire insisted. Imagination andconjecture about a different world than theunjust one that exists for so many are as nec-essary to the transformation of reality as adesign is for a craftsperson or an artisan.And they may become, he went on to say, “aroute to the invention of citizenship.”

For Dewey, distinctive human projectscould best be achieved by means of a “subtle,delicate, vivid and responsive art of com-munication”; and surely he meant the kindof communication that is fundamentallymetaphorical, that opens to possibilities. Ifuniversity-school collaboration is to be sig-nificant, this should be fundamental to whatit achieves.

“The function of art has always been tobreak through the crust of conventionalized

and routine consciousness.”—John Dewey

ON COMMON GROUND22

The National Writing Project: A University-based Teacher-centered Partnership Program

and doughnuts, teachers would gather tohear the annual speech, then go to a favoriterestaurant for a long and enjoyable lunch,and at some time in mid-afternoon reas-semble back at the school for departmentmeetings to decide who would get the set ofA Tale of Two Cities the first six weeks. Ifthere were occasional workshops offeredduring the school year, they usually focusedon particular school problems (tardiness,behavior in the halls, detecting lice in thehair) and seldom, if ever, on the content of

methods of teaching. In their teacher edu-cation programs, universities gave all of theirattention to programs that prepared studentsfor teaching credentials. There were noregular programs—except continuing edu-cation and summer school courses—forpracticing teachers. The rare special pro-grams for teachers that universities mightoffer, such as the National Defense Educa-tion Act (NDEA) English Institutes of thelate 60s, were all based on the traditional‘top-down’ summer school model: the pro-fessors spoke and the teachers—no matterhow successful or informed they might havebeen—listened. At the end of the four orsix week summer programs, there was noattempt to keep the teachers involved, noplans for the teachers sharing what they hadlearned with other teachers, nothing!

hen the Bay Area Writing Projectopened its doors to teachers inthe summer of 1974, it offered

teachers a program unlike any other theyhad experienced. The BAWP vision, con-ceived by a small group of classroom teach-ers, faculty and administrators at UC Ber-keley, moved to improve writing in theschools by creating a new model for con-tinuing education, one that recognized theexpertise, knowledge and leadership poten-tial of classroom teachers. Wewere prodded to action bywhat we saw as the failure ofthe profession to understandthat writing is fundamental tolearning. We found this lackof interest, this almost totalneglect, inexplicable.

New teachers were trainedto teach reading but not writ-ing. Not a single universityin the country offered a courseon the teaching of writing forstudents in teacher training.Little writing was going on inthe schools and little was be-ing written by students athome. Federal researchmoney was available in thefield of reading but not inwriting, and the Modern Language Asso-ciation, at its huge annual conferences,scheduled no sections on the teaching ofwriting. An academic whose field of inter-est was rhetoric was frequently regarded asa pariah by his colleagues. If in the schoolsthere were teachers who cared about teach-ing writing and were successful, they hadlearned on their own in the cauldron of theirclassrooms.

More fundamentally, neither the univer-sities nor the schools gave any serious at-tention to the continuing education of class-room teachers. Some schools offered teach-ers a staff development day at the beginningof each new school year. After the coffee

WBy James Gray and Richard Sterling And teachers sat at the bottom of the hier-

archical totem pole of educational policymakers. Their voices were seldom askedfor or heard. Decisions on curriculum, in-struction and staffing were made by thosewho were not teaching in the classrooms—that is, school board members, school anddistrict administrators, university adminis-trators, staff members of county and statedepartments of education.

Those of us who planned the new Bay AreaWriting Project were determined to make a

change—to do it better.Doing it better meant

turning past models andworn-out traditions upsidedown. The changes that wemade led to the birth and ex-traordinary success of theBay Area Writing Projectwhich in turn led to its rep-lication across Californiaand the entire country. Overits twenty-two year historythe Writing Project has con-tinued to evolve and refineitself as it continues to growat the local site level, state-wide, and nationally, yet theinitial changes the WritingProject made in the early70s are the changes we be-

lieve must still be made in order to makeschool reform possible and effective.

The Writing Project is basically one ofteachers teaching teachers. It is one in whichteachers come together regularly, year afteryear, in a variety of summer and school-yearprograms led by classroom teachers whohave been trained by the writing project totalk to each other about teaching, about ap-proaches that have worked, about success-ful ways to solve the problems teachers face.It’s a model based on the assumption thatthe best classroom teachers—and we knowthey can be found in all regions of the coun-try—make the best teachers of other teach-ers. Such teachers are believable to otherteachers as no outside consultant can everbe. They know the classrooms and theyknow the students and they know the prob-

James Gray and Richard Sterling are theformer and current Executive Directors ofthe National Writing Project.

JOSEF ALBERS, ENCIRCLED, 1933

FALL 1995 23

lems. These Writing Project teacher-teach-ing-teacher programs have captured thehearts of teachers all across the country.Over 146,000 teachers each year now attendNational Writing Project programs, andclose to 1,250,000 teachers have participatedin Writing Project programs since the BAWPoffered its first program in the summer of1974.

Everything starts with the design and con-tent of the Invitational Summer Institutes atthe local NWP sites, the linchpin of all Writ-ing Project programs. Each institute isplanned and coordinated by a team, usuallyone university and one classroom teacher.But most of the teaching is done by the par-ticipating teachers, usually 25 per institute,who have been drawn from all levels of in-struction, elementary school through univer-sity. Each participant is scheduled for oneto two hours to demonstrate an approach toteaching writing—some actual practice thatthe participant has had success with in hisor her classroom. Most participants havenever been asked to do anything like thisbefore. Keith Caldwell, a participant in theproject’s first summer program, asked theother teachers in his school year workshopsthat followed the Institute: “How many ofyou have ever been asked to demonstratesome teaching practice to other teachers?”In 1974, and for many years to come, notone hand was raised. In addition to the dem-onstration of successful practices, partici-pants also write a great deal, choosing var-ied forms and subjects, and discussing theirpieces in regularly scheduled editing/re-sponse groups. Lastly, teachers read, dis-cuss and write about key research and im-portant works in the literature of the field.

These teachers, all successful in their ownclassrooms, discover quickly that teachingteachers is not the same as teaching students.After the experience of a five-week Institutewhere they all have witnessed and partici-pated in each other’s trial run workshop, andhave participated in one-on-one coachingsessions with other teachers and the staff,most of the teachers develop a good sense ofwhat it takes to become equally successfulas a teacher of other teachers.

