by Matt Cauthon
Twenty years ago
while completing my BA in studio art, I attended a presentation by a speaker
who said that the artist’s role should be one of more active leadership within
his or her own community, not so tucked away and reclusive. At the time I found
this slightly disturbing, especially since my life’s calling at the time was to
spend a career pulling a Rauschenberg or Johns, eternally blissful in the
studio.
Twenty years
later, fifteen as a secondary arts educator, I now have a deeper understanding
of what that speaker was trying to communicate to us UC Santa Cruz pre-pixel
Banana Slugs. Through a variety of media arts tools, we now have the ability
to offer students greater access to the creative process and an incredibly
wider connection to our local and global communities. With this in mind,
I’d like to share a collection of global arts challenges that have developed
under the umbrella of a collaborative we call The Student Creative (TSC).
The Student Creative
Through TSC we invite
secondary students from around the globe to collaborate on challenges based on
common themes. TSC came about while I was working on
the Challenge Based Learning (CBL) framework in Cupertino with Apple and in
response to Sir Ken Robinson’s well-known 2006 TED Talk, How Schools Kill
Creativity. Since Apple Education was asking our team of educators from
across the country to come up with something new, different, and personalized,
I figured that I should apply the same principles to my own curriculum and “challenge”
my students in the digital arts. This prompted a serious effort to reach out to
my local community and far beyond.
A Brief History
After many
trans-continental tweets and a Skype session or two with University of Florida
professor Craig Roland, I had some direction and connected with another digital
arts educator, David Gran (who writes SchoolArts’
column @R+), who was utilizing the same resources and blog template, as I.
Initially intriguing was that he was teaching at the Shanghai American School
in China. As far as I knew, pen pals had long ago disappeared, but the ability
to connect classrooms was even more real then it had ever been before. The fact
that it could happen might just have been reason enough to make it
happen.
We initially
developed Paint the World with Light,
a common project that we felt interesting enough for other educators; wrangled
in a worthy advisor, Mike Skocko of the Mac Lab at Valhalla High School in Southern
California; and pursued our passion to connect others through our own and
combined professional networks. At the
end of the project, we published the collection of student works in print and
for the iPad with the proceeds benefiting the Jacaranda Foundation in Malawi.
Our
project sprouted wings and we saw it hit NPR’s photography blog, The Picture
Show. Even as grown men, we seriously geeked out on the email requesting
student work from such a prestigious site. Ego (and geek) aside, the big idea was always to showcase the
creativity in schools and connect imagery through a common denominator. Our mission was playing out.
The Challenges
Each project and
each year has proved to be interesting as we’ve shared and discussed ideas
through far too many emails. Like a snowball slowly gaining momentum
down a five-year hill, we have seen some amazing student work occur from
multiple countries and from several continents. If you look into the books
published under TSC on Blurb.com, you’ll find many exciting images created by teens that are both
inspirational stand-alone-on-the coffee-table-worthy and solid supplemental
curricular material. As TSC, we continue to create challenges that are not just
“one trick ponies,” but ones that will live on in a teacher’s tool kit and
excite creativity on a regular basis.
You can see results of our first project in the April 2014 issue of SchoolArts Magazine, in Light Painting by Kendra Farrell.
Matt Cauthron is an Apple Distinguished Educator,
Adobe Education Leader, and ISTE Outstanding Teacher from the Digital Arts
Technology Academy near Palm Springs, California. Connect with him on Twitter @imagemonki, learn more about
his program at or catch his 2014 NAEA Super Session at 1pm on Sunday, March 30th in
San Diego! mcauthon@psusd.us
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