News
Art Project in Colegio Alto Peru
June 12, 2009 by Valentina Martufi
Objective
With the aim of maintaining SOLAC’s commitment to the school of Alto Perú, in the District of Chosica-Lurigancho, we decided to organize an art project with the children of the school. When discussing with the Headmistress of the school, Sr.a Nelli Villegas, about what would be a good theme for the project in order to benefit the children the most, she suggested making it about the history of Huachipa. She explained to us that many of the children found it hard to identify with and relate to their community as an entity. This is how we came up with the idea of having the children build a pop-up book about the history of their community.
The Project
Unfortunately, we realized it was not possible to work with all 120 kids of the school. Since there were only three of us working on this project, we decided to work with three classes only, the 2nd, 3rd and 4th year, comprising a total of 63 children of ages ranging from 7 to 13.
Each class would be building their own book. The class would be divided into 4 sub-groups which would each prepare one of the 4 pages of the book. Each child would be preparing one element (a drawing of a building, plants, animals, people) and have it glued onto his/her group’s page as a pop-up image. This way all the kids would be able to see their input into the class work.
The pop-up book itself would be about the history of Huachipa. Through talking with the teachers about what they knew and researching on the internet, we managed to determine four phases in the history of Huachipa:
1) A Pre-Inca phase (up to 1400 A.D.);
2) An Inca phase (1430 to 1535);
3) A Colonial phase (1535 to 1821);
4) An Independence phase (1821 to present day).
After the independence phase came a post-Agricultural Reform phase, where big lots of land previously owned by wealthy families were redistributed, but we figured it was too much information to be taken in by primary children, so we decided to leave it at those four basic phases.
The teachers informed us that there were some pre-Inca ruins just around the corner from the school, belonging to a culture called “Pedreros” (know by this name because of their stone-work). Thus we decided to start introducing the children to the history of their community by taking them on a brief day-trip to the ruins.
Monday 11th May
On Monday morning we went to the school and, together with the help of the teachers, we took the children to see the ruins. On this occasion the headmistress actually thought it would be nice to have all 120 children of the school come to visit the ruins, even those who would not be participating in the workshop. However, since the day before it had been Mother’s Day, which is a very big celebration in Peru, many children were not attending school that day, so there were only about 50-60 children there.
Later, one of the 4th year boys gave us a personal explanation about some other ruins that we walked through on our way back to the school. The version he told us had a lot of personal input from his own creative view of the history behind those ruins.
Wednesday 13th May
The first day of the project we started off by assembling all three classes that were going to participate in the workshop in one room, so as to give them all together an introduction to the workshop. We introduced ourselves and played a quick game with them to help relax the atmosphere and gain their confidence. Then we explained to them that we wanted to learn about the history of their community together with them, and we started asking them what they could tell us. The children were not really confident enough to tell us anything, so we introduced the beginning phase by reminding them of the day trip on Monday. Then we proceeded through the four phases by asking them what came next and what they knew about it, filling in any gaps in their description also with the help of the teachers. We helped this process along by showing them images of representative things for each phase (e.g. aqueducts for Inca phase, slave for Colonial phase, etc.).
We then divided them into each individual class, and each one of us starting work with one class. The first thing we did was explain to them the various steps of the building of the book. We then divided them into the subgroups and assigned a phase to each group. First of all each group painted the background of the page they would be responsible for. Then we put that to dry and the children started drawing their elements. The aim was for each element to be relevant to the page the child was working on, but with the youngest ones (2nd year) it pretty much ended up being anything they felt like drawing.
Two classes finished all their drawings on the first day, whilst the 4th years – who took a little bit more care in what they were drawing (being the eldest) – had to finish up their drawings the 2nd day.
Thursday 14th May
The second day was used to finish up drawings where needed, decorating the pages and the cover of the book, and gluing all elements on the respective page and all pages together into the cover.
Results
Both teachers and students seemed very happy about the result of the workshop. The teachers were looking forward to using the idea of the pop-up book for other themes, and the children were very proud of their own work. We hope that as time goes by a resulting proud identification with their community will result from this work, perhaps the youngest will forget about it quite quickly, but it is certainly something that the teachers will be referring to when talking to the children about the history of their country and their community. The 4th year teacher already announced wanting to do some follow-up work with his class, perhaps even with the editing of a descriptive text for each page.
At this point we would like to thank Sara Scarll for providing such dedicated support during the workshop, and Rodolfo Abdias Arrascue Navas, who spent Thursday taking photos of the children and their work.
Project coordinators:
Valentina Martufi, Ruth Pollak, and Marta Dormal