October 30th

With the paint and sealant dry, it was ready to begin to decorate the pottery the students had sculpted a few days before. I told them to think about how they were going to condense their mythology, their entire story, into a flat image on a vessel. This certainly puzzled them for a while. A few students asked for scrap paper to draft on before they began working, roughly tracing the shape of their vessel onto the page to gauge the space available to them.  How could they possibly take their long and winding mythological narratives down to just an image?

With my class pondering this question and beginning to sketch out the most important parts of their story, condensing the characters into symbols with meaning, I turned the same question over in my head. How could I take all of this research that I had done with my students and make it mean something as close to the experience itself? Could I really portray these experiences in the classroom as a long-winded essay with cited sources? If they were able to condense a story with meaningful characters, morals, triumph, and grief all into one static image, surely I would have to find a way to do the same. 

It felt, at that moment, that the only way to portray the vulnerability, ups and downs, and learning experiences in the classroom was to try my best to simulate my personal experience. You can’t understand the happiness that these students got without seeing their faces. It would be impossible to understand their academic growth on a chart of standardized testing scores when it went against the very core principle of my curriculum in the first place!

If my students were going to have to display their work publicly, explain their art and experiences to an audience, then I would have to as well. Didn’t I want others to learn from me? To see how exploratory curriculum could help students become more engaged in their work?