Teaching Artist Journal

Teaching Artist Journal A few people have asked me to share this column from the current TAJ. Here it is. Hope you like it and find it useful.
--Nick

Script Flippers/Flip Scripters

As TA’s we often think of ourselves as people who bring new approaches and experiences to students, teachers, schools, community centers and prisons. Many of us l...ike the idea of pushing pedagogy and student experience beyond convention and what seems “comfortable.” We have a sense that out of such novelty, risk, and uncertainty comes deeper learning and greater invention.

It stands to reason that, at least some of the time, we should push ourselves in the same way. In that spirit, rather than write my usual sort of column, I give you a list of ideas about how we might “flip the script” of our own practice:

1) Scare yourself.
If you’re the sort of TA who is known for being highly organized and always successful, design a project which you are only 1% sure will be successful and 99% sure will crash and burn; a project though that is so cool that if it is successful, it will be really, really, cool. Chances are your students will radically alter the odds and even if they don’t, it’s likely to result in a spectacular and highly educative “failure.”

2) Play it really safe.
If you are the sort of TA who is always doing the sort of thing described in idea 1, do the opposite: create a highly structured, clearly defined, very predictable project of which you are 99% sure of the outcome. Undoubtedly your students will introduce many great surprises.


3) Stir up trouble.
If you are the type of TA who is very careful about the themes, images and language your students use in their work, or in their interactions; or if you are particularly sensitive to school culture and administrator expectations, lighten up. Push your students to subvert some of those expectations, and to feel free to examine and portray the full range of human emotion and experience. You may find your students more nuanced and sensitive in their work than you expect. You may also find teachers, administrators, funders and parents more tolerant and sophisticated in their expectations than you anticipated.


4) Be all warm and fuzzy.
If you are the TA who is always fighting the strictures of institutional and self-censorship, who is always on guard against “inauthentic,” excessively predictable student work, lighten up. Ask some funders, parents, teachers or administrators what they would like to see come out of a project. Then, present these expectations as an aesthetic, intellectual or technical challenge to the students. You might find that, in adapting to and interpreting openly expressed limits and expectations, your students find highly innovative solutions. Some of the greatest art ever made was “work for hire.”

5) Ditch the mirror.
Are you heavy into process, reflection, documentation, analysis and action research? Get your head out of your, umm, navel. Drop all of that, for a day, a month, or a year and focus on the art as art and, if applicable, focus on the academic content as the raw material of art. This is what most of us do in our own work; why shouldn’t our students? You may find that when it’s all about the work, and not about evaluating the student or the TA, students engage differently, and you work differently.

6) Look a little more closely.
Do you cringe at the thought of evaluating the learning that takes place in your classroom or studio? Do you become slightly nauseous at the prospect of writing reflectively about your pedagogy? Does the sight of the word “rubric” feel like an affront to your mystical destiny as a TA? Get over it. If you work with an arts ed organization that encourages reflective practice, try embracing it. If you don’t, do a little reading and research and apply it to your work. Examine what’s really happening when you teach. Consider that you might actually be able to learn something from what you do and improve how you teach and even how you make art. And if you can learn something from what you do, so can the rest of us.


7) Write an article for TAJ.
You know your work is interesting, successful and novel. You’re good at talking about it. A publication would look great on your CV. Send Nick a draft of your brilliant, highly innovative, theoretically informed and yet eminently practical essay about how you taught a group of 5000 “at risk” teenagers to build a working mass spectrometer out of macaroni and Elmer’s glue (which is a good project for Idea 1 and, no, I’m not joking).

8) Write an Article for TAJ.
You are convinced your work is interesting only to you, that you have nothing to say about it, that you’d sooner file your taxes on time than write or talk about it, and besides you’re not a “writer” anyway, you’re not even sure you’re a TA, and after all, you’re just teaching a few kids to draw with charcoal. You are exactly who we are looking for as a writer for TAJ; when you write about your work we know we’ll all learn something we can only learn from…your work. So, if you don’t want to write a draft of something yet, you should send Nick a note with some ideas you have and he’ll be happy to give you some feedback. All the info is in the front of this copy of the Journal. I look forward to hearing about your work, OK?As for me, I’m going to go try a few of these.
--Nick JaffeChief Editor TAJ







Pic caption: A working diagram for a "machine to detect bad music" as conceived by students at NCP High School (Chicago Public Schools).