The summer institute is the WritingProject’s first step toward recognizing teach-ers’ authority and expertise in the world ofteaching. When the Writing Project asksteachers to demonstrate what they knowabout teaching writing, it is tapping knowl-edge from practice, the single most impor-tant resource to improve teaching and learn-ing in the nation’s schools and the one mostignored by the education profession. Whenwe train a corps of Teacher Consultants weare acknowledging that successful classroomteachers are the profession’s natural teachereducators.

This preparation of teacher leaders is re-inforced in several ways:• Teachers quickly gain additional experi-

ence as teachers of teachers when theyconduct school year in-service programs,the basic follow-up to the summer insti-tute. These workshops are scheduled as aseries, and may involve as many as tenTeacher-Consultants and one Coordina-tor, an experienced Teacher-Consultant,who helps the staff plan and oversee theseprograms. As is the case with all WritingProject programs, attendance at theseworkshops is voluntary. The sessions aretypically three hours long, and give theTeacher-Consultant and the audience ofteachers sufficient time to discuss particu-lar practices, time to do some writingbased on these practice, and time to sharetheir writings in small editing/responsegroups.

• As teachers conduct more of these work-shops, their professional careers take onadded dimensions. They become TeacherConsultant staff members of their localsites, part-time teacher educators as wellas full-time classroom teachers, and asthey are sought out as workshop present-ers their voices are heard as leaders of theWriting Project. They make connectionsto other Teacher Consultants at their ownsite and beyond, establishing their ownpersonal networks, and often becomingmembers of one or more of the well es-tablished national networks of the Writ-ing Project, such as the Urban Sites Net-work and the Rural Sites Network. Be-

cause the Writing Project has developedthis corps of well prepared teacher lead-ers all across the country, it is now com-monplace for many to be asked to serveby other educational organizations, suchas the National Council of Teachers ofEnglish, the National Board for Profes-sional Teaching Standards, and state andnational assessment and reform programs.

• The summer institute turns teachers intowriters, and for many teachers the Writ-ing Project’s close attention to their per-sonal and professional writing becomesthe most important experience of the in-stitute. The opportunity to focus on theirown writing for five uninterrupted weeks,the assistance of feedback from fellowwriters in the sessions of the editing/re-sponse groups, the reading of their fin-ished pieces to an appreciative instituteaudience, and the publication of their bestpieces in the annual anthology are activi-ties which take teachers to a new level ofpersonal as well as professional confi-dence. They know now that they are notonly successful teachers of writing but suc-cessful writers as well. It is not surpris-ing then that editing/response groups fre-quently continue long after the summerexperience and become important follow-up programs of the Writing Project.

• The Writing Project has been a strongplayer in the nationwide teacher researchmovement, and the Writing Project’s en-couragement of teacher research, morethan any other project activity, has helpedbreak down the walls that have tradition-ally separated teaching and research,teachers from researchers. Teachers en-gaged in their own research develop natu-rally a personal interest in the field of re-search. Teacher-researchers want to knowwhat, if anything, has been written relatedto their areas of interest. They regularlymeet together with other researchers todiscuss their reflections and insights, tocompare methodologies and to raise ques-tions. They are no longer outsiders to theworld of research. Now they are contribu-tors to the field.

(continued on next page)

ON COMMON GROUND24

Teachers and StudentsCollaborating as “Makers”

Laura J. Roop is dissemination coordina-tor for the Michigan English LanguageArts Framework (MELAF) Project. LauraSchiller, co-director of the Oakland (MI)Writing Project, teaches sixth grade atBirney Middle School in Sou th f ie ld ,Michigan.

Five years later, I was named the directorof the Oakland (MI) Writing Project, homeof the summer institute that spurred my ownprofessional growth. In that capacity, I havebeen able to work alongside other teacher-learners (and their students) as they revisetheir texts, their practice, and often, theirlives. One such colleague, Laura Schiller,is collaborating with me as we explore theeffects of Writing Project-related experienceson teachers’ lives. Since Laura participatedin the 1992 summer institute, she has blos-somed professionally. She and another Writ-ing Project teacher-consultant, KathleenHayes-Parvin, brought colleagues togetherto form a whole language support group.These Southfield teachers planned and con-ducted workshops and courses for other dis-trict teachers and administrators. Becauseof their efforts, the district was selected tobe a demonstration site for the Michigan En-glish Language Arts Framework (MELAF)Project, a state standards effort. LauraSchiller has published articles in ChangingMinds, Language Arts Journal of Michigan,and Language Arts, and is completing a bookabout her own experiences teaching in amulticultural classroom.

Schiller identifies an experience with po-etry during the summer institute as pivotalto her development:

You were talking about the way po-ems are like photographs, pictures.I was looking for a photograph ofpersonal significance. I chose not towrite about my husband—therecould have been ramifications—Icould write about my grandmother.She was dead; what harm could therebe? I didn’t have any idea what I wasopening up. It was a Pandora’s box.I was closed out of her death—shedied when I was nine. This wassomething in my life that had beenleft unresolved.

The “photograph” she chose to write aboutwas an image in her memory. Schiller de-scribes the writing and rewriting of the poemas a cathartic experience. She tells of lock-ing herself in the family study, then writing

en summers ago, I spent much ofmy vacation in a National WritingProject (NWP) summer institute, an

intensive five-week learning experiencebringing together teacher-leaders across dis-ciplines and grade levels. Like my col-leagues, I was reputed to be a strong teacherof writing. Unlike many, however, I sawmyself as a serious writer of poems and es-says from the outset. Over the weeks, Iwatched many of these elementary, middleschool, and high school teachers revise theiridentities—as they drafted, conferenced,read, and revised essays, stories, and poems,they became writers, too. As I wrote, I hadan unprecedented opportunity to reflect onthe relationship between my writing life andmy teaching life. What experiences had per-mitted me to become a writer? What experi-ences had discouraged so many of my col-leagues from writing, and why were theywilling to engage in it now? Would it bepossible to create a successful classroomworkshop based on my own most positivelearning experiences, as well as the modelembodied in the summer institute?

I returned to my high school classroomeager to refine my teaching practice. Thatfall, I was invited by my writing project di-rector to conduct several workshops for sec-ondary teachers on the teaching of poetrywriting and reading. Because of my sum-mer institute experience, I knew better thanto lecture at my colleagues; together, we readand wrote and reflected on reading, writ-ing, and teaching poetry. With that strate-gic nudge by the director, I permanently re-vised my notion of professional behavior—l was responsible for sharing my learningwith my colleagues as well as with my stu-dents and the larger community.

