Rationale
The district’s implementation of busing in 1979 exists today in a unique real-life representation of a school population composed of city mouse/country mouse. Glasgow High School serves both students who live within close proximity of the school and students who travel down a 15-mile stretch of I-95 in order to receive their education. Each group of students comes from a drastically different residential setting. Students residing near the school are acclimated to a suburban landscape of strip malls and destinations best reached by car, while Wilmington students live in a typical pedestrian and public transit-dominated grid. The visual layout of each group’s physical space is just one of many differences, and these stark variations between both groups play an obvious role in the overall culture and climate of the school.
Although the students are aware of the two categories – urban and suburban -- into which they can easily be sorted, they generally seem to be oblivious as to why it is that they have been combined into this one building; many students chalk it up to the fact that Wilmington is completely devoid of a public high school. While Wilmington’s lack of a public high school certainly contributes to the overall reason for the district’s busing procedures, it is only a portion of a much larger history that fuels this unique synthesis of cultures under one suburban roof.
Therefore, the investigation of our students’ uncommon situation will provide the background knowledge that students will need in order to complete a collaborative art project. The history of desegregation and busing as a part of desegregation is necessary to understand in order for students to have informed views and opinions of how the district arrived at the decision to bus students from the city into the suburbs. Therefore, the investigation of our students’ unconventional mix will provide the background they need to complete a large-scale project; students will need to determine how to best represent their combined histories and cultures in a work of student-designed and created public art.
In addition to learning valuable information that will provide the meaning or theme of their original artwork, students will need to gain an understanding of public art in general. Therefore, students will learn about different types of public art (including monuments and memorials), with a particular focus on both public art throughout the city of Wilmington and more famous or prominent public art works outside of the state of Delaware. Students will then combine what they have learned about their own history and the practice of public art and bring these two seemingly unrelated avenues of instruction to create a collaborative representational piece of public art about the history of their school’s formation.
This unit obviously contains a notable “history lesson” with which some art teachers might be uncomfortable, however, the freedom that I have with my curriculum means that I tend to make cross-curricular ventures more often than teachers with significantly less freedom. I often view the fact that I design and deliver my own curriculum as a proverbial double-edged sword; while many teachers of core content areas are envious of the fact that I simply decide what my students will do and when they will do it, what they typically fail to understand right away is the havoc this kind of freedom can reap on a creative mind. However, it is this freedom that I have with my curriculum that allows me to focus on aspects of visual art that are typically not explored within “cookie cutter art curricula” such as public art—and, more specifically, local public art. The usual tie between history and art occurs only in an art history context, which is unfortunate given the critical role that visual art and design plays in public history. For example, some of the most well known pieces of public art, specifically, monuments and memorials, demonstrate the importance of historical research in informing the artistic process.
It is for this reason, among several others, that the benefits of building my own curriculum far outweigh the drawbacks. After working in the same position for four years, I can confidently say that I know my kids. Again, although it takes time, I am able to build lessons and units that meet their needs and, simply stated, “work” for them. Furthermore, my students truly know what to expect from me; they seem to trust that I keep them in mind when planning for them—not just in terms of content, but also in terms of level of difficulty. I have spent the past four years in this position working diligently to grow and expand the art program; when I began, we seemed to have very full entry-level classes and very sparse advanced-level classes. I encouraged many students who had me as an instructor for their first art class to continue and take 3D Design classes with me—and many of them did. So, this being my fourth year in my current position, many of the freshmen that I had four years ago comprise the fullest advanced-level class that I have ever seen, while previous years produced advanced-level classes that were canceled or condensed due to low enrollment.
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