Something Closed, Suddenly Opening
This past February, during a winter storm that brought dark skies and cold rain to the Valley of the Sun, I spent a week dreaming of spring with students at McClintock High School in Tempe, Arizona. My artist residency was inspired by the exhibition “Designed to Move: Seeds That Float, Fly or Hitchhike through the Desert Southwest.” I organized the exhibition in 2018 in collaboration with botanists from the Desert Botanical Garden, Phoenix, and the Herbarium at Arizona State University. Featuring the macrophotography of desert seeds by Taylor James, “Designed to Move” showcased not only the beauty of desert seeds but also the diversity of their dispersal strategies and their potential for inspiring sustainable innovation in human applications. The exhibition was most recently on view at the Museum of Northern Arizona, Flagstaff.
Truth be told, I was a little nervous about engaging with high school students. My work as an educator, writer and special projects developer at Arizona State University focused almost exclusively on a college-age audience. From the start, I decided, with some trepidation, that I would challenge the McClintock students and refrain from “dumbing down” their lessons, which involved some fairly sophisticated ideas in biology and engineering. Would I lose my young audience with the opening slide of my very first lecture? I wondered. Furthermore, I assumed that high schoolers would be far too enamored with the bells and whistles of the digital screen to be interested in the slower, fustier world of botany. I was soooooo wrong!
Liz Makings, manager of the plant collection at ASU’s herbarium, consulted on lesson plans and lent our class a wide range of seeds and other plant materials. To enable the students to view them in close detail, McClintock’s inimitable art teacher, Christina Wilson, purchased a series of hand lenses and borrowed microscopes from the school’s biology department. Her classroom setup looked as much like a biology lab as an art studio, a true reflection of our STEAM (Science Technology Engineering Art Math) collaboration.
I began each day of my residency with a lecture or class exercise. Then I just stepped back and let nature cast its spell. The students peered through hand lenses and dissecting scopes. They observed, pondered, sketched, painted, modeled clay. Then they observed, pondered, sketched, painted and modeled clay again. They clearly were enraptured by the beauty that was revealed by such close attention and magnification. One student summed up the experience like this: She was so surprised by how much had been hiding in plain sight all around her that she vowed to never look at nature in the same way again. In short, she experienced an unfolding sense of wonder, as described by the writer David James Duncan in his book My Story as Told by Water: “Wonder is anything taken for granted…suddenly filling with mystery. Wonder is anything closed, suddenly opening….”
Kudos to teacher Christina Wilson for going not just the extra mile but the extra thousand miles to create an enriched educational environment for her students by applying for grant funding from the Tempe Union High Schools Education Foundation and the City of Tempe Arts in Schools Grants/Community Arts/Arts and Culture program. Her efforts allowed me and two other guest artists to have an unforgettable experience with her and her amazing students. Click here to learn more!