Hetland Ch. 6 - Learning to Engage and Persist & Ch. 7 - Learning To Envision
Twyla Tharp: Scratching (pdf document on lore)
- What are ways that the habits of envisioning, engagement, and persistence evident in your own work?
- How do we teach the habits of envisioning, engagement, and persistence to our students?
Oh my gosh that Twyla Tharp article! On Amazon, I always see the book it came from suggested to me based on my other purchases and I've thought to myself, "Why would this book on dance be suggested?" Reading this small excerpt, I now know why and feel compelled to add it to my amazon Christmas wish list in hopes that St. Nick will have needed a last minute gift idea. So many sections I feel like I need to have blown up and plastered on my art room walls.
I felt a kinship to her process for generating ideas. For just about any creative endeavor I take on, I seem to go through the same process. I love the 4 components she lays out: 1) Generation, 2) Retention, 3) Inspection, and 4) Transformation. I have the hardest part with the retention part. I tend to do a lot of Inspection of an idea in my head (mostly b/c the best ideas come when it is hardest to get them recorded somewhere) and hold on to it for a short amount of time before >poof!< it is gone. I also think I am either partially dehydrated at all times and therefore my short term memory is shiite due to that or that old adage of having children and the mother giving them half her brain is right. I've had two kids so do the math there. O.o The other side of that is what Tharp says and that good ideas generate more ideas. And for me they tend to cancel each other out in terms of holding a place in my memory banks. Unfortunately all that is left is the phantom itch of knowing there was an idea to begin with there.
With my multi-tasking art project previously, I had felt a twinge of sympathy for my students who are made to pack up and leave. And out of respect for a well-rounded education and my colleagues, I try to have students out on time and not continuously write passes to let them stay. As the Hetland book points out, "when students are truly engaged, they lose themselves. They are in a state of "flow"" (another book on my wish list as it so happens.) I cherish those days where we all lose sense of time and the bell catches us off guard. To me that signals an extraordinary day. Even if it does send us all into a tizzy to clean up and get a move on.
Some of the advice, or stratagem the book give for teaching students to persist and envision are things that I do out of instinct, I think, and so do not feel very purposeful. I hadn't thought about it teaching students to persist, I thought it was more of a pep talk and don't give up! motivational talk. Interesting. I wonder if the teachers in this book recognized it as such, or if the authors were able to make those connections as they wrote. Sometimes what we do as art teachers seems so obvious after the fact. It makes me think of what Dr. Unrath said this summer about Art teachers operating on intuition, instinct and the gut - more so than other types of teachers. Its funny because I'm thinking of my Intro students versus my elective studio students (the ones I used to have before I cut back my hours) and how different they are to receive this type of teacher interactions. And how you can start to see the difference in the students who will go on to the studio classes. It gets in their bellies and you can see the fire thats there in their eyes. Not that the fire is that great-creative-artist-for-life fire, but its the creative spirit that has been re-kindled. You can see them start to make the transformation. And that is so worth all the other whip-cracking. I might have to see what I can do to share the Tharp thoughts. I will definitely need to re-read this on a regular basis.
I'm not sure where in all my postings I should include this, but wanted to share... For my scratching activity, I kept a Pinterest board. See my scratchings here.
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