My students need art materials, such as enamel, paint and paste, to complete an indepth unit on the folk art and craft traditions of Mexico.
$566 goal
This project expired on July 10, 2011.
This project expired on July 10, 2011.
Celebrating Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month
This project is a part of the Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month celebration because
it supports a Latino teacher or a school where the majority of students are Latino.
The rich folk art and crafts tradition in Mexico is colorful, exciting and full of unique symbolic images. What better way to teach the basic principles of sculpture than to have the students explore armature making and bas relief through Mexican folk art traditions.
My students live in a large, urban and culturally diverse city in New Jersey.
Our high school has 2300 students from Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and South and Central America, and the Caribbean. Many of them are first generation who come to this country with limited or no English. Forty percent of our population come from a Spanish speaking cultures, and the rest of the population is comprised of Arabic, Urdu, Hindi and Chinese speaking students.
Most of my students work after school to help support their families or watch younger siblings after school so their parents can work into the night. Because most of these students come to us with large economic disadvantages, basic supplies cannot be brought in from home.
My Project
I struggled my first two years of teaching sculpture class trying to get the students fully engaged in the basic principles of sculpture that they found boring. Then after a trip to Mexico I had the idea of teaching those basic sculpture principles not through Western Masters, but through a folk art tradition my students recognized, or found visually and symbolically exciting. So I came back in the fall and introduced the lesson of The Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) to teach armature constructions and Milagros making to teach bas relief concepts to my students. Boy were they excited!
With the art materials (tooling, stovepipe wire, paint, cotton, etc) being requested, students will create a basic figurative wire armature illustrating proportion and movement. Next they coat the armature with aluminum foil and then 3 coats of papier-mache. Then they decorate the figure by creating a character. When teaching the tin Milagros, I explain to the students the purpose of their creation and students create tin reliefs to create a stylized heart symbol.
This project is essential because I fully believe that we must engage are young adults by any means necessary.
In this unit, the principles of sculpture are taught, although not traditionally, but the students come away with a thorough understanding. They also create a beautiful work of art that is exhibited at our annual Multicultural festival held in May. In this event 30 cultures perform traditional dances, eat ethnically diverse food and share crafts and costumes from their culture.
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