Cambodian students seem to get pretty bored during the summer, with neither school nor organized sports to keep them busy and very little farming to be done. I wanted to give some local students something fun and productive to do and also encourage them to think creatively. So I put out an announcement that I would teach a month-long art workshop, and every day for an hour in July 10 to 25 students showed up at the otherwise deserted high school, eager to learn and do. I taught the basics of various art forms, taking about a week for each different subject. We started with visual arts: origami, cartooning, and collage using old magazines. The second week we talked about music and singing, including the Western musical staff and notation (was this concept extremely foreign to the students? Yes. Was it useful? Probably not. But that doesn't stop math teachers from teaching the formula for the volume of a cone so why should it keep me from teaching musical notation?). In the third week, we went on to poetry and rhyme, and the students tried their hand at writing a couple of short poems. The last week was all about Khmer dancing, including dances called the Madison and Cambodian cha-cha-cha. I'm no expert in Khmer dancing, but the school's PE teacher had taught me some basic moves that were easy to pass on to the students. We borrowed the PE teacher's car-battery-powered stereo and cassette tapes with Khmer music so we could all dance in sync. (If only we had had a tape with the Electric Slide!) Unsurprisingly, dance was probably the most popular unit.
The workshop was great fun overall, and I was struck by the talent a lot of the students displayed, especially during the collage portion. So I took pictures of a few of their collages. (My apologies for being an amateur and not cropping the photos. Technology is hard!) This first one is called The Green World and Beautiful of Life by a girl who gave herself the English name Lizzie. I thought she used an interesting combination of paper scraps and meaningful pictures to make a striking landscape. And she used the whole page!
This next one is called Advertise of Watch (no, I didn't correct students' grammar in titling their art. What kind of pedant do you think I am?). This one could be seen as a commentary on the large number of prominent watch ads in Newsweeks, our primary source magazine for these collages. Or maybe this girl really liked telling time. Either way, for some reason I was really impressed with it.
This last one is by a boy who gave himself the English name Peter. He created several distinctive collages using bright colors and basic shapes: this one of a fruit basket, a flower and a fairy, and a grinning pig's face (it's cuter than it sounds).
Hooray for art!
This last one is by a boy who gave himself the English name Peter. He created several distinctive collages using bright colors and basic shapes: this one of a fruit basket, a flower and a fairy, and a grinning pig's face (it's cuter than it sounds).Hooray for art!
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