Emancipating our Pedagogy with San Mateo County Educators
Michelle Holdt did it again—the 3rd Annual San Mateo County Office of Education (SMCOE) Arts Institute inspired educators with more creative approaches to their work, even while all being held over Zoom. I learned quite a bit from other presenters and also from participants in the workshop I hosted.
Michelle, as Coordinator of Arts and Restorative Learning for SMCOE, welcomed us to the event and Niambi Clay, Executive Director of Equity, Social Justice and Inclusion for SMCOE, talked about the importance of the arts for young people to thrive and to tell their own stories - including their joys!
As the keynote speaker, Charles “Chip” McNeal, Director of Diversity, Equity and Community at SF Opera, lead with love, passion, and outrage.
Chip has been inspiring me for a decade. You can see my drawing of him at the 2011 Bay Area Celebrates National Arts in Education Week at Herbst Theater in San Francisco on his website. I’m excited and intrigued for his upcoming book about his framework for an Emancipatory Pedagogy. By understanding the importance of motivation, relationships, and culture in education we can help students to learn to love the vessels they are in and each achieve their full potential.
At the “Literacy in the Making: Where Heads, Hearts, and Hands Meet”, Maureen Carrol and Lois Logan showed us methods for using art to help young students to express their hunches and inferences to better connect with a text.
Lois has a fun routine for online learning that she calls a “chatterfall.” She asks students to type their reply to a question in the chat bar, and then has everyone click “return” at the same time so that all their responses cascade down the screen at once.
The day continued with a panel on “Music, Social-Emotional Learning, and Equity” and a presentation on the Quilters of Gee’s Bend, but I’ll admit to being distracted as I made some edits to the slides for my own presentation. I did take a moment to make some mindful spiral drawings in a “Restorative Practices - Creatively Enriched!” workshop with Bradley Ostrander and Bettina Graf.
I had about a dozen participants attending my own workshop, “Artistic Notetaking to Deepen Learning and Overcome Zoom Fatigue.” Many of them were artists so I felt comfortable pushing through a few drawing exercises and trying some experimental approaches. I wish we could have had a whole other hour just to discuss the experience.
I started with my favorite - scribbling to music as a warm up. This got our hands moving and is always a chance to get familiar with our materials.
I offered some of my philosophy about how scribbling is a way to use art to access our emotions, and can help us use our emotions to create meaningful and compelling art. Watch my “Scribbling Away Our Worries” videos to try this yourself.
My approach to sketchnoting won’t work for everyone. I encourage students of any age to try different aspects of my approach to see which help them focus and learn more.
For myself and others, drawing a portrait of someone helps me focus my attention on their face and listen more closely. For others, the effort of drawing becomes a distraction from the words. So we tried this with a short video from Chip McNeal.
As you can see, each participant had their own approach and some of them shared their drawings at the end of the class. Max found that the best way for him to listen was to doodle wavy lines in response to Chip’s words.
Next, I cued up a 7.5 minute podcast episode from Studio Pathways, “What are LARJ conditions in Teaching and Learning?.” I welcomed the participants to take notes in whatever form that felt like, and opened up a Jamboard that we could take collaborative notes on together. This online tool allowed for shapes, scribbles, and words.
You can see that the Jamboard got lively with expression and notes. We don’t know which participants added which elements.
As a meta-experiment, we finished the workshop by using this collaborative jamboard as the inspiration for another piece of art.
A few of the participants shared their results. There’s a lot more to play with and figure out about this process. There are as many ways to explore this approach to learning as there are individuals.