Jess+notes

materials:

handouts: activities: materials or resources:

Welcome: Introductions

We are going to ask you to write down how is visual literacy defined within literacy, why is it important? Just take a minute to jot some ideas down. We are going to revisit this at the end of the presentation.

People who have influenced us at the arts academy and inspired us within our curriculum through our visual literacy)...Now, take a minute to see if you can identify them.

Daniel Pink.Rene Hobbs summer programs

Summer of 2009 the faculty read A Whole New Mind. Teachers were asked to draw connections between the book and their classrooms.

Big Points included: Core values connection. The idea of creativity playing a key piece in school and having teachers/students realize that in order to compete in this world today, students need this. The MFA is the new MBA.

Rush Arts: we have established core values: ICEPAC which frames our curriculum and our way of doing at the school. They are our habits of mind. Intentionally we did this: we want our students to become empathatic, creative, commited, open-minded citzens. So, the teachers lesson plans must include how they are including these core values an bringing them out in class.

Summer reads so far: Daniel Pink and the Socially networked classroom.

a. Brief overview of school and our day of writing. (Can I get some clips?)
 * Introduction to AABR - Jess**

Facts about school: Started in Sept. 2008 with 120 students in 9th grade, 11 full time teachers, 2 part time, and students taking a course load of 5 subject areas and a 70 minute art black. The school was part of Paul Vallas "small school reform" and was earmarked for the last amount of funding for small high schools in Philadelphia.

Text that influence the starting of the school for me: The Right To Learn, Linda Darling Hammond, and Deborah Meiers The Power of their Ideas,

-student leadership emphasized. -integrating arts into all subject areas, imagination, a tremendous creative bent, and questioned text with the same process that was used to question/critique a piece of artwork or dance performance. Or, form the same kind of relationship that a musician has with a score, an artist has with his/her piece, etc. We want to intertwine the curricula and use what we have learned from an Artist perspective in every subject he/she approached. Elliot Eisner describes what education can learn from the arts ... -we learn in and through the arts we become more qualitatively intelligent. Learning to pay attention to the way in which form is configured is a mode of thought that can be applied to all things made, theoretical or practical.

school vision lends itself well to visual literacy. (Students often have a harder time articulating or writing what they think. Visuals thinking can be more meaningful to them.

Observations of Lorraine's class. Thinking about connections of media arts class and English.

How can I support this work.

PD - Showcasing lessons last year where visual literacy played an important role. Emailing articles etc Sharing during dept meetings and observing when students are presenting this work. December half day on "engagement" and asking Melissa to showcase some of the virtual posters that she had her students present. How are they constructing their images?

In the summer of 09 our entire faculty read the book A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink. We deconstructed the chapters and thought about the implications for teaching and learning. If we were going to take this right brained approach to curriclulum, what would it look like? How would we asses? How do we integrate technology and what is it that we want students to walk away learning? As a project based school, we were excited to plan collaboratively but we had no formal structure set up. We knew the design, creativity and interdisciplinary studies were an important focus yet how were we gong to emphasize this? Pink had offered us applications to real life industries, but there was no chapter(s) on exactly how to cultivate this in a school that was in a district where the core curriuclum and the teaching of elbigle content were the live/by die by expectation. So, we planned and collaborated along the journey. And still do this...

Collaboration and interdisciplinary studies go hand in hand. There is not one approach or structure that we have taken, but much of what we have accomplished has been unintentional. Many of the projectst that have been created were started from a hallway conversation or a lunchtime break. We struggle to find a structure to put in place to connect teachers and the planning of their projects. And it is this collaboration that creates the learning community that excites most teachers. It is clear that we share in the understandings of Pink, Robinson, Eisner, and Wiggins (understanding by design). The emphasis of questions or inquiry and looking at all dsicplines in a more creative way sets us a part, we believe than most school in the district.

We set up (established) core values in the school and created the acronym ICEPAC. They are a set of values that frames our thinking around curriculum. In the spirit of last night's discussion,I guess we see SMART as imagination, analysis, empathy, persepctive, analysis, and committment. All of these values make up smart or what I like to call my students BRILLIANT people. We try to remind students about these values as much as possible, we try to create curriculum around them. And we believe by doing these we are doing what's morally right for all students. I don't feel that creating "smart" students is a mystery, it's the courage to do what's right for kids.

But the question I would like to leave you with is that all of this work take collaboration and this is not to be underestimated. How do you best cultivate this in a school? How do you create a place where everyone trusts the process? And how do you create a place where brilliance can be nurtured in the most unexpected places....