Age vs. Hope

For my Dad's 61st Birthday last week I made this card (in the center) by melding an old photo of him from 1972(?) and the well know Obama poster from 2008. I meant it as an homage to my dad and a humurous reflection on the past. He took it as a parody, as in, he now has the opposite of hope because all he has is age. Woops. I even wrote a poem on the inside of the card explaining the drawing, but the print was so small that he couldn't read it.

Numb toes

Next on my agenda after finishing my earlier post was to look up why my big toes have been numb ever since day three in the woods with the kidos. I have had the same hiking boots for seven or eight years and don't recall having numb big toes in the past. It's not painful, but it is irritating and a bit disconcerting - like, are my toes going gangreen?

My super in-depth research (i.e. 20 minutes of web-browsing) leads me to believe that I have a fairly common condition experienced by hikers, and most creatively pseudonymed "Christmastoe" by tree-planters who work from May to September on steep terrain and then regain feeling in their big toes around Christmas time. Great. That puts me into February with numb toes.

At least I can talk about having Christmastoe, though.

Might be worth it.

Back from the woods

Returning from life in the woods with 10-year-olds is a rough transition. I spent last week in just such an alternate reality, which was lovely, both in its own right, and for its difference from the day-to-day goings on in my office, which are all-consuming unless you are forced to take a break. Four days in the woods will do anyone a world of good. Four days with 10-year-olds makes it magical if you let it.






This trip to the woods marks a end of sorts to my Thesis Fieldwork. I have much more material to write about than I initially anticipated. The structure of the writing itself remains a bit of mystery, but I have to get going on that before I get to far from the experiences. I just don't want it to be boring.

Incredibly dim light at the end of the tunnel

Moving into week eight of my fieldwork I took some time to sit down with the ol’ thesis proposal, which I have been evading since last spring. Today I attempted to chalk out the “Story” section, and to grapple with how I would differentiate between the content of the story section and the upcoming “Discussion” section. The story section is meant for describing literally what happened during your fieldwork. The discussion is reserved for analysis of the story. The difficulty will come in keeping my observations and opinions out of the story section, reserving them for discussion.

The good news, though, is that I can start to see how this thing is going to come together. There is an enormous amount of writing still to take place between now and then, but I can see a glimmer from the distant end of this long dark tunnel.

In keeping with my belief that all blog posts should include images, I drew you this:

New attentions leave no time to Blog Today

http://cyberpedteenlab.blogspot.com/

Drawing can be taught like any other skill...

...if you're willing to read all this text. Oy...


The New York Times on line is featuring a weekly drawing lesson from illustrator James McMullan:

1. Getting Back to The Phantom Skill: the joy of drawing
2. The Frisbee of Art: the importance of the ellipse
3. Hatching the Pot: modeling with hatching
4. The Beagle Vanishes: 1, 2, and 3 point perspective
5. Mother Nature Decoded: seeing nature as a construct of its smaller elements

Dock malfunctions, but thesis lives!

While my thesis fieldwork took a technical hiatus this weekend while I was away in Wisconsin, I have enjoyed mentally processing my own exploits as place-based activities. For instance:

I arrived a the family lake cabin to find the swimming dock, for lack of a better phrase, all f-ed up. My analysis is that the water level in the lake rose so fast (no doubt during some recent storm) that the wooden dock floated up, lifting the dock legs off the bottom of the lake. As the water level regressed, the dock was set back down, somewhat askew. Generally, one would have their dock out of the lake by mid-October, if for no other reason than the water is cold, and a human person must get into this water in order to uproot the dock legs from the mud and the much below. Tempted though I was to let this be someone else's problem, the possibility that one or two fishermen a week may have floated passed and snickered at our expense, was not a bearable blight on the Franke family name. Also, in the words of so many Double Dare contestants before me, I was motivated to "take the physical challenge!"

So, I wriggled into ye ol' hip-waders, and had a fine time wrastlin' the whole dock, section by section, out of the lake. Some sections were locked together with a little pin thingy. Some of the legs were no longer upright. Some posts wouldn't detach. Some posts fell off and began drifting away. Having no memory of how the pieces of the dock fit together in the first place, and finding that the water was in fact much deeper than usual, keeping my head and arms above water, and thus keeping the lake water out of the waders was no easy task. A few strained muscles and one hip-wader leak in the rear end, and the situation was resolved. Dock saved. Family name rescued from local ridicule. Thesis lives?

