En Masse
Group Management in Art and Activities
This summer I had the privilege of working for 7 weeks at a little church camp called Camp Challenge in Bedford, Indiana. It offers 5 day overnight camps for 1st graders up through highschoolers, with attendances ranging from 50-120 campers each week. As a member of the summer staff, I resided in a cabin with 8-12 of these campers and guided them through the planned activities and discussions (alongside co-counselors). Luckily for this blog, there was a little bit of art! Not a lot, but enough for me to mention it. Alongside mentioning the art projects I think it's also worth noting how different age groups interacted with both me and each other.
I wish I had taken better notes, but the hectic schedule kept me on my toes both physically and mentally, so here is my best attempt at coherent thought.
Minions! Tonight we steal THE MOON!!
The summer started off with a BANG, featuring the 1st through 3rd grade bunch we call "Young Explorers". I found this especially cool, because I had never been to Camp Challenge before either! So there I was for the two day camp leading these first-timers around and experiencing it with them for my own first time! They certainly had energy, but I was able to match it for the brief two days.
The only activity involving art was short but sweet. We only had a half-hour to create a "Cabin Flag" on a decent-sized piece of canvas. We grabbed some markers and headed to the cabin.
For better context, this was a group of eight 6-8 year-olds: they don't have an attention span. But somehow I still felt confident that we could create a cohesive piece (with a good amount of help).
I've heard that this age group struggles to form mental pictures. Hence the "Look at this Dragon" blobs they create. It's obviously a dragon…
So as I taught my Cardboard Club to do this past Spring, I started with Brainstorming. (The YOU PLAN acronym)
In this phase it's important to say that there are NO wrong ideas. And by that I mean anything can be used to work towards generating that first step. (Of course some things do not belong in certain contexts, and that was acknowledged if necessary, but wasn’t really a problem)
I went around the room and asked them to just throw out ideas. They had clearly seldom done that before, so we had some strange or vague responses, but eventually we got "American Flag" and "The Moon" and then someone referenced Despicable Me.
"Minions! Tonight, we steal… THE MOON!" they declared,
and the idea was planted.
I squatted down to the flag, grabbed a marker and wrote "Mahuron Minions" in bold (our cabin was named Mahuron) and then drew a minion from memory. Then told them to draw their own minions on the flag.
What happened next was beautiful.
In the mere 15-20 minutes, everybody who wanted to contribute, contributed. One of them sat out and one drew a moon and an american flag instead of a minion, but everyone felt very included. AND the flag looked really good. I was impressed, and I think my co-counselors were a little impressed too, though I had prepped them by saying "guys, I teach art to kids as a job".
I loved it.
What I noticed was that because I had drawn my minion with one eye, so had everyone else. But they had been creative in other ways! One made a disco minion, some added the little levitation potion bottles (from the first movie) and others just made theirs have a slightly different hairstyle. This age group copied what I put in front of them, and tweaked it slightly as they saw fit. But they didn't stray that far. Nobody added a second eye, or made an extra buff minion. They took the template I had drawn and then changed things like color and outfits, but not structure.
8 is Great!
I've found that eight is a really good number for collaborative arts. Everyone can pair up, and the pairs can pair up, and they can all fit at a table and learn each other's names within a half hour.
When the groups start to get any larger than that, even to 10 or 11, then side discussions happen way too quickly and the group is harder to control. You won't have the same focus with a larger group.
There are ways around this, but with different results. As in, it's not impossible for a larger group of say, two dozen kids to accomplish a project together or individually. The problem is, they won't be able to work on the same project at the same time (unless this thing is MASSIVE and allows for 48 hands on it at a time). In most cases, a few voices will be heard, and everybody else's will be too quiet. With 8 or fewer, it's far clearer who is talking most and who should be asked to provide their input.
Think of a classroom art setting you may have experienced. Yes, there are 20+ kids in there, but you only really see the work of the three or four people sitting at your table, and you only really give your input there (unless you're like me, and liked to walk around and comment on other peoples' projects). If all twenty were sitting at the same table, the table would be like that of a lunchroom (long) table where you are only talking to the five, maybe six kids closest to you (your left, right, and three across).
That's why 8 is great. Because everyone can sit at the same table and collaborate together. 3 on each side and two on the ends. Or pairs, or two groups of four.
It's one cohesive table, not too much to handle.
At camp I found that the larger the group was, the less instruction the person in charge was able to give before kids lost focus–particularly in the crafts context. The kids would get antsy rather quickly to start painting their sled or whatever the project was. All the instructor could say was, "Okay guys, paint this" and then distribute paint, because it just took so much effort to get a larger group quiet enough to receive instruction.
It's different talking over 20 voices as opposed to 4 (realistically all 8 members are never talking all at once)
I suppose the reason I'm so drawn to the smaller groups is because I can then actually provide input and help each one when needed. I'm not stretched too thin as I am in a larger group. That being said, large group workshops are possible to do well. They just must be structured differently. How exactly, I'm not certain yet, but I can tell you right now that it needs far more logistics and better prepared materials than a smaller group does. Passing out 8 pallets of paint isn't a huge problem. Refilling 30 palettes of white is a full-time job.
There really weren't many instances where we made art at camp. On several occasions people made friendship bracelets and drew with chalk, and the staff made some fun mailboxes during training week, but art wasn't hugely prevalent. So, to wrap up this post I just have an observation I would like to share with any future camp directors—a sort of plea ripped from the void of my camper-induced insanity:
please don't give wet bandanas to middle school boys.
