CONTEXT
Weirdly, from what I’ve seen in elementary schools, kids are often told they can and should produce a perfect result in one brief sitting, and to engage in that activity isolated from its context and connections, and even without suitable guidance or materials. And all of this happens, as far as I can tell, for the administrative imperative of grading and not (certainly not obviously) for student learning.
How could the above assertion possibly be true? Even suggesting this comes across as over the top, no? Well, I agree. When it first became apparent to me I too figured I was missing something or just being silly; but then it was driven home again and again in many different settings. So, let me explain.
For example, every elementary school I visited in B.C. as a prospective teacher, but also the one I myself attended as a child, had a class doing an art lesson or a whole unit on Emily Carr. That’s great. They should. But when doing so, teachers almost always focus exclusively on Carr’s paintings – and even then only on a few of her most popular later works. That may be fine too; however, even within this narrow frame, virtually every kid in B.C. spends time (as I did) viewing and reproducing her work without even talking about, nevermind understanding, anything about Carr!
They don't learn that this is a body of work created by a woman at the beginning of the twentieth century, and what that means. They're not told that she was working in remote isolation, and on themes relating to the forests and peoples of Haida Gwaii and those surrounding the Nass and Skeena rivers, and the tremendous significance of that. And they certainly aren't told that Emily Carr – one of Canada's most famous and notable artists and B.C.’s Van Gogh – was a high school drop-out. They're told almost nothing. All of this context appears systematically omitted. Yet surely all of this detail matters a great deal. In my mind this essential context is more interesting even than her famous paintings. And I may be mistaken but I imagine Emily Carr to be the focus of countless school assignments precisely because of all this context. To me she would be just as critical a figure if she'd been a poet or pianist or potter working in the same context. And if you don't think so then why are our children not exploring the work of A.Y. Jackson or Ai Weiwei instead?
How and – for the love of history and politics and feminism and all that is interesting and messy and wonderful – WHY is this context ignored? Because it’s complicated? Because it’s an “art” project and not a “social studies” project? Well, that doesn’t even make sense. And you can’t tell me it’s because these kids are too young. Every child I’ve ever met, from age three on up, is all about the why and how of things and is starving for this stuff. How could it be that none of the above is searingly relevant and crucial to any Carr unit? It cannot be that anyone thinks Carr, were she male and living in the twenty-first century, in an apartment in Toronto or Montreal, say, interpreting black and white photos of Pacific rainforestscapes, these works would have the same look, feel, meaning, or impact? They simply couldn’t. So it feels like pure madness to engage with Emily Carr’s work, in any way, even with a grade two class, without wrestling with who she was, where she was, how she got there, what she was up to, and the time period she lived in: the important information.
Context is huge and it's also left out of much of our schooling. Similarly neglected are research, revision, and editing. This reality is at least as bizarre if not more so than leaving out all the important information. We seem to program kids to think that they can do something perfectly, on their first attempt, and in twenty minutes or less. I mean, just about every assignment in every class I’ve seen, and participated in, establishes this as not merely a possibility but also as ideal and a norm. (I was taught this myself and I’d be very surprised if you weren’t too.)
To stay with Emily Carr, and speak from experience, I recently watched as a grade four class was given a bucket of crayons and large sheets of orange poster paper (because paint was said to be messy and expensive and the poster paper was the only suitable material large enough wallpaper the room with when the project was done.) Kids were then asked to reproduce their favourite Emily Carr painting from pictures in books brought in by their teacher. On the timetable this slot was designated as an "art lesson". There was no lesson of any kind. Students were not able to research Carr themselves; instead, they were handed their source material, photocopies, and tools, crayons, and told what to produce. There was no lesson about how to use their tools, about style or shape or movement, about colour or texture, or even really what their aim was. There was no paint or brushes in sight and no talk about Carr's chosen medium at all. There was no context for who Carr was or why they were reproducing her work and not, say, a Captain Underpants comic. There was no discussion about the physical dimensions of Carr’s works or where and how they were produced. There was no talk about forests or the Interior or the West Coast, about First Nations or even the time period in which Carr lived. The kids didn’t make any sketches or drafts and they did not experiment at all, in any way. They didn’t talk about their work or critique each others’ or, of course, learn how or why they might do so.
So, by design, as a result of all this omission, there was no noticeable skill development and likely nothing learned either. (Needless to say, there was likely little enjoyment either.) Almost every child produced a nearly identical green and brown splotch of colour in the allotted time. Those that didn’t were encouraged to quickly fill the blank spaces so they could call their work complete. Their "completed" work was then hung on the wall and graded.
(And, worst of all, I was asked to grade them. Based on what? I had no idea. When I asked I was told to find the best one, give it the highest mark, and then rank and mark everything else accordingly. Incidentally, this is universally understood as the worst possible assessment method. It is both professionally and intellectually bankrupt. It is lazy, it is unfair, it is ineffective, and, as a result, it is wholly unreasonable. No kindergarten teacher who takes himself or his profession seriously would dole out marks this way. And yet the directive came from someone with a PhD in education, with the highest possible seniority and pay available within the union – no doubt a leader and role model. ...but I digress.)
