When Alice Darby was elected cultural arts director of the Robert E. Lee Elementary PTA in 1990, the school was without an art program.
She wanted to change that.
She looked for volunteers to help implement a program for the students. But when she couldn’t find anyone, she went to the students for help.
“The children had no art activities, no exposure,” Darby says. “There was just a big void. It occurred to me, the kids could learn to teach.”
Darby used Lee sixth-grade students to start Art Force, an educational art program she developed. She pairs students and gives them a folder of information about a famous artist along with a print of the artist’s work. The students prepare a lecture and an art activity to demonstrate the style of the artist, and then they present their lessons to younger classes. Many of the activities include videos and music to illustrate the artists’ work, history or ethnic background.
By working with the sixth graders, Darby saw the potential of using students to conduct art workshops. To expand the program, she started using volunteers from Woodrow Wilson High School’s Future Teachers of America to teach the lessons.
“This was like hands-on training for those students,” Darby says. “It really does give them an understanding of what their teachers go through, and they are role models at the same time.”
Darby works with eight to 12 Woodrow students twice each school year to implement the program. Last spring, she expanded the program to Ignacio Zaragosa Elementary, where the Woodrow students presented lessons about rain forests.
Most of the original prints used for the program were by European artists. Because of the ethnic diversity of Lee’s student body, Darby researched and enlarged the collection to include artists of different ethnic backgrounds, such as Diego Rivera, Amos Ferguson and Juan Miro.
When Lee third graders studied Rivera, they made murals influenced by his work that still hang in the school’s cafeteria.
In another art project, fifth-grade students painted concrete tunnels on their playground similar to the six flags of Texas. Darby says the tunnels originally were covered with graffiti, so the project was not only a lesson, but also a way to beautify the school and increase the students’ pride in Lee.
The murals and tunnels won the school honors from the Texas Congress of Parents and Teachers.
Darby is trying to obtain funding to expand Art Force into other neighborhood schools.
“You’ve got a blank piece of paper and an objective, and you’ve got to figure out how to do it,” Darby says.
“There’s nothing that builds a student’s self-esteem more than their own sense of accomplishment.”
