Last month’s excellent Lower School Music Department production, Trickster Tales, brought to my mind the writings of the great philosopher and transcendentalist, Henry David Thoreau. I will admit that as a native New Englander and neighbor to Walden Pond, his ethic on many topics was thrust upon my psyche, but as I found my vocation as a teacher, his views on education resonated with truth.

 

“What does education often do?” he pontificated. “It makes a straight-cut ditch out of a meandering brook.” Trickster Tales was by no means a straight-cut ditch. It was an innovative collective of Fourth and Fifth grade students’ minds and hearts, engaging them to adapt literature, write music, create shadow puppets, and perform an original production of their own, where they took on both the roles of leadership and ensemble identity.

 

Delightfully global in perspective, this production celebrated four stories from around the world, which the students adapted to a script format with the mentoring instruction of teachers Alicia Knox, Nora Golden, and our fantastic student teacher, Jackie Newman. Says Knox of the undertaking: “We were looking for a performance project that would create an opportunity for students to take some ownership of their work. When students feel that they are the authors and creators, they are more invested. We also wanted it to feel as “real world” as possible.

 

Instead of just signing up for a task, we had them fill out a job application, complete with reasons why they wanted to work on this team, and what strengths they felt they would bring to the project. The work of putting all the pieces together was a powerful lesson in collaboration.

 

The design teams took the lead on their individual areas, but every student had to make decisions and compromises once the show was in rehearsal. With so many moving parts, everyone had to be focused and engaged.” In looking at the project as a whole, Golden says, “There is no finer way to synthesize what they’ve learned over five years in Lower School music.”

 

I left the theater thinking that this had all the attributes of a solid experience in clearly defined yet innovative Arts Education. There was textual analysis, cross-curricular exploration of where and how music tells stories as well as words, and the tactile creation of puppets, which lent a linear and visual reality to the concepts presented.

 

What is more, the students did this on their own with the careful guidance of their teachers who knew when to tailor advice and suggest changes; however, they did so without allowing it to become an adult project of rote presentation by children. Thoreau would have been proud. At Colorado Academy we are unapologetic proponents of 21st century learning skills, individualized instruction, and of students learning to work as an ensemble while sculpting a voice that will define them as creative young artists and as citizens of the world. That voice was loud and clear in Trickster Tales. Our children are open and enlightened creatures, and we would do well to learn from them. As written in Walden, “The universe is wider than our views of it.”