Growing a Garden of Peace (Testimonies for the Classroom)

Years ago, when I began working with elementary students and Quaker Testimonies, I created a graphic to help teachers and students remember the six testimonies commonly refereed to as the SPICES: Simplicity, Peace, Integrity, Community, Equality, and Stewardship.

At the time, I wanted to focus on those six. At my school, we had a beginning understanding of the Testimonies and the SPICES acronym served us well. For my graphic, I decided on a garden of six carrots, each with one of the SPICES written on it. At the time, I personally wanted this garden to have room for other carrots so I made blank carrots that I could use for our class testimonies.

Over time, my fellow Quaker clerk and I noticed that teachers embraced the carrots and those SPICES. They took that poster so literally that the idea or belief that those six are the only testimonies started to take hold. So I made two new posters. One with six colorful trees holding the SPICES and one that included the trees but added flowers with many more testimonies. Kindness, Truth, Love, etc. were added to the poster. My hope was that the carrots would give way to the trees, building our understanding of testimonies and their endless possibilities for growth and action.

Paul Buckley has done some wonderful thinking about testimonies and explains the thinking here (click here). (credit: QuakerSpeak and Paul Buckley)

 

The tree posters with the little blue flowers pop up all over campus, but the carrots are the OG. They are universally used and spread. I needed something new and better. Better than the carrots (tall order in my heart and mind) and better than the trees (which are "just okay" to me).

Note: I love my carrots poster. It is a tool that I still use myself (adding other flowers, plants, bees, worms to the garden in a way to make that first poster interactive and reflective of the specific group of children before me. While I love my carrots, I have also long felt that I needed to "right the wrongs" of that poster - the limits of the SPICES. But who has time to make new posters? And I really do love the carrots - a replacement has to be pretty spectacular to compete with my beloved carrots!

New year, new poster: This August was finally the time for a new poster. I created my better tool. A garden of testimonies. Carrots, radishes, beets, and garlic take root as some bumble bees pollinate the garden with those familiar SPICES. I've made two versions, one with the SPICES and one with a blank space for teachers to add their own classroom testimonies - changing them as the needs of the group grow and shift. I've captured my process so that you can all join me in starting this garden.

choosing colors

creating a background

root vegetables and layout

Here is the finished Poster:

Quaker / Peace Garden with Testimonies

Why I use "testimonies" in my teaching practice and not "norms"... I've not ever been comfortable with "norms." The idea that certain behaviors or expectations are made "normal" by exclusion has always bothered me. Who decides what makes "normal." Who is made to conform? Whose way of being is lifted up as normal or desired? Whose identity might face discrimination in those traditional meeting norms? I have instead preferred "agreements," "ways of being," or (in the past few years) "testimonies."

Quaker/Peace Garden with space for classroom agreements and testimonies

Want a copy for your classroom? I would love to share my posters with you. I do kindly request a small payment in exchange for the digital file. Please contact me at denise@teamcoffin.com and let me know you'd like to purchase the file (US $5.00 for each 30MB file). Thank you for supporting my folly!

Disruptive Art

 

At the start of the school year, we began our conversation about environmental stewardship by noticing that our school community, including us, was not taking care of our playgrounds. Every time we went outside to play or to go for a walk, we discovered lots of trash. We felt called to action. 

We had many discussions about this and about what we might do to change it.

"The playground should be green and brown and stuff, not papers.”“Stewardship is    important. It’s because this is our school.”“It’s a Quaker school.”“It’s also because this is our beautiful world.”“Yeah and we need to take care of it too. And my yard."

Teacher:“What might be some ways we can solve this problem?”

“We can pick it all up.”“Except for glass at the playground in the neighborhood.”“We should show everyone at school what we find! That’ll make them so shocked!”

We began to pick up the trash we found on the playground. In order to see how much of a problem we really had, we decided to collect the trash and measure the amount. After two weeks of collecting, we had two large bags full!

