Читать книгу Stories of Caring School Leadership - Mark A. Smylie - Страница 10

Throughout this book, you will find pieces of student artwork on caring in school. We asked a teacher in an educational summer camp program in Nashville, Tennessee, to engage three diverse groups of elementary school students in a simple exercise. Using a single prompt that we supplied, she asked these students to draw a picture to show how they felt to be cared for in their schools. We requested that she not give her students any additional guidance other than to encourage them to draw anything that came to mind. It did not matter if students felt like drawing a scene depicting people or an abstraction of shapes and colors conveying emotion. The objective was for students to express whatever caring in schools might look like and mean to them. With the help of a high school teacher and a pastoral associate of a church in Oak Park, Illinois, we engaged groups of middle and high school students in similar exercises, asking them to think about caring both in and out of school. Finally, using the same process, Corwin elicited drawings through its website.

We selected nearly thirty of the drawings and placed them throughout the book. These drawings can be thought of as graphic stories of how students perceive caring. The names of our contributing artists and their grade levels are shown beneath their drawings, as are titles we gave to each.