TBy Laura J. Roop, in collaboration withLaura Schiller

Given the traditional paradigm for educa-tion research that has prevailed for so long,and the usual ways that new knowledge iscreated, acknowledged and disseminated, itis perhaps not surprising that WritingProjects have been opposed by some. In-deed, the Writing Project’s zeal in recogniz-ing the expertise of our best classroom teach-ers and developing their place as leaderswithin the world of professional educatorshas been met with opposition by many inacademe, particularly from researchers in thefield of writing. Throughout the twenty-twoyears of the Writing Project, we have en-dured a steady stream of criticism from someacademics while at the same time, ironically,other academics are seeking to bring in theWriting Project to their campuses. And whatwe have heard over the years is always avariation on the same note, that is, it is be-yond belief that teachers could be recognizedas knowing anything. A sampling of whathas been said:

“The Bay Area Writing Project is nothingbut sophisticated Show-and-Tell.”

“The writing project is the blind leadingthe blind.”

“Teachers not only don’t know anything,but worse, they don’t want to know any-thing.”

“Teacher knowledge is just impressionistic.”“Those National Writing Project teachers

don’t know anything!”“What those writing project teachers need

is MY COURSE!”It is not surprising that classroom teach-

ers have been ignored if those who are rec-ognized leaders make such comments. Be-cause we continue to hear such commentsin the mid-90s as we once heard them in themid-70s, it is likely that teacher-based re-form movements such as the Writing Projectwill probably need additional time for totalacceptance.

The Writing Project has always believedthat any effective effort to improve teachingand learning must put classroom teachersat the center. It is in the classroom that theultimate test of reform will take place, and,if changes are to succeed, they must be em-braced by our strongest and best teachers.Otherwise reform will go nowhere.

(continued from previous page)Gray: Writing Project

FALL 1995 25

and crying all afternoon. She felt as thoughshe were finally acknowledging her feelings.“To this day, I cannot read the poem with-out crying,” she says. “I was given permis-sion to be affected when I am reading; I al-lowed myself to feel more deeply.” Schillernotes that this was the first time she everwrote a poem or something personally sig-nificant. Her previous experiences withwriting had been largely informational anddetached from personal experience.

For Laura Schiller, the act of revision wasthe connection between writing poetry andwriting other genres. Heidi Wilkins (thenco-director, currently principal of WalledLake Elementary School) and I conferenceda number of times with her, bringing up is-sues of audience, purpose, and craft. Shealso received extensive feedback from hersummer institute response group. Her poem,“My Grandma’s Arms,” went through abouteleven drafts, beginning as prose notes, thenmoving back and forth from poetry to proseto poetry.

That experience became emblematic forSchiller partly because it represented an epi-sode of risk-taking and experimentation.She had written in a genre she had neverbefore attempted, had written her way intosomething deeply personal, had willinglydrafted and revised text (some twenty draftpages), and had allowed the writing of thepoem to spill out of “school” into her life.

Schiller has continued to experiment withgenre studies, and to school herself—andher sixth graders—in the art and craft ofwriting. This winter, after visiting her po-etry classroom, I was amazed to receive theirinsightful written responses to a difficult,three-page poem on mortality and transcen-dence I had recently completed. Sara, a sixthgrade student, wrote in a letter:

The third time I read (the poem) over,I grasped it even better, and then allof the sudden, the moral sort of hitme. My mind staggered a little, butI recovered quickly from the blow. Ifound a whole new set of emotionsin the poem.... The poem was notabout Uncle Rube, or Luke, or Aunt

Tillie. It was about human beings,and how it’s the faults that we havethat make us so human. Nobody everreached heaven without falling intoa few potholes. If that was the pointyou were trying to get across, it worked.It hit me like a slap in the face.

Another of Schiller’s classroom genre ex-periments during the 94-95 school year wasa memoir study. Students read and wrotememoirs, as did their teacher. Schiller cri-tiqued her own efforts in a letter to herSouthfield colleagues, after rereading a chap-ter of Living Between the Lines, a book byLucy Calkins on the teaching of literacy:

I never succeeded at getting my stu-dents to “pearlize,” layer, or growmeaning from, their entries. Ourwriters’ notebooks consist mostly ofseparate incidents. I now see mymemoir, as well as many of my stu-dents’, did not succeed at clearly con-necting the strands of meaning inlife. Before next year, I’ll rereadsome memoirs and look for waysauthors juxtapose moments andhandle jumps in time. [M]ost im-portant, I’ll try to rewrite my ownmemoir. My guess is, my students’writing next year will reflect my owngrowth. If I can do it, then I cancoach it.

When teachers like Laura Schiller are in-vited to see themselves as writers, they arebeing encouraged to tell, to tend, and to maketheir own unique stories. During summerinstitutes I’ve led, participants have talkedabout the risky but rewarding decision manywriters have claimed to make: the decisionto lead an examined life, paying close atten-tion to what is seen, felt, heard, remembered,and imagined. On occasion, I’ve shared apassage from an essay, “Poems Are NotLuxuries,” by poet Audre Lorde:

[Poetry] forms the quality of the lightwith which we predicate our hopesand dreams toward survival andchange, first made into language,then into idea, then into more tan-gible action. Poetry is the way we

help give name to the nameless sothat it can be thought.

Sometimes we’ve talked about and experi-mented with what I call “transformations,”the unsettling but important moves writersmake when they take slices of life, whethertedious, painful, confusing, or endearing,and imagine them “other,” with differentconsequences, chronologies, and dramaticshapes. By experimenting with possibilityin the seemingly safe context of a poem,story, or essay we may learn to experimentwith possibility in our lives. In writingproject summer institutes, the compositionand revision of texts become the centralmetaphor for making and revising our pro-fessional and personal lives. Writingprojects effect change in participants becausethey build literate learning communitiesamong teachers where life narratives arevalued and sometimes transformed into art.Teachers placed in the role of active learn-ers may imagine and empathize with theirstudents. Placed in the role of writers, theybegin to imagine themselves writers, andactive readers. Placed in the role of inquir-ing professionals teaching and learning withother professionals, they begin to imaginerich professional lives filled with colleagueswho see themselves as learners, responsibleto one another. Thus, workshop activitiesbecome exercises in imagination, leadingparticipants toward empathic understandingof others—students, teachers, administra-tors, parents, and of course, authors—andtheir worlds.

In Stories Lives Tell: Narrative and Dia-logue in Education, Carol Witherell identi-ties two central reasons for the rich use ofnarrative in teaching and counseling: “Onehas to do with the coherence and the ongo-ing autobiographical activity of the self, theother with the power of story and metaphorin human action and feeling.” NWP sitesaround the country understand and tap thepower of the word—written, read, and spo-ken—to mend the sometimes profound splitbetween learning and teaching, betweenpoetry and pedagogy, between our personaland professional lives.

ON COMMON GROUND26

Collaboration as Story BuildingBy Colleen M. Fairbanks

aving participated in the develop-ment of collaborations betweenuniversities and schools in differ-

ent sites and across different states, I havecome to see collaboration as a kind of livedstory, one that unfolds but is rarely predict-able. By lived story, I mean something onthe order of Jerome Bruner’s definition: “hu-man agents doing things on the basis of be-liefs and desires, striving for goals, meetingobstacles which they best or which best them,all of this extended over time” (1992, p. 43).Partnerships between people who havecomplementary but not necessarily identi-cal aims or beliefs must negotiate, compro-mise, find consensus if they are to make goalsand meet them, if they are to overcome theobstacles that their different roles or the con-text puts in their path. When they succeedand their story evolves along constructivelines, each character in the story learns atleast as much as they have bargained for andusually a great deal more.

To illustrate how such partnerships be-tween teachers from different institutionsgrow and change, I want to sketch brieflythe story of one school-based collaborationin which I took part and then to discuss whythis partnership worked as it did, to the ben-efit, I think, of both participants.

For three years, I worked with the Saginaw(Michigan) public schools in a broad-basedcollaboration between the schools and the Uni-versity of Michigan’s Center for EducationalInnovation through Collaboration (CEIC). Theinstitutional collaboration was aimed at theexploration of literacy, teaching, and teaming,and involved a number of faculty and graduatestudents in partnerships with teachers. My roleconsisted in facilitating the CEIC’s projects withthe schools. In addition, I also established withmy Saginaw colleagues individual classroomprojects aimed at developing curriculum toencourage the literacy learning of students inthe district.

When I started my work in Saginaw, aboutninety miles from the University of Michi-gan campus, I could not have imagined thetwists and turns that my life as full-time,

Hschool-based project coordinator would take.Nor, I suspect, could Kathie Smith, a tenthgrade English teacher at Saginaw HighSchool, one of the city’s two comprehensivehigh schools. My initial activities consistedof acquainting myself with the district’s lan-guage arts teachers and the projects currentlyunderway. In October, several of us attendeda seminar in Detroit to talk with other teach-ers about our individual efforts at school re-form and to learn about what others hadbegun in their own classrooms. One of thesessions included an example of a cross-agetutoring project in Chicago. As I recall itnow, it seems that Kathie and I were struckby the same bolt of lightning; we began plan-ning, even during the session, how we mightdo something similar with Kathie’s tenthgraders and one of the local elementaryschools. This moment began for us a year-long co-teaching partnership that extendedfar beyond the cross-school project we hadinitially stumbled upon.

Our work together did not then just magi-cally unfold. It began with a mutual inter-est sparked by the opportunity to learn fromother teachers and to explore what we mightlearn in our own context. Kathie and I dis-covered at that meeting, and in our subse-

Colleen M. Fairbanks is Assistant Profes-sor of Curriculum and Instruction at theUniversity of Texas at Austin.

quent work, compatible beliefs about teach-ing and learning as well as the means bywhich we could put our respective abilitiesto work for the students at Saginaw High. Ithelped immensely that the language artsteachers in Kathie’s school district had beentalking with their university partners forsome time about their classrooms; univer-sity academics had already shed the imageof remote outsiders with little interest in thepracticalities of schools. Both groups hadcommitted their energies to the prospect thatuniversity/school collaborations can andought to be formed, not simply to create abetter understanding across institutions, al-though this has been one of their outcomes.We discovered that such partnerships enrichthe individual activities we pursue in aca-demic settings. The possibilities that Kathieand I were privileged to explore came fromsuch commitments as well as from the timeand resources that allowed us to collaborate.

As we planned and taught together, welearned a great deal from each other aboutour individual roles, our relationship witheach other and our students, and the life ofthe classroom we built together. We madeour blunders together, and we celebrated oursuccesses over a beer at Holly’s Landing, a

NATALIE PEDROZA, BUILDING A TREE HOUSE WHERE WE CAN PLAY, 1995

FALL 1995 27

local pub. Our original plans for the cross-age teaching project had to be scrapped, forexample, because we had planned our visitsto the elementary school too close togetherand too close to final exams in January. Afterthinking about the schedule over night,Kathie came in the next morning and ex-plained what concerned her; we changed theschedule. At the end of the year, as our stu-dents were writing the children’s stories theirelementary school partners would illustrate,we also both sat dumbstruck when Lee, ourne’er do well student, came into first periodclass asking to read the story he had drafted,“The Scarecrow who Scared the River Spot-less.” The previous day, the students hadshared their story ideas for the children’sbook. When Lee’s time came, he mumbledsomething barely coherent about a scare-crow. It was clear that he had made up thisidea on the spot, but the other students inthe class questioned, cajoled, andmade suggestions to him about a plothe might use. To the best of ourknowledge, it was the first time Leehad actually completed a writing taskoutside of school.

We also learned to reflect moredeeply about our interactions with studentsand the aims of our instruction by drawingupon our individual perspectives about class-room events. I want to share a planningsession between Kathie and me to illustratehow we worked together, pushing each otherto find more effective means to build ourstudents’ understanding of texts and hencetheir own literate abilities. Our class hadjust begun to read The Bluest Eye by ToniMorrison, and Kathie and I were both con-cerned that the students were having diffi-culty following the different narrative voicesin this complex novel. “I like the idea ofhaving the students write about an experi-ence and talking about if you would get moreinformation if you recalled that incident tosomebody else,” Kathie began. “What kindsof information could someone else add?”

“Maybe we could use a school story sincewe’re on ‘Who am I in school?’ You know,some kind of incident from school,” I suggested.

“We could model stories,” Kathie said.“Yeah, we could model one or two for

them. I remember a story about Gloria dur-

tions had developed their own routines. Theconstructed nature of our collaborative teach-ing, enacted through the give-and-take ofsuch conversations, involved us both in newactivities with students and new relation-ships between school and university teach-ers. We had, in essence, established our ownways of talking about the classrooms weshare, using our own shorthand that nolonger needed detailed explanations. Be-low the surface of our talk, we had devel-oped shared assumptions, derived from bothour individual and collaborative experiences.We had generated a collaborative view ofreading, writing, and the connections be-tween them as well as the importance ofmodeling, sharing our lives with students,and inviting students to share their lives out-side of school.

lt is tempting to see Kathie’s and my plan-ning meeting as occurring effortlessly. Perhaps

only Kathie and I can know how manyconversations and classroom interac-tions took place to reach this level ofease. Judith Lindfors and SarahHudelson have described collaborationsas “delicate balances.” They suggest thatsuccessful collaboration is characterized

by “its continuing and evolving nature; its es-sential dialogic character; and above all, its lifewithin and dependence upon a relationshipcharacterized by mutual trust, a relationshipsimultaneously affiliative and autonomous” (p.3). For such relationships to occur, universityand school partners need time, space, and thewillingness to explore classrooms together.They need not only to respect but also to appre-ciate the expertise that each person brings tothe collective effort, and they need to discoveramongst themselves the mutual interests thatwill guide their work together. Sometimes,these interests reveal themselves suddenly, ashappened with Kathie and me. Other times,interests accrue more slowly. Like stories, eachpartnership has its own plot, its own charac-ters, and its own evolution.

ReferencesBruner, J. (1990). Acts of Meaning. Cam-

bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.Lindfors, J.W., and Hudelson, S.J. (1993).

Delicate Balances: Collaborative Researchin Language Education, Urbana, Ill.: NCTE.

ing recess. It was hysterical,” I respondedthinking about the stories I might tell in classtomorrow.

“What do we want to do after that? Havethem write in their joumals?” Kathie asked.

“Do we want them to just write the storyin their journals, or do we want them to doboth—write their story and discuss what thedifferences might be,” I wondered.

“Do you think it would help to have themassume another character in their narrationand write the same story from that point ofview? That’s exactly what the writer is do-ing.” Kathie was beginning to visualizewhat class will be like tomorrow.

“Yeah, that’s great. Then we can use theirstories and have them talk about how eachone is different,” I responded.

In class the next day, Kathie told a storyabout a friend from high school who gotpregnant and had to give the baby up for

adoption, even though she and the baby’sfather eventually married. It was a sad andpoignant story, and the students respondedwith all kinds of questions, since most ofthe teenage girls they know who get preg-nant keep their children. I also told my storyabout Gloria, whose skirt fell off one dayduring recess while we played dodge ballon the school playground. The stories madea good pair, providing the students with ideasfor their own stories. They had more diffi-culty with changing the narrative perspec-tive. One student, Lanette, however, didshare a very funny story about painting herbangs with nail polish. She captured beau-tifully her mother’s irritation when she dis-covered Lanette’s after-school activities. Itnot only left the students rolling in the aislesbut provided a wonderful example of per-spective for them.

This kind of planning meeting had becomefamiliar to us as we negotiated the curricu-lum amongst ourselves and our students. Bythe time we began to plan for our unit “Whoam I in school?,” the pattern of our interac-

Partnerships enrich the individualactivities we pursue.

ON COMMON GROUND28

Voices from the Classroom:

Collaboration from aTeacher’s Perspective

arts teachers were given the opportunity toattend a workshop led by Jay Robinson andPatricia Lambert Stock. This was our firstintroduction to programs offered throughThe University of Michigan’s Center forEducational Improvement through Collabo-ration (CEIC), which Robinson directed.What came after was more important thanany single workshop.

I came away from this initial workshopamazed by the freshness and enthusiasmthese university teachers exhibited and en-couraged by their willingness to listen to us:to hear about our problems and to attend to

our hopes and aspirations. These early ses-sions, in which we explored our commonunderstandings and identified problems ofteaching and learning that we felt we couldsolve together, and in no other way, devel-oped into several collaborative projects in-volving the assessment and teaching of writ-ing and the place of writing instruction in abroader language arts curriculum. In ourinitial work together we encountered differ-ences of experience and perspective that wehad to negotiate and resolve: the idea ofworking on various projects with universitypersonnel was uncommon in these parts at

that time and many teachers were apprehen-sive about getting involved with the un-known. But I was longing for a change andbegan to think, as time went on, that thisjust might be it.

Our administrators supported our efforts.Interested teachers were released from classtime to attend many day-long in-service ses-sions in which we met and worked with vari-ous professors and graduate students fromthe University of Michigan. We were of-fered models for authentic assessment of stu-dent writing and were given practice in “readarounds” as a means of articulating stan-

dards for good writing; we were offeredideas for innovative and creative les-sons. The way we were treated by Jay,Patti, and their university colleagueswas very surprising to me and to manyof my colleagues. We were not onlytreated as professionals but as equalsas well. What we, as teachers, hadlearned and knew was always valued;what we had to say made a difference.Our opinions counted. If we desiredchange, it was up to us to effect it, work-ing with but not relying upon our uni-versity colleagues.

Our work together moved from theworkshop to the classroom and our uni-versity colleagues sometimes taughtwith us. We used collaboration exten-sively in planning and developing cur-riculum. We generated ideas in ourgroup planning sessions and testedthem out in our classrooms, returningto group sessions to improve them; we

tried out new ways of doing things whichseemed valuable but had gone stale. I be-gan to allow my students more freedom toplan and direct their learning and I waspleased with the results. Through a newawareness, I began to let the curriculumemerge and grow, following the direction ofmy students’ interests. The benefits of in-volving students in collaborative work werefirst made clear to me when I decided to so-licit their help in designing the writing as-sessment that would be required of allSaginaw students.

We teachers had been asked to come up

After fifteen years in the same class-room at the same high school, Ibegan to experience symptoms of

“teacher burnout.” The affliction occurswhen a teacher feels worn down by the pressof daily demands: too many classes and toomany students with too many problems; toomany papers to read and too many reportsto fill out and submit; too many routine anddispiriting conversations with col-leagues, administrators, and parents; toomany public reports about what teach-ers and schools are doing wrong; all toolittle time to read new books or to re-flect on what I was doing in the class-room. Teaching had been my callingsince I was five years old and I still feltthe call. But the pressures and routinesof teaching had begun to get me down.When I walked into the classroom,something vital was missing, and I’msure that my students were suffering be-cause of the way that I was feeling.

In 1985, after a mid-semester teacherin-service (a service I had come to seeas routine), one of my colleagues,Katherine Smith, told me about twouniversity teachers and a presentationthey had made about collaboration—about new ways for teachers across lev-els to work with one another on prob-lems of teaching and learning. Becauseof my state of mind, I didn’t think that thesetwo people would eventually change my lifeinside the classroom to the extent that theyhave: what did they know about the studentsI taught or the pressures I faced every day ofmy professional and personal life? But Kathywas so impressed that she began to tell allof us who had missed the session about adifferent way of teaching and about differ-ent ways to imagine our lives as teachers.Because her enthusiasm was contagious, allSaginaw Public Schools secondary language

By Sharon Floyd

WILLIAM SIDNEY MOUNT, THE NOVICE, 1847

Sharon M. Floyd is a teacher at SaginawHigh School in Saginaw, Michigan.

FALL 1995 29

Empowering Studentsthrough the Arts

dren compare and contrast their own workto the works of the artists they were study-ing. As their confidence grew, the chil-dren began to view themselves as artists,and began referring to the artists they werestudying as if they were personal friends.They began excitedly to anticipate the artsinstruction. With their increased knowl-edge base, they also began to compare andcontrast the techniques and style of thevarious artists studied. Arts instruction inthis classroom quickly became a means bywhich the student began to see themselvesand the world around them.

They began to think critically about thequality of their own work. They also be-gan to take more risks, learning from theirmistakes, resulting in higher expectationsfor themselves.

The arts allowed the students from thismulticultural setting to come together inorder to form a community of learners.They shared a common bond and interestand had many opportunities to observe anddiscuss their work and that of their peers.Their teachers learned about the students’interests and strengths and began to get aglimpse of how the students viewed them-selves. As the teachers’ understandinggrew, they learned that inclusion of thearts as an area of study had a larger pur-pose. The arts had become the vehicle thatenhanced the development of the self es-teem of the students in their classroom.They had created the conditions that al-lowed the students to develop the skillsnecessary to be problem solvers and criti-cal thinkers. The development of theseskills was valuable because of their appli-cation to the classroom and to their life-time experiences. The teachers discoveredthe magic of empowering their students.

As I think about my return to the class-room, I find that this experience demon-strated the unlimited potential a strong artsprogram has for instruction and personalgrowth. It also offers a rationale for in-creased funding to the arts within ourschools. No longer should the arts bemarginalized. The arts are a powerful ap-proach for learning and knowing.

I n some schools and some classrooms,the arts are viewed as a powerful toolfor stimulating students to investigate

many ways of knowing. However, the artsin many schools have experienced budgetcuts because of funding constraints andhave become marginalized in the curricu-lum. Yet there are some classroom teach-ers who maintain a commitment to theinclusion of the arts in their programs ofinstruction. These individuals see the in-tegration of the arts as a vehicle for help-ing students develop a more complete andcomprehensive understanding of the real-ity of their world.

In my role as a clinical supervisor, I hadthe opportunity to work with two newteachers who had made a career change;both had extensive backgrounds in thearts. This teaching team was also placedin a school that had a diverse multiculturalstudent population. As the teachers beganto plan for instruction in their classroom,it was decided that the arts would be em-phasized. It was their belief that the artscould inform the study of other subjectareas in the curriculum, could raise anindividual’s self esteem, and had the po-tential for developing the critical think-ing and creative abilities of the students,as they explored and learned about theirworld.

The children of this classroom were en-gaged in activities that incorporated thearts as both an instructional strategy anda discipline. Instruction in the visual artswas integrated daily. The lessons the stu-dents experienced taught them about thevaried techniques and mediums used byfamous artists, about style and about arthistory. Ample time was also given to chil-dren to practice using the techniques theywere learning. Instruction helped the chil-

By Sharon A. Olguin

Sharon Olguin is Acting Director for the Al-buquerque Public School/University of NewMexico Career Development Program.

with topics for a writing prompt that wouldchallenge students and allow them to writefreely and honestly (something that we didnot find in state mandated tests or nationalmodels). With my eleventh grade students,we took a survey and brainstormed ideasabout issues that concern teens. Many com-mon issues emerged—teen pregnancy, prob-lems with peers and with peer pressure, prob-lems with parents and other adults, prob-lems with school, issues of alcohol and druguse and abuse. The issue that most studentsranked as number one, however, somewhatto our surprise, was teenage stress. The stu-dents argued, persuasively, that in treatingthis issue, many others could be addressedbecause they were indeed stressful. The ex-citement with which the students tackled thisassignment was unbelievable, perhaps be-cause they knew that their work would beused in the design of a writing assessment.Maybe a fresh approach was the answer. Iwas amazed.

From this initial exercise, I began to be-come convinced that the interest level of stu-dents increases as they are made partners inthe planning of their own learning. Similarlessons were to come from the work we weredoing together as teachers. Even thoughteachers on the same faculty teach the samesubjects, none of us actually knew what othercolleagues were doing in individual class-rooms. After collaborating with universitypersonnel, teachers began to see the value ofplanning with each other, sharing ideas thatworked in the classroom and brainstormingabout issues and problems that all of us face.

Collaboration is the best thing that hashappened to me in my twenty-five yearteaching career. It allowed the university tocome into my classroom, providing accessto materials and information that enrichedmy knowledge and re-directed my practice.Work with my university colleagues gave methe push I needed to make my teaching aviable and valuable experience for my stu-dents. Because of the collaborative experi-ences that I have been a part of, I am proudto be a teacher who tries to make a differ-ence in the lives of my students; because ofthat experience, I know I am not alone.

ON COMMON GROUND30

Wrinkle Writingthe process-orientation of creative drama.Several meetings later, the outlines of theWrinkle Writing Project (named in honorof L’Engle’s famous novel) emerged, and theRio Grande Writing Project agreed to fundteacher stipends for the professional devel-opment training that teachers would need.Although L’Engle had to postpone her visituntil March of 1995, the project kept“Wrinkle” in the title, took on a life of itsown, and has grown to be more than a singlevisit by a famous writer.

