A Class that Counts

Dragonfly Art Studio students practicing
still life drawing.

The sun-splashed atrium of Santa Fe’s Museum of International Folk Art buzzes with creative energy. That’s hardly unusual for this museum, which hosts field trips and art workshops throughout the year. The difference today is that the participants are all adults — not a child in sight (though perhaps in spirit). They’re all Santa Fe Public School art teachers.

Five “art stations” serve up a buffet of activities. There’s a multimedia table, with iridescent and acrylic paints, chalk pastels, cotton balls and cut-up credit cards for playing with texture and pattern. At other tables teachers sketch still-lifes, weave, write words with rubber stamps or make sculptures from recycled bottle caps, fabric scraps, corks and little bottles.

For the 25 elementary and middle school art teachers, this full-day in-service is an infusion of camaraderie and inspiration at the start of the school year. The hands-on workshop that starts the day exposes them to an art model called TAB, or Teaching for Artistic Behavior.

The key word here is behavior — not product or technique or skill. It focuses on what artists do: exercise creative thinking within a range of options.

“We want to let kids think like artists and work like artists, and to come up with their own ideas,” explains Mary Olson, Wood Gormley Elementary School art teacher. “I was taught to design a lesson where we guide them through a project from step one to step 10. We know how to take them to success perfectly with that model. What if they had five stations and they could choose?”

As if on cue, Roni Rohr, one of the art teachers at Eldorado Community School and the president of the New Mexico Art Educator’s Association, comes over, beaming. “I just learned about myself! I don’t ever want to leave!” What did she learn? “I learned to have empathy for my students. We have a limited time in class — just an hour a week. This affects the time a student has to be creative. You have some who want to try everything and others who don’t want to leave one station.”

I hear this theme from several of these teachers: Students come to their art room straight from math or spelling or reading and have to turn on their creativity on a dime. Teachers who have already adopted the TAB model say it gives students freedom to make meaningful choices — something for which they otherwise don’t get a lot of opportunity at school.

“It’s really hard for a kid, those transitions,” says Katy Hees, who teaches art at Carlos Gilbert and Acequia Madre Elementary Schools. After she and Olson took a workshop by Katherine Douglas and Diane Jaquith, creators of the TAB approach, at a National Art Educators Association convention in 2009, she felt its choice-based approach would benefit her students of both genders, but particularly boys. “I really felt they needed more freedom, they needed to explore more. Having them choose their own subject matter gets them so much more engaged.”

These words keep coming up about TAB: “choice,” “engagement,” “investment.” The teachers who are already using it at their schools say that students “buy in” with more involvement, better focus and fewer behavioral problems.

After clean-up, the teachers move to the other side of the atrium to discuss some administrative matters. Amy Summa, the the school district’s Art Education Coordinator, presents a new form that she’d like teachers to use this year: to list the art lessons they use and correlate them to things like technique, materials, new vocabulary and integration with other aspects of the class curriculum. Suddenly the language shifts to words like “consistency,” “tracking” and “accountability,” and the mood turns a little prickly.

“I’m concerned about having more busy work,” one teacher says. Another responds that the form can be useful for planning and self-evaluation. Worries surface about how the forms will be used and who will have access to them.

“I’m seeing this and the discussion we just had on TAB as opposites,” a teacher points out, wondering how to convert the freewheeling creativity we experienced on the other side of the room into items on a checklist.

This is the dynamic of an art teacher in the public schools.

If you’d asked me the day before, I’d have guessed that this isn’t the best time to be a public-school art teacher. Everywhere you turn these days you bump into words like “assessment,” “test scores” and “benchmarks,” and booby-trapped phrases like “adequate yearly progress” and “failing schools.”

Then there’s the budget crisis: the district was forced to cut $6.8 million from the SFPS 2010-11 budget; future cuts have been kept at bay, but just temporarily (see page 11). Cuts to school art and music funding haven’t been debilitating so far (see page 10), but the notion that they’re expendable luxuries in tough financial times still persists.

And yet we hear on all fronts that creative thinking is more important now than ever. Top headhunters look for employees who can make choices, work independently within reasonable guidelines, adapt to the implications of their decisions and work well with peers … in other words, good art students.

“Let’s go forward with this as a pilot,” Summa says, proposing that they meet again later in the year to see how the form is working.

One of the teachers points out that the forms could provide useful evidence that “we are a real class that counts” — when the inevitable next budget-cut debates roll around.

Looking at that roomful of teachers, I can picture Mrs. Miller, my elementary-school art teacher, right in there with them. Not that I remember ever seeing her in a group, actually; she was idiosyncratic, individualistic, even (to a sixth-grader’s eyes) a little weird. She rode a bike. She twisted up her hair in ways adults didn’t “do” in the late 60s.  She taught us English and Art, infusing the verbal and visual realms with fire. I can’t imagine her at my parents’ dinner parties, but I can still see her springing around our classroom like some kind of long-limbed bird, gushing about a poem a student wrote, railing against the racism in a magazine article we read together. Her style was her own (there’s no cookie-cutter artist or art teacher), but her passion for creative thinking would fit right in with this group. And I know for a fact that the influence of that passion can stay with students long after they leave school.

In a way, perhaps this is the best time to be a public-school art teacher, when children so need encouragement for creative thinking, and when our public schools are staffed with such a dedicated and intelligent cadre of art teachers and administrators.

“As a culture we’re all realizing how misguided it is to focus strictly on test scores,” says Nina Mastrangelo, art teacher at Atalaya, before the group breaks for lunch. “I just got a letter from Tom Udall about the importance of art education.” She cites books such as “A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers will Rule the Future,” and “How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci” as indications of a shift in perceptions about creative thinking. “Art class is not just play. It’s about learning to tap into creativity.”

Tumbleweeds will continue to tie into this topic throughout this quarter with arts-themed material on our website, including book and website recommendations from teachers and others, lesson suggestions and an art materials wish-list; come visit at www.sftumbleweeds.com.