Bringing arts to life in the classroom
Los Angeles-based professional artist instructs New Mexico teachers on how to integrate puppets during class time
It’s not often teachers get a chance to play. But that’s what Sam Jay Gold asked of a group of Santa Fe Public Schools teachers during a professional development workshop last week.
He overturned a tote bag in the center of the room, sending its contents — a mishmash of playing cards, pipe cleaners, popsicle sticks, cooking utensils, blocks and more — flying. The teachers were tasked with selecting a few items from the pile and playing with them for five minutes, any way they wanted.
At Gold’s say-so, they rushed the table, grabbing their items and starting the important work of playing with them.
Brenda Dominguez, a third grade teacher at Nina Otero Community School, threaded a pipe cleaner through the holes in the head of a wooden spatula, twisting the wire into alien antennae.
Nearby, Roni Rohr, an art teacher at El Dorado Community School, fashioned a duck-like being from a green pipe cleaner, a yellow block and a spatula.
Within minutes, the two teachers were creating a scene involving their creatures. Dominguez’s alien met Rohr’s duck.
“We’re putting ourselves in the place of students and how they interact with their world,” Dominguez said.
That was the goal, Gold said. A Los Angeles-based professional puppeteer, Gold traveled throughout Central New Mexico last week teaching teachers how to integrate puppetry into their classrooms.
When implemented in the classroom, puppetry opens up a world of artistic expression and emotional connection, Gold said, because “to bring life to a puppet, we have to bring life to ourselves.”
Gold visited New Mexico as part of the Santa Fe Opera’s Active Learning Through Opera program, which invites teachers to integrate the arts into their classrooms, combining academic subject matter with the performing arts and allowing students to demonstrate their knowledge through performance.
Since its founding in 1993, the program
has led nearly 250 professional development workshops for New Mexico educators. During the 2023-24 school year, 10 ALTO teaching artists will serve more than 1,500 students, with similar figures anticipated next school year, said Charles Gamble, Santa Fe Opera’s director of school programs.
And puppetry in particular can bring learning to life, Dominguez said during the workshop.
“We can create something that is more sterile and disconnected, or we can create lessons that are more engaging and help students feel safe and help them interact with the content — so that they’re not just memorizing it but they are becoming what they’re learning,” she said.
In her classroom, for instance, Dominguez said she’s used shadow puppets to illustrate Greek myths, an activity that got students excited to learn more about characters, story development and writing. In particular, she said, the puppets can offer students learning English or who have disabilities — including students with autism or who are nonverbal — a way to communicate that doesn’t necessarily require English fluency or even speech.
Second graders in Terese Kitts’ art classroom at Gonzales Community School also experienced hands-on learning through puppetry first-hand on Nov. 28, when Gold visited their classroom. In addition to the fun of simply having puppets in the classroom, Kitts said, the characters contributed to an art history lesson as Gold showed the students puppets made by abstract artist Paul Klee about 100 years ago and created puppet facial expressions relating to Klee’s surrealist and cubist works.
The result was an engaging lesson. “That immediate creativity,” Kitts said, “came out of their mouths.”
In addition to traditional academic lessons, Gold said, puppets can also offer social-emotional learning, or education designed to help students manage their emotions, practice empathy and interact with others in a healthy way. The subject is one of Santa Fe Public Schools’ priorities in the aftermath of prolonged pandemic isolation.
Consider, for a moment, the many facial expressions of Kermit the Frog, from his signature scrunched look of confusion to the sincerity on his face as he sings “The Rainbow Connection.” Though he may be inanimate, no one could accuse him of being emotionless.
Gold said channeling emotion through an inanimate puppet is the job of a puppeteer, and to do that job requires a deep understanding of emotions — both how to manage them internally and how to embody them in a puppet.
“Built into the form is this ask that we, as performers, in a weird way get even more in touch with ourselves so that we can translate it into our hand or into this object,” Gold said.
In this way, puppets can help students identify and express their own emotions, while learning how to respond to others’.
That’s one of the main lessons Rohr said she plans to impart to her students in kindergarten through eighth grade at El Dorado Community School. Like playing with blocks, puppetry requires some cooperation, problem solving and empathy skills, Rohr said. When students voice expectations around how their puppet should be treated, they learn to stick up for themselves, too.
“If everyone could speak up and communicate well and civilly, we’d all be better off,” Rohr said. “Puppetry can teach you that.”