Yvonne Pepin-Wakefield
Rebecca Hoenig
 Gary Earl Ross
 

 

 

 

 

Reflections 
Yvonne Pepin-Wakefield 
Kuwait University’s College for Women.

On Teaching in Kuwait

On September 11, 2004 I boarded a flight in cool green, Seattle, Washington and landed the next day in Kuwait where the temperature was over 115 degrees.  Within days I would begin my teaching at Kuwait University, Department of Art and Design in the newly established College for Women.

Prior to arriving my stereotypes of this culture coincided with predominant cultural stereotypes of the Middle East as viewed through popular and news media.  Stereotypes perpetuated by popular films portray the Arab world as a place of endless hot deserts where camels roam among cruel and barbaric people.  However, my ideas were also specific to my profession - teaching studio arts.  Based on my limited knowledge of Kuwait, I believed:

  • I would have to wear abaya and hejab (long black robe and head scarf)
  • I could not teach art using the figure, face, animal or flowers
  • I could not use nude models
  • I could not show pictures of nude or semi-nude models

As a professor I dress in the same skirts, blouses, dresses and slacks I wear when teaching in America.  Instead of posing nude models for traditional gesture drawings, I have students in my all women classes pose for quick drawings.  However, since most of my students wear abaya and hejab these gesture drawings are more like fabric studies.  Still life materials substitute for the organic forms found in the human figure.

Library textbooks are edited by the Ministry of Education (pictures revealing any semblance of nudity are pasted over with thick-white stickers), yet student purchased textbooks in art history, even though edited for the Middle East, often contain uncensored nudity.

While some students feel more secure “copying” from photographs, others paint and draw combining realism with imagination. Some will not render facial features.  At first I believed this was because of their religion or something depicted in the Qurán, the holy book of Muslims.  While this is true in some cases, I discovered students avoided rendering facial features because they had no prior experience in portraiture and did not want to ruin a figure drawing eyes, nose and mouth.

Fatma, who removes her black gloves and face veil in class, only when the curtains are drawn (the only males to see her face are her immediate family father, brother and uncle) explains why she cannot draw faces.  “When I was a child I did draw the faces.  When I got older I was told it was haram (bad).  So I stop.  You can draw faces if it is in cartoons or sometimes if it is serious, like in study. But then you must draw a little line across the neck.” The line would indicate the drawing was inanimate like a manikin.  Fatma  explained that to draw faces would be to emulate the work of Allah or God, the only entity righteous enough to create human and animal forms.  However, there are students with an express desire to learn portraiture and practice on their own time.

Learning to adapt my studio instruction in consideration with the culture and elements meant using water-soluble pigments and vehicles instead of oil-based media.  Between the air conditioning and the intense heat, acrylic paint dries too rapidly for blending, and lack of ventilation (curtains have to be drawn when students remove hejab) prevents use of oil paint.

As an artist and arts educator, I’ve learned teaching studio arts in a Muslim country is like creating a semi-abstract painting – experience, emotion, perceptions are distilled and projected through the mind’s eye whether it be on a canvas or a culture.  To paint an honest presentation is to see beyond one’s veil of stereotypes.

 
 
Rebecca Hoenig
Museum Educator
Philadelphia Museum of Art
 
This I Believe
 
Art is essential to understanding.
Through the arts, I comprehend my essential being, articulate my
place in the world, and relate to others.
 
When I create art, I exist in the here and now, my concentration centers, mind and body become one.
 
As much as I love making art, I am almost more content discussing
art with others. I found this out some years ago when I had the good fortune to lose my job. At the time I was absolutely devastated to lose my part time position teaching at a prestigious independent school. Like many artists, I balanced several part time jobs, but I had hoped that this particular job would lead to a full time offer. When it fell through, I searched for jobs to tide me over until I found a permanent position. I went to one former employer who told me she didn't need any studio teachers, but her colleague
might use me to teach in the museum galleries. I took the part time position as a museum educator even though it sounded rather dull. I thought, " who would want to dress up and bore children, droning on in front of some old painting?" I decided to do this temporarily until I got a job where I could get my hands dirty and make things again. From the moment I started my new job, I was surprised to find that I enjoyed it more than anything I had ever done. There was a magic in the air, an energy to these classes that I had never experienced before. Far from being dull, my interactions with the students were lively and totally unpredictable. All I needed to do was to create a safe and welcoming atmosphere in front of virtually anything in the museum and ask open-ended questions to get the ball rolling. Within a few minutes the students understood that this was not a typical class, but an opportunity for them to fearlessly express themselves. The only rule was unspoken - that they speak
from their hearts. Everyone is invited to observe the art in silence and ask questions or make comments. I was delighted to find that it made absolutely no difference if the student was young or old, well versed in art history or a first time museum visitor - the playing field was perfectly even. Often the most eloquent, insightful, memorable comments were made by those who had never set foot in a museum. My temporary job quickly became a vocation. I felt a true calling in my work, particularly with Public School Students who had little or no access to art education.
 
