All Posts from Art Curator for Kids
Art is Everything: Our Classroom is Not a Bubble
In this episode, I talk about why it’s vital that we don’t avoid the hard conversations or difficult subjects as educators, especially in art.
Separation Inspired Artworks from Students:
By J. Toussant
By K. Fox
By K. Adams
By S. Yu
Hello, everybody. It’s Cindy Ingram from the Art Class Curator Podcast. And today I want to kind of…. Not vent, maybe vent, I’m not much of a venter. But I have a comment that someone had posted, or it was not a comment, it was a post in the Art Class Curator Collective Facebook group. So it’s an amazing Facebook group. If you’d like to join us, head over to facebook.com/groups/artclasscuratorcollective, I believe is the address, but you can also just search Art Class Curator Collective.
And we have been talking obviously a lot about Black Lives Matter, how we support our students, how we can become allies, where we can learn about privilege, where we can learn how to help, all of those things. And so the post that this person posted, basically she said that… She said a lot of things. I’m not going to bring up all of them. But one of the things that she said is that basically, what does this have to do with teaching art? That wasn’t the exact word words that she used, but it was like… I’m going to open up the exact words here. It says, “This group is supposed to be about art. So if you want to teach art of many cultures, way cool. To use this as another platform and once more bring our kiddos into this is appalling.” Sorry. I’m reading that exactly as it’s written, and there’s more to it, but that was the beginning. So, “This group is supposed to be about art.” And my first reaction was, this is art. This is about art, because art is everything. Art is all of it. Art is everything. So when we put art in a box, when we put art separate as, this is art and this is real life, we’re doing art a disservice, we’re doing ourselves a disservice, because art is everything.
And I just wrote a bunch of words here, so I’m going to just going to kind of take each word and talk about it, but someone in the comments of that post, and I didn’t save the comments, I deleted the post, but someone in the comments had posted a picture of Guernica. And I thought that was a really good example, because if you think about Picasso, all his terrible character flaws aside, most of his career was painting pictures of still lives, women, children, that sort of thing. And he did not do political art at all, until the bombing of the town of Guernica. And he was so angered by that, that that led him to create his first political artwork. I don’t know how old he was when he made that, but he had done, a large portion of his career not responding to political events. And so it was made in 1937. And he was born… When was Picasso born? This is another chance of you listening to me, Google. Oh, he was born in 1881. So he was a good, like, 50 plus years at this point.
That’s an example of how the world moves us. The world moves us to create, it moves us to process and reflect and communicate and discuss. And art is a tool to do that. And so if we teach art as if it’s this bubble of the elements and principles, of it’s this bubble of technique, of it’s this bubble of just purely making something, we’re missing out on so much, and our kids are missing out on so much. Our kids are capable of having deep, real conversations. And I know so many of us shy away from these sorts of conversations because we don’t want flack from the principal, from the admin, from the parents. “Oh, you’re putting your views on my child,” and all of that. But these conversations can be had without bringing politics into it, without bringing Democrat versus Republican into it, because humanity and people and someone dying under the knee of someone else who is supposed to be helping, that’s not a political issue. That is a human issue.
And that is what we need to talk about. We need to talk about how we got here and how we can change it. And we can do that through art. Art gives us an amazing way to connect and to teach and to educate and to discuss in a safe way. We were talking about the art, but we’re talking about the bigger picture too. So all of this is art. Art also helps us look at the world in different ways. It helps us see something from someone else’s perspective and understand their perspective better. It’s an ultimate way of connecting with someone and seeing something from their point of view. And it’s easy to get trapped in our own mind and our own thoughts and our own experience of the world. And art allows us to see into another person’s experience in a really powerful, powerful way.
I’ve given this example probably a few times, you might’ve heard it. But when I was teaching community college, which was very early when I first started teaching, I would do a non-Western cultures group project, which if you remember the Curating Connections library, all the materials to do that project are in there. So just a little plug there, but each group would be assigned a different culture from around the world, well they would be assigned a part of the world, and they got to choose what culture it was, whether it was like something ancient or something, a group now, or anything like that.
So anyway, they were doing their presentations, and of course I required them to lead a discussion or some sort of engaging activity with the class. So it was more than just a presentation, they actually had to engage the class in some way. So I started teaching community college in 2007. And so this was right around the same time as the Iraq War, five years after 9/11, and Muslims were very much distrusted, and that’s not over, but it was big. And I live in Texas. And so one of my students was Muslim, and he wanted to do Islamic art as his presentation. So he and his group did a presentation on Islamic art, taught some of the main fundamentals, taught a little bit about the religion, and where it came from and all of that. And then I always let the class ask questions.
And so what happened was the discussion kept going. The kids in the class took that as a wonderful opportunity to have someone to talk to and ask these questions that they had. And so there were boys in the class who really thought all Muslims are terrorists and they would ask him, they were like, “Why is that? What…” And so there was this back and forth, it went on way longer than their presentation time. It was one of those Saturday morning, three hour classes. So we were scheduled to take our break. And I let some of them take a break, but I was like, “You can keep having this conversation through the break if you want to.” And they did, they kept talking about it, and they were talking about it after. And it was probably one of the highlights of my teaching career to see like, that activity made some changes in some people in that classroom. And think of the ripple effect of that throughout their lives. That was about 15 years ago. That can’t be true. Yeah. 10 or like, 12 years ago. Holy crap. Okay. Sorry. I just all of a sudden can’t believe how old I am.
So anyway, these conversations that start through art give students the ability to have a place to talk about things, have a place to reflect and to think, and that’s why we really harp on the idea of personal connection to art so much in what we do at our Class Curator, is because we know the power that an artwork has to change you, to change your life, to make you see the world in a different way, to connect you with someone else in a really deep, meaningful way. When you see the art made by another culture, when you see the art made by another person who is different than you, it connects you to their humanity in ways that you might not have connected. And this goes for music that they make, it goes to videos, performances, any type of art connects you to a person in a way that is so pure and so deeply connected.
So we can’t say that this is not about art. If we were doing crafts and painting flowers and teaching about implied line, and that’s all we did, okay, are you really teaching art at that point? Okay. Well, that’s where I’m going to start getting ranty there. So that’s what art is. It’s everything. We talked about the humanity and the connection. It gives kids and people and adults a chance to process, through the looking at art, discussing art gives you a chance to reflect and process. And through the making of art gives you another chance to reflect and process. One of the first answers I always get in the aesthetics lessons that I do at the beginning of the semester is that art is expression. And I kind of sometimes disagree, that not all art is expression, but it can be expression and it can be a way to process your feelings.
And we’ve seen some really amazing things just in the coronavirus. One of the people on my team, Jennifer Easterling, who has been on this podcast before, and she writes a lot of our lessons in the membership. She did our SPARK distance learning curriculum with her kids. And she wrote a lot of the projects in there. Well, I think she wrote all the projects in there. And she did this with her students. And one of them was a project inspired by Edvard Munch’s Separation. So the artist who did The Scream, he did a series of other paintings about core human emotions. And this artwork, Separation, is one of my favorites.
So her project was to assign them to do anything… Anytime that they felt isolated or lonely or separated and that sort of thing. And then they had to create something in that vein with any media, because the kids are at home. We didn’t know what they would have. So she shared with me some of their projects, there’s digital, there’s photographs, there’s all sorts of different things, but they’re all so deep and so meaningful. And these kids were really connecting deeply with that feeling, because they were separated, they were isolated, in their safer at home situations during the pandemic.
So art gives us a chance to tell our stories, to tell about our emotions, to process our emotions, to think about our emotions in such powerful, powerful ways. And so we need to do that through the Black Lives Matter movement. We need to be involved. We need to be actively anti-racist from the artworks we choose, the lessons that we do, all of our interactions with our students and the community, now is the time to make these changes. We need to not shy away from talking about it with our students, because it is about art. It is.
But I know that some of you, and I was in this situation, that some of you feel like you’re not supported from your admins. And I really hope that this changes with everything going on right now. I was teaching during the 2016 election. And the day after Trump was elected, I got a text message to all staff, all teachers, that said, “Don’t talk about this today with the kids.” And I was like… You’ve never seen me so mad. And I actually don’t get mad that often. But I was so mad, because I was like, one, it’s history. This is like a civic action, a major presidential election. And you’re telling me not to talk about it? That’s weird, first of all. But our students were, I think 90% Latino. And then I don’t remember the rest of the percentages, but it was mostly Hispanic students or Latino students.
So anyway, that was hard. And I did not follow that rule. I’m not really a rule follower sometimes. Like if I don’t agree with the rule, I won’t follow it. So anywho, that’s a rant for another day. So I know you don’t feel like you’re supported in this, and that’s a really good conversation to have with your teacher friends.
And so I recommend you joining our Art Class Curator Book Club, we are going to read “For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood… and the Rest of Y’all Too” by Christopher Emlin, I believe. I should have had his name offhand. I think that might be right. Yes, Emdin, not Emlin. We’re having a meeting for that book club on June 24th. So that’s only next week. So you might not have a time, but we’re going to have a second one on July the 8th. So you can find out about that by visiting the Art Class Curator Book Club Facebook group. And also if you’re on our email list, you should have gotten an email about that as well. Links to everything I mentioned today will also be in the show notes at artclasscurator.com/50.
Thank you so much for listening to the Art Class Curator podcast. I will see you next week. Bye.
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Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion with Dr. James Rolling Jr.
In this interview from the Call to Art Unconference, Dr. James Rolling Jr., NAEA’s President-Elect, discusses his role and vision for the newly created commission on Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion. In addition to supporting systemic changes, we discuss how teachers can create a classroom culture that supports connection, communication, conversation, and understanding.
Cindy Ingram:
Hello, and welcome to the Art Class Curator Podcast. I am Cindy Ingram, your host and the founder of Art Class Curator and the Curated Connections Library. We’re here to talk about teaching art with purpose and inspiration from the daily delight to creativity to a messy mishap that come with being a teacher. Whether you’re driving home from school or cleaning up your classroom for the 15th time today, take a second, take a deep breath, relax those shoulders, and let’s get started.
Cindy Ingram:
Hello, everybody. This is Cindy Ingram and thank you for joining me for the Art Class Curator Podcast. Today, I have a very special guest, Dr. James Rolling Jr. who is the president-elect of the National Art Education Association, as well as the chairman of the Task Force of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion in NAEA. We sat down for an interview for the Call to Art Conference that happened at the beginning of April and I have decided to take that interview and post it here as a podcast because I really felt it was a great conversation, a lot of good stuff about curriculum and the importance of equity, diversity and inclusion.
Cindy Ingram:
So, thank you again for Dr. Rolling for the interview and allowing me to post this on the podcast as well. I hope you enjoy our conversation. And if you’re still interested in participating in the Call to Art Conference, I know it’s over now, but you still can access the recordings. So if you go to learn.artclasscurator.com/cta, you’ll be able to buy the on-demand pass to access the other 49 presentations from that week.
Cindy Ingram:
All right. Well, I am so excited to welcome Dr. James Rolling Jr. to The Call to Art Conference. Thank you for joining me today.
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
Sure, Cindy. Thank you for having me.
Cindy Ingram:
So before we get started, can you introduce yourself and tell us about your professional journey as an art educator?
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
Yes, sure. So, just in general, I’m a former elementary school art teacher. I’m currently a professor at Syracuse University where I’m a teacher educator preparing new art teachers who got into the world. I’ve been here at my alma mater, as a matter of fact, because I did my MFA here many years ago. I’ve been here since fall 2007.
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
I’m also currently the president-elect of the National Art Education Association. That’s it in a nutshell my background as a kid from the… I was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York and still an East Coast kid. And then probably identified as an artist since I was a child given that I grew up in a household with an art studio in it. My father being a practicing professional artist and art director and graphic design.
Cindy Ingram:
Wonderful. Yeah. So, you see the power of being introduced to the arts very early in your life makes a big difference. Wonderful. So how long have you been involved with NAEA?
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
Oh, gosh. I was a student at Teachers College, Columbia University and did my doctoral work there between 19… finished in 2003. Just prior to that, my mentor in the field, Dr. Graeme Sullivan, just recently retired, introduced me to the conference. My first conference presentation at NAEA was probably I think in 2002 to 2003, one of those. I think it was 2002. So that was when I first got introduced to it. I was a K-12 teacher prior to that but I wasn’t involved with the NAEA at that time so I became involved as a doctoral student.
Cindy Ingram:
Awesome. So, you are the chair of the Commission on Equity, Diversity & Inclusion which is brand new to NAEA.
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
Brand new.
Cindy Ingram:
Just this year?
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Cindy Ingram:
So, can you tell us a little bit about how that got started and what the role is of that commission?
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
Sure. Well, it goes for me, my connection with the work is personal having oftentimes gone to schools from when I was bused as a kid to pretty much an all-white school in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, from my neighborhood in Crown Heights, Brooklyn as New York City was attempting to address inequities in terms of schooling. But ever since then I’ve gone to schools where I was typically one of a handful of persons of color there. So, the work first of all is personal but as far as doing it professionally, doing it for NAEA for the National Art Education Association.
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
From 2018 to 2019, I was a part of the NAEA ED&I Task Force. ED&I is equity, diversity & inclusion. And that was a task force which was put together by NAEA to deal with the charts, to really take a close look at the demographics and the histories of NAEA, as well as similar initiatives like ED&I initiatives by other organizations and to try to assemble a research base record with practical recommendations to advance ED&I work throughout NAEA and all its affiliate organizations.
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
And so ultimately out of that work, which was a little over a year, as the task force came up with about 16 recommendations to help make the work that NAEA wanted to do, was committed to doing, sustainable, all right, and measurable. The first of those recommendations was to develop a standing commission similar to the research commission for NAEA, that was the first recommendation. And so, when I got elected as president-elect, partly because of my history with the task force and partly because it was one of the roles that I was asked to take on in my duties as president-elect, what I do is different than what the president does which is different than what the president-elect, sorry, the past president does.
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
So in that role, I helped to lead a very rigorous and very confidential process of reviewing applications from across the nation. We got 74 applications to take seats, to draw from that 10 inaugural commissioners, ED&I commissioners. Each commissioner serving either a two-year or a three-year term and so they rotate off and then we’ll elect new folks and they’ll come on board. But we convened for the first time this past December in Alexandria, Virginia at NAEA headquarters. And so I’m honored to serve as the inaugural chair of this new commission.
Cindy Ingram:
Wonderful. So what are some of the things that, and I’m sure this is an evolving commission since as you only met one time, and even with the-
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
Let me clarify. We met for the first time in December but we’ve been meeting-
Cindy Ingram:
Oh, okay.
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
… by group since then.
Cindy Ingram:
Okay, good.
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
We have virtual meetings because the work is ongoing as you mentioned. So I want to clarify that we’ve met two to three times since-
Cindy Ingram:
Oh, perfect.
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
… our inaugural convening convening and we were set to meet again in Minneapolis but of course everything was canceled for obvious reasons in terms of the global crisis, but we will be having another meeting next week-
Cindy Ingram:
Oh, cool.
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
… and to meet regularly.
Cindy Ingram:
Awesome. So what are some of the things that y’all are… that you’re working on creating for the NAEA right now if it’s not-
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
I like that y’all by the way. We say y’all in Brooklyn too by the way.
Cindy Ingram:
Oh, okay. I’m in Texas so.
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
They had in Brooklyn too, okay. So, the two things I would say in my mind are primary goals. Other goals will be generated by talking with NAEA divisions and constituents and leaders and membership to sort of get a sense about what from the ground up folks want to see doing in their localities, in their regions, in their organizations but first and foremost, as I alluded to, was there’s still 16 recommendations from the ED&I Task Force. Our goal is to carry those forward. I’m not going to list them all here. Those can be found on the NAEA website-
Cindy Ingram:
Yeah, we’ll link to that below.
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
Yes, yeah. That’d be a great thing to do. But the whole purpose of all those recommendations is to help dismantles certain structural and institutional inequities that have been a part of the association in spite of its best intentions and meant also to help with the cultural shift towards greater ED&I vision and strategies that will aid our field in terms of greater equity, greater diversity, greater inclusion, greater accessibility.
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
And so, towards that last point is where I would say secondly where our goal is to serve as a catalyst for the work of the affiliated state organizations, any partners, for individual members who might look at themselves as field workers within this effort to prioritize and brainstorm and enact sustainable structures and systems for infusing ED&I and accessibility into their workplaces or into their art institutions, or into their museums, or their communities of practice. So those are, I would say, are the two primary goal.
Cindy Ingram:
Yeah, it’s interesting to think about from the perspective of that hierarchy of NAEA to all the state organizations to then all the schools and all the museums and everybody underneath it, and then all the individual teachers that every part has a different role to play.
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
Yeah, yes. Yeah. And I would say the-
Cindy Ingram:
So most of… oh, go ahead.
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
Well, just to add real quickly is that we’ve already had the opportunity in the roles of president, past president and president-elect to go out to state organizations and talk about this and start getting, so priming the pump so to speak as different regions and their regional conferences, leadership conferences, we’re beginning to think about, okay now, what do we do with this now, these recommendations? How do we adopt them and turn them into actionable practices?
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
So, we’ve already begun that work of going out and sharing what the recommendations were and what we could begin doing as the organization itself is currently beginning to develop a new strategic pillar along with organizational vibrancy and advocacy and research, a pillar for ED&I work so, well, things are converting, so-
Cindy Ingram:
That’s awesome.
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
Yeah.
Cindy Ingram:
Yeah. So, when it comes to these recommendations, and I actually did a podcast episode recently about where I went through and talked about some of my favorite ones. So what do you think is the biggest area for growth when it comes to… especially what an individual art teacher can do because a lot of people who are watching this right now are practicing teachers, that’s their main role at the moment. What are some of the things that they can be thinking about right now?
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
Okay. So, well, I want to say one thing in particular which is that to my mind, and this is something that I’ve… the way I conceive of diversity initiatives in general. Whether you’re enacting things that will change things in five years, 10 years, 20 years, whatever. In general, diversity to me is an organizational growth strategy. I also do this work, I should mention, here at Syracuse University, the director of diversity, equity and inclusion for our College of Visual and Performing Arts.
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
We tend to think about diversity, some folks think about it in a negative way, some folks are neutral about it. I think it is a total opportunity so sort of the same way that biodiversity makes for strengthen ecosystems naturally. We’ve talked about economic growth, the need for diversification. We talked about how genetic diversity within the social groups helps to make those social groups more adaptable when changes happen and makes them a stronger species. And so, we think about diversity in those other realms and we get it, right?
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
But sometimes we don’t get that it has exactly the same purpose in terms of associations and organizations that actually help strengthen organization and helps it to grow in ways that can’t necessarily be anticipated. So I think that just in general, wherever you are, whether you’re working in a school or working at an association or museum, if you are thinking properly about diversity initiatives, it’s not something that needs to be done just for the sake of checking out boxes. It’s not a dangerous thing. It’s actually a way of growing and strengthening who you are, who your association is, and who your community is.
