Category Archives: graffiti

“Life is a great big canvas, and you should throw all the paint on it you can” – Danny Kaye

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Haunting a new favorite place in the city, I found the above stenciled art a useful reminder about priorities and usage of time. As I type this, an ever-growing pile of articles and books teeters menacingly to my left. To my right, a stack of fellowship, grant, and conference forms & applications in varying states of duress meander from couch to floor. Sadie snores bemusedly in the corner as I riffle through one pile then another. My computer screen is a personified Jackson Pollock splash of awaiting-reply emails and tabbed-to-infinity Safari windows. And I guess this is the ocean I’ve been lost in for the past few weeks as I’ve been off-track from teaching duties at Manual Arts. Catching breath and wandering outside, it was useful to be challenged by a simple, quickly sprayed stencil. Having recently seen Banksy’s film, Exit Through the Gift Shop, I would argue that such a specimen is demonstrative of art’s ability to better the day-to-day lived experience of those it interacts with, regardless of medium or location.

[I’m again pondering the above as well for lessons of borders and space and classroom discourse, though not ready to jump into such a substantive rant quite yet.]

Graffiti Murals at Manual Arts High School

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Came to work today and was pleased to see the bungalows covered in new murals by esteemed LA graf writers and students.

I was out of town on the Saturday when the muralists held a public event for the community to attend. However, a colleague described it as “our Woodstock – a once in a lifetime, magical event.”

The murals are incredible and anyone that’s driven through the city will recognize many of the artists represented in these new pieces.

I sent a student to snap photos with my phone during first period today and share the pix below.

[flickrslideshow acct_name=”24051579@N03″ id=”72157623362938965″]

Reflections on AERA 09 and the Winners’ Showcase of the Digital Media and Learning Competition Pt. 3: The Continuing Disconnect

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As always, I’m amazed by the density of the AERA program. The thousands of sessions that crammed the San Diego Convention Center and adjoining hotels are all over the map and cover just about any discussion you want to be a part of within the world of education. There are always sessions that will help propel my thinking more deeply on various education issues (an obvious highlight this year was Angela Valenzuela’s John Dewey Annual Lecture: “United States Assimilation Policy and Generational Trauma: The Dismembered Passion of Love and Betrayal”  in which she claimed that Dewey was clearly a Chicana feminist – awesome!). However, I’m frustrated by the clear divide between the academy and the classroom. Aside from the teachers with whom I shared a panel session*, I see very few classroom teachers at these conferences. Why are we generating this knowledge if were not funneling it back into the classroom?

Likewise, I spent the second half of my week at the Digital Media and Learning Competition Showcase, talking clouds (a larger discussion of the Windy City Black Cloud and the discussions that took place to follow shortly).  Along with the 2nd year of winners, the MacArthur/HASTAC showcase bursts with cutting edge learning ideas and applications. As I perused the work the other grant winners undertook over the past year, I was excited about how I could apply these projects to my own classroom.  Further, I was thrilled at the morning talk by Connie Yowell – the Director of Education at MacArthur. In it, she basically challenged attendees to think about learning implications in a 21st century environment. She asked us to think about what 21st century assessment looks like. These are things my colleagues and my administrators need to hear. I’m fairly certain I was the only practicing classroom teacher in the room at the time. This isn’t a gloat. I’m concerned that teachers weren’t there to network, to learn, to be inspired. And while AERA, too, has its problems, that the showcase took place at the same time that the majority of educational researchers were on the West Coast, I hope to see a larger connection between digital innovator, researcher, and educator.

Although I’ll talk a bit more about the DML Showcase soon, if you’re interested in seeing a screen a snippet of a short film you can see online but this time on a screen … and then see Cloudy briefly discuss the Black Cloud, by all means.

*Mark and I presented on our Graffiti curriculum. I’m embedding the slides we used for the presentation for those interested.

Interactive Build-Up and the Academic Spirit

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“But shapes on a painting are just shapes on a canvas unless they start acting on each other and really, in a sense, multiplying. A good painting has a gathering, interactive build-up. And the good artists all knew it, too. That’s what a good Vermeer has, or a raku cup, or a Stonehenge. And when they’ve got it, they just jump off the goddamn wall at you. They just, bam!” – Robert Irwin

Some random updates

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– The Beyond Pedagogy schedule has been updated here.

– I’ve been offering sample lessons from the Words on Walls graffiti unit I’ve been teaching over at the homeroom. It’s being updated once or twice a week at the moment. The description of the project is here.

– Innovation Division happenings: Manual Arts teachers will be voting on May 28th and 29th and Manual Arts parents will be voting on May 31st. All stops have been proverbially pulled out.

– Daye and I will be part of a demo/poster session at the HASTAC Conference on the 24th. We’ll be unveiling the revised Black Cloud game scheduled to launch in July. (I know the project isn’t listed on the site, but I assure I’ll be there!) Here are a few pictures of the student notebooks we’re developing for the game – check out the colored pupils on Cloudy! Daye’s a goku superstar and I’m the shoddy photographer here.

Full picture set here.

