ArtEd
A 3 month Teacher Education on Art in a Montessori Classroom. The trainings looked at facilitating groups sessions for interactive skill building such as story-telling, visualisation, characterisation and movement. It also involved training the teachers on presenting Montessori based Art Tray Material that developed self-driven individual art and aesthetic skills. The project saw an upskilling that allowed for a more multi-dimensional understanding of art and its practice.
Context
The teachers of Azim Premji School Bangalore underwent a 6 month training that involved bi-weekly training sessions and obersvation time to strengthen their capacities of teaching art. ArtEd was multi-strand and multi-skill building set of sessions that attempted a more wholesome and all-round sense of art, its practice and its persepctives.
After developing a 4 strand curriculum of Art Education that involved skills and craft, aesthetic experiencing, aesthetic perspective and artistic vocabulary, there was a requirement to equip the teachers to facilitate such sessions.
Process
The training was divided into skills towards facilitating group sessions of movement, story-telling, settings, characterisations, costume, voice. Generalised to practice of theatre and movement. The other set of sessions involved montessori art material.
The montessori method of self-driven, self- facilitated and independent work created a framework for multiple art skills at a pre-primary level. This saw work such as balance, aesthetic choices, sculpting, cutting, pasting, making multiple aesthetic choices, mandala work, colouring and painting and many more. The presentations of the same looked at breath, grip, hand modulation and postures.
The training also aimed at facilitating the aesthetic lens through which assesment can be done. Of choices being made, of practices being developed, of observation, of conversation. All of which requires rigourous sharpening of the artistic eye that facilated a encouraging and scaffolding voice to communicate with the child in the practice of art and craft.
Insights received
Relevance, Relevance, Relevance
The teachers were uninterested in the dialogue around phenomenology, aesthetic experiences and art history. The lessons required contextualisation into their classroom. The teacher-training has to be relevant to their everyday work and what they require the students to learn and engage with.
You can teach only what has been experienced
This might be my biggest claim for all of teacher training. Teachers may be able to faciliate what they observe from a demonstrative class however, their habits of teaching are coloured by their actual experience. The sessions of teacher training require that they inhabit the bodies of the student and undergo the same lesson that they require to teach so that they may develop insight and execute the same for their students. The purpose and relevance is also then entrenched in this experience.
Mindfulness and Montessori
Through my building of the art curriculum for the Montessori Environment, thorough research and practice showed the modality that lends itself to art and other practices. The focus on breath, movement and intentionality was impressive when it was drawn to the practices of rolling and placing that can be shifted towards artistic practice of colouring, drawing and creating.