Cindy Ingram:
Yeah, yeah, that’s great. I know that… I’m thinking about. I kind of have a question for you in my head. It’s trying to get itself together but it hasn’t quite happened yet. So, when we’re talking about diversity, I just kind of want to break it down. So, we’re talking about diversity in like, what are the different levels of diversity that we’re thinking about in terms of diversity of the staff, diversity in terms of your curriculum? Is there some pillars here that are not against?
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
Well. So, you asked an interesting question because when I’m dealing with this at a college level, we’re thinking about diversity as it pertains to students but it’s systemic, right? Because you should bring students in and they don’t see folks who look like them as mentors or leaders or to help infuse their experience with life experiences that they find commonality with or share. Those students feel alone and they don’t feel supported and they’re leaving because oftentimes they deal with not just intentional racism that does exists but sometimes the microaggressions that come from folks just not getting it and not really seeing them.
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
So what I’m getting at is that you almost have to deal with a lot of these things almost at the same time. Like if you were Thanos and you had a glove and you could snap and change everything at once of the ideal but that’s not the way it works. So you’d have to sort of figure out the different levels depending on what your institution is in terms of what it is that needs to be done in order to allow for whatever changes you make to take so that you don’t start something.
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
And then because you haven’t thought systemically about it, think about the many different levels of change that might need to happen to support one new change brought in because, I mean, your faculty can be brought in for instance or instructors. And if they’re not supported within a community, say it’s a very homogenous community just in terms of where they have to live and bring up their kids, they may not see it happens, folks don’t feel like to stay. And then all of a sudden you have a faculty member who you bring in and they’re gone in the next few years because they didn’t feel welcomed.
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
They didn’t feel like this was a community that really prioritized or valued their presence. All these things have to happen sometimes simultaneously. So I tend to think about it though and maybe this is helpful, I don’t know. I don’t think this is something where you top-down edicts to get it done. I don’t think you hire a chief diversity officer and they’re in charge of it and nobody else has to think about it.
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
I think it’s actually something where everybody has to be involved in the work of looking over the shows like in the kindergarten like where I think ultimately everything that we need to do… anybody needs to know about diversity, equity, inclusion, we learn in elementary school. When you look out for the kid who was being bullied or the kid who wasn’t being included in the game and didn’t want them to feel left out and you looked out for the person who was over your shoulder. So like it becomes a community effort.
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
Someone’s like we have to deal with it at a community level so that everybody values it, understands that it helps everyone, everybody wins if our world becomes a little bit more diverse, a little bit more equitable, a little bit more inclusive. So, I do think about that part of the work is to help everyone understand that it’s not one person’s job, it’s everybody’s job, right? And then everything becomes a lot easier that way.
Cindy Ingram:
So, I’m a very like logistical process oriented thinker. So I’m just like, “Okay, how do you do that? I mean, that’s your job, you have to figure that out.” But like for someone who’s a teacher in a school that is not embracing this goal, what can that one teacher, how did they get that started?
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
Well, since one of the places that I visited, I won’t name the state organization that I went to. When I talked about this work to them, there was a couple of folks who stated in a very, it wasn’t pushback, it was almost like, “Well, we don’t have any diversity here in our state, we have very little.” So it’s like where do we start, right, if there are very few people of color here, it’s a very homogenous state. But I also know a couple of folks who are on the ED&I, commission which is very diverse, who also live in states like that, right, but are totally committed to the idea of if nothing else, starting with what they teach right?
Cindy Ingram:
Yeah.
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
Because a part of what oftentimes happens in communities where there isn’t any much diversity in the first place, it’s sort of like out of sight, out of mind. It’s not an important thing because it doesn’t affect their everyday lives. They don’t see it, they don’t taste it, they don’t touch it. And so it becomes something that’s on a way, on a shelf, were in a high shelf, and maybe you pull down a project that you… your multicultural project for the semester.
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
But I think you can begin to combat that or pushback against that or make some changes when, first of all, you recognize that the content that we have in our curriculum for learning, right, we sometimes think, “Okay, I got to pull this off the shelf, we got to pull this out of the book,” and that’s what the curriculum is. So you feel like you’re responsible for giving it and imparting it. But we forget that kids come into classrooms with classroom content that’s already preloaded. They have life experiences, they live in their local worlds, they have intersections and conversations with folks that maybe we’ve never encountered as teachers, as instructors.
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
And I speak once again as a former elementary school teacher and I was one of those teachers who one of my… I remember a fourth grader who wants to talk to me about how he loved coming to my class because he loved learning about social studies. And what he was getting at was that we talked about stuff that was happening in society in our classroom. It wasn’t just about teaching skills. It wasn’t just about teaching, how to cut and looking at works of art from history but we actually also made art based on stories that were important to them, a family stories, cultural stories, stories that they that… even if you just have one or two students in your classroom who come from background who’s very different from others.
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
And then you begin to realize that everybody’s got stories that is totally unlike one another. It’s not just about persons of color being present in the room. But once you begin to understand that your curriculum content is not just the stuff that you pull out of your book, you begin to think differently about what you look at and what you use as a source or a prompt for creating an activity. And not just depending on what you know, you have to do something so things that are new as new people come in, new stories come to the fore.
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
And in general, if you make a class irrelevant to kids in that way so that they’re engaged because they recognize it, they understand it’s about real life, it’s not just about stuff to do, it’s not just about things to cut. It’s about real life and it’s about the way the arts have always been in central to cultures and civilizations, right? And it becomes much more relevant. And when it becomes much more relevant, classrooms become easier to manage because students understand that they’re invested in it and that this has to deal with who they are and who we are as opposed to what it is, right?
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
So, I think it’s just a different mindset. I recently gave a talk at the Corning Museum of Glass where I was sharing from the former NAEA president, F. Robert Sabol, I’d say a long time, maybe 10, 20 years ago, he wrote an article called Studying art history through the multicultural education looking-glass. And he was talking about this… thinking about curriculum differently through matrix.
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
And I’m going to read something here, it talks about looking at it through looking at the history of art, through the history of classified objects, through the history of competing forms, through divergent styles and universal ideas, through changing cultures, through varying symbol systems, looking at artists as influencers and looking at the personality traits that make an artist. But I will also add to that, just looking at the life experiences of artists who are coming from a diverse background, and the more varied that matrix is, the more ways you can combine and mix and match and create different kinds of approaches to your curriculum and make it just much more richer.
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
And if you begin to look at curriculum differently, I think it begins to open up ways for you to affect what you are getting kids to talk about and share about and engage about and that can be a starting point. Because one teacher can’t necessarily change the hiring practices of the school or the museum but they can change the stories that they tell and look at through an art’s lens.
Cindy Ingram:
That was beautiful. It was just like preach over here. That was amazing. I loved it. I just wanted to write it all down. Yeah, I just think that those-
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
They’re recording it.
Cindy Ingram:
… the people that practicing cutting and the zigzag lines and the things that a lot of teachers focus on. Yes, those things you can include, but I think we do such a disservice to our world when we limit art to skills like that.
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
Yup. Skill is important but it’s not the only thing that the arts comprise of. They’re comprised of our identity, our stories, our family ties, our current events. It’s materials but it’s also questions. It’s also a communication of information about who we are and what we experienced in a particular era in human history. It’s all these things. It’s not just objects and skills. That’s just a thin slice of what the arts should be defined as.
Cindy Ingram:
Yeah. And I think even to when you are opening up your curriculum to discussion and conversation and story that even if you don’t have diversity in your classroom, you’re teaching kids the skills to have those conversations when they’re older. You’re teaching them to be open. You’re teaching them to be vulnerable. You’re teaching them to recognize difference and you’re teaching them all of that even if you’re not in a diverse situation, so it’s only going to make the world better.
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
Yeah. You teach them to make connections and to make relationships and find relationships and to take the second and the third look as opposed to just one look and glance and then be done with it. No. When you teach those kinds of values or mindsets, when students finally encounter difference or encounter things that they don’t understand, encounter things that they’ve never really seen before in juxtaposition, they don’t look at it and go and shrug their shoulders and say, “I don’t know what to do with this and so I’m not going to think about it at all.”
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
They’re actually more ready to make the connection, find the meaning. Art is a meaning making activity, right? They’re more ready to engage and to grapple with and to interrogate and to question as opposed to turning the other way or being in curious, not asking any questions at all, right? And it gives them much more agency, right, which is what I think ultimately way, way back when I first started teaching, I began to understand myself as not just as an art teacher but as a creativity teacher.
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
And as a creativity teacher, my responsibility is not just to expose them to the world of art and design but to expose them to their own sense of agency as human beings. We forget that the root word of education is to educe, to draw out of, as opposed to putting stuff into students, right? So that’s the root word of everything that we do, right, to educe, to draw out what’s already there, to help develop what’s already there. And so, we can’t leave agency on the table, part of what we do as teaching folks how to be creative, and to be creative forces in the world is to help them to understand that they have the agency to make changes and to find the change that needs to be made, so to speak.
Cindy Ingram:
Oh, I love that. I’ve never heard that educe thing. I’m going to use that one. That’s really good.
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
Well, I was one of those kids who like read the dictionary when I was growing up.
Cindy Ingram:
Oh, yeah.
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
So etymology is a no friend to me.
Cindy Ingram:
Yeah. I really love that because that’s one of the things I talk about is that nowadays we are so trained to look for answers somewhere else rather than inside. And so that’s really cool. Okay. So, I love this conversation. Also, I’m wondering, what I see, I think I’m seeing at myself. I was trained this way to rock any boats, to keep quiet, to not offend anybody. And so, you get stuck in this to where then you’re afraid to speak up or you’re afraid to get something wrong so you just don’t say anything at all.
Cindy Ingram:
Do you know where I’m going at with that like, how do we… I know that’s the wrong tactic to take when it comes to having this kind of hard conversation, like what are some things we can do to help ourselves and our students be brave enough to have these sorts of conversations?
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
Well, so I would say, Cindy, that it’s very much about modeling that behavior ourselves, human beings. Well, just like all sorts of creatures, we need models to live by, stories to live by, models to extrapolate from that’s why we have mentors, teachers can be those. But if we’re asking certain things of students to be the one who’s daring to ask the question, the one who is willing to look out when everybody else is turning the other way and if someone’s being bullied, well, even if everybody else is bullying that person, how does someone feel the agency to be the one to step in.
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
They probably have seen it modeled by parent or by a friend or by someone they respect. We have to model that ourselves. We have to be willing to, like I say, take the second look and the third look and talk about it with our students. So as I’ve said, oftentimes to me the best teachers are those who are not performing teacher but are practicing relationship with their students. So, if they’re having a bad day, the students know that they’re having a bad day. If they’re frustrated, the students know that they’re frustrated. If they’re happy or something is worth sharing, they sit down in a circle and talk about it.
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
So, you have to practice it and model it for your students. Otherwise, they don’t know that it’s a thing to do or that it’s valued. So it’s about building a culture where… a classroom culture just within your own classroom to start with, right, where you’re willing to do such things, talk about things that are important to talk about and are… Obviously, you understand the needs of… you’re not trying to, just for the sake of tipping over the applecart.
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
What you’re doing is looking out for the best interests of your students and their families. And so that sometimes means being a voice in the wilderness. Hopefully, you’re not that lone voice but sometimes you have to be. And if you model that, I think that the students will see it and recognize if… At least in this place, it’s safe to talk about certain things.
Cindy Ingram:
Yeah, I love that. But I do think a lot of teachers walk around in fear of what the parents are going to say, what the administration is going to say. So on our class curator, we share all sorts of types of works of art and I get comments sometimes, they’re like, “Oh, I can never show that to elementary kids.” I’m like, “Yes, you could.” And then they can handle all of this stuff, they can handle these topics, but they’re so worried about getting in trouble or having a fight with the parents so that they choose to play it safe.
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
Yeah. So I cannot just say, well, just one quick thing because I know we’re running out of time. But I remember one of my favorite projects with my, I would say, it was my third graders. This was many years ago. I haven’t taught in elementary school for quite some time. But I did a cartoon project on political cartoons. Typically, folks do that kind of work in high school, middle school, but I knew that my… I started by prompting my students to talk about things that they have opinions about.
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
What is something that you wanted to change or do in the world, something you see in the world that needs to be fixed or needs to that we can do better at or something like that just to get their… because I knew that there were opinions and ideas in the room that were never given an opportunity to be voiced. And so part of the project was showing them political cartoons, the history of it. We happen to have a family, a parent, who was a well-known political cartoonist and we had to do a little workshop on what he did, right?
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
And ultimately, the whole goal was to get to the place where students would work from their opinions about the things that were important to them to see changed, to then express that in the form of their own political cartoon, understanding that to be critical is to be political, right? And understanding that political cartoons were never just about politics. They were about being observant about things that needed to be changed or fixed or that we could do better at as a society. And so it turns out that every kid had their own opinion about something that was important to them.
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
And so in the end when we put a little gallery of political cartoons up online, no parent could quibble with it because these were the ideas of their kids. I didn’t tell one of the students in my third grade classrooms what they should draw about or what they… It all came from them, right? So, the parents could only be proud, right? They couldn’t have trouble with it, right?
Cindy Ingram:
Yeah, I love that. That’s really good. Love that. Okay. So, we’ve completely gone off all the questions, which is totally fine, that always happens. I just write them just to make myself feel better. I know it always goes somewhere else. So to wrap up, I think that what I really loved about this talk on curriculum was that it’s not about just doing another multicultural project this semester, that you can infuse every lesson with these sorts of conversations and it’s just not about adding in-
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
And I’m checking it, not about checking a box. It isn’t.
Cindy Ingram:
Yeah, yeah. It’s a complete, yeah, framework for how you come view every single lesson that you do in every classroom.
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
Yeah. So I can have you switch out, allows you to switch out lenses so that you’re seeing… you know how sometimes with the red filter and you see certain things, with the green filter and you see certain things, but allows you to change out those filters and be aware that things are being filtered out. Sometimes those unconscious biases that we have, sometimes we need to put in a new lens every once in a while and see something through another person’s story or another person’s expertise to even our student’s expertise with their own life stories, right? And allow that to see our curriculum differently and to rework it.
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
And we use this because we’re all artists, right? So, we should be used to it and if we’ve forgotten that it’s all a work in progress then let’s get back to that mindset that it’s not static, your curriculum is not a static thing. It’s something that’s a work in progress and that shouldn’t be changed from time to time, moment to moment, as is needed and as is possible in order to keep it relevant and to keep it current and to keep it inclusive.
Cindy Ingram:
Awesome. Okay. I think that was a very good ending. So to wrap it up, I’m going to ask you the question that I asked everybody on my podcast so I’m asking in here too because we’re doing an interview. And that is which artwork changed your life?
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
It’s an interesting question because I’m not a… I grew up in walking distance from the Brooklyn Museum, which is actually a world class museum on Eastern Parkway. And I used to love that museum. But the works of art that I could speak about, a Rembrandt that affected me with this. But I’m going to go back to something I mentioned earlier on in this conversation that I grew up in a household where art was being made. I grew up in a household with an art studio in it. It’s a second floor apartment but there was an art studio that was always there.
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
And my father was always working and he allowed me and my brother, who also became an artist, a graphic designer. We all went to the High School of Art and Design. My father went to what was called the High School of Industrial Art. But when I was five years old, six years old, I identified as an artist and so my father did a portrait of me as a child, which I still use for different reasons and publish about it.
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
But that image is one of the longest image or the oldest images of me, that portrait that he did of me which he saw something in me in terms of my ability and my willingness and my peculiarity to make connections in sort of in my head. Instead of just like my natural hair texture, he created it as sort of like this network of lines and designs that suggest lots of connectivity happening like he was almost like x-raying into my head. And that particular image stays with me and I’ve used it over and over again. And I’m in my 50s now.
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
And so I would say that the image, the artworks that changed my life were artworks that nobody else knows about, they’re in my home, except for me sharing them in a publication. So my father wasn’t a famous artist. He doesn’t have any work with me at any museums but I guess that’s something which is important to me, which is that every human being is a creative being. And sometimes we are more aware of that creative gene and sometimes we’re less aware of it. Sometimes it gets schooled out of us. Sometimes we get convinced that those people over there are creative and I’m just like, what? I don’t know. I’m not creative.
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
And so many of our students think that way. And I think that I learned by the fact that I grew up in a household full of artwork that nobody will ever know about. They will never be famous but they were part of my everyday life, right. And I think that notion that my creative ability is supposed to be a part of my everyday life, just like it was a part of my father’s everyday life, my brother’s everyday life. I think that’s what has changed me and made me who I am today.
Cindy Ingram:
Yeah, I love that. And to get me started on art is only good if it was in a museum. So that’s wonderful. And do you have a link or somewhere that we can share a picture of that artwork?
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
Oh, sure.
Cindy Ingram:
Do you have it?
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
Yeah.
Cindy Ingram:
Okay.
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
I can send it to you after the call.
Cindy Ingram:
Cool. We’ll put it in the links below.
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
Oh, sure. Yeah. I think I have a LinkedIn article actually of all things, a LinkedIn article that features that particular image so-
Cindy Ingram:
Wonderful. We’ll link to that below. And last question is what can art teachers do to support your work? Is there a place they can watch what you’re doing on social media or is there any sort of things that they can help with?
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
Yeah. So, this is a good question. So just in general in supporting the work of our commission, Commission on Equity, Diversity & Inclusion for NAEA. First of all, I don’t know if anybody in your audience is not an NAEA member. I would encourage folks to become NAEA members if they aren’t already or to renew their membership. But part of what I asked folks to consider doing at their locality, I asked folks to think about themselves, to transform themselves into ED&I field workers because everybody wins that way.
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
When I went to a recent state conference, I asked folks to think about four different things as thinking about ED&I as something that wasn’t, something that somebody else did, but something that I did as a teacher, right? So ask yourself as a teacher, what are the needs in your school, your organization, your institution or state association in order to bring about greater equity, diversity, inclusion and accessibility?
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
Secondly, I asked folks to think about what is most needed at present in order to shape or advance a viable ED&I initiative in their own organization or their local region that will grow or strengthen their professional community? I asked them what are one to three ED&I ideas that you yourself as a teacher can present to your principal or to your state leader or to your colleagues for discussion and development and commitment over the next year so you can have a small incremental change instead of thinking big giant picture.
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
And finally, what are the steps or extra steps in order to execute one of those ideas and to sort of like break that idea into steps in order to get something done, right? And so basically I’m asking folks to think about themselves differently as a worker towards bringing… to create a diversity which to my mind is greater strength to their school or museum or wherever they work. And then to work with others to figure out how to get those things done. You can’t do it by yourself, right? Because like I said right from the very start, it’s a work that everybody has to do as a community in order to do it well, right?
Cindy Ingram:
Awesome! That’s great. Do you mind if I type that up and put that below this video too, those five recommends?
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
Sure. I will just email it to you so you can just cut and paste.
Cindy Ingram:
Perfect. Yeah. So we’ll link to that just so people can go back to that because I know I wanted to rewatch that part to make sure I got it all down. Wonderful! Okay. Well, thank you so very much for joining us today. It was-
Dr. James Rolling Jr.:
Thank you, Cindy [crosstalk 00:48:13].
