Drawn Together Through Visual Practice

by Brandy Agerbeck

  Sam Bradd

  STINA BROWN enjoys spending most of her time reading, listening to music, sketching, writing, walking and in silent contemplation. Silence has so much to teach us. Sometimes she works with groups who want to take a quantum leap.

  Stina is an artist who listens to her life, her clients, the present moment and the future. She designs and leads processes to create new shared awareness, expression, trust, vision and strategic plans. Stina also enjoys the role of “Artist in Residence” on longer retreats and prioritizes projects that enable the healing of humans’ relationship with Nature and each other. Through visual facilitation and teaching, Stina invests in people and the planet with local and international clients. Stina lives in Vancouver, BC Canada and is Super Auntie to six amazing kids. www.stinabrown.com stina@stinabrown.com

  Creative Commons (CC) license Attribution

  References

  For more information on the Climate Justice Project, see:

  www.policyalternatives.ca/projects/climate-justice-project. For information on teaching about climate justice, see: teachclimatejustice.ca

  Big Think.com: bigthink.com/risk-reason-and-reality/climate-change-and-emotions-how-we-feel-matters-more-than-what-we-know

  bigthink.com/users/davidropeik

  David Suzuki Foundation: www.davidsuzuki.org/blogs/docs-talk/2012/01/coping-with-climate-change-is-a-family-matter/

  Sharing a Dia Experience

  Claudia Madrazo

  How can we create a space in which reflection emerges?

  How does deep listening happen?

  How do we learn to inquire about our own perceptions and thoughts?

  How do we connect our own and others’ learning experiences in order to make sense of the world together?

  dia® (Development of Intelligence through Art) is essentially a methodology and a learning process that uses works of art to catalyze ideas, encourage reflection, and promote free thought and discussion on important issues related to students’ personal life experiences and large-scale, global challenges.

  Centered on the power of dialog around a work of Art, dia helps to build a sense of connectivity between students and teachers, children and parents. In fact, the dia programs and methodology have an impact on all of the participants, building mutual understanding across different levels and kinds of relationships. dia transforms teachers from their unilateral and “downloading content” habits to a more emotionally engaged partnership of mutual learning and development.

  Over the past 18 years, the dia program has been taught to more than 40,000 teachers in Mexican public and private schools, and has benefitted more than 800,000 students in different contexts, along a continuous process of practice, investigation, and systematization. Over these years dia has evolved from being a “structured” educational program to a much more holistic and dynamic methodology of innovative learning for personal and social development. Even though the program was initially designed for children and teachers, it has now expanded to adults, and specifically to serving underprivileged sectors—prisons, psychiatric hospitals, Indigenous communities, and parents.

  Students and their teachers connecting through an inquiry into art

  Teachers in Mexico learning the dia methodology

  Claudia Madrazo • Sharing a Dia Experience

  La Vaca Independiente, the company that created and developed the dia program, (named after a painting by Mexican artist Abel Quezada), was born in 1992 out of my dual passion for art and education. The vision of the organization was to integrate art into every day life as vehicle for personal development. Early in our history we created the dia program, with the intention to inspire educators to transform their teaching practices. Based on the research of Abigail Housen and contributions by David Perkins, dia grew out of the New York Museum of Modern Art’s Visual Thinking Curriculum, (VTC) which promotes student-teacher partnership through the learning process in various New York City schools. With this inspiration dia was born to helps develop a broad set of skills in students and transforms classrooms at every level within a school.

  In each program session, teachers guide students through a conversation about what is evoked through viewing the artwork, encouraging students and participants to share personal perceptions of the image. Through this process they learn to think about their opinions, to offer logical arguments and emotionally persuasive stories, and to apply their conclusions to personal experiences. dia facilitators are not specialists in art, but full-time teachers who interact with their students daily. The major outcome for students and participants is the development of communicative, cognitive, emotional, and social skills.

  Through this exploration with art, participants discover their own voices and share their perceptions, learning to make sense of the world with each other through the practice of listening, understanding, and sharing. The process is about awakening an inner awareness that drives individuals to act with intentionality and gain a sense of purpose and a feeling that they are valued.

  The methodology can be adapted to meet the needs of different groups and contexts outside the traditional classroom and serve as a vehicle for cultural transformation.

  dia methodologies and tools can be applied in a variety of contexts, enhancing team building, organizational development, and systems change.

  The art of creating safe spaces for collective intelligence, deep inquiry, and self and social development is at the core of dia innovative learning programs. The methodology offers a set of didactic principles that structure the sessions to guide the process, encouraging people into a space of conversation and community and into circles of deep confidence and understanding.

