18. Discovering the Teacher-Artist Within
Becoming a Teacher Who Writes - Let Teaching be your Writing Muse - Nancy S. Gorrell
Nancy S. Gorrell [+]
English teacher and poet
Description
Chapter 18 introduces the concept of teacher-artist, offering model projects that embrace three or more subject areas, art forms, or disciplines. The author begins with her own “Teacher-Artist Story” in the context of her creative writing classroom: how she responded to the “teachable moment,” how her students responded in writing, and how the project “Artifacts: Kids Respond to a World in Crisis was created. The author’s students wrote ecphrastic poems to the “lost works of art” which were in the World Trade Center on 9/11. The author mailed the poems to Scholastic Writing and Art Awards and asked them to forward them to the young artists whose works were destroyed. The remainder of Chapter 18 features model teaching artist projects. Part Three offers Inter-Arts Projects: “Jersey Rain (creative writing, poetry, musical composition, choral performance) and an “Our Town” Inter-Arts Book Project (poetry of place, ecphrasis, photography, self-publishing). Part Four Interdisciplinary Applications for Students and Teachers offers a total of four model across-the-curriculum projects involving teachers, scientists, and teaching artists: Science Poetry: Interdisciplinary Literacy Tool; Anne Osbourne’s Science, Art and Writing Initiative; CuriousSCIENCEwriters; and Youth Birding Alaska. The author concludes Chapter 18 by encouraging teacher artists to engage with their students in creating inter-arts and interdisciplinary projects to improve artistic, ecological, and scientific literacy.