Last year, Little Black Pearl, a community arts center in Hyde Park launched a charter school called the Options Laboratory, offering an arts and technology-based curriculum for young folks that have had trouble succeeding in traditional educational environments. They are also running a series of after-school programs, including a poetry class and a woodshop experience. Meshed together, under the auspices of a grant won by local arts education non-profit Urban Gateways, the program was named WordsWood. On Thursday afternoons, a crew of nine young men would be studying poetry with local writer Avery Young, and on Fridays, they would be working on designing and building some chairs with me.
I started out the curriculum with a simple exercise: measuring our own bodies and a bunch of different chairs. The idea was to engage the students in realizing that there are reasons behind the way things are in the world, on a meta-level -- why chairs are the height they are, why they are the width they are, why doorknobs are the size they are, etc. -- and work on the practical skills of reading a tape measure, making readable sketches, and translating real-world data into a visual form. We discussed different kinds of drawings -- elevations, plans, and sections, and got familiar with the dimensions of our world.
I started out the curriculum with a simple exercise: measuring our own bodies and a bunch of different chairs. The idea was to engage the students in realizing that there are reasons behind the way things are in the world, on a meta-level -- why chairs are the height they are, why they are the width they are, why doorknobs are the size they are, etc. -- and work on the practical skills of reading a tape measure, making readable sketches, and translating real-world data into a visual form. We discussed different kinds of drawings -- elevations, plans, and sections, and got familiar with the dimensions of our world.
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| The modern wing of Little Black Pearl arts center. |
