From time to time, we'll hear through the grapevine about different activities our students might be interested in participating in. One of these activities was an art exchange organized by OneWorld Classrooms. The idea behind the art exchange is to give students from different parts of the world the opportunity to teach each other about their home country through their artwork. This sounded like a great idea to us. Most of our students have never left China and don't have any sense of what the "outside world" is really like. Also, some of our students are great artists and this would give them an outlet to showcase their work. Well, looking back, the Art Exchange turned out to be more of a learning experience for us in terms of how things work at our school.The concept of the art exchange was pretty simple: Our students would submit up to 60 pieces of art, and we'd receive the same number in return from other students around the world (in total, we teach over 1,200 students, so we figured gathering 60 would not be a big problem). The organization sponsoring the exchange gave the students a lot of flexibility as to what kind of art they could create, but there were a few rules that had to be followed:
- The artwork had to relate to China in some way.
- The artwork had to be on either 8.5 x 11" or 11.5 x 17" paper
- The student should, in English, include a short description of the subject of their artwork
- The artwork must be received by OneWorld Classrooms (based in the US) by May 1, 2009 in order to be included in the 1st round of the exchange. (We requested the art be submitted to us by March 24th, so we would have time to get it to America by May 1).
When I asked my student how this related to China, he simply said "It's a Chinese nose."
.
We received this scary picture of Ronald McDonald. We had fun trying to figure out how this related to China.
Clearly, the finer points of the art exchange rules had somehow escaped our students. How had this happened?
Before committing to the project, we'd run the idea by various Chinese English teachers at our school. They'd all been excited and supportive of the idea and had agreed to help us communicate the exchange to the students. We'd even prepared an instruction sheet explaining the project and detailing the guidelines for each of the English teachers in our grades. The teachers we'd given the instruction sheets to had agreed to distribute it to the other English teachers and explain the project to them so they could then explain it to the students. Of course, we would also do our best to get the students excited about the project in our own class. It had seemed like a good plan to us: We knew we could communicate the "gist" of the art exchange to our students, but we thought it would be better for a fluent Chinese speaker to thoroughly explain the guidelines and deadlines to the students. At this time, our self-imposed deadline for receiving art (March 24th) was 1 month a way. We thought this was enough time. Our students are busy, but they do have some free time. Besides, it doesn't take our students long to create some pretty nice works of art (I know this because I've taken up some impressive pieces my students drew in the span of just one of my classes while I was trying to teach them . . . ).
It was at this point that things stopped going smoothly. That week in class, we started asking our students if their teachers had mentioned the project to them. In response, they gave us confused, blank stares. We then started asking some of the other teachers if they had communicated the project to their students, and they too gave us confused, blank stares. Why? It seemed that the teachers we'd entrusted with our instruction sheets hadn't really explained the art exchange to anyone. Instead, they had set our instructions on the other teachers desks and assumed they'd read them on their own. Of course, our instructions then got "lost in the shuffle" on those teachers desks, and they never read them. When we realized what had happened, we made an effort to track down every Chinese teacher individually to explain the art exchange to them and ask them to relay the guidelines to their classes. Despite our efforts, I don't think they ever actually did this, as we continued to receive mostly blank stares from our students when we asked them about it over the subsequent weeks.
This left explaining the project completely up to us. Sure, we got the "gist" of the project across easily enough. Still, we're not fluent Mandarin speakers, and so some of the more detailed guidelines didn't completely get through to our students. Hence, the first few we received were a random picture of a nose and a scary drawing of Ronald McDonald. (We also received a fantastic Chinese mountain landscape painting from one of Tiffany's students, the only problem was that it was mounted on a scroll that was about 4 feet tall and 2 feet wide - not quite "legal-sized" paper). So, the art exchange was off to a poor start. Nearing our deadline, we didn't have much art that was "sendable" and we started to think that we'd have to cancel the project altogether.
The day before our deadline, March 23rd, we had a knock on our door. It was our neighbor, Janet, along with one of the senior school (high school) English teachers. We teach in the junior school (middle school) and hadn't told anyone in the senior school about the art exchange. Still, she had 2 copies of our "instruction sheet" in hand: the one we'd written in English and another that someone had translated in Chinese. Apparently, word of the art project had slowly been making its way through the bureaucracy at our school and after 4 weeks had made it to the top, to a man named "Mr. Shi." Mr. Shi thought the project was a good idea and wanted our school to participate. He would have the art teacher pick some of the best "China-themed" art from the primary and junior school art classes this year and would give them to us to send to America. This wasn't exactly what we'd had in mind (we'd wanted the students to create something new and original . . . and we don't even teach in the primary school!), but we were happy to at least be making some progress. The school said they would get the artwork to us as soon as possible, and we were back on track.
Ultimately, we got the art back in mid-April, and it was too late for us to make the May 1st deadline. It was interesting to see what the art teacher deemed "China-themed" art -- some of them were a bit of a stretch and we had to do quite a bit of work tracking down students to figure out exactly how their artwork related to China. There were some that were a bit too much of a stretch and we couldn't send them overseas: these included several pictures of dinosaurs eating each other and one drawing of a train flying into outer-space. Still, we did get many creative, cute, and well-done pieces of art. There were many pieces that portrayed legends from long ago in China's past. There were some other good pieces that gave insight into how the students view modern life in their city. We learned things from reading and listening to the students' comments about their artwork.
