In the Art Room with Preform Students

My apologies for the long break in between posts—it’s been a busy and sort of crazy few weeks.  I wanted this next post to be a sort of “overview” of my daily schedule at Sega so I was waiting, hoping I would settle into a routine.  But, I can’t really say that I have a set daily or even weekly schedule—things come up last minute a lot and there is constantly something new.  Instead I decided I would talk about the thing I most enjoy here—teaching art to the preform girls.

Before I get started, I should probably explain a little bit about how the Tanzanian school system works and where the girls I teach lie in this.  First is seven years of primary school, which is taught in Swahili, divided up into what are called “standards”, and is mandatory for all children in Tanzania.  Because it’s mandatory, girls don’t usually drop out until secondary school, which is where Sega comes in.  Although Sega is technically a secondary school, girls are selected during their Standard 6 year based upon how likely it is that they might drop out once they reach secondary.  They arrive at Sega at the end of their Standard 6 year and take all of Standard 7 at Sega which helps them get adjusted to Sega but also ensures there isn’t a gap between the time they stop primary and start secondary school.  At the end of Standard 7, all students take a national exam which they need to pass to get into secondary school.  This exam is taken in September and, usually, primary school students have a break until the next January when they return to school. Secondary school is 6 years total, divided into what is called “forms”, and is split into O-Levels (Form 1-4) and A-Levels (Form 5 & 6).  Sega is an O-Level secondary school so (not including the primary school girls) there are students from Forms 1-4.

The Preform students (the ones that I am teaching) are girls that already took their Standard 7 exam but are waiting for their national exam results.  Because secondary school is taught in entirely in English, Sega uses these few months for an English-intensive program which is mostly taught by me and the other U.S. volunteers.  This is both good and bad.  Since most of us speak very little Swahili, they’ve definitely been completely immersed in English.  However, there’s no curriculum for these girls, a lot of them are at very different levels as far as their English, and they don’t really have any exams to study for so they can be pretty undisciplined.   It’s been a challenge for a lot of us.  

Although I had taught a lot of craft classes via girl scouts throughout middle and high school, teaching art to 31 34 middle school aged girls who don’t really speak the same language has been… well it has been a lot of what you would probably call “trial-and-error” teaching.  This basically means that I have been figuring out how to explain things using mostly gestures, what skill level they are at, and how to manage supplies.  It’s also a lot of remembering that these girls have really never had any art classes and probably have had really limited access to supplies.

It can be stressful, but it’s also really rewarding.  The girls do some really good work and many of them seem to really enjoy it.  Some things work better than others and it’s always sort of a surprise as to what works and what doesn’t.  Here are a few of the projects we’ve worked on:

Learning about primary, secondary, warm, and cool colors.

This was a really messy first project, but definitely fun.  We put different primary colored acrylic paints on each of our hands and then rubbed them together to learn about mixing primary colors to make secondary colors.  Also I had two visitors from the U.S. who came to help out in the class which was pretty cool.  I think they enjoyed the class and they took some pretty incredible pictures (some of which I already posted to Facebook, but here they are again).

As for warm and cool colors, the girls traced their hands and drew lines through them, breaking them into geometric shapes.  The object of the lesson was to do warm colors inside the hand and cool colors on the background, butttt that kind of got lost in translation and they just ended up painting them all different colors.    They still turned out pretty nice and they look really good hung up all together, in my opinion at least.

Learning about Value, Highlights, and Shading

This one was definitely tougher to explain with the language barrier, but I do think they turned out really nicely and they look pretty neat.  I also think that the girls got it by the end and I have seen some of them apply the things we talked about in this project to later projects.  Basically, I had premade sheets with different 3D shapes and they used colored pencils to shade their shapes depending upon the light source.  Then they used black sharpie to create a pattern in the background and pencil to create shadows on the background once they pasted on their shapes.  They turned out sort of like “op-art” and, again, looked pretty good all hung up together. 

“Stained Glass” Flowers

For this I was really just trying to figure out a way to re-use toilet paper tubes.  This was definitely pretty tough for them and probably too complicated of a project, but I still think it turned out okay.  I had the girls draw a series of geometric shapes onto tracing paper in colored markers and then trace them with black sharpie.  I had cut and put together all of the cardboard tube flowers earlier that week, so the girls just had to trace around the flower, cut them out, and then we taped them together.  Taping was definitely a challenge and required me to help everybody individually which is always problematic with such a big class.  I think they look cool, but maybe better suited for a Pinterest-y DIY preject than for an art class.  You live and learn.

 

Figure Drawing

In our most recent class we practiced figure drawing.  Again, not an easy concept to describe to the girls.  Despite that, they really enjoyed the lesson.  I think their favorite part was getting to be “models” for the rest of the class.  We had 8 different models come up and I gave them about five or six minutes to draw each person.  They didn’t really get it at first, but I stressed that you focus on drawing the general pose or position of the person and not on the details and they seemed to catch on by the end.  

Student modelling for figure drawing practice.

Despite the challenges, I really do enjoy teaching these girls and I do enjoy teaching art.

Until next time,

Carolyn