This is exactly the type of physical, place-based problem solving that I think art education can help teach. Not that this dock situation was a particularly amazing feat, or particulary art-related, but I believe that somewhere between me wanting to give up, and me finding success, lies elements of my own art education. It has to do with assessing the situation, having a confidence in your own physical abilities (including knowing when the job is too big), figuring out how things work, and then working toward a solution. I believe that art making is a great way to develop student's ability to think and act simultaneously, and to do so creatively. In the best case, these creative acts stem from the physical world of students' lives and are thus "place-based experiences of art making," a term that recurs in my thesis.

Also, I got to tour a cranberry bog where they were harvesting the berries. A very place-based activity. These guys love it so much that apparently they take vacation days from their other jobs to come harvest cranberries every year. I'm telling you, we all benefit from physically engaging with place.

This gentleman just hopped over the floating corral buoys to start raking the floating cranberries up the green conveyor into the truck. Cool!

Transparent Dreams at 65mph

I know that dream stories are conversation killers, but last night's dream was so transparently symbolic that I can not resist sharing:

I was pulling onto an expressway from a right side on-ramp into four lanes of heavy, high-speed traffic. I negotiated the merge and got into the second lane. I was moving along at a good clip, keeping pace with all the other people on the road. I checked, and we were all traveling at 65 mph. I passed a sign saying "Speed Limit 45". I felt uneasy with my speed and tried to slow down. Nothing would work. I just kept barreling along at 65 mph.

The funny thing about this highway was that no one was actually in a vehicle. We were all just moving along like floating drivers and passengers, as though we were performing a pantomime of driving a car. Still anxious about the 45mph speed limit, I started reaching my feet down toward the rushing pavement below to try and regulate my speed, Flintstone-style. This was nerve-racking of course, because I was barefoot, and because I couldn't really image that the foot-stop would be a productive breaking technique at 65mph. Sure enough, skidding one heel on the ground made me spin around backwards. I waved to the family gliding along behind me in my lane as I kept shooting forward down the road, my invisible vehicle apparently unphased by my heel-dragging. Eventually, with the use of a toe-plant, I got myself facing forward again, where I continued nervously hurtling on at 65 mph.
What could this possibly mean!? I'm not one to put too much stock in dream-interpretation, but I am staying home sick today in what I hope is a more effective method of foot-dragging.

Fieldwork: Unexpected Positives and Negatives - and Crying

As an unexpected positive of my time in 5th grade science is that when the students aren't working on the mapping project (which is what I am really there to see), they are doing a "seed challenge" where they each plant tiny seeds in soil-filled film canisters. Little do the students know, these seeds are super-infused with some kinda growth hormone so they grow fast. Each day the students return to class they measure the progress their plant has made and make other observations. This has provided great place-oriented observations that I did not anticipate.

The unexpected negative came when the students had to add support sicks to the soil because the leaves of their plants were getting too heavy for the stems. One little boy accidentally ripped a leaf off of his plant. The negative was that he had a total meltdown, crying over the loss of his plant. Not even the whole plant. Just one leaf. He was SO sad. I tried to comfort him, and told him to make a memorial to the leaf in his journal, but this had little affect. He was simply devastated at having killed his plant. Or so I thought. Turns out this kid has meltdowns all the time as a result of any perceived failure on his part.

And that's why it's important to talk about your observations with teachers who know the kids. The little boy cared no more about his plant than when he cut his paper wrong, or couldn't find his book.

Fieldwork Jounal 5: Building Blocks of Mapping

Turns out there are many steps to teaching 10-year-olds to make a scaled map of their classroom. After teaching two seperate sessions of the lessons, I recommend that students:

• Consider the room
• Orient to cardinal directions
• Determine unit of measurement (non-standard in this case)
• Gather Data (length &width of room, longitude and latitude objects)

THEN begin plotting the data on a piece of graph paper. Translating data to paper as you collect it simply won't do for 10-year-olds. We actually didn't get to plotting the data on graph paper at all this week. One thing at a time.

But students had lots of fun choosing non-standard units of measurement. My favorites included: a trashcan, an injured students crutches, the class sugar glider* (students were encouraged to use a stuffed animal sugar glider, and not that actual animal).

*This is what a sugar glider baby looks like:

This is what they can do when they grow up.

Field Work Journal 4: Reflection

I was able to gather lots of data this week as 5th graders began learning how to map their classroom on a scale (more on that later). I am now floating through the phase of the fieldwork process where you hope that your data will actually show you something, or provide some kind of meaningful insight, even if it's only meaningful to me. I'd setting for that. I am learning a lot and enjoying my time collecting information that I perceive relates to students' understanding of place, but I am not at all sure that combing through the mountains of information I will have come December, will really show much of anything.

I do take solace in the notion that all I may be able to "conclude" by next May is that I have a lot more places to look for information on the subject in the years to come. Seems kind of inevitable actually.

Fieldwork: Sidenote - what's the point anyway?

I wouldn't want anyone to have to read my Thesis to figure this out, so I will try to explain what I am looking for in my fieldwork.

My thesis is about Place. It is about how children come to understand their physical place in their own world. It is about how I think an increased understanding of place will help children to see how they occupy and affect space in their lives. My hope is to show that physically creative acts (art making, for instance) are an important way of teaching children to engage with their world, and to develop a stronger understanding of place.

My fieldwork is designed to seek data about students understanding of place through two case studies. One study revolves around the aforementioned mapping work. Maps are clearly about place, and thus provide direct, if creatively limited data for analysis. The second study is based around a creative sculpture project that uses materials from, and is completed at a specific place. The sculptures will provide far more abstract data about place, but may provide stronger data about the physical acts of creativity that interest me.
- - -
This is a collage map of Chicago I made for Social Theory class. The collage process itself was exploratory and physical. The choices I made about materials (all from local papers and magazines), and where to place the outline of the city, and how to include the flag imagery, brought me to a new understanding of the place that is Chicago.

Field Work Journal 3: 5th grade map readers

I got a chance to meet, greet and map this week with the 5th graders I am working with. We are working in their science class to understand how to read maps; what different types of maps are used for, and how to identify the key, the scale, the cardinal direction, and other important characteristics. After two sessions of work with a wide variety of maps, it seems that most students are quite good and locating features to help them decipher a wide variety of maps. There is some struggle understanding scale, but translating Miles, to inches to centimeters is hard!

Next week, students will start making their own maps, which is important to my study. I can't wait to see what they do.

Personal reflection: anxiety

No rip on fieldwork planning, but it does not yet make for interesting blogging. Perhaps when I have something to reflect on, I can regale you with hilarious anecdotes about this one time...during fieldwork...

For now, most of what I can reflect on is anxiety.

Will I be able to observe what I am looking for in student's work?
Is someone' s understanding of something observable anyway?
Will my presence and leading questions make any "data" I collect wholly bunk?
Will I get too distracted by the social/psycho drama of teaching that I forget to look for data?

Worksheets don't fail me now!

At left: Cubist Anxiety

Fieldwork Journal Step 2: Design a Worksheet

Fieldwork Journal Step 2: Design a Worksheet

This week may well commence some actual fieldwork. I am pulling together a worksheet to help me keep track of what is likely to be a series of slightly disjointed observations/participation/instruction in three 5th grade science classes.

The goal: Observe ways in which students' creative engagement with physical materials affects there understanding of their own "place"- their own physical presence in the world.

Worksheet Basics
Date/Time:_____ Student Section:___
Instructional Material Covered:________
In Class Assignment:________
Student Questions:________
Student Responses:________
Personal Reflection on the lesson/work produced:________

Thought of the Day

I may take this back, but considering the mountain of tasks associated with the Thesis Fieldwork I intend to complete this fall in parallel with my desire for a meaningful blog, my thought of the day is to use the blog as a Fieldwork Journal. My fieldwork, in its current entropic state, has enough disparate elements that some of them just might be helpful or useful to others who are considering thinking about knowing how to approach the Study of Art Education.

