Hiu's GCE Portfolio

Today was an eventful day full of visitors. Leslie from Lillstreet brought our glass pieces from our visit to her studio a couple of weeks ago. She revealed to us today that she is an installation artist on top of being an expert with glass. She inspired me today both personally and professionally. Personally, to learn the art of glass-blowing and professionally, to use her installation knowledge for our spring term.

Our pieces after coming out of the kiln.

REFER TO THE POST “EXPLORATION OF COLOR THROUGH GLASS” TO SEE THE BEFORE AND AFTER.

Then Kathryn, who Eric and I both knew from an Educational Endeavors program a couple of summers ago showed us the secrets of Audacity and how to produce an effective podcast.

Our students got right to work with Kathryn.

MML hard at work.

SS piecing together the information she collected from the schools in Pilsen just earlier today.

Thanks for EL, we have our own recording studio!

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We spent a chilly and productive day in Pilsen hitting up Mujeres Latinas En Accion and El Valor. I started to keep an investigator’s notebook taking down notes and sketches.

A sketch of the VP at El Valor and the beautiful pattern on her scarf. Ms. Lopez was a beautiful story-teller and it was difficult to keep up with writing down all of her beautiful words.

She told several really touching and funny stories about the founder of El Valor, Mrs. Gaudalupe Reyes. One was about Mrs. Reyes helping her young son Bobby who suffered from spinal meningitis (who was her inspiration to start the organization) to feel movement. “Her means were humble, so she went to the flea market to buy a tricycle and picked up a roll of that silver tape. With the help of her neighbor, Mrs. Reyes strapped Bobby into the tricycle with the tape, taping his hands to the handlebars and his feet to the pedals. She then pulled the tricycle and even though Bobby could not speak, he made noises from his throat signifying his excitement because for the first time Bobby felt movement in his body.”

A sketch of the logo of Mujeres Latinas En Accion. It is an image of a woman holding her arm to form a muscle- signifying strength and resilience against adversity and violence.

Our first field experience as civically engaged journalist to Pilsen was filled with beautiful, investigative questions formulated by the students, inspiring community leaders advocating art, and delicious food. We visited the roots of my inspiration for arts education, Yollocalli and their roommate RadioArte. We saw beautiful art and spent some time with Vanessa, Dulce, and Adriana talking about art, radio, and community.

Then we went to a delicious, organic, fair-trade, Mexican-Italian buffet at Fogata Village. Looking forward to continuing our investigation in a couple of days.

Tomorrow will be our second day as civically engaged journalists on the field in Pilsen. We will be visiting St. Pius School and Parish, Mujeres Latinas En Acción, Working Bikes Cooperative, Casa Aztlán and El Valor. As any well-seasoned, professional journalists would do- we are researching each organization so we can formulate worthwhile questions.

Each of our students will be researching:
THE MISSION/ PURPOSE OF EACH ORGANIZATION
THE HISTORY OF EACH ORGANIZATION
THE PROGRAMS/SERVICES OFFERED

With a good knowledge of the goals and purposes of each organization in the community, each student will formulate questions to ask that are relevant to their focus areas. The students will post their questions as a comment on this blog. Help out our journalists, if you have answers.

When I learned that our first Civic Engagement unit was going to be focused in Pilsen, the voices of my colleagues speaking of lessons and field experiences were drowned out and the lights in my head went bright, white bright and I was thrown back into high school. I thought about cold winters when it was dark at 4:30 and the snow snuck into my boots and socks waiting for the #9 Ashland bus on the corner of Ashland and 18th Street going home after making art and teaching art at Yollocalli Youth Museum. Then I was thrown back into bright, sweaty summer afternoons walking to the Blue Line 18th stop with my friends after a long day of painting, screen-printing, and speaking with the Taco Shop Poets.

Yollocalli located on 18th and Blue Island was where I spent a good portion of my high school years. This was where I first got the inspiration to learn through art and to teach through art. I had the fortune to explore different forms of social injustice locally and around the world through many different forms of art at Yollocalli. My heart skipped a beat when I learned that I have the opportunity to show my students where my inspiration started.

Stepping back into Yollcalli a couple of days ago after about 6 years really sparked something in me. The space is beautiful covered with more murals than ever before. I felt inspired to draw and paint and perform and can’t wait to pass on that inspired feeling to the students in a couple of days. Sharing a space with Yollcalli is RadioArte, a youth-run radio station. Seeing as how our platform for final projects this term is sound- I can’t wait to really utilize the folks at Yollocalli and RadioArte and collaborate on projects after the unit is over.

The Junior class spent some time looking at light and colors- John and I challenged the students to look at colors from a scientific lens and an artistic lens. In art, we’ve been exploring how lights, shadows, and colors set different moods in artwork. So it was perfect when the opportunity to go to Lillstreet Art Center presented itself.

Leslie, the Director of the Glass Studio led us through a flameworking demonstration explaining some scientific properties of glass and how it reacts with heat. Then she gave us the chance to create our own glass artwork- giving us some background on how different colors and transparency of different pieces of glass complement each other.

Leslie will visit us in a couple of weeks at GCE with our glass pieces fused. Looking forward to continue our collaboration with Lillstreet and to see how our pieces turned out.

We went to the beautiful Day of the Dead exhibit at the National Museum of Mexican Fine Arts a couple of weeks ago with the Juniors and finally got the inspiration to blog about it. We spent the time before the trip talking about colors and what colors complement each other. Each student picked one favorite color then found the complementary color of their favorite color and used these colors to create their own Day of the Dead skull.

The juniors spent some time looking at and defining propaganda. We got in a pretty heated discussion about whether or not there is a difference between propaganda and education. Their upcoming assignment is to create two videos- the student are split up into two groups and one group is responsible to present information using propaganda and the other group is challenged to present only the facts.

WHAT IS PROPAGANDA?

HOW IS PROPAGANDA DIFFERENT FROM EDUCATION? IS IT DIFFERENT?

VIDEOS TO COME!