by Ann Skerratt Richardson '49 Arts Educator, Montgomery County (Maryland) Public School System
 

I am greatly moved to be honored by Wells in this way. The Alumnae Award is an unexpected and thrilling achievement, coming as it does almost 50 years after graduation. I want to thank the awards committee and everyone at Wells who made the award possible. I must express my appreciation to the many friends in public education who have supported my efforts in the schools for years.

My husband of 50 years is here with me. He has been a true partner during my career in education and studies at 11 graduate schools and colleges, and 18 different addresses (Wells kept up with me). We were married after my junior year. A navy pilot, he had to ask the dean for permission to marry me! She asked him if he would be "hanging around." Senior year I was the one married woman in the Class of 1949. Our daughter, Sara, was born in December after graduation in May. The career immediately ahead of me upon graduation from Wells was that of navy wife. I left Aurora for Key West and the long-term discovery that people and languages and the arts were what gave life meaning. With the help of Wells, I have been a navigator as much as a goal-setter. I am 70 years old and I still get up every day to carry a book bag.

I am often asked why I chose Wells. I could go anywhere, as long as it was Wells. My family has roots here. My great-grandfather kept a lock on the Erie Canal. His wife, French and Indian, came down from Canada.

I regret that our children cannot be here today. Sara is head of an English department in California. Her husband is an artist of great merit. Our son, John, and his wife, Joy, own a company in Texas that provides seminars for the oil industry. Most important, their son, Jake, graduated from high school on Thursday and will attend St. Thomas University in the fall.

Two Interrelated ARTS teachers are here with me, Janis Jones and Betty Weincek. We have worked together so long that we are family. They represent the many teachers with whom I have worked as well as their own special contributions in the arts. I am delighted to have them here and for them to visit Wells.

I have been called a "lifelong learner." I think we all are. Probably, like Alice, I just became "curiouser and curiouser." Learning through the arts - my educational interest - begins with play which is the work of children. Play-acting and make-believe help us explore new roles. Of course, it would all remain at the level of personal fantasy were it not for the means to make it happen. At Wells, I was a scholarship student and I am doubly grateful to my college for all that it provided. Wells taught me to do research, to discover the resources available, and to try out new ideas with experts. In education we talk about the "individual educational plan," a luxury extended only to special students. At Wells, we could find our own pathway and choose courses designed for our specific needs. Respect for individual combinations of abilities led to my interest, really a fascination, with the way we learn.

Before I began teaching, I studied for a master’s degree at Memphis State University. The title of my thesis was, "The Creative Methods of Teaching Foreign Languages in the Elementary Schools of the United States." It was concerned with teaching through the arts and really began at Wells with Else Fleissner.

In southern Maryland where I supervised art, foreign languages, and gifted programs, I received a grant from the Maryland State Department of Education to work on curriculum for an arts-centered elementary school. We used the arts to teach and to teach about other cultures. I remember making-up dozens of characters for a full-fledged, music-included, production of the Indian Ramayana. Understanding of the different concept of music in Indian culture was new to most of the participants, the mischievous monkeys in the Ramayana were not.

As a supervisor in public education, I realized how important policy could be in designing programs. The community must support the schools and the schools must reflect community values. I was fortunate to be able to attend the University of Southern California to study for a Ph.D. in educational philosophy, policy really. Although the university had a center in Washington, I commuted to Los Angeles for two summers. The cultural contrast in that sprawling city and the resources available there, plus early technological support for references, were the incentives for expanded multi-cultural studies, for learning about cultures through the arts. As part of the admissions process, the university required an informal autobiography. I wrote mine in blank verse. Of course, it extolled my education in modern languages at Wells. I was a little hurt when the committee did not even ask questions.

I know the cliché says we are supposed to learn "more and more about less and less" when we work on a doctorate. I kept hoping for "more and more about more and more." My dissertation covered goals, trends, and attitudes in art education in the high schools. It included a national survey sponsored by the National Art Education Association. It also included an extra chapter on the history of the problem, as did my master’s thesis. The years spent in the Frances Folsom Cleveland Library at Wells left me addicted to research, even when I had to search in the basement of the Library of Congress.

Please do not misunderstand all of the academic processes. They were not an end in themselves. My work supported presentations in the schools with teachers and students. After completing the dissertation, I became aware of the work of Howard Gardner at Project Zero, Harvard. His theory of multiple intelligences fits perfectly with learning through the arts. He describes several kinds of intelligence and combinations of intelligence. Eager to work with the concept of multiple intelligences and learning through the arts, I came to Montgomery County Public Schools as Coordinator of the Interrelated ARTS program. From the very beginning, the teachers in the arts were wonderful and willing to try new approaches in education.

During the decade that I have been in Montgomery County, dramatic changes have occurred in the schools and the community. The population served has moved from primarily white suburban to 40% other ethnicities. At last count 102 languages were spoken by students. Our high schools, as well as elementary and middle schools, receive students who have never attended school anywhere. One student at the visual art center did a series of paintings depicting his father’s seizure and subsequent execution. In the face of all the change and trauma, education is a complex process. We do reach students and our scores keep rising.

When I began as coordinator of Interrelated ARTS in Montgomery County, the program was designed to teach the curriculum through the arts. We created lessons to teach language arts, social studies, science, and mathematics through art, music, dance, and drama. With help from members of the community, we presented a dramatization of the Ellis Island experience - immigrants arriving in New York. Students came in costume and were given identities. From this concept of entry into a new culture grew the idea of highlighting some of the cultures in our schools and studying them through the arts. We offered seminars on Central America, Indonesia, Africa, Japan, Native Americans, and the Harlem Renaissance. The catalog of seminars grew and we offered services to a larger number of schools.

The seminar on the Harlem Renaissance extended from kindergarten to high school classes. Betty Weincek had done her master’s thesis in dance on the tap dance of Harlem and we added music, art, and drama lessons. The theme of migration to the cities, of the arts as icons of hope and aspiration, was one that teachers and students enjoyed. So did adults at the senior centers and educators nationally. The lessons grew to over 100 pages and new ideas kept developing. The Studio Museum in Harlem asked for our music lessons. The curriculum content demonstrated the way things were, the way people lived in cities, and used the arts, even the blues, to make life bearable. Kids write blues songs about homework, bumps on their faces, and kids who do not notice them. They relive the period of history and cultural change through the arts.

In contrast, the lessons on the arts of Indonesia were far more formal. The shadow plays with puppets offered a kind of evening news for a culture without television in every home. Jan Jones used an assortment of vessels, pots and pans, to simulate the gamelan, the Indonesian musical accompaniment to the shadow plays. The tone of the production was in keeping with the cultural frame. Yet when Jan demonstrates scat singing or jazz in Harlem she is right there with a less formal image.

Satisfaction in working with these lessons frequently comes from brief comments. I demonstrated Asian brush stroke at the Visual Art Center and one student who had recently arrived from China kept picking up my examples. I explained to him that they were not even sketches, they were only sample strokes. He replied, "I want the parents to know this is taught." We do want the parents to know too.

Interrelated Arts has been integrated with the curriculum. The lessons are in the schools. The Maryland State Department of Education runs summer sessions on interrelating the arts for teams of teachers and the Getty Center for the Arts in Education uses integration of the arts with the curriculum for educational reform.

Currently, I am coordinator of high school art, theatre and dance, and have been chairperson of the committee for design of an arts signature high school, Hubert E. Blake (named for the Baltimore musician), that will open in September. I have a great director with whom to work. Much of my recent work in art has centered on a new art form - digital art or computer graphics. Students and teachers are involved in exploring the potential of multi-media provided by computer software. We were the first to put a high school student’s portfolio on line. You can view high school art programs via the Montgomery County Public Schools homepage. Students can, and do, move all over the world to find examples of art and architecture. The world wide web is another language, another means of communication, another way to understand. I hope we will find new ways to link technology with the arts and humanities for better.

At Wells, I was collegiate librarian. Have I mentioned that I even like the smell of old books? The resources here were magnificent and the new emphasis on technology will multiply them. The art library was upstairs in Morgan and I loved it. Best of all were the faculty who always seemed to be available. Senior year I was in classes of one or two. The Fleissners taught much more than the German language, they offered the philosophy behind linguistics and pointed me toward comparative literature (which surfaced as multi-cultural units). Dr. Rusk always was way ahead of traditional critics with insights that hold up today. What outstanding teachers they were!

When I graduated from Wells, I assumed everyone everywhere had a similar experience in college. We were confident that our opinions mattered. We knew we had choices. In spite of its literature of change, public education remains, necessarily, conservative. It took a long time for me to appreciate the Wells heritage and to find ways to share it with the teachers with whom I work, both men and women. Building teams and honestly appreciating the contributions of each member has kept me in school all of these years. It is a joy to return to Wells and to reaffirm the values that are taught here.

Delivered Saturday, May 31, 1998, in Phipps Auditorium at Wells College