By Wesley Harris & Malena Khan
When art teacher Jasmine Silverman received news in March that her Baltimore County school was closing because of COVID-19, she immediately began to worry about her middle school students. Most of them did not have the basic materials needed to learn virtually, much less art supplies that would allow them to take her art class from home.
Silverman teaches in an area where many students don’t have access to the internet and essential supplies that many people take for granted.
“In the spring, when we started this, it was pretty much all of them who did not have what they needed,” Silverman said. “Like 90 percent of my kids. The spring pretty much felt like a Band-Aid during a true emergency situation. It was stressful knowing that kids wouldn’t have the supplies they needed.”
When schools closed in the spring, art teachers across the country were forced to come up with last-minute lesson plans and techniques to teach art virtually. When fall semester started, Baltimore County schools continued virtual learning. Art is very tactile. Teaching it requires a lot of in-person instruction and demonstrations that are harder to teach from a computer screen. With many students not having the supplies at home that they would normally have in the classroom, Silverman and her students had to get creative.
Silverman said being an art educator gives her the opportunity to show her students that they can use their voice through art, no matter their circumstances. That’s more more challenging at home for a variety of reasons.
Adapting on the fly
Silverman was one of many teachers who had to adapt on the fly as schools across the country closed their classroom doors. It all began in late January when the first U.S. case of COVID-19 emerged. COVID-19 cases steadily increased, and teachers’ unions, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization began to recognize the true severity of the coronavirus. This prompted closures across the nation. On Thursday, March 12, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan announced all public schools would close for two weeks starting Monday, March 16.
By March 16, more than half of students in U.S. were impacted by school closures. And by March 25, public school buildings were closed across the U.S., affecting more than 50 million students, according to Education Week.
With these nationwide closures, Silverman and 3.7 million other K-12 educators would spend the rest of the spring semester teaching strictly online. The virtual learning curve was steep, with educators having to learn to navigate online platforms, and communicate with students, parents and colleagues. Teachers, especially art educators, had a difficult time assessing whether their students were learning. Some didn’t show up to class. Others had their video cameras off. Teachers could no longer check progress over their students’ shoulders as they worked.
Tracy Fortune, a ninth and 10th grade art educator in Lakewood, Washington, said Washington’s state superintendent barred any teachers from changing students’ grades once COVID-19 hit, even if they did not attend class or turn in homework. This made assessing students’ work even more complicated.
“We basically were providing enrichment for students who wanted to [do the work],” Fortune said. “That was a dynamic that we’d never had to deal with before. So working to create and plan a curriculum that would engage those students who want to was really crucial in the process.”
Online accessibility was another issue in Maryland. Some art educators, teaching from their homes in rural areas or on the Eastern Shore, lacked WiFi accessibility, according to Quanice Floyd, executive director of Arts Education in Maryland Schools, a nonprofit organization focused on providing art education to students through a variety of programs. Floyd works alongside teachers, schools and policy makers to assist in art advocacy across Baltimore City. She had five community meetings in May, trying to understand what art educators were going through. Through these conversations, she realized just how hectic things were.
“Everybody was in such a reactionary mode that they didn’t even understand what was going on,” Floyd said. “Making logical sense out of no sense at all.”
Art educators were faced with one of the steepest hills to climb in the swift transition to virtual education. From drawing to pottery classes, art educators depend on physical resources to educate their students. Unlike math or English, art students use more than a book, pen or paper to complete their homework.
“All art requires a product,” said Dr. David Sousa, an international educational consultant and author. “The product may be visual art, may be a dance, a musical piece or a play. So you can always assess what’s going on in the student’s brain by the product they produce. And that product is not like in chemistry. If I tell you name the five most common acids, that doesn’t take creativity, it’s memory. Does he name them? Okay, so he knows those cognitively. That’s not creative at all. That’s rote recall, the lowest form of thinking.”
But as students flooded back home in the spring, many went online without even simple materials like notebooks to do their art work. The swift school closures left teachers with no time or means to collect and deliver supplies to their students. Schools also have limited supplies in their classrooms. Before COVID-19, three classes could be sharing materials and a teacher would only need 30 paint brushes for 90 students. That same teacher would then need 90 brushes after all of her students learning from home.
What’s more, art supplies are expensive. Prior to COVID-19, families with school-age children were already spending an average of $634.78 for school supplies. So students were left with little to work with as they logged in for online learning. The lack of various supplies forced art educators to think outside of the box.
One of those art educators is Cheyenne Gillett, who teaches sixth, eighth and 12th grade at an international baccalaureate school in Washington State. The transition online was difficult, but Gillett got creative.
Figuring out fall
As last school year ended and summer break began, many teachers still had questions about what “flattening the curve” would mean for them. They did not know what the fall would bring. Would they be reunited with their students in person? Would they have to continue to teach virtually? Silverman said many teachers struggled to prepare for the upcoming school year because they did not know for sure what they were preparing for.
“Luckily, we had a two-week heads up that we needed to have kits for all of my kids,” Silverman said. “There are 630 kids in art in our school. So I had two weeks to come up with art kits for all of them.”
