Notes from the Arts As Life! conference
Each year, the San Mateo County Office of Education holds a conference about the techniques and power of arts education.
Some of my workshop participants waving goodbye as they sign off.
In 2021, the event moved to online for obvious reasons. In 2022, with substitute teachers being very hard to come by, the organizers innovated. You could attend as an individual, or you could bring your whole classroom of students with you. That worked so well, that this year they did it again.
I taught a workshop called “Scribbling and Doodling to Make Our Learning Visible” to a zoom window that included individual educators and elementary school classrooms from all over San Mateo County and beyond.
We learned 4 ways to artistically respond and document what we see and hear. We scribbled to music, we doodled while listening to a poem, we drew a picture of a poet’s face, and then we selected powerful words from the text of a poem. Then I invited participants to use any mix of those tools to make art as we watched a video of Zoe Dorado reading "In Parallel" from the 2022 Arts As Life conference.
I invited everyone to add pictures of their art to an online “Making Learning Visible” wall and to continue to add art they make about other sessions throughout the day. The conference is over now, but the wall continues to grow.
See my sketchnotes, drawings by students of my workshop, and other creative reactions to the Arts As Life! conference on this padlet.
Last year, for my workshop about artistic inquiry, we took turns for giving instructions about the next steps to take in making art about a classroom that is full of love. We had fourth grade students giving instructions that adult educators across the state followed. You can see the results in the online gallery below.
I also documented and presented at this conference in 2021. Read all about that in “Emancipating our Pedagogy with San Mateo County Educators.”
Art from students in my Arts Inquiry workshop from the 2022 Arts As Life conference.