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Article Excerpt
A children's book by the award-winning Chris Van Allsburg (1984) is rifled The Mysteries of Harris Burdick. It is an odd tale, consisting of 14 surreal black-and-white drawings, each accompanied by a title and a cryptic caption. In one picture, a white bird within a wallpaper pattern peels off the wall and flies away. In another, a woman sleeps while vines ominously grow out of the pages of her open book. And in the final image, a suburban house takes off like a rocket ship, shooting up into the midnight sky. The art is stunning, and the titles and captions alluring. But the real mystery appears in the opening frame of the book.
It is a letter from Chris Van Allsburg, explaining that the pictures were first revealed in a meeting between Peter Wenders--a publisher Van Allsburg once knew--and an artist named Harris Burdick. Van Allsburg relates that long ago Burdick appeared in the publisher's office with his artwork. He explained that the singular drawings and snippets of prose were only samples from 14 fully developed stories he had crafted along with many more illustrations. The publisher was thrilled with the art and intrigued by the tantalizing captions, and the artist said that he would return the next day with the completed manuscripts. Instead, he never returned.
Van Allsburg told Wenders that he found it impossible to look at the art and words and not think of his own stories to extend Burdick's work. The publisher smilingly retrieved an old box with many, many stories that had been written by his own children as well as their friends. Harris Burdick's images and prose had proved to be an irresistible inspiration to the children.
Of course, the frame story in the form of a letter from Van Allsburg is as much a feat of the imagination as the images themselves. There is no Harris Burdick, for the artwork belongs to Van Allsburg himself, and there is not even a Peter Wenders, although Van Allsburg humorously tries to throw the reader off by dedicating the book to Wenders. Yet the story and the artwork are simultaneously so real and surreal that the reader cannot help but be drawn in. How did the fleeting partnership between Wenders and Burdick result in such imaginative work? And what would have resulted if the artist had returned and entered into a more complex and long-term working relationship with the publisher as well as the children? Would the creativity of the children have been stifled or enhanced?
Often times when artists enter into school settings, they work briefly with children and teachers and then leave just as quickly as Burdick. Certainly a touch of the magic remains, but teachers may not feel they have the time nor the requisite skill sets to pick up where the artists left off. Conversely, in these brief encounters, artists have little time to learn from teachers, especially if they come to follow their own agendas and ignore the educational goals of the school (Weissman, 2004). And what about the children? Left to their own devices, children often do accomplish wonderful things, but as Vygotsky (1978) argued, wouldn't they achieve more if guided and encouraged by those who are more experienced? Egan (2005) explained:
If we want to be able to routinely engage students' imaginations in learning, we must understand the main tools they have available for the task. We must shape our lessons to take advantage of their current skills and help develop them further. ... Of course, everyone knows that engaging students' imaginations in learning is one key to successful teaching. Over the years we have seen many suggestions for how to do this, but making its achievement a routine part of the classroom experience has proven quite elusive. (pp. xi-xii)
The central argument of this article is that successful teaching often occurs in long-term professional development exchanges among teachers and artists, and it results in extended language opportunities for children. Here I follow the work of two teachers at Bexhill Primary School in England with the dramatic artists of County Durham's Theatre Cap-a-Pie as they planned for, explored, and dramatized scenes from The Mysteries of Harris Burdick (Van Allsburg, 1984) with 6- and 7-year-old children. My goal will be to unlock the mysteries of creative partnerships: how they are formed, supported, and, most important, marked by the language of creativity, collaboration, compromise, and critique as well as how such engaging professional exchanges successfully invite children into the creative process.
CREATIVE PARTNERSHIPS: THE CASE OF BEXHILL SCHOOL
Unlike the "shortsighted disregard of the arts in American schooling" (Fowler, 1996), Creative Partnerships (2003), of the Arts Council of England, is investing time, energy, and resources to bring artists and schools together. Their goal is "to enrich school life by making the best use of the United Kingdom's creative wealth." In the best of partnerships, teachers and artists become colleagues, collaborating on projects that will encourage creativity based on the expertise of all involved and focused on the children's talents, interests, and needs.
For the past 4 years, I have been conducting research in Bexhill Primary School, located in Sunderland in the Northeast of England. Surrounded by a housing estate, the school community is characterized by what Head Teacher Joy Lowther describes as "high levels of unemployment, a range of family contexts, and little cultural diversity," for 99% of the children are of western European descent. Since the loss of the shipping and coal industries during the Thatcher years, the children of Bexhill come from families that are generationally poor, with many members of the community receiving public assistance. Because Creative Partnerships "focuses on the most deprived communities in England," Bexhill was a perfect choice for an investment in what Creative Partnerships call "the creative industries," and their offices in Durham Sunderland took up the task and invited a colleague, Shirley Brice Heath, and me to research their endeavor.
Still, the school was already invested in a creative curriculum when we arrived. They had an active interest in the arts, particularly music, and all teachers used drama in their classrooms. For example, "hot seating'--when a child takes on a character's role and answers class questions--was a common technique. Four teachers were especially interested in drama, and in the study's 1st year, we formed a Teacher Research Team. With the support of the head teacher for several days of release time, we observed individual artists, analyzed their techniques, and discussed the links between drama and the school's central goal of extending their children's language development. In that year, a stream of dramatic artists flowed in and out of Bexhill, with some successful and some not, and those results are reported in Heath and Wolf (2005).
But out of this stream, one company of players stood out--Theatre Cap-a-Pie, led by Gordon Poad and Mark Labrow. As a result, in the next 2 years, two teachers--Linda Nesbitt and Lesley Watson--chose to work closely with the company, and it was this interaction that I followed. Linda and Lesley are Year 2 teachers (first grade in the United States), and their children's first years of school often mark their first experience with reading and talking about text, for the mainstream pattern of bedtime story reading has not been a part of their nightly routine (Heath, 1982). Thus, the teachers felt that opportunities for their children's expressive language were limited, both in the community as well as within traditional classroom structures.
In the 2nd year of the study, as Linda and Lesley worked intensively with Theatre Cap-a-Pie in workshops, set up their own after-school Drama Club, and shifted their classroom curricula to include more drama, all four adults saw the children stretching into more sophisticated modes of expression through new vocabulary, grammatical structures, understandings of genre and story structure, as well as their willingness to critique by asking and answering questions of substance. These ever-developing markers of language were most evident when the children scripted a full-length pirate play for the adults in Cap-a-Pie to perform (see Wolf, 2006). Consequently, the teachers and artists had more than a year of collaboration as well as the success of a long-term project under their belts when they began the 3rd year of the study. They felt confident and comfortable in their shared abilities to develop yet other projects that would allow for children's maximal growth in language development.
The focus on language for these four adults makes sense. Both Linda and Lesley came to teaching later in their lives. Both had raised their children and held other jobs before they decided to become teachers. Their first jobs were at Bexhill; Linda started 11 years ago, and Lesley...
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