120 TEACHERs COLLEGE COLUmbIA UNIvERsITy
Drawing: A matter of Life and Death?
simply using art to illustrate math and language arts
concepts. This has been a complex and challenging
task, full of unexpected twists, turns and oppor-
tunities. Students, when prompted, easily see the
connections. They notice acute and obtuse angles,
for example, or apply their knowledge of scalene,
isosceles, equilateral or right triangles, to help them
draw a butterfly’s wings more accurately. (Figure
1) In this case, they are using math to help them
draw better: the core subject is at the service of the
arts. One student, Bazeed, said at the end of fourth
grade, “I had art before, but Studio in a School is
really different... I never realized before how art
was not just making things, but about learning and
understanding stuff. Not just about art, but science
and social studies and math and ELA. How every-
thing is connected.”
Making visible the specific character and sub-
stance of those connections is at the heart of our
work as artists and art educators. By literally “draw-
ing” those connections for themselves, students
take ownership of their education, assimilating core
subject knowledge into a bigger, integrated under-
standing of the real world. Along the way, they
learn to “draw” out their own internal ideas and
feelings, giving them material form, and thereby
seeing it more clearly, through what Barbara Tver-
sky describes as a “tool for thought” (2011). For
example, one of our units involved creating a myth-
ological creature based on a self portrait drawn
from observation. They then wrote a story about
their super hero. One girl, (living in a shelter with
her mother) drew a portrait of an invisible girl, with
tears running down her face. Her story was about
how it was now time for this girl “to shine her light,
to let everyone know what she could do.” (Figure 3)
Quantitative data is visible everywhere in this
school. Attendance percentages decorate the hall-
ways. Charts with test scores, broken down in
seemingly infinite detail, line the resource room.
We know our program is beginning to have an
impact: with three treatment schools and three
control schools involved we are starting to see the
measurable results administrators and government
officials look for. How do we measure the quality
of attention, the deep, sustained engagement seen
in the classroom as students have the opportunity
to make the deep connections, not just across dis-
ciplines, but within their own personal sense of
themselves? What is the value of a practice which
integrates the work of their hearts, hands andFigure 2.
Figure 3.
Figure 4.