Creative Pedagogy
Lara J. Phelps Randby CdeP 1991 Making the Most of Artistic License
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teach a combined fourth and fifth grade class at the Club Boulevard Humanities Magnet School in Durham, NC. Club is an old Durham public school that became a magnet school about ten years ago. The students at Club are a diverse group with many in low socio-economic or otherwise stressful family situations. Out of my 23 students, only four still live with their biological mother and father. Some have parents who work such long hours that they leave before their kids get up in the morning and get home after the kids have gone to bed at night. These nine and ten-year-olds get themselves up, make their own lunches, and get to the bus on time…all by themselves. One of my students, even as late as last year, often went to live with his aunt because Mom was in and out of jail for drugs. I don’t mean to give the impression that this is the entire Club student population; we are also blessed with many supportive and successful families. But, students facing the kinds of heartache that we privileged private-schoolers will never know are in every classroom. Regardless of these challenges, Club Boulevard is a North Carolina School of Distinction. As a humanities magnet, we receive extra funding to support and to develop our humanities theme. The result is a public school experience that is unusually rich in the arts. In addition to regular weekly classes in art and music, Club also offers full-time Spanish and dance. We are able to fund artist residencies that go above and beyond most public school humanities experiences. In the next three years, Club will host Pilobolus, an internationally acclaimed dance company, for a week of intense dance instruction each fall and spring. Pilobolus dancers work with one grade all week while the rest of the school observes them, writes about them, sketches them, and documents their progress on film. Other projects include our “Literacy Through Photography” program done in conjunction with Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies. Students take cameras home over weekends to photograph their lives, learn to develop prints
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in the school’s darkroom, and combine them with written work for some truly meaningful pieces of art. In a time when public schools are coming under constant pressure to succeed in only one realm (standardized tests), it is a blessing to be working in a school that has not only retained its arts program, but is developing it further. The arts and humanities experiences at Club are world-class and the work that students produce in them showcases the richness and depth of their spirits. e Lara Phelps Randby graduated from Dartmouth College in 1995 with a degree in art history. She married Ken Randby in 1997 and the couple moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where they opened an art gallery. Since then they have added another art gallery, a ski shop, a flower shop, and two boys to their family. “After the boys were born, everything changed; I wanted to do something that would make a difference in the lives of children. I had enjoyed some volunteer teaching I had done in the past, so, I went back to school and got certified to teach public school.” The Randbys now live in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.