As we were noticing and collecting and measuring trash, we were (coincidentally) having conversations about how art tells a story. We looked at some pieces of art that told powerful stories about change or action. This led to a decision to use art to share our message about environmental stewardship with the larger school community. Disruptive art to disrupt ideas about our stewardship of our playgrounds…

Using sense of the meeting, a Quaker decision making process around unity rather than unanimity, we settled upon a plan for our artwork… We would paint a view of the earth as it should be, the greenest greens and the bluest blues and one perfect tree. We would cut a hole or pull back our perfect tree to reveal the truth that we had discovered: litter.

We began by gluing all of the trash we had collected onto a large board. Next, we painted our tree on a background of green and blue on a paper canvas. 

Finally, we explored several ideas for combining the two: draping the painting over the surface of the trash board, pulling back one corner of the painting, and rolling up the bottom of the painting. We eventually decided to cut out a part of the painting to reveal the trash behind. 

*Using the exact-o knife to cut out the tree and using the glue gun for the trash board were the only non student-led parts of this project.

To accompany our work, the students came up with some queries (driving questions):

How can we be kind to the earth?

How can we be mindful of our surroundings?

How can we be mindful about not throwing chalk and toys around the playground?

How can we be kind to others?

How can we make sure we are grateful for what we have?

How can we be mindful to not throw trash on the ground?

How can we take care of nature?

How can we make the school a better place?

We decided to install our artwork with a thinking routine and a message box to find out what our community thought as they interacted with our piece.

We asked:

What story do you see in our artwork?

What message might we be sharing?

We were thrilled to receive thinking from our friends at lower school!

“I can’t believe you saw this much trash!” Second grader

“It makes me feel that we can do better as community members of earth to cherish it more.” Fourth grader

“I think that this may be a message about the environment. I see a tree that could replace items that seem to be things that you might find in the trash. I love this and think this is a really neat piece.” Visitor to campus

“I see that there is so much pollution in the world and that you’re trying to stop it.” Third grader

“I see a lot of trash where a tree should be. If we had less trash, could we grow more trees?” Science Teacher
 

“It’s weird, cool and awesome!” Second grader 

“Our world is all tied together so we need to take care of it and love it like we would our family.” Fourth grader

One of the fourth-grade classes borrowed our art and spent some time thinking about its meaning. Using a combination of the See Think Wonder and Main Side Hidden Story Routines, their thoughts included:

“I think the story is that you can take something like trash and turn it into something amazing.”“I think that the tree is being hurt because a lot of people are littering and it’s hurting nature.”“I thought that the kindergarten art was showing how many things trees can make.” 

Our friends in prekindergarten also looked carefully at our disruptive art using the See Think Wonder routine.

Teacher:“Share something you notice or see.”

“I see paper all over it.”“I see a sticker.”“A plastic thing. A knife!”“I see a piece of a beach bucket.”“me too.”“They painted it.”“I see that there’s stuff inside the painting.”

Teacher:“How did this shape happen?”(the tree cut out)

“Maybe they cut it out.”“It’s a tree!”

Teacher:“What story do you see in the artwork?”

“Imagination stuff”“That our environment is important. Because there’s a tree.”“That it’s not good to leave trash on the ground.”“You shouldn’t leave trash around because it might ruin the trees.”

Teacher:“Is there anything you wonder about?”

“I wonder why they made… why they picked a tree.”“How long did they make the trash stay?”“Maybe they glued it on?”“I am wondering what is that piece of silver thing and I am wondering how they didn’t run out of glue?”“Why didn’t they cut the whole thing out?”

After we read the ideas from our lower school friends, we thought about our connections:

What was in line with our thinking?

What was surprising?

What next?

We were surprised that some of the fourth-graders thought different things than we did. We were really glad that so many people seemed to think that our disruptive art had an important message. We wondered what would happen if we put our piece somewhere else? Would different people see it and what would they think? We were inspired to make more disruptive art and to find other ways to "teach" about big ideas.