Earth, Art and Life: Young Artist’s Perspectives
So much of what has been shared and discussed in this series on classrooms and climate change, has been focused on what adults think, say, do or do not do. In this final episode of the series, “Is Climate Change Changing Classrooms” the CHLL group (Cally, Heather, Lois and Louise) reflect on what young people have to say through their artistic expressions. The Brigham Young University Arts Education Partnership hosts an annual art competition for all grade levels, in all art forms. It’s part of an initiative called Arts for Life, Utah. The purpose is to highlight the impact of the arts on students' lives, particularly their social and emotional well being. The initiative is a collaboration between the BYU Arts Partnership where Cally and Heather work, and the four professional arts education organizations in Utah. The competition is called M(arts)ch Madness, and includes a bracket style competition inspired by the athletics March Madness. Students submit their work showing the impact of the arts in their life and their schooling experience. Usually the theme is Arts for Life. But this year students were asked to submit work on the theme of Earth, Arts and Life, in an effort to surface students' perspectives on the environment, as well.
Examples of the student artwork and their artist statements are here in the show notes. The CHLL team reflected on what they noticed about the interface of the Earth, Arts and Life in student work, and what they could learn from student perspectives.
Cally
I would love to start with one of the paintings that's very memorable for me. There's so many artworks that I love, but I want to start with one, a high school 11th grader. This is his artist statement, “The name of my art piece is progress. It depicts a crow looking up at the clouded sky, knowing that he is not able to fly high without harming himself. I created my own paint out of smoke, which allowed me to paint the piece purely with smoke paint. I decided to use a crow, as crows are black and highly intelligent, which allowed for the use of monochrome colors. The piece is titled ‘Progress’. It shows an industrialized city filled with factories and buildings shooting pollution up into the air. I use smoke to represent how we as humans are affecting the Earth. …The crow is representing a human perspective looking down this long road at the pollution.” The student has used perspective to draw our attention to the factory that's releasing the smoke into the air. And the crow seems reflective. Gazing, watching, and wondering how this impacts him. I really liked the contrast of nature, and the concrete breaks and the strong lines of the image around it. I thought this was a powerful piece, and showed a lot of commitment to the theme. He chose smoke to do this monochromatic piece with shades, everything from white to very dark blacks, and mostly shades of gray.
Develop Craft and Technique
Lois
I think one of the things that interests me is the way this kid used material. One of the Studio Habits of Mind is to develop craft, and he really used the technique of perspective. It's like that crow is on the line of the perspective aiming right for the smokestacks. This crow is in the foreground and is dark and is facing away. It's really interesting how this kid was able to use technique to express something very personal. I think a really powerful thing about the arts is that, however much technique the kids have, students can use it to say what they want to say. Some students don't have very much technique yet, but still the expression is very, very rich.
Louise
In this series we've been talking a lot about curriculum development, and how who decides and who decides what is being taught and learned. In this one piece, it seems to me, there's so much curriculum opportunity on the topic of progress. What is progress? When I was a child, General Electric had a logo, ‘Progress is our Business”. It's a real question, what is progress as we are going forward? When we have exhibitions of student work, often it is a culminating event. But it's also the beginning. That’s the case with Lois’s Sea Rise Mural event at Umana elementary school in Boston to celebrate the completed mural. These events are opportunities to ask young people about the impact of artmaking and art viewing on their lives going forward. It is an opportunity for curriculum development because there are so many generative next places to go.
Supporting Students’ Where They Truly Need Adult Support
Lois
There's this one piece, by a 10th grader in Timpanogos High School, of a cherry tree on a little island reflected in the water. The artist says, “You know, cherry blossoms connect me with me by reminding me that there's always a chance to start over and do better than the last time.” This makes me sad, because I do think that that's true, and that's something we really want kids to know. It's a very important piece about making art. At the same time, there is a chance that if we don't pay attention to what's going on with climate change, if we don't get this conversation out there and get everybody talking about it, that we may be, for the first time at a place where human beings don't have a chance to start over and do better.