Fieldwork Journal
Step One: Induce Stress
Create a self-imposed agenda - due dates, goals, measures of "success", in as much as that is possible in qualitative research

Prezi - a mixed bag

Trying out the new on line tool like PREZI has been a mixed bag of frustration an elation. My first complaint is the name "prezi" which is both cutezi and stupidzi. My other complaints have to do with the difficulty of controlling the view of your presentation. The ease of image upload and manipulation is a true delight, but controlling the zoom on the "path" leaves much to be desired.

Website - work in progress

Here is a work in progress website of my artwork, academic work, and miscellaneous work from the last ten years or so. It has been fun, and daunting to starting compiling this stuff in one place.

Click Here: ABF...The Website

Chicago Artists Coalition

These membership benefits are great resources for Chicago-area practicing artists - health insurance and tax help and everything. Now if only I made some art I'd be all set.

Mess Hall

Mess Hall looks great. I have heard of them, but never really grasped what their deal is, perhaps because there isn't much of a deal to grasp.

Though this article on MFA vs. Community Art Centers is really from AREA Chicago, I found the link through Mess Hall. this article from Mess Hall.

Teaching Art With Alex - a movie

One girl's quest toward becoming an art educator.

Indianapolis Museum of Art is Ro-BUST

There is a ton of cool stuff on this site, and they seem dedicated to blogging to keep more current information available. Here is a huge project they are working on right now incorporating the city's sports history, art, public space, activity, and hard hats! Cool.

http://www.imamuseum.org/blog/2010/04/20/ima-tv-free-basket/

SFMOMA blog: My favorite post so far...

http://blog.sfmoma.org/2010/04/flickr-kiki

Fwd: How about now?

Purple monkey dishwasher

Now, I am texting a post to my blog.

I am making this post from my phone

On Movies

I am having a great time working on my movie project, which is a good thing because I deleted it by accident after a 14 hour editing session yesterday! Blaaaaaaaaaaaaah!

After throwing up inside my mouth a little bit, I am now focusing on the positives of redoing it better next weekend. At least I still have all the files that comprised the movie. Next time it will be even better. Next time, I'll vomit rainbows.

Give Computers a Break

Youth Learn seems to strike a good balance between promoting technology integration into lots of their projects, and stressing the importance of "real world" learning away from the computer. The "Our Neighborhood" Project, for example, builds science skills and teaches graphing, but has students engage with their own community in several different hands-on ways.

Street Level Youth Media: New York Style

Education resources are available here for video based work that is totally critical and post modern: http://www.evc.org/store/videos/study-guides?page=1

Street Level Youth Media

I spent last Saturday participating in a video shoot and have new appreciation for the patience and planning that video work takes. The projects that kids are doing at Street Level Youth Media, however, also show the potential of the medium to give voice to kids in a way that is fun, and teaches them important skills on a lot of levels. These videos were fun to watch (though some of them no longer work).

Tree Treasure!

I just got this message from Domain of Heros, one of the gaming sites I became a member of before last week's presentation on MOOs and MUDs:

"Your character, Cyberped, just found a World Tree Treasure Key!"

Who's Bad?

You know it, you know.

Coming Soon.

Art 21 - Cao Fei

I have used Art 21 videos in my high school installation art class to help frame students' thinking in a broader, more out-side-of the box way. The videos make great discussion tools, and are a good resource if you have 8:00am Monday morning art class.

The Cao Fei video we discussed in class (thanks Kent!) is from the current season (5) and is thus not yet available on line. Here's a little teaser though from the Art 21 site:

"Dear ladies and gentleman, I’m China Tracy—the avatar of Cao Fei—and I’m her interpreter.” Cao Fei’s digital Second Life alter ego acts as the English translator for the Chinese-speaking artist throughout the segment, guiding the viewer through seven multimedia projects.

Role Playing Games

Video Games in general hold little appeal for me, so it is extra difficult to imagine myself spending hours-days-years developing a character through which to engage in on line fantasy role-play.

I do acknowledge, however, that this activity does hold great appeal for large numbers of people.

http://geniushackers.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/gaming-huge-lan-party.jpg

I wonder if there is an effective way to access and utilize this type of role-playing, game-based communication in classrooms, or if part of the fun, or all of the fun is in the escapism.

