Land and Nature: Threading Manhattan Project (USA) |
Project coordinator: Dr. Yichien Cooper
Artist-in-resident: Patti Kirch Participants: Students enrolled in Spring 2022 MIT 535 (Integrating Fine Arts in K-8 Curriculum): Maria Fierros, Amanda Pearson, Rosalva Rodriguez, Danysha Salinas, Rebekah Shook, Steven Townsend, Kelli Trevino. |
Location: Washington State University, Tri-Cities. Teaching and Learning, College of Education.
Description: Land and Nature: Threading Manhattan Project aims to provide a reflective, transformative, and relational practice in integrating arts curriculum for culturally responsive teaching. Utilizing reflective strategies to guide artistic processes, Dr. Yichien Cooper invites her pre-service teachers at the Washington State University, Tri-Cities, USA, to retrace the Manhattan Project’s past and present. And critically examine its impacts from the perspective of Land and Nature. There are three phases in this project: research, making, and reflecting. During the research phase, participants first investigate available archives related to the Manhattan Project at the Hanford Site along the Columbia River that is twenty-eight miles north upstream along the Columbia River from the university. As a class, we will explore how data visualization could serve as an inferring tool to facilitate learners' synthesizing skills to confront, resist, and transform the unspoken history. Participants utilize data visualization to shed new light on complex and somewhat controversial historical events. The second phase of the project highlights the creating textile weavings as metaphoric and reminiscent of the Hanford Site's transformative impacts on nearby land and nature. To enhance the learning and artistic process, Patti Kirch, a local textile artist, becomes our artist-in-resident coordinator, providing her expertise in weaving. After learning basic skills on weaving using portable looms and paper looms, pre-service teachers incorporate data into their design to illustrate their critical examination on the Manhattan Project. Topics such as in-migration, water usage for B Reactor, service tanks, segregation, and displacements create visual tapestries that breathe life to an otherwise concealed past. In the final phase, reflecting, the participants capture their arts-based experience in the form of poetry. Sound structures add audio texture and patterns, narrating hidden or recovered emotions. The goal is to mindfully practice arts integration to foster resilience for empowering learning experiences for all. |
Dr. Yichien Cooper is an artist/educator/author/arts advocate. She is a faculty at Washington State University, Tri-Cities. She serves as the Chair of the Asian Arts and Culture Interests Group at National Art Education Association (2021-2023) and a board member of Academy of Children’s Theater in Richland, WA. She was the President of the World Chinese Arts Education Association (2017-2021), the Chair of Data Visualization Working Group (2017-2021), and an art commissioner at the City of Richland (2014-2019). Her research interests include STEAM education, concept mapping, data visualization, social justice, arts-based research, narrative inquiry, mixed identity, and community-based art education. She has published six Chinese books on integrating arts curriculum.
Patti Kirch is a tennis instructor by profession and an artist by obsession. A physical education graduate of Iowa State University, where she captained the tennis team, her roots in tapestry weaving go even deeper. She was introduced to weaving as a high school student in greater Vancouver, Canada and has kept perfecting her craft ever since. Settling in Washington State after college and marriage, she teaches tennis and weaves on an almost daily basis. Her tapestries have been displayed in museums and galleries throughout North America. Patti has added sketching and watercolor to her artistic repertoire, but these have mostly been to aid in her tapestry designs. Patti and her husband Nick have proudly raised twin adult daughters to be power women.
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