Residency 1, Week 2: 15.5 hours. Minnesota Center for Book Arts, Minneapolis, MN.
For my second week of my residency at MCBA, I was assisting various teaching artists with lessons nearly every day. Most classes had around 18-25 students, who were visiting from local schools.
On Tuesday, we had two 2nd grade classes again, and they doing the font poster lesson (see last week’s journal entry for a description of this lesson; it was just the font poster this week, not the books).
On Wednesday, we taught a group of young adults with learning disabilities sumingashi, a method of paper marbling. Stations were set up with trays of water, containers of colored ink, and color-coded brushes, and the students each made several sheets of marbled paper with various patterns, starting with concentric rings and moving to more varied patterns, formed by introducing movement and resists to the trays of water (such as gently blowing on the surface, drawing a stick through the water, or touching the water with a lotion-covered toothpick, which would push the ink away from it). The paper was hung up to dry in the wet studio’s big windows and sent to them later.
On Thursday, we had four more groups of 2nd graders come for the font poster project. I led a portion of the last lesson (printing the posters using the Vandercook press, once they had designed the template) which was super fun for me. I’ve just been shadowing/assisting the teaching artists, but my supervising artist/instructor wanted me to have the opportunity to lead all or a part of the exercise. I chose to do the printing since I wasn’t ready to teach the entire lesson. It went very well and I’m so glad I did. I didn’t forget anything and it was a big confidence booster (my biggest fear in teaching is that I’ll forget what I need to teach or lose my train of thought and not know how to pick it up again quickly).
On Friday, we had one group of high schoolers come for a sewn pamphlet book with pockets on the cover. The students used cover-weight paper for the covers, which were folded and cut to make pockets on the inside, and text-weight paper for the single-signature body, which was sewn to the cover using a 5-hole figure-eight stitch.
It’s really cool to me how teaching and learning, especially in the arts, really do build social/physical/mental skills outside of the art content, not just for the students but also for instructors (if they are open to learning!). I really appreciate being in the middle. This week has been a fast track of learning–not only the concrete teachings skills (like what order to do things in, what kind of awl is appropriate for a ten-year-old, and what to say to communicate concepts effectively), but the softer skills (like when to jump in and help, when to give space, and being non-judgmental towards students regardless of their attention and focus–who knows what’s going on in their life? and if they’re having a hard time it’s likely not because of the lesson). Also, just the little things like how age, ability, and privilege can affect a student-teacher relationship. We have a lot of power in our hands as educators and I think that really hit home for me this week. It’s humbling. Especially as a white, able-bodied, queer person, I want to be able to use my position to afford agency to the people I teach and elevate voices that need to be heard. This residency is helping me see some of the ways that can happen in real life.