This audio piece produced by KQED explores the life of Dorothy Arzner. Perhaps the most prolific female director in movie history, Arzner was the first woman to be accepted into the Directors Guild of America and is the inventor of the boom mic. She directed more than 20 unflinchingly feminist films from 1927 to 1943, before finishing her career teaching at UCLA’s film school, where she left a lasting impression on countless students, including Francis Ford Coppola. Anzner did, said, and filmed whatever she wanted and blazed a trail for the many who followed.

Activities For Post-Secondary Educators and Students

Short Description:
Drawing in class is often seen as a distraction to learning. We are here to change that, with a series of activities designed to get both students and teachers benefiting from the power of visual thinking through drawing.

Long Description:
Communicating visually, through drawing, is a core practice to many fields and endeavors. However, in the world of post-secondary educators, it can be seen as fraught with peril. The barrier of one’s perceived drawing ability, on top of managing a lecture or facilitating a discussion, often means educators are hesitant to take advantage of a visual practice to its most benefit. This is a missed opportunity, but the situation is changing. More people are realizing the power of drawing as an extension of thinking, taking advantage of how the act of drawing generates new ideas and reveals unseen connections.

Quite simply, Drawing in the Classroom, generates learning.

Word Count: 4557

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In the prime of her career (1930 - 1960s,) African American dance legend Katherine Dunham and her company toured over 60 countries, and she performed on Broadway and in Hollywood films. She created the Katherine Dunham Technique, bringing together elements of dances from the African diaspora -- including Haiti, Jamaica, Martinique, and Trinidad -- with modern dance and ballet. The rigorous technique is credited for bringing Black dance to the classroom and to the stage, where it has mesmerized audiences globally and transformed the world of dance.

The program Dunham created runs to this day at the Katherine Dunham Centers for Arts and Humanities, and continues to revolutionize lives with dance and culture. Meet some of East St. Louis’ culture keepers, including Ruby Streate, one of Dunham’s most trusted teachers whom Dunham passed the baton to, and choreographer and educator Keith Tyrone Williams. Watch dancers Heather Beal and other Dunham program alums perform at the Mississippi River’s edge, in front of the Katherine Dunham Museum, and in downtown East St. Louis.

Learn about the fundamental connections between math and music, in four Acts: Rhythm, Frequency, Harmony and Fractals. Concepts presented in the video documentary are reinforced by hands-on experiments using the Google Chrome Music Lab Experiments.

Color is one of the seven basic building blocks of art along with Line, Form, Shape, Value, Space, and Texture. Learn how different colors have different impacts on how emotions are conveyed through art.

Form is one of the seven basic building blocks of art along with Line, Space, Shape, Value, Color, and Texture. Through the eye-fooling genre of Trompe L'oeil, we look at a variety of techniques artists use to transform shapes into forms and give their art depth and dimension.

Check out the entire collection of KQED Art School videos!

Line is one of the seven basic elements of art along with Shape, Form, Texture, Value, Space and Color. These are the building blocks of all art and are a good place to start when making, looking at or analyzing works of art. However, lines are not only limited to drawings. They apply to photographs, videos and anything that is placed anywhere deliberately to convey meaning. Learn about the different types of lines here.

Check out the entire collection of KQED Art School videos!

Shape is one of the seven basic building blocks of art along with Line, Form, Texture, Value, Space, and Color. Using still life paintings of fruit, we look into how artists' create their individual style and develop a unique approach to making shapes.

Check out the entire collection of KQED Art School videos!

Space is one of the seven basic building blocks of art along with Line, Form, Shape, Value, Color, and Texture. Using site specific art as a starting point, we highlight the techniques that artists use to control and manipulate space in their work.

Texture is one of the seven basic building blocks of art along with Line, Form, Shape, Value, Space, and Color. Here we look at the how visual artists try to stimulate our sight and our other senses through different textures. They create something that we can see and feel or imagine the feeling of and try to engage us in that way as well. Learn how different textures (and implied textures) convey different feelings here.

Check out the entire collection of KQED Art School videos!

Value is one of the seven basic building blocks of art along with Line, Form, Shape, Color, Space, and Texture. Through the lens of black and white photography, we look at how artists produce value scales and contrast, and how different kinds of lines change the way we perceive depth and space. Learn how different values can invoke different emotions in this video.

Elisabeth Higgins O'Connor creates poignant, larger-than-life figures that are seemingly cobbled together with reused scrap materials including wood, textiles and newspaper.

In this activity from Commonwealth Theatre Center in Louisville, Kentucky, students can write and perform a monologue addressed to a selected emotion describing their experiences with the emotion and why they would like to spend more or less time together. Students will better understand their relationship with their emotions and communicate complex ideas.

Linda Black Elk is passionate about plants. Linda Black Elk is an ethnobotanist and professor of ethnobotany and science education at Sitting Bull College in Fort Yates, North Dakota and recently she traveled to the Cansayapi Oyate (the Lower Sioux Indian Community) to share her knowledge of medicinal plants with students there.

Two lesson plans for grades 9-12 are included as gallery assets and in the Support Materials.

Artist Evah Fan makes drawings, zines and more in a style that is influenced by wordplay and folk art techniques. She tells visual stories through her interpretation of words she finds tantalizing with their multiple meanings. She emphasizes that style is not a skill that can be found overnight, but rather developed over years and realized in retrospect.

How do you make artwork that is conceptual? Artist Robb Godshaw uses technical means to move things that can’t be moved, or make visible things that aren’t normally visible. Watch as Godshaw scavenges electronic waste during an artist residency at SF Recology.

In this unit, students are asked to use the six hats analytical method to interact with both visual and written art. During the unit, students will be introduced to the six hats technique and apply the practice to art work from artist collective the Spiral Group as well as various versions of their core text. For our core text, my students will be reading Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 play “A Raisin in the Sun.” The text is important to our unit because Hansberry is an artist who is creating works reflective of the social movements of the period of time in. Many of these social movements still resonate today.

The forces of fate and free pull at Romeo and Juliet’s relationship throughout the play, and it is up for debate whether fate or free will plays a larger role in the tragic events that unfold in their story. Examine the balcony scene to see how these forces are already at play from the very beginning of their relationship in this video from Great Performances: Romeo and Juliet.

In this video from August Wilson: The Ground on Which I Stand scholars discuss Fences, the Tony Award-winning drama about a former Negro League baseball player and his family. The video features performances of two scenes from the play along with critical commentary.

Sensitive: This resource contains material that may be sensitive for some students. Teachers should exercise discretion in evaluating whether this resource is suitable for their class.

A class at Central High School in Louisville, Kentucky, becomes a production studio as students learn about filmmaking in Vanessa Miller’s yearlong film course.