JOSHUA BLOCK

9-12 | Reading & Language Arts | Other

My Classroom Innovation

During the last school year I collaborated with Leah Stein Dance Company to create a student run “Hidden City Festival.” The whole process was an extension of our larger, year-long themes of observation and expression. Sixty five students from my tenth grade humanities classes began the process by attending a workshop with Ms. Stein where she introduced them to the process of creating site specific work. At the workshop, in a local Armory, students fanned out with their journals and had to write about something in the space that interested them. They were all over the large expanse of the building. Then they had to create a motion that goes with that space and a sound. Then we started grouping people together and they had to determine an order, and transitions between their pieces. It was creative and fun, and students had a lot of ownership over their pieces. During the next week students, in groups, chose sites within a five block radius of the school. Each day during class they were on site designing pieces that followed the equation site + sound + movement = dance. During this time, Leah Stein and I biked around and visited students on site helping them with their creative process and reminding them of some different points to keep in mind while creating site specific work. The festival performances took place every ten minutes for two hours, attracting a crowd of spectators. A map of performances over a five-block radius brought the school and residents of the neighborhood to watch. We broke down so many barriers in this project. Where does the classroom exist? What does it mean to be a thoughtful, expressive person?

How Students were Engaged

Student quotes: Robbie Glynn, 17: “One of the points of this project was to get people to notice the site in a way they never saw it before. If you just walk past the spot, you might look at it and think that it’s just a small abandoned section of gravel. But when we were presenting there, everyone was really paying attention…” Jenny, 16: “While doing this, we learned how to take a site that maybe wouldn’t be so interesting, and made it creative and the process fun to do. Some schools will make you learn about something then write a paper. Here, we got to see a site, and pull something out of it. We used the nature around us. We did it in a way where we could move. We personified the past and the future, and made it a whole.” Taylor V., 16: “I learned that freedom is the ability to express yourself in any way that you choose to.” Taylor T., 16: “We learned how to think differently.”

PBS Program/Content Used

This project connected to our studies throughout the year which incorporated PBS content.