I got to be a small part of an interesting project on my last day at Advanced Learning Academy. One of my colleagues, Dan Mallette, teaches a class for the high school students called, “Global Changemakers.” Inspired by the World Art Drop Day in which the Southwest School of Art participates annually, Dan tasked his students to each create two works of art based on the Sustainable Development Goals each student had chosen to study. About a week before Art Drop Day, they started advertising #alaartdropday on our web announcements, and encouraged the school community to follow the Instagram account for our makerspace/studio (@studiozorro). On the day of the Art Drop, I was able to accompany a couple of the groups of students as they took their pieces of art to different spots around campus to “hide” them. Once a student found the perfect spot for his/her art, we took a picture of it in its location, trying to include a couple of clues to its surroundings, and posted the picture of the artwork on Instagram with the #alaartdropday tag. Any student or teacher who was interested in one of the masterpieces could try to find it based on the clues in the Instagram picture, and claim it as their own.
The students had a great time hiding their artwork (one piece ended up on the railing inside the elevator). It was the perfect activity for the last day before Winter Break – allowing the students to get out of the classrooms and to come up with devious ways to camouflage their pieces while leaving them in plain sight. A couple of staff members I ran into were excited about trying to find particular artworks that spoke to them that they hoped to display in their classrooms.
Finding a way to give students a larger audience than just the teacher and their classmates can be challenging. This was a unique way to achieve that goal, and I hope that it will become an annual tradition at the school.
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