Cross Case Features: Teachers
Clemens Middle School: Art
Barbara Chen, Art
Barbara Chen , an Art teacher at Clemens Middle School, likes to incorporate a lot of different cultures in her teaching. Barbara collects artifacts from all over the world, including art visuals/objects, stories, and music, and displays them in her classroom.
Before attending the NCTA seminar, Barbara took a one-week seminar on Japanese art and literature at a local college and traveled to Japan on a tour sponsored by a local manufacturing plant. As an NCTA graduate, she has been selected to go on an NCTA study tour this coming summer. She is involved with the city’s Japanese sister city program, has hosted a Japanese exchange student, and works at the Japan booth at the city’s annual International Festival.
Asia was a permanent part of Barbara Chen’s curriculum before NCTA and continues to be (e.g., bookmaking, origami, brush painting, and printmaking). Although Barbara has taught art in several different states and school systems, Clemens Middle School gave her the first opportunity to teach about Asia as much as she wants to. Resources provided by the NCTA stipend have improved the quality of visuals and information Barbara uses in her classroom. She now has good reproductions of Asian art and a wider variety of art materials that can show students the wealth and range of Asian art designs and techniques. She ties the art work to learning about Asian cultures.
Barbara is becoming more involved in interdisciplinary work focused on Asia, working primarily with Language Arts and Social Studies teachers. Next year an English teacher and Social Studies teacher will work with her on an interdisciplinary unit on haiku poetry and brush painting for which she wrote and received a grant. As part of her sharing resources with other teachers, she put together Chinese and Japanese “culture boxes” that she lets the Social Studies teachers borrow. She also goes to their classes and talks about Asia and shows the students her videos of Japanese school children.
Melanie Vereen, Art
Melanie Vereen, an Art teacher at Clemens Middle School, has a long-term interest in Asian art, especially Japanese art, which led her to start taking professional development courses on Asia. Prior to the NCTA seminar, Melanie visited Japan on a study tour sponsored by a local manufacturing plant. She said, “I think once you get involved [in Asian studies], you get carried away. I just keep looking for things now.”
After participating in the NCTA seminar, Melanie was one of twenty teachers selected from a nationwide pool of applicants to attend an NCTA study tour to Japan and Korea. Before the tour, Melanie was able get information about the places they were to visit through a web site one of the national coordinating sites set up. In addition to providing information about locales, the web site offered suggestions for research that participants could do in advance of the trip. Of the NCTA tour, Melanie said, “We were constantly learning because [our guides] had such a depth of knowledge that if we asked a question one of the four [guides] could elaborate.” When Melanie was on the NCTA tour, she visited a pottery village in Japan and saw pottery being made in Korea.
Melanie developed a pottery unit out of her NCTA experiences. During this two-week unit, students created their own pottery. Melanie tied the hands-on pottery work with learning about traditional Asian designs and with literature such as The Single Shard by Linda Patty Park. Funding from the Freeman Foundation and a local education foundation made it possible for Melanie to buy the materials for this unit.
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