Even though students come to Mira Reisberg’s ARTE 383 course to learn how art can integrate into a traditional elementary school curriculum, they leave with something greater: a better understanding of young minds.
Reisberg teaches concepts of visual culture – the principal focus in the NIU School of Art’s art education division – while giving her students a good dose of social consciousness.
Each semester, students create local animal paper maché banks to learn about their environment. They creatively paint the banks and place them out in the community to raise money for DeKalb homeless shelter Hope Haven.
“The idea is to raise the students’ awareness about participating in community life and being aware of people who, through no fault of their own, just don’t earn enough money to pay rent,” Reisberg says.
She always encourages participation in community, and that local spirit takes center stage during puppet shows that are free and open to the public.
Her students, who are planning careers as elementary school teachers and take her course as an elective, write their own scripts and make their own glove puppets and sock puppets.
The puppet show is “what education should be,” she says: “critical and pleasurable.”
“It’s a real fun night,” she says. “We’re spoofing kids’ TV shows, kids’ books and kids’ movies with glove puppets, and every now and then we have sock puppets interrupt with commercials. The commercials are designed to show the underlying messages in advertising, hopefully promoting kids’ awareness that they are being manipulated.”
- by Mark McGowan, NIU Public Affairs
- Photo by NIU Media Services