Cindy Ingram:
Awesome.
Cindy Ingram:
Thanks again to Dr. Rolling for that amazing interview. And if you’re interested in watching the rest of the presentations from Call to Art, remember, you can go to learn.artclasscurator.com/cta to get the on-demand pass to access the 50 sessions from that amazing online conference that you missed back in April. Thanks again. I’ll talk to you next time.
Cindy Ingram:
Thank you so much for listening to the Art Class Curator Podcast. Help more art teachers find us by reviewing the podcast and recommending it to a friend. Do you have a work of art that changed your life? If so, send me your art story. You can send it to support@artclasscurator.com or leave a voicemail to (202) 996-7972. Get more inspiration for teaching art with purpose by subscribing to our newsletter, Your Weekly Art Break.
Cindy Ingram:
Recent topics include how to support English language learners, why we should teach artworks from black artists even if it isn’t February, and how to deal with teacher burnout. Subscribe at artclasscurator.com/artbreak to receive six free art appreciation worksheets. Today’s art quote comes from Bruce Gerbrandt and he says, “Creativity doesn’t wait for that perfect moment. It fashions its own perfect moments out of ordinary ones.” Thank you so much for listening. Have a great day!
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Artists as Activists: Black Lives Matter Art
Inside: Black Lives Matter art from across the Internet.
At Art Class Curator, we believe art should challenge us and inspire us. In this post, we feature some of the art that we’ve been looking at during this historic moment—from famous artists to those connecting on social media to slam poetry from students and adults. Many of these artworks are challenging, difficult to see or listen to, which makes them all the more important. We cannot look away. We cannot be silent. Sitting with our thoughts and the facts may be uncomfortable, but that discomfort must be the catalyst for change.
Black Lives Matter Art
Faith Ringgold, United States of Attica, 1972
Faith Ringgold, American People Series #20: Die, 1967 (See the artist discuss this painting here.)
By @nikkolas_smith on Instagram
By @madame_maya on Instagram
By @eme_freethinker on Instagram
By @doctaword on Instagram
By @shirien.creates on Instagram
By @artworkbychill on Instagram
artist unknown
artist unknown
This bronze sculpture sits outside the Salt Lake City Public Safety Building. Titled Serve and Protect, the artist, Gregory Ragland, used the ASL sign meaning ‘to serve’ as a representation of what the community expected from its first responders. An unknown protestor changed the symbolic meaning by pouring red, blood-like paint over the palms.
Black Lives Matter Art — Slam Poetry
Black Poetry (Contains strong language)
Values Demand Action
While activists are taking to the streets around the world to protest racial inequality, we’re opening up about our company values and the importance of diversity and inclusion at Art Class Curator.
Hello, and welcome to the Art Class Curator podcast. I am Cindy Ingram, your host and the founder of Art Class Curator and the Curated Connections Library. We’re here to talk about teaching art with purpose and inspiration, from the daily delight to creativity to the messy mishaps that come with being a teacher. Whether you’re driving home from school or cleaning up your classroom for the 15th time today, take a second, take a deep breath, relax those shoulders, and let’s get started.
Hello, everybody. It’s Cindy Ingram. I know it has been awhile since my last podcast recording. Maybe a month or two. I don’t exactly remember. Today is going to be kind of like one of those last ones where I don’t necessarily know what I’m going to say, but I know that I have some things to process. I got some feedback from the podcast I did from my bathroom about the pandemic that people appreciated, that I just kind of came on and started talking. So that’s what I’m going to do right now.
I haven’t been recording podcasts mainly because I didn’t know exactly what to say when everybody’s jobs are turned upside down and everybody’s worlds have completely changed because of the pandemic and because of everybody working from home, teaching from home, and that sort of thing. We offered the distance learning curriculum, we did the Call to Art conference, so I feel good about the service that we did do.
But now we’re in another situation where everything is turned on its head with the killing of George Floyd. I’m going to tear up. I’m certain of it. I already am. And all of the rioting that’s going on in the United States. I think we’re all in another situation where we know we have things to say, but we’re not exactly sure what to say, and so that’s what I’m going to do here.
I have been processing for days waves of rage, and in grief, and tears kind coming out of nowhere, and I now recognize that that’s my privilege in that this is not a new feeling for a lot of people in this world. It’s not necessarily a new feeling for me, but I’m so encouraged to see voices speaking up from people that I never hear this sort of stuff from. In my sort of conservative Texas area everyone I know is speaking up and it’s encouraging to me to see that.
I’m at a point where I’m running a business and having a lot of conversations about do we sell right now? We need to sell to keep the business running. We need to sell to make the difference that we want to make on the world. But it’s also like we want to make sure that we are doing everything in our power to stand up for what’s right. So it is in our company values of Art Class Curator, and I should open them right now, find that file, I should have had them opened up in advance, that we stand for diversity and we stand for other voices. Not other, but you know, everyone’s voices. And that as we are looking to what we’re doing next, we are making sure we lean even more into those company values, that what we do is everything in our power to stand for Black Lives Matter, to stand for equity and diversity and inclusion in this world.
So how we’re going to do that this month, the month of June, is that we are going to devote all of our content to issues of race and celebrating Black artists and celebrating and engaging in conversations related to white privilege and race and what we can do, what every person can do, to further this cause. So we have picked some artworks we’re going to feature. Artworks that challenge. Artworks that make you think. Artworks that make you uncomfortable.
We are doing a book club to talk about the book For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood and the Rest of Y’all Too, which I just recently bought a few months ago and I hadn’t started reading it yet. So we’re going to be talking about that book. So if you want to join that book club, you can go to the show notes and get the link. We’re going to do a Facebook group to talk about it as well as a Zoom call on June 24th, 2020.
Then we’re going to do our monthly membership curriculum guide that we write every third week of every month, we release. We’re going to do that on this topic as well.
I’ve said it before in other podcasts that I think white fragility exists from a place of… From a lot of places. But from one of the places that it exists is people are scared to say the wrong thing, that they’re scared they’re going to say something wrong and people are going to get mad at them. They’re scared they’re going to offend. They’re scared and so they just don’t say anything at all. I’ve seen this play out in all sorts of ways over the last few years in running this business and I’ve kind of stuck my fork in the ground. What is it? Fork in the ground? Foot in the ground? I don’t know.
Well, I’m sticking something in the ground, I don’t know what it is, that I’m no longer going to censor what I say to appease everyone. That there is no way to appease everyone, so I need to speak for my heart and for my values and from what I believe to be right. I know that I’m going to say something wrong and I have to learn to learn from that. I have to learn to live in that uncomfortable place. I have to learn to deal with that anxiety that comes from always wanting to be perfect and always wanting to be right.
One of my business friends said today in a meeting we were in that you have to be willing to be sore to get stronger. You know, when you’re starting an exercise plan, you have to be willing to be sore. I feel like that’s kind of what’s happening with these sorts of conversations. You have to be willing to get sore to get better at this. You have to be willing to have the conversation and to get in the ring and to rumble with these ideas if you’re going to make any sort of progress.
So that’s what we’re doing here. I just kind of wanted to say it out loud. Emails can be… We’ve been sending emails about this sort of thing, but it’s one thing to say it and to type it and to make it pretty and another thing to just kind of come out and just talk. So I just wanted to say that that is my commitment to you, to not shy away from the conversations that need to be had. It is my commitment to learn all I need to learn to make myself stronger. That means getting sore and that means being uncomfortable, but I’m going to read the books and the articles and talk about them, and I invite you to do that with me. It’s very important to us.
I finally got my values open. I was talking and trying to click and open to it at the same time. But the four values of Art Class Curator, just as a reminder to you, and actually you’ve probably never seen these because this is an internal document right now, but are diversity and open-mindedness. We feel that art is universal as all, I’m just reading from the values, art is universal as its artists are unique. We believe our lives, our team, and our community are better when we listen and raise voices and opinions from diverse backgrounds, cultures, and experiences. We’re committed to diversity and inclusion in the programs we create and the team that we build.
That’s the first one on our list. Then we also have, unrelated, but I might as we’ll tell you the rest of them, is joy and delight. It says, paint fades, pencils break, life is short. We believe in spending the time we have immersed in joy and delight, personally, professionally, and all the moments in between. We’ve seen the power of joy and delight as a spark for deeper learning in the classroom and we know the importance of keeping that spark lit throughout our lives. We’re committed to creating a workplace culture that’s positive, fulfilling, and bright with joy and delight.
But that doesn’t mean that we’re keeping things on the surface. I think that joy comes from a deep place of groundedness. It comes from knowing that you’re doing the very best that you… I’m tearing up again. You’re doing the very best that you can in all the areas of your life and that you can feel good about the contribution that you’re making in the world.
To me, when I am speaking for my truths and when I am living according to my values, that that is where the joy comes from. The joy doesn’t come from just having a few drinks with friends, the joy comes from sort of this deep satisfaction. So we want a place of joy, and I think you can’t have the joy and you can’t have the delight if you don’t have the uncomfortable feelings too, or that integrity to your values and your truth.
Our third value is connection and authenticity. Connecting with an artwork can change the course of a life. Connecting with people is the core meaning of life’s journey. We’re committed to being honest and real with one another. Each of us will stumble and fail. We fail these losses as a team so that we can learn, grow, and rise together.
So it’s really important for me to come in here and just post this podcast. I, honestly, as I’m talking, I’m like, oh shit, I shouldn’t post this. This is making no sense whatsoever. But you know what? I’m going to do it, because I just read that value of connection and authenticity and so I’m going to post it. Even if I sound like a crazy person as I’m talking because I keep breaking into tears.
Okay. Our fourth company value is passion and spirit. Most of humanity’s best artworks are born from a deep well of emotion. Our passion for art, our team, and our community enlivens our spirit, fuels our best ideas, and keeps us going when we fail. When we’re tapped into our passion, others are inspired by our spirit. We are committed to keeping that passion alive on our team so that we can empower our community to be the best at what they do – teaching and nurturing students while igniting a love for art that will transform generations.
You know, we wrote those and we live by them in our normal work, and haven’t yet sent that out anywhere. But I just wanted to tell you those to tell you our commitment and that we are committed to having this conversation. So if you have ideas on how we can do this better, if you have ideas on things you would like to see, we would love to hear about it.
But in the meantime, I would love for you to participate in our book club. Go to the Facebook Group Art Class Curator Book Club, and then you’ll get all the information there. There’s a Zoom call you can register for that is in your email if you’re on our email list, and you can also access it via the Facebook Group that you should be able to pull up in a search.
So, okay. Well, thank you so much for hanging out and listening to me today. I am committed to making more podcasts. I took a little bit of break, especially because all the people in my house. You can probably hear my kids eating in the other room and you can hear my dog clicking around, walking around. His claws on the floor always shows up in my recordings.
But we at Art Class Curator are here to have rich deep conversations with art, with each other, to make us better teachers so that we can impact the world. We are not here for anything more than that. I’m glad that you’re here with us. I’m glad that you are as passionate about this stuff as we are. We will carve out the future through art that can make us proud and that we can know that we have made a difference in this life on our students, on the community. Every student that we reach, every conversation that we have that makes us uncomfortable, those things are ripples through this world. I’m grateful that I get to do that with you guys.
So thank you for listening. I will talk to you all later. Bye.
Thank you so much for listening to the Art Class Curator podcast. Help more art teachers find us by reviewing the podcast and recommending it to a friend.
Do you have a work of art that changed your life? If so, send me your art story. You can send it to support@artclasscurator.com or leave a voicemail to (202)996-7972.
Get more inspiration for teaching art with purpose by subscribing to our newsletter, Your Weekly Art Break. Recent topics include how to support English language learners, why we should teach artworks from Black artists even if it isn’t February, and how to deal with teacher burnout. Subscribe at artclasscurator.com/artbreak to receive six free art appreciation worksheets.
Today’s art quote comes from Marina Abramovic, and she says, “Art must be life. It must belong to everybody.”
Thank you so much for listening. Have a great day.
47: Teaching Art from Home: Creative Online Learning Ideas
Teachers around the world are taking their lessons online. Teaching art from home is a challenge, but when we work together, it gets a lot easier. Learn about some of the free distance learning resources art teachers are sharing in this episode.
Hello and welcome to The Art Class Curator Podcast. I am Cindy Ingram, your host and the founder of Art Class Curator and the Curated Connections Library. We’re here to talk about teaching art with purpose and inspiration from the daily delight to creativity to the messy mishaps that come with being a teacher. Whether you’re driving home from school or cleaning up your classroom for the 15th time today, take a second, take a deep breath, relax those shoulders and let’s get started.
Hello everybody. It’s Cindy Ingram from Art Class Curator, and I am back with another bathroom episode of The Art Class Curator Podcast because that is the quietest place in my house right now to record an episode. My husband is working from home and we are sharing an office. And usually I kick him out when I want to make recordings, but I could not do that because he has a meeting at the same time so we’re here in the bathroom. That’s life now.
I want to, first, in this episode share with you a couple of things we’ve got going on with Art Class Curator that we’re super excited about. And then I want to talk about a lot of the creative ideas that I have been seeing with the online learning thing because a lot of us are now being forced to take our classrooms online. I talked last week a little bit about the importance of connecting with your students, calling them, making sure you’re checking in, and not as much about the curriculum.
What I want to talk about today is more about your curriculum and the ideas that you might be doing or using. And I have to say I have been blown away this week with… Well, I’ll be posting this episode on Monday. It’s Friday right now. Nothing like waiting until the last minute, but I have just really been blown away this week with the creativity and the love and just the creative problem-solving that I’m seeing with teachers and educators administration across the world. It’s really, really blown me away.
There was a time this week even that… The district that my kids go to are starting their online learning next week and I was watching a video that my daughter’s middle school was posting just about laptop checkout. They have Chromebooks at their school that they use and so we could go pick them up. And I was just like, right in the middle of that video… It’s a pretty short video, but they were cute about it and they were being silly and the assistant principal was dancing in the background. And I was like, you know what? I just got an immense wave of gratitude for all of these people who are… I’m starting to tear up about it now. But all these people who are out here solving problems. How are we getting kids fed? How are we getting kids educated? How are we supporting the mental needs of the kids and emotional needs of the kids? They’re thinking through all of this.
And it’s such a burden on all of us, but it’s also just, I cannot be more grateful to all of the teachers and administrators out there that are going through this for the sake of our kids. And I know you’re worried and you would rather be in there with them, but I know that our kids are in such good hands. I really do. So thank you for all you’re doing. If you don’t hear that enough, thank you so much. We’re all too going to get a sense of gratitude from parents who realize all that we do and maybe teachers are going to be seen in a new light coming soon, so we’ll see.
Alright. Well, let’s move on before I start crying about how amazing you all are more because I already have tears on my face, so I’m going to move on. The first thing I want to tell you about is we are putting on an online conference. I have to tell you, the last episode that I made, I came here and I didn’t know what I was going to say and I just sort of started talking because I think I needed to verbally process everything. I was in a really state of like flight, fight or freeze. Last week I was in freeze. I was just terrified. And what I did to get out of that is I just kind of processed it through the podcast and that really helped shake out some of the anxiety that I was feeling and sent me into kind of a plan of action.
We created our Instagram challenge, which I told you about last week. I am loving the Instagram challenge. It is just totally giving me life. Go to my Instagram, instagram.com/artclasscurator to get the You Need Art Challenge. Everyday we’re posting a new challenge. We’re taking a break over the weekend because we realize this thing’s not going away, so we might as well pace ourselves a little bit. But the challenge have been anywhere from painting with coffee to posing like Chinese sculptures to finding artworks that make you feel. We’re just really giving a wide range of types of things that you can do with students, and you can take those challenges and send them to your kids. In our minds when we’re creating those, I’m thinking, “Okay, can a child do this too?’ My daughter has been having fun. We can get the challenges too in thinking about what she would do. She hasn’t actually done any of them yet. I’m not making them do any schoolwork this week, so anywho.
The other thing which I started to say… I’m a little bit
squirrely right now, but, is we’re putting on a conference. So NAEA was canceled. I was set to present twice in NAEA and I know a lot of people really look forward to NAEA as a place to connect and see your colleagues and feel less alone, actually get relevant professional development instead of the things that we’re stuck into at our school districts. And I just was feeling a big void with that. I had already started to talk to some of my friends who were going to be there. We were already starting to make plans and then instead we got the rug swept out from underneath us.
What I decided to do was to throw together an unconference, a virtual conference, a virtual online summit where a lot of people can come together, share ideas with presentations and fill a little bit of that gap that we are feeling with the cancellation of NAEA. This is not an NAEA program, but it’s something to help us feel a little bit like we can get some of that back.
This conference is called Call to Art, an Unconference for Art Educators. You can register at artclasscurator.com/calltoart. And if you forget, just go to Art Class Curator and this will be in the show notes. You can also check any of our social media and you’ll find links to it there too. And it is a free conference. For the entire week of March 30th through April 3rd, we will have three to five or more depending on if I get some more presenters, which I’ll tell you about in a minute, online sessions.
Everybody’s recording their presentations and you’ll have access to them all week and the following week, and we will have some areas for chatting about the content in our Facebook group. It’s just a really a fun way to pull together, share ideas and I’m super, super excited about it. I already have, I think, 18 presenters at the time of recording, although I am getting more. So if you are interested in presenting at Call to Art, please send me an email to cindy@artclasscurator.com. There is a form. If you’re on our email list you would have gotten the link to the form when we announced it, but you can also send me an email if you can’t find that and I’ll also put a link in the show notes.
But if you have a topic to share, anything related to teaching art, especially anything related to online teaching, but it doesn’t have to be just online teaching. I left it open so that we could have a range of types of things because you’re going to go back in the classroom eventually, so a lot of it we can still learn from each other too. I’m super excited. Please join us at artclasscurator.com/calltoart. Again, it’s a free conference and it starts a week from when I post this podcast. And so that will be on March the 30th that it begins. Super, super exciting.
Okay, so let’s talk about the content of today’s lesson. First, I want to share with you what I’m recommending for how to do an online lesson. I think this is an amazing, amazing opportunity to incorporate, and of course you know I’m going to say this because I’m Art Class Curator, is to incorporate more works of art into your classroom because your students might not have access to all their art supplies. You’re not there to help them with their art technique, that you can only do so much when you’re separated from them. However, they can interpret art, they can connect with art, and you can use this as an opportunity to do that.
What we’re recommending in the membership of the Curated Connections Library is to take our artwork of the week lesson. We have over a hundred of these lessons, artwork of the week lessons, and in them there’s a PowerPoint, there’s a lesson plan, there’s like three to five engagement activities related to them, and then there’s extensions that are like art project ideas too. And all of the worksheets for the engagement activities are in there, which are in DOC format and PDF format, so they’re really easily transferred into Google Docs with that Word Doc.
