Spending a week in the artistic city of Chicago with its vibrant culture and dynamic environment has been a very wonderful experience for me so far. As an artist and art educator, I believe that deep learning happens when one is exposed to real experiences in the contexts of life. We learn from events and happenings rather than books.

Working as an art teacher and performing at different schools made me reflect on my thought and process of meaning making in my pedagogy.

How can I leave a more long lasting message in the minds of my students? How can I transfer my message more strongly? What would be the most efficient and current methodology that I can apply in my teaching? These were my first questions when I entered Chicago. Before my arrival, my Faculty sponsor, a great mentor and real friend of me : Kate Thomas has asked me to reflect deeply on Chicago and feel the difference between this city with Vancouver, then respond to it and come up with my own teaching methodology here. I think we should not repeat ourselves and our pedagogies in a different place. We have a huge responsibility as educators to feel, to taste, to think and to respond to the context that we are in, in every moment and day and think of the best appropriate way of communicating our message to the students.

I feel Chicago has a warmer culture than Vancouver. People interact more with each other and some times they look at each other’s face. I got more awareness of my presence, I could shine, smile at people more than Vancouver and I felt I am more welcomed here. I can enjoy having a little conversation in the trains with people from different cultures and I feel how the city has its own style of living and eating to the highest potential and enjoy these transient moments that we have in our short life. Chicago seems to me a middle ground of voices, a tone of working class more than the self-confessed of bourgeois. I see pain in the faces of some African descent people and I feel I am connected to them as they seem marginalized or segregated some how. I hear the voice of their labor and their struggles back in the history and this makes me to think of the social justice and the beauty of equal treatment and respect for all people. How as an art educator can I make people more connected and more aware of other people?

These thoughts and observations made me think of an idea of using performance art as my teaching methodology in Chicago’s public schools. Mrs. Kate Thomas helped me to refine my idea and make it better. She communicated with many art teachers in different schools around Chicago that I can go and do my performance while observing their classrooms. This has been a great opportunity so far and I am excited of the teaching learning process that it has brought to me.

My performance Art’s name is “ Carpet Woman” and basically I wear a carpet and sit down on ground and invite students to come and sit down with me and join each other. This brings all the students together on a piece of carpet and then we talk about the idea of connection. I start from the carpet, why Iranians have made carpets in the history and designed it with beautiful flowers. Usually there is a bouquet of flower in the center, do you know why?

Students started naming the beauty of carpet, its application, its sense of comfort and warm feeling. Then I mentioned that Iranians have made carpet because they were interested to have a long lasting flower garden for all seasons in which they sit down together and appreciate the beauty and togetherness. So they visualized that garden and weaved it into a carpet. Carpet is a place of sitting and being together. All students came and sat down on the carpet and at the end they mentioned it was a great experience and they felt more connected, more welcomed and warmer. In some classes, by conversation with the art teacher, I came up with a responding activity to the performance. In one high school class students wrote the reflection paper about their experience and in one of the elementary schools they painted the carpet lady with oil pastels. In a social studies class, they reflected on the performance by participation on classroom’s conversations.

This experience was very beautiful for both me and my students. It elevated me and taught me some thing new. how contemporary art pedagogy can have more stronger impact for the students that the traditional art styles couldn’t.

This was my immediate response to this experience:

…….”I came back from walking in a flower garden! Today was one of the most beautiful days in my life.,,I taught art students in an elementary school in Chicago as a performance artist. Kids were so close, engaged and connected to me and my performance art that I can feel their pure energy right now. The overall experience was very exciting, refreshing like walking in the garden. We all found a common moment of awareness of our bodies and our emotions. We became so connected that we did not want to leave the classroom. I think it was one of the extraordinary moments that I have had in classroom without trying without working with ordinary art supply. Our bodies and our emotions were the art materials today, ,,,the whole experience was art. This happens when teaching methodology overlaps the art”.