I am the jock in this, and only this scenario

I was talking briefly with the woman who runs this in Chaffee County Colorado


http://www.coloradomountainpleinairfestival.com/

I don't see dates fro 2010 yet, but sign me up!

Pi Day!

Google's home page reminded me that today, 3.14, is Pi Day. I can't wait for 1:59 and 26.5 seconds.

I use to have a curmudgeonly math teacher who would break character once a year on pi day to do the pi dance (something of a little jig) on March 14th at 1:59pm. The kids, they loved it.

<- The pi dance looks a little something like this chap to the right.

Newsweek on Art

I never have time to read the Newsweek's that renew as quickly as my NPR membership, but they have had few recent articles on art that I took the time to peruse.

This article, "But What Does it Mean?" notices a decline in the hackneyed uber-self conscious, personal/political art to which we have all become so accustom. While I find some of the conclusions a bit suspect (while the art world might be done with exploring identity, there are a lot of other people out there who shouldn't be allowed to skip ahead to a post-politically-correct society), I generally agree with the sentiments if this article.

This short piece, "Art Attack", made me laugh out loud about the power of good art to make you woosy, or to induce "aesthetic rapture".

Bad at Sports Preview

Color me heartbroken that badatsports.com doesn't have a little more of this:

They actually don't seem interested in sports at all.

MCA website treasure trove

This section of the MCA website archives podcasts of people talking about exhibits at the MCA. Seems like artists talking about artists mostly. What a great resource for someone doing research on how artists feel about museums.*

*I am not doing this kind of research, but kind of wish that I was.

Ramón “Chunky” Sánchez

Here is a little teaser for next week's website discussion. I am a big fan of storycorps on NPR but have never gone to the website. It was great to see photos of people in the oft-mentioned "booth" were they do the radio recordings. The story below is one I remember hearing recently, but how much better is it with the accompanying photo?!

Ramón “Chunky” Sánchez

Diane Ravich

I am trying to decide how I feel about Diane Ravich and her new book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System. Now, I haven't read the book, just some reviews, and I heard an ambiguous interview on NPR. I think I agree with some of her opinions and not others, so I shall have to remain ambiguous.

This article presents some decent balance if you are interested: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alan-gottlieb/ravitch-is-right-and-wron_b_482763.html

Comments anyone?

Git yer goggles! - digital interactive

What would make your museum visit fantastic???

Brooklyn Museum Blogs

These visitor blogs seem like an effective way to invite museum guests to be part of the voice of the institution without having them actually speak for the museum itself. I wonder who decides where to draw the line on content. Perhaps linking to external blogs alleviates some of the need to have every post represent your museum in a particular way. Perhaps not. Either way, the posts they have chosen to include have caused me to put the Brooklyn Museum on my list for my next trip to New York.

Photobet Teaser

Museum 2.0

Just inspired by Museum 2.0 to add a search bar to my blog. Not much to search just yet, but you never know when you will need to watch that Carol Channing video again.

.

.

. except it doesn't seem to work.

Cabinets of Wonder-ful

This section of Art Babble that I got to through the "Interact" section on the Art Institute site is interesting to me. I used to teach a "cabinet of wonder" unit in my high school installation art class. This would have been a great resource for the kids. Hopefully I will teach this again soon.

Principal's Office Chronicles I

In an ongoing contest with a school colleague about who, as a result of their job, is asked to do a more ridiculous thing than the other during the course of a given school day, I have started to compile my resulting data in...

The Principal's Office Chronicles (1)

Today's contest was easily won when I received a phone call from a parent of a student who does not even attend my school asking me to check the lost and found for her daughter's Little Mermaid glitter wand. I am sympathetic to the sadness derived from lost childhood treasures, but the daughter apparently lost the wand during a school festival last October. October! Did I check the lost and found for her? Oh, yes I did. The wand, as of yet, has not been recovered.

Carol Channing is...see top right of blog

I defy you not to get this stuck in your head.

Blog Today

Blog Tomorrow,
Blog Yesterday
But never ever blog today.