Читать книгу Cultivating Curiosity - Doreen Gehry Nelson - Страница 20

Iconic designers Ray and Charles Eames, whose Venice, California, office was across the street from Westminster Elementary School when I was teaching there, discovered my work in 1971. After showing their films and pictures of their furniture to my students, I wrote and asked the Eameses to come to see the “City of the Future” that my students had built, based on the Oakwood area of Venice that included their office. The busy designers politely declined. Undaunted, my students, whom I had taught to advocate for themselves, wrote a giant, knock-out of a letter, complete with drawings of their City, and delivered it in person to the Eames Office. Ray and Charles showed up the next day and, after witnessing my methodology in action, saw to it that I received National Endowment for the Arts funding (Charles was on the board of the NEA). They took 6,000 slides of classrooms for a visual presentation and a film about my methodology as I trained other teachers in diverse neighborhoods, and gave me space in the Eames Office for the making of a film about my methodology.

Some years later, I mentioned to Ray Eames with pride how, early in 1971, I had taught my 4th and 5th graders in Venice about the art of American painter, sculptor, and printmaker Frank Stella and taken them to an exhibit of his work at the Pasadena Art Museum (now the Norton Simon Museum).

I was married to an art dealer then and we lived upstairs from his cutting-edge Los Angeles art gallery, so I was surrounded by such artists as Stella, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Indiana, Ed Ruscha, John Chamberlain, John Altoon, Edward Keinholz, H. C. “Cliff” Westermann, and Louise Nevelson. Taking my students to see art exhibitions had become part of my regular teaching practice. I hoped to inspire them to think creatively and to be creative, so for each new exhibit, I wracked my brain trying to figure out how to prepare them for what they would see.

(After one such excursion to the Pasadena Art Museum to see a show about the Bauhaus School, as the bus drove home to Venice through downtown Los Angeles, one of my students pointed to the skyscrapers and yelled, “Look! Bauhaus is everywhere!”)

By the time the Frank Stella exhibit came to Pasadena, I had conceived my Design-Based Learning methodology. Wanting to teach my students that artists were not a rarified group, I decided not to first show them Stella's work, but to have them “invent” what it was like being him.

I moved all of the desks in the classroom to the side and brought in large rolls of white butcher paper, bottles of brightly colored tempera paint, and scale-enlarged compasses and protractors. I told my students that they could do anything they wanted to do, but they had to use the tools that I had provided. My hope was that they would make giant and bold geometrical paintings that resembled Frank Stella's work. That's exactly what happened. They even trimmed the butcher paper where paint had been applied sloppily, with results similar to Stella's shaped canvases. (One student, instead of making art, went to the library—with my permission—and ended up writing a lengthy report on the history and function of the compass and protractor.)

After my students completed their projects, I brought them to the Stella Exhibit at the Museum, where the Grinstein Family, cofounders of the renowned Gemini G.E.L. artists' workshop, arranged to have my students meet Frank Stella and show him their work.

Stella greeted my students, who eagerly unrolled their large paintings for his perusal and happily accepted his compliments. When they saw Stella's own work, they could not contain themselves. “He stole our ideas!” they exclaimed. All of the adults in attendance were enchanted by this reaction and by what the students had painted.

In relating all of this to Ray Eames (who was herself a painter), I was sort of patting myself on the back, telling her how I had empowered my students to think like artists. When I finished the story, Ray smiled and said gently, “Yes, but they didn't learn how Frank Stella knew to use those instruments, those geometric shapes, bright colors, and to shape his large canvases. That,” she said, “is the real struggle: to find one's own voice.”

I realized then that I had unintentionally tricked my students into replicating Stella's artwork, contradicting my intended goal: to enable students to achieve higher-level learning through original, creative thinking.