A global art project

I recently heard about an opportunity to involve the children of the two schools where I work in a unique art project.  Basically, I snail-mail 30 pieces of original artwork from the students (they are referred to as learners here) to an office based out of Boston.  The office collects these pieces and then they will send me 30 pieces of artwork from the same age group from students all over the world.  This is a wonderful opportunity for several reasons.

                First a brief background:  One of the major problems facing the schools is parental support.  Since a good number of the parents of the learners live away for months at a time to work in the major cities, they are not actively involved in their children’s daily lives.  Often this leaves the children in their grandmother’s care and the grandmothers very often have not received much (if any) formal education themselves and have a difficult time seeing the value in education since it takes the children away from daily chores.  Furthermore, many of the learners live with their teenage mothers who themselves dropped out of school and are not always supportive of their children academically (Teenage Pregnancy is an enormous problem here).  And finally, AIDS is such a large problem here than many children are simply left orphaned and do not have the direct support necessary at home.  I have never previously appreciated the link between parental support and scholastic achievement as much as I do now.  Indeed, it is not surprising that the dozen or so highest achieving learners are the ones with an actively supportive familial support net.

So in summary, the learners here often times do not have anything to feel ‘proud’ about in the classroom.  The lack of role models is apparent and it is difficult to be motivated to succeed in school without either a clear role model or even a clear link between high academic achievement and future opportunity. 

Although indeed small, my hope is that this art project is one way for the learners to feel proud of their own work while also appreciating the world outside of the rural South African classroom.  Since the project limits me to 30 submissions initially, I will have to select the 30 best pieces of art submitted and this is further limited currently to 15 from each of the two schools where I work. 

This past week, I explained the project to two 6^th grade classes (one at each school).  At the school in Seleteng (Matsobane Primary School), this class has 71 learners in one room!  Some of the children seemed rather excited and this was very encouraging for me.  I explained to them that if their artwork is selected, I will take their picture and they will have the opportunity to write some information about themselves to accompany their artwork.  (The fact that they will have their picture taken was exciting for them as well).  Their artwork will then be displayed in some classroom somewhere in the world.  At the tiny school in Phoshiri (Mokgapaneng Primary School), I selected one piece of artwork that a young girl, Moklego, made earlier this year.  I had the learners help me construct a map of the village of Phoshiri since maps of the village simply do not exist.  As an assignment for Peace Corps, I had to construct my own map as well but I wanted to see what the learners could show me on their maps that I would potentially overlook.  I picked Moklego’s map to submit and took a picture of her with her map and that picture is below. 

The info about the project is here:  http://www.oneworldclassrooms.org/

I will be turning in the artwork at the end of February.  I went ahead and explained the project now though because the school year ends here in a couple of weeks and I wanted to give the students the opportunity to work on their pieces over the break.  (It’s summer here so it is their end-of-the-year Schools-out-for-summer break).  My plan is to post the artwork that we receive and conduct an accompanying lesson in geography in March.  I also plan to scan a few of the pieces and put them up on this site early next year.

~ by bernish on November 22, 2008.