Voice of APLI: Creation as Celebration!
Image Description: Self-Portrait doodles were digitally created by APLI cohort members using Jamboard.
Image Description: Student Destiny led Saturday’s workshop on character building. She is speaking in this photo in front of a black and white backdrop of the sun and moon.
It's hard to believe this as I say it, but the APLI program has nearly come to an end! Closing out an outstanding series was a two-day weekend workshop called "Creation as Celebration," led by Appel Farm Arts & Music Campus.
While waking up for 9 a.m. professional learning isn't the way most people would like to start their Saturday or Sunday, the APLI family has built a warm, welcoming community that made this morning journey well worth it.
We opened Saturday by making fun self-portraits with squiggly lines and bold shapes creating on a shared Jamboard that became a powerful place of connection throughout the workshops. Seeing the happy doodly faces of my cohort members -- along with their coffee cups and dogs -- was a fun, artsy way of getting plugged in. As presenter Kristina Hill would share, kicking off her day with creative activities like this was just one way she continuously celebrated her artistry in the midst of her day as an educator. (She shared digital art of adorable little monsters built from the blocks of her busy work calendar as an example!)
The next two days were spent exploring ways to reconnect to our personal artistry, grow our creative skills, and stay connected to our students as learning artists.
A highlight for both days were student-facilitated lessons that showed us how learners did better when they were given choice, control, challenge, opportunities for collaboration, and room for true creativity.
Saturday's student teacher, Destiny, led us in a character building exercise that had us study fictional figures and break them down the way an actor might -what were their character traits, motives, relationships? What could we learn from them?
Sunday has a similar exercise led by Scarlette, who had us create characters inspired by a color, give a short improvised performance, then had us guess who was portraying which. In a twist, we found out that the diverse, colorful characters we created all stemmed from only two potential prompts - yellow or purple - and not from an entire rainbow!
Together, both of these exercises showed us how student creativity and choice had power - not just through each student's teaching, but also through our own learning.
We were equipped to engage learners of all types and encourage their creativity by two teacher presenters, Martha Garcia and Julia Weekes.
Martha taught us different techniques for differentiation, which she defined as being able to meet the needs of a student to become successful at the task at hand. She encouraged us to create multiple access points in our lessons for students with different learning styles and that engaged different intelligences. For example, we could differentiate our lessons in terms of content (what students learn), product (how they demonstrate learning), process (how they learn), and environment (where they learn).
On Sunday, Julia focused on getting us to remember the power of play - when students can have fun, spontaneous exploratory time without adult guidance or control. She also pushed us to engage in play ourselves, to refresh and rejuvenate ourselves as we teach. We even played a game together, building a hilarious group story using vocabulary words.
While all of these powerful lessons taught me new techniques and got me looking at my creativity and students differently, I felt most plugged in when guest artists got us all on our feet. On Saturday, dancer Willie Hinton reconnected us to movement, and on Sunday, drummer Josh Robinson returned to give us more rhythm. Both presenters preached the importance of using art to build empathy and to attend to our mental health.
Overall, this weekend revealed new truths about art, something I thought I already understood so well. Choice enhances engagement, play enhances learning, and creativity enhances the body, mind, and spirit. If there's anything I'm going to take away from the APLI series, it is certainly the true power of art - something that is going to make me a better lifelong learner and a better teaching artist than ever.
About the 2021 Voice of APLI: Summer Dawn Reyes
Photo credit: Acid Test Photo
Summer Dawn Reyes is a playwright, director, production manager, teaching artist and actor. Her work has been highlighted in numerous festivals including the Downtown Urban Theater Festival, the New Jersey Young Playwrights Festival, FringeNYC and more. She is also the founder and director of Thinking In Full Color, an organization that empowers women of color through education and the arts. TIFC has received two commendations from the New Jersey State Assembly and the inaugural Jersey City Arts Council's Performing Arts Award. Summer is also the co-founder of 68 Productions and the winner of the Permanent Career Award in Literature from the Society of Arts and Letters-NJ and the N.J. Governor's Award in Arts Education. Summer loves karaoke, rubber duckies and crosswords. She's also a big fan of modern dance and genetics. She is married to a very tall Greg and the proud stepmom of a slightly smaller one. For more information, visit ThinkingInFullColor.com or follow her @thinkinginfullcolor
Summer will be sharing her experiences throughout the APLI program year.
The Arts Professional Learning Institute is a co-sponsored project of the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and Young Audiences Arts for Learning NJ & Eastern PA. It is generously supported by the Grunin Foundation and Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation.
