ART AND DESIGN EDUCATION STUDENTS TEACH IN Brooklyn Homeless Shelter
Artwork produced by children in the Junius Family Shelter in BrooklynDuring the spring semester for the last four years, Pratt Art and Design Education students taking the course Student Teaching: After School have conducted an art teaching program at the Junius Family Shelter/Women In Need, a Brooklyn facility that houses displaced families.
The course is taught by Lisa Capone (M.F.A. Sculpture ’95), an adjunct instructor in the department. “The class is an exhilarating combination of art making and community outreach,” says Capone. “Its aim is to empower our students ability to connect with the larger issues of the day.”
On Monday evenings from 5:30-7 PM, these Pratt students teach art to homeless children in the Junius Family shelter. Afterwards, the students meet for an hour-long seminar to analyze the class just taught. The course is not only a boon to the children—who enjoy drawing, painting, and working in clay and wire—but also a novel approach for Pratt students to gain useful experience before starting the formal student teaching required for New York State certification.
Artwork produced by children in the Junius Family Shelter in BrooklynPratt students come to the shelter well prepared to help disadvantaged children. To overcome any preconceived notions, students are required to complete readings about the family shelter system, the lives of homeless children, and socio-cultural themes in education. This background helps them design and teach art classes that encourage children’s creativity and heighten their self-esteem.
“Art is therapeutic,” says Shoshana Goldsmith (M.S. Art and Design Education ’11), a repeat participant who is writing her master’s thesis on the use of art programs in homeless shelters. “It keeps the kids busy and gives them something to feel good about. It also keeps them out of trouble and out of the shelter’s hallways. Many of the kids are talented, and this helps them become more resourceful.”
Pratt students learn to design lessons that will tap the inner experiences of at-risk children so they can express themselves in meaningful ways. They also learn how to distribute and collect materials, and effective strategies for classroom management. They teach their pupils how to keep a dialogic journal, using “thick description” as they refer to the archival build up of drawings, dialogues, and other documentation that children aged 5-15 compile during the 10-week duration of the course to build up their visual, verbal, and written skills. Their weekly sketchbook entries this year have explored the theme of “home.”
To showcase the children’s joyful progress in the visual arts, Goldsmith is preparing an exhibition of their work, titled “No Where to Hang Up My Art,” which will be on display from March 22 through April 11 at The Nancy Ross Gallery on the second floor of Main Building, room 227.
For the last six years the Department of Art and Design Education has offered a similar practicum course at Pratt Manhattan, giving students the opportunity to teach art to inner-city high school students at off-site learning facilities such as galleries, museums, and other nearby cultural venues. The after-school program meets on Fridays at 2 PM during the fall semester, and Pratt student instructors are finding that teaching art in the world outside of academe can lead to some interesting results.
Thanks to her enrollment in this course, current Pratt student Rachel Margolis is a teaching intern at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and recent graduate Gina Llerena (M.S. Art and Design Education ’10), who interned at the Rubin Museum, is now on the Education Department staff at The Museum of Modern Art.
Photos: Shoshana Goldsmith (M.S. ’11)
Gateway Editors
Reader Comments (4)
As a graduate of Pratt's Graduate Creative Arts Therapy Dept. and as a long time former faculty member, I am familiarly amazed how one department at Pratt works in such isolation believing it is so unique. This is to say, for the 20 years I taught on the graduate level at Pratt, rarely did the internships of the Creative Arts Therapy students receive such attention as the above Art and Design Education students. Yes, I applaud the teaching to at-risk children in the shelters of New York even if it is only 21/2 hrs a week in the spring semester. Additionally, I applaud the therapeutic work dedicated to the diverse at-risk populations and otherwise that the Graduate Creative Arts Therapy students devote 16 to 24 hours a week for 4 semesters. Isn't it time that the Graduate Creative Arts Therapy Dept. is not given short shrift by the Institute? It baffles me that there is not more communication between departments so that
there is an even higher level of exchange in learning, teaching, and understanding.
I suspect the Pratt students learned a lot more than the students in these community outreach programs. I was Supervisor of Student Teaching at Pratt in 1969 following the first teachers' strike in the history of the U.S. We had to find alternative placement for our practice teachers which lead to private school placement for the first time as well as public. Our most interesting experiment was a 'street school' set up for teens who had dropped out of the public school system. It was created and run by Young Life in lower Manhattan. This was a much less structured experience that the ones you now have at homeless shelters and other art venues. Thus Pratt does have a history here and one worth building on more purposefully. We all say the world is better off with and through art. Let us continuously prove that by working with some of the populations who could most use it and enrich it.
Jeanie Daniel Duck, '68
This kind of Education practicum can be very valuable to students who want to teach art in any kind of setting, whether the intention is directly therapeutic or not. I'm a Pratt grad and teaching artist(BFA painting '92, with a minor in ED), and one of the places I teach is a family shelter. I would be interested in reading more about this program.