  In activating the potential of the visual image we use five pedagogical principles to guide and structure the facilitated process:

  Orient: to create a safe space

  Generate: to ask questions and activate the mind

  Recapture: to connect and knit all participants’ ideas together

  Motivate: to bring trust to the space and to every participant

  Close and transcend: to expand understanding into everyday life

  Mediators—or facilitators—either use the collections curated by dia or select inspiring works of art, paintings, or photographs for their classes or sessions based on the work’s ability to be widely discussed and interpreted.

  To get a better sense of a dia class in action, we invite you to activate your imagination and be transported to a slum neighborhood in Mexico City.

  Our lesson today begins in a CAM—a “Multiple Attention Centre” for children with serious mental and developmental disabilities. This school has been working with the dia methodology for more than 15 years. Gaby, the teacher, is now performing dia kaleidoscope, a program focused on art history and culture awareness, where the exploration includes inquiring about the context, the techniques, and the creative process. Questions are the main tool used to generate thinking and reflection, to pull out what everyone knows and imagines.

  A teacher guiding students through a conversation about a piece of artwork

  Claudia Madrazo • Sharing a Dia Experience

  Orient

  Gaby calls a group of 16 or so 14-year-old youth to start the class following recess, inviting them to start the session by performing a physical activity that enables them to bring their attention to the present moment, feel their body, name their emotions, and be connected to themselves.

  She then asks them to enact the position of a tree and first models how to do it. The tree is an exercise to develop self-regulation and physical balance. All students stand still and begin to perform the tree.

  After completing the task, she asks the children to reflect on their own emotions and feelings. Whenever a child says, “I feel o
kay,” she insists that they be more specific and go deeper to connect with their physical sensations and to share a word that more precisely describes their feelings.

  Then Gaby requests that students remember and share “the rules of the game” out loud as these are the keys to keeping an organized and safe space. “Look with attention, respect others’ ideas, honor silence, and speak your ideas out loud,” she tells the group with enthusiasm.

  Generate

  After the orientation practice, Gaby asks them to attentively observe the work of art, a photograph from the Altamira Caves. “What do you see? What is happening here?” The scene shows several stamped red hands on the stone wall of a cave.

  “They are cavemen,” “Hunters,” “The hands are painted.” The children express what they see, and each of them waits for the other to finish their ideas and listens to each other’s expressions (two essential rules of the game).

  Recapture

  Gaby continues the learning by connecting the ideas, creating and narrating a story in which each child’s comment is included; she integrates and makes sense with every piece the students have given her, retaining the depth and richness of the comments.

  Sensemaking is emerging.

  She then asks: “Why do you think they created these hand paintings?”

  “So we can see in the future how they lived in the past,” says one child. Another comments, “They wanted to show us what they hunt.”

  And Gaby continues, “How do you think they created the painting?” inviting the children to search their minds while engendering trust in the participants and the whole space.

  They answer “They painted it with the blood of the animals they were killing!” “They use their hands as templates.”

  The children are placed in small groups; Gaby goes to each of them, and she listens closely as they share.

  “So we could know these animals existed before us – now they are extinct,” quietly says a child. Another says, “They had to use their hands to hunt them...”

  “Wow! That’s a phenomenal idea,” Gaby says.

  Motivate

  The generation of knowledge kicks into action and the children start naming the diversity of painting techniques inferred from the picture. They re-create with their own bodies the way they imagine the cave people created their images.

  A student experiments with a process he imagines was used for hand markings in the Altamira Caves

  Claudia Madrazo • Sharing a Dia Experience

  Gaby listens. She loves them, and she comes closer. She takes time with each child. She is there, fully present. She is not just connecting their phrases, but connecting with their hearts. She is expanding the field of love and attention.

  Close and Transcend

  In order to close and transcend, Gaby invites the children to paint something they would like someone in the future to see, just as they are seeing the paintings of the cave people. Suddenly a girl raises her hand (another rule of the game) and tells everybody: “I am going to paint the kaleidoscope class, so in the future other people can see how we sat together in conversation to unravel how we saw the past.”

  All of the children open their eyes and listen to the girl with their whole bodies, and stay a little while with what they just heard, reflecting on and understanding for themselves what she said.

  Gaby’s smile illuminates them, she breathes, and she knows something important was understood. She holds the space, stays quiet, and gives the children time to think and reflect—to rest their thoughts on their own works of art.

  In Summary

  The art of mediating in education is a profound approach that helps students connect with their own passion for learning, as opposed to the traditional method where the teacher is a unilateral transmitter of knowledge and the students are passive learners. They also connect with each other at a deeper level and make sense of what it means to be human and interact within the community and the environment.

