Opening New Windows

Opening New Windows | Visual Arts & Literacy | Session 1

February 11th, 2021

Essential Question/Big Idea:
What are our new learnings about our inside/outside worlds?
How do we connect across virtual and physical borders?
Parallel Processes.

Outside/Inside: Translingual Story Mapping
What is a story you can tell about how a tradition or celebration changed this year?
What is a story of how you “connected across borders” this year?
What is a story about a new learning or transformation you experienced this year?
What is a story you have to share about a space/object inside or outside your home that brought you joy this year?
What has centered you during time of pandemic?
What rituals have you maintained that have kept you grounded?

The work began even before the official start time by viewing and listening to images and music that stirred the imagination around the theme of “opening new windows”.

Habla’s methodology is grounded in the understanding that all meaningful literacy is inherently:
- Social
- Multi-Sensory
- Grounded in personal experience
- A creative act of the readers themselves

Learning on-line, despite its challenges, provides special opportunities to highlight these aspects of literacy. This was accomplished by:

- Encouraging discourse between and among participants and facilitators in real time, rather than having ideas only moving from a single facilitator to a single participant at a time.

- “Blowing Up the Chat” – opportunities for everyone to respond without getting “called on”.

- Intentionally drawing on personal meanings and associations as a way of entering texts.

- Activating all the senses, including our kinesthetic senses, in preparation for encountering a text together in a community of collaborating readers.

- Creating and sharing personal expressive work in response to a text.

The Visual Arts facilitation team of Cynthia Weiss, Fannie Medina, and Tommaso Iskra De Silvestri guided us in encountering the beautifully written and illustrated book Outside In through our own visual art responses. The themes contained in the book (of the nurturing we receive from the outside world) was extremely powerful to explore after living inside for a year throughout the pandemic.

We began by visualizing – imagining ourselves in the wide space of a natural place we love – a space that centers us. We all carry these images in our internal geography, and we can return there in our minds whenever we need to. Tommaso played beautiful music on a Tibetan singing bowl while we traveled in our minds.

Background / Middleground / Foreground

- Imagine yourself in the wide space of a natural place you love--a space that centers you. See this place through a bird’s eye view.

- Where are you in this space? What/Who is nearby you? Experience this space through all your senses.

- What is an object in this foreground space that captures your attention? What does it feel like?

Here were some of our responses:

We wrote our findings from our visualizations one word at a time, choosing words from what we noticed in the background, the middle ground and the foreground of our imagined outside landscape, and entered them into a Menti “Word Bubble”:

Our imaginations and creative juices were now “cooking,” and we were ready to start dialoguing with the text. Cynthia read to us single phrases from the book, and the whole Zoom grid became a choreographed set of improvised gestures we made together in response. Here is our “dance” of lines from the text:

The transformation of the text into our moving bodies mirrored the transformation of the sun and rain and seeds into bread and berries. Next, Tommaso guided us through the process of using the Zoom “White Board” function for collaborative drawing as a group.

We then proceeded to create several collective drawings representing lines from the book, working together from our separate locations. We were now already physically, visually, and intellectually invested in the text, even before we had read these words in context, or had seen the lovely illustrations. Our own images had now not only been in dialogue with those of our colleagues, but they could also now dialogue with the images created by the book’s illustrator. This process of enriching our associations with a text even before we start to read it in its entirety is known as creating “thick air” - full of lots of oxygen for the reader’s engagement.

We then discussed how different devices have different configurations on their Zoom platforms, and the participants shared challenges and options for moving between Zoom and other programs, especially when working with younger students.

Fannie guided us in reading through the full text of “Outside In” by Deborah Underwood, and then we reviewed the images from the book in break out groups, focusing on a series of reflection questions:

Participants noticed such strategies as emphasizing the colors for the OUTSIDE images to pull focus on one page, and leaving lots of empty space around characters in another.

Fannie shared with us a slide show of the wide range of expressive watercolor techniques that professional illustrators have used to great advantage.

The facilitators then demystified these techniques so we could use them ourselves for creating the backgrounds for the visual artworks that we were building up to producing. The institute had provided the participants with all the watercolor supplies they needed. Now, by mastering new approaches to multi-media expression one approach at a time, we found ourselves able to invest in complex projects over time without feeling overwhelmed. And the company of colleagues in working breakout groups allowed us to support each other through our various areas of expertise.

Techniques: Experiment with watercolors options: wet on wet, splatter, straw blowing, brush strokes, layering, and using different color palettes.

We were then given time to just work! By remaining on-line during our studio time, we were able to feel each others’ energy, even as we worked in our separate homes after a long day of teaching.

Opening New Windows | Visual Arts & Literacy | Session 2

February 25th, 2021

Hirameki

We discussed the human impulse to perceive shapes and images implied by abstract patterns, such as the age-old custom of cloud gazing and the imagining of constellations in the stars.

Tommaso introduced us to the Japanese practice of “Hirameki”- extending abstract paint splats to reveal images latent in our imaginations.

We then used a white board to collectively outline shapes and images we saw suggested by clouds and by Hirameki splashes. This was a warm up to our discovering stories in our own watercolor washes, reversing the idea that images always follow texts to illustrate them. Instead, we explored how rich abstract images can reveal fresh, emergent narrative.

It was the abstract background that young Alex had made that gave him the sophisticated and fresh idea of water as a bridge, opening up for him a set of rich writing pathways, as well as compelling ideas for his visual collage. Cynthia calls this moving back and forth between more than one medium to support meaningful composition in both as “parallel processes”. Alex’s attention to the details of his watery painted background for his undersea landscape sparked the delightful poetic notion that fish enjoyed the waving of seaweed as they swam as a bridge between where they were and where they wanted to be. This would probably not have occurred to him if he had not painted first as his pre-writing. His act of painting created a receptive field for the emergence of his imagination, unencumbered by linguistic narrative clichés.

We proceeded to try out this approach ourselves, using our own watercolors for ideas generation, remembering to write about what we saw/ felt within our visual creations, and keeping in mind the places we loved and that have helped center us during this pandemic.

Our facilitators introduced us to some formal design concepts as we proceeded to use the writing inspired by our visual arts explorations to guide us in creating the next layers of our visual art collages. First, they shared some examples of professional artists who work with silhouettes, who work with cut outs, who create collages, and who work in layers. Kara Walker, Rene Magritte, Romare Bearden, and Auguste Edouart.

Collage Design Ideas - Some Examples

- We talked about layering and making choices that allow us to see one image through another, deciding on what we want as foreground, middle ground, and background.
- We were encouraged to find things we could use in our homes for tracing.
- We were encouraged to try cutting into our painted papers and to use both the positive and negative shapes we had thus created.
- We were encouraged to cut up magazines and to use found images.

Options

Making collages can call upon us to cut up beautiful papers we have painted. We discussed our reluctance to disassemble what we had made, and talked through the options.

Collage In Process

In Habla methodology, all expressive production in response to texts is both deeply personal and individual, but also socially constructed. Both the thinking of creators and the responses of colleagues to works in progress is regularly shared between respondents and creators.

Opening New Windows | Visual Arts & Literacy | Session 3

March 11th, 2021

In the final session of the Visual Arts strand of this institute, we revisited the lovely text OUTSIDE IN once again. It’s theme of our hopes for reopening when Covid-19 has been successfully mitigated was especially poignant to experience on March 10th, the year anniversary of when the disease was formally declared a pandemic.

We gave special attention to how the writer drew on the senses to establish a sense of place, including sounds and smells:

The facilitators shared prompts with us to catalyze more writing inspired by our senses:

Studio Time

The facilitators shared examples of collages that incorporated text: