RESIDENCY- JUSTICE PAGE SCHOOL WITH ELISSA CEDARLEAF-DAHL - 35 HOURS
This week was a big one! When speaking about this residency placement I am going to need to divide this by days since everyday was so jam packed! I had a great time at this placement, I really learned a lot since it was so different from what I have been doing at the Children’s Residential Treatment Center.
Monday, March 18th
This was the first day starting at Justice Page Middle School. The school had recently just changed its name to be named after Alan Page, retired Minnesota jurist and football player. He has a great message and has played a great roll in getting involved in the school after they renamed their name. The students had a big part in changing the name and already that told me a lot about the school and the students that would be there. This is a really socially forward school, the students and administrators have a lot of communication with each other and I thought that was really awesome.
Elissa immediately started to show me the ropes, she starts her day with a homeroom class that the school calls crew. Every morning they go through announcements for the school and play a game. This takes place in one of Elissa’s two classrooms in the school, her murals classroom. This is primarily where she teaches, she is the pioneer of a program that she started on teaching students how to make murals. Everyday she teaches one regular art class to a mix of 6th, 7th and 8th graders and the rest of the day she spends in the murals classroom with only 7th and 8th graders.
After crew we head upstairs to her regular art class where she is doing a lesson on abstract watercolor creatures, I will get into this a bit more later. The way that Elissa teaches is by making a demo video before hand and then plays it for her students. I liked this method since it allowed for her to pass out work while she played the demo and she can replay it multiple times for the class. The class sizes at this school are anywhere from 30-40 people so I can understand how this makes things much easier.
This is the students working on their abstract watercolor pieces.
After this class we went back down to Elissa’s mural class where I introduced myself and the students got started with labeling their mural panels. Elissa does murals on parachute fabric, or polytab, which allows for the mural to be painted in the classroom and then later installed on the building. She does this for almost all murals that she works on and it works really well for working with different populations.
Tuesday, March 19
On Tuesday, the day was really different. I went with Elissa and some of her seventh grade students on a field trip to go see David Hogg speak. David Hogg was a survivor of the Parkland High School shooting and one of the founders of the March for Our Lives movement. The students had just worked on some social justice posters and when he was coming to town, Elissa arranged for some of the students to go see him speak. It was a really incredible event. It was really nice to hear someone around my age have such a huge platform to speak on about issues that I feel really strongly about. It was nice and very expiring to hear the students discuss the talk after it happened.
After the field trip and other classes, Elissa took me along with her to go work on a mural at Little Brothers Friends of the Elderly. This was amazing. We worked with the elderly at the location to help paint pieces of the mural on poly tab. Elissa loved having me around because it make her work take half of the time. I always get attached to certain age groups and believe, “I really want to teach only this age” but then, I meet with another group and everything changes. I think I just really like people and teaching is the perfect avenue for that. I have lots of pictures of us at Friends of the Elderly!
This is a bonus photo of me painting some scrabble letters.
Wednesday, March 20th
Today was a half day at the school so there was no crew in the morning and every class was about half of the time of a regular class. The day was early release so the teachers could have staff development on the topics of white supremacy and how to eliminate that from their schools. This is the day where we really planned out the lesson that I was going to teach the next day. I felt a little rushed on the lesson for this because all of my hours happened in one week but since there was an early release day, I got to go back early and work on the lesson plan and gather materials the next day.
I decided that I was going to do a lesson that worked along with Elissa’s current project because they are nearing midterms and I didn’t want to take away too much time from them being able to work on their projects. I use a paper ( that I am a very big fan of) called yupo paper. This is a synthetic paper that is non absorbent and essentially is just a piece of high quality plastic. It takes to oils really well which means that it picks up finger prints. This made me a little bit wary because even I have a really hard time with this paper sometimes because it is really finicky with water and inks and literally everything else that gets put on it. At the same time, it is SO fun and experimental. Its perfect for what the students are working on.
This is the example that I made for class showing different water color techniques on the paper.
Since Elissa does video demos for her class I decided to try her method and make a video demo while I made my example. The point of my lesson was to give the students a place to really see instant watercolor results and experiments before they moved on to their final so they could loosen up a bit. Many of the students weren’t fully understanding what it meant to make something abstract so I wanted to given them a place to experiment with it.
Thursday, March 21st
I did my actual teaching today and on Friday. The lesson went REALLY well. The kids were so excited by the yupo paper because it was much less pressure than their final. Students kept calling me over just to show me different effects that the combination of water color and the paper made.
Some students got so into experimenting with the paper that they worked on it for the entire class period. Since I told the students it was plastic, a lot of them got the understanding that they could even run their entire paper underwater and it would not warp at all. I had a student come up to me for an extra piece so they could try it at home. It is really cool to bring such high quality products into the classroom because it sometimes brings forward an interest for students that they did not know that they even had!
This is me talking over my demo video before I handed out the paper to anyone.
Later on this day I brought in a lot of my work so that I could speak to the murals class about what its like to be an illustrator. I did this presentation of my work four times in total, twice on Thursday and twice on Friday. The students had a lot of really good questions and comments about my work. Some groups were more interested in my content while others were really interested in how I make money in my field. I was really happy to answer these questions because these are topics that I wish someone had come in and spoken to me about before I was in college.
Here I am discussing a series of work that I had made a while back.
Friday, March 22nd
Today was repeat of everything that I had done the previous day but with different classes. The school runs on a A-day B-day schedule which means that every other day the classes switch off. For this day, I got to change my approach a bit since I had already done the lesson before and I got to explain more ways to play with the paper to the class. Here are some examples from this day:
In the murals class where I showed my work again, Elissa asked them for any advice that they had for me on being a teacher. I will end this journal with my favorite comment of the whole week. When asked for key teaching advice a student said to me, “always have a mop.” Don’t know why this one got me so good but it was very funny to me.
That concludes my week with Elissa! I am so glad that I got all of the opportunities that I did while working with her!