Selected Teaching Projects & Student Artwork:
(****more recent teaching projects from 2021 & 2022 forthcoming****)
Budding Roses Summer Camp Curriculum, 2020
Budding Roses is a no-cost radical social-justice oriented program for middle school aged youth in East Portland that takes inspiration from anarchist pedagogy, mutual aid projects, popular education, and alternative education models such as democratic free schools, among others. I was involved in the founding and co-organized with this project until 2021 (it is still ongoing!). In summer 2020, as we were not able to hold our annual summer camp, we prepared and delivered 70 covid-safe camp kits to our campers, focusing on racial justice in the wake of violent police brutality, and the subsequent uprising led by Black youth across the country. The curriculm was collaboratively created, and now, much of it is digitized. Here, you can read more about the project and look through the digitized curriculum.
All the packaging materials + designs were beautifully created with help from the Independent Publishing Resource Center and their amazing teen interns at the time. Thank you!
This was a large scale collaborative project between teachers and students stretched over several months for our big end of year show that includes all schools that participated in our after-school program. We won second place that year! Created by all k-5 students, and intended to be a dreamscape installation of sorts. This project was very multimedia and included: paper-mâché mountains, a found object mixed media shiny floor, bead curtains, water-colored flying animals, fluffy clouds, an acrylic painted fabric galaxy roof, painted sunset fabric walls, paper cranes, borax crystals, small hanging zines filled with poetry written by the students, and interactive tools for viewers such as an iSpy game of the hidden objects, prisms to look through, and headphones that played a soundscape that the students made together. (K-5) Watch a video walkthrough of the installation here.
Re-performing Ana Mendieta, 2018
In this project, I taught students about Ana Mendieta, and we looked at images of her Silueta series of earthworks. We spoke about her desire to connect her body with the earth/nature, and connections to land, identity, and the idea of home, and talked about what the images made us think of. I then told the students about a project Mendieta did in 1973 called Untitled (Soul) with her students at Henry Sabin Elementary School in Iowa City when she taught art there. In this project, she asked her students “What is a soul?” and recorded their responses. We re-performed this work, going around in a circle and saying what we thought the difference between a soul and a body was. I then asked the students to think about these ideas and the Siluetas, and create a self-portrait of their body and/or soul using watercolors. (K-5)
During this time, we were learning about France. This project combined French Absurdism and the French tradition of cooking into a game project based on the cooking show Chopped. We talked about French cuisine/cooking and its influence, and then a simple introduction to the concept of Absurdism: that humans will constantly search for meaning and value in life, even though this is an impossible task, and that we must embrace the absurdity of our existence. We also thought of synonyms for “absurd” and tried to figure out what it meant. I had made a bucket of ingredients written on paper ahead of time, ranging from the basic to the absurd, including a few non-food ingredients. The students had to pick three mystery ingredients and create recipes from these ingredients. I stressed that they should embrace absurdity with their recipes, and that they did not need to have a meaning, a point, or be a real food. They then made simple 8-fold books and filled them with their recipes, which included illustrations of ingredients and finished food products. (K-5)
I unfortunately do not have any final pictures of this project.
Collaborative Giant Chess Set, 2017
This was a collaborative project stretched over two months that I directed for our big end of year show that includes all schools that participate in our afterschool program. We won first place that year! The concept was developed together with students,. We created life size playable chess pieces from papier-mâché and paint, with each piece representing different countries that we had studied or were interested in studying. (K-4)
This was a collaborative effort amongst teachers and students, developed to use several different projects and combine them into one. We were studying the ocean, and this short video shows off some of the many techniques/movements we were studying the ocean through: found poetry, costuming, tie-dye, dance, sound-making, and Dada performance and film! (K-4) Watch it here.
Puppet Theatre, 2016
This was a collaboratively made puppet theatre, almost completely kid-directed (K & 1st). They worked together to figure out how to transform the recycled materials we had into a puppet theatre for a performance that they developed and put on for the rest of the after-school program.
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Antarctica Soundscape, 2015
When learning about the animals of Antarctica, I also introduced my Kindergarteners and 1st graders to the idea of soundscape, recording, and music. We came up with categories and split into three groups from their ideas: wind/ocean, whales, and seals. They practiced their sound, and then I recorded them as groups in a makeshift sound studio. Listen to it here!