And there's a piece by an anonymous student in eighth grade. This is one where the technique is crude. It's gradations of color, pinks, and purples and reds in the top, and the bottom is sort of a greenish yellow. It's called ‘Gold Sand Sunset’. The artist writes, “The beauty of the sand and loneliness, the world coming undone. The beauty of acceptance and broken things. I know what it's like to be broken. So do you. If you don't, you will soon because that's life. You can love and laugh too.” I look at these kids trying to make sense, and trying to live their lives trying to move through adolescence in the way that they need to. I'm reading a book by Elena Ferrante called The Lying Lives of Adults. It's from the perspective of an adolescent. Her family is a mess. They're really trying, and she's really trying to make sense of who she's going to become in the midst of all this broken stuff. I think we shy away sometimes from letting kids talk about the hard stuff because we want them to be beautiful and wise and there's a lot of hard stuff. I think we have to be courageous about meeting young people where they are and sometimes they are in very deep, dark, hard places.
Cally
We want them to be unburdened. The children are burdened with the task of growing up, and the emotional lessons are hard and family relationships are hard, and friends are hard, and all those things you have to learn are hard. Some people have supportive environments and others have more challenging environments. I wonder how we choose which burdens are for their growth and what we want to unburden them with. So often, we protect young people from things that that they don't need protection from, while they are dealing with things that they definitely need protection from. That idea of burdened and unburdened, I find interesting.
Lois
Trena talked about going to the kids and asking them where they are, what they know, what they think, what they care about. I think that's the answer. We don't have to unburden them, we just have to go and be present to them where they are.
Social and Emotional Resilience and Well Being
Heather
Cally and I attended an instructional leadership conference last week and one of the speakers spoke about the importance of adults in helping children with social emotional resilience and well being. The speaker encouraged adults to model the way that we sometimes have to express emotions and sometimes we have to tame them. Both are important. The role of adults in helping model that coregulation is so important. One of the entries in this competition was submitted by one of my dear friends who has been that adult for her son his entire life. I saw her post something on social media and I said, you have to share this with the world. It is so beautiful. In her post, she said they knew her son was different from a young age. He has needed support at school for various learning struggles. He has known he's not like the other students. They gave him the lead role of Horton, the elephant, in Seussical, the musical. His mother recorded him sitting on the box on stage singing Horton's song, which is so beautiful. It's all about being alone in the universe, and how Horton feels so alone and so different. This child probably really, really feels that way. But you would have no idea the struggles that this child has endured by the beautiful musical performance that he gives. He didn't submit it himself. His mom submitted it, and his mom is honoring and sharing his work. She's out there making sure everybody's voting for him today.
I would probably say this about so many of the contributing artists. But it's so amazing the way his mother and his father and his family and his teachers have been there for this boy. They really know him. They know where he shines when singing; he's alone in the universe, but he is the star of the stage.
Lois
Beautiful.
What does adding earth to the competition title bring out? I don't know what proportion of the kids just still did the impact of the arts in their lives. For many it was still straight social emotional learning. I found that I really wanted to look at the ones about earth. There were some that were about earth like, “I like to fish and so I made a fish.”
There were some that were really digging into like the centipede one. So this is by an 11th grader at the Cedar Valley School. It's a vertical canvas with this statement by the artist:
”The world is screaming and we don't even hear it. I created this painting as a way to make people open their eyes and see the world burning and life dying right in front of us. The meaning behind this artwork is a centipede symbolizing the world, earth, nature etc. As you can see, it is being stitched together with pins on the legs taped down, symbolizing how more and more buildings are being put on top of the earth and eventually the earth is covered in concrete, one building after another, to the point where we have fake grass. How do I use my art to make the earth a better place? Well, there's a difference between telling a person and showing them. Showing a person through art gives it a very emotional point of view, and is different from telling a person that the world's dying. My process of creating this work was by starting to gesso my board and let that dry. Then I started sketching my design with the centipede pin cushion sewing needles. Next, I taped down the areas I didn't want to paint on, so it would be easier to paint on. Then I spray painted, trying to make it look like a spray painted table. Then I started throwing paint on: mixing, blending and shading, etc. I finished it with a layer of blue glitter on just the centipede, and then made some rearrangement, adding a few things here and there.”
Wow. This statement of how that kid was using art to make an impact with his personal feelings, knowledge, and intention was pretty stunning.
Learning From Each Other
Louise
I’m not sure it matters how many children artists are making works about the earth, when everyone has the opportunity to benefit from what individuals choose to make work about: the earth, art, or life. I think a beautiful thing about this exhibition is that it isn't a performance just for the purpose of culminating your project, but it is seeing all of the children's interests and concerns in deeper ways. This exhibition is building community knowledge and understanding. It's individual social and emotional learning and it's community, social and emotional learning as well.
