Isn't it time for some Creativ-Tea?
During the past two years of our COVID experience, when school campuses shut down and contact was limited, I had the unique and highly pleasurable opportunity to spend time in Montreal taking long walks up and down Mont Royal and meeting for up on outdoor balconies for tea and conversations with my Concordia Art Education colleagues.?I loved every moment of sitting (or walking) and talking about making art, mentoring art, teaching art and all that fun creative stuff in between.
I have been an art teacher for what some may consider a long time. Some days I also feel like its been forever and some days I feel like I am just getting started. For the majority of my teaching career I have been a secondary art teacher, teaching the IB DP curriculum within international schools… and….it’s a very busy job.?In my experience, I have found that (since the study of arts are more erroneously marginalised) usually secondary schools only have one or two art teachers.?(Not to mention the even lesser number of art teachers in elementary… but that’s a conversation for another post)?To house the nature of the creative subjects, art teachers need large rooms or studio and so usually each teacher has their own art room and their own space.?Which I adore, don’t get me wrong. I love decorating my room and leaving projects out and around the room in all forms of process.?But for art teachers, it can be very isolating.?
A few years ago, I taught at International School Eastern Seaboard in Thailand.?Our school was a member of MRISA, a group of 6 schools from the Mekong Delta region. ?
The Mekong River International Schools Association (MRISA) is a group of eight schools that, since 1999, have made a commitment to join together to create collaborative learning activities for their students in sports, leadership, and the arts. Originally, when MRISA formed, the member schools were all about the same size and were rather isolated within their prospective areas. Over the past 15 years, each school has seen immense growth, both as an institution and in their surrounding communities, creating a very diverse and expansive network of students and teachers which share hosting duties within the three disciplines, providing students with the opportunity to travel within the four countries, engage with a variety of different cultures, and make lasting friendships.
Each year, all 6 MRISA schools would work together in collaboration to organise an Arts Festival, selecting 15 Art Specialist students from each school based on their passion, skills, and contribution to their art form (Visual Arts, Drama, Dance, and Music) to work with arts teachers to plan and develop specialized workshops in their art form. During a three-day event, held each year in spring, students participate in specialist workshops, led by teachers and student-led workshops based on their art form of choice. ( I wrote an article Arts Exchange is a Collaborative Success about my experience here for EARCOS journal in 2014.)
It was always an extraordinary time.?And the BEST part of each weekend (for me) was getting to hang out and just talk with other art teachers.?Share ideas, concerns, questions, tour each others studios and art-making spaces, and then share social accounts so we could follow and connect with each other as we went back to our own school environment.?
I am currently researching the work and philosophies of Japanese writer and thinker Okakura Kakuzō (1863–1913) who more than a century ago compared the international struggle for supremacy and power to dragons "tossed in a sea of ferment," who "in vain strive to regain the jewel of life." In 1904, the same year that hostilities broke out between Japan and Russia, Kakuzo, who is familiarity referred to as Tenshin moved to USA, where he became the first Japanese curator of the department of Chinese and Japanese art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He wrote three books in English in which he shared his insights into the art, history, and esthetic philosophy of Japan and the rest of Asia:?The Ideals of the East with Special Reference to the Art of Japan,?The Awakening of Japan, and?The Book of Tea.
The?Book of Tea?is often understood as a work that sought to introduce Japanese culture to Western audiences through the prism of the tea ceremony. But the book contains a larger message. Tenshin skillfully used the tea ceremony to argue that the cultural exchanges that bring people together on a daily basis through the humble act of enjoying a cup of tea can be put to a wider use on the global stage, suggesting that our best hope in a "world torn asunder by warring dragons" was to wait for better days.
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"Meanwhile, let us have a sip of tea. The afternoon glow is brightening to bamboos, the fountains are bubbling with delight, the soughing of the pines is heard in our kettle. Let us dream of evanescence, and linger in the beautiful foolishness of things.".
As Tenshin considered that "humanity has so far met in the tea-cup," I decided to gather my world of art educators into a moment of calm and community and invite them for a cup of tea.?To add a fun twist, I decided to record our conversations and to create a podcast, sharing our delightfully creative-centric art educator wisdoms with you.?I decided to name the podcast ‘Creativ-tea’.?The very fitting name did not come from me but was developed by a past student of mine at Shekou International School. It was originally the title to our Coffee House (where we did also sell tea… and student made tea cups).?I am grateful to Jennie Soh for the permission to use it for my podcast.
In the beginning, I had no clue how to even get started with a podcast, and so I approached 4th space at Concordia University for assistance. I also downloaded Adobe Audition and bless his heart, my first podcast guest Jacob LeGallais and I just dove in. ?
Some of my podcasts, I created with technical support and pizzaz within the 4th space studio: which was the coolest experience ever!?(And which you can watch on YouTube) And some were me and my blue yeti microphone and an empty Concordia study hall.. or empty living room in the early morning quiet times (also a cool experience ;)) But they all had tea (or sometimes coffee and sometimes timbits) and the most interesting conversations about the making and mentoring of art.?
Teaism essentially a worship of the Imperfect, a tender attempt to accomplish something possible in this enjoying a moment’s reflection.
If you haven’t already, I invite you to take some time to visit and listen (or re-visit and re-listen) to my season one podcasts which I am referring to as The Concordia Year. They are comprised of interviews with my dear colleagues and mentors from the Concordia Art Education program. And the variety, depth and creative breadth of conversations we discuss is inspiring.?
With each episode, not only do we discuss opinions on art education and views from each guest’s research and art education experiences but we delve into artworks that inspire and inform the guest, analysing the art works and its impacts on the guest. ?