School Name: George Washington high school
Teacher Name: Mary Rossi
Teaching Artist Name: Mirtes Zwiercinski
Big Idea: Inquiry: how can public art generate inclusion?
1. Planning: What interests and curiosities were brought to the planning by each of you?
Teacher response: My primary interest is grounded in using the public school entrance to further the intention of inclusion and using the existing exterior columns to express our students visual description of inclusion As well as continuing the theme from our initial column completed this past year
My curiosity is how to engage both our student artists and our unlicensed audience in an authentic meaningful way
Teaching Artist response:
2. The Project: Tell the story of your project. What happened in the classroom?
In the classroom we have worked with student artists as well as adult community manners to develop a vision of expressing their idea of inclusion
This occurred following visiting the site where the mosaic art will be installed and following our dedication ceremony that occurred st the start of this school year
All of these events provided visual and reflective opportunities got our student artists
3. How did you check in throughout the project to plan and adjust plans as the project unfolded?
Check in occurs each week with constant democratic communication which continuously altered and generated new ideas
Basically this mosaic project has a solid goal but the visual making part is highly malleable
4. What are the conflicts, contradictions or challenges of your teacher/artist collaboration?
Teacher response:
I am incredibly fortunate that if conflicts or challenges were to occur, our partnership is transparent and respectful enough that we do address,clarify and move forward
Exterior challenges include difficulty with flexibility in the shared space of my classroom which limits my teaching artists’ ability to work individually or with community artists in a single established location. This requires that the teaching artist change locations during the day interrupting work, having to gather and move materials to work in another location and limits community artist participants access to full visual realization and engagement on the primary mosaic artwork housed in the classroom
Teaching Artist response:
5. What are you learning as a result of collaborating with one another in terms of teaching and art making?
Teacher response: I am learning that my role in this process is to support my fellow teaching artist both in teaching and art making . And to support my students in solidarity with my teaching artist so they recognize we are a team providing an opportunity for students to model our behavior strengthening our artist classroom community
Teaching Artist response:
6. How has the community-focused component of the project contributed to or challenged your teacher/artist collaboration?
Teacher response: the greatest challenge of the community focused component is twofold:
1. It is generally difficult to get community members to participate in general due to their many responsibilities such as other family to care for or jobs
2.the inflexibility of our shared classroom space has reduced the amount of community participants because of the very fact that it is an inflexible space
Teaching Artist response: