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:
“Walking along the Des Plaines river”
“I’m getting warm just thinking about these places!”
“The Muskegon River in Michigan”
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”:
Tommaso demonstrated how we could add a favored word several times to have it appear more prominently in our 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.
Now Sometimes even when we’re outside… we’re inside.
It holds us in wooden chairs, once trees.
Even rivers come inside: cool water rushing, eager to return to the sea.
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:
How does the artist create space?
How does the artist make marks?
How does the artist create mood?
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.