The previous chapters outline a general view of the conceptual and contextual issues that I engage throughout this project. In my exploration of the ways in which Meg’s artistic work exists in tension with the organization of schooling, I have also thought deeply about my own artistic work and the tensions that emerged as I attempted to articulate that artistic work to the organization of my own schooling. As a result, part of this story is what researching as an artist means, when the performance of a research artist’s work comes into tension with organization of the ways in which writing, research, and schooling are frequentlyconducted. I crafted the method for this project, which I describe in this chapter, in order to both study a phenomenon and to engage in the phenomenon as it developed. Research is craftwork. Like hand-crafts, research has potential as both art (something produced) and aesthetic (something appreciated). Like hand-crafts, qualitative research, in particular, often reveals the ways in which hands and material come together in order to shape something; ideally, that “something” is both useful and beautiful. Frequently, the “something” produced through research is both a troublesome product and one which betrays the humanness and precarity of the whole enterprise. Like hand-crafts, qualitative research is a media with rich communicative possibilities.
I began this project curious about the tensions that emerged as the performance of Meg’s work became articulated to the organization of schooling at both the Penland
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School of Crafts and the Mitchell County Schools. I believed her work to be a bridge between these two organizations which, despite proximal geography in rural western North Carolina, seemed to share little aesthetic, economic, or cultural space. I perceived that Meg worked as a kind of aesthetic, economic, and cultural liaison between these organizations and the community. By asking what tensions emerge as the performance of an artist’s work is articulated to the organization of schooling, I sought to gain a better understanding of the inherent tensions that emerged as Meg navigated these differences between her work and each organization.
In Chapter One, I described the ways in which my work with a nonprofit educational organization shaped the guiding question of this study. The development of that question – of the tensions that emerge as the performance an artist’s work is articulated to the organization of schooling – has other influences, as well. Before I outline this project’s methodology, I want to attend to the perceived differences between the Penland School of Crafts and the Mitchell County Schools, because they significantly shaped the methodology I developed for this project.
In the last months that I worked at Student U, which I described in Chapter One, I participated in a collaborative arts integration project between the a few people in the School of Education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a nearby rural elementary school. As a collaborating artist in this project, I was partnered with a fourth- grade Spanish teacher. Ideally, we would work closely with each other and her curriculum to develop arts-based ways to teach key concepts of the curriculum. Despite what became a friendly personal relationship, our working relationship was rife with tension. I understood the sanctions placed upon her and her classroom by end-of-grade
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testing and the race to remediate students enough to make the ubiquitous goal of adequate yearly progress, but I did not feel them and the fear, ennui, and displeasure they induced. The curriculum for fourth grade Spanish in the state of North Carolina was so stripped – featuring only vocabulary words, including verbs, yet no conjugation – that in order to do
anything interesting with the vocabulary state-prescribed curriculum she had to deviate
from it. Furthermore, and perhaps most dispiriting, was her sense that the only way she could deepen her own teaching practice was to pursue a Master’s degree in Spanish at a nearby university. She perceived the audit culture of schooling to curtail all possibilities to meaningfully deepen her work as a teacher in her own classroom.
I share this experience of a brief period of work as a teaching artist because together, my experiences in the organization of education, both in typical schools and educationally-oriented community and art programs, established my assumption that aesthetic processes and schooling processes were fundamentally different. Particularly in the pervasive audit culture that characterizes much of the conversation and practice around the organization of education in this country, whether that education is school- affiliated or not, I began this project expecting that discourses and practices of art-making in studios and student-making in schools would be profoundly different.
Though my experiences with Penland were limited prior to beginning this study, I sensed that despite the clear regard for Meg and the people involved in bookmaking held among the Penland School of Crafts and in the broader Penland community of artists, Meg’s work as a teaching artist was located, if not outside, peripheral to the work of the Penland School of Crafts. The gallery space for Penland artists’ work helped to cement my sense of the location of her work. During my first trip to the Penland School of
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Crafts, I toured the large gallery featuring artwork made by Penland students, long-term Penland artists, and visiting artists and teachers affiliated with Penland. Much of the work was for sale, and much of it seemed to be more “art” than “craft.” In a back room, there were some distinctly “craft” pieces: small handmade books and beautiful pottery pieces of all sizes. When in the main galleries amid the featured objects, I felt as though I was in a more typical art museum or gallery. Many of the pieces were stunning.
During a conversation with Meg that weekend, she showed me some of her art. Some of the pieces she showed me were her own paintings and books. I adore Meg’s aesthetic; many of her paintings and drawings of nature seem as though new life has shot through the trees, infusing them with worship. Pulling them one-by-one from a well-used cardboard box, Meg explained the ways in which she used each of the pieces in the workshops that she taught in the schools. Interspersed with the artwork Meg made with her own hands were photographs of the artwork Mitchell County School students had made the previous academic year. She spoke about the work she made with her own hands and the work that students made in her workshops almost seamlessly.
Many of the pieces displayed in the Penland gallery were stunning, certainly. Looking through Meg’s work with her, though, I was struck by the relationship that her pieces had with her, and her students’, hands. The beautiful paintings and books that they made were primarily for use, not for display. Meg and students created paintings and objects in the service of the respective functions they would serve in their respective classrooms. The more that their artwork was used, the more value it gained – as a teaching tool, as a learning object, as a symbolic expression of an experience or curricula – those books could not be sold to a stranger for a price because the significance they
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imbued came from their use. Beyond this, the blurred distinctions between what was
Meg’s artwork and the artwork of students and teachers who made books through her tutelage marked a contrast from the attribution of one artist’s name to art objects displayed in Penland’s gallery. The distinctions I noted between the gallery spaces reserved (and not reserved) for the typical work of Penland students and the Mitchell County students brought into Penland’s fold through Meg’s teaching artist work indicated to me that there would be tensions as Meg’s work was articulated to the organization of education at the Penland School of Crafts.
Throughout this project, I paid particular attention to the discursive and material resources that persons working as artists, knowledge-creators, and organizational members called upon in order to perform, organize, contest, value, and negotiate various ways of working. In short order, I will elaborate on the particular ways in which I attuned my attention to those discursive and material resources while doing and interpreting fieldwork and interviews. I designed this project as a partial ethnography of Meg’s work. Understanding her artistic work as a communicative phenomenon through which she interacted (and struggled against) two disparate organizations that both, incidentally, dealt with education, I expected to learn a great deal about the tensions that emerge when an artists’ work is articulated to the organization of schooling. What I found, revealed in the chapter that follow, was more interesting.
Before delving into the specifics of this project’s method, I must attend to one unexpected detail: during the research process, I learned how to make books. Though I might have anticipated developing skill in bookmaking (after all, Meg required that I participate fully in her bookmaking and art workshops with students), I did not foresee
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the ways in which bookmaking as a craft and craft as a broader concept would ultimately inform this project’s method. The negotiations that shoot through bookmaking and hand- crafts permeate this research method: tradition and improvisation, procedure and process, and performance and product.
In the Chapter One, I cited craft scholar Glen Adamson’s (2010) assertion that craft products are the troubling outcome of the performative process of making craft, troublesome because craft products can be commodified in ways that the process cannot. John Dewey’s (1934/2005) emphasis on art as experience rather than product parallels the tension between the live process of “doing” artistic work and its objectification as an art product. Similarly, the final products of a research process can often obscure the methodological approach and particular methods used in its creation, shortchanging the pedagogical possibilities of the research process. As such, throughout this project, I paid particular attention to the process of craft work and enabled that process to shift my method as necessary. Two pivotal moments in my own cognizance of the tense relationship between artists’ work and the organization of schooling occurred around bookmaking.
The first moment occurred when, in the fall months of 2010, I found myself unable to make sense of this research in a typically-written format and began filling pages of the book I had made with fourth grade students. Throughout this research, I immersed myself in the often non-linguistic professes of art making, and struggled to render that aesthetic experience into written language – academic prose, at that. I started creating pages filled with drawings, collages, paintings, and ultimately, creative writing, all related to themes emergent in the research. The second moment occurred when, in the
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summer of 2011, I summoned all I learned from Meg during the 2010-2011 school year in Mitchell County and taught my own bookmaking workshop to six teachers and sixty rising second- and third-grade students at the Children’s Defense Fund Freedom School in Durham, North Carolina. Later in this chapter, I further discuss the ways in which these moments of bookmaking shaped my interpretative process for this project.
In the spirit of contributing to an ongoing conversation in research-craft, making more transparent the process of this particular piece of research – opening it further for your assessment and critique – I trace this project’s trajectory from question to painting to interpretation to presentation. In this chapter, I discuss my journey to the work, its methodological assumptions and underpinnings, research design and methods utilized for data collection and interpretation, and how I worked to produce the chapters that follow. Meeting Mitchell County and Meg
I arrived in Mitchell County with a varied history: three years of an undergraduate degree spent in schools and artists’ galleries in a “revitalizing” downtown Indianapolis; two years in a Louisiana black box theatre studying performance studies and community while the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina revealed deep structural problems in both the systems of levees and social stratifications that supposedly kept the area “safe”; and four years of academic training in critical organizational studies while managing a year-round academic enrichment program for “at-risk” middle school youth. In studios, classrooms, organizations, and communities, I saw parallel tensions between structure and method on one hand, and creative and wonder-filled work on the other. Additionally, I saw the ways in which people used communicative, material, and aesthetic resources in order to shape their senses of self and to wield, ignore, negotiate, and to struggle against power, control,
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and inequality. Put into the language of my current education, I would now describe my observations as tensions among structure and agency and the oft-conflicting machinery of standardized processes of organizing intersecting with persons’ subjectivities and desires for aesthetic possibilities in their work.
