That’s what the Staten Island Teaching Artist Institute (SI TAI) is about – helping working artists to become teachers, or to become even better teachers; making those connections between mastering your art and communicating your art form. SI TAI, now in its third year, is a program of COAHSI, Sundog Theatre, and the Center for Arts Education. It brings nationally known practitioners and master teaching artists to provide training and information to local Staten Island artists.

COAHSI will be holding an information session about this year’s SI TAI at our offices (1000 Richmond Terrace, Snug Harbor, Building G) on Thursday, March 22nd, from 6:00-7:30. RSVP is required, to kkuwabara@statenislandarts.org. This year will be particularly geared towards advanced and intermediate teaching artists; beginners can also apply, and those who are accepted into the program will be given a special prerequisite session on Saturday, April 14th. The rest of SI TAI will be held on April 21st, April 28th, May 5th, and June 2nd. All sessions are 10:00 a.m. – 3:00 p.m.

Past graduate Hiroko Otani, a multi-disciplinary folk artist, says “Staten Island Teaching Artist Institute was one of the best professional workshops I have ever attended. Above all, exchanging information and forming friendships with other teaching artists was really beneficial for me, and a great networking opportunity.”

The application form for SI TAI is available at www.statenislandarts.org. Contact Kelly Kuwabara (kkuwabara@statenislandarts.org) or Gena Mimozo (gmimozo@statenislandarts.org) with questions!

The murals were created during an art residency where over 200 P.S. 13 students worked with teaching artist Dimitar Lukanov and Art in Motion. All of the painting was done by the students themselves, with guidance and direction from Mr. Lukanov.

To create the portrait collages, P.S. 65 students combined faces with images and visual elements that are significant to each artist – hobbies, interests, family, and heritage elements – creating rich and vivid representations of “What Makes Me, Me.” Teaching artists Patrizia Vignola and Anke Michaelson (who have backgrounds in fine arts and photography) led students in the creation of their portraits.

The residencies were supported by the Council on the Arts and Humanities for Staten Island (COAHSI) through an Arts Investment Regrant (P.S. 13), funded by the Staten Island Foundation and an Arts Bring Change Regrant (P.S. 65), funded by the Local Capacity Building Initiative of the New York State Council on the Arts.

There’s still a chance to catch one of the P.S. 13 murals, which will be on display at COAHSI’s Night of Staten Island Artists at the CSI Recital Hall on January 28th at 8:00. (Tickets $15; 718-982-2787).

“You’ll be doing your teaching artist internship with a class of non-verbal teenagers,” my mentor said.

“Non-verbal … teenagers,” I repeated, like a stunned parrot.

She nodded.

“That means they don’t talk?”

She nodded again.

“Okay,” I replied, trying to smile while quaking in my boots. I had some experience with developmentally disabled kids, but not with kids who didn’t talk. Teaching is all about communication. If the students couldn’t talk, would they understand when I spoke to them? How could they learn? I hoped I could figure out a way.

Luckily, I had two opportunities to observe the students before I worked with them. The classroom was large and sunny, with desks grouped in clusters around the room. It contained twelve students, ranging in age from thirteen to twenty-one, with a variety of severe disabilities. A couple of kids had Down syndrome; a couple of others had cerebral palsy. Some walked; some used wheelchairs. One or two of the students in wheelchairs had very limited movement. Most sat passively at their desks, a few wandered around the room. One, in particular, seemed to be in her own reality. She enjoyed the feel and smell of books and remained rather literally absorbed in a book the whole time.

Most of the students greeted me by pressing a button on an electronic speaking device, a la Stephen Hawking. They practiced with the devices each morning, their teacher told me, but the boxes only contained a few simple words, so they were of limited value in the grand scheme of things.

The classroom had a Smart Board—a terrific learning tool that, among other things, allows teachers to connect to the Internet with an entire-class-sized screen. I watched while the regular music teacher showed the students a video of musical instruments. The next week, I went back to observe once more. Again, the students watched a video on the Smart Board. Both times, the students didn’t seem to pay much attention. The wanderers wandered. The young woman who liked books rubbed a book against her face and grunted grumpily at gentle suggestions to do otherwise. The rest sat looking like droopy potted plants.

