Illuminated by African light

While serving in the Peace Corps a few years ago, I had a few insights into my responsibilities as an art educator. A Namibian teacher, Meme Frieda, asked me to explain "parallelism" to her, so that she could pass her teacher's-certification test.

Using an apple reserved for my lunch to illustrate the term, I stabbed the core with a pencil and drew rough continents on its skin with permanent marker. Asking her to make a fist to represent the sun, I began spinning and rotating my makeshift Earth.

"Yes!" she exclaimed, "I understand, now." Pleased, I removed the pencil, looked at my altered meal, and decided that I wasn't quite that hungry. "Well, I can't eat this now," I chuckled, to which the teacher answered, "Why? Give it to me!"

I did, and watched as she rubbed the marker off the skin, buffed it on her blouse, and then enjoyed the sweet taste of my former planet.

Another African teacher, Meme Ndeyapo, was reading a South African art curriculum and asked me, "What is a potato print?" I explained the procedure: cut, carve, wet, stamp. She inquired, "Then you wash it to eat, yes?"

"Well, no," I admitted. I can still see the confusion and heartbreak on her face when I told her that they were then thrown away. I said this, straight-faced, to a woman exposed daily to starvation and extreme poverty.

She carefully went on to instruct me how, if these prints must be made, that the parts cut away to make the design should be saved. Once the print has been made, the paint must be washed off so that the potato can be sliced into a stew.

At that moment, I began to rethink the use of food in art class. My attitude toward colored "corn meal" sand, flour play-dough, gingerbread houses and macaroni designs was forever altered.

I fear we may be teaching our children to be wasteful--and not just in art class. In a math classroom, I once saw 100 Cheerios (or some brand of generic oat-loops) glued to a piece of cardboard to create sets of 10. Count out 100 pieces of cereal and put them in a bowl. That's one breakfast--maybe even for one of your own disadvantaged students.

No, your pasta conservation isn't going to solve world hunger, but I have seen the eyes that don't understand. I've seen the withered bodies of non-artistic unfairness. I've seen potential meals wasted.

As a fellow Peace Corps volunteer once said to me, "The African light, while not necessarily good for the skin, is good for the soul." It illuminates things that we might not have thought about before.

Carole Brown is an elementary level art teacher for the Red Lion Area School District in Red Lion, Pennsylvania.

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COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group