I began to look at arts integration and the work of teaching artists as a potentially fruitful kind of relationship through which to pursue my emerging questions about the tensions and struggles I noted in those experiences in studios, classrooms, organizations, and communities. My choices to work with Meg and to trace her process as “the artist’s” work central to the study were both strategic and fortuitous. I learned of the Penland School of Crafts through a progression of discoveries. Interested in the organization of experiments in progressive education and the arts, I read Martin Duberman’s (1972) extensive history of Black Mountain College. A long-time academic and artistic home of Anni and Josef Albers, whose work I cited at the end of Chapter One, Black Mountain College came onto my radar because of its artistic legacy and its proximity to Chapel Hill. I discovered that Black Mountain College’s late poet-come-potter M.C. Richards (who then taught at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts) had loved a man named Paulus Berensohn. Berensohn, it turned out, lived in a small town in western North Carolina not far away from Black Mountain and still sometimes taught at the Penland School of Crafts. When I picked up a copy of Berensohn’s (1972) book, Finding One’s Way with Clay, his tactile descriptions of clay and craft and all of their literal and metaphorical beauty resonated with me. Fittingly, I met Paulus on the same day I met Meg – he is the Penland muse, community member, and longtime mentor of Meg’s that I described meeting in Chapter One.
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I arrived at the Penland School of Crafts with all the wrong kinds of artistic training and all the right kinds of questions. On one hand, all of my more-serious artistic endeavors prior to this project were performance-based – dance, theater, and performance art; I had no portfolio of art objects that I could catalogue. As I discussed in Chapter Two, while Penland has a deep history of community-based work and represents itself as a place where people can learn to live creative lives, its reputation and status arise from its maintenance of serious studio programs and the production (and sale of) interesting and innovative art. On the other hand, however, I arrived with questions about the artistic possibilities of communication and work and a curiosity of the ways in which working artistically produced and organized knowledge – questions that resonated with the work and pedagogy of Penland’s teaching artist, Meg Peterson.
The duration of Meg’s relationships with the Penland School of Crafts, the Mitchell County Schools, and the broader community of Mitchell County distinguishes her work from most established teaching artists. Though possibilities for teaching artists tend to be located in large urban areas (Burnaford, 2003), the rurality of Mitchell County actually helps to support Meg’s long-term relationship with Penland, the Mitchell County Schools, and the people of the community. Meg has worked between arts and education in the county since she moved there in the early 1980s, and is highly regarded as an artist in her own right throughout the community.
Writing about what she calls “deep teams” between teachers and artists, arts education specialist Gail Burnaford (2003) argues that a teacher and an artist must work together for approximately four years before they can really learn one another’s rhythms of working, pedagogical strengths and weaknesses, and respective disciplines. Arts-
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integration relationships between teachers and artists trend toward the short-term; these four-year “deep team” relationship are desirable and yet a rarity (Burnaford, 2003). For the last six years, Meg has worked one-on-one with an average of 16 different teachers in five different school buildings across the county. Mitchell County Schools perpetually shuffles teachers between grades, schools, and subjects, yet Meg has worked with several teachers for the duration of the current iteration of her teaching artist work. Meg’s relationships with many teachers currently involved in the bookmaking project extend beyond her bookmaking years and back into her varied and long history as a teaching artist in the county. Certainly, not all of these Meg-teacher relationships classify as “deep teams,” but the duration of Meg’s relationships certainly Meg’s work with the community as very deep.
The duration of the current bookmaking project, Meg’s presence in the schools, and her familiarity with the teachers, administration, and curricula of the third, fourth, and tenth grades, however, are nonetheless incredibly rich. Because of her rich history working as an artist and a teaching artist between various organizations with sometimes conflicting goals, and her own reflexive understanding of her practice, this study’s investigation of Meg’s work provides an uncharacteristically nuanced view into the tensions and navigations of artistic work in the organization of schooling. Additionally, Meg’s positionality at the Penland School of Crafts provides a rare view into the relationships between the abstract images and lived work of teaching artists and professional artists, public school classrooms and studio space, and work as an artist, and member of both organizations and community. Organizations that “do” arts integration often function as artist clearing-houses, providing a means to connect schools and their
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curricula to artists and artistic work. Meg’s position at Penland is rare in that she is the