The Other Side of the Presentation Story

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This week, I wrote a brief post discussing the graffiti presentation that I was a part of on Saturday; I also ended up adding a comment clarifying Elizabeth Morin’s role in the workshop (sorry Liz! – and no, this was not in response the first commentor, despite what she may have thought). Unfortunately, there is more to the conference story: to be blunt, this wasn’t a very good presentation, in my opinion. Mark is almost too generous in calling the presentation “mediocre” (though his story of what happened after is a fun read if you’re feeling especially spunky).

The presentation was exactly what it was – an overview of graffiti and ways it can be incorporated in schools. Elizabeth was on point with what she was to say, the two artists did an exceptional job at demonstrating expertise. However, the presentation never engaged the audience and I don’t think Mark or I did our best to bring all of these elements together to create the kind of critical dialogue around graffiti that we were able to do at our first presentation on this work back in October. Of late, Mark and I have been going back and forth on our respective blogs about graffiti and our thought process in creating the curriculum Mark is currently teaching and that I’ll be teaching in three weeks.

I agree wholeheartedly that there needs to be the critical discussion that was missing last week. Largely, this is what the curriculum that we’ve created is about. There are no absolutes (graffiti is…, it’s good when it is used for …). This project stemmed from personal interest in getting students to think critically about their surroundings and the possibilities of these surroundings – isn’t that what all this talk of Critical P. is really about?

I’m not going to stew any further over the presentation. I don’t think it was able to convey the critical topics in graffiti I would have wanted to have discussed if I was a participant in my own workshop – it was a cursory overview, it probably didn’t add a whole lot of useful resources for budding teachers, and it didn’t get to the root of why and how the curriculum is going where it will go.

Bombed

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As I walked Sadie around the block today I saw a couple of kids tagging on the various houses and apartment complexes in my neighborhood. The two were working their way toward my direction and Sadie was working her way toward theirs. The two would indiscriminately stop every couple of houses, marking the territory the same way that Sadie does. (For those more scatologically minded of you out there, it is worth noting the connection between these two kids crossing out other graffiti and Sadie preferring to urinate over the various pieces of dog feces she encounters.)

Though I have not documented the process on this blog, I have been working on a graffiti curriculum to teach to my students in May. The project is being created in conjunction with Mark, a middle school social studies teacher and will be made publicly available after being taught and revised. As such, I have more than a passing interest in graffiti at the moment. Part of the aim of this project is to help empower students with the skills to look critically at graffiti and the varied possibilities it can represent. The marginalized voice and forms of activist expression that can be entrenched in legal and illegal graffiti seems tossed to the public wayside by the focus on gang graffiti.

So here I am, walking my dog around the block as two kids (around the same age as my students, if not younger) continue to tag, unfazed by my presence.

As for the graffiti? It was the kind of gang demarcation that is prevalent. Thank you for letting me know you are from a gang that is 20 blocks south of my street. This is your block. Point taken.

This should have been my teachable moment. I could have engaged these kids in dialogue, asked them for advice, or censured them. I did nothing. My brain was locked up trying to grasp the situation – “catching” kids tag at school feels different. There is an implied sense of authority and students understand and recognize that. That was lost on my block today. The kids walked by and continued their work as I continued mine, Sadie slow and meandering as always.

I felt hypocritical, at the moment and I still do. There’s a likely chance engaging the kids in dialogue would have resulted in them running away or being ignored; I didn’t feel like I was in physical danger, though that’s never my first thought anyways. The problem is I don’t know and I allowed the moment to pass. I was the bystander that I teach my students about in our unit on resistance and civil disobedience. Yes, this frustrates me to no end.

The 101s

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I’m thinking about what’s missing in our current high school course offerings (hint: a lot). I’m brainstorming the classes I feel are most urgently needed by my current students. I want to use this as an exercise to see what I can fold or further adapt in my own classroom, within my SLC, and what can eventually be pushed forward into new class structures. This may be a recurring exercise I’ll return to – we’ll see.

Classes that should be required:
– Feelings 101: expression, empathy, and dealing with grief

This is related to the large immigrant student tropes I’ve been attempting to document.

– Social Media 101: Blogging, online networks, and RSS

I recently wrote about the fact that most of these sites are blocked by our district. I’m not accepting the comments as a proper response. These are the skills imperative to being successful in our 2.0 environment. I’ve been recently following the work of Henry Jenkins, and the participation gap hits the nail on the head. I have more to say on this… just not yet.

– Humanism

I’ll return to this one as the Beyond Pedagogy discussions continue – I want to outline a realistic framework

– Interaction 101: Consensus, Mediation and Resolution

Perhaps the follow-up course to Feelings 101? (I know a few adults that could use a refresher in this course as well)

– Urban Art & Critical Response: Graffiti, Print Media, fashion, and music

 Yes, this is something I’m actively working on and presenting about.

– History of My Suppressed Voice: a personal inquiry; independent studies class

I think this sounds pretty clear, don’t you?

What are the current required classes? Along with the regular academic stuff we’ve got “a class called “Life Skills.” I can’t say what happens in this class with any certainty, but aren’t all of the above “Life Skills”?