Day 2
Un Bestiario de Latinoamérica
a digital arts integrative workshop with Cynthia Weiss, Tommaso Iskra De Silvestri, and Fannie Medina
Yet another creature my abuela had told me stories about.
Sharing Back Our Inheritance Mural Work
As we re-entered the Zoom platform, we were treated to a slide show of the Inheritance Murals and Found Poems we had created on the first day of our institute. And, for all the challenges there are in teaching online, this kind of digital sharing provides new opportunities for quickly viewing as a whole class completed work products and works-in-progress in a way in which everyone can be equally represented. This is not always possible in live, face-to-face classrooms, where more gregarious students tend to dominate classroom discourse. Sharing visual art representations of our responses to and associations with a text (in addition to our text responses) significantly contributes to the power of this kind of online peer-to-peer sharing, allowing students to quickly encounter each others’ work without the need for inordinate amounts of teacher mediation.Loved each and every one of the inheritance wall pieces...so touching and unique.
Welcome & Whole Group Whiteboard Warm Up
We were introduced to our visual arts presenting team (Cynthia Weiss, Tommaso Iskra De Silvestri, and Fannie Medina), and we welcomed each other back to our second day by using an online whiteboard to collectively respond to prompts drawn from Charlie Hernandez & the League of Shadows:![Whiteboard[1]-01](https://www.hablateacherinstitute.org/documentation/chicago2020/files/2018/06/Whiteboard1-01.png)
My abuela, telling her favorite tales from memory.
![Whiteboard[2]-01](https://www.hablateacherinstitute.org/documentation/chicago2020/files/2018/06/Whiteboard2-01.png)
Myths spread like wildfire around the globe.
![Whiteboard[3]-01](https://www.hablateacherinstitute.org/documentation/chicago2020/files/2018/06/Whiteboard3-01.png)
Two headed vampire dogs with glowing red eyes.
The whole group whiteboard process is a highly efficient and inclusive way of warming up a class.
Here are some of our crowd-sourced ideas for whiteboard classroom applications:
Here are some of our crowd-sourced ideas for whiteboard classroom applications:
Brainstorming writing topics.
To practice vocabulary building.
Having students being the organizers of Whiteboards in breakout rooms.
Actividad acerca de sonidos iniciales, conteo de números.
In a small group we could assign each kid their own box.
We can annotate screen share images - so that students can annotate a shared text with each student using a different color for their comments - with arrows pointing to the piece of text. being commented on.
I could do this exact activity with my kindergarten students!
Exactly. I love this!
Bestiary Memory Game
Tommaso demonstrated how to play an online memory game in Google Drawings. The game works exactly as the traditional memory game of moving cards and adding them to your deck as you guess pairs. In the online version, you can use the "undo" button to move cards back, delete the orange squares, and add just the images to your deck. He created the game based on the creatures listed in the glossary in Charlie Hernández and the League of Shadows.We then proceeded into breakout rooms to play the game in small groups.
Reimaging Myths and Monsters
After reading out loud excerpts from Chapter Thirteen of Charlie Hernandez & the League of Shadows, the Visual Art presenting team had us create Four Square Charts (paper folded into four “squares”), and then we filled in the four squares with our responses to the following prompts as we looked at the Glosario/Glossary of scary monsters from our core text.1- Write the name of your chosen mythological creature and list 2-3 of their qualities and powers.
2- Reverse those powers. How might they be transformed for the public good?
For instance, we could reimagine La Llorona from being a frightening ghost that weeps for having drowned her children to becoming a benevolent being that protects children.
Examples:
2- Reverse those powers. How might they be transformed for the public good?
For instance, we could reimagine La Llorona from being a frightening ghost that weeps for having drowned her children to becoming a benevolent being that protects children.
Examples:
She rescues children from being bullied.
Her tears create a river to find lost children.
She could cry when kids are in trouble to provide warning.
She takes children in bad situations to parents who don’t have any.
3- Rename your creature.
Examples: La Llorona could become:
Examples: La Llorona could become:
La Protectora.
The Just Warrior.
El Ángel de los Niños.
4- Who is a hero of yours? This could be an ancestor, someone in your family, or someone from a book or myth. List 2-3 qualities of theirs. You can rename your hero.
I picked my mom, and I would rename her La Cuca. Not because she is a fire breathing dragon, but because she would love it!
We then shared our ideas and notes from the Four Square exercise in breakout groups.
Putting Together Our Own Benevolent Monsters
Habla had provided an on-line folder of digital monster “body parts” for us to use to design our own benevolent monsters.Tommaso guided us through learning extra techniques for using the Google Drawing tools to design our creatures, including:
- Copy paste.
- Mirroring.
- Scaling.
- Transparency.
- Accessing images in drive.
- Starting a folder and searching one.
- Copy paste.
- Mirroring.
- Scaling.
- Transparency.
- Accessing images in drive.
- Starting a folder and searching one.
Building Bestiaries
We warmed up our whole group by making the sounds of our invented monsters, by performing the facial gestures of our monsters, and by moving like our monsters move (within the limits of our Zoom locations).
Marimar Patron Vazquez shared the compelling history behind the creation of “Bestiaries” - a literary and visual art tradition that started out as a way of sorting animals into categories of those that are imagined to be forces for good and those that are imagined to be associated with evil. These beautifully illustrated, highly elaborate documents, intended to be a kind of “field guide” to the mysteries and wonder of negative and positive forces in the world, soon came to blur the line between imaginary and actual creatures.
And when Europeans invaded the “New World,” they tried to represent the animals they encountered there not as their own various species, but rather as remixes of parts of animals that the colonizers already knew. The bestiary form grew into an increasingly magical mix of documentation and fantasy, and has inspired the work of many contemporary writers and artists.
And when Europeans invaded the “New World,” they tried to represent the animals they encountered there not as their own various species, but rather as remixes of parts of animals that the colonizers already knew. The bestiary form grew into an increasingly magical mix of documentation and fantasy, and has inspired the work of many contemporary writers and artists.
After Tommaso helped us to review how to use Google Drawing, as well as how to access the folder of animal body components, we broke out into working groups of 2 to 3 people, and jointly designed composite new creatures together. The process was challenging, delightful, and hilarious.
I like the other legs better!
I was hoping for dragon wings.
Let’s just use the same arm image.I am kind of anal about symmetry.
No, no lion head, please.
If we decide that our creature lives in the water, we’ve definitely got to add something FISHY.
That tail is HUGE!!! Let’s shrink it down - and FLIP it.
Let’s put the octopus in FRONT of the fire.
Do we want it to be flying?
Back in the large group, the Visual Art presenting team shared their own hybrid animal creations, complete with text descriptions of the creatures’ habits and powers.
We then went back into our break-out groups, and worked together to write our Glossary Descriptions of our co-created creatures. Our final step was to bring together different co-creation teams to discuss the decision-making process behind each hybrid animal. This work proved to be especially poignant because all of our collaboratively created creatures quickly came to represent all of our own needs and capacities for healing during these challenging times.