  Sensemaking or making sense of the world requires a mental process that we can divide into three moments: perception, thinking, and expression. Perception is the moment that connects us to the outside world through our senses; it is the capacity to absorb, connect, and grasp the world around us. The process of thinking occurs when we reflect on what we are perceiving, and analyze our experience; expression is the interface where we communicate and share with others what we have been thinking and understanding.

  Through the dia process we are continuously engaging the mind in these three moments of the mental act, individually and collectively, so that we become—through this journey—aware of how, and what, we perceive and how to express ourselves. Most profoundly we realize that making sense of the world is not only an individual quest, but a collective endeavor.

  Claudia Madrazo was born into a family of educators and has had a lifelong interest in learning, with specific inquiry into the relationship of art, nature, and integral education for the development of human consciousness, social awareness, and social change.

  Claudia has a degree in Communications and Mass Media from Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City, and a Master’s in Museology and Semiology of Cultural Objects from Essex University in the UK. She is the author of nine books, as well as numerous essays and articles. She has founded and participated in different NGOs including La Vaca Independiente®, dia®, Fundación TAE®, and the Academy for Systemic Change—an initiative to enable leaders, communities, and networks in critical systems to catalyze and facilitate societal, environmental, and economic well- being on a scale that matters. www.claudiamadrazo.com

  Embodied

  Mark-Making

  The Big Brush experience

  Barbara Bash

  Two hundred people sit on chairs lining the sides of a large room. In the center of the space lengths of white paper stretch down the floor, buckets of ink with large bamboo-handled brushes are placed near the cushioned seats, a round rock rests on each corner of the large sheets of paper. Everything is ready.

  This is the setup for the Big Brush practice I have been guiding over the years. Corporate bankers and consultants, coaches and recovering mental health patients, Buddhist practitioners, students and even children have all participated. What will unfold is an experience of natural order, learning how to begin an action, how to follow through, how to complete. Being held by this form, a fresh beauty shows up in the marks people make. What comes forth is good, worthwhile, and insightful. In this group setting the Big Brush practice joins individual embodied mark making with community art expression.

  Getting ready for a Big Brush session, my preparation is focused and intense. I feel like I’m setting the table for a huge feast, every object placed exactly. Beginning with a clean, clear, uplifted environment opens and invites in the nourishment and unpredictable nature of the creative act.

  The seeds of this practice began with my meeting Chogyam Trungpa, a Tibetan Buddhist meditation teacher, in the early 1970s. I had been working for a number of years as a western calligrapher, bringing my love of the alphabet and the scripts of the Middle Ages into contemporary graphic design, bookmaking, and calligraphic commissions. I was involved in the precision, delicacy, and intense focus of the calligraphic form, but something inside was longing to take more risks and be bold. In 1978 I attended a talk by Trungpa at Naropa University in Colorado on Dharma Art. He described Dharma Art as coming from non-aggression and well-being rather than neurosis. He said the work of a dharmic artist expressed sanity and a settled state of mind, and that living an artistic life was a fundamentally human act, available to all. Then he said, “It’s possible to make a brush stroke that expresses your whole life.”

  Barbara Bash • Embodied Mark-Making

  I sat in the middle of the crowd taking in these words, letting them land
inside — “This means a really big brushstroke,” I thought to myself. Looking back on this moment I recognize my inner teacher guiding me towards working larger, looser, involving the whole body as a counterbalance and enrichment to my precision. Over the next 10 years the Big Brush

  practice became my vehicle for taking more risks and getting grounded in my body. It also brought with it the companionship and delight of community art making.

  Here is how it works:

  Participants come up (four at a time or more depending on the size of the group) and kneel on the cushions. I introduce the principles of heaven, earth, and human as the form that we will be following in the making of our abstract strokes. Trungpa had presented these ancient Asian principles in a fresh, up-to-date, and universal way. This will be the essential structure that will hold us through the process and give our strokes strength and integrity.

  To begin I ask everyone seated to bow together. A simple bow brings one into the present and bowing together is a collective act. Then each person enters the solo space of making a stroke. When everyone is finished with their strokes all bow together again as a marking of completion and a return to the larger group awareness. The strokes are then folded up, set aside, and a new sheet laid down for the next person. A new group comes up and the sequence continues.

  The folding up of the strokes developed out of a logistical need to contain and manage so much wet ink, but this letting go has become a powerful teaching in itself, offering the experience of not holding on to the results of our actions. There are always more brushstrokes ready to be born. It is possible to trust this endless creative energy available to us all.