That caught my attention. As a person with a disability (I have psoriatic arthritis and have used a power wheelchair for mobility since 1997), I have often felt like a potted plant. It seems like people without disabilities frequently assume that disability prevents us from being active participants in life. I once had someone look at me—or, more accurately, at my chair—and ask, quite sincerely, “What WERE you?”

Not dead yet, I wondered whether the students might respond better to actually doing something, rather than watching other people do things. It had to be an activity that required little explanation, though, and it had to be a quick activity, because we only had one class period to make it happen. So I decided to have the kids try making French horns from garden hoses and funnels. I had done that before with groups ranging from pre-K to adults. It was easy, most people found it fun, and I could show the kids how to do it without much talking.

Lo and behold, the majority of students responded! I had them try buzzing their lips, and showed them how it sounded when they buzzed into their “horns.” Two of the kids caught on right away and had a blast for the rest of the class period. Another young woman didn’t actually play her horn, but held it up while she marched around the classroom imagining her own one-person band. Except for two students with very limited movement and Lucy, the student who absorbed herself in books, everyone did their best to participate.

That was in the spring of 2010. I was pleased that my potted plant theory seemed to have some merit, and wondered if I could challenge the kids to do more. So, thanks to an Arts Bring Change re-grant from COAHSI (funded by the Local Capacity Building initiative of the New York State Council on the Arts), I went back to the class in the spring of 2011. Most of the kids from the previous spring were still there. This time, we had six weeks to create and perform on percussion instruments. The first week, we made sandpaper blocks, and played along to a recording of Leroy Anderson’s Sandpaper Ballet. Most of the students were attentive, and a few seemed to really enjoy the activity, listening and playing along at the appropriate times.

In the following weeks, some things worked just like I hoped they would, while others needed adjustment. I noticed that the teacher, the paras, and I were doing most of the work of making instruments, so I started bringing drums and other percussion instruments to allow more time for the students to play. We used less recorded music; I used a keyboard to play folk songs, like She’ll Be Comin’ Round the Mountain, for them to accompany instead. We worked on starting and stopping together—I tried to be consistent in saying, “One, two, ready, GO!” each time we started and giving a cut-off with my hand, like a conductor would with any ensemble, when it was time to stop. They followed me. We worked on playing louder and softer, and faster and slower. Along with saying the words, I tried to demonstrate what I wanted. They followed me.

Each week, more students participated. And each week, I got to know them better as individuals. There was Sebastian, a boy with Down Syndrome, who did talk a bit. He called me Mom. An incredibly slim boy named Brandon would sometimes get up and dance to the music, and sing along a little to I’ve Been Workin’ on the Railroad. Denise didn’t talk, but she watched me like a hawk the whole time and did everything I asked with great enthusiasm. Ann Marie, who used a wheelchair and barely moved at all, blew me away when she bounced up and down in her chair and squealed for more music.

One week when I came in, the class had a substitute teacher who said, “Oh look, class! You are going to hear some nice music today.” I smiled as I chuckled to myself, “That’s what you think, lady. Today we’re making music. All of us.”

And we did, ending the project by performing a half-dozen folk songs, with guests from Helluva Choir supplying the words, for other classes from their school. Everyone in the class participated—even Lucy put down her book and played the maracas!

Words are wonderful things, but music is a powerful language all its own. These kids are no potted plants, and we communicate just fine. I hope to work with them again in the coming year.

The Center for Arts Education has created a practical, information-packed guide called Getting the Best High School Arts Education: A Guide for Parents and Students in New York City.  Described as “an action-oriented resource that can help families ensure that their child is receiving the arts education they deserve,” the guide is geared to parents of high school and middle school students.

You can get free downloads of the guide in English or Spanish by clicking on the cover images here, and you can order free hard copies too.  The book is full of information about why the arts matter to education, state requirements for the arts, and how to advocate for your teen’s education in the arts. It can also serve as a valuable (and free!) resource for teaching artists to advocate for our projects and for the importance of our work.

