Art for Students’ Sake : San Diego Teachers Learning Lessons in Creativity at Workshops

After the 80 public school teachers shed their inhibitions, there was no stopping their ability to absorb the dance, music and visual arts seminar materials given them last week.

So a visitor to one cavernous room at the Balboa Park Recital Hall saw a group of teachers paired off, each performing a complex pantomime for his or her partner, who then took colored construction paper and chairs to create a three-dimensional representation of the movements.

“You’re trying to capture a creative moment, you’re trying to understand why artists do what they do,” David Keevil, a San Diego artist, yelled to the busy group.

Each pantomime, and the resulting sculptural creation, represented the teacher’s reaction to modern assemblages of art by Vito Acconci viewed at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art the day before.

“My impression was at first to yell and retch, and close up and resist his art, but then that reaction caused me to think more about it,” said Point Loma High School English and history teacher Marilyn Brown, explaining her pantomime of standing up straight, then leaning over as if to throw up, followed by sitting down cross-legged on the wooden floor and putting her hands to her head in pain.

While Brown created her visual piece, other teachers rehearsed a modern dance movement, practicing how to put the vocabulary of movement in action. A third group in the park’s puppet theater sat in a circle, clapping their hands in rhythm to the beat of a classical music movement as part of a sound game.

Diverse Group

The diverse group of teachers from 21 schools throughout San Diego County spent the past two weeks dancing, singing, clapping, and doing other hands-on experiences with the various fine arts. Under the sponsorship of the San Diego Institute for Arts Education, the teachers will take their knowledge of how artists work back to their classrooms in the fall, and prepare their students for visits during the school year from artists provided by the institute.

The summer workshops, in their second year, are a major effort on the part of San Diegans not to let the teaching of fine arts in public schools go by the wayside as a result of years of budget cutting. The Junior League of San Diego Inc. founded the institute in 1983, modeling it after New York’s Lincoln Center Institute, which gives more than 1,200 teachers training in the arts each summer. Professional artists from both San Diego and elsewhere teach the local workshops.

“For every teacher we can have feel the artistic world, that teacher will affect hundreds of kids who hopefully in years to come will demand museums and symphonies,” said Elizabeth Bergmann, executive director of the institute. “And the money that we spend goes back into the community to support artists.”

“This fires up my juices,” said Evelyn G. Tossas, a fifth-grade teacher at Balboa Elementary School in Barrio Logan, who was back for a second summer of seminars. Tossas was demonstrating her “elephant walk” that she developed from the dance workshops last year. “I tried this with the kids on Friday when everyone feels a little bit beat and they get a kick out of it, and also learn about body movement,” she said, leaning over and swinging her arms back-and-forth as she loped along.

“I go home every night and think about ways to teach these concepts throughout the curriculum, like in science and math,” Tossas said. “I can incorporate what I’ve learned (about body movement) into math, such as showing angles with my arms and body in teaching geometry. I’ll call my reading group into session by jumping up and down and singing out in a falsetto voice, which gets the kids excited, because (I’m introducing) the group as being fun.

“Another exercise I do is to have kids in my bilingual class make up an idea of theirs that they don’t know a word for in English or Spanish and have them explain the word with body language.”

Any school in the county can send a teacher to the institute, but either the principal or the school district must pay $3,000 to cover one-third of the costs. The institute contributes an additional $6,000 per school to cover expenses of paying for resident artists during the school year, as well as transportation and other costs for taking students to museums, concerts or plays. Additional support comes from private foundations and companies, including Nordstrom department stores, San Diego Gas & Electric Co., Peninsula Bank of San Diego, and The Parker Foundation.

After completion of the summer session, teachers from each participating school will select which particular piece or performance they want to emphasize during the school year, based on what they learned and what particularly excited them.

For example, if a teacher wants to concentrate on dance, the institute will arrange for professional dancers to work with students periodically during a monthlong unit. The teacher will augment the dancers based on information learned during the summer workshops. The unit will culminate with the students attending a professional dance performance.

“We give the teachers credibility to help get the kids to respond to what is being shown them in the arts,” said UC San Diego music professor Bertram Turetzky, a workshop instructor.

“From what the teachers learn (at the workshops), they can go back to their classes and talk about sound awareness, about how to use sounds. A lot of teachers come in with no musical training and of course in a week or two, we’re not going to make them experts. But we can show them how to approach the topic, and how to connect sound to dance, and to visual arts.

“I like to play the sound game with them, where we sit and write down every sound you hear over a two-minute period,” Turetzky said. “Then when we compare, some people will say, ‘Gee, I didn’t hear that sound’ while others will say, ‘Yes, I heard it.’ You realize that the ear is the only sense organ we can’t shut off. We can close our eyes but not our ears.

“I’m trying to be a bit like Dr. Doolittle, where the teachers learn without them knowing it.

“We then come into the classroom to reinforce teachers. We’ll play a live performance and the students will really sit and listen, and understand what we are doing as art.”

The institute requires that the music, dance and visual arts teachers participate as students in those workshops outside their area of expertise. For example, Turetzky goes through the dance and visual arts routines.

“That’s to allow the public school teachers to see that artists have to struggle with other forms of expression as well,” Bergmann said.

“Lots of teachers ask us at first, ‘What are we going to do? How are we going to do it?’ We just tell them to go inside themselves and discover.”

Bergmann bemoaned the fact that more schools cannot afford to participate.

“But it’s hard for a lot of schools to come up with even $3,000,” said Kay Wagner, fine arts basic education director for the San Diego Unified School District. “I really approve of the institute’s philosophy to involve students with real artists and by training their teachers as a way to get people to understand what it takes to make a work of art, to put on a dance or drama production.

“And we (public schools) simply cannot finance the arts to the extent that we should.”

Wagner does have some funds for the city school’s own artists-in-residence program, who bring more general exposures to art to students at various schools, rather than concentrating on one or two particular pieces. The County Office of Education, which provides assistance to many small school districts countywide, has an “Arts Colleague” program that brings retired art teachers and artists back into classrooms on a part-time basis.

“We’ve all got the same goal,” Wagner said. “And maybe (someday) we’ll achieve it.”