My fellow teacher was disappointed by her art lesson. She came to my classroom to talk. After going through all the work of preparing potato ink stamps, cut in various shapes, for her fifth-grade class to dip in paint to create artwork, she felt that they didn’t take it seriously. She expected they would develop more unique designs than her previous year’s third-graders. A few did, but for the most part, they stamped all over the paper haphazardly. She didn’t know what to make of it.
I wanted to help her feel better but didn’t want to brush her concern away. I thought for a moment, considering the neighborhood and the backgrounds of the students. It was a low-income neighborhood with many new immigrant families. Often, our students were the first to be educated in the U.S. or the first to go to school at all. It could be dangerous due to gangs. Parents both worked in most cases, some at more than one job. Life was stressful, and there was little time for carefree play, art and music lessons, museum trips, and all the privileged experiences my colleague and I had grown up with. Next, I thought about how schools were different from the past. Although the upper grades have always expected more of children, back in the 1970s and 1980s, when I was growing up, there were more opportunities for fun at school. We had art lessons, music classes, and visiting experts; there were class parties, games, and sometimes fun assignments and trips.
After putting all this together, I realized that many of these children might need opportunities for free play and exploration with materials. If the materials were commonplace and they had experimented several times, they might be ready to think through a design. But given the circumstances, they played with everything to see how it felt and behaved. What if I slide the paint around on the paper? What if I mix the colors? Questions I had answered for myself in preschool had gone unanswered for them.
I explained my theory to my colleague. She agreed but wasn’t much happier. She explained that she felt sad that their childhoods were so limited. While things could have been much better for them, a teacher can do nothing to rewrite their history and shouldn’t try to. Our job is to do our best to give them the learning experiences they need going forward.
Although we couldn’t implement authentic, self-directed learning then, I incorporated choice and projects whenever possible. For example, I had the students form groups when we studied the Revolutionary War. Each group was given a one-paragraph explanation of an event or person from that period. Their job was to research the textbook to learn more and then develop a way to teach their topic to the class. It might be a mural, a skit, a song, or a more traditional report. Anything they could think up that could be made from the materials in the classroom and used to do a presentation.
This way of teaching allowed them to take ownership of their learning and express themselves creatively. Because they could make choices, they could work to their strengths, and because they could get feedback before presenting the final project, they had the safety to fail. The day everyone presented their projects was great fun and allowed me to discuss with them how all the events fit together, ensuring they understood vital points and connections.
Creativity and choice are essential to authentic learning. I hope these free art opportunities and group projects are still remembered by our students today as a highlight of elementary school.
This is a true story from the mid-1990s when I taught 5th grade in a public school on the east side of San Jose, CA.
"Creativity and choice are essential to authentic learning." TRUTH!