Narrative Fragment as Inquiry Into Teaching

I remember how the fifth grade class stood in the hallway, waiting to enter our elementary art studio in anticipation of art class time. The students carried their seed journals with them, the composition notebooks they used to develop ideas for creative writing during writer’s workshop time in their homeroom class.

“Good morning, everyone. Go ahead and continue where you left off last week. I will come around to visit you and talk with you about your art ideas.” The students rushed into the classroom and opened their portfolios to look at their work from last week’s art class. Kelly bounded toward me.

“Now can I start my sparkles?” she asked.

“Yes,” I nodded. “The sparkly paint is there on the counter.”

During the previous art class, students began developing a self-directed art project that originated from an idea they had recorded in their seed journals. “Seeds” were themes of personal interest and idea starters for future development in creative writing and visual art. Both Erica and Kelly elected to use paint as their medium-of-choice to convey ideas they had previously described in their creative writing seed journals.

I observed as Erica and Kelly gathered their brushes, water, and paint and sat down together. Kelly rubbed the pad of her index finger sensitively over the chalky texture of the dry tempera paint. She pointed and touched, “I like the color right here. It looks like the root is real and then it comes out …”

“Whoaoooh!” Erica interrupted with a worried, shrill energy in her voice.

“What’s happening?” Kelly looked over at Erica’s paper in time to see her complete a fresh, wide, stroke of yellow paint over the first layer of dry, dark red paint.

“It’s turning orange,” Erica said with a tinge of frustration. “This paint is too see-through.”

“Why don’t you use this kind?” Kelly pointed with a nod of her chin as she used both hands to squirt the beloved glitter paint onto the paper plate. At the end of our previous art class, Kelly made a request for this precious commodity.

“Can we please use sparkle paint next week?” she had asked me with a plea in her voice. I obliged and told her that I would remember to get it from the storage closet.

“Okay, I’ll try it,” Erica replied, now dipping her brush in the new paint. She paused and looked intensely at her painting.

“Hey, Kelly, how many sparkles do you think will be on our paper by the time we are done?” Erica inquired.

“I don’t know, maybe over a million,” Kelly smiled as she spoke, tilting her head toward her friend but keeping her eyes fixed on her brushwork. The girls took turns dipping their brushes into the glittery paint. They moved their arms slowly as if to savor the feeling of the brushwork and the bristles’ contact with the paper. Sometimes they took a break from their painting to look over to each other’s work, as if to check in.

“Erica, your paint is mixing with the dark purple,” Kelly noticed.

“I kind of like it that way,” Erica said.

Kelly returned her attention to her own tree painting. “Do you like how the roots are coming out?”

“Yea,” Erica agreed, leaning over to look closely at Kelly’s tree roots, as they appeared to be overlapping and twisting.

Kelly and Erica painted side by side in the noisy art classroom where students at each table were having similar conversations with each other. Some were working on sculptures, others making drawings or collages. One student was making the illustrations for a book. Another was designing his own Rubik’s cube. In the role of art-teacher-as-facilitator, I moved about the room and talked with the students at each table, asking them what they were thinking about and how their work was progressing. Sometimes I looked with students at pages in their journals to reference ideas and fuel their self-directed processes.

“I like the way the paint is mixing up here.” Erica pointed...