Reflections on Learning in a Pandemic
This year was one for the books. No matter how you look at it, it was monumentally disruptive and transformative. Now that our spring classes have ended, I have been reflecting with Teaching Artists, parents, and students about their experiences and what's sticking with them as we move ahead. Three powerful themes that have come up in many conversations are artistic fluency, a plant/garden metaphor, and the power of community.
Theme 1 - Artistic Fluency
This year, virtual classes explored a deeper relationship between emotions and artistry. I witnessed a deepening of artistic expression simply because we were not able to devote as much time to the technical growth within each medium. This seemed counterintuitive to me until I looked at it through the lens of language acquisition. In language, you can memorize word definitions, spelling, conjugations, and grammar to gain the tools needed, but fluency doesn't come solely from knowing words. It comes from the adaptive challenge of making decisions that don't have a right or wrong answer, yet figuring out a way to use techniques you know to express what you intend. In a similar way, the artistic ability also develops through technicality and fluency. Our young artists were able to use techniques they already knew, and a few new ones, to express themselves more deeply and with greater conviction this year. We've even developed some ideas for ways to use card games to encourage technical growth and fluency for the coming year.
Theme 2 - Plant/Garden Metaphor
For many of us, our program team is like a metaphor of a tree or garden, which is in part inspired by a training I attended from the Rising Leaders program through the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs (MCACA). The facilitator, John McCann, was leading us through a series of reflective exercises on biomimicry as metaphors for leadership. A friend of mine posed the question - “Does true failure exist in nature?” That made me wonder, “how do we build a holistic system at Living Arts where there is no true failure?” This prompted a series of questions that I've explored with our team:
Who are the fruit?
Who are the branches?
Is any one role trying to be too many parts?
Does the tree have enough water to pull nutrients from the ground and create healthy fruit?
Who are the bugs that digest nutrients in the ground that we need?
Reflecting on these questions, I’ve come to understand the garden metaphor as a system where people share learnings, insights, difficulties, and pain points, to work separately and together in concert to create a healthy garden. A garden where mistakes inform our work as much as successes; where the bees and worms are just as integral to the system as the branches and the fruit; where the death of one thing leads to nutrients for the next and we work systematically to maintain a healthy codependent equilibrium. These reflections have provided me with a useful framework for exploring the possibilities of our organization and how we operate as we emerge from the pandemic.
Theme 3 - Power of Community
Despite all the challenges this year, our Out-Of-School Arts Program (OSA) completed 30-weeks of virtual classes, produced a 1-hour time capsule video with all 23 classes contributing a segment, and came together as a community to learn, grow, and build this program together. We have had to create flexibility in our plans, sometimes changing them at the last minute, and, through it all, we persevered. We were in constant collaboration with our Teaching Artists, youth, families, and staff to figure out how to reimagine things. Teaching Artist, Stephanie Mae RichWell, said it best:
"Teaching in a virtual setting really made it clear how strong of a learning community OSA has nurtured. Out of all the virtual programming I did, OSA was the MOST successful because we had already built trust and a foundational skillset as art-makers to allow for freedom of choice and social support to be successful. Really special!"
I am endlessly grateful for our collaborative team who is always willing to bring challenges and adaptations to the forefront alongside the beauty we witness daily.
