Awakening Creativity Through Art

“It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge” (Albert Einstein).

A Brookline Education Foundation grant provided Runkle Teacher Alaina Birden and six other Brookline Art educators an opportunity to nurture their joy in creative expression this summer at a three-day workshop at The Fort Point Studio School in South Boston. They will be able to share that joy, along with newly acquired art processes and techniques, with their students this year.

The workshop the seven attended focused on process over product. New artistic techniques were introduced, however, greater emphasis was placed on supporting and encouraging artistic growth in students. "I left the workshop with many new ideas for helping my students notice details and enrich their work," declares Birden.

Key components of the program were attention to detail and self-reflection before, during, and after the creation of a work of art. Activities were designed to illustrate the influence of sight, sound, memory, reflection, context, and collaboration on the creative process and subsequent product.

Birden intends to use a number of the Fort Point Studio exercises in her classroom this year as a way to help students notice and incorporate details, both from the world around them and from their own responses and emotions, into their creative pursuits.

The Visual Journal that each workshop participant maintained will serve as a model for the introduction of this technique at Runkle. Birden plans to have each eighth grade student create a journal with both art and narrative components as a vehicle for growth and self-reflection.

An added benefit of this grant is that it provided a unique opportunity for a large group of Brookline art educators, representing three elementary schools and Brookline High School, to collaborate on processes that will inform their future teaching.