Manifesto

My Teaching Manifesto

The arts saved my life.

I began in 1997, as a part time storyteller, after having a created a successful Story Hour in a local book chain. I began my Teaching Artistry because it was a natural step back into performing. As the mother of a toddler, it gave me balance between life and a need to participate in the arts. I began work as a teaching artist because it drew me closer to my daughter and children in her age range and that was more important than simply acting or dancing in productions.

My work is my mission.

It inspires me to see children learn to love dance and theater by playing and exploring together. Play, as an approach came to me as I began working with young children. Early in my work as a TA, there were many programs for middle school and high school children. The same couldn’t be said for early childhood programs. As a window into my own life working with young children, time slowed down and made me more intentional in my own life. The work mirrored my own memories of life as child, and reminded me that mindfulness is synonymous with childhood. My now 24-year-old daughter continues to show me how to fully live my life. Though she is now on the verge of her own life as a musical artist, she continues to model, what is important. To show that window into a life in the arts, for all children, to use those creative powers of visual, musical and theater arts to make meaning of the world at large, guides and continues to expand my work. I am inspired by how children make discoveries as they play while finding new and innovative ways to make meaning. Their work buoys my creative spirit and deep emotional connection to the process of creating art.

Innovation in curriculum development is where I play.

As a teaching artist, I am driven to refine my work while I reflect on my practice. Being a teaching artist allows you a vast amount of freedom to create so that curriculum is able to grow and expand naturally. This form of process aligns perfectly with my artistic ideals. As a divergent thinker the creative process is continuously fascinating and motivating to the inner artist. How do movement arts and dance specifically motivate? What are the ways to engage students who have no outside access to dance? What motivates reluctant learners? When, if ever does imagination wane or become dormant? How does movement affect our acquisition of language, expression and concrete thought? I teach in a community with a limited access to high quality art experience. How can I bridge that gap, without trying to be all things to all people? Is my work inclusive or exclusive? The gospel of the arts lives in me.

My life is a balancing act.

Even though I have worked as an artist who teaches, my career in the public schools is primarily as a teacher of the arts. Though my own performing life in the arts has been limited, for the last eleven years, creating performances with the children and enhancing their learning does give me a creative outlet. And though it doesn’t exactly fill the enjoyment I felt from performing, it does use many of the same talents I embodied as a performer. Art for arts sake is certainly not the norm within the public schools so my continuum is to stress process over product to students while trying to explain the value of this approach to administrators. It is an ongoing argument with number crunchers that keeps me cutting edge in my work as well. Even though the expectations to evaluate our methods, curriculum, class structure and teaching style is not for a classroom of twenty two, but for four to five hundred students per year, arts specialists don’t default to an attitude of defeat. We rise to what is required going beyond by finding ways to create core art curriculum that inspires literacy. As I create-connect-perform-reflect, my work in the dance classroom envisions an expansion of what it means to be a fully formed human being. As a teacher who values her inner artist, I value process over product, performance over testing, and reflection over evaluation. Though I will continue to be evaluated in how I meet school wide goals that must be measured, my mission continues to be appealing and giving less fractured hope that the arts is a bridge to life.

The teaching artists that have greatly influenced me throughout have been Marina Abramovic, Celeste Miller, Susan Griss, and Anne Green Gilbert. Of course there are many others, including Richard Serra and Frank Lloyd Wright, but these are the artists I go back to time and again, for inspiration.