Splendors of community.

Five year old Aaron burst into my classroom a few years ago and forever changed my vision of suspenders. "Ellen!" he exclaimed, "Look at my new splendors!" Never again will I see people's pants held up by anything less than "splendors." Our community-based art program at Lucas School in Des Moines, Iowa is much like "splendors." It's functional, practical, and we do all we're required to do. The splendors of Community Based Art Education (CBAE) are also stunning, meaningful and daily lift up lives in our inner city neighborhood. Aaron transformed my vision of suspenders; through our art work, we're changing some vision in Des Moines.

Opening Communication

Lucas School is sadly, but accurately, defined by the State as having a 100 percent at-risk population, including our deaf and hard-of-hearing students. CBAE opened up wide avenues of communication and pride with students who are deaf. CBAE allows them to teach others about something they know, even though their daily experience includes so much not knowing.

After an experience outside or inside the building, our students choose the medium that's right for that day. Then they carry out their visual decompression and composing, sorting out their lives as all young children do.

Revitalizing the Community

Our committed group of neighbors and local business persons began a community revitalization project. With Lucas staff, the Capitol East Neighborhood Group planted sixty trees, demolished run down dwellings, built two playgrounds, and developed an effective odor control system to deal with the problem from a nearby packing plant. This group and students created a mural about people who've made a difference in the community. On individual squares we wrote and designed images of these citizens to create a "Quilt of Honor and Inspiration."

For a juvenile court judge at the courthouse twelve blocks away, Lucas students, adults, and courthouse employees completed a 4 x 16' (1.2 x 4.9 m) mural entitled "Children and Gardens: That to Which You Attend Flourishes."

Learning on the Road

In the belief that all are learners and all are teachers, our school custodian shares his photography knowledge with us. We display his splendid work and he shares camera tips with the fifth grade before their grand tour of Iowa. This annual bus journey becomes a modern day rite of passage.

To introduce students to Iowa's history and culture, we provide a solid seventy-two hours of "primary experiences." We tour two college campuses, study restoration architecture, explore a cave, hike the Effigy Mounds, and travel up river on a paddlewheel boat. We prepare well in advance for this trip, so our students relate to what they see, touch, and smell. In the evening we respond to the day's direct experiences in written and visual ways.

Trouble Back Home

Of course, those are the high points, and Lucas exists in a universe that tends to seek balance. On conference night, police haul knife-wielding gang members from a fight in the parking lot. After a visit to hear an artist talk at a downtown gallery, my fourth grade companion points out the bullet holes in her house where a drive-by shooting killed a young man. on the playground while jumping rope, a first grader recounts the gunshot experiences that resulted in her sleeping in the bathtub. I've held more babies of girls only three short years out of elementary school than I want to admit in writing.

We have children beaten, ignored, ill-fed, ill-housed yet loved. We also have students whose greatest misfortune is to be the classmates of such mistreated children. Their own, less brutal but ever so meaningful stories may never be heard or witnessed, their life struggles never acknowledged.

Art from Life

The legacy of humans doing art is about making meaning. It's about sorting out, coming to grips with or even celebrating the things the world is built on -- life's experiences, tricks, pleasures, and mysteries. Shouldn't the artroom provide an environment fertile enough for the aesthetically sensitive, intuitive students in the world that we all are? For so many the traditional classroom holds no joy or knowing. An artroom should be a safe place for ideas, questions, feelings, bodies, and risk-taking! Curriculum Based Art Education is about art from children. CBAE results in images and stories that matter, that have life because they are about life.

Last winter, I read children's literature on Saturday mornings in a local coffee house. I invited children and adults to create images in response. I read Allen Say's book, Grandfather's Journey, about a Japanese grandfather who loves Japan and the West Coast of this country. He misses the one place as soon as he travels to the other.

Jessica Bowden listened as her mother signed the story for Jessica's grandmother who is deaf. After the reading, the invitation I made was to create an image of a place you love and miss when you're away from it. On her paper, four year old Jessica traced her own hand and her mother's hand, used to speak to her grandmother in sign language. Last, she outlined her grandmother's hand explaining, "I made this because the place I like to be is together."

This is artwork that matters. This is a drawing that is alive and this is a child who is heard.