School as a Living Museum Transcript

Teacher: Art is really communications, and so when the students put up the work that they’ve done, they’re communicating what they’ve learned. We’ve filled the whole school up. To me, it doesn’t seem odd; it seems normal. It seems like this is what you’re supposed to do. The ultimate goal of curation is to show what the students have done and to communicate what they’ve learned.

Student: It has to be like at least three inches—

Student: Okay, we’re good there.

Student: Yeah.

Student: Hold on. This—

Teacher: I think that making student work public is a great driver for school improvement. Because if we look at the work that students are actually doing, we can all draw our own conclusions and say, “How can I get more students doing work that’s really fantastic?”

Teacher: I’ll give you the red, it’s right over there.

Teacher: The kids are the ones that are driving it, so it’s having them do authentic work and then feeling like they’re taking charge. It’s really the basis of all project-based learning. It’s gotta be authentic. The kids have to care. It has to be their idea, and it has to be their project.

Teacher: My philosophy for curation is put stuff up everywhere, but it’s gotta be beautiful. I believe in three things: symmetry, repetition and surprise.

Teacher: This is from the project we did, art about physics and engineering. It talks about friction, but it’s physically surprising and loud and complicated and enormous.

Teacher: Up here, the students got together in teams of two and made their own plans for a 30 foot by 6 foot mural. We chose the best two and the four kids that did the best two mixed their mural together and had this. They collaborated and they critiqued and made the work better by showing it, by putting it up on the wall.

Teacher: This is repetition—all the same size canvases—and it’s symmetrical.

Teacher: You need to prepare a space for art. One thing that I did was I put up these frames on the wall. That way they can be unscrewed and you can put artwork up. Then they can be replaced, but they’re hung symmetrically. They’re the same size, it’s clean and neat.

Teacher: This hallway was just a white hallway, and we were doing a project called The Shift in Art. I thought, “Oh, well, wouldn’t it be cool if before we put the art up on the wall, we painted it a color that’s different than the color that was here?” Then along the bottom, we have the transition of Roman architecture, and to kind of make it look classical. You wanna use a color palette. That’s what the teacher needs to bring. The teacher needs to bring control. Remember, the artist is he who dances in chains. You don’t have to use every single color in the color palette.

Teacher: The reason people plein aire paint is because they go outside and see what nature is. Referencing artists, referencing science, referencing the world around us is a really big part of it.

Teacher: These birds that are hanging from the ceiling are from the multimedia teacher and the biological science teacher, and they did this collaboration where they went down to the San Diego River and they did research about the different waterfowl and where they’re living and where they exist. You might not necessarily be able to read everything, but you see it, and you say, “Well, what’s that about?” and then you maybe go find out about it.

Teacher: Come with me into the bathroom. This is gonna come as a surprise to a lot of educators, but the kids come into the bathroom to get away from them. We put jazz on specifically—the one student came to me, and he’s like, “I know, jazz in the bathroom.” When you walk in here, you know you’re not alone. We also put plaques to dedicate the urinals to different people. One is to my art class, just—it’s my favorite urinal, too.

Teacher: This is a project about collaboration. The collaboration of the physics teacher and the humanities teacher got together and said, “We want to make something monumental, and we don’t want it to be about us. We want it to be about what they’ve done, and we want it to be about both of our subject areas.”

Teacher: Several kids collaborated on each of these spots as they did on the history in this.

Teacher: Sometimes you just come in and you think to yourself, “I can’t believe the fifth graders did that. I can’t believe tenth graders did that.” That’s when you know—wow, we’re really kind of getting somewhere.

Teacher: The greatest thing that I ever have is after the semester’s over and I’d look and see where we hung our artwork and it’s all gone because the kids wanted their work so much they took it home with them. It’s like, “Oh, really, you’re going to put it up at school? But I wanna take it home!” That’s something you wanna hear, because they’re proud of what they’ve done. It means something to them.

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