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Anne Thulson

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AANOTWORKING broadsides

           protest   broadsides 4th/5th grades                    site specific intervention         environment as the third teacher

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BROADSIDES While my 4th and 5th graders studied the American Revolution, we looked at American Colonial Street Broadsides in art studio. These mass printed, cheap forms of public communication often contained images as well as text. Their purpose was to reach a large audience with messages ranging from popular gossip, news, political commentary, protest, and propaganda.  Sons of Liberty Broadside, 1770 Then we looked at broadsides from other times and places. We used a kid-friendly website explaining broadsides through 18th and 19th century Scotland. http://digital.nls.uk/broadsides/  We looked at the street literature illustrations of José Guadalupe Posada (1853 - 1913, Mexico)  We looked at contemporary artists who work with site specific, public formats of text and image. Mark Bradford “Post-Katrina Ark” 2008 (art21 featured artist)  Krzysztof Wodiczko “Bunker Hill Monument” 1998 (art21 featured artist)  Shepard Fairy  Barbara Krueger “We Don’t Need Another Hero” 1988  My students and I went back and looked again at American colonial political cartoons and broadsides. I emphasized that these were made by people with less power (the patriots) speaking out within a context of a bigger power (Great Britain). I asked my students if they felt like their voice wasn’t heard in our school. What issues they would like to speak out about in school? I told them they would be making a public protest piece using text and image. They would place it in any part of the school building that would help make its message clear.  Benjamin Franklin “Join or Die” 1754, published in the Pennsylvania Gazette TEXT IMAGE INTERACTION: BE OBSCURE CLEARLY We used Barbara Kruger’s simple combinations of text and image as a model for our broadsides. In order to make our text and image relate poetically, we followed E.B. White’s advice to writers, “Be obscure clearly. Be wild of tongue in a way we can understand.” Like Kruger’s work, our goal was to make text and image connections that were clearly obscure. We didn’t want to totally give away our message, but we didn’t want to leave the viewer completely in the dark either. So we studied the relationship of text and image, specifically how a text changes the meaning of an image. I gave students picture book pages with the text covered up and they inferred meanings from the image alone. Then I gave them the missing text. We talked about how the text changed their first understanding of the image.  Imogene’s Antlers , David Small student comments: “At first I thought she was stretching.” “I thought she was doing a dance in bed.” “ I thought she was doing sign language.” We read whole picture books and noticed how some had a direct or indirect correspondence between text and image. In John Burningham’s Come Away From the Water Shirley, we noticed an ironic discrepancy between text and image as the pictures showed a child living in an imaginative world and the text contained only her parent’s words. As she bravely fought pirates in a sword fight, her parents would say things like, “Shirley, put down that stick!”.  We played the cartoon caption game from the New Yorker magazine. We looked at cartoons without captions and then at the New Yorker readers’ attempts to add captions to them. We voted on our favorite, funniest captions. Then we created captions of our own to go with caption-less cartoons.  We critiqued images/texts with the “obscurometer,” a tool to judge how obscure or how clear a text/image interaction appears. A check on the far right means there is little distance or obscurity between the text and image, indicating that their pairing is obvious and boring. A check on the far left means there is little connection between the text and image, implying that the combination may seem confusing and distracting to the viewer. Checks in the middle indicate the spectrum in between the two.   chair poison apple Finally students choose two duplicate images and added different texts to each one in order to change their meanings. Students discussed how the texts changed the pictures’ meanings for them.    FINAL PROJECT Then we took our own issue of concern and created text/image broadsides to place in the school. Because these were to be site specific installations, I asked students to keep the issue within the boundaries of school life. So a protest about homework could go in the teacher’s lounge or a comment on the school lunches could go on the cafeteria wall. Students photographed images or chose images from magazines. Then they did the harder work of creating a message that clearly, yet obscurely connected to the image. They critiqued one another’s first attempts using the obscurometer as a gauge. For instance, Jasmine’s’s protest against our school’s camping program, started with a tent image and the words “I don’t like to sleep in a tent.” Through critique, she changed her text to a more obscure comment, “I’d rather sleep in a hotel.”   “Pull ‘Em Up” Kian’s protest against saggy pants fashion of the middle school students  “Kindness to All” Sparrow’s protest against playground bullying  Elena’s protest about the new math program When we finished, students placed their protests around the school. This kind of placement of work, energized and engaged students. They kept talking about this work, alive on the school walls for week. In a highly structured lesson like this, students are only given choice in the protest issue, image, and text. Having choice in the placement of the final work is a way to give more students autonomy for this very teacher-directed curriculum.  Jasmine’s protest against school camping trips on the door of the camping gear closet  Chase’s protest against “no flushing” practices on bathroom stall doors STUDENT ENGAGEMENT AND CHOICE I’m committed to finding a curriculum that balances student choice with teacher intention. I’m not sure how to always balance them. I find so many valuable parts of choice-based classrooms and I admire the Teaching for Artistic Behaviors Movement (TAB). However, I’m coming to understand the delicate relationship between student choice and teacher intention as a metaphor for who the teacher is as an artist. As an artist, I rely heavily on other people’s research and other people’s content. My artwork is a hybrid of me and them. I don’t approach art-making as an autonomous, private pursuit. So, I think this is why my art classroom has a similar balance. Projects are a hybrid of what I want to teach my students and their surprising reactions within that framework. RESOURCES Art21, http://www.pbs.org/art21/ The Word on the Street http://digital.nls.uk/broadsides/ William Strunk, E. B. White The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition, Longman

http://digital.nls.uk/broadsides/ http://www.pbs.org/art21/ http://digital.nls.uk/broadsides/ http://livepage.apple.com/

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