And so what we’re recommending is you pick an artwork for your week and then you, on day one, you introduce the artwork and have them do what we call The Spark Framework. And The Spark Framework is from Art Class Curator, and I’ll link to it in the show notes, but it’s see, perceive, ask an answer, reflect and know. And so they interpret the art with those prompts. There’s a worksheet that you can use, and so you do that on the first day. And then like days two and maybe three, you have them do one of the engaging activities. Maybe it’s a compare and contrast with another artwork, maybe it’s writing a poem about the art artwork. These are so wide ranging. A kinesthetic activity, anything sort of thing that helps them engage with the artwork in a different way rather than just answering questions about it.
And then do it for the rest of the week, having them do one of the extension projects, so a small art project that is related to the artwork. It’s not a copy of the artwork. We don’t ever put that in there. We don’t support that. But if the artwork is about community, maybe they do an artwork about community or if the artwork uses a lot of pattern, maybe they do an artwork that has a lot of pattern. Those are really simplified versions. But it’s a really easy structure and then every week you can do a new artwork.
That is what we’re recommending. And Jennifer, who is on our team, she’s been on the podcast before, Jennifer Easterling, that’s what she’s doing. She’s just setting it up. I talked to her yesterday and she was just setting it up for hers to start on Monday. And I asked her if she would make a video of how she’s doing it and how it’s going, so that should be coming along the pipeline sometime too.
They’re a really easy structure. You have to think too hard about it, but it’s meaningful. They’re doing something meaningful. It’s not busy work. I know a lot of our kids are going to be just filled with a lot of busy work over the next few weeks, and this is something that they can actually benefit from and they can learn from and they can connect with art in in new ways. We recommend that.
If you are interested in getting those artwork lessons, they are part of the membership, the Curated Connections Library Membership, which right now is completely open for enrollment. We usually have it closed this time of year, but we just decided to leave it open. So if you go to artclasscurator.com, you’ll see at the top there’s a link to it. There’s a link this has join, so you can head over there if you’re interested in checking out those lessons. We have over a hundred artwork lessons. They are really wide-ranging, women, diverse, other countries. We really make sure we include a wide range of types of art and they are all filterable by, say you want to a female artist from Africa. You click female, you click Africa and it’ll pull up what we have in the archive with those terms, so a lot of different options there.
That’s what we’re recommending, but I want to share with you some other creative ideas that I’ve been seeing on social media that I’ve been really inspired by. One of them is not necessarily an art project, but it is a community connection type of idea. One of my friends, her neighborhood… And you might’ve seen this. I’ve seen a couple neighborhoods post this. That they’re having a neighborhood challenge and then they put things in their windows so that as people are walking their dog or riding their bike, they can look at the window and see that the art from the window.
It might be not just art with this thing, but what she’s doing is they made a family window museum. They posted a little label and it has her last name and it says, Window Art Museum. And then they’re posting the art that the kids make in the window for their neighbors to see when their neighbors are walking by, and I just thought that was so, so clever. And that might even be something that you could do with your kids and you could say, “Put your art in your window,” and then maybe you at one point drive by and check it out. You can imagine that would make a student feel really special if they said, “Hey, we made this art museum in our window.” And then you said, “Yeah, I saw it,” and then you made a comment about it. Like, can you imagine how special that would make your student feel? Right now, they need all of that.
Another idea is Devin Calvert from Mr. Calvert’s Art Room. He’s also, I think, the president of Wisconsin Art Education Association. He is one of the speakers at The Call to Art. He is doing for his students an Artist of the Day and he’s posting a video every day for his students. And I think you can actually follow that online. I can see him. If I can find a link to that, I’ll post them in the show notes as well. But you probably can just send his videos onto them, I would imagine, because I think they’re public. I think that’s really awesome. A way to introduce your kids to more artists.
I’ve seen a lot of creativity challenges. My friend Jamie Hand, she runs the website, Preschool Steam, is doing challenges to get kids creative thinking. And now’s the time to really focus on creativity. If we don’t have the normal supplies that we usually have, what can we do? I’ve seen color wheels made from objects in your house, collecting all the different colors and then making a range. Even you could do value, you can say, “Okay, get all the ranges of blue that you can find and then put them in order from lightest to darkest,” things like that. Any sort of creative challenge like building challenges or engineering challenges, anything like that would really help give your students something fun to do. Give them a break from all of the worksheets that they’re about to have to do. I’m really scared about how many worksheets are about to happen. I really hope it’s not too many.
Another awesome resource is something that Amy Bultena from Artful Artsy Amy, another presenter at Call to Art, and I’m sure you’ve seen this on Facebook, but she compiled and had teachers send in their digital learning lessons into this giant Google folder. I think you couldn’t see the folder unless you submitted a lesson, but now she’s opened it up for everyone to see. You can still submit lessons, but now she’s made this resource public. I will put a link to that as well in the show notes with her permission. I need to ask her if she’s okay with me doing that. If not, you can check out all of the art teacher Facebook groups on Facebook, all of those groups and you will find it pretty easily.
I’ve been seeing a lot of teachers post videos for their students. Even one of my daughter’s teachers sent one yesterday and it was so silly and she had her like pet hippo stuffed animal and they were talking about what they’ve been doing. And just little things like that about your life, what you’ve been doing, giving them a tour of your house, little things that can increase that connection and make it feel less isolating. Less like you’re just giving them busy work because you don’t know what else to do and more like, “Hey, I’m your teacher. I miss you.” I think our kids really need to hear that.
All right, so that’s what I got. I hope to see you at The Call to Art Conference. Again, that’s artclasscurator.com/calltoart and then the You Need Art Challenge is on Instagram. Both of those things are free. We are super excited about them and we hope to see you there. All right, thanks so much.
And oh, one more thing, I’m having a hard time with the podcast, thinking of what should this podcast be. If no one is teaching, what do you all need? If you have a topic idea, if there’s anything you want me to talk about, I would love to hear what you have to say. And also some of the presenters from Call to Art, I’m going to schedule their interviews as podcast episodes too, things related especially to this online learning thing where we’re dealing with. But I would love to hear any ideas that you have on podcasts that you want to hear, things that you want discussed and I really appreciate that. You can send those to support@artclasscurator.com.
All right. Thanks so much. Have a great day. Stay safe. Stay healthy. Love you. Bye.
Thank you so much for listening to the Art Class Curator Podcast. Help more art teachers find us by reviewing the podcast and recommending it to a friend. Do you have a work of art that changed your life? If so, send me your art story. You can send it to support@artclasscurator.com or leave a voicemail to 202-996-7972.
Get more inspiration for teaching art with purpose by subscribing to our newsletter, Your Weekly Art Break. Recent topics include how to support English language learners, why we should teach artworks from black artists, even if it isn’t February, and how to deal with teacher burnout. Subscribe at artclasscurator.com/artbreak to receive six free art appreciation worksheets.
Today’s art quote comes from Yayoi Kusama and she says, “I want to start a revolution using art to build the sort of society I myself envisioned.”
Thank you so much for listening. Have a great day.
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Art in Times of Stress
The whole world in one big ball of stress and anxiety as coronavirus continues to spread. Let’s talk about how we can use art to deal with all of this.
Hello, and welcome to the Art Class Curator Podcast. I am Cindy Ingram, your host and the founder of Art Class Curator and the Curated Connections Library. We’re here to talk about teaching art with purpose and inspiration from the daily delights of creativity to the messy mishaps that come with being a teacher. Whether you’re driving home from school or cleaning up your classroom for the 15th time today, take a second, take a deep breath, relax those shoulders, and let’s get started.
Hello everybody. This is Cindy Ingram from Art Class Curator. And before we get into this episode, I want to tell you about a new program that we’re going to do to help us with the coronavirus. I actually had the idea for this after I recorded this episode. Because as you’ll see at the end of the episode, I started to think about ways of adding more art into our lives during this time.
So what we are going to do on Art Class Curator is have the You Need Art Challenge. So what we’re going to do every day on Instagram, which is instagram.com/artclasscurator, we are going to do a daily challenge task that is somehow related to a work of art that will give you a little creative break, a chance to use your mind in a different way, and to add some lightness and joy into this rough time.
The challenge is starting on Saturday, March 14th. So if you are listening to this afterwards, you can check out the past prompts at instagram.com/artclasscurator and get caught up with the challenge or just jump right into whatever day it is. We’re going to run this for at least 30 days as long as we feel the need for this, which I have a feeling will be a little while. I look forward to seeing everything that you come up with. All right, so let’s get into this episode.
Hey everybody, Cindy Ingram from Art Class Curator. In today’s episode, I have to tell you, I had a completely different plan of what I was going to say. Then, I scrapped it because I just couldn’t manage to form a complete sentence about that topic. So I’m going to talk about that, about how that happened.
So right now, I am in my bathroom because my children are home. They are on Spring Break this week. Their schools have been canceled next week for an extended Spring Break because of the coronavirus. My husband is working from home because of the coronavirus. So I have a house full of people. My 10-year-old daughter, last I checked, was in the backyard swinging and singing ‘Into the Unknown’ from Frozen at the top of her lungs. I was like, “That is really appropriate,” because it’s kind of how I feel right now. ‘Into the Unknown’ should be sort of our theme song for the coronavirus and what we’re doing here. It’s just completely unknown and uncertain.
I thought I had a handle on sort of my role in helping teachers through this, and so I created a podcast episode. My podcast episode was going to be about tips for taking your class online for e-learning. Because I do have like four years experience, not counting my Art Class Curator experience, of teaching online. That’s what I did when my kids were babies, is I worked for one of those homeschooling companies. It helped provide a curriculum for online charter schools, and homeschool students, and stuff like that, and I was an art teacher online. I have a lot of ideas about that.
But as I was talking about it, I just felt just completely stifled in what to say. Because I don’t know about you, but I am just feeling really overwhelmed about everything that’s going on right now with the coronavirus. So I just felt like talking it out and trying that. I’m not exactly sure. I don’t have an outline like I usually do. I don’t have things I’m wanting to teach or a message that I’m trying to get across here. But I just felt like there’s so much noise right now on social media, and on the news, and in every conversation I’m having with every person about it that I am getting to the point where I’m getting a feeling. The term I used earlier with my team is I was like, “I’m trying to create this podcast episode. But really, all I want to do is crawl into my closet, cover myself with blankets, and come out in two months. I feel like an anxious pile of goo.” But maybe if I go into my closet, cover myself in blankets I can maybe form to be a person and just sort of hibernate, you know? So that’s where I’m at.
So many people are with so many different opinions. Hey, we’re going to go on this cruise and risk it anyway even though I have elderly parents who have health issues or … It’s like all of this stuff, and you don’t know who to believe. You don’t know what information you can trust. You don’t know what it means for your family, for your community, for your parents. I know a lot of us in my age are especially worried about our parents. It’s pretty terrifying.
So I’m trying to think of what I can do. And what I can do is I can donate to the food bank. I can keep my family, practice my social distancing. I’m not going to be going to NAEA. They have not canceled it yet. I am pretty sure they will. If they don’t, I think that’s crazy. But, we can each do our individual part the best that we can.
But, I also know that my resources on Art Class Curator have the ability to assist in this time of need. So we have decided to open up our membership, the Curated Connections Library. We decided to just open that up. It’s usually closed, only open a couple of times a year because that’s … It’s easier to segment for the selling part of my brain versus the content creation part of my brain when I have those things separated. But in the instant in … There’s a lot of people who need things right now that we are going to keep that open. So if you go to artclasscurator.com/join, you can learn about it. It’s our membership with tons of art appreciation resources right at your fingertips.
The next thing that we’re going to do is create plans for those of you who are moving to online learning. So a lot of you are forced to take … You’re not in the classroom anymore. You have to deliver your lessons online in some sort of format. So we’re going to create plans within the membership that uses the resources from the membership, points you to the things that we think will work best, and then give you a place to start and go from there.
I am feeling the need especially to encourage art in this time. I just realized last night. I was getting ready for bed or I was laying … I usually read in bed before I go to sleep. I had just finished a book so I didn’t know what to read yet, and so I’m just sort of scrambling. Then I get sucked into all the news articles and news article after news article until I realized at some point that I’m like, “I am completely swept up.” And I didn’t necessarily realize how swept up I was, but I was like, “This is all I’ve thought about today.” I looked back on the day and I’m like, “Coronavirus was like 100% what I thought about that day,” which is really interesting because I’m not usually someone who gets worked up about the news and about the current events, that I usually have trust that everything’s going to be fine. And I do have trust that everything’s going to be fine, but that I realized that I was letting all of this weigh on me too, too heavily.
So I think what we need right now is art, that we need an escape. We need a place to process our feelings. I have someone in one of my groups that I’m in, it’s a mastermind group for business, and she is a coach. She also has her own mastermind groups, and she has been leading conversations within her community about how they feel and giving them a space to just to share that feeling, and to be brave, to be courageous, and share how they’re feeling in an accepting way. Because right now, any viewpoint you take or any … As you’re wiggling through this, it’s all up for criticism.
And I think it’s really important to remember that how everyone deals with this is unique and how everyone deals with this is … Someone else might be super angry about the administration’s responses where someone else is super scared because they have an autoimmune disorder, or their parents have asthma, or … And then someone else is threatened by their lack of freedom by this whole social distancing thing so they just go out and do things anyway. Everybody’s going to have different feelings about this. And I think if we had more art, we can think our way through this, and express our way through this, and feel our way through this I think in a more effective way.
So I’m not sure what that looks like. I’m not sure. I’m not sure what that means, honestly, for what I’m going to do moving forward. I know that I personally am going to make a commitment to myself. I’m tearing up when I’m about to say this because that makes me know that … Anytime I tear up when I’m about to say something, I know I’m on the right track. But, I know for myself I am going to make a more concerted effort to do something creative in this time. I’m going to break out my paints. I’m going to maybe write some new lessons. I’m going to do something that fulfills me creatively, even if I can’t go to the art museum, which I learned just canceled all its programs in Dallas. They’re still open for now. But, I think it’s important that we remember that in times of great stress, in times of emotional upheaval that we can use art in a way that is meaningful.
I know something’s going to happen from this, from Art Class Curator. We’re going to think about what we can do as a community to help keep people engaged in the art, because that’s going to be a soothing thing for people. I don’t know what that looks like just yet, but I just know that that’s what I’m thinking about. I would love to hear your ideas. I really think that we could do something great in this time. I honestly, like just as I’m talking about it, I feel more sure that this is what we should be doing. But, I would love your feedback on if you have ideas on what we can do to help this, not only for our students but for ourselves and for each other, that we need art. I’m going to keep thinking about that. So keep looking for my emails if you’re not signed up to get the emails. We’re going to come up with it. We’re going to come up with something that we can … that can tie us together.
So for those of you who are doing online learning, I’m do want to share the tips that I was going to share in my original podcast episode that was just far too tactical and not enough emotions, and I think that is generally … When I get to tactical and not enough emotions, you know I’m not usually on the right track there. I’m a feelings person.
My biggest tips for you for if you are in that situation is to do not forget that no matter what curriculum you choose, whether you go into the Curated Connections Library, membership, artclasscurator.com/join, and you do art connection lessons where students are interpreting art or you send them to Khan Academy and you have them learn about art history, or you send them to how-to-draw videos, or you send them to anything else on the internet, that whatever you choose to choose it thoughtfully, to not do coloring sheets and busy work. Don’t just do something that is just going to keep them busy, but this is a really good time to address those emotional, social needs that they’re going to have. Because if we’re feeling uneasy about it, our children are empathetic. They feel what we’re feeling. They are picking up on all of this. And they might not be sharing those fears with you or with anybody else, but they’re feeling them just as much as we are, and they’re probably more confused. Because we’ve got all the news media, they’ve got just what snippets they hear from adults. So, I think it’s really important to help our students through this.
I love schools that are passing out lunches, making sure that the kids are still fed. That is huge. But, also think about those emotional needs. So when I was teaching online, it often wasn’t about the curriculum, it was about connecting with the kids. So it was reaching out every day, sending them an email, a class newsletter, sending them a cute little ChatterPix of Mona Lisa but with your voice over it telling them to have a good day. Little things like that can foster that connection.
Another thing I would really look to is if you are using a Google Classroom or another LMS that you build in classroom discussion, so places where the kids can share their feelings, share their thoughts. Maybe you put an artwork up and they talk about it. Or maybe you just ask them how they’re feeling about this or you have them draw a picture of how they feel about all of this, that using this as an opportunity to find ways to connect socially when there is social distances.
We’ve got the amazing internet on our hands. And I know a lot of kids don’t have the internet. A lot of districts are working on getting Chromebooks to the kids and stuff like that. But, really think about ways to foster connection, and you can do that through your curriculum. You can do that through art assignments. You can do that through what artwork you choose to show them and what you talk about. You can also do online classes in person, like a live action class online. So you can use a program called Zoom. You can use a program called Electa Live. I’ve used both of those. And you can do online office hours. Every day from 10 to 11 you’re in there to answer questions, just to chat with a student if they need someone to talk to, just ask how they’re doing, you know? I think all of that is super important in this time of instability and uncertainty.
What can ground us is our relationships with other people, having places to go. And I think that is what led me to record this is because I was feeling that way. I was feeling totally my anxious ball of goo that I said earlier. I reached out to two of my teammates on Art Class Curator, also my friends, and I was like, “I can’t.” I was like, “I don’t know what to do. I feel completely stuck,” and they said … Madalyn, who is on my team, she says, “Be real. Say you’re feeling like goo and go from there. She said, “Be you.” And I was like, “Okay. I’m going to do that.” So that’s why I am recording this. Just that’s it.
I hope that what you got from this episode is that you’re not alone, that I want to challenge you to think about ways to support yourself through this stressful time. You’re at home with your kids at home when you can’t go anywhere. How are you not going to go insane? Think about yourself and your self-care and use art as a way to creatively address how you’re feeling. And give yourself a break. Give yourself grace. No one knows what they’re doing right now. I’m really inspired by a lot of the solutions I’m seeing out there in the world right now. I know that we’re going to see a lot of human greatness come out of this. And let’s make art the thing that brings us together in our communities and with your students.
So that’s all I’ve got right now. I will be back hopefully next week with some ideas in place for how we can make this happen. Thank you so much for listening, and for understanding where I’m at, and helping me realize that I don’t have all the answers. None of us have all the answers. And that is okay. So, thank you so much. Have a wonderful day. Stay healthy, stay safe, wash your hands, you know, all those things. Alright. Bye.
Thank you so much for listening to the Art Class Curator Podcast. Help more art teachers find us by reviewing the podcast and recommending it to a friend. Do you have a work of art that changed your life? If so, send me your art story. You can send it to support@artclasscurator.com or leave a voicemail to (202) 996-7972.
Get more inspiration for teaching art with purpose by subscribing to our newsletter, Your Weekly Art Break. Recent topics include how to support English Language Learners, why we should teach artworks from black artists even if it isn’t February, and how to deal with teacher burnout. Subscribe at artclasscurator.com/artbreak to receive six free art appreciation worksheets.
