Arts in The NEK

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Created on Thursday, 12 May 2016 14:03

Written by Tim Laroche

AROUND THE NEK - The art room at the Lyndon Town School is messy and disheveled after a group of students file out.

At the counter near the back left corner of the room, a copy of the Caledonian-Record is splayed out, covered in all sorts of paints and glue. A bucket of dirty rinse water for paintbrushes sits next to a sink, in which there is a water bottle for drinking and a spray bottle for cleaning the tables.

 On the wall behind a nearby desk, a corkboard is covered in pieces of construction paper with classroom rules written on them. They are all placed at odd diagonals from one another – even the rules are multicolored here.

A black-and-white paper cube hangs from a string on the ceiling in the middle of the room. The smoke detector occupies it’s own space a few feet away. The ceiling is the only sparse section of the room, as bits of cut construction paper sit in heaps on the tables, and a few stray pieces found their way to the floor.

All around, red, orange and yellow cutouts seem to blanket every surface. At the front of the room, near a projector, these materials are fully assembled into a mask. Such was the subject of today’s lesson for the kindergarteners of Julie Clements’ art class.

“This year for example, I’ve been doing a theme and a medium,” Clements said. “We’ve all been doing African masks, we’re all doing paper collage, a cut color paper collage.”

Clements teaches visual arts at Lyndon Town School in Lyndon, which enrolls more than 500 students. During a recent interview just after noon on a Friday with Clements at LTS’s art room, she explained that she would normally be taking a short break to eat lunch and clean the room at this hour.

Soon, another group of students is scheduled to march into the room and begin their lesson. Again, the subject of this lesson would be the creation of African masks, but the expectations for the project would be different.

“I’ve been scaffolding the expectations of what they are actually going to do or able to do with the project,” Clements said. “For the kindergarteners and first graders and preschoolers, I’ve cut out oval shapes for them and gave them the paper. The second graders had to cut out their own designs – and so I talk more about the actual shapes and designs of the masks. And then the third and fourth graders are working on a larger scale and so they get more choice of what they want for colors and materials. And we talk more about why Africans used masks and what the use was and what they meant.”

Clements says she picks a theme for her classes each year, and all of her students in all of her grade levels – she is the sole art teacher for every grade at LTS – talk about the same sort of topics. For her thematic approach to African masks, she says that she chose the topic because LTS would host a guest performer to speak about tribal dancing later in the school year.

Just a few miles away from LTS though, in the nearby town of Burke, art education is looks very different. Carol Mason has been teaching visual arts at the Burke Town School since 1996. BTS, which enrolls 204 students, – less than half that of LTS – falls behind many of the current trends in art education.

“I use the old fashioned method of having kids gather around a table, no matter how many kids there may be,” Mason said. “I use the old thing with the camera that projects, which is harder. I use lots of resources, whether it’s the old fashioned photocopied ideas, or nowadays it’s the computer. So, I guess, with those two, that’s mainly how I teach everything.”

Unlike Clements – who is new to LTS – Mason is a part-time teacher. And she says she doesn’t receive enough money from the school to run her classes. She spends $500 of her own money each year just on supplies, she says.

Unlike the larger LTS, which has its own kiln and 3D printer, funding is low for BTS. But even Mason considers her lucky in the amount of support she receives from the school compared to many other art programs in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont.