Best Practices: Sample Teaching Artist Workshop, Artist Statements

Other Best Practices

During their residencies, City Lore teaching artists use their art form as a vehicle for cultural inquiry. Working in collaboration with City Lore folklorists and anthropologists, they become skilled at eliciting cultural information from classroom teachers and students and using that information as a source for new artwork. City Lore employs both folk and fine artists with backgrounds in theater, dance, music, and visual art. Increasingly we are pairing folk and fine artists together to team teach. Many of our teaching artists are also pairing off independently of City Lore to collaborate on their own artistic endeavors!

Each year we bring together all our teaching artists for at least one "artist institute." During these institutes, we provide a forum for discussing issues related to arts-in-education. Past institutes have focused on: the impact of learning standards on teaching artists, the creation of a City Lore teaching artist manual, behavior management, and professional development opportunities for teaching artists. The structure and theme for the workshop is informed by our teaching artists. Below is a sample of a teaching artist institute we conducted in the Spring of 2001. We offer evening, day-long, and weekend retreat institute.

Artist Statement Workshop

Background
The theme of this workshop was inspired by the success of one of our teaching artists' residency activities. At the end of his theater residencies, teaching artist, playwright, and visual artist, John Kallas, had students write an artist's statement. In this statement, students wrote a brief biography and a character sketch. Their statements, along with their pictures, appeared in the performance program book. Participating students, classroom teachers, and audiences enjoyed and benefited from the activity.

Because it was such a creative writing and assessment tool, we decided to introduce artist statements into all our other residencies—visual arts, dance, and music. Rather than a writing biography, however, we encourage students to focus on their artistic process. We tell students that just like in science and literature, art is created through a process. Students then reflect on and explain their artwork and the process of creating it. Doing so reinforces the knowledge they gained during the residency about themselves, another culture, and a new art form. Students share their artist statements with their classmates and others who view their artwork or performance.

We now also ask all our teaching artists to create artist statements. These statements are written for students and are about how the artist developed, how and why s/he started teaching and the cultural influences on his or her work.

Workshop Objectives

• To introduce a creative assessment and writing tool to teaching artists.
  
• To obtain artist statements from participating teaching artists.
  
• To emphasize the value City Lore education programs place on the artistic process.
  
• To connect teaching artists to their childhood and process of becoming artists and to share techniques and activities for connecting their experience to their students.

Workshop Outline

1. Introductions and warm-up.
Participants sit in a circle, state their name, then offer a gesture from a particular childhood game s/he played. The group guesses the game. In addition to orienting the group, this fun warm-up is intended to initiate childhood reflection—reflections which will inform artist statements.

2. Introduction to sponsoring organizations, Elders Share the Arts and City Lore.

3. Visualization exercise.
Facilitator takes participants through a 10-minute guided visualization that gets them in touch with the people and experiences that led them to become artists. Afterwards, participants write down three memories from their "trip" on an index card. Participants are then paired off and asked to share their visualization experiences with each other. Facilitators asks a few pairs to share their visualization stories with the group. After the sharing, the facilitator processes the exercise with participants and the group discusses how visualization exercises are used with students in the classroom to launch study into a culture and artform.

5. Introduction to artists statements.
Participants review reference packet consisting of one teaching artist statement, several student artist statements, and a selection of statements and self-portraits from Harriet Rohmer's book, Just Like Me: Stories and Self-portraits by Fourteen Artists. They discuss how to bridge lessons and incorporate writing throughout an arts residency.

6. Teaching artist statements
Participants draft their own teaching artist statements using prompts.

7. Participants share their artist statements with each other.

8. Closure activity—web of learning.
All participants form a circle. The facilitator holds a large ball of yarn and tells the group one thing she will take away from the workshop. She then holds on to a piece of yarn and tosses the ball to another person who shares a lesson gained, holds a piece of yarn and tosses the ball of yarn to another person. The result of the closure activity is a large web of yarn reminding participants how they connected throughout the workshop. Participants lay the web on the ground and snip a piece to take with them as a reminder of the workshop.

Resources

For this workshop we offered teaching artists inspiration from Harriet Rohmer's book, Just Like Me: Stories and Self Portraits by Fourteen Artists. Rohmer's book is a wonderful resource for a lesson on self-portraits and for inspiring young people to become artists, $15.95. (Buy it!)

Fourteen artists of different backgrounds created pictures and stories of their ancestors—filial, cultural, and spiritual—for this gorgeous collection. The works in Honoring Our Ancestors will inspire young artists and writers to find material from among their own families and personal heroes, and will encourage students to use both words and art to express their cultural identity, $15.95. (Buy it!)