Art allows me to see through the eyes of others. Art gives me the grace to sit in silence and listen for the small voice of a child teaching me to see truth and beauty that is initially invisible.
This I believe: Every child and every adult needs art in order to
grow and understand themselves and others.

 
 

 
Gary Earl Ross
 
When I joined the faculty of the University at Buffalo Educational Opportunity Center in 1977, I adapted to the scheduling and professional demands of higher education. Some years later, however, I found I missed the kind of children I had encountered during my four years as a secondary English teacher. One of my solutions was to return to public school classrooms as a visiting writer for the Just Buffalo Literary Center's Writers in Education program. For nearly two decades, I've worked around my university schedule to spend five to ten days a year in public schools, working with a host teacher, or teachers, to give creative writing experiences to children.
 
My experiences have been varied and satisfying. I have worked with junior high and high school students on writing poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. For two schools I helped develop an integrated curriculum project that produced publications. In the first school, students studying the Westward Expansion in social studies learned period music in music class, surveying techniques in math class, and produced "You Are There" style Western newspapers in English. In the second school, students studying the Great Depression in social studies, read Depression-era literature and watched Depression-era films in English and produced a news magazine summarizing the decade, including book and film reviews, news stories, and obituaries of the famous who died during that period. For two years I helped another school develop two websites and publish online magazines of student writing, art, and photography.
 
I have had students write to classical music and film scores, blindfold themselves and write about their other senses, look through a telescope and create stories about what they see, pass stories around a classroom with each student adding two lines, and write plays in pairs. None of my secondary experiences, however, prepared me for the exuberance of the fourth-grade poets I encountered at Martin Luther King Academy in the spring of 2005.
 
I was the visiting writer in the classrooms of four teachers (Ms. Carson, Mrs. Dixon, Ms. Fields, and Mrs. Polak) who were unsure what to expect from a visiting writer. In our initial planning meeting we discussed a variety of instructional possibilities, from getting students to write about their feelings to producing poems on the Erie Canal, which they had studied. The more we talked, however, the more creative we became, and the writing lessons that took shape were more successful than any of us could have imagined.
 
English sometimes seems a harsh companion, impossible to master and unforgiving of errors. Over the years, on all levels, I've had students say, "Is this what you want? Did I do it right?" With the fourth-graders at MLK, we approached language from the point of view of a challenge. There was no right and wrong at this point, I said, only words that we would come up with and use. In one lesson I explained haiku to them, using construction paper signs to demonstrate syllables, which we later mixed and matched to create new words. In another lesson, we discussed synonyms and had students generate lists; in others, students generated lists of rhymes and words associated with feelings, colors, families, home, and the like. Perhaps the most memorable lesson involved a giant Scrabble game made from poster board and post-it notes, which the entire class played to generate a new list of words. Each time we created word lists or demonstrated a particular poetic pattern, the challenge was to copy the pattern or write something using only the words on the list. 
 
In the end, we were all transported so far beyond tradition that we had 100% participation in every class. Students rose to each challenge enthusiastically, willingly reading their work aloud and applauding their peers. Even the teachers participated as writers, and their work appears in the booklet of poems and pictures each class published. The few students who did not appear in print were excluded because they failed to turn in their parent permission slips. (Desire to be included was so high that two students even tried to forge permission slips.) Weeks after the residency concluded, I returned to the school for a special program during which all the fourth graders (and their teachers) read and performed their poetry for other teachers, administrators, and parents.
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Gary Earl Ross is a writing professor at the UB EOC and the author of the short story collections The Wheel of Desire (Writers Club Press, 2000) and Shimmerville (Writers Club Press 2002), as well as the children's tale Dots (Erie County Fair Housing Partnership, 2002). His courtroom thriller Matter of Intent, performed to sold-out houses and standing ovations by Buffalo's Ujima Theater in April, won the 2005 Emanuel Fried Best New Play Award.