Taiwan ESL Summer Art Classes

During the summer I taught art to the elementary students.  We learned about famous artists, created paintings inspired by their work, and completed writing projects appropriate for the students' levels.

Besides building vocabulary through the subjects of the artwork we studied, it was exciting to introduce sentence patterns such as, "I wonder..." and "I wish..."

One artist I introduced is Faith Ringgold.  Though some aspects of American culture are pervasive in Taiwan, African Americans and African American culture are rarely represented.  Yet at the same time, when I looked into Ringgold's art, I saw the dense urban world these children lived in.

I found a narrated copy of Tar Beach on YouTube to make up for not having a copy of Ringgold's beautiful book in Taiwan.

So the students flew over their own city.

They also practiced the proportion drawing I had done back on Maui.

The students wrote about what they imagined, what they wondered, and where they flew.

As always, we showed proof of learning.

2013: Community and Vocabulary Strengthening Go Together

We had just finished reading a book together on working as a team, so I constructed a lesson that would require them to do so.   Better yet, it involved reviewing vocabulary from that week, and making art!

First, we talked about a monster we would like to make together. The students decided how many of each body part it should have.

 I gave the students a single large paper and instructed them to decide who would draw which body parts.  I reminded them that they were going to have to work together so everyone could draw.

They colored their wild monster with colored pencils, again communicating and working together.  They modeled each others' blending techniques, resulting in richer color and color detail than I would have likely seen if they were working separately.  

We all loved the result!

2013-2014 Teaching English in Taiwan

I returned to Asia in March 2013, this time to Taipei, Taiwan.  There, I took a position teaching English and Kindergarten.

Portions of my job have been very open to my use of the arts and project-based teaching, and portions have had little flexibility. 

In my kindergarten class, where we act out stories, where I coach these English learners to construct and write their own sentences and illustrate them,  I can feel the effects of deep learning.  I construct group art projects that require the students to communicate, practicing their English and their social skills. They create beautiful work that shows their learning, that shows their enjoyment. 

Why are the six-year-olds allowed to learn like this but not the seven-year-olds?

In this kindergarten class I combined ocean ecology with vocabulary building and visual arts.  I brought these city kids a collection of seashells and beach trash from a beach outside of Taipei.  Some of them had never been to the beach.   

 They were fascinated by the materials.  We sorted them in various ways, described them, and categorized them.  New vocabulary was learned, skills of observation were practiced, and science skills were developed.  

What is Arts Integration?

The Kennedy Center explains it in-depth HERE.  

Both Pomaika'i Elementary School and the Maui Arts and Cultural Center are partners with the Kennedy Center.

I've seen again and again how this approach leads to students creating meaning in relation to the material.  They are invested in the subject matter through their brains, but also through their emotions, and sometimes through their bodies.  The depth of learning is real.  

The partnerships with the Kennedy Center results in many professional development seminars available to Maui teachers and teaching artists each year.  At the Maui Arts and Cultural Center I attended seminars on arts integration and classroom protocols for teaching artists, co-teaching, teaching with the big questions, and more.

One excellent learning experience was the 2010 Summer Arts Institute, where over 5 days Sean Layne taught drama as a classroom management strategy and tableau as a learning tool, and Melanie Layne led the teachers through a project teaching biography via printmaking.  

2013: Visit to Pomaika'i

After two years in Asia I was briefly back on Maui in early 2013.  While there, I visited Pomaika'i Elementary, taught a few art classes, and attended several events.  The school continues to grow and flourish with the arts.

2012 EduCamp: Arts Integration Presentation in Kuala Lumpur

In Kuala Lumpur I connected with a group called EduCamp which met monthly at Mind Valley.  This was a group of parents and teachers who were interested in new ideas in education.
In July 2012 I offered to give a talk on arts integration.

What they got was a hands-on activity involving triangles, architecture, and drawing.

We talked about different types of triangles, and looked at examples of architecture using triangles.  I then challenged them to draw their own building made of isosceles, equilateral, and right triangles.

Following the format of Create, Present, Respond, we had an impromptu exhibition of our sketches.

We then discussed what we learned, both from the assignment, and the process.










Recently I posted about the High Tech High MOOC and Ron Berger's butterfly video on the Educamp Facebook page.  Over a year after the event, I received this comment:

"Maggie T. Sutrov. Attended one of your art workshop at mind valley. Upon completion, I like the way all the pieces were discussed; it provide a good feedback loop for learning. I was pretty sure after looking at all the pieces, and if everyone were to produce a second piece, they would all be better on the second iteration. I only wonder if everyone were to do a third iteration the art piece could further improved. The video above has similar iterative effect. I am convinced we can learn creative writing by getting feedback iteratively from peers and teacher. Each piece of writing should be written more than once."

The whole presentation was filmed.  It would have been wonderful to repeat the process and see how our understanding deepened, but alas, it was a single evening.  And the video below is long enough as is!

2011 Art in the Park with Learning Beyond Schooling

In Kulala Lumpur I connected up with Chong Wai Leng of Learning Beyond Schooling, an innovative homeschool group.  We arranged two art classes.  The first was at the park.  The students ranged from 5 years old to teenager, many with parents along to participate.  It was a great success.

We used viewfinders to decide what we wanted to draw.

Everyone discovered something interesting with this way of looking!

Having the parents so excited and involved was a treat.

We reconnected a month later for a painting class at their Center.

2011, 2012 ArtCamp Kuala Lumpur

During adventure I missed teaching, and put together classes along the way.  In Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia we met an exciting tech community that was also full of creative people, artists, and people willing to give drawing a try.

We held ArtCamp at the Hall of Awesomeness at the Mind Valley offices.

The 2011 ArtCamp was so much fun, that when we were back in Malaysia in 2012 we had another one.

Yes, they like beanbag chairs at Mind Valley.

This became a family affair.  We played with collage and patterns.

2011-2012 Travel Adventures

In April 2011 my boyfriend and I left Maui for Southeast Asia.  We visited eight countries, spending multiple months in many.  I painted and I helped him with his freelance webdesign business.

Angkor Wat, Cambodia.

 Chiang Mai, Thailand

 Luang Prabang, Laos

 I met these children while painting, and they were interested in what I was doing.  I couldn't help myself.  We had an art class.

 A curious local in Samosir Island, Sumatra.

Sunset at the harbor, Kota Kinabalu, Malaysian Borneo

More artwork and comics depicting the journey can be found HERE.

2010 Reverse Origami

When I wasn't teaching art, my boyfriend and I were putting on creative events for adults.  Reverse Origami was an umbrella for a variety of events designed to get people to unfold their creativity.  These ranged from the  to art classes for adults, to creativity classes, to the Reverse Origami Film Festival.

The Pecha-Kucha inspired Elephant Egg was a huge success.  In the same vein, each presenter was allowed 20 powerpoint slides at 20 seconds each.  We had a teacher speak on her trip to the Galapagos, a paddler's voyage of the Northwest Pacific Islands, the launching of a documentary project to plant native trees in every state, and more.

I gave several talks on different aspects of the creative process.

I attempted to illustrate all my slides myself.

The Reverse Origami Film Festival, held twice, brought together professional, armature, and student filmmakers from the community.

This was perhaps the most exciting of the projects, especially as we created our own films while also hosting the event.  This was my live-animated movie.

A group photo from one of the showings.

These were only the larger of the events.  There were also creativity classes, adult art classes, and more.

2010 Summer Art Adventure!

In working with so many schools and arts organizations, I saw a hole.  There were no summer art classes in Central Maui.  So, I rented space at the Maui Arts and Cultural Center and created my own summer camp.  Over the course of four weeks 50 students attended between the ages of 6-12.

Each week had a theme, ranging from Famous Artists, to World Traveler, to Monsters and Robots, to Making Comics.

The students' puppets ended up taking all different forms.

 One really exciting project was making Balinese-inspired shadow puppets during the World Traveler week.

The students really enjoyed the monster face sculptures of Monster and Robots.

It was so much fun, so many wonderful artists!

2nd Grade Coral Ecology Co-teaching

This project was a very special arts integration residency co-sponsored by Pomaika'i Elementary School and Maui Arts and Cultural Center.  

Teaching artists and a classroom teachers were partnered together and coached on skills and processes to create a positive co-teaching experience and successful lesson.  I was partnered with 2nd grade teacher Marilyn Yuen, and over an intensive two weeks we lead the students in an arts integrated exploration of the coral reef ecosystem.  

One of the arts integration lessons I learned at Pomaika'i, is that art, and the core subject are rarely split equally in every lesson.  Rather, some lessons may be all art technique, and others may be dealing primarily with the core material.  As the lessons progress the two will combine, eventually adding to a sum larger than the two parts.  In parts of this project that was the case.  However, the extent that we were able to use the art as the process for learning about the coral was quite exhilarating.  

Here, the students are observing and sculpting their own coral pieces out of plasticine.  They each created two.

We used one set of coral sculptures to model the growth of coral.  

We talked about how slowly some coral species grow, and added up the length of growing time as we "grew" the coral.

Then our coral reef model was visited by all sorts of horrible occurrences: pollution, anchors, flippers from snorkelers standing on it.  

It was obvious; this coral, which the students grew themselves, would never be the same.  

Luckily, we still had the students' other beautiful coral sculptures.  

After this experience we started on the larger project, a two-sided mural depicting a healthy ocean and an unhealthy ocean.  

Various painting techniques were used to create the backgrounds.  They drew beautiful fish, and living and dead coral.  

On the unhealthy ocean they used their skills from the proportion project to illustrate people doing things on land that harm the coral reef in the water.   

For the healthy reef side they put their understanding into words by creating signs that said what we should do for the reef.

Along the way we reflected on what were were learning in various ways.  Here the students use tableau.  

Finally, it was all put together, both our positive and negative scenarios.  

We had our own classroom art opening and reflected on the journey.