Wrinkle Writing now has four compo-nents. The key component is professionaldevelopment of teachers. We train partici-pating teachers in: methods for using cre-ative drama and writing workshop tech-niques; the basic concepts of playwriting;and how to use dramatic staging techniquessuch as staged reading, story theatre, andreaders’ theatre to stage their students’ writ-ten works. These team-taught training ses-sions include Saturday morning workshopsthroughout the school year and an intensivetwo week institute in the summer. UNMplaywriting professor and Emmy Awardwinner, Digby Wolfe covers playwriting;classroom teacher Julia Huchmala and au-thor Jeanne Whitehouse teach about writ-ing processes; and I teach the creative drama.Participating teachers then use these con-cepts and techniques in their classrooms, andtheir students create portfolios of writingstimulated by dramatic improvisations.Once a teacher has taken one of our train-ing workshops, that teacher’s classroom iseligible to be a part of the other componentslisted below. Teachers also receive our bi-monthly Wrinkle Writing Newsletter and anextensive curriculum guide.

The second component is the portfoliocompetition that culminates in a visit by aluminary guest writer. Each year, WrinkleWriting brings a well-known author or play-wright to the University of New Mexico.Students from participating classrooms whowant to attend a two-day intensive workshoptaught by that writer, submit two selectionsfrom their portfolios. A panel of ten writingteachers reads the submissions and selectsthe top forty young writers to come to theUNM campus and attend that workshop.Teachers who have served as portfolio com-petition judges also earn the right to attend.

he Wrinkle Writing Project is a col-laborative program which originatedin the University of New Mexico’s

Department of Theatre and Dance in 1993.Its purposes are to use creative drama toenrich writing experiences in elementary andsecondary classrooms, to encourage the in-clusion of playwriting in the curriculum, andto use dramatic performance to publish stu-dent writing. Currently, most schools in Al-buquerque do not include playwriting in thecurriculum. Wrinkle Writing is driven bythe belief that dramatizing the written wordinvolves students not just intellectually andimaginatively, but physically, emotionally,and socially as well. Drama can provide avaluable addition to more traditional ap-proaches to teaching and learning.

The idea for Wrinkle Writing emergedwhen I directed a stage adaptation ofMadeleine L’Engle’s Newbery Award win-ning novel, A Wrinkle in Time in the springof 1993. L’Engle, a friend of UNM emeri-tus playwriting professor, Robert Hartung,accepted our invitation to visit UNM to teacha writing workshop. Although the Depart-ment already had strong ties with Albuquer-que high school drama teachers, I hoped thatL’Engle’s visit would help us forge a rela-tionship with elementary and secondary lan-guage arts teachers that focused on writing.L’Engle wanted her workshop to beintergenerational, including children andteens as well as adults, so her desires dove-tailed with mine.

I called colleagues from the College ofEducation for advice on making L’Engle’sworkshop useful to teachers and children.Education Professor, Don Zancanella, whoheads the Rio Grande Writing Project, achapter of the National Writing Project, pro-vided me with the names of elementary andsecondary writing teachers who would begood at designing a conference surround-ing the L’Engle workshop. The twelve teach-ers who agreed to help us were all membersof the Rio Grande Writing Project, so theyhad a strong philosophical commitment towriting process that blended beautifully with

T

Susan Pearson-Davis is an Associate Pro-fessor of Theatre at the University of NewMexico and President of the American Al-liance for Theatre and Education.

By Susan Pearson-DavisOther kinds of images also come from learn-

ing situations: on page 11, The Orrery, apainting that Jules Prown has used as an ex-ample of learning through material objects;on page 12, Moresque, one of the patternsthat teachers were studying in Kent Bloomer’sseminar on architecture; on page 13, a photo-graph depicting a moment in our New Haven“improv” on Woza Albert!; and on page 19, aphotograph of two young dancers from theSaint Joseph Ballet.

Finally, two images in this number, onedrawn from European-American modernism

and the other from a Native American tradi-tion, point both to adjacent essays and toour larger concerns. Josef Albers’ woodcutEncircled, on page 22, is a subtle instance ofhow lines and spaces can generate linkages,volumes, and dynamic process—a metaphor,if we take it so, for the collaborative move-ment itself. And the symbolic shield designedby Hyemeyohsts Storm and painted by KarenHarris, on page 6, evokes the understandingof the Plains People (set forth in fascinatingdetail by Storm’s narratives in Seven Arrows)that art is a shared questing and teaching, away of knowledge that leads us into the greatbalancing harmony of a universe that in-cludes the entire family of the Earth’s crea-tures.

(continued from page 17)

Whitaker: the Arts

HUYVU TAHIKAWA, UNTITLED, 1995

FALL 1995 31

In addition, guest writers give a talk for allteachers, students, and parents of studentsin participating classrooms. MadeleineL’Engle was this year’s guest writer. Lastyear’s was Newbery Award winner, PaulFleischman.

We designed the third component, the per-formance troupe, for teachers who want anintensive immersion in drama. We selectup to twelve teachers from those who applyand assign a UNM theatre student to visittheir classroom and work with their studentstwice a month for an entire school year. TheUNM theatre student leads improvisationaldrama activities to introduce the conceptsand processes of theatre and to stimulateideas for first drafts. Then the UNM stu-dent organizes informal classroom readingsand performances of these drafts so studentscan see their work on its feet for purposesof revisions. Finally, the theatre student di-rects them in a production of their worksthat they present for the whole school.Teachers find that this extensive demonstra-tion of drama techniques in their own class-room allows them to learn more about whatwe’ve introduced in the professional devel-opment workshops.

The fourth component of Wrinkle Writ-ing is its showcases. The UNM Depart-ment of Theatre and Dance produces ashowcase of short works, written and per-formed by Wrinkle Writing students whohave been in the performance troupe. Thisgives students the experience of creatingcostumes for their scenes and performingthem in a fully equipped theatre on campus.The Department of Theatre and Dance pro-vides a flexible modular set they can arrangeas needed to serve their scripts and full stagelighting. The performance is free and opento the public, but heavily attended by par-ents, relatives, and friends.

The portfolio competition generates somuch good writing that we are adding sev-eral more showcases. Next year, UNM the-atre students will tour a production of se-lected Wrinkle Writing pieces to Albuquer-que elementary and middle schools. Alsonext year, a local youth theatre group, The-atre-in-the-Making, is joining forces withAlbuquerque Little Theatre, to produce a se-lection of works from the portfolio competi-tion. These will allow the young playwrights

to see their work in a polished, professionalproduction either by college actors at UNMor by accomplished child and teenage ac-tors. In some cases, the directors will workwith the young playwrights on any neces-sary revisions so they learn what a collabo-rative art form theatre is. This link to com-munity theatres as well as to schools sig-nificantly enriches the collaboration.

