Elizabeth Hallmark is a teaching artist, choreographer and performer.  Her work has been presented at the Fringe Festival of Independent Dance Artists in Toronto, the Arts Center of the Capital Region in Troy NY, the Beyond Festival in Albany NY, Heidelberg College, Mount Holyoke College, Swarthmore College, Hobart & William Smith Colleges, and at the Image Movement Sound Festival of SUNY/Brockport, Rochester Institute of Technology & Eastman School of Music.  Elizabeth directs Hallmark Danceworks, a performing arts company in Rochester that focuses on interdisciplinary arts through community and school-based productions.  In schools, she coordinates her Bully Project – a residency that develops body language awareness, communication skills, and opportunities for students' interactive role-play.  In the community, she facilitates Fieldwork/ Rochester for adult artists seeking group feedback on their works-in-progress.  Ms. Hallmark has been awarded numerous grants from NYSCA, The Field in NYC, and the Rochester Area Community Foundation.  A graduate of Mount Holyoke College with an MA in Dance Movement Therapy from Antioch, she is currently pursuing doctoral studies in Education at the University of Rochester's Warner School.

Elizabeth Hallmark / elizabethhallmark@teachingartists.com
 

Name:

Liz Hallmark

Subject:

Looking at Structure

Date:

15 Jan 2006

Time:

11:53:06 AM -0500

Blog

I’ve been thinking a lot about structure. How do we shape or become shaped by the environments we work in? Being a Teaching Artist gives me the opportunity to observe a wide variety of classroom teaching practices, administrative philosophies and general cultural microcosms of different schools. I also notice how my own teaching practice undergoes subtle changes depending on where and with whom I am working. As an ‘outsider’ to the system, it is easy to focus on how teaching artist practice and philosophy is either supported or thwarted by the school system. Lately though, I’ve been noticing how similar our situation is with Classroom Teachers… how much their hands are tied by all the procedural and No Child Left Behind (NCLB) nonsense that is getting in the way of meaningful learning today. Teaching to the test and bureaucratic adherence to separated curricular areas does not allow for broad connections, expansive thinking or improvisatory insight. It also creates a false hierarchy of learning approaches: ‘left-brain’ type thinking is elevated to a strange and lonely place without its imaginative and complementary ‘right-brain’ partner. Are we able to pull in both sides of the brain in working with students – to develop both ‘creativity’ and ‘follow-ativity’ in our students? Sometimes Teaching Artists get viewed as right-brain ‘creativity gurus’, or as recuperative antidotes to school systems choked shut by their own left-brained habits. This dualistic lens is not really accurate and it also belittles the vital left-brained approaches we TAs also bring to the table. As any performing artist knows, follow-ativity is equally important as creativity is. The musician or dancer who cannot perceive the rhythm, sequence or dynamics will clash with his or her fellow performers. On the other hand, performers who are slavishly tied to the parameters of a piece inevitably lose their growing edge. Teachers within systems that exclusively emphasize the procedural end of the learning spectrum OR the other more fluid end are actually handicapping their students. How many of us (TAs and CTs) are struggling with the educational structure here and have found ourselves too easily pushed into one role or the other? I imagine there are very few Classroom Teachers who haven’t chafed under the strictures of their working environment, especially in the current NCLB testing madness. I also imagine there are very few Teaching Artists who haven’t felt a sense of loss when their residencies were over and their reach or impact appeared limited within the larger scope of the school focus. Classroom Teachers need a break from the rules and Teaching Artists need a chance for more integrated work in schools! I am wishing for school systems that more successfully allow in-depth influence and creative freedom from both kinds of teachers. How might we find more balanced ways of working with students and with colleagues, all within a school system? Let’s create some forums to talk about this together. I'd like to brainstorm about redesigning structures.