“I Work Like a Gardener” 8-31-14
As the new school year approaches, and I find myself filled with a familiar heady mix of excitement and fear about the upcoming year with new and familiar students, I am drawn to a reading that I often distribute at the end of my classes. It is a photocopy of two pages of an interview of the artist Joan Miro by Yvon Taillandier entitiled, “I Work like a Gardener.”(1959) I first came upon this reading years ago in a chapter authored by Grace Paley, who used Miro’s thoughts to help writers in their craft. I was so intrigued by this idea, and the potential that Miro’s words would be helpful for teachers, that I visited the Teacher’s and Writer’s Center in New York and asked if someone could find and send me the entire article. I received the article in the mail not too long after, with a hand written response:
2/26/03 “Dear Kathleen,
Here’s a copy of the handout that Grace used in a workshop she did here at T & W – with the Miro piece. Sorry – there are some lines a bit “cut off,” but the original was that way. Perhaps this will lead you to a better version.
Nancy”
I did indeed find the text within a periodical about the working process of visual artists. However, it was the Miro piece that continued to intrigue me. As I was writing my dissertation I wanted my research methodology to be based entirely on Miro’s piece, drawing connections between the way I worked in my backyard Brooklyn garden and qualitative research. My dissertation committee did not approve, and so “I work like a Gardener” inspired me from the sidelines.
After defending my dissertation and graduating, I began my work at Sarah Lawrence College in the Art of Teaching Program. I was filled with ideas about the connections between pedagogy and the creation of artworks, and how teachers at their core were artists who worked their own craft with very special, human, materials. I felt as if Miro’s interviews might be a helpful metaphor for my students, but I was unsure of how to give it full attention. Instead I gave it to my students the last day of class as a ‘gift.’ We never read it aloud.
Oddly enough, Grace Paley, an alumna of Sarah Lawrence College, gave the commencement address the first year I was working there, and I was able to quickly speak to her on the Westlands porch before she was escorted away. She remembered the reading fondly and was glad I was using it. But was I really?
Looking back, I saw that although I believed strongly that gardening, creating art, and teaching all include processes of creation and growth, and that metaphors for each profession might help illuminate the other, I knew that these ideas would not be welcomed or understood in the educational climate of No Child Left Behind, Standardized Testing, and “Annual Yearly Progress.” How could an Artist’s thoughts on gardening stand up to education’s giant measuring stick? As teachers, we were all living in a world where we began to question what we felt was true about teaching and learning, where a score that was generated from a few hours of a child’s life, placed alongside thousands of other scores, somehow held more truth and more weight with politicians, administrators and families.
I sense that things are shifting, and I see an opening and tear in this landscape. There is a potential that educators and families, as a collective, can help the larger world see not only the misdirection of the path that is being taken with our most vulnerable of citizens, but also a way of thinking and working that allows what John Dewey speaks of “Growth..”
Here are the words of Joan Miro:
“I think of my studio as a vegetable garden. Here, there are the artichokes. Over there, potatoes. The leaves have to be cut so the vegetables can grow. At a certain moment, you must prune.
I work like a gardener or a wine grower. Everything takes time. My vocabulary of forms, for example, did not all come to me at once. It formulated itself almost in spite of me.
Things follow their natural course. They grow, they ripen. You have to graft. You have to water, as you do for lettuce. Things ripen in my mind. In addition, I always work on many things at once. And even in different areas: painting, etching, lithography, sculpture, ceramics…..
A painting must be fertile. It must give birth to a world. It doesn’t matter if it depicts flowers or people or horses, as long as it reveals a world, something alive.
Two and two do not make four. Only accountants know that. But that is not enough: a painting must make this clear; it must fertilize the imagination.
I do not exclude the possibility that when looking at one of my paintings, a businessman might doscover a way to do business, or a scholar might be given an answer to a problem.
The answer given by a painting is a general sort of answer, and can be applied to all sorts of other answers.” (pp 250-251, 1959)
These stunning, familiar, and visual words of Miro find a contemporary companion in a teacher, Junia Yearwood, speaking about her own practice in Sonia Nieto’s book, What Keeps Teacher’s Going? (2003).
“ Dear New Teacher,
I am a passionate gardener. In the spring and summer, I parade around tending and enjoying my peonies, roses, and daffodils. From September to June, I roam around my classroom and the corridors of my school making sure that Tiffany, Jose, and Rasheed grow, mature, and bloom to their full potential as students and as citizens. I am a year round gardener.
One important discovery I have made from many years of cultivating flowers and minds is that they all respond best to hands that tend them with faith, hope, and love. Without these three, my seedlings wilt, my flowers droop, my students languish; and I, the gardener, fail.
When I plant my seeds, I believe without a doubt that they will grow. I have no evidence that these particular seeds will grow, but I am firm in my belief that they will. Without that strong conviction, my efforts would be tenuous at best. I know they will grow because they are seeds and under the right conditions-soil, water, and sun- seeds grow. My students grow also. I believe that all students have the ability to grow, to learn, under the right conditions. I know that they will rise to my expectations, just as my clematis vine sprouts and climbs to whatever height I set my trellis; or as Mike Rose so succinctly affirms in his book, Lives on the Boundary, “Students will float to whatever bar you set.” (1989)
My faith in my students is an extension of the confidence I have in myself as a person and educator. Maintaining my sense of self and the confidence I have in my skills is a continuous and never ending process. I work at it…..