This scenario, in my experience, is, very sadly, typical. It seems obvious that if a teacher is just getting their students to reproduce pretty pictures – without getting to know the materials or the artist, without exploring her technique, making multiple attempts, or building on their skills in any way – that teacher may as well just photocopy Carr’s work and have students sign their name to one they like. (Of course, if you’re going to do that you’d probably be better off just sitting them in front of Disney movies the whole day.) And, in case you feel the above Carr scenario happens only because of our lack of appreciation for art, especially in schools, I can assure you that this activity is quite similar to what I’ve seen in most other subjects. From what I’ve experienced (in four different grades, at five different schools, in four different districts) it’s a rare class in which learners make multiple attempts and revise their work – during a Science lesson, say, or in Language Arts even – toward learning, or producing something resembling a real effort, in a manner that may one day lead to *gasp* competence.
(Surely if we really cared about learning and effort we’d have students submit several drafts before producing a final good copy, of anything (a drawing, poem, song, dance, short story, research report, math test...) And then grade them, if that’s really necessary, on the difference between their first attempt and their last, their improvement. As it is, we tend to reward those kids who show the least effort with the best marks: those who get their work done fastest and without error. But, very obviously, their grade is then only a measure of how little they were challenged and how poorly the teacher met their needs as a learner.)
Noticing all this, at the start of my practicum I tried to introduce these notions of context, research, and revision. (...Feeling as I did, I simply couldn’t then reproduce what I saw and had experienced myself as a kid.) To this end, I asked my children how many pages they thought the average work of adult fiction was. We agreed that most fiction was around two or three hundred pages long. I then asked them how many pages they felt they themselves could write in a day, if they were motivated and having fun. Some thought ten, others thought closer to fifty. (One said, “I’d probably run out of paper!”) I then suggested that most books take authors three to six years to write. We then did the math on the board. If the best authors took their time, and wrote only one page per day, we agreed that they would easily be finished their novel in less that a year. And if these authors wrote really fast on a computer we agreed they could be finished in just a week or so. This had many of these kids wondering how the best writers were so very slow, taking many years, when a bunch of nine-year-olds could surely press out a great novel in mere days. Consternation was all over their faces. We then talked about preparation, about research, and about revisions and editing. We talked about writing multiple drafts and about how everyone needs an editor, even professional writers, to help them write more effectively. I suggested that most of the work, almost all of the effort and fun, was not in the filling of pages with words, and as quickly as possible (like we do in class), but happened before an author even started writing and then again after their first draft. We talked about how it seemed crazy to me that we only ever did a first draft: what I feel is the smallest, least interesting, least fun fraction of what writing is.
We went on and related this to the rest of the world and to other work. I suggested that the same process, the same labour, that went into making most books went into virtually all of art and science and even sports too. We talked about how at the end of a movie there is a long list of credits. We agreed that there were many dozens and even hundreds of people’s names there that scroll by, each with a different job. I noted that most of our favourite films, just two hours long, took hundreds of people several years to produce. That blew many of their little minds.
We then talked about sports, about Olympic athletes. They all seemed to have prior knowledge of the Olympics and that it only took place every four years. I proposed that an Olympic swimmer or gymnast may be involved in only one event, and would likely complete her performance in a matter of seconds. I asked these kids what that person would be up to for the rest of the time between the end of her competition and the next Olympics? They thought she would be spending a lot of time practicing, working out, researching her sport, studying other athletes, trying new things and learning how to get better – so that her best effort would be on display when it really counted. We agreed that the thirty seconds we saw on television belied the years of work that she and all her competitors and all the coaches and parents and organizers and everyone else put in.
I asked them why then – if everything we know and love takes research, planning, experimentation, revision, and editing – we do not do this, in an appropriate manner, in every subject in school? (I was hoping they would enlighten me.) They weren’t sure.
Together we tried to practise what I was preaching. (It was like pulling teeth, of cats, while herding them, while on thin ice...) Context was easy. I could put together great visuals for them on just about anything. I also had no trouble getting excited and loud and flailing my arms over just about anything either – and they seemed to lap that up. However, even after our discussions, it was a real challenge to get these folks to spend more than fifteen minutes working on anything at all, and harder still to get them to return to, make improvements upon, or even another attempt at virtually anything. It seemed that at this early stage they’d already grown accustomed to, essentially, NOT learning. And, no, I was sure it was not about a lack of attention span (or otherwise explained by the latest scapegoat or bout of moral panic.) This was about students AND teachers AND parents AND administrators AND curriculum. The problem felt bigger than my class, and that getting them doing anything different than they were used to would likely take more time than I had with them.
Most depressingly, after having reviewed my lesson plans and observing my talk with these kids, their teacher sat me down and told me that if we all worked so slow and produced so little I wouldn’t gather enough quantitative data for those ever-impending report cards. What was needed, he said, was not learning, skill development, displays of effort, or to produce anything of quality that we were proud of but, instead, volume – and a lot of it. We needed lots of worksheets and tests, and to plough through the curriculum, not make multiple drafts or teach recurrent painting lessons. And the reasoning for this, I was told, to allay my skepticism and naiveté, was so that we teachers could pretend to be able to stand behind the wildly and demonstrably unjustifiable grades that parents demand and that we were mandated to deliver.
...four days later I was no longer a teacher candidate.
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