During our last SI TAI training, Dr. Jerry James (Director of Teaching and Learning for the Center for Arts Education) mentioned community based settings as the next big area of growing opportunity for teaching artists.  SPARC is a prime example of exactly what he was talking about.

The program is overseen by The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA) with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.  DCA is hosting an informational session at 5:30 next Tuesday the 20th, at their offices (31 Chambers Street – a short trip on the R from the ferry). Attendance isn’t required in order to apply, but there will be helpful information, and it should be an interesting chance to meet artists from throughout the city who are applying (each borough has its own separate process), including some who did great work last year. I’ll be heading over there from COAHSI – maybe we’ll run into each other on the ferry.

Image: Arnold Wechsler (age 82) painting “Off The Wall.” Image courtesy of gallery 307, Carter Burden Center for the Aging / Photo by Sonia J. Lessuck

It starts with the resume update: a process of decisions and revisions about what jobs to include, how much detail to relate, and whether to have one resume or two (artist and teaching). For new teaching artists, it’s often most realistic to stick with one, and to break out a teaching section within your artist resume. Volunteerism, internships, classes in your basement, lecture-demos – these are all teaching. They show that you have experience breaking down the process of creating art, and communicating it to a group of people.

Sometimes to build up the content of this part of your resume, it might be necessary to continue to volunteer. Pick and choose settings that really provide you with professional development and networking contacts in your areas of interest. If you’re active in a school, then that could be a good place to offer volunteer services. Don’t stop at asking if they have opportunities – propose a specific activity that’s engaging and interesting, to bring to a particular class.

If you don’t already have a relationship, schools can be a difficult place to approach “cold.” Community settings, like arts organizations, camps, senior centers, and so on, might be a better starting point. If you know of street fairs, festivals, or other events, consider offering a brief free art-making demonstration.

Another experience-builder is to organize independent classes – something many artists do on their own. Outreach can include every community you’re involved in, from exercise classes to tenant associations. You can maximize the chance to build your teaching skills by consciously setting aside time to do lesson plans, and to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of your teaching strategies after each class.

When you transfer all of this onto paper, it’s good to include information about your teaching methods, media used, the age groups you worked with (seniors, teens, children), and a summary of what your students learned. Keep highlighting your artistic credentials, as well – if you’re an award winning artist, a published illustrator, or a professional musician, these things add to your appeal as a teaching artist.

As with all writing, a good resume is made by a combination of what you have to say and how you say it. When you’ve built the “what” up enough, you’ll have a separate teaching resume to accompany your artist resume. The “how” is a matter of being both comprehensive and clear. It also involves careful proofreading – it helps to get a friend or colleague to do this, since it’s hard to proofread your own work. You can also make an appointment with me at COAHSI (kkuwabara@statenislandarts.org) if you’d like feedback on your teaching artist resume, or input on where to start.

And of course this isn’t only a local issue. The U.S. is in the midst of a major demographic shift, as noted in Creativity Matters: Arts and Aging in America (Gay Hanna and Susan Perlstein). People are living longer, and the population of older adults is growing. According to Hanna and Perlstein, “Arts participation is proven to increase the health and well-being of older adults; however, few organizations offer quality professional arts programs for them.”

Mirroring the situation of young people in school, a gap exists in high quality arts services for their older counterparts, despite evidence (for both groups) that the arts enhance quality of life, build community, and nurture cognitive skills.

Fortunately, art non-profits are stepping in to fill some of this gap. Lifetime Arts was formed to promote the “creation, expansion and sustainability of professionally conducted arts programs for older adults.” A couple of weeks ago I blogged that the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs is working with local arts councils on programming in senior centers. As our population ages, the field is creating demand for skilled teaching artists who will deliver responsive, high quality programs for older adults.

If you’re a teaching artist interested in working with older adults, check out Lifetime Arts’ website and consider signing up for their database. And watch for applications for COAHSI’s Space for Art residencies, available in early September.