Thus far, the project has reached approxi-mately 55 teachers and nearly 2000 studentsfrom a wide variety of cultural and linguis-tic backgrounds. Two of our most activeclassrooms are at the Zuni Pueblo, and wehave had bilingual students submitting workin Spanish as well as English. The UNMtheatre students working for us include Na-

tive Americans, Hispanics, and AfricanAmericans, as well as Anglo/EuropeanWhites. They provide important role mod-els for our young writers. Participating class-rooms also represent the entire spectrum ofability levels. Along with their creative writ-ing, portfolio competition participants mustsubmit a “Process Paper” discussing howand why they wrote their works. In this way,judges can take into account a student’s dedi-cation and motivation in addition to talent.

We were fortunate to be able to build onan existing network of excellent elementaryand secondary writing teachers through the

Rio Grande Writing Project and these teach-ers have inspired us with their talent, en-thusiasm, and commitment. They quicklydiscovered how to integrate drama into sub-jects across the curriculum and have used itto teach literature, art, science, and socialstudies as well as creative writing in allgenres. The quality of dramatic writing doneby these teachers in the professional devel-opment workshops has been excellent. Someof them have seen their work produced inUNM showcases along with plays writtenby graduate and undergraduate theatre ma-jors. Their excitement at discovering theirplaywriting ability adds depth and passionto their work with students.

Wrinkle Writing has also affected the livesof the students who have participated. Thosewho are shy about putting pen to paper areoften very happy to get up and improvisedramatic situations, then write alone or ingroups to capture on paper what they’ve justenacted. We treat our young writers as pro-fessionals. They sign contracts if we selecttheir work for production and they see theirwriting taken seriously by their peers, col-lege students and faculty, teachers, and par-ents. We give awards or certificates to allparticipants. Our guest writers also ap-proach the children as colleagues and fel-low writers.

The collaboration has had some other un-expected benefits. It has opened up excit-ing areas for research in the interaction be-tween creative drama processes and writ-ing processes. The knowledge and exper-tise of the participating teachers have ex-panded the horizons of the college facultyand vice versa. (I am integrating writing intomy regular college courses in creative dramaand acting in ways I never expected!) Thetheatre education and playwriting programswithin the UNM Department of Theatre andDance have come closer together, with moretheatre education students taking playwrit-ing while more playwriting students are ex-ploring the opportunities available in teach-ing. Theatre majors are receiving invalu-able classroom teaching experience guidedby excellent teachers. More lines of communi-cation are opening up between the Departmentof Theatre and Dance and the College of Edu-cation. The intergenerational nature of theproject has had a profound effect on all of us.

A Reader, A Writer

A writer is a person who paints,whose pallet holds wordswhose mind holds visions.A mind filled with joy and thoughts.

A reader is a person with the giftof seeing the meaning of the writer’s workand hears the voiceless messagewho sees the colorless picture.

But the reader and the writerhold one thing alike,an imagination.

Rosa Citlali Zamora

Rosa Citlali Zamora, eleven years old,lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. A vo-racious reader, she began pursuing writ-ing seriously when she was nine.

Strengthening Teaching throughSchool-University Partnership

On Common Ground

Yale-New Haven Teachers InstituteP.O. Box 203563New Haven, Connecticut 06520

Forwarding and Return Postage Guar-anteed. Address Correction Requested

NONPROFIT ORG.U.S. POSTAGE

PAIDMINNEAPOLIS, MNPERMIT NO. 2828

Editorial BoardSharon Floyd, TeacherSaginaw High SchoolSaginaw, Michigan

Manuel N. GómezVice ChancellorStudent AffairsUniversity of California at Irvine

Patricia King, TeacherNew Hanover-Upper Frederick Elementary SchoolBoyertown, Pennsylvania

Edward C. KisailusProfessor of BiologyCanisius College

Antonio C. LasagaProfessor of Geology and GeophysicsYale University

Sharon Olguin, Acting DirectorAlbuquerque Public School/University of New

Mexico Career Development ProgramAlbuquerque, New Mexico

Thomas E. Persing, Executive DirectorSuburban Schools Study CouncilPennsburg, Pennsylvania

Norine A. Polio, ESL TeacherEast Rock Community SchoolNew Haven, Connecticut

Jay L. RobinsonProfessor of English and of EducationDirector, Center for Educational Improvement

through CollaborationUniversity of Michigan

Charles S. Serns, PrincipalHubert Humphrey Elementary SchoolAlbuquerque, New Mexico

Thomas R. Whitaker, ChairmanFrederick W. Hilles Professor Emeritus of EnglishYale University

Fall 1995Yale-New Haven Teachers InstituteBox 203563 Yale StationNew Haven, Connecticut 06520-3563

Phone: (203) 432-1080Fax: (203) 432-1084E-mail: Common_Ground@yale.eduWorld Wide Web: http://www.cis.yale.edu/ynhti

Executive Editor, James R. VivianProduction Associate, Margaret M. DaveyEditorial Assistant, John R. Savoie

The Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute is an edu-cational partnership between Yale University and theNew Haven Public Schools designed to strengthenteaching and learning in local schools and, by ex-ample, in schools across the country. Through theInstitute, teachers from the University and the Schoolswork together in a collegial relationship. Founded in1978, the Institute is the first program of its type tobe established permanently as a unit of a university.

SERGIO ROMAN, STOP! SAVE THE WHALES , 1995

Editorial Advisory BoardAdrienne Y. Bailey, Chicago, Illinois • Rene Castilla, President, Dallas Independent School District School Board,Texas • Lucy Davis, Chair, Program in Education, Duke University • Thomas Furtado, Corporate Ombudsman, UnitedTechnologies • Dixie Goswami, Professor of English, Clemson University; Coordinator, Bread Loaf Rural TeacherNetwork, Bread Loaf School of English, Middlebury College • Kati Haycock, Director, Education Trust, AmericanAssociation for Higher Education • Fred M. Hechinger, Senior Adviser, Carnegie Corporation of New York • VinettaJones, National Director, College Board Equity 2000 Project • Gene I. Maeroff, Senior Fellow, Carnegie Foundationfor the Advancement of Teaching • John Merrow, Executive Editor, The Merrow Report (PBS) • Jules D. Prown,Paul Mellon Professor of History of Art, Yale University • Leo Rockas, Professor of English, University of Hartford• Adele Seeff, Executive Director, Center for Renaissance and Baroque Studies, University of Maryland at CollegePark • Thomas Toch, U.S. News and World Report , Washington, D.C. • Gita Z. Wilder, Education Policy Division,Educational Testing Service

Read On Common Ground on-line.Return reader response card (see page 2).