This is the first in a series of blog posts focused on the value of art in our lives, and the role art can play in resisting the test and punish model of education.  See the intro and links to other posts in the series here.

By Sarah Puglisi.

When I was in training, in university, my Art Education teacher Bill Thomas once said something to the effect that if we can connect the home, and world in that home of the student, to our projects in an art room-if we can glimpse who the student is-then our lesson design was doing something profound.

He was teaching how to design starting points for children’s work as an art educator. Something we needed fieldwork to experience and understand but those days were in front of us. And indeed over my many years working as teacher and artist, art teacher,  I saw the bridge, but rarely.

He understood the elusive edge. To connect to who that child is, that was his point.

One time I glimpsed it. I had set up an “Olympics” for a wild two classes- days and days of events that I ran with two 6th grade classes — Mrs. Smithro abandoning her kids to me at the end of the year, and my having everything from ringtoss to how high can you reach, along with more traditional events I one by one ran for medals I made out of yarn and tag. How was this art?

We did manufacture the medals as I recall now, but at the cardboard-covered pavement art came to exist. And not even at the chalkdrawing competition.

A student, Kevin, came to the dance off, where he joined 12 girls and a great breakdancer from my class who could easily go to LA and dance on the Santa Monica pier for money. Armed with his expensive and going to be ruined tap shoes, Kevin waded into some pretty determined kids. He was a student in Smithro’s room- a student getting the A’s but often teased by his class, sometimes unmercifully for certain things like his love of and collection of pewter.

No one had ANY idea he was a competitive tapper, and almost no kid had ever seen tap dance. Great way to learn it exists. He brought his own player and I had to jerry-rig extension cords. I have never seen talent in a leotard to match that. Every child there had never seen a guy in a leotard in our barrio.

And he took dance, the art that it is, and killed it.

No one looked at Kevin the same way, that I can tell you.

I saw this as the potentials, home lives, abilities we never tap in school, that art bridged.

My husband had a short little conversation maybe two years ago with a person in his district that was working in the library. We lost librarians before my career started. I suppose librarian clerks at minimal wages are forced to do what training and degrees might help, but she expressed a desire to do some art with kids, and he HEARD her. She began and he encouraged her setting up, or supporting her trying something in her library art connected.

He decided around this time after re-instituting full music programs, within his district, to pursue art as well as music teachers. He hired art teachers, with the support of Board and district,  and one new hire at the last second left, leaving him with a year starting and no art teacher. That turned out to be the best thing that ever happened for children because the district team put into place that library clerk, she had some ed training, degree, and a hunger to teach art. Now her blog might say this better than I can, if you can scroll it 

I go there and just literally laugh with the joy of it.

If you look through her year so far, the images you will SEE play, invention, support of core standards, art ed principles, joy, delight, connection, bridges to culture, samples of  recurrent themes, her adjusting to student levels, you’ll pretty much take a course in what an art teacher can do K-8.

If you can scroll with time you’ll see how over time she is changing and her students are changing. In short, I’m looking somewhat at myself early in my career-if I had one heck of a cognitive boost and a camera.

AND I see her pulling her children through art movements, art history too with pieces like her recent POP art volcanoes, or the works studying Kandinsky. Since art is embedded in culture, since in the 20th century it drove us forward through massive wars, change, technological growth-you see her students glimpsing the enormity that is “man”.

What is man? Who are we? What is the reason?

These things have lined the inner world of artist and humans since time began. I would venture that right this minute as folks around our world are deciding life is something to be blown apart, hurled, to crush the other-as these themes are reverberating we COULD look at what was spawned when a version of that paralyzed our grandparents in the 1950’s. as nuclear war loomed and drills for potential nuclear disaster hit, even in schools, as folks dug and lead walled a room in the backyard, art sprang forward with the abstract expressionists.

And I think, when life is meaningless and a man contemplates with his brethren mass extinction, what image captures that inner awareness. So I know the students sitting before me in my little Transitional Kinder class, given the bridge to the arts may well represent to their peer group one day the times we are in. And in doing so, help us once more to work on, who are we? Why are we here? To make visual and give meaning to the hidden.

These young art teachers who largely do not exist thanks to NCLB, thanks to the painter George Bush’s policies, may well help us to examine our feet in a tub of water as Bush has, help us to put our relationship to one another into portrait form. Help us move into reality and out of our head. Art is ultimately on the plain of doing. It is zen, it is movement, form, feeling, systems, structures, it is both language and meaning, metaphor embedded in actual physical reality. It serves a broader purpose so necessary to human life. It is a bridge to experience, planet, others, emotion, meaning.

Art is happening. 

Art is love, it is all you feel, it is a training, a passion, a compulsion, a precision, a methodology, a core of your humanity.

It would be amazingly great to see it returned to our children so they can gift us with a tomorrow that can consider itself.

Sarah Puglisi teaches young children in Southern California. Her blog is here.