I am not a perfect gardener. In spite of all my faith, hope, and love, many of my plants do not thrive and flourish. My method of gardening, my lack of skills, and the environment I create are a few of the possible reasons that some of my charges fail to respond. However, I keep cultivating. I am aware of my limitations, but my faith is unshaken. I hope that at some point another gardener will succeed in bringing Rasheed, Tiffany, of Jose to life just as I’ve been known to breathe the breath of life back to the near-to-death spider plants and Boston ferns that one of my colleagues keeps sending to my classroom.
I mourn when I lose a plant. I mourn because it was such a waste-a waste of potential, a waste of beauty, a waste of life. My grief, however, is tempered with a sense of reality. What’s real is that some of my plants arrive broken, damaged beyond repair by some former gardener whose afflicted injury I could not mend and whose brand of gardening I try hard not to duplicate.
Dear New Teacher, welcome to my garden. Are you ready?
(pp50-51, Nieto, 2003)
Junia Yearwood’s comparison of her work of teaching and gardening has a realness that only comes from a seasoned educator. I feel as if she has captured the essence and the art of teaching by using a metaphor which is almost the same as the thing she describes. When she speaks of the children who come to her broken by others, I at first think she has given up on them, and I am uncomfortable with this idea. However, recalling my own practice with children who may or may not have been ‘damaged,’ I remember the handful of children for whom there was little I could do alone to help them grow. Children who are suffering need many more supports, fertilizer, and care than a single teacher can provide.
Since I worked with the whole elementary school as a movement teacher, watching 3 year olds transform into 6th graders year by year, I witnessed incredible physical, social, and intellectual growth. I remember singing with the entire school on Monday mornings, and knowing that I was speaking about my students when we sang the lines from “The Garden Song” made famous by singer Pete Seeger.
Inch by Inch
Row by Row
Gonna make this garden grow
All you need is a rake and a hoe
And a piece of fertile ground
Inch by Inch
Row by Row
Please bless these seeds I sow
Please keep them safe below
Till the rains come tumbling down (Mallett, 1975)
One cannot measure the care and love that a teacher feels and gives to their students. The academics and knowledge that teachers bring to students are important to their growth as thinkers and learners, and to incite passion within children for subject matter can change the course of their lives. But without the sense of teaching as gardening, without the teacher’s care that children can feel and see, the kind of ‘success’ that society wants for children will never come.
I’ll end here coming back to the beginning, back to Miro, and the connection between teaching and art. One of my former students is a librarian and has a blog. This May she sent me a poem she had written:
Poem: A Lifelong Work of Art
May14
Teaching is a lifelong work of art.
A career in education at first is a blank canvas,
But as you teach and gain knowledge from colleagues and the children,
The canvas is not blank anymore.
It begins to absorb many unique colors and forms.
Sometimes the shapes and colors overlap and new hues and figures emerge through the process.
As years progress the canvas expands and becomes a mural.
Teaching evolves into a vast and complex work of art
That encompasses a breadth and depth of knowledge of how
Children grow and learn as individuals.
By K. Fasano (http://librarianlife.edublogs.org/)
Kristy brings forward the idea that one’s life work of teaching is an art, continually developing, growing, and becoming more layered and complex over time. She speaks to the satisfaction and pleasure that comes from this work. I love this poem, and for me it speaks to the unspoken joy that teachers experience when they see how their work and the work of their students are interconnected.
I leave you with these images, these wonderful words, these connections that help illuminate the hard to grasp work of teaching. I think there is much more to uncover by looking at these four voices alongside each other, and I welcome your responses and thoughts.
-Kathleen Kristin Ruen
Fasano, K. (2014). http://librarianlife.edublogs.org/
Mallett, D. (1975). The Garden Song
Nieto, S. (2003). What Keeps Teachers Going. New York, New York. Teachers College Press
Pete Seeger singing the Garden Song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u90qRE2F7CM
Taillandier, Y. (1959). I work Like a Gardener-Interview with Joan Miro. Paris. XXE Siecle
Curricular Ideas:
*Joan Miro’s artwork is playful and young children in particular may enjoy looking and interacting with it. I visited Miro’s museum in Barcelona this winter and saw children talking excitedly about his paintings and sculptures. This book may be a great entry point for your class or child to enter into Miro’s world:
Miroins: A Book for Playing and Learning with Joan Miro, by Anna Carretero, Marcela Hattmer, and Anna Purroy. (2013) Printed in Spain – ISBN 978-84-252-2685-4
*It can be problematic to garden with children during the school year because the major growing season is when children are out of school. However, planting spring bulbs in the fall and then watching them come up in the spring can work well. In an upcoming blog I will describe the spring bulb work that my Emergent Curriculum class and a K/1 class at the Early Childhood Center at Sarah Lawrence College has done.