Samantha Nolte-Yupari
Activities with Pre-Service Teachers
The projects presented here represent the developing arts integrated experiences I have tried to choreograph for pre-service teachers in undergraduate teacher training programs.
Culture Jamming Personal Labels.
In this visual journal/sketchbook project pre-service education students explored the concept of a culture jam as it applies to personal labels. After analyzing advertising based culture jams--a tactic that uses juxtaposition to visually disrupt the messages in pop culture, advertising, mainstream media images--students wrote down a label/name someone has ascribed to them/called them (e.g. brace face). This label was then unpacked to consider imagery and connotations the student associated with it. Students then worked with collage and mixed media techniques to create a personal culture jam to disrupt the label/name and reclaim it in some way (e.g. "my braces are my face bling"). This was done using both words and images. The class then discussed the images they created, when and where they first heard these labels and how by both being aware of these labels they can help themselves and their future students critically reflect and disrupt stereotypes and labels in their classroom. Connections were made to helping diverse student populations co-exist, bullying in schools, and educational labeling in testing culture.
Post Secret Teacher Fears
I designed this project because I wanted to give pre-service educator's a chance to talk about the things they are concerned about in choosing teaching as a profession. For this assignment, pre-service teachers viewed and analyzed the community art project Post Secret. After a discussion about what a secret is, what it means to keep and tell secrets, what it means to be able to tell a secret anonymously, students began thinking through what "secret" they might want to tell about their own developing teaching personal, experiences become a teacher, worries or concerns about becoming a teacher in contemporary society. As a class we then moved past our viewership of the Post Secret images to an analysis of their composition--which images are especially successful and powerful and why? Students then were given a blank post card which they combined with mixed-media and collage techniques to create their own post secret-teacher fears. The projects were turned into a class mailbox anonymously, and I stayed out of the way during their construction. We then posted the picture grouping online to a secure page so that students could review the body of images and write a reflection.
Books and Maps: Documenting Childhood Places
In this bookmaking project, elementary pre-service teachers taking Visual Methods in the Elementary Classroom drew maps of a place that was special to them during their childhood (before the age of 16). Mapping vocabulary was something they were familiar and comfortable with and became a good way to scaffold their visual communications. They then wrote a story on the back of them map about one or more particular memories that surfaces as they were drawing their maps paying special attention to the sights, smells, sounds, textures, and overall atmosphere of the place in their maps. This map then became a prompt for a book making project. The pre-service elementary teachers then workshopped various bookmaking and artistic techniques they might be able to use and teach to their future students including--basic one-page zines, accordion books, tunnel books, image transfer, cover techniques and paper marbling. Students could use any and all techniques they felt helped them develop a book that captured their experience of place. Theoretical reflections included how Beth Olshansky's argument (in The Power of Pictures Creating Pathways to Literacy Through Art) that students write more and better when they have the opportunity to draw first can be seen in this project and how a "drawing first" approach might be transmediate to other methods, like mapping, in their future classrooms.