NEWS
BY J.D. SWERZENSKI
6TH GRADERS AT
KELLY MIDDLE
SCHOOL CREATE
TILE MOSAICS
DURING ARTCORE
THE CREATIVE CLASS
ArtCore brings the arts back to five Lane County middle schools
ot often do you hear something like “we had a
small philosophical discussion of positive and
negative space” in a typical middle school
classroom.
But then again, the class that artist and
educator Milla Oliviera is explaining isn’t anywhere in the
realm of typical. Teaching a room of sixth graders at
Cascade Middle School last year, her lesson combined
Oregon ecology, Egyptian art and visual cognition to
provoke students into thinking about space in completely
new ways.
As with most of her lessons, Oliviera concluded the
course by having students create work that allowed them
to personally express what they had learned.
“I told them to create patterns that expressed who they
were, but leave the first letter of their name blank,”
Oliveria says. “I want to see who you are through the
patterns that you make.”
As one of ArtCore’s original “weavers” (named for
their ability to weave arts in with traditional school
subjects), Oliviera showcases just what has made the
program so invigoratingly nontraditional. ArtCore, a
developing arts-integration model for middle schools,
dodges easy definition of an arts program: Lessons can
take the form of art, science or social studies, if need be.
The connective tissue between Oliviera’s courses and
those of her fellow weavers is the use of art to approach
each subject.
“Art really offers the kind of problem solving that it
takes to question something and to find common ground
between subjects,” Oliviera explains. “There’s a sense of
N
ownership students get out of the lesson when they can
create their own work.”
Since launching at Junction City’s Oaklea Middle
School in 2014, ArtCore is now set to expand to four other
Lane County middle schools — Kelly Middle School,
Network Charter School, Hamlin Middle School and
Cascade Middle School — thanks to a $2.2-million grant
from the U.S. Department of Education. Starting this
month, that funding will give Lane County artists with
backgrounds in ceramics, theater and writing the chance to
weave their work in with an array of school subjects.
“The origins of this really come from Lane Arts
Council’s understanding of what the field of educators and
students need right now in Lane County and just building
on the creative strength of the teaching artists wanting to
be involved,” says Liora Sponko, executive director of the
Lane Arts Council and ArtCore program director. “It’s the
schools that have gotten involved really saying, ‘Yes, this
is the direction we want to go.’”
Of course, arts education — both in Lane County and
across the country — has long been headed the other
direction, with funding drying up for arts classes not
focused on boosting test scores. The trick for ArtCore is
finding an interdisciplinary approach for students looking to
learn outside of textbooks, and for administrators needing to
keep up standardized exam standards.
“There’s a lot of room for play and experimentation
within the confines of standards,” explains Michelle
Sinclair, an ArtCore researcher who will step into the role
of weaver this coming term. “As teachers, we need to be
thinking about the ways we’re allowing students to learn,”
For more info, visit lanearts.org/artcore.
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she says. “You don’t have to color a sheet to understand
the diagram of a cell in biology — you could also make it,
and maybe that ignites something in your memory that
helps you remember that for the test.”
Ross Anderson, ArtCore project manager and senior
lead researcher at Eugene’s Educational Policy
Improvement Center (EPIC), emphasizes how the
organization’s arts education approach fits within many of
the school’s existing goals.
“We’re looking at ways to live up to the mission
statement of some of these schools,” Anderson says. “So a
Kelly Middle School graduate will be innovative, creative,
collaborative — these things. That’s awesome, that’s what
we need, but how? What parts of their school day are
engineered to develop those skills? And that’s what we’re
trying to create.”
ArtCore is also aiming to address another key education
issue often plaguing students in the program: why it sucks
to be in middle school.
“Middle school is this weird thing,” Anderson says. “It
was created to give students this transition into high
school, so let’s break them into a lot of classes, break up
this idea that they get to know a teacher really well and, in
a lot of cases, it’s creating the ingredients for students to
drop out.”
Art, as Oliviera explains, can give students a means of
making the material easier to connect with and, crucially,
of providing a space to work out who they are.
“It’s an age when they’re dealing heavily with issues of
identity,” Oliviera says. “These projects offer a window
that students don’t usually have, to play around and figure
themselves out.”
“You hear a lot of sixth graders saying, ‘I can’t do this,’”
Sinclair elaborates. “I think these art projects should come
as an entry point to say, ‘Well, yes you can.’” She adds:
“They don’t come easy; it’s a lot of hard work for everybody,
but to learn that perseverance, to make mistakes and it’s OK,
that’s huge for a pre-teen looking to build a skill.”
ArtCore’s approach is now beginning to hit a sweet
spot with students and educators, offering a fresh approach
to prepare students for a rapidly changing world.
“The whole mentality of education as a rigid, skill-
building practice doesn’t apply anymore,” Oliviera says.
“We’re living through a technological revolution where
those sorts of mechanical jobs are being taken over by
computers, so what is the kind of thinking that we really
need for the problems that we’re facing?”
As the ArtCore projects expand across Lane County
middle schools, the concept of learning about ancient
Egypt by painting tiles or fractions through African drum
rhythms may seem less and less out of the ordinary.
“You don’t need to be a painter to be an artist,” Oliviera
says. “People are highly creative every day — when
they’re dressing up, when they’re going out and take a
different route.” She adds, “It’s figuring out: How do we
take that and go deeper?” ■
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