Make a place to sit down.

Wendell Berry tells us in poem ‘ How to Be a Poet’ to : ‘Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.’This is about listening; listening to the quiet. Classroom management is about listening to the quiet space between student action and student learning. Now, you might have already enlisted biases about how the art room looks different and that students need to talk to one another. I agree. Students do need to talk with one another about their art/art making and the art room does look different. The quiet is about routines, relationship, safe environment, consistent kindness and intentional adult action. All of which when in place instructional practices can and do thrive;conversely without routines, relationship, safe environment, consistent kindness and intentional adult action the very best resources, units and planning fall flat. 

Classroom management is a deep layer with in the strata of the studio classroom. It can and does look different with every teacher. And every teacher at some point in their day or week struggles with management of behaviors of the human beings they are charged with educating in visual arts practices. So, think about it. How are the routines going in your classroom? Do you have some? Are there consistent predicable things you do with your students? Do you have systems in place that ensure the safety of all students all the time? As the adult in the room, how do you follow up on those systems when a student/s are or become unsafe or off task?

In my studio classroom we have agreements. Agreements look like rules the difference is we all generated the pieces that we felt made artists and art making meaningful as well as doable within our studio classroom. So the change is that the students created the agreements instead of the ‘rules’ coming from the teachers(me) through group activity. The students decided what they felt was important about ‘what arts do…’ and ‘what art is…’; then individually made choices about what was important. In the ‘individual step’ each student from 2nd -6th grade completed some form of the following sentence: I agree to _________ and ____________ so that I can _________________ in our creative learning environment. Then we moved from the individual back to the collective by sharing with two thought partners (other students). For 1st grade we generated what artists do… and what is art… then each student shared with two thought partners (other students) what they felt they could do to be an artist and do art. The agreements are posted in our classroom on chart paper as a reminder; the sentences are in the student journals. The purpose in doing this is to create a collaborative and collective responsibility for the function of the daily environment in the studio classroom. 

Classroom management must be cultivated and attended to. Management is woven into instructional practices. There is not one without the other; to ensure student success in the visual arts we consistently must ‘make a place’ for the ‘quiet’ in the space between management and instructional practice.

How to Be a Poet

By Wendell Berry

(to remind myself)

i

Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill—more of each
than you have—inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your poems,
doubt their judgment.

ii

Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.

iii

Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.

Source: Poetry (Poetry)