Jessica Collins’ social studies classroom in Dzantik’i Heeni Middle School is full of energetic seventh- and eighth-graders. Chairs and desks are pushed to the sides of the room.
The students are separated into groups of four and they’re frozen in awkward poses.
One group is sitting with their legs crossed and all four kids are facing each other. Their heads are bowed, their arms are stretched up into the middle of the circle and they’ve stacked their hands on top of each other.
One boy’s right arm is above the others and it’s pointing straight up into the air.
The kids have made a tableau – a picture made with nothing but their bodies. They’ve become a pumpkin.
Jessica Collins asked the kids to make something related to Halloween.
“I really want to see that they get — showing me what they know in a different way because they’re used to paper and pencil,” Collins said. “Some kids do really well with that and some need a different method of learning and communicating what they know.”
What Collins is doing is part of an initiative called Artful Teaching that Juneau School District officials said was adopted about a year ago.
The district, in partnership with University of Alaska Southeast and Juneau Arts and Humanities Council, has been inviting artists into classrooms to show teachers how to use art to teach their classes.
The point is to help kids learn and express themselves in ways they can’t through standard book learning.
Amy Rautiainen, the artful teaching coordinator for the district said it’s, “kind of like coupling arts, whether it’s drama, or visual arts, or music with curricular content – so math, or reading, or language arts.”
Rautiainen said the district-wide project is funded through a grant provided by the Margaret A. Cargill Foundation.
She doesn’t have documentation, like test scores, to prove it’s making a difference, but she said it has been researched.
“An organization that we work with a lot is the Kennedy Center, out of Washington D.C.,” Rautiainen said. “They have funded a lot of research based around arts integration as an effective instructional method.”
Back in Collins’ classroom things are escalating. Now they’ve got the steps down and she’s asking the kids to make something related to their subject material – ancient Egypt.
“You’re going to show me: Why might it be difficult to travel upstream on the Nile River,” she asked.
First, the kids get to think about the question. Next, they share ideas on how to answer with their group. Then they decide what they’ll do. Once they know what they’re making, they have 30 seconds to create their tableau.
One student said two members of his group represent, “boat like … rowers … (they have) like lack of energy because the river is really long.”
Another group of students made cataracts – waterfalls or rapids that they say will smash a boat up against rocks.
That is how a tableau works.
Collins has been teaching her kids about Egypt and then asking them to demonstrate what they learn. She said the strategy helps kids use skills they don’t usually get to tap into.
“Through the experience of working together and moving their bodies … a lot of students learn better that way than traditional reading from a book, or listening to a lecture and taking notes,” she explained.
“They can make connections between the information that they read and the movements that they make.”
Collins said this method also helps kids learn from each other and acting these concepts out might help them hold onto the information they learn.
But at the same time, she admitted some kids learn better from standard book work.
“This is kind of an equalizing sort of thing where if you’re a really strong reader and writer, you may not be comfortable with acting and cooperative group work – so it pushes kids equally,” she said.
As much as Collins and the kids seem to enjoy this artful way of teaching, she doesn’t believe it can defeat the teenagers’ short attention spans.
Soon she said they’d drop the tableaus for a while and start learning about Egyptian hieroglyphics, cartouches and of course, the pyramids.