Silverman, who is the chair for the art department at her school, was responsible for creating art kits for each of the students enrolled in art. The art kits that Silverman put together included basic art materials that students would need for the class. Sketch books, pencils, erasers, pencil sharpeners and construction paper were all put into reusable bags and given to each student. Although she knows of other schools who were giving out paint, Silverman could not because she was limited by her school’s budget.
“During the summer I wasn’t really sure what to expect truthfully and I knew I would be getting a curriculum outline from the county visual art office so I wasn’t able to plan much at all until school started,” Silverman said.
Silverman scrapped every lesson plan she had ever done and started over from scratch. Online teaching demanded re-thinking everything.
“It’s definitely been weird,” Silverman said. “But they’re still getting to make something. And even if they don’t have a sketch book. I don’t care if you draw on the back of another worksheet or if you draw on a paper towel. You can draw on whatever. I just want them to try to make something.”
Katie Haire, a high school art teacher in North Philadelphia, was anxiously anticipating answers from her school about whether she would be teaching her students virtually or through hybrid teaching. As the first day of school drew closer, Haire grew worried that the school would not give them answers in time for them to fully prepare for the upcoming school year.
“It was a week- and- a- half before school started and we had not done anything,” Haire said. “We had not tested our video software. We had not come up with any school-wide policies about teenagers getting a laptop or being on video. We had no attendance policy or schedule for the year. This was all a week and a half before school. We knew September was coming.”
Once Haire received the news that her school would be continuing virtual learning in the fall, she began thinking of ways to provide a quality art education for her students, even though they were at home and did not have access to the supplies they normally would have in her classroom.
“I made art kits for every kid,” Haire said. “The art kits have the most basic stuff in them. They have a drawing pencil, an eraser, a glue stick, a small sketch book and then I gave them a pack of miscellaneous construction paper.”
Materials for the art kits were hard to get a hold of amid the rush of back-to-school shopping, an already high-demand shopping season. A Bloomberg report from March anticipated this inventory shortage. Chinese factories halted manufacturing due to COVID-19, causing all manner of delays and issues along the supply chain to American stores.
Some art teachers were given small budgets to scrape together supplies, finding items anywhere from classrooms to retail stores. Fortune used her own money to buy supplies from The Dollar Store. She found sketchbooks for her students, an item many of them did not have in the spring. She spent her own money on gallon bags to package the kits she assembled.
Buying materials for students is nothing new for art educators. According to a 2016 YouGov survey, teachers spend an estimated $495 of their own money on school supplies. Of the teachers surveyed, 63 percent said they purchased their own arts and crafts supplies.
Educators weren’t alone in their art kit preparations, as organizations Floyd’s Arts Education in Maryland Schools teamed up with the Baltimore-based organization Arts Everyday to prepare art kits, sanitize them and send them out to food sites for distribution.
“Because sometimes you go into houses and they don’t necessarily have the paint or canvas or some type of art function for visual arts,” Floyd said.
Schools nationwide staged supply drive-throughs and pick-ups before the year began, passing out art kits, WiFi hotspots and laptops. In places like North Carolina, art educators mailed their kits to students, according to an article from Edutopia. Art teachers also delivered kits personally in instances when students were unable to pick them up. After finding out a student didn’t have any art supplies or access to a car to pick up supplies from school, Fortune took matters into her own hands.
She drove to the student’s house with the kit she made and “his eyes just lit up,” Fortune said. “That was kind of recognizing the inequity and disparity of some situations, but I worked to find a solution that would really help.”
Jael Jones, a third grader from Joppa, Maryland, picked up art kits from Magnolia Elementary School. The kids included paint, crayons and markers. She does live art every Monday online on the Chromebook Magnolia Elementary provided. Her teacher gives students activities like painting leaves using the primary colors. But it’s not so easy for Jones to learn during these live sessions.
“It’s not as easy because when she is when [the teacher] tries to hold up her thing, it shows what she did it’s kind of like blurry and we can’t see what she did, or her example of what we should do,” Jones said. “And I can’t really see how she’s doing it. She just shows us a picture of her thing, that image. She can’t really like show us how she’s doing it.”
When Magnolia Elementary’s students finish their artwork they put it on Padlet, a website that allows for posting, comments and responses. Gillett uses Padlet, too, as well as other free platforms like Flipgrid for students to submit their work. She also engages students using the trivia site Kahoot!
Fortune went to Facebook, finding groups for ceramics teachers and art teachers who pooled ideas on how to teach art during online learning. Her research gave her the idea to create “Choice Boards,” giving her students the opportunity to choose what projects they work on and using a handout to complete their assignments.
While Silverman and other art teachers across the country have made the best of the situation, there remains uncertainty in the coming months. Silverman said she doesn’t know what the rest of the year will look like, and this leaves her fearful that any day she can receive an email saying that she will be switching to in-person learning.
“We’re virtual for now, but we may be going back in November, or December, or January,” Silverman said. “Literally no one knows at all. I know this is not ideal. This is not what any of us signed up for, but it’s where we’re at and we’re making it work. So why throw a wrench into things when kids are just finally starting to get a routine, because that matters for kids.”
Until she is given instruction about how she will be teaching for the rest of the year, Silverman continues to support her students and keeps connected to them virtually while in her “classroom” in her home.