Artistic expression at the service of education
Illustrations prepared by the students themselves or the use of elements such as diskettes, plastic bags, newspaper, wool or coloured paint in various activities have given the teachers in the IES Gernika a basis for tackling in the classroom numerous curriculum aspects.
The relation between art and the School Agenda 21 in the IES Gernika has a long past. Approximately a decade ago, the person in charge of coordinating the Agenda in the centre requested the cooperation of various teachers to undertake a project that combined environmental conservation and artistic expression. Without giving it much thought, they got to work to elaborate the final idea and, taking as a basis the theme dealt with during the course, biodiversity, they decided to make a huge drawing on the ground of the covered-playground.
The idea was to make a large mural that could be seen from above (from the first and second floor) and had to have some relation with the immediate surroundings of the school. So, the Urdaibai estuary and the amazing union between the river and the sea became the protagonists of the work. The coming and going of the water and the movement of the sand were the most representative motifs in a work in which GCSE students specialising in Art, in the subject Techniques of Expression, participated. It was a very special activity given the dimensions of the canvas and the value given to team-work.
The bond between environment and art in Gernika had only just begun. During the following years, and due largely to the success of the initiative, new projects came along. The same space that had been used for the enormous drawing was occupied, for example, by a pile of discarded computer diskettes. Also together with GCSE students work was done on the reuse of discarded materials, the enormous consumption of these as well as awareness of the speed with which some objects become outdated in the present society.
Plastic bags constitute one of the most contaminating elements given their extensive use in everyday life and, obviously, were the object of analysis by the students. To start this new activity the students in the school were asked to cooperate by bringing in different bags used at home and stacking them in the playground. They made a gigantic carpet with all the bags, something which served to channel the study of areas such as consumption and publicity in different groups of varying ages.
The school playground, as a communal space, thus became the ideal place to carry out a host of activities. It is, as we have seen, a wholly active space in which sheets of newspaper, wool and wax crayons were also protagonists. The former served as the starting point to tackle themes such as recycling and re-utilisation. Using numerous sheets of newspaper a large mural was made which also served as a canvas for different large-scale drawings.
With the wool, everyone who wanted to cooperate had the opportunity to design and construct a great net of woollen thread which afterwards was hung from the handrail of the second floor while the small leftovers of the coloured wax crayons, pieces that were going to be thrown away made it possible for the students in the third course of Secondary education to work on the colour in a different way. Their work was even exhibited on the "txoko verde" (the green board).
In all the activities underlined up to now, artistic expression was used as a starting point to carry out different curriculum objectives but we cannot forget that these initiatives can also be valuable for getting to know many other things. One example is the spiral that was drawn with the compost made in the centre itself precisely to publicise the compost generation project. A poem by Xabier Lete that talks of regeneration even accompanied the spiral.