Today’s art quote comes from Bruce Garrabrandt, and he says, “Creativity doesn’t wait for that perfect moment. It fashions its own perfect moments out of ordinary ones.” Thank you so much for listening. Have a great day.
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Trip Over the Truth: Crafting Lessons with the End in Mind
What do you want your students to know? What do you want them to remember from art class next year? What about in 5 or 10 years? In this episode, we’re talking about the power of moments and how to create a curriculum with the big picture in mind.
Hello and welcome to The Art Class Curator podcast. I am Cindy Ingram, your host and the founder of Art Class Curator and the Curated Connections Library. We’re here to talk about teaching art with purpose and inspiration from the daily delight to creativity to the messy mishaps that come with being a teacher. Whether you’re driving home from school or cleaning up your classroom for the 15th time today, take a second, take a deep breath, relax those shoulders, and let’s get started.
Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Art Class Curator Podcast. This is Cindy Ingram and today on the podcast we are going to talk about a little bit about something that I was inspired to talk about by a book that I’m reading. I am reading a really fantastic book and it is called The Power of Moments by Chip and Dan Heath. I haven’t even finished the book and I already have probably five podcast ideas just from all of the content in this book. It’s really, really good. It’s not just good for a teacher. It’s good for a parent. It’s good for a business owner. It’s good for, I think anybody who interacts with other people or is in charge of creating joy in the world. So basically what the book is about is these powerful moments that make up your life and how when you’re looking back on your life, it’s these really pivotal moments that create the memories, that create the transitions in your life, that create the things that you look back on.
One of the things that he talked about in the book, and I could go in many different directions for this episode, like I said, because there’s so much juicy stuff in this book, but he had a whole chapter on it was called, I think the chapter was called Trip Over the Truth, and it was a way to help people craft moments of change in their lives, moments where they can’t not see, they can’t unsee the truth or something like that. I’m going to be more clear on what that means in a minute, but it really to me applies so much towards how we plan our lessons. There’s a couple examples that he provided in the book that I’m going to share and then I’m going to share sort of how that applies in your art classroom.
One of the things that he describes in this book is the attempt to help communities who don’t have proper sanitation in place, get proper sanitation in place to prevent disease and stuff like that. And for a while people would say, “Okay, if we want to have people stop using the restroom outside, then we need to provide them with latrines and then give them a place to use the restroom so then they won’t use the restroom outside.” Well, it turns out they spent all this time and money building these latrines and that people still didn’t use them. So they’re trying to think of a way to solve this problem, and one of the things that they figured out was they have to get people on board with the why, why do we need to use the latrines and not outside like we’ve always done.
And so they developed this thing called community-led total sanitation. And basically what they do is in a nutshell is they have a facilitator come into the community who is there on the pretense of collecting information, asking questions and not necessarily there to tell them, “Hey, you should do this because it causes disease,” that sort of thing. But instead he goes and he says … the book explains a lot better and I’m not going to go into too much detail, but he essentially asked questions like, “Where do you go to the bathroom?” And then he has the people show them where they use the bathroom. He asks questions like where does the water flow when it rains?
And then long story short, but he ends up holding a glass of water from the community and he says, “Who’s willing to drink this?” And everybody’s like, “Okay, yes, I’m willing to doing that.” And then he takes a piece of his hair, dips it in the poop, and then puts it in the water, shakes it up and asks, “Is anybody willing to drink this?” And then they all say no. They’d also had a whole conversation about flies and he’s like, “Well, a fly has six legs. When they step in the poop and then drink your water or go into your water, it’s the same thing” as what’s happening with his hair basically. And then he does it all in a very nonjudgmental way and then they end up wanting to reform the system themselves because it’s like they suddenly can’t not ignore the problem anymore. They all knew that it was a problem, but they didn’t necessarily do anything about it, and that this apparently helps transform them to see the truth and act on the truth. They can no longer avoid the truth.
I love this process. Thinking about how they crafted it in a way that was nonjudgmental. I mean, it’s pretty rough. It’s pretty rough and pretty brutal, but apparently it gets really good results. The book said that in Bangladesh where CLTS has been most used went from an open defecation rate from 34% down to 1%. That’s pretty amazing.
And the reason that I started to connect it to teaching, one, is because I’m always connecting everything to teaching, but also that when I craft my art history lessons especially or any sort of lesson where I’m trying to teach something, that is what I’m thinking about, is that I have somewhere I want them to go usually, and my job is the teacher is to figure out a way for them to arrive at that information on their own.
It is not my role as the teacher in my opinion to tell them the information. The facilitator for CLTS could’ve gone in and said, “Hey, poop causes disease and when you poop outside it gets in your water supply and then you drink it.” That wouldn’t necessarily make any sort of lasting impact because it’s going to be more meaningful for the person, for the student, too, if they arrive at that information for themselves. So, that’s what I’m thinking about when I’m planning a lesson. If I’m going to do a lesson on, say … okay, I’m going to give an actual example for when I first started teaching.
I wanted to do a lesson on Renaissance art. I will never forget this because I have a really hard time teaching Renaissance art. I’ve always, it was really intimidating to me probably because there’s so much you can teach and I always feel like I was leaving stuff out. Same thing with Ancient Egypt. It just gave me total anxiety when I had to teach those two topics for some reason. I’m in my first semester of teaching. I was teaching community college, wanted to do a lesson on the Renaissance, so of course I go to Google and then I start thinking, okay, well I want to teach them about … I started thinking about the content. Okay, I want to teach them about the artist and the style and the context and why it was so different than what came before and what that meant and humanism and all these things, and so then I started mapping out the content and I started putting slides together and pretty soon it became just a lecture where I’m telling them things, that I took the content, I broke it up into chunks, put images to it, and then planned to speak it.
And then I was like, “This is not what I want at all. This is not the way they’re going to learn this. This is not the way they’re going to get excited about it. This is not, there’s no discovery here.” So I really, that was a big lesson for me as I was learning how to be a teacher in the classroom because before, I was a teacher in the museum, and so it was a totally different experience.
So I started to think, okay, well what do I really actually want them to know? And when I anchor my lessons with that information of, okay, what do I actually want in three years, in five years, in 10 years, in 20 years, what do I want them to actually know about this, how do I want it to be a part of their lives when they look back at my class, when they look back at studying art with me, what am I actually wanting to accomplish? And it never is. I want them to know the main details and the dates of Italian Renaissance arts. No, I want them to know how revolutionary it was from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. I want them to know how this was the first time that artists became real artists, that artists became known with their names. This was the first time that art was made … well, not the first time, but it was after the Middle Ages was such a drastic shift. So it was the bigger ideas are really what I’m more interested in.
And then I’m more interested in them finding some personal connection. I’m more interested in them making art a part of their lives. I’m more interested in them going into a museum, seeing a Renaissance painting and being delighted by it and pleasantly surprised by it and remembering, “Hey, I know what that is. I’ve seen that before. I learned about that. I know a lot about that” and to experience that sort of pride that comes with knowing something when you’re faced with art in the world. So it’s not about me giving them information for them to memorize. It’s about them arriving at that information for themselves, and so I want them to arrive at a certain end goal.
In the book of Power of Moments, he calls it the truth, arriving at the truth. I don’t necessarily believe in any sort of truth. That’s not … I don’t think there is truth. I mean, that’s a whole other thing. There is truth, but I don’t know. That’s a whole other situation we could talk about later. I have so many opinions on what, on truth. But anyway, so I have where I want them to go, and then I can craft my activities to get there.
In the book he also describes this man who created a curriculum design for college professors. This man’s name was Michael Palmer, and he worked for the University of Virginia and created a program called the Course Design Institute where he took a bunch of higher education faculty members and over the course of this week helps them, facilitated the process for them to write their curriculum for their course.
And I think this is amazing because one of the things I’m particularly passionate about is changing the teaching of art history and art appreciation at the college level. I think it needs to change everywhere, but the college level, I think is, from what I’ve experienced, and I’m sure there are so many amazing college professors out there who are just rocking it, but there are so many art history professors that are just lecturing, not leading engaging activities, not really engaging deeply with the art and having the students interact with the art. It’s a lot more lecture-y and I think that happens in a lot of subjects in at the college level.
So this guy wanted to change this, and so what he did is in this Institute he asked them that question. In three to five years, what do you want your students to know at the end? And all of their answers were things like, “I want them to click on math articles when they’re faced with them and read them and be interested in them” or, “I want them to understand how human bodies are and how they function and be delighted by that.” None of it was, “I want them to know about mitochondria” or whatever it was, all this sort of bigger picture stuff, and so that helped them facilitate writing their curriculum in a way that helps them get to those goals.
And so I think that’s really important when you’re starting out, you’re planning your curriculum for the school year, when you’re planning your next lesson, not to come at it from a content perspective, like, “I am going to teach this topic and then I’m going to divide this topic into chunks and then I’m going to teach those particular parts of the topic,” but to think about it in a bigger scope. Same thing for projects. “Okay, well, I want my next lesson to be a project on are going to make prints, lithographic prints, and we’re going to use,” I don’t know, line. I’m just making something up, but that it’s … and then you just do the project, but really think about what you’re actually teaching and what you want them to arrive at the end and how do you craft an experience that gets them there.
I’m going to give you a couple of examples of lessons that are, that we’ve created at Art Class Curator that I’ve done in the classroom and that are in the Curated Connections library that show you some examples of how this might work. So one of my favorite lessons that I created, and I created this one of my first years of teaching, I was so pleased with myself. I love this lesson. It is a classical sculpture sorting activity. It is on the blog sites. I’m going to link to that on our Class Curator. You can see that activity in action. You can also buy the individual lesson or you can find it in the membership, the curated connections library. But basically what I was faced with teaching at the time was how the styles of sculpture changed from archaic Greek to Hellenistic and then how it changed into Roman times.
I had that you could show different examples and say archaic and then you could list the styles, or you can even have them list characteristics from looking at them and then you can move on to the next one so you can see how it changes. And then you could tell them all of that information and then it would kind of go in one ear out the other. They might not find it too terribly interesting and they might learn it enough to take a test on it and then it kind of leaves their head. But instead, I really wanted my students to not just recognize the differences or know that there were different, that there were different styles, but I wanted them really trained at looking closely at art and noticing things.
So honestly, the skill for me and what I want to teach them is not necessarily the styles of sculpture, but that they get really confident in finding this information for themselves. So what I do is I have printed out, there’s four groups of sculpture and then there’s four sculptures in each group, so that’s what, 16 pictures. So they get 16 pictures of sculpture from ancient Greece and ancient Rome. They have numbers on them randomly, and then the students are tasked with sorting those sculptures into four groups by the style. And I tell them, “You want to look for the body positions, you want to look for the emotion, but really it’s up to you to find those differences and put them together in whatever way your group thinks that they should be put together.”
So then they sort it, they put them into groups, and they have to write out … then they have to … the older students I would have them rank them by which ones they think are oldest and which ones they think are newest, and then they have to write what they have in common on their paper. And then we go around the room, do a little gallery walk, and have each group explain to the rest of class what groups they chose, why they put them together, and what are some of the things that they noticed.
And then by the end they have seen what everyone else did, they see all the reasonings, and then I can show them like what the actual real answers are. And of course there are a lot that don’t get it right, and honestly it doesn’t matter because to me the experience of doing it really connects them deeply to it. And those kids are, you wouldn’t believe how much they remember that. I did this with sixth graders and they knew it the whole year. By the end of the year, they were still, they knew it. I probably could ask them now. Those sixth graders that I did it last with were … they’re probably ninth grade now. They probably would still, a lot of them would still know it because they just, they got so engrossed in it, and that’s going to stick. They’re going to remember that experience. They’re going to remember that was something different, too.
Another thing you could do with classical sculpture is have them put their … I do this both when I’m going through the answers after and telling them, talking about the different characteristics, having them stand up and put themselves into the body pose of that and then they can see that transfer. They can see, okay, it goes from archaic, we’re standing here, super stiff and awkward, and then in classical we’re feeling really graceful, and then in Hellenistic we’re feeling really dramatic. And they feel it in their bodies. They saw it, they talked about it, they analyzed it, and they feel it in their bodies, and that is just connecting them all to this artwork.
And then you could follow it up with, okay, now you and your group have to create a little movement. I actually don’t know what the right word is. It’s a series of tableaus of you start with archaic and then you transition to classical, transition to Hellenistic, and you have to do it as a group and then do it, but then do it with current day. So someone did it, they did a cell phone thing where it’s just like they had … or the progression of technology through the styles of this sculpture. One of the groups did that and it was just so creative, but they became so intimately connected with that and then could … they knew what to look for when they looked at sculpture in the future.
You can also do this with just art discussions. I usually start in art discussion mainly using VTS, visual thinking strategies where you’re asking questions and you’re not necessarily having an end goal in mind, which I is what I recommend because you don’t want to be too leading of this discussion.
But there are some times when there’s something really cool and interesting about the artwork that you want to tell the student and you want them to know and you want them to discover, but you don’t really want to tell them what it is, and so you have to think about the discussion questions, think about what you’re asking so that they can find that information out for themselves because the joy of finding it out for yourself, the joy of creating an interpretation that’s super insightful? You can craft those moments. You can create that for your student through the questions that you ask.
Thinking about … there’s an artwork I really love to look at. It’s called Selim and Zuleika by Delacroix and it is at the Kimbell Art Museum. It was actually the, I talk about this one a lot mainly cause it really means a lot to me. My first real museum job outside, my first job after college was a fellowship at the Kimbell Art Museum and my first discussion art discussion where I 100% knew that I was meant to do this. You get that amazing high after an art discussion that goes really well and it’s really powerful and really exciting. Was in front of that painting and it was in that fellowship.
It was with actually a bunch of a group of deaf students. We had a partnership with one of the local community colleges who had an interpreter program, and so the kids in the interpreter program were, well, they probably weren’t all kids, but I’d just college students calling them kids, but they were … that was part of their training is they would be the interpreter for this museum program. So it was the deaf school got to come get a call museum program, the interpreter school got to have real life practice, so it was a really cool program.
But it was that discussion where I really saw how amazing and powerful this really was. It’s one of the highlights, I think, when I look back at all the art discussions I’ve ever led, which is hundreds and hundreds, but a few definitely stand out. So anyway, this artwork, Selim and Zuleika, which I’ll link to on the show notes, artclasscurator.com/45, has a really cool use of the elements of principles. And so I don’t always say, “Well, how does this art artists use line? How does this artist use circles or shape” or whatever. I usually … we tie it in with meaning.
So if we say in this particular painting, Selim and Zuleika are running away together. And the first thing most people say is he’s kidnapping her. And I’m like, “Well, what do you see that makes you say that?” And they start looking at it and they’re like, “Wait. No, he’s not kidnapping her” once they look closer because they see, well, he’s not holding onto her, she’s holding onto him. They’re both running in the same direction. They’re both looking the same direction. They look, they have the similar emotions. It’s not like he looks very fierce and she looks very scared. They really look like a pair. They figure that out on their own, and then one of the things that helps them see the protection is that Selim’s arms are in this sort of oval and they … it connects with the sword, connects with the gun and his other hand and his arms and creates this oval around Zuleika. I’m moving my hands around as if you can see me, but it creates this oval around her and creates this sort of protective bubble for her in a way.
And so then we can say, “Oh, that’s so cool that the artist is using line and shape to add to the meaning.” I want them to notice that, so I think about what kind of questions I’m asking to help them get there. I’m not giving them an interpretation, but I’m helping them notice things that they might not have noticed before, which then will open them up to look for those sort of things when they’re looking at art in the future.
Those kinesthetic connections are really important, too. I mentioned that with the classical sculpture lesson, but I do this again with the Nkisi N’kondi power figures from the Kongo people in Western and Central Africa. Kongo with a K. These power figures are these wooden sculptures of men. They have kind of fierce looks on their face. They’re in this sort of hunched over, tense body position, and they have nails hammered into them. They also have a hole in the chest or the stomach that has medicines and herbs and stuff, and they put either a mirror or a shell over the front of that. You might think for something that has a ritualistic type of function, that this was created for a reason. Those nails were hammered for a reason. Those medicine herbs were put there for a reason. It was all crafted for a function. You can still have a discussion about that and you can still help kids arrive at the actual real life function of it in in a way that makes sense.
So one of the things that I do is first we talk about, well what’s going on? They just can open it up. We talk about the facial expression, we talk about the nails, what they could be, why someone would do that, who put the nails in? Was it the artist or was it other people that did the nails, anything they could observe there. And after we’ve had that discussion, then I have them stand up and put themselves into the body position of the sculpture. One, I think this is hilarious because they’ll pose is kind of a, you kind of have to stick your butt out a little bit and they think that’s really fun. But so you do that, you’ve got your arms out. I’m doing the pose again like you can see me. You’re standing, your knees are bent or crunched over a little bit, and then I ask, “Have you ever seen anyone in this position or have you ever been in this position yourself? What’s familiar about this?”
And inevitably one student always sticks their hand out and points their finger like they’re a scolding teacher or a scolding grandmother or something and they say, and they start pretending to them to scold the student or the child. I love sometimes there’s a couple of times that that has not happened and I hate when it doesn’t happen, but it usually does, and then I say, “You know what? That is exactly what this sculpture is all about, that the power figures are actually hunting figures. They … anytime there was someone with a promise or a vow or a treaty, something like that, they would hammer a nail into the sculpture, and if that treaty was broken, if that promise was broken, then the spirit of the power figure would go and punish the person who broke the promise.”
So in a way that’s what the sculpture is doing. They’re scoldings someone for breaking a promise. So they’re, they are being kind of like that scolding teacher. And so that helps them connect with the meaning of the sculpture a little bit more. It’s going to help them connect with it. It’s going to help them remember it. It’s going to help them understand what it was used for and all of that.
So really these lessons can be created so that the student feels confident that they can look at art, they can come up with the answers themselves, that the answers aren’t these things that exist outside of them. They don’t, the answers don’t exist in the teacher, the textbook, the museum label. They have them. They have the ability, the capacity, the creativity, the imagination to do it themselves, and I’ve talked about this again and again, but that our world, we live in a world where we want the answer and we want it now. We have the answer in our pockets, in our phones and we are supremely uncomfortable with the idea that we might not know something and we’ve become a little bit lazy in our thinking that well, I could just look it up.
So I’m trying to one, help myself exist in that discomfort. I have that discomfort all the time, but that I think our students, ones that were not raised without technology, that this is a part of their lives have always been able to have the answer just given to them at any moment, that we need them to be able to have the confidence that they know the answer, that they can find the answer, and that there’s not more than one answer, that there are many truths like I said before.
So when you’re planning these lessons think about what that end goal is. Is the end goal connection, lifelong appreciation for art, creativity, creating powerful memorable moments? Those things are just as powerful and valuable as them knowing the art technique or the art history facts or the dates or … these are the things that are going to make the impact, these soft skills that they … I hate the word soft skills because they’re not soft. They’re hard, but that’s what we can be providing with these lessons.
I am only halfway through The Power of Moments by Chip and Dan Heath, and I sure I will talk about it more. It’s such a good book, it’s just full of stuff. I will put the link to The Power of Moments in the show notes, artclasscurator.com/45, and I encourage you to read it. Honestly, I really think that as a teacher, as an educator, it’s really good to think about these sorts of things, about creating these moments for our students because they make big a bigger impact than I think we even realize. So thank you so much for listening. I will be back next week for another episode of The Art Class Curator Podcast, and have a wonderful week. Bye.
Thank you so much for listening to The Art Class Curator Podcast. Help more art teachers find us by reviewing the podcast and recommending it to a friend. Do you have a work of art that changed your life? If so, send me your art story. You can send it to support@artclasscurator.com or leave a voicemail to (202) 996-7972. Get more inspiration for teaching art with purpose by subscribing to our newsletter Your Weekly Art Break. Recent topics include how to support English Language Learners, why we should teach artworks from black artists even if it isn’t February, and how to deal with teacher burnout. Subscribe at artclasscurator.com/artbreak to receive six free art appreciation worksheets.
This week’s art quote is from Kurt Vonnegut, and he says, “To practice any art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, so do it.” Thank you so much for listening. Have a great day.Thanks for listening! Have an idea for an episode topic or think you may be a great guest for the show? Click here to send us an email telling us about it.
44: Our Faces Tell the Tale: How We Experience Art
Have you ever wondered how Mona Lisa was feeling? Or wanted to know what your students were thinking when they look at art? Discover the emotions behind Mona Lisa’s smile, learn how long the average person looks at an artwork in a museum, and much more as I talk to Dan Hill, a facial recognition expert who wrote a book about how people react to famous artworks.
- Dan Hill’s website
- First Blush: People’s Intuitive Reactions to Famous Art (Dan’s book, affiliate link)
- Faces of the Week blog
Cindy Ingram:
Hello and welcome to the Art Class Curator Podcast. I am Cindy Ingram, your host and the founder of Art Class Curator and The Curated Connections Library. We’re here to talk about teaching art with purpose and inspiration from the daily delights of creativity to the messy mishaps that come with being a teacher. Whether you’re driving home from school or cleaning up your classroom for the 15th time today, take a second, take a deep breath, relax those shoulders and let’s get started.
Cindy Ingram:
On the podcast, I welcome Dan Hill. Dan Hill is a facial coding expert with an expertise in marketing and market research, and he has written the book First Blush: People’s Intuitive Reactions to Famous Art. I found this conversation to be completely fascinating and I know that you will too. There are so many learnings here for how we look at art, how we experience art, how we help our students experience art. Honestly, it was just super fun to geek out about art and science and emotions and faces. Let’s welcome Dan Hill.
Cindy Ingram:
I am so excited to welcome Dan Hill to the Art Class Curator Podcast. Welcome, Dan.
Dan Hill:
Good morning or Good afternoon, good evening, whatever.
Cindy Ingram:
You reached out to me and shared with me your book, which is called First Blush: People’s Intuitive Reactions to Famous Art. I’m super excited to talk about this today. There’s so much like cool sciency stuff in here and research that I’m really excited to geek out about that. Can you tell us a little bit more about you and your background and experiences?
Dan Hill:
Well, first of all, I got really lucky. My mom was an interior designer and has a great innate sense of color scheme, but probably the decisive thing for me, for waking me up to my environment and to visuals was when I was six years old, my family moved to Italy. It was kind of like a reverse migration. We went from the new world to the old world. We landed in Naples. I get off the boat, I looked to my left, there’s a baby octopus hanging from a meat hook, and I basically said to myself, toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore. Everything was different, and I didn’t know the language at first. I went to Italian first grade in a fishing village, so I waited all day for the math unit, so I had something to do. But the great thing for me, if you got the first in the math unit, first done and all correct, you got to do a drawing in your notebook, which could occupy me for the rest of the day when I couldn’t do any of the other subjects because I didn’t know the language.
Dan Hill:
That was my innate first introduction to visuals and the power of visuals and noticing the world around me.
Cindy Ingram:
Yeah. Did you find, I don’t know if you remember this, but you’ve studied, it looks like most of your career studying faces. Did you notice that back then and when you were trying to learn a new language that you could interpret things based on the faces, facial expression?
Dan Hill:
Well, I had to because again, I didn’t have language. My parents sent me then into a town of 100,000 on my own to go to a Berlitz school. So I had to read faces to figure out who I could trust. When people were approaching me, offering me guidance. Well, did I want to take that advice? Was that going to get me in trouble? Fortunately, I’m around to tell the tale so I must’ve been able to figure out who was trustworthy. But the really powerful moment proved to be when we were going back home. Rather than go back out of Italy, we went up to England, and on the way we went to the Rijksmuseum, and when we went to the Rijksmuseum, I fell in love with Rembrandt. Now, this is anticipating one of your possible questions, like what art matters to you? Well, that is the first art that really grabbed me.
Dan Hill:
It was the power of the intellectual, ability to get across the emotions, the personality of people, the somberness of it. It just was so trenching for me. My mom said, “You can pick out any artwork from the museum collection you want in terms of a postcard,” and everything I chose was Rembrandt. There’s more than Rembrandt in the museum, but Rembrandt, Rembrandt, Rembrandt, and he’s of course, great for faces. Some years later, I got really lucky. A business contact in Holland, his dad was a former director of the Rijksmuseum. One day we went around the museum, he gave me all the background on the paintings and I deciphered the facial expressions in the paintings, and even though it was just an impromptu session of us together, by the time we got done, we had over 35, probably 40 people following this painting by painting eaves dropping on the conversation.
Cindy Ingram:
I love it. I have both been the one eavesdropped on and the eavesdropper in those situations. Like oh, that’s fascinating. I love it. Just along those lines of communicating through phases, I was reading a book recently. What’s the name of the book? It’s called The Stroke of Insight is about a neuroscientist who had a stroke, and she lost all of her language because the stroke was in her left side, but she said she could still really understand what people were saying or the general idea just based on her right brain interpreting the emotions of the faces. She knew who she could trust even though she couldn’t actually hear their words. So I thought that was really fascinating about faces.
Dan Hill:
Yeah, no, it changes everything. How you obviously look at an artwork if it’s representational, about photography, people testify in front of Congress, watching a movie, everything changes once you really lock it on the face.
Cindy Ingram:
Yeah. When did you become interested in faces?
Dan Hill:
Well, I got lucky, in 1998, someone I knew from IBM sent over an article about the breakthroughs in brain science and how much we are intuitive emotional decision makers. The killer statistic is that about 95% of our mental activity is not fully conscious. That’s the conservative estimation. They actually think it’s about 98%. So I went, wow, that is so cool and it makes so much sense. Then the question was, how are you actually going to capture and quantify and understand emotions? In doing my readings, I came across the fact that Charles Darwin came to realize that in your face, you best reflect and communicate your feelings because it’s the only place in the body where the muscles attach right to the skin. So it gives you quick, real time reactions. It conveys several different emotions, and we as human beings have more facial muscles than any other species on the planet.
Dan Hill:
Yes, I can put the dog into the painting and so on and so forth, but it’s the face of human beings that’s just the most wonderful instrument for getting a sense of somebody and what’s going on for them.
Cindy Ingram:
Oh, that’s fascinating. I never thought about that, that the muscles are attached to the skin on the face.
Dan Hill:
Yeah. It’s just a super sensitive in the moment exploration of what’s happening.
Cindy Ingram:
When you’re having a conversation with someone, can you tell how they feel about you pretty easily by seeing how their face moves?
Dan Hill:
Yes, I can. When I first met my wife, I could tell she wasn’t too interested in meeting any guys. So I was like, I better go really slowly here, but she’s a wonderful person and she does have a signature expression, which she loves me for never divulging. We all have signature expressions. As George Orwell, the writer said, by the age of 50, a man has the face he deserves because muscle memory causes us to hold on to certain things.
Cindy Ingram:
Yeah. I thought leading up to this interview, I was like, oh man, my face is going to be communicating all sorts of things. I kind of got self-conscious about it.
Dan Hill:
Well, the great thing is, I’m looking at your face as we’re doing this and you’re so animated. It’s obvious you love your subject matter.
Cindy Ingram:
Yes.
Dan Hill:
The only way you can really be great at something is to love what you’re doing.
Cindy Ingram:
I totally agree. I tell that to teachers all the time when I’m talking about teaching. I’m like, “You have to really be passionate about what you’re teaching.”
Dan Hill:
Yeah, and the students will pick up on it because emotions are also contagious. What you feel conveys to somebody else in turn. Yeah.
Cindy Ingram:
Awesome. Okay. I’m thinking about sort of what you said about all the emotions being communicated through our faces. How accurate is this science? Is it really widely accepted in, I don’t know, who was excited about the science community? You know what I mean?
Dan Hill:
Very fair question. Obviously, Charles Darwin was not around for a conversation when I discovered facial coding. Fortunately, there’s a man named Paul Ekman. He was the inspiration for the Lie to Me show that was on Fox in the early 2000s, a prime time hit. He was an advisor for Pixar, for the movie Inside Out where you have the various characters who are playing one or more emotion, disgust and sadness and so forth. So Ekman had a statistic just a couple of years ago. He interviewed researchers whose specialty is emotions and being able to quantify and capture emotions. About 80% of the academic fields who are specialists in this area are onboard on facial coding. Of course, you always have people who will object or disagree, but that’s academia for you. People love to fight and squabble over things, and that’s perfectly fine.
Dan Hill:
Nothing’s infallible on the face of the earth, but one of the deep things is how universal it is. So even a person born blind emotes the same way as you or I, it is hardwired into the brain. I’ve been to more than 65 countries. I’ve spoken in over 25. Every place I go, I look for the faces and for the expressions and I see them all the time. Just yesterday on PBS, they were interviewing, someone said, “Do you really think the Chinese government is telling the truth about the coronavirus and the number of people affected?” Before the person even the answered, they showed a smirk at the corner of their mouth. A smirk says, I don’t trust you, I don’t respect you. So I had the answer before the guy ever said a word. He did not believe the numbers out of Beijing.
Cindy Ingram:
Okay. So can you explain like when you’re doing facial coding, what are the types of things you are looking at? Can you give some examples just so I can get a idea?
Dan Hill:
Sure. Let’s start with happiness. It’s the one positive emotion of the core emotions, but people do not know typically that there’s a difference between a true smile and a social smile. A social smile only involves the muscles around the mouth and the cheeks rise and so forth. But with a true smile, you get the crow’s feet. That’s probably the simplest way to describe it. You get the twinkle in the eye, because the muscle around the eye is relaxing. Let’s switch over to anger, because happiness and anger actually for most people constitute about 70% of their emoting. They are the real heavyweights. If happiness in the essence is to hug, the essence of anger is to hit.
Dan Hill:
Now, sometimes it’s constructive. You want to break through barriers. You want to make progress. You don’t want to be confused anymore. If you see this confusion look in your students’ faces, obviously you’re not quite getting across. The surest way to see anger, if it’s confusion, is that the eyebrows will knit together and lower. If it is anger like, yo, I’m not following you, I’m not going along. I’m resistant. What you’ll also see in the classroom, I’ve taught college, after all I know, the mouth will pull tight. So the lips my pressed together a bit. If it gets more intense, you get a bolt below the middle of the lower lip. That is a really reliable way of essentially you’ve, pardon my French, you’ve pissed somebody off.
Cindy Ingram:
How many emotions can you pick up? Do you have like a number?
Dan Hill:
Yes, it’s seven.
Cindy Ingram:
Seven
Dan Hill:
Happiness and anger I’ve already covered. Then you have surprise, which includes for one thing, the eyes going wide, because guess what? With surprise, you’re orienting to your environment, and as the eyes go wide and the eyebrows lift, you’re able to see better. You’re taking in more information. That’s one of the things I love about facial coding is it just makes common sense. You’re surprises, you’re like, okay, what’s going on around me? Just like in disgust. What happens, the nose wrinkles, the upper lip flares, bad taste, bad smell. It’s as if you’re revolting and trying to almost back up, but only your features are doing it for you. Contempt as the smirk. Sadness is often in drooping. You can think of a rodeo clowns, corner of the mouth going down, painted corners of the block going down, very reliable. Finally, fear, and the most reliable indication of fear is the mouth pulls wide in a kind of Egads sort of expression.
Dan Hill:
But it’s worth knowing that surprise and fear overlap in many ways on how they show in the face because human beings, generally speaking, do not welcome surprises.
Cindy Ingram:
Yeah. I was like, we’re fearful of surprises.
Dan Hill:
Yeah. Because a change in our setting means we’re going to have to acclimate and make some effort to make the change. On the other hand, as an artist and as a teacher, what are you trying to do? Create a lot of surprise, you want them to wake up, you want to break through the clutter, you want to grab their attention. So you have to have some edginess, but the key is to make sure the surprise exceeds the fear and to bring some happiness into the equation because everybody likes happiness.
Cindy Ingram:
Yeah. Oh, that’s interesting. Yes, that is so true. Yeah, our brains like the novelty, but you need to do it in a safe way.
Dan Hill:
Yeah, bring the sweet more than the sour.
Cindy Ingram:
Yeah. Okay, cool. So you’ve been doing facial coding for a long time and then you decided to study people’s reactions to art. Can you explain that study and how that came to be and all that stuff?
Dan Hill:
Sure. For 20 years, yes, I applied this particularly in advertising. My real love was, of course, was the imagery effective. Sometimes it was, sometimes it wasn’t. Now that I’m semiretired, I said, well, I have this passion for art, I want to now exercise it. The linchpin of doing the study was that I saw an article that said that in a museum, the average person looks at a work of art for about 20 seconds. I just instinctively said, “I don’t think that’s true.” The next time I was in New York, I went to the Guggenheim. I went to the Brooklyn Museum, I was in the Frick. I spent between the three places, about a day and a half, literally sitting on benches, moving around different parts of the museum and noticing and tabulating how long people looked at art.
Dan Hill:
What I found was, yes, there are moments when you really get involved in an artwork, but on average what most people did was four seconds of viewing, five seconds of looking at the name plate and one second back to the artwork. So, it was one half of what this expert had said it was. Then I said, now it’s game on. I am really fascinated and I’m going to use my eye tracker so I can follow where their eyes going. I’m going use facial coding with a little camera built into the screen so I know how they’re feeling. That’s what I went to town on, and what I discovered from both those tools was it was true. I gave people 15 seconds of viewing time. So I elongated it almost back to what the expert said. And yet, people’s true emotional and visual obsession with an artwork when they saw it on the screen, on the eye tracking screen was the first four seconds.
Dan Hill:
That was really the heart of their action. And then it started dipping away. What they did naturally in the museum very much was paralleled with what I saw in my study.
Cindy Ingram:
Oh, that’s fascinating. I think that’s totally true. I did that one time. I was doing an internship at the Dallas Museum of Art, and I was doing research. I don’t actually remember why I was doing it, but I was sitting in the gallery tracking everybody’s movements and a time. It was great fun. I’m like, I just want to be a part of this research. You put artworks up on the screen?
Dan Hill:
Yes, I did.
Cindy Ingram:
Okay.
Dan Hill:
There was 88 hour works, and granted, it’d be lovely to go around to all the museums and set up an eye tracking machine and let them see the actual piece, but simply too complicated. I didn’t have the Ford Foundation funding by study, so I needed to do it the way I could. There’s 88 hour works. This is by far the largest study ever done. The biggest I could find was 40 people looking at 12 Zurbaráns. So only one artist. I had 87 hours because there’s two Michelangelos in the study, 96 people, and they weren’t all college students. I had people as young as eight year olds to the age of 80, and I tried really hard to replicate the demographics of who goes to art museums and who loves art.
Cindy Ingram:
Did they view all 88 in one sitting?
Dan Hill:
No, no, no. It was just be too much for people. What I did is I created three trenches, so any one person saw one third of the artworks and then there was a little pause in between. Then I should say that what happened was about the nine second mark right in the middle, I gave them out loud the last name of the artist and the title of the artwork because I also want to know the impact of titles, which would be a fascinating thing for us to go to in a moment, but I got a little bit of … that was the only thing that gave a rise out to those first four seconds. Everybody slid away in terms of their visual and emotional interests, but when they got the title of the artwork and the artists last name, there was typically a little bit of a bump increase.
Dan Hill:
Not anywhere near the first four seconds, but it came back a bit. But it’s the first four seconds that’s so crucial. I often say that art, just like advertising, is like trying to land an airplane on a helicopter pad. It takes a lot of talent because you’ve got to arrest them, distract them, disassociate them from everything else around them and get them into your piece right here, right now before the game is over.
Cindy Ingram:
Yeah, that’s a really good point. I think about myself going to an art museum and that’s pretty much what I do. What I do is I look around the room, and I used to go to every single one out of some sort of weird sense of obligation, but then now I just go in and I take a scan and then I just go to the one that immediately gives me that emotional reaction. Then once I have that, then I stop and I think, okay, well what was that? And then I analyze it a little bit more. You talking makes me think that that’s really what we should be striving for is helping the viewers know what to do next. They have the emotional reaction. Sorry, you’ve got me thinking. I’m going to have to do some thinking after this, but it really is like teaching them what to do next after they have that reaction.
Dan Hill:
Well, my wife’s an artist. One of the things we do when we go to a museum, we’ll go into a new room and we’ll say, let’s split up and we’ll give you one minute and then let’s reconvene and I’m going to guess what’s your favorite piece in this room, you’re going to guess which is my favorite piece, and then the really interesting thing is why? What was it? What arresting detail brought you into it? How are you additionally rewarded in the composition potentially? How did the title add to it, if it did? And how does it match up to other things you love? Is this a standout piece? Is it a pattern or a trend, a subject matter, a style as you pick an artist? Why, why, why, why, why?
Cindy Ingram:
So cool. Yeah, that’s really good. Okay, so going back to … I just want to like really understand what you’re doing. When your eye tracking a device then measures where in the artwork they’re looking and in what order,
Dan Hill:
It does. The key they’d introduce here is the word fixations. What they found, people smarter than me, have found out that you need about one sixth of a second to look at a particular detail for it actually register for you mentally. You can stay with it longer, but if you don’t get to that, it’s here and gone, the paper shredder that is our brain just lets it go. With eye tracking, the key output is what’s called a heat map. If you see something in red or with an orange or green, those are descending levels of your eyes went there and stayed there, and a lot of people’s eyes did the same thing. Normally, in an eye tracking study you only need about 10 to 12 subjects because there really tend to be patterns that emerge. So by my having 30 people for each tranche of this artwork, I was 3X-ing what’s typical. So it’s really solid data.
Dan Hill:
Then the interesting thing is there’s a lot of things that get, not even a light green, which means it’s peripheral vision. You’re probably taking it in, but if your eyes aren’t focusing on something, it’s really not going to have any mental power behind it. So, it’s making a passing impression, but it’s just not going to be the key.
Cindy Ingram:
I know it’s probably really different depending on the artwork, but is there an average number of fixations that happen in one art viewing experience?
