2015 UWM Summer Institute

July 6, 2015 - 1:30pm

Movement and Migration 2015 1

Movement and Migration

July 6-August 15, 2015

Schedule
July 6-10, 2015 - 1:30-5 pm: Intensive workshop.
July 31, 2015 – 1:30-5 pm: Presentation of projects and installation of exhibition.
July 31, 2015 - 5-6 pm: Opening Reception for exhibition (free and open to the public).
Independent study periods: July 11-30 and August 1-15
September 2015-June 2016: curriculum development, classroom observation, in-service workshops, field trips to Lynden, artist residencies in schools.

Registration: The Summer Institute is open, free of charge, to teams of teachers from select schools. Participants receive one credit (graduate or undergraduate), honoraria for in-service workshops, and resources for their students (field trips, artist residencies). For information on registration, please contact pmorris@lyndensculpturegarden.org.

Download syllabus here.
Download faculty biographies here.

The Summer Institute, a collaboration with the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Art Education program, welcomes K-12 teachers with an interest in developing an interdisciplinary and integrated curriculum that explores the relationship between art and nature. Built around a summer intensive at the Lynden Sculpture Garden, the Institute requires a year-long commitment from teachers. In addition to the July workshop, the Institute includes two extended independent study periods to prepare for an exhibition and to complete curriculum projects. During the 2015-2016 school year, participants will remain actively involved with their team members, Institute colleagues, and Institute faculty and artists. Expectations include: two in-service workshops for the entire group; ongoing teamwork on implementation of the new curriculum; classroom field trips to Lynden; school residencies with Institute artists (when possible); and classroom visits from Institute faculty.

This summer, Lynden Sculpture Garden embarks on Movement and Migration, a series of events culminating in the performance of a new site-specific iteration of choreographer Reggie Wilson's acclaimed work Moses(es). The theme, movement and migration, resonates with Wilson's abiding interest in the cultures of Africans in the Americas and the effect that migration has on beliefs. At Lynden, these themes can be tied to the movement of creatures--including humans--across the landscape and to natural cycles, as well as to the movement of sculptures from around the world to their current home in our collection (where, it could be argued, their meaning as a collectivity supersedes their individual significance). They also enable us to consider the cultural contributions of the African diaspora to America's culture, Milwaukee's migration history, the Exodus story, and the movement of bodies across Lynden's grounds.

The 2015 Summer Institute will take movement and migration as its central idea. Over the course of the 5-day intensive workshop, we will incorporate additional layers of meaning through a number of immersive, hands-on learning experiences. We will pay particular attention to the movement of our own bodies through the garden, exploring walking as an act of thinking and subjectivity that permanently occurs in movement and therefore remains unformalized (Delgado, 2014). Architect Andrea Careri (2009) refers to the Latin verb discurrere, which means both moving through and the process of thinking. As one moves, spaces remain open. Sense-making is a forming, re-forming, lived, and mutable practice that resists fixed ways of representation.

These experiences will be facilitated by Lynden Sculpture Garden educator and naturalist Naomi Cobb, graduate fellow Anna Grosch, resident artists Reggie Wilson, Santiago Cucullu and Nirmal Raja, and lead instructor Laura Trafí-Prats, associate professor of art and education at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

July 6
Guided by naturalist Naomi Cobb, we will grapple with the diversity of Lynden’s ecosystems and species. We will learn about the importance--both in art and natural sciences research--of skills like sense of place, close observation, looking from different perspectives, and collecting specimens that reveal things about a given environment and our experience of it. We will take our first walk through Lynden, which Laura Trafí-Prats will connect to one of the assigned readings, Africa Taylor’s “Reconstructing the natures of childhood”(2013), to reflect on learning as an embodied practice in which knowledge becomes sensorial, evocative, and relational. Through two hands-on experiences, we will explore different ways of visualizing how knowledge varies when expressed from different perspectives, human and non-human.

July 7
The day will begin with a participatory movement workshop with choreographer Reggie Wilson. Wilson, one of his generation's most acclaimed choreographers, is a graduate of what is now Golda Meir School and Rufus King High School. He has devoted nearly 30 years to making "post-African/Neo-HooDoo Modern dances" for his Fist and Heel Performance Group.

Afterward, Anna Grosch and Laura Trafí-Prats will lead a number of artful thinking routines centered on spatial and sensorial ways of understanding key examples of Lynden’s sculpture collection. This activity will be informed by Sarah Pink’s Sensorial Ethnography (2009). We will discuss how to use these artful thinking routines within different school contexts, adapting them to the philosophies and grade levels of participating teachers. This conversation will continue with Anna Grosch over the course of the year, and will contribute to the development of customized resources that link these artful thinking routines to the specific lessons designed by participating teams, the school field trips led by Lynden Sculpture Garden educators, and the mini-residencies in participating classrooms with Lynden's artists in residence.

Nirmal Raja, Tangled I
Nirmal Raja, Tangled I (2015)

July 8-9
We will collaborate with Milwaukee-based artists Santiago Cucullu and Nirmal Raja in a hands (and feet)-on project inspired by the metaphor of murmuration, a term used to describe “the organic and graceful movement of starlings in flight.” The artists use this metaphor to “echo the act of incorporating various elements found in a landscape and pairing these with participants' understandings and subjectivities.” As part of our research, we will revisit the walks and itineraries developed on the first day, engage in mapping exercises, take photographs, collect sound, and identify potential materials. Cucullu and Raja will provide some quick tech tutorials, and an introduction to the idea of installation-making. Working in teams, we will use found and natural objects to create murmuration-inspired mini-installations, and develop slideshows using the sound and images. (This project will involve some additional work sorting images and sound outside of workshop hours on July 8.)

Santiago Cucullu, Here To Go, 2014
Santiago Cucullu, Here To Go (2014)

July 10
The final day will be devoted to synthesis. We will discuss and elaborate the initial structure of our lesson plans under the leadership of Laura Trafí-Prats and Anna Grosch. We will reconnect with the idea of walking as a way of thinking to evoke a curriculum practice that promotes and sustains forms of learning grounded in located, living, flexible processes. We will also discuss the reading from Callejo, Adair and White’s Curriculum as Spaces: Aesthetics, Community, and the Politics of Place (2014).

July 31
We will reconvene at Lynden to present our projects and to install the exhibition. Opening reception at 5 pm (free and open to the public).

August 15
Curriculum projects due.


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