We all want to become better educators. We obsess about how to improve a lesson, better engage our learners, and still deliver strong content. The recent project-based learning buzz has helped invigorate our desire to create more interdisciplinary connections, both with each other and within our community. Recognizing that we all shared the same goals was the first step in making our Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) lesson come to life. All irony aside, we four Middle School teachers from University School of Milwaukee (USM) collaborated to connect art, music, social studies, and Spanish to our local and global communities. This collaboration led to greater learning, understanding, and appreciation of culture for us and for our fifth-grade students. Participating in this project also allowed us to find ways to meaningfully enhance curriculum and deepen student learning through authentic interdisciplinary lessons and cultural connections.
Getting Started: Year 1
The planning began in September 2013, after we read about one of Milwaukee’s cultural treasures — Latino Arts Incorporated. Latino Arts Inc. functions under the umbrella of the United Community Center (UCC), a community-based organization of progressive educational leaders in Milwaukee who have been sharing visual, musical, and performance-based arts from Latin America for decades. For the four of us, this passage on the organization’s website was the hook:
Latino Arts’ annual Day of the Dead celebration features a bright and eclectic collection of ofrendas (altars) prepared by local, regional, and international artists. Exhibiting presenters share their tributes to lost loved ones as a celebration of their lives and accomplishments, often decorating their altars with their loved ones’ personal effects and favorite items. Día de los Muertos celebrations frequently feature colorful floral arrangements, photographs, and skeleton iconography.1
Miriam Altman (music), Sarah Markwald (art), Will Piper (social studies) and Todd Schlenker (Spanish) agreed that Latino Arts Inc.’s fabulous, hands-on field-trip experience was developmentally appropriate for all of our fifth-graders.
On our arrival at Latino Arts, we were graciously greeted and escorted into the gallery, where one of the exhibiting artists spoke to the students about the history of Día de los Muertos and the traditions associated with this holiday, focusing specifically on the creation of both contemporary and traditional ofrendas (a display designed to honor people who have died). Students had their first glimpse of what a Día de los Muertos ofrenda looked like up close, and they could read the personal descriptions accompanying each ofrenda that provided a better understanding of each artist’s intent.
After spending time viewing the variety of ofrendas, our students went next door to the Latino Arts studio to create their own ofrenda. Sarah Markwald supplied a small white cardboard box that each student decorated with an array of supplies provided by the arts center. Before the field trip, students had been encouraged to collect small personal belongings, like photos and other memorabilia of a loved one or person they admired, to use for their ofrenda. Both the students and Markwald appreciated the 90 minutes students were given to work, providing ample time to complete their boxes. We returned to USM in time for lunch and with an eclectic array of ofrendas that we displayed throughout the school, along with student-written statements about the person being honored and a description of the tradition of Día de los Muertos. During the months that followed, we often saw passersby, especially parents and visitors, stopping in the halls to admire these fifth-grade creations.
With our fifth-grade social studies curriculum focusing on world cultures and geography, social studies teacher Will Piper was able to use this wonderful experience at Latino Arts to kick off a unit focusing on Latin America, with case studies of Mexico and Costa Rica and a research project allowing students to explore different geographical wonders in South America. Piper extended this lesson by fostering a collaboration with a Mexican fifth-grade class run by Pedro Aparicio at Centro Escolar Cedros, a boys’ Catholic school in Mexico City, Mexico. Using Skype, Piper was able to share the students’ ofrendas with the students in Mexico City. What ensued was a lively conversation between Piper’s and Aparicio’s classes about what ofrendas were and the significance of Día de los Muertos to Mexican culture. The Mexican students, through the use of Skype and iPads, were able to share their own classroom ofrendas with our fifth-grade students, thus deepening our understanding of this important tradition.
Todd Schlenker has always included Día de los Muertos in the Spanish curriculum, but never before have his students visited an art gallery and created such a personalized project. Prior to the visit, we scaffolded some imagery, vocabulary, and music that traditionally go with this holiday. Words like ofrenda, cementerio, tumba, cempazuchil, altar, pan de muertos, calacas, calaveras, and esqueleto may be hard to remember, but two delicious memories for most of the Middle School students were the pan de muertos (bread of the dead) and the calavera de azúcar (skull lollipop). Furthermore, Piper’s connection to Aparicio’s class led to Schlenker connecting to Colegio Banting, a coed school in Mexico City. Schlenker and Adriana Lara, a Google-certified teacher from Banting, arranged Google handouts between their classes.