From the art exchange, we learned a little more about the "last minute" nature of the Chinese culture, as well as the bureaucratic hierarchy of our school. It seems that many times you've got to have the right people working on your side to get things done effectively here. Our art exchange was doomed for failure until the leader threw his support behind it. Then, all of a sudden, it became a success. Living as foreigners in China, every task becomes a learning experience, if not an adventure. Sure, it is a bit frustrating at times, but ultimately I think this is what makes us love living here so much.
If you are interested, we have created an online album of the artwork we received for the art exchange. It is complete with explanations of each piece of art (there are 50 in all). To view it, just click here .
Additionally, I've discovered that you can make some pretty cool collages using Picasa, and I made one of our students' art that you see at the top of this blog entry. Hope you enjoy it!
Before committing to the project, we'd run the idea by various Chinese English teachers at our school. They'd all been excited and supportive of the idea and had agreed to help us communicate the exchange to the students. We'd even prepared an instruction sheet explaining the project and detailing the guidelines for each of the English teachers in our grades. The teachers we'd given the instruction sheets to had agreed to distribute it to the other English teachers and explain the project to them so they could then explain it to the students. Of course, we would also do our best to get the students excited about the project in our own class. It had seemed like a good plan to us: We knew we could communicate the "gist" of the art exchange to our students, but we thought it would be better for a fluent Chinese speaker to thoroughly explain the guidelines and deadlines to the students. At this time, our self-imposed deadline for receiving art (March 24th) was 1 month a way. We thought this was enough time. Our students are busy, but they do have some free time. Besides, it doesn't take our students long to create some pretty nice works of art (I know this because I've taken up some impressive pieces my students drew in the span of just one of my classes while I was trying to teach them . . . ).
It was at this point that things stopped going smoothly. That week in class, we started asking our students if their teachers had mentioned the project to them. In response, they gave us confused, blank stares. We then started asking some of the other teachers if they had communicated the project to their students, and they too gave us confused, blank stares. Why? It seemed that the teachers we'd entrusted with our instruction sheets hadn't really explained the art exchange to anyone. Instead, they had set our instructions on the other teachers desks and assumed they'd read them on their own. Of course, our instructions then got "lost in the shuffle" on those teachers desks, and they never read them. When we realized what had happened, we made an effort to track down every Chinese teacher individually to explain the art exchange to them and ask them to relay the guidelines to their classes. Despite our efforts, I don't think they ever actually did this, as we continued to receive mostly blank stares from our students when we asked them about it over the subsequent weeks.
This left explaining the project completely up to us. Sure, we got the "gist" of the project across easily enough. Still, we're not fluent Mandarin speakers, and so some of the more detailed guidelines didn't completely get through to our students. Hence, the first few we received were a random picture of a nose and a scary drawing of Ronald McDonald. (We also received a fantastic Chinese mountain landscape painting from one of Tiffany's students, the only problem was that it was mounted on a scroll that was about 4 feet tall and 2 feet wide - not quite "legal-sized" paper). So, the art exchange was off to a poor start. Nearing our deadline, we didn't have much art that was "sendable" and we started to think that we'd have to cancel the project altogether.
The day before our deadline, March 23rd, we had a knock on our door. It was our neighbor, Janet, along with one of the senior school (high school) English teachers. We teach in the junior school (middle school) and hadn't told anyone in the senior school about the art exchange. Still, she had 2 copies of our "instruction sheet" in hand: the one we'd written in English and another that someone had translated in Chinese. Apparently, word of the art project had slowly been making its way through the bureaucracy at our school and after 4 weeks had made it to the top, to a man named "Mr. Shi." Mr. Shi thought the project was a good idea and wanted our school to participate. He would have the art teacher pick some of the best "China-themed" art from the primary and junior school art classes this year and would give them to us to send to America. This wasn't exactly what we'd had in mind (we'd wanted the students to create something new and original . . . and we don't even teach in the primary school!), but we were happy to at least be making some progress. The school said they would get the artwork to us as soon as possible, and we were back on track.
Ultimately, we got the art back in mid-April, and it was too late for us to make the May 1st deadline. It was interesting to see what the art teacher deemed "China-themed" art -- some of them were a bit of a stretch and we had to do quite a bit of work tracking down students to figure out exactly how their artwork related to China. There were some that were a bit too much of a stretch and we couldn't send them overseas: these included several pictures of dinosaurs eating each other and one drawing of a train flying into outer-space. Still, we did get many creative, cute, and well-done pieces of art. There were many pieces that portrayed legends from long ago in China's past. There were some other good pieces that gave insight into how the students view modern life in their city. We learned things from reading and listening to the students' comments about their artwork.
From the art exchange, we learned a little more about the "last minute" nature of the Chinese culture, as well as the bureaucratic hierarchy of our school. It seems that many times you've got to have the right people working on your side to get things done effectively here. Our art exchange was doomed for failure until the leader threw his support behind it. Then, all of a sudden, it became a success. Living as foreigners in China, every task becomes a learning experience, if not an adventure. Sure, it is a bit frustrating at times, but ultimately I think this is what makes us love living here so much.
If you are interested, we have created an online album of the artwork we received for the art exchange. It is complete with explanations of each piece of art (there are 50 in all). To view it, just click here .
Additionally, I've discovered that you can make some pretty cool collages using Picasa, and I made one of our students' art that you see at the top of this blog entry. Hope you enjoy it!
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