If there is one thing more than another that helps create a liberating and stimulating environment to grow, it is the learning materials that teachers make available to their students. Materials can be viewed, heard, examined, rejected, accepted, used, dispensed with, retrieved, recreated, and viewed again.
The materials may be made entirely of symbols (letters, figures, musical notes) or they may be of the flesh and blood of living things, such as the two goats that may be housed in a small shed in the corner of a children’s playground. One can never be completely surprised at the form materials take: one can hear a rooster crow from the fenced-in enclosure near the door of a first-grade classroom; or see against a hill on the north end of some campus, near the physics lab, the outline of a cyclotron, or see a library rise up where once there had been only a vacant lot. The art in handling materials is having them in the right place, at the right time, in the right conditions and quantity, and appropriate to the need of the moment; the right book for the kid in the front row, the fresh egg for the osmosis experiment, the new transportation movie featuring the jet plane, enough copies of “Mystery Cat” for fourth grade choral reading , an extra bag of apples for children who forgot to bring theirs.
There are some schools where the problem is a death of materials; but more often the problem with the materials arises from the willingness to accept the obvious, the monotonous, the boring, the habitual. Teachers sometimes fail to distinguish between material that is useful for practice or information seeking and material that introduces new values and ideals, stimulates new feelings, and provides the precise, substantive knowledge needed at the “entry stage” of thinking and learning. make creative. ”….even creativity requires a sense of criticism and precision.”
Using humble things creatively
It is often in the use of close and humble things that a teacher can foster in his students the power of observation and appreciation. Few materials introduced in a class with only three purposes have results as delicious as the apple. This was one of the resources used in an English unit for high school that, like the unit for second grade, encouraged, at a more adult level, the exploration of the world of the five senses. Smell, taste, hearing, sight, touch: these were the appropriate subjects of study. To start the adventure, each student brought to class an apple of her choice; Jonathan, Spitzenburg, Northern Spy, Delicious, McIntosh. As they studied the apple, one slowly turned it in the light, smelled it, touched it, and finally devoured it. In this process, they recorded the words and phrases through which they could communicate to others the sensations and thoughts that crowded them. A class list made up of student contributions began to look like this:
View: red, pink, autumnal scarlet, ivory flesh, mottled, bright, striped
Sound – hiss, crackle, crack
Taste: refreshing, juicy, cool, moist, tart, mealy
Touch: waxy, smooth, rounded, conical.
Odor – – aromatic, fragrant, pungent
Aware that much of the aesthetic satisfaction of language is found in imagery, class members tried their luck in the field of association;
red berries against white snow
autumn mist in the valleys
red sumac
Hallowe’en
winter fires
With words and ideas on paper and on the board, the class was now ready to write. Each student wrote no more than one page to record in the way she wanted the thoughts that had come to her during the apple party. The rarity of the experience, the emphasis on the unique and the personal, the informality of the relationships engendered between teacher and students, the common search for meanings and words to express them, the appreciation of each one’s final “masterpiece” as such . was shared in the group- everything led to transactions of the kind that allow each one to be himself and write freely about himself and his feelings. Neither was limited to a single topic. As a result, there were articles about the taste of Jell-O, Thanksgiving turkey, toothpaste, and Chinese teas, in addition to apples.
Creative Use of Graphic and Plastic Materials
The materials that are primarily associated with the graphic and plastic arts – clay, paint, wood, paper, paste, glue, crayons, to name a few – have the wonderful quality of being available to teachers for all kinds of purposes. They can be made accessible to children for the purposes of exploration and manipulation or, when familiarity with the materials is achieved and skills are maturing, in order to express an idea in some relatively finished form. It is at the time of exploration that teachers can provide a variety of materials and create the friendly and helpful atmosphere in which students can become increasingly familiar with the possibilities of art media. Within the bounds of courtesy and safety there must be freedom of both discovery and expression. Describing my work with a sixth grade class:
My group included eleven-year-old boys and rapidly maturing twelve-year-old girls.
The exploring hands were continually busy with clay, wood carving and modelling, puppet making, weaving and creative sewing for both boys and girls. And these activities seemed to satisfy an almost compulsive need for manipulation and self-expression. I hope there have been valuable learnings. There were some signs that creative attitudes were beginning to gel. At one point a student wrote. ”At first I didn’t understand your art form. You are the most different teacher I have ever had.” At the end of the year, after our visit to the next year’s high school, the same boy wrote, “I don’t think I’m going to like carpentry class. They all have to do the same. First you have to make a stool and then a shelf. You can’t do what you want your way. You have to do it the way they tell you.”
A research study to assess children’s growth through art experiences highlights the importance of encouraging materials “broad enough to allow extensive exploration and necessary errors, that arouse curiosity and encourage inquiry, that are appropriate for a given stage of maturity, presenting a variety of possibilities and choices. The way one teacher encouraged her children to try new art experiences in kindergarten is further evidence of what an inventive teacher can do:
During the first few weeks in kindergarten, some children find safety only in the familiar blocks and the sandbox. Others go to one of the art centers but tend to return to the same center over and over again. As they get to know me and the other children, their confidence grows and they seem more eager to try something new. Sometimes I tell the kids, ”Some of you seem to have a favorite place. If you always work in the same center, you will learn to do only one thing. There are many things that are fun to learn to do. If you try them, we’ll help you learn how to make them.” Before the work period begins, we look at things and handle them. We dramatize what we might want to paint. Each child is encouraged to choose what she wants to do and do it her way. Now we rarely hear “I can’t”.