My Summer at the Peabody Essex Museum

A few teachers having fun on our summer vacation at the Peabody Essex Museum

This past July, I was lucky to spend time at the Peabody Essex Museum's Summer Teacher Institute, Artist as Innovator. The summer institute included about 20 teacher participants from various disciplines. The course is available to all teachers who want to learn more about art and educational techniques. I signed up for the course because I thought it would be a unique and fun experience to learn about art and contemporary art education practices. This institute really got me to think about how I run my classroom; I took away many practices that I have already used in this school year. I was able to meet so many teachers with such insight into education. We had wonderful conversations and built a strong community throughout the week. We even were able to preview the upcoming Strandbeest exhibit before it opened! Take a look at some of the things we did.

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Making Art with a Practicing Artist

My kinetic sculpture

A teaching artist demonstrated how to make plaster molds. It was great to see non-art teachers digging into the messy art making process! 

We designed kinetic sculptures in PEM's maker space.

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Julia Marshall - Keynote Speaker

Julia Marshall, Head of Art Education at San Francisco State University, giving a talk on contemporary art & education

Julia Marshall, the head of art education at San Francisco State University, gave a speech about how to incorporate contemporary art into the curriculum. According to her presentation, "contemporary art gives our students innovative, insightful, playful, ways to explore and see the world and multiple ways to express our understandings."

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Concept Mapping

We learned about concept mapping by using a piece of art found in the museum

We learned about Maker Spaces from Brian Gravel. He asked us to concept map our thoughts on Maker Spaces, as seen here.

Concept Mapping is a diagram that allows people to brainstorm relationships between topics. It is usually organized in a hierarchal fashion. Concepts and ideas flow through natural brainstorming and conversation, sometimes showing cross-links. I really enjoyed the idea of concept mapping to help student brainstorming techniques.

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Learning Some New Technology

We learned about a cool science/tech toy called the "Makey Makey." I even purchased one for the classroom to teach my students about coding!

The Strandbeest

Theo Jansen with his lumbering Strandbeest

We were able to get a sneak peek of Theo Jansen's exhibit at the Peabody Essex Museum, Strandbeest. Theo Jansen is a Dutch artist who has been working on his Strandbeest for over 20 years. The Peabody Essex Museum asked us to create a lesson plan using Strandbeest as the central theme. I plan on creating a lesson plan in my web design class utilizing storytelling techniques using the Adobe Slate app. 

To learn more, read this great New York Times article.

Showing my Strandbeest lesson to some other teachers