On Wednesday, January 27th, the Athena Project visited PHHP for the first time. We had a tour of the house and the property and saw the brand new facility which is ALMOST finished. We are going to be the first people to work there! It is a large airy one room building that has a capacity for 50, so the 18 CCA students, the 28 youth, myself and our PHHP partners will all fit (just). Actually, when the weather is nice we'll be spread out, making art outside in the park. Unlike the other partnerships, in which CCA students are working in classrooms with students in school, the Athena Project is working with an after school program. This means that advertising and recruitment need to take place before the actual working relationship begins. We will meet our youth partners for the first time next week.
This week I devoted to having students think about lesson planning. Each student wrote a lesson plan based on one state standard of their choice from the Visual Arts component for 7th or 8th grade. Within the working groups (6 groups of 3 students each) they shared their individual lessons. After that, they came up with a new lesson plan by consensus, choosing a different state standard and using their own expertise to guide their decisions (ex: one group has a sculptor, graphic designer and printer; another has a writer, a photographer and an illustrator).
The lessons the CCA students created (both the individual ones and the collaborative ones) might contribute to the semester long project or not. They are exercises in lesson planning and a vehicle for the college students to bond as a group because the youth will be studying the relationship amongst the mentors and the way they interact with each other. So it is important for me to create a fertile environment in which the creative relationships amongst the CCA students can flower before we even meet the youth.
For homework, the Athena Project mentors will look at those same lessons and expand them by applying the categories of the Studio Habits of Mind. In the meantime, they are reading Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Chapter 2, in which he explains the "banking" concept of education so clearly. His reference to traditional education as domination education is the same term used in the book we are reading by Marshall Rosenberg, Life Enriching Education. Rosenberg also offers explicit help to the facilitator (teacher) to retrain him/herself in order not fall into domination education.
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Sounds like you are off to a rich start. Interesting way into thinking about how to plan using Studio Habits. Appreciate the reading
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I would like to pick up Freire again, as well as read the Rosenberg text. I can't wait to see how your students expand their lessons w/SHoM. I have a pretty simple lesson plan template if you need one.
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