Undergraduate and graduate students in SAIC’s teaching certification programs participated in the Second Annual Teachers for Social Justice Curriculum Fair, which took place at the Chicago Teacher’s Center during the Fall 2002 semester. Attended by over 300 educators and others interested in education and activism, the Fair was filled with student artwork, teachers’ lesson plans, books, and posters, all emphasizing ways to explore and analyze social issues, and often, to take action. The event, organized by the local group of activist educators, Teachers for Social Justice, closed with a two-hour group discussion on “Teaching Peace and Justice in a Time of War.”
SAIC student and faculty exhibits of their own and their students’ artworks filled one room at the Center. Graduate student Bert Stabler’s display included a three-color paper sculptures of Run-DMC and his co-produced comics anthology, The New Graphics Revival. BFA with Emphasis in Art Education student Crisol Garcia showed a gritty collage of materials, including plastic lighters, dime bags, and crumpled cigarette packs, gathered from the streets of her West-side neighborhood. She also passed out 50 copies of her lesson plan to Fair attendees; the project asked students to look closely at their communities for inspiration, materials, and issues to examine, and taught about Argentinian artist Antonio Berni, who brings that focus to his work.
Other SAIC students’ projects blended poetry with printmaking, referenced the work of Adrian Piper and Glenn Ligon through multiply “raced” self-portraits, and used Chinese Lattices as an entryway to cultural exploration. SAIC students gave away nearly a thousand copies of arts-based lesson plans to TSJ Fair goers, increasing the possibility that local teachers of art and other subjects will be prepared to develop their own class projects dealing with contemporary art and culture.
“[Art education is] an honorable profession,” says Lanny Wong, a recent entrant to SAIC’s new BFA with Emphasis in Art Education Program, one of two teacher certification programs at the school (the other is the Master of Arts in Teaching, or MAT Program). And, the program’s directors, faculty members, and students insist, it’s a way to change the world. The Conceptual Framework for the Art Education Department notes that both certification programs aim for “preparing educators as critical citizens” who value democracy and social justice. Students in the programs learn to develop art and culture-based projects for their elementary and high school students that foster those goals — they practice bringing both art and activism to their teaching methods.
Philosopher Maxine Greene describes the animating spirit used by SAIC’s teaching certification programs in Releasing the Imagination: Essays on Education, the Arts, and Social Change: “[T]he recovery of imagination ... lessens the social paralysis we see around us and restores the sense that something can be done in the name of what is decent and humane ... art experiences open perspectives and move the young to look and listen, to overcome the taken-for-granted and the routine.”
The connections between education and activism are rich — think of the Mississippi Freedom Schools teaching black citizens to read to enable them to pass exclusionary tests and vote. Ditto the links between art and seekers of social justice — that list is long and familiar to students at SAIC (but for inspiration, and because they are local, think of sculpture professor/artist Laurie Palmer’s work on DuSable Park and other space and land issues; of teacher/artist Lavie Raven’s work in poetry and performance with the University of Hip-Hop; and of AIC employee/artist Michael Wolf’s work on labor issues in cultural institutions).
As Maxine Greene notes, and SAIC’s BFA and MAT teaching certification programs insist, all possibilities are enlarged at the points where art overlaps with education. Both favor students who are as committed to their own continuing art practice as their future in teaching. The programs share some courses, and both culminate with a full-time semester of student teaching in area schools. Every student does at least half of their fieldwork and teaching in Chicago public schools. The programs blend in-class work with out-of-the-building engagement; students visit galleries, work in schools and youth arts programs, and meet colleagues as they present their work in venues like the TSJ Fair and art education conferences.
Therese Quinn is Assistant Professor Director of BFA with Emphasis in Art Education Program. The three semester BFA certification program is open only to currently enrolled SAIC undergraduate students; application deadlines are March 1 and October 1. The two-year MAT program accepts outside applicants, with application deadlines on March 1 (priority) and May 1 (final). The three semester BFA certification program is open only to currently enrolled SAIC undergraduate students; application deadlines are March 1 and October 1. The two-year MAT program accepts outside applicants, with application deadlines on March 1 (priority) and May 1 (final). For information about TSJ meetings contact Rico at rico@uic.edu.