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Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education (CAPE)
203 N. Wabash, Suite 1720, Chicago, Illinois 60601-2417
312/870-6140 fax 312/870-6147
Indivisible: Stories of Chicago Communities, 2001
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This approach moves the work of collaborating teachers, artists, and students beyond the typical student display or art fair. Rather, the exhibition as curriculum approach acknowledges and empowers participants as creators of culture. In doing so, and in exploring together the process of conceptualizing and mounting an exhibition, collaborative work done by teachers, artists, and students is finally given the accord it deserves as essential aesthetic and intellectual statements in our society.
The starting point for Indivisible: Stories of Chicago Communities was an exhibition at the Terra Museum of American Art, entitled Indivisible: Stories of American Communities. A project of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University in partnership with the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, and funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts, Indivisible: Stories of American Communities featured depictions by a variety of photographers, oral historians, journalists, and ethnographers of very different communities across the United States. The exhibition offered CAPE teachers, artists, and students a unique opportunity to explore the concept of community and how it is documented.
Workshops held at the Terra Museum with Terra staff, and in other venues, allowed teachers and artists to become fully familiar with the exhibition, and with certain key concepts that would inspire later classroom work:
1. community is a flexible contruct communities can be based on location, ethnicity, social issues, economic issues, age, and more;
2. there are different ways to document/depict/present communities - no one technique is right for all, each approach has its own veracity and power.
Teachers explored these ideas in touring the exhibition, through examining images with and without text (and what implications that has), and through deep discussions.
From the beginning, CAPE strove through these workshops to create a community amongst the teachers and artists. This was valuable not only in creating a potential support network that all could draw upon as needed to create the classroom projects and produce the exhibition, but also in stimulating ideas and camaraderie early on. Teachers were asked in the first workshops "when are we indivisible? when are we not? what are occasions that bring us together? what keeps us apart? can the telling of our stories create community? and what is our story to tell?" Answering these questions helped bring the teachers together, and gave them a rare opportunity to form a professional community engaged in serious exploration of issues, art and innovative educational practice. In this way, emerging concepts for the work to be done in the classroom began to take shape.
Later teacher and artist workshops took place at the actual galleries where the exhibitions would eventually be held. By the time of these workshops, certain teachers and artists had begun exploring Indivisible in their classrooms, and were able to share the excitement of this with their colleagues. This sharing allowed teachers and artists to conceive of the exhibition as a product of all their work, as an exchange of ideas across the city of Chicago, not just a showing of their particular classroom's art work.
In their classrooms, teachers and artists began asking further questions, such as "what gives us a sense of home? how is our identity tied to place? what would we include in a community of our own design? how does culture shape who we are? who are our heroes and how do we choose them? can we change the portrayal of our community to affect deeper changes? can we imagine ourselves through the eyes of another person?" As the discussions of questions like these spun out, classrooms developed a focus for their documentation. Some classes focused on neighborhood issues, some focused on the idea of community as part of their social studies curriculum, and some focused in on themselves, their family and their classroom community. Students explored these subjects in a wide range of art forms, finding answers (and questions) that were surprising, moving and challenging.
The process of working collaboratively became as important as the content of the work. In each group the students explored how his/her own part fit into the whole. Together, they had to edit, frame, rework and assemble all the pieces. The collaboration of the students was guided by the teachers and artists, who had already become part of a collaborative community through the initial Indivisible workshops. As one teacher put it, "you've got to make a community if you're gonna talk about community."
The exhibitions and their openings were empowering experiences that allowed teachers, students and artists to see their work displayed professionally in a gallery setting. All students who participated in the Indivisible project took a field trip to see their work on view during the exhibition. Some of the field trips were organized to let students from different communities to act as docents and explain their work to each other, further creating a sense of community. On these field trips, teachers worked with their students in exploring the exhibition and their responses to it through sketches and writing. Students were asked such questions as "what does it mean to be indivisible? how are people in a community connected to each other? what is it like to see your work on the walls of a gallery? how does the exhibition look in reality compared to what you imagined? what was the process involved in creating this work? what was it like to document your community? what did you learn about your community and yourself by participating in this project? after looking at some of the other works of art, which one of the other projects interested you, and why?"
For teachers and artists, the Indivisible exhibition and project provided a powerful experience of forming a professional community with other teachers, artists, museum staff and arts organization professionals. The project recognized and honored teacher, student and artist work through the spring exhibitions. Indivisible also gave participants a powerful tool in creating classroom community, and exploring issues of great import to students that might not always be so easily accessible. One student, studying and documenting the process of gentrification in her neighborhood, stated that she never knew there was a word ("gentrification") for what was happening to her world. This is but one of many examples of critical thinking that empowered teachers, artists and students a critical thinking nurtured by the exhibition as curriculum processes of Indivisible: Stories of Chicago Communities.
© 2004-2008 Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education (CAPE)
203 N. Wabash, Suite 1720, Chicago, Illinois 60601-2417
312/870-6140 fax 312/870-6147 www.capeweb.org
If you have come to this page from a search engine, here is a link to CAPE's Home page.