Building on Our Successes: Year 2
While the first year of this project-based learning experience was good, our students were now being asked to exhibit their work at Latino Arts. This pushed us to revise, tweak, and improve the project to create more connections and a deeper understanding of el Día de los Muertos.
The first question we had to address as a team was, What will the exhibit look like? Under Markwald’s creative direction, we decided to have each student create an individual “ofrendita” (small ofrenda), using the boxes from the year before but making them at USM. To convey a single theme, we assembled the boxes in a large collaborative exhibit. Since family and community are such important aspects of American, USM, and Mexican cultures, Markwald designed a series of 4- by 8-foot cutout houses, inspired by colonial Spanish architecture in Mexico, with windows for students to display their ofrendas. We enlisted the help of our stage director, Jeremy Woods, and his Upper School stagecraft elective class to build the house structures out of insulation foam board and wooden supports to connect the structures.
In art class, students created their memorial ofrendas, honoring a friend or relative who had died or a historical figure whom they admired. Topics ranged from students’ grandparents to Abraham Lincoln, Vince Lombardi, Robin Williams, and Neil Armstrong (the choice of a girl who aspires to become an astronaut one day). Students in art class worked collaboratively to paint the buildings with bright vibrant colors, adorned with colored skeleton faces. In Spanish class, students learned to craft cempazuchil flowers with orange and yellow tissue paper and green pipe-cleaners while listening to “Tumba, tumba, tumbabá,” a Costa Rican song, and “Hasta Los Muertos Salen a Bailar,” by Tish Hinojosa.
Meanwhile, in social studies class, students learned more about the culture of the holiday by furthering our Skype collaborations with Pedro Aparicio and his students from the Centro Escolar Cedros. This time, instead of simply sharing each other’s ofrendas, Aparicio and Piper used Aparicio’s experience as a Google-certified teacher to create a collaborative Google Site, where Aparicio and his students would write the history of the holiday, and Piper and his students would share images and text about how Día de los Muertos is celebrated in Milwaukee, a city more than 2,000 miles away.
In music class, Miriam Altman reinforced the Spanish class songs relating to Día de los Muertos. As part of her winter concert, Altman included a fully memorized and polished bilingual performance of “Hasta Los Muertos Salen a Bailar.”
As part of the demonstration of learning at the Latino Arts Inc. gallery, we held a well-attended presentation for students’ parents and families. Students had the opportunity to display and talk about their artwork alongside other local, regional, and national artists at Latino Arts Inc. We also worked with Latino Arts to have families enjoy a meal at Café el Sol, the restaurant run by the United Community Center, and we offered tickets to an after-dinner performance by Grammy Award-winning act La Santa Cecilia, a Mexican-American band based in Los Angeles.
The feedback we received from those who attended the opening at Latino Arts Inc. — members of the community, parents of our students, and, most important, the students themselves — was overwhelmingly positive and supportive. Giving students the opportunity not just to learn about a cultural holiday but to create art in conjunction with it and then to go into the community and present their work — this was something truly remarkable.
An Invitation to Return: Year 3
At the end of the 2014–2015 school year, we received another invitation from our colleagues at the Latino Arts gallery. They were so impressed with our students’ work that they asked us back for the 2015 celebration. Summer has barely begun, and we four teachers are working on ways to tweak this project yet again. How can we make it more reflective and transformational, not only for our own students but for those who are 2,000 miles away? How can University School of Milwaukee fifth-graders, partnering with Pedro Aparicio and his classes, create a joint project about some of the symbols and history of the holiday? And how can USM and Colegio Banting continue fostering genuine cultural and communicative exchanges between both classrooms and individual students? The sky really is the limit when it comes to ways to make this collaboration a powerful and sustainable project-based learning experience for all.
Note
1. “Day of the Dead Ofrendas,” Latino Arts Inc.