Sunday, August 11, 2013

Learning Through Younger Eyes

Being the lead teaching artist for a group of young curators has lots of potential for learning. Of course we consider the learning through teaching from my own experiences and sharing but I was actually writing about my own learning through them.

Presently there are 7 girls registered for the Curators of Culture summer program. During Dance week, we had a workshop with one of Young Audiences dance teaching artists. But during the introductory porton I planned for them to watch a short film about dance, discussing dance, why dance is art, what you like about dance, what do dancers need, how do dancers train, etc.

After futzing with Netflix and finding we couldn't download the plug in for the necessary software because we were using a library laptop that refused to allow us to take the role of admin, my trusty assistant, my oldest daughter, went to Youtube and found a set of dance videos made by one of her favorite mash-up DJ artists. The girls liked the videos very much. Then being inspired by her quickness, I searched dance on youtube to find an interesting contemporary ballet piece by a Netherlands ballet company that used only drum rhythm.
The girls were spellbound. They hadn't seen dance like that before and neither had I.
The power of information at your fingertips is amazing. It has taken a simple day of sharing and turned it into a group sharing event. After a field trip to Canal-side to walk around and take part in a drumming workshop with teaching artist Miriam Minkoff, we all caught the subway back to the library to document the day in their video diaries and get a quick Voyzee, tutorial.

The college course that I am taking at the moment, is titled Creativity and Multicultural Communication. What I have been seeing or rather noticing since this course began is that the "creative" part in kids lives is beginning to disappear. They are confused about what creativity is and when and how they are supposed to be creative.

How did this happen?

I am not sure. Some folks say it's the standardized testing, some say its the rise of mobile devices and the internet, some say too much video games and TV, some say not enough parental involvement and supervision. I think it could possibly be a collection of all of those and others I haven't considered. But what I do know is that kids, teens and preteens, want to play. They want to be creative, some of them don't know how. Just like some of them don't know how to speak coherently, or read effectively. So it helps when the educator whether it be a parent, teacher, artist, entrepreneur, civil servant can understand where the child is coming from emotionally , physically, intellectually, and creatively.

So often I hear a child's mentor talk about the problem with Johnny or Ashante as if they were the same kinds of people needing the same kind of solution. Public education teaches very often that there is one correct answer to the problem, artists often discover this is false. Creatives learn and many can teach that there can be many solutions or answers to a question, puzzle, problem,or  project.
Our imagination tells us so.

Watch this video with John Cleese about creativity.


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