Teaching the Arts

My original degree was Theater Arts. With a minor in English. Believe it or not, the theatre degree has served me well. You’d be astounded at how often I use the skills I learned. Not just acting, but in directing, which is a huge lesson in organization, people management, and working on a deadline. I also learned how to wire massive lamps, spotlights, and run audio equipment. In set-building, I learned how to build real furniture, how to dry wall, how to suspend heavy objects, how to automate doors and other stuff. In acting, we learned how to trust each other, be empathetic, get inside someone else’s skin and know what it was like to live there for a bit, how to take direction, and of course, overcoming the fear of public speaking was a nice skill to learn too. Mostly I learned to show up. Do my best. Take direction. And believe in myself.

I was also a competitive athlete, and I learned a lot of stuff there too, but my participation in the arts really lit a passion.

I started my college career as an art major. I didn’t have any background in art, but it seemed fun (oh the joys of being 18). My switch to theater was really more about wanting to teach and picking two subjects I wanted to specialize in. By the end of my fourth year of teaching in a small school, I taught Theater, Speech (I was on my college speech team), Art, Secondary Reading, and I directed something called One Act Play, which was a state-wide competition. I was immersed in introducing middle and high school students to the fine arts and beautiful literature. It was the best. Really. These are subjects and activities that allow people to stretch their creative muscles, but also teach us about life, beauty, teamwork, and there’s a certain amount of therapy that happens too.

Yesterday, friends descended on my home to make vision boards. Given the above explanation of some of my lifelong passions, you can imagine the amount of craft supplies I own. Ok. You probably can’t imagine that. It’s a lot (overwhelming understatement right there). For an entire day, I watched grown folks put together collages, paint, cut, glue, compose, arrange, design, and then talk about events in their lives that led them to put this or that on their board, about where they want to go, what they want to do, who they want to be. As they were leaving, one of my friends said, “I feel so calm here.” The reality is that my house was (is) anything but calm. Grandbabies were running through occasionally, there were spills, two large dogs pranced through, three cats ran from two dogs, baby chicks were constantly chirping in the laundry room, music was playing, and folks were coming and going. It could have been described as chaotic.

But working with your hands, looking at colors, arranging pictures, being self reflective, and working with others…that looked and felt like calm.

Enough about me. Why is it we end up defending fine art instruction every so often, usually when budget cuts come up? Why don’t we have more fine arts in our correctional classrooms? I agree that we need to provide industry credentials and high school equivalency diplomas to incarcerated individuals, but especially for people in prisons with long stretches of time ahead of them, we can also offer fine arts instruction and experiences. Engaging in the arts also bolsters other skills that come in handy in STEM, project management, design, marketing, etc, etc, etc.

Ways in which I’ve inserted arts instruction in prisons and jails? Creating a podcast that was broadcast on APDS tablets for residents, teaching short, 6 week Master Classes in Drawing Portraits from Photographs, Design 101, Shakespeare in Today’s World, Modern Heroes in Classic Films, Public Speaking, Journalism (writing, layout design, interviewing to produce a monthly newspaper. We also digitized this on APDS tablets), website design, Poetry Quilt (we did this on paper. Totally cool activity with juveniles and adults and staff), Poetry Month activities, Short Story Contest, Bookmark Contest, Playwriting, Card Making, Drawing with Perspective, Lyrics as Storytelling, Lyrics, Metaphors, and Analogies, and the list just goes on and on. It’s endless, really, how you can introduce the arts to students, no matter where your classroom is located or what your main subject is.

I challenge you to think of one way you could introduce students to the arts. If you want to talk about your ideas, contact me here.

Thanks for joining me for Sunday Morning Coffee. I’m going to take my cup and stare at my vision board for a while. Watch out world!