Dan Hill:
The range is quite incredible over the artworks. The best of them had over a thousand for their subjects, the worse had as few as 200. Some people, if they really got turned on by something, they might be here and gone. I threw into some of my presentations, Fragonard’s, The Swing, where you have the woman on the swing and two guys are flirting with her. I just took one person who loved this artwork piece, obviously, because this person had about 40 different fixations all bouncing around in the 15 seconds. So basically every second, every time they had a sixth of a second, they were onto something new in the artwork, the eye was just dancing across the piece.
Cindy Ingram:
Okay, so you’re measuring where their eye moves, which I think is really cool information.
Dan Hill:
And for how long and in what order.
Cindy Ingram:
How long in what order. Was there anything in the research that really stood out to you? Besides, oh, you said the Fragonard, but …
Dan Hill:
Well, a couple of really important things I think for anybody, whether they’re teaching it or just appreciating art or trying to create art. One is the power of faces. I’m not saying that just because I’m a facial coder or because I love Rembrandt, it’s because I saw this for 20 years in market research where I did work for more than half the world’s top 100 companies who are marketers. So I had a lot of experience over a lot of countries, and the same thing in this study. If there is a face or faces in the artwork, it’s going to seize about 70% of the gaze activity, 70%. It is an absolute vampire in terms of sucking the blood of everything else in the artwork. The same thing happens emotionally, but let’s stay with the visual. The next key thing is if I’ve got four seconds, my God, what’s the most valuable real estate?
Dan Hill:
I really got to know this. What I found is yes, there are different patterns by all means, but if you had to take an average, people come up through the middle, the lower middle. So they take the foreground and they comp through the middle, and then probably because we’re a culture, we’re not usually reading Hebrew, we’re going to move left to right. The top right corner is the third place that gets picked up. So lower, middle, upper middle, move to the right corner, and then you start the dance to the other three corners. But you probably don’t normally get there. I made them sit for 15 seconds. That’s longer than they normally are going to look. So I call the other three corners, except for the top right corner, outer Mongolia, because they probably just aren’t in play.
Cindy Ingram:
Yeah. That’s so funny. I was at a museum in London and it was this painting, Bronzino is the artist and I can’t remember the name of the painting, Cupid something or other. I have seen this painting over and over again. Well, that’s our history books example. I’ve even probably put it out on PowerPoints in front of students. I was, at the museum, I looked at it, and there is a dragon in the painting, in the background. The woman turned into a dragon, and I was like, how many times have I seen this artwork, and I have never once noticed that the main character is half dragon? It’s true. Yeah, we just focus on the main stuff and we don’t look all the way around it.
Dan Hill:
No, we don’t, and that’s one of the things I learned from the study actually, is the subtle details. In academia, we love to revel in the subtle, subtle details, a chance for the teacher to point out some unusual aspect, which is great and very legitimate, but I’m telling you the person in four seconds, they probably don’t get there.
Cindy Ingram:
Okay. I’m getting some key takeaways here that I’m going to have to start writing down. I can go back and listen to this, but I’m going to write something out really fast.
Dan Hill:
Sure, by all means.
Cindy Ingram:
I’m learning from this. Okay.
Dan Hill:
Well, for instance, the slipper in Fragonard’s The Swing, I mean, there are two men who are pulling the rope as she’s on the swing. Quite honestly, I’m sure they’re hoping she’s going to flip away more than a slipper. They would like her to flip a bit more, but the slipper, just flung into the air and most people did not notice the detail.
Cindy Ingram:
That’s interesting.
Dan Hill:
Even though, narratively, that’s almost the linchpin of the whole dynamic of what’s going on. The same thing. You want to take a really bold example and it also tells you the power of the face, go to Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam. Well, they’re touching fingers. This is the moment of giving the spark of life. People didn’t go there because in part I think you had flesh tones that gets an off white background. So you didn’t have color contrast, but they actually went to God’s face.
Cindy Ingram:
Yeah, I remember that when I was looking through the book, that most of the attention was right there.
Dan Hill:
Yeah. I think this is Michelangelo being really bold. I can think of all sorts of artwork where you’ve got Jesus and Virgin Mary and so forth. I can’t think of a single other artist who is so bold to put God into the artwork and so directly. So you want to know who’s God, what does God look like? How is God feeling? God wins.
Cindy Ingram:
I love it. Okay, so this is so fascinating. Okay, so you measured the eye tracking and then you also measured emotional response. Can you tell us how do that?
Dan Hill:
I did. With coding, there are 23 different facial expressions. I alluded to a few of them, the lips pursing together, the nose wrinkling, the eyes go wide, etc. There are 23 expressions that correspond to those seven emotions I introduced earlier. Some of the expressions just go to one emotion, some go to two or three emotions for instance. What we have, and the eye tracking company in Sweden actually put a small camera into the lower right corner of their eye tracker because of me. I said, “I’m a facial coder, it’d be lovely if you would do that for me,” and I said, “Yes, we will,” because we think about the people who will be interested as well. What it means is I had to take that video, put it through a studio where I have a software system that allows me to slow motion freeze-frame, replay the video so I can see what is on the looks of the people looking at the artwork.
Dan Hill:
I’m playing detective basically. What I’m looking for is, first and foremost, engagement. Do their muscles move? Actions peak louder than words, the actions. I’m looking for subtle little expressions of the face, or sometimes not so subtle if it’s a huge smile, for instance. So I’m looking for engagement. What’s the volume of the emoting? And then I’m looking for which particular muscle movements, which tells me which particular emotions are happening for people.
Cindy Ingram:
Okay. Yeah, you had on your … there was charts that had both engagement and appeal. Engagement is just that they’re emoting at all. And then appeal is …
Dan Hill:
Well, let me answer for you.
Cindy Ingram:
[laughs] I’m trying to answer.
Dan Hill:
It’s perfectly understandable. Engagement is you’re turning them on. It’s arousal, it’s going to be memorable, it’s going to be motivating. Appeal is really positive versus negative emoting, because happiness is the only positive of our core emotions. Because emotions have an evolutionary role. They make us alert to danger like, oh my God, something bad’s happening, how am I going to deal with it? Happiness is almost like a luxury emotion. We’re fortunate enough to be happy for a little bit and then I have go back to the struggle to make a living and all these other things that go on. So anger and fear and sadness and disgust and contempt are negative emotions. Surprise is basically a neutral emotion. Is the surprise a good surprise? I got a new car for Christmas. Is it a bad surprise? I got a new car accident on the way home from work. Which one is it?
Dan Hill:
It can tilt either way. If you get to the far right side of positive appeal, that means there’s lots of happiness. For instance, people of course, loved Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. They love the painting in its own right, and they probably love it because it’s familiar. It’s like coming home. There’s Mona Lisa, I’m waiting to see Mona Lisa. Now I get to see Mona Lisa, but that does not disqualify negative emotions. They have every right to exist. They may be what I call being on emotion, that you’re trying to, the emotional response that fits the nature of the artwork. One of the most heartbreaking pieces in my study was by a photographer named, last name of Carter, a South African, and he has a photograph called Famine in Sudan.
Dan Hill:
And it’s a young boy and there’s a vulture sitting just a few feet away waiting for the inevitable outcome. Carter committed suicide with a year and a half of doing the photograph. It’s heartbreaking. It’s heartbreaking to look of the photograph, and when people looked at it, they had a negative response. Does that mean it’s a bad artwork? By no means. It means it got home what it was trying to get home. People had a strong reaction and it’s a negative reaction, and that’s appropriate.
Cindy Ingram:
Yeah. Did you find with most to viewers that they did have plenty of strong emotional responses of … I don’t know how I’m wording that question. Does that question make sense to you?
Dan Hill:
No, it does. Because I’m looking for engagement level, I’m looking for fixations level. I have 88 artworks works. They’re all great artworks. You’re up against … it’s like an all star game of baseball or basketball to be in this study. It was so painful to have to choose what was going to be in there. I felt like I was Noah loaded the ark, two by two. Matisse didn’t make it into the study. I love Matisse, but in the end I was looking for themes and ways to kind of group the artwork and so there was no Matisse in the study by chance. So yes, there were some things like for instance, Hopper’s Nighthawks, I really like the painting. I like hopper, but it was just a little too monochrome for people in color scheme.
Dan Hill:
You can’t really see the faces all that well, they’re a little bit smaller, a little bit turned obliquely in terms of the angle. And so that didn’t necessarily capture people. Let’s go the opposite extreme. Tracey Emin’s My Bed. Most people won’t know this piece. I did not know this piece till I got ready to start picking out elements, but I really wanted to move into contemporary art as well. I didn’t want this just to be famous art, like old dead white guys necessarily. I wanted variety. I wanted female artists, I wanted artists of color, and I wanted contemporary works. I started looking around. I went, wow, this is a really interesting piece. And it was my overall winner. It created the boast fixations and the most emotional engagement, and Emin’s My Bed is the bed that she basically harbored in after romantic relationship ended.
Dan Hill:
She lived in this bed for, I’m going to say three weeks, five weeks. By the side of the bed is the empty cigarette card, the empty vodka bottle, the nylons that she shed, the luggage in the corner if she could only get herself out of bed where she might go away on vacation to get away from it all, get away from the heartache, and people could really relate to this because beds are so powerful. We’re likely born in a bed. We might quite possibly die in a bed. We make love in a bed, we sleep in a bed or we might just lounge in a bed. We might read in bed, watch TV in bed. It has so many associations for us, and people can relate to it across the age range that I had here. And that just makes so much sense. So it’s contemporary, it’s an installation and people just went for it big time.
Cindy Ingram:
That’s awesome. Yeah, I remember that from the book. There’s no faces in that one.
Dan Hill:
No faces, but there’s a storyline we can relate to and there’s an object because a lot of installation pieces did really well. If you had to choose a single genre that did well, it was what I would call the ready mades or the installations where you’re using chairs like a Chinese artist did. It could be the urinal, the notorious urinal that Duchamp used, but it was things that are for people’s lives. And again, they can relate to it. This is important as a teacher. I remember one time I thought I’d given a great lecture, but I had a student who always sat in the back of the room, rarely talked, sometimes came late to class. Of all days, this is the day he finally talks to me, but he doesn’t really talk to me. He said, “Great lecture Professor Hill,” and he raised his hand over his head, like, this all went over my head. Thank you very much, you lost me. So if the artwork can’t come home to people and can’t come home fairly quickly or at least striking an initial cord. You’re kind of talking to yourself, sadly.
Cindy Ingram:
Yeah, that’s a really good point. I went to a museum this last weekend. I went to the high museum in Atlanta and there was a really cool exhibit, but all of it, I could tell there was all sorts of deep meaning, but it wasn’t readily available to me. I would have to really sit and think and process. At my state, I was like, I’m not in the mood to do that right now. So I totally didn’t get any of it, but if he had used maybe some more universal objects.
Dan Hill:
Yeah. No, we need a way in. We need a way in, and the longer you’re in the museum, the more you need it. One of the things I did is a little sub bar that said, let’s see, even just over 30 pieces, if the amount of emotional engagement declines, and it did by about 8%. In most museums, unless they’re like the Guidhall of London and so forth, there are a lot of pieces in those museums. So, we do need some help and we need more help as museum fatigue sets in in going through a collection.
Cindy Ingram:
Yeah, and too, it makes me think that these big museum people try to see everything. So like, well, I paid this money or whatever, I want to go and see all of it, but they’re actually doing themselves a disservice by doing that. They’re going to end it being too exhausted to remember the highlights I think.
Dan Hill:
Yeah. No, I think the best thing they could, is quite honestly, take a lunch break and then come back or maybe a lunch break, a coffee break and another coffee break. If they’re so enthralled, they’re going to stay there long time. Just recognize your limits.
Cindy Ingram:
Yeah, I did go to that exhibit at the end and I had already had several quality emotional experiences by that point and I was kind of done I think.
Dan Hill:
Yeah. No, we all have a limit someplace somewhere.
Cindy Ingram:
Okay. So you said that they loved Mona Lisa and I saw that in the book about like you had in the book charted all the spots where people liked the most. The hands were not at all … People didn’t care about the hands, I thought that was really interesting. Can you tell us what people’s reactions were to Mona Lisa?
Dan Hill:
Well, they really went for the face because da Vinci was the original facial coder, quite honestly. He and Michelangelo really got into, I know it’s a little grotesque, into dissection of bodies. In Michelangelo’s case, you really focused on the torso. He was most on the body. It’s probably why his statue of David is so great, but da Vinci went the opposite direction. He went for the face, he got obsessed with the facial muscles and how they move and what emotions they show. There was probably nobody who was that good on facial anatomy as da Vinci for another 200 years. All the ways in which he’s a genius, even before Darwin could get there, da Vinci got there, of course. da Vinci always does everything. I think Mona Lisa is fascinating because there’s multiple emotions on her face.
Dan Hill:
The real disservice is when we talk about the Mona Lisa smile and we kind of acknowledge, usually that’s a world wary smile or some such thing, but actually there are five different emotions going on in Mona Lisa’s face. There is a smile. It’s very faint smile. There’s also a smirk. I think the smirk could very well be because she was of higher social status. She was the life of a wealthy merchant in Florence. da Vinci was born illegitimate and a painter, and he’s famous now, but he wasn’t necessarily so famous then. In fact, when he left Italy to go to France, he took Mona Lisa on the back of a mule out of the country on his way up to Paris. She shows both contempt and a smile. Then she shows anger. The lower eyelid is straight, tout with some tension to it.
Dan Hill:
I imagine this could be because he was a perfectionist. It took him four years to do the basis of the work for Mona Lisa. Michelangelo got the whole Sistine Chapel ceiling done at the same time, four years. She may have gotten annoyed with the perfectionist she was sitting in front of. Then the mouth pushes upward, the lower chin pushes upward, which is a sign of anger and disgust and sadness. All of this is happening on her face, and I think it’s that complexity that just fascinates us. It’s that talent for facial coding that he originated really and brought home in the painting.
Cindy Ingram:
That is so cool. I was also really fascinated by the emotional reactions of Munch’s, The Scream, and also the Arnolfini Portrait where the emotions of the viewers don’t match the emotions in the painting. Can you talk about that?
Dan Hill:
Yeah, I was fascinated by both of them, and I’m half Norwegian. Of course Munch’s, The Scream had to be in the study no matter what. The reaction was low grade happiness. When I look at happiness, I put it on four levels. The weakest level is what I call acceptance, the begrudging smile as in, that’s the worst joke I ever heard, but at least you’d tried to humor me, and that’s basically the reaction people had to Munch. I don’t know why they had it necessarily, but this is my surmise so that they can make some sense. One is that the imagery has been co-opted, has been co-opted twice over. One is home alone. The promotional materials use this as a knock off. So we’ve got a whole different context for it suddenly.
Dan Hill:
The other one is, are these plastic dolls, as people may know, that you can have in the corner of your office at home imitating the street like my God, office politics, my boss is driving me crazy. That’s out and out humor. But I also think we’re in a different era. We’re in a much more cynical era. For Munch, it was a pure distillation of, he suffered from acrophobia depression. His family did the long winters in Norway, all of it, but this was a very heartfelt scream. But for us, the blood red sky, sorry, just too much maybe, can’t go there with you.
Cindy Ingram:
That makes me wonder too, that a lot of this would be different if they were faced with the actual painting, because we’re used to seeing it on a screen. We’re used to seeing reproductions of it. I think seeing it in person, which I’ve never gotten to see that one in person, but that the way Munch did the textures and the size and all of that would maybe then take them out of that, oh, I recognize this. This is famous. I like this too. Like, oh, I can feel this.
Dan Hill:
Yeah. No, I think it’s possible, but I would say that the Carter photograph, for instance, with the vulture, they did feel that and there was a lot of anger and sadness going on with that. I do think the co-opting had a lot to do with it also because we’re in a very right political environment to try to put it politely, and the scream has been used many times by cartoonists to reflect on what they think the other side is making them feel like, oh my God, this is crazy. We’re all out of control here. It’s a very current image in our culture. That’s one of the realities is, and I know as someone who’s been a poet and an essayist, you create it and then frankly it leaves your control.
Dan Hill:
It is also very much about what your audience makes of it. If they happen to go there, they happen to go there. Now, the other one you mentioned was the Arnolfini. This is the famous wedding portrait. Very ancient piece. You have an older gentleman and a younger looking woman who is looking down and is also evidently quite pregnant. This time we had a lot of contempt reaction, which is, if trust is the emotion of life in business relationships, contempt is its opposite. I don’t trust you, I don’t respect you. This case, I was so freaked out that I took the results over to an art school of my wife studies and I caught a bunch of artists, particularly female artists having to be around the lunch room at noon. And I said, “You got to help me out here. What is happening?”
Dan Hill:
By the time I got done with the discussion, it made a lot of sense to me. Some of them said, “Well, we’re in the Me Too movement. Frankly, he looks older, more powerful. His body language kind of is a bit haughty. He’s holding court over her and we don’t like that. We’re reacting against this. We have an adverse reaction to that setting because they don’t look like they’re equals. Other people said, “Well, I got to be honest. I’m a little more traditional and I don’t think you should be pregnant on your wedding day.” So, it didn’t work to them for a different moral reason. Between those two I went, huh, that makes a lot of sense. And I had my own reason, which is the guy looks a bit like Putin, Vladimir Putin. Yeah, I was like, that’s not who I’d be marrying.
Dan Hill:
But the reaction was while looking at her, that’s actually what spurred the reaction. I think it’s those two things. She really looks uncomfortable to be there. There is some speculation now that this was actually taken after her death, that she died in childbirth. So, the sad sadness, just possibly, has something to do with, not this guy she’s marrying, but what actually befell her as a fate.
Cindy Ingram:
Oh, I didn’t know about that one.
Dan Hill:
Yeah.
Cindy Ingram:
Cool. Another artwork that surprised me was Guernica by Picasso. In the book you said that it had the most dramatic eye tracking results in terms of people moving their eyes around, but that it had very little emotional engagement.
Dan Hill:
Yeah. I think that ties into another theme of the book. I went through and I did pick the artworks by theme. One of them was what I called conflicts and struggle. The Carter piece that I alluded to with the vulture, is one of those instances where it did manage to get an emotional response, but in a number of cases, including Guernica, it’s just like, I don’t really want to go there. I don’t want to take that on. That’s a really interesting dynamic because a lot of contemporary art is much more aggressive than older art. It’s more in your face, it’s more struggling for and seeking a reaction. It means that there probably has to be a little bit of sugar with the salt because people just … it’s almost like a roadside accident. You’re fascinated in a way, but then you also kind of want to look away because, God forbid, I’m the one in the accident.
Dan Hill:
I think there’s something about human nature wanting to preserve ourself, not be too emotionally taxed by something. So, the subject matter is taxing, and then the complexity is taxing. It’s a large piece. There are a lot of things going on. People don’t like to work that hard. I think one of the advantages the Carter piece had was radical simplicity. This one is the opposite. A friend of mine said, “You have to remember, Dan, a lot of people are until workers.” Until five o’clock, until the next job, until retirement, so on and so forth.
Dan Hill:
Human nature is, if we had our druthers, we would be like house cats. We would sit around most of the day and then say, “Yeah, I’m hungry now.” Making people work too hard in art appreciation or anything else is a possible danger. If you don’t mind, I’ll add to this just a little bit. When I’ve trying to study both advertising and art, I’ve always looked for what’s a theory of what’s going to succeed. What will get visual attention, will get emotional attention. There’s a man named William Wundt who was the contemporary of Freud, they together founded modern psychology. Wundt has what he calls Wundt’s curve, how are you going to grab people?
Dan Hill:
What doesn’t grab people is you play it totally safe. You make it really simple and really familiar and you’ve given them applesauce. What an ad agency, I found in my experiences and sometimes an artist will do is, they go way to the opposite end. They make it really complicated and it’s really novel and now you’re working really hard to put the whole thing together and people just give up. The sweet spot is to give them away in, either it is novel but simple or it’s familiar but it’s complex. You give them a way in and then you twist it. You give some extra layer of intrigue through either the complexity or the novelty to make up for the familiar and the simple. That’s how you get the apple pie.
Cindy Ingram:
I love that. That is so cool. I can apply this to so many things in my life. That’s so cool. Okay. You got me thinking again. I was taking notes.
Dan Hill:
Hopefully, I got your feeling too.
Cindy Ingram:
Yeah. I don’t know, that was like a mic drop or something that I just lost all train of thought, so that’s cool. Okay. How do you spell that psychologist name, Wundt.
Dan Hill:
W-U-N-D-T. William Wundt.
Cindy Ingram:
Got it. Okay. I want to look at that later, because I’m in the business of finding stock photos sometimes. I’m like, this is all very applicable to my stock photo finding for my website.
Dan Hill:
I think I missed one of your questions earlier, which was about hands. I’d like to go back and make sure I cover it. in Mona Lisa, they don’t really look at the hands, they are to the face and I just kind of ran with the face. But unfortunately, yes, limbs, torso, Michelangelo’s David was an exception, but in many cases they didn’t even particularly go there. They even didn’t even go there with nudity. It’s amazing how often nudity, male or female, was not as captivating as the face. Take Rodin’s The Thinker, for instance, you’ve got massive legs that are protruding towards you if you’re facing the sculpture piece, but they went to the face. If you take Parmigianino, I love his self portrait in a convex mirror.
Dan Hill:
Well, front and center, and I told you the lower foreground is a really powerful way to capture people. That’s where you see his hand. He is emphasizing the fact that he’s an artist. He uses his hand to draw and to paint, but people bounce to the face yet again. In fact, the Munch painting was one of the few instances where they didn’t go to the face. They went to the blood red sky that they thought was a little too much. It sent them over the top. The other time they didn’t go to a human face was Chagall’s I in the Village, where they went instead the horse’s face. So the face still won, it just wasn’t the human face.
Cindy Ingram:
Okay. For all of you who are listening and who are just dying to like go through every single artwork, the book has amazing illustrations of all of this stuff by topic, there’s gender, there’s line and color and all of these things. I encourage you to check it out because I have been really enjoying it and I want to go back and even dive in more after we talk because I’m just like so fascinated. I think that that is a good stopping place for our conversation. Although I want to ask you, when it comes to helping teacher, because I help teachers teach from works of art and help their students appreciate art and connect with art, can you think of any of the lessons from your research that are especially applicable that we maybe didn’t cover?
Dan Hill:
Yes, absolutely. Color. There’s a neurological study that I just was alerted to recently at Columbia University discovered yes, faces beat out bodies because we want to know how they’re feeling, so identity from the face comes ahead of those, but they also found that color came before form, that we quickly have an emotional vibe in response to the color scheme. In my book, I went through very carefully to identify what colors could do well. I don’t think this will surprise people necessarily, red was the most engaging, it caused the most emotional response. Blue was the most appealing. We like a blue sky day, we like a nice calm Lake, so on and so forth. A lot of the browns and blacks and tan color scheme, that’s so much a part of the renaissance in the 18th century doesn’t do as well for us in a modern palette.
Dan Hill:
White is kind of a middle ground. It can struggle a bit. Although there was a wonderful use of white by Norman Rockwell, I want to say defense from hunger, but that’s not quite the title, but it’s at Thanksgiving time and the family’s gathered around to have the Turkey and it’s white, on white, on white basically, and yet he pulls it off. He really pulls it off. Green falls back. Green does well in terms of eye tracking duration because you have nature and you can look at all the elements of nature. But people get to nature slowly. It doesn’t usually make your four seconds, and emotionally green, it’s kind of like a nowhere color. It performed as poorly or more poorly than anything other than the black, brown color spectrum.
Cindy Ingram:
That’s fascinating. That’s cool. Okay, so in the show notes we will put a link to your book as well as pictures of some of the artworks that we’ve talked about today and to your website. Is there any other place that our listeners can connect with you online?
Dan Hill:
I think the website is the perfect way to start. That’s danhill.sensorylogic.com. But I do have, if you go there, you’re going to see, I also have a blog series called Faces of the Week. It’s often about politics, but I try to do it on a nonpartisan basis as best I can. But politics is a blood sport. There are lots of emotions that are invoked, but I also go to the Academy Awards and I’ll do some sports stuff and whatever else captures my eye in a given week. I think that’s something they could enjoy as well. They can find me. I’m out there.
Cindy Ingram:
I really enjoyed your blog today too. I got lost in it because you would circle the different parts of the face and what they were doing, what the conversation was.
Dan Hill:
Yeah, and I think for an artist or an art teacher, yeah, this stuff is all around us in the culture.
Cindy Ingram:
Yeah. It’s awesome. All right, so my last question, which I ask everybody, and you already kind of answered it at the beginning, so I’m going to give you a chance in maybe another artwork or you can reiterate your first one, but that is, what artwork changed your life?
Dan Hill:
Well, I’m going to take the artwork that most struck me recently. I was in the Broad Museum in Los Angeles. I loved the large oversized table and chairs called Under the Table, because it’s so large in scale that you as a human being pass underneath it as if you’re in a world of giants and you are the midget or the child. I’d like to think that if we’re really going to be honest with ourselves, we’re all still children, and we’re all still children in part because of the very premise of the book, which is our emotions dominate. We are not as rational, we are not as grown up, we are not as conscious of how we respond to the world we might imagine.
Dan Hill:
For me, I saw the at the corner my eye when I turned a corner in the museum and then I just kept walking back and forth underneath that, just imagining myself in a room where the giants are eating lunch and I was going to try to have to find a way to survive. I found it just so captivating and I’ve been sharing that with some friends on Facebook and so forth, artists and other people, and it’s been trending a little bit. I just loved the piece.
Cindy Ingram:
Awesome. Cool. I’ll look that up and will also post and link to that in the show notes as well. All right, well thank you so very much for this conversation. It was totally fascinating, and I’m sure that everyone listening felt the same way.
Dan Hill:
I had a great time. Thank you so much. You’re very kind.
Cindy Ingram:
Thank you.
Cindy Ingram:
Thank you so much for listening to the Art Class Curator Podcast. Help more art teachers find us by reviewing the podcast and recommending it to a friend. Get more inspiration for teaching art with purpose by subscribing to our newsletter, Your Weekly Art Break. Recent topics include the importance of seeing art in-person, famous and should be famous women artists and 21 days of art from around the world. Subscribe at artclasscurator.com/artbreak to receive six free art appreciation worksheets. This week’s our quote is from Émile Zola. He says, “If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you. I am here to live out loud.” Thanks so much for listening. Have a wonderful week.
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Teaching from Your Values
What are your top ten values? What about your top three? Are your values as a teacher the same as the values in other parts of your life? Living in your values and teaching from your values is essential to living a balanced, healthy, happy life.
In this episode, I talk about my values and how my life changed when I started being true to them and give you the tools you need to discover your true values.
- Dare to Lead by Brené Brown*
- Values List from Brené Brown
- Atomic Habits*
- Full Frontal Living Podcast with Lisa Carpenter
- The Jim Fortin Podcast
*affiliate link
Hello and welcome to the Art Class Curator podcast. I am Cindy Ingram, your host and the founder of Art Class Curator and the Curated Connections library. We’re here to talk about teaching art with purpose and inspiration from the daily delight to creativity, to the messy mishaps that come with being a teacher, whether you’re driving home from school or cleaning up your classroom for the 15th time today. Take a second, take a deep breath, relax those shoulders and let’s get started.
Hello everybody. It’s Cindy Ingram, back for another episode of the Art Class Curator podcast. Now last week on the podcast we had Joan Marie and she to me is such an amazing example of living from your values and working from your values and I love that she talked about that, kind of near the end of that podcast episode where she spent her whole life sort of floundering, trying to figure out exactly where she stood. And it wasn’t until she realized what her values are and started doing her art and doing her teaching from the place of those values that she really began to get into that flow. And after recording that episode, I knew immediately that I wanted to do a whole episode on this, this idea of teaching from your values. And because for me personally, it has been pretty transformational to start thinking about my life through the lens of what are my values.
And what are values? So values are basically the things you believe, they are your fundamental beliefs and they guide your decision making. So through the lens of your values, you’ve made all sorts of decisions in your life. Whether or not you’re actively aware that those values were helping you with those decisions. They’re the sort of top priorities in your life. They’re the non-negotiables. They’re the things that when you’re in integrity with your values, you’re in a state of peace. You’re in a state of flow and ease. I’ve been in several programs over the last few years and many of them have done this in many different ways, how helping you discover what your values are. So I’m going to go over a few of the activities that I’ve seen that can help you figure out your values if you don’t sort of know off the top of your head what they are.
One of them is, Brené Brown has a list of values on the web and there’s also a list of values from James Clear who wrote the book Atomic Habits which I highly recommend. You can look at a list of values, and then you can narrow it down to your top three to five and just look through the list, highlight all the ones that you think could be contenders and then chances are you’re going to end up with a pretty extensive list, I know mine was over 10 and then narrow it down. So looking at the list and then taking off values that… kind of ranking them. Is creativity higher than responsibility or is consistency higher than experience? There are lots of different values and so interesting that when people I know have done this, it’s such a fun experience to see a person through their values because I’m looking at everyone through my values and then when I see someone else have a completely different set of values that really helps me connect with them in a better way, which I have some examples of that I will share a little bit later.
Another exercise that you can try and I love this one. Lisa Carpenter shared this one with me. You can listen to her podcast. It’s called the Full Frontal Living podcast. Really awesome, awesome woman, Lisa is, but what she does is she has you think about a dinner party that you are going to hold and you want to think about what are the top three or five people that you would automatically want to invite to your dinner party. It can be people you know, it could be famous people, it could be people from history, whoever it is, but people you would really want to spend time with. And then you think of three to five people that you would not want at your dinner party. You are dis-inviting them to your dinner party. And then you go through and think about, well what makes those people who they are?
Why do you want them to come to your party versus why do you not want them to come to your party? So for example, one of my top values, and I’ll share more about mine later, but one of my top values is authenticity. And so people who are not invited to my party are inauthentic people, people who have this sort of facade, who don’t want to connect deeper, who have this sort of mask on like that. I had someone on my list who is like that. So it made me sort of aware of what my values are. And the people on my invite list are, I noticed authentic people that are just just unapologetically themselves. You can think about your values through that way. And it’s not that you don’t like the people that you disinvite, but it helps you think about what is it about them that rubs up against what your values are.
Another values exercise that I heard about through Jim Fortin was, he basically has you come down to 10 and then he gives you scenarios like, okay, I’m going to give you the cure to world peace, but you have to give up one of your values to do it. Which one would you choose? So he gives a bunch of scenarios for that and then it helps you really narrow down. You’re like, Oh, shoot. What am I willing to part with? And it’s hard, super hard, but there’s lots of different scenarios that he gives out. But to start, you can just go, and this is what Brené Brown has you do, is you look at the list and just pick the top three. So narrow down your list. Mine is, the one I’m going to share with you, is really a top four. I have a hard time of narrowing it down. I have a top three but I just, I hate leaving up the fourth one.
And so once you have your three you think about well does this really define who you are? Do these things really put you into a state of flow, into a state of ease. Questions that Brené Brown has in her book, Dare to Lead is does this define me? Is this who I am when I’m at my best? And is this a filter that I use to make decisions? And so if you feel good about the answer to those questions with your values, you’re probably in the right spot. And you can use knowing these values to increase your job satisfaction, to put you into a state of flow. If you realize your main value is consistency and you have this more loosey goosey approach in your classroom where there isn’t a lot of consistency, you can see how that would cause a lot of stress in your day to day.
So you can think, okay, well how can I use my value of consistency to improve my day? So maybe you’re going to work on adding more consistency into your job. This will put you, being responsible to your values will increase your wellbeing. It will increase your job satisfaction, your sense of peace and ease, your integrity to yourself. And it will also add more light and joy into your life. Like for example, one of my values is experience and so I was just thinking recently that, and enjoy is one of my top ones too, it’s not one of the top four. I have a whole long list that I wish I could have all of them be my top ones. But I realized that I wasn’t incorporating enough experience into my day to day life. I love to travel and I travel almost every month, for work things or for fun too.
But mostly for work. And I live for those because it’s experience, it’s going to a new place, it’s doing new things, it’s meeting new people. And I realized I wasn’t doing enough of that in my day to day life. So I have made a commitment to go to the art museum every two weeks. And I have made a commitment to seeing more theater and taking my kids out on adventures as well. It’s a way to check in. Like every month you’re like, am I living to my values? Is there any, if there is an element of yourself that is sort of unsettled feeling, not just in your teaching life but in your personal life, that you can think about your values and check in with them every month. To give you some examples of this, I will share what my values are and give you some examples of where I was out of integrity with those values and how knowing them allows me to really understand situations that I have been put in.
My top four values are connection, wellbeing, authenticity and experience. I recently had an experience a couple of weeks ago where I did some travel and I met with a group of amazing people. It was highly connected, very authentic, my values were very much firmly in this space. However, one of my values is wellbeing and what I didn’t do in this situation is build in enough time to focus on my wellbeing. One of my highest sort of tier values, that’s part of wellbeing is comfort. I have really like particular a neurotic sensory needs. I have to have like soft clothes and I have to have space alone because I’m kind of highly introverted and I get overwhelmed if I’m around too much activity for too long and too many conversations.
I need to make sure I remove myself every now and then to sort of ground myself and recenter and get back into my body and my brain so that I’m not so overwhelmed. And that is something I did not do enough of during that week. I left the week feeling highly, highly drained, really emotional, really just beat down. And it reminded me a lot of what it felt like as a teacher at the end of a really hard week or even a hard day where I would just be so totally drained because I didn’t build in the values of my wellbeing, of making sure that I am my best self at any given moment because I let circumstances sort of whisk me away. So I learned, okay, that when I’m in a situation like this, I need to make sure I have my own room. I need to make sure that I build in breaks, that I go away from everybody else and get comfortable for a while.
And that was true of teaching and it actually true of my whole life up until maybe, I don’t know, a few months ago, honestly, I didn’t make wellbeing a priority. And when I did the values exercise, wellbeing wasn’t on it last year. But I realized that you can make something of value if it’s not necessarily a value that you really think of all that often. But I realized that I am a better person if I have wellbeing as first and foremost in my mind. In a work day, making sure that, one of the things that I had a problem with is during my planning period, kids would show up because they loved me. They wanted to spend more time with me, but I couldn’t be my best self if I didn’t have that break. I had to, sometimes I would turn off the lights in my classroom and kind of hide because I didn’t want to show them I didn’t care.
Because again, connection and authenticity are some of my top values. I want to connect with my students, but also my wellbeing had to come first if I was to give in that way. I think I’m starting to ramble on that one. But it’s an exercise in giving yourself what you need in your life. Another thing is, my top value being connection. So I talked about in the first episodes when I kind of came back from a year break from the podcast, that things in my business started to feel a little bit too trying to get perfect and trying to get whitewashed in a way. Just, don’t ruffle any feathers, don’t do this and that. And then I started to feel that didn’t feel very authentic to me and authentic is one of my top values and connection is one of my top values. And if I am not putting my full self out there, then I’m not going to be satisfied in my work.
The same thing with authenticity. When I realized that I don’t like small talk, when I first meet a person, I’m always like, can we get straight to talking about our feelings? Like I am much more comfortable talking about my feelings, talking about deep things then talking about the weather or I’ve been selling girl scout cookies with my daughters and the cookie booths drive me crazy because it’s the constant same small talk that everybody has. Like, Oh I’m trying not to eat cookies. Oh, I bought so many cookies, it’s like the same conversations over and over again that we’ve been having.
But I, for a long time in my life felt like there was something wrong with me because I couldn’t handle that sort of stuff and I would avoid it at all costs. Having a small talk with people, because I realized authenticity and connection are really important to me and that stays too surface level. So my challenge to you is to think about what your values are. For example, Joan’s values were creativity. And so when her teacher told her that she wasn’t creative, it really hurt her in a deep way because it was something really important to her and that she found her creativity through teaching. I want you to think about what are those things that are your values, how are you using them in your life? How are you using them in your teaching life and are you in integrity with your values?
Are you being responsible to those values? The question I’m going to leave you with too is, that where in your life are you living your values and where in your life are you living outside of your values and that once you have figured that out, it is a great pathway to greater peace and ease in your life. And I would love to hear your values. So if you could respond to this email that you got the podcast in or the social media post where you saw the podcast episode, on Instagram or Facebook or you can share on the show notes, blog comments at artclasscurator.com/43. And I want to hear about it because I find this to be so fascinating to see how a person’s values impact who they are. And I also would encourage you to have your family members, your husband or wife, your friends, your coworkers, do a values exercise with them and compare your values.
Because I made my husband do this, I think it was in, September or October, and he did his, and it made me really better understand who he was. His values were family, stability, trust and things that are important to me like experience and adventure were not anywhere near the top of his values. So it made sense that I’m the one that wants to go travel and go do things, but he wants to feel more stable. It was a really great connection point for us to talk about who we are as people and how we can support each other in our values. It’s been a really great thing. I think now that I’m talking about it, I think I want to do this for my kids too. I think that’ll be really good.
That’s all for today. Thank you so much for listening. Next week on the podcast we have an awesome guest named Dan Hill and he does facial coding to study emotions and he wrote a book where he analyzed people’s facial reactions and eye tracking with famous works of art and our conversation was so cool. I could geek out about that all day, so I can’t wait to share that with you. We will have that on the podcast next week. All right. Thank you so much for listening. Have a wonderful day.
Thank you so much for listening to the Art Class Curator podcast. Help more art teachers find us by reviewing the podcast and recommending it to a friend. Get more inspiration for teaching art with purpose by subscribing to our newsletter, your weekly Art Break. Recent topics include the importance of seeing art in-person, famous and should be famous women artists and 21 days of art from around the world. Subscribe at artclasscurator.com/art break to receive six free art appreciation worksheets. This week’s art quote is from a Émile Zola. He says, “If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist will answer you. I am here to live out loud.” Thanks so much for listening. Have a wonderful week.
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