Lois
The inclusion is what's so easy to do with the arts if you allow it, like this one by Ruben Weeks. He is a second grader who says, “I drew this for my cousin Madeline's birthday. She's turning 12. She loves bunnies. Through my pictures I can show that I know her and love her. And it's a bunny with all of this scrawled green around it. That is the grass that the bunny lives in.”
This is Ruben’s true heart and deep thinking. It's about love.
It’s About Love Between Each Other and the Love of Nature
Heather
That's his wisdom for sure. Let’s summarize what we've learned in this series. Something that I see in this competition, that I've seen through all of our conversations in this series, is this need to help students and children connect with nature. I think the challenge that we've addressed in this series is how do we help children maintain their love for the earth as they go into adulthood. So many of us are sitting at desks, working in business, working in education, working in any discipline, and it often requires keeping us from nature. Some jobs really get us into nature, and that’s great. But how do we help children continue to want to make connections to art and the earth because they love it so much into adulthood?
Lois
These children are so lucky because they live in Utah, which is some of the most beautiful country in the entire world. They can walk out their door and be in a heavenly environment. There are a lot of kids who are not anywhere near a heavenly environment. They are in urban jungles. There's still nature there, but you really have to look for it. It's not as easy as going out and wandering through the grass to find the animals and the beautiful natural world.
Louise
Yes. I think one of the things that I've been learning from this series is something that the IDEAL facilitators and the Our Changing Planet project eloquently spoke to. Begin wherever you are, with whatever you have. Remember that they talked about when COVID hit, and everyone had to work online and be in their homes? They thought their professional development was doomed. But then they discovered that when teachers were in their living room, they could look out their window. Children’s bodies are part of nature. There are many ways to connect children to what they have, and what they don't have. Also, we're lucky to have the space of the internet and videos, where we can connect children to each other and to the world.
Lois
Yes, and we're unlucky because we have this barrier, which is that many schools are using scripted curriculum and minimizing the teacher and the student relationship. How does the teacher go to where a student is when they're mandated to be on page 11, paragraph three, today, and tomorrow, they're mandated to be on page 12, paragraph four? The barriers of schooling are really huge, and the behemoth of this system of schooling and how it has coalesced around tightening down with rules and steps and limitations and constraints is daunting. Let the people be people. Let them be who they are. Let them come together and find what they're curious about and start figuring that out. It's a human made problem that made the schools like this, and we can remake them.
How Do We Act Together? The Time is Now
Louise
As we're wrapping this up, I’m thinking about the episode about Our Changing Planet. We were all remarking on how important that project is and how it really seems to be working well, and we were asking, “What is it that makes this so special?” I've been thinking about it and I think it really is that idea of frameworks. Lois, you brought those frameworks to us in Alameda County that have resulted in the IDEAL and Our Changing Planet project, that you've brought to people all over the world. Those frameworks are a foundation base. Those frameworks are learning from the experience of teachers who are really doing a good job of meeting young people where they are, using experts, using disciplinary resources, and making it relevant to children who are either in nature rich places or in concrete jungles. I think that that's such an important thing. The other thing that really stands out to me is Paul Hawken's book, Regeneration, Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation. It is a hope and a challenge that has a lot of wisdom in it. I think its greatest wisdom is that this is about everybody. This isn't about just teachers, this isn't just about politicians, this isn't just about administrators. It's about everyone.
It's about every career. When young people grow up, and they go into jobs, where they are tied to desks… every single position needs to be asking themselves, “How is what I'm doing every day, in school, in my job, either contributing to the current suicidal path that we're on with our environment, or really rethinking and contributing to how we need to do things differently?”
To me, those are the two biggest things. I think educators need those frameworks. I think we need to accept that this is everybody's issue. We need everyone, the indigenous wisdom, the experts, the children's new knowledge, all of it!
Lois
And we, as examples, just need to keep talking about it. We need to talk about it to everybody. It needs to be a pyramid scheme. It needs to be a cascade.The only way to get everybody involved is to keep the conversation going. I do think that art does that. Figuring out how to keep everybody in the conversation, regardless of where they're starting from.
Cally
One of our ninth grade artists in the contest summarized it this way,
“I painted an hourglass, with trash in the top and the earth in the bottom. I wondered, how can the arts heal the earth? I think that the arts heal the earth by spreading awareness to others about what is happening and what can be done to save our planet. People always say it is a problem for the next generation, but the truth is that the time is now.”
Heather
Beautiful.
Lois
There’s some child wisdom.
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