Episode 3

Nathan Holbert:

Welcome to Pop and Play, the podcast all about play in its many silly, serious, and powerful forms. I'm Nathan Holbert.

 

Haeny Yoon:

I'm Haeny Yoon. And in this season, we're talking about young people's media, how to make it, why it matters, what participation looks like, and its challenges and limitations.

 

Nathan Holbert:

And today we're talking with Erica Halverson about what it's like to make media with children. Erica is a learning scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and also the host of the fantastic podcast Arts Educators Save the World, where she invites well-known artists to interview the arts educators in their life, which is pretty cool. I'm excited to hear how she's thinking about this and how she works around the kind of unique power and affordances of arts education. But I want to start by playing Erica for a moment here and asking you a question about the educators in your life, Haeny Yoon. Who inspired you to become who you are today? The great Haeny Yoon.

 

Haeny Yoon:

The great Haeny Yoon. Here's the secret to my success. Okay. So I have to admit that when you first asked me this question, I had a hard time answering it because I think my immediate response to you was, "I don't know. I can't really think of any teachers that inspired me."

 

Nathan Holbert:

Because you are the only inspiration for you.

 

Haeny Yoon:

I refuse to be taught.

 

Nathan Holbert:

I've been my own inspiration.

 

Haeny Yoon:

I'm unteachable.

 

Nathan Holbert:

And that may be true.

 

Haeny Yoon:

That could be true. Sorry. I think I was okay. So then I had a moment where I was like, "Why is that? Why is that?" And I realized, you know how people have these special relationships with their teachers or special connections? You're like, "Oh my God, whatever was such a, she was like my friend and she listened to me" and all that stuff. I don't think I ever really had that, only because I was like, again, I said this on the podcast, trying to be less Asian, trying to be invisible. And I think that invisibility also made me go unnoticed. So some kids can provoke a certain kind of relationship with their teachers because they're always there or they have a certain, I don't know what it is, sometimes whiteness, but also just a way of being that makes them more susceptible to those relationships with adults.

I didn't necessarily have that until... Okay. I actually do remember I got to sixth grade and I had this, she was not my homeroom teacher, she was my English teacher. I think she was my English teacher or writing teacher or whatever that was. And her name was Mrs. Feingold or Ms. Feingold, actually. Sorry.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Thank you, yeah.

 

Haeny Yoon:

I have actually a story attached to this story.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Okay. Okay. Story within the story.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yes. It was Ms. Feingold and I felt like she was the first teacher that I felt like I had a playful relationship with. She would go out of her way to talk to me, to make jokes with me. She would even write me these little notes out of nowhere. And we had this ongoing joke for a whole year, and I can't even remember what the joke was, but it was the first time that I ever had that kind of relationship with any teacher.

 

Nathan Holbert:

You pass notes to your teacher?

 

Haeny Yoon:

Well, no. She would write notes to me like... Oh, oh, now I remember the joke. The joke was that I was older than my previous grade that I'm in because I'm in sixth grade. I must be in seventh grade. So she's like, does that, so she would always just make a joke about it. It doesn't make any sense.

 

Nathan Holbert:

But it felt personal.

 

Haeny Yoon:

It felt personal, yeah. And she was just like, yeah, I felt like it wasn't about giving me extra rewards. It wasn't about candy, it wasn't about learning something different from her. I felt like I probably learned a lot from a lot of my teachers, but it was this special relationship and connection that I made to an adult in my life and a teacher that felt different from the kinds of relationships that I had with teachers before, which is very authoritative and you kind of do what you need to do sort of thing. And she also then eventually married our industrial arts teacher named a Mr. Venegoni, so she might be Mrs. Venegoni now. How about you?

 

Nathan Holbert:

That's good. That was a good story by the way. And you acted, you never had a teacher that inspired you, but sixth grade, that's pretty early for an inspirational experience.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yeah, I guess so. Is it?

 

Nathan Holbert:

I can't think of anybody before high school.

 

Haeny Yoon:

I was an early childhood teacher and I think, yeah, your favorite teacher should have been like kindergarten.

 

Nathan Holbert:

No, no. The teachers that were, I think most inspirational to the eventual career trajectories I went on were in high school and I had two teachers, Mr. Diskin, and also Mr. Berkamp. One was the chemistry teacher. One was the physics teacher. I think specifically what really drew me in, Mr. Diskin and his wife was Ms. Diskin was also a chemistry teacher. They used to do these big performances.

 

Haeny Yoon:

So it was the husband and wife duo?

 

Nathan Holbert:

They were, yeah. Again, don't know what's happening now.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Feingold.

 

Nathan Holbert:

But back then, and they used to do these big performances. They would do these chemistry performances where they would blow things up, but they would do acting and they would integrate music. And so they kind of had this thing that was a mix of, remember Stomp where they'd bang on. It was like a mix of Stomp

 

Haeny Yoon:

Oh, describe Stomp, though. For the listeners.

 

Nathan Holbert:

It's like a percussion performance where people would be banging on buckets or various kind of street artifacts to create really cool percussion songs. So they would do these things with that. They would work with the kind of band, but also then they would integrate pyrotechnics with the chemistry stuff and they would time that to the beats as well. And so it was this really cool, flashy performance that was also chemistry, and I just thought it was the coolest thing.

And so there was a class I could take where I would assist the chemistry teachers in making the stuff for the labs that would happen in the class. So I would go back to the back room and I would get into the stockroom and I'd mix up the different acids and bases or whatever it was. And I felt like a real serious person that was doing real stuff. That was part of what was happening in the classroom.

Similarly, Mr. Berkamp, the physics teacher, he would be there after school sometimes, and so he would kind of come and help me out or I'd go ask him questions about classes. So we just started having this more kind of casual conversations. And I think it was this treating you, sort of what you were saying, treating you as a serious person, treating you as someone that isn't just a kid and I'm an authority figure over you, but somebody to have a real meaningful interaction and conversation with. And that really stuck with me. And eventually when I became a teacher, I remember calling up Mr. Berkamp and saying, "Hey, can you give me some advice on what it is to be a teacher?" And he talked me for an hour or two on the phone and gave me all sorts of advice.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Wait, so you talked to him post high school?

 

Nathan Holbert:

Yeah, after I graduated undergrad and became a teacher, he gave me some great advice.

 

Haeny Yoon:

See, that's when, you know you had a meaningful impact on someone's life, is when you call them years after where you don't have to speak to them if you don't want to.

 

Nathan Holbert:

All my former students, my phone number is... Yeah, you know what? It seems like we're kind of circling an idea here around the importance of relationships, the importance of taking youth seriously, engaging with their ideas, engaging with them as people that have ideas. I think we should talk to Erica about the way she sort of integrates this into her work as an arts educator.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Sounds like a good time.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Great. All right. We are thrilled to have with us today, Erica Halverson to talk about media and making media specifically with young people. So let me give a big juicy introduction to you. Erica is professor of curriculum and instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Go Badgers.

 

Nathan Holbert:

She's also the author of How the Arts Can Save Education and co-founder of Playmakers Laboratory in Chicago and the creator of Whoopensocker in Madison, Wisconsin, both brilliant educational communities that connect young artists and young writers with arts professionals to make and perform original productions. I'm excited to talk to her about that today. And most importantly, most importantly, Erica is the creator and host of the smash hit Podcast Arts Educators Save the World, where artists and actors you know and love interview the arts educators that have inspired them. Erica, we're super excited to have you here with us today.

 

Erica Halverson:

I'm excited to be here in studio. It's such a great kismet that I was in the New York area and y'all were ready to receive me. It's so cool.

 

Nathan Holbert:

We're always ready, first of all. Well, today we're going to talk with you a little bit about the work that you do, your research, we'll talk with you about the opportunities that you've engaged in to make media with youth. But before we get into that stuff, we got to start with a bit of a game.

 

Erica Halverson:

I love a game.

 

Nathan Holbert:

You ready for a little game? Okay, so here's the idea. You are a learning scientist.

 

Erica Halverson:

I am.

 

Nathan Holbert:

As am I. And both of us are pretty knowledgeable about nerdy things like cognition and nerdy things like design, but totally different than me, you are a performer and also a very knowledgeable person about musical theater and the arts. And so I thought it might be fun to invite you to provide some brief descriptions of core learning scientists ideas, but doing it in a style of well-known musicals.

 

Erica Halverson:

Oh boy. Now I'm on Jimmy Fallon.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Oh my God. Is that where you got this game from?

 

Nathan Holbert:

No. Is it on Jimmy Fallon?

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yes.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Okay, we'll try to start easy. I think. Maybe not. I don't think I could do it, but it's still all right. Why don't you tell us a little bit about scaffolding in the style of Oklahoma?

 

Erica Halverson:

Okay. Well, darling, you see it goes a little something like this. When you got a problem and there's no one to solve it. Sometimes you got to give yourself a hand. I got to give myself a hand. How does that work? Well, we use something called scaffolding, which is like you put on the outside of a building. A building. You mean on the page? No, like they have in the big city. Oh, the big city. Yeah. You take, when you want to build a building, the big city, you need some help. How do you get that help? You build some structures that you can hang on to in order to be able to make that building stand up all on its own without help. Oh, I can't wait to go to the big city. See how that works. Scene.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Oh, my God.

 

Erica Halverson:

And by Oklahoma you meant bad southern accents, right?

 

Nathan Holbert:

Yeah.

 

Erica Halverson:

That's what you meant.

 

Nathan Holbert:

That was pretty much exactly it.

 

Erica Halverson:

That's excellent. Excellent.

 

Nathan Holbert:

You want to try another one?

 

Erica Halverson:

Sure. How's this going for people listening, right? Are you enjoying yourself?

 

Nathan Holbert:

I'm having a ball. Okay. How about explaining design-based research in the style of Phantom of the Opera?

 

Erica Halverson:

Oh, okay. Here I am in this place drawing to make something new. But if I do, if I do, I need to work with you to take some theories and people and practice our goals together until we try again and again, until we get it right. I decided to just go for the bad, bad Opera, man.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Oh, you nailed it.

 

Haeny Yoon:

That's so much.

 

Nathan Holbert:

I can't hit that note. Any of those notes.

 

Erica Halverson:

Did I send [inaudible 00:12:51] this research?

 

Nathan Holbert:

Yes.

 

Erica Halverson:

Unclear.

 

Nathan Holbert:

You did.

 

Erica Halverson:

And again and again.

 

Nathan Holbert:

And you got the iteration in there. You got working with others, you got theory building. I mean, you crushed it. Absolutely crushed it. That was incredible.

 

Haeny Yoon:

That was very good.

 

Nathan Holbert:

I have more, but I feel like we've asked so much from you already. It was just-

 

Erica Halverson:

I know. Yeah. I am sweating a little right now, just so you know.

 

Haeny Yoon:

That was so good.

 

Erica Halverson:

Minute of sweating.

 

Nathan Holbert:

That was good.

 

Haeny Yoon:

I mean, I have little faith. I will definitely take my words back because that was very good.

 

Nathan Holbert:

That was extremely good. You're in luck though. I have one for you.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Oh no, I don't want one.

 

Nathan Holbert:

I'm just kidding.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Do you want me to leave? Is that what you're trying to do?

 

Nathan Holbert:

Get out. Erica, thank you very much for partaking in this little game. That was a lot to ask. And you far exceeded.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Oh, definitely.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Our expectations, which were already very high.

 

Haeny Yoon:

I think that leads us really well to our first question, because I'm thinking about what you just did right now, stroke of brilliance, and I'm wondering what child Erica was watching or doing with her time to grow up into this amazing adult Erica, who can perform musicals on the whim. What were you watching or engaging with when you were young?

 

Erica Halverson:

So most of my childhood was spent in a dance studio, but not in a ballet, formal dance studio you may think of. Actually with an organization that is now very, very close geographically to here at Teacher's College, the National Dance Institute, which is a nonprofit dance education organization that was started by former New York City principal dancer, Jacques D'Amboise, to bring dance education to public school kids.

And then NDI had some programs for kids who were really excited by dance and performing as a way to spend their time on Saturdays and in the summers. And so I spent a lot of my time doing that and learning how to be an artist from Jacques and the teaching artists who worked with him, many of whom were professional dancers, former professional dancers, but who wanted to be more expansive about the way they thought about art making and learning.

 

Haeny Yoon:

And you got introduced through this through school?

 

Erica Halverson:

Through school. I was eight years old and they had an artist in residence program at my elementary school, and any third and fourth grade kid could join. And so I joined that program and that evolved into a seven or eight year commitment to making art through dance.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Wow, that's really cool.

 

Erica Halverson:

Yeah.

 

Haeny Yoon:

I'm wondering what the, because I'm thinking about all the things that kids get introduced to at school, and I'm wondering about what's the thing that sticks right? You get introduced to whatever, this art or this little thing. I still remember this guy came and played spoons at my school. I was like, that was the most amazing thing.

 

Nathan Holbert:

I would be a spoons artist.

 

Haeny Yoon:

If it was a spoons school. I would've gone to it. Okay. So what is it about NDI that really resonated with you that made you want to stick with it for all that time? As you said, it was a big commitment.

 

Erica Halverson:

Yeah. So two things. I think first of all, I would be remiss if I didn't mention the sort of twin counterpart to that, which on my own podcast I had the opportunity to talk with Lin-Manuel Miranda, Robert Lopez, and our elementary school music teacher, who was my teacher at the same time. She was not involved with NDI at all.

But at the same time that I was becoming part of this NDI community, I also was part of this extremely rich music and theater program in my elementary school. So I think I was surrounded by art making as legitimate and exciting forms of becoming human. It was a pre No Child Left Behind time where of course there were academic commitments that we all were making and had to keep, but there was just not the pressure to use all of our time to do that and be that.

So what kept me going back to NDI, two things. One, the community, I mean, this was a multi-everything community of kids from all over the five boroughs of New York City and New Jersey who came every Saturday. We used to rehearse at the New York City Ballet in their rehearsal rooms.

So you would go to Lincoln Center with your little backpack and walk down the stairs. And I had friends from all over the place, and we are still connected to each other, many of us through social media and some people through professional networks. And so part of it was the community and part of it was Jacques. Jacques' vision for being in a constant environment of movement and inquiry and making and practice. I tell the story sometimes about how in the early years I spent a lot of time under the piano, which is where you would go if you couldn't stop talking during rehearsal.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Literally under the piano?

 

Erica Halverson:

Literally under the piano.

 

Haeny Yoon:

I thought that was some metaphorical thing.

 

Erica Halverson:

Nope. Under the piano. You know what it is under the piano? Loud.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Loud, let's get drowned out.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Oh my God. Wait, was it a form of torture?

 

Erica Halverson:

I mean, it was a form of I told you to shut your mouth and you didn't shut your mouth. So I did spend a lot of time under the piano, but it also, it taught me at a very early age that the value of making art was not to be the star. And we all got our turns. I mean, they were very cool about this group of, at the time there were maybe 50 or 60 of us, I don't know. Opportunities to stand out and shine. But that was never the goal. And so there were all sorts of mechanisms in place set up to explicitly teach us, it's not your turn, settle down.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Get under the piano.

 

Erica Halverson:

Ones of us needed different kinds of ways to learn to step out of ourselves, settle down with ourselves a little bit. So when they kicked us out at 15, that was a very long last set of performances of weeping.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Oh, I'm sure.

 

Erica Halverson:

Not wanting to go.

 

Haeny Yoon:

And you spent so much time together.

 

Erica Halverson:

So much time together.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Doing things that require a lot of vulnerability, I think.

 

Erica Halverson:

And a lot of commitment and a lot of time. I mean, and that's not to say I didn't consume other kinds of media as a kid, but of course as at least Nathan and I are pre-internet, kids of the pre-era.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Haeny's 22. So she's-

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yeah, I don't know.

 

Erica Halverson:

Of course I watch TV, love cartoons, but it just didn't occupy such a central place.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Did you watch dance or get involved in it?

 

Erica Halverson:

Did I watch?

 

Haeny Yoon:

Get involved in watching it, I guess?

 

Nathan Holbert:

Or even Broadway or, I mean grew up here right?

 

Erica Halverson:

I was lucky enough to grow up in New York City and I was lucky enough to grow up in a multi-generational middle-class New York City family. So going to the Nutcracker, going to Broadway shows was part of what you got for Hanukkah gifts or birthday gifts. I've just been lucky enough to grow up in a place and in a sort of cultural way where we just always did that. And then when I was in high school, so I found musical theater kind of in high school, and I went to a theater camp, and so I was an annoying theater camp kid who sang a bajillion musicals all the time.

 

Nathan Holbert:

I am shocked.

 

Erica Halverson:

I know. It's hard to imagine.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Judging by the performance is at the beginning.

 

Nathan Holbert:

It's worked out fine.

 

Erica Halverson:

So then I kind of went on to move more into the kind of theater and musical theater space.

 

Haeny Yoon:

And hearing you talk just made me think about how I feel like in first grade, I had a big crush on this kid, Kevin McCormick.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Kevin, if you're listening.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Partly is because his mom was a ballerina, I believe. And we went to go see the Nutcracker as a classroom to her performance of it. And it was just so magical. Every time she came to class out of Nutcracker mode, I was like, "Oh my God, she's amazing. She's glowing."

 

Erica Halverson:

On a very, very, very micro level. This happens to us with Whoopensocker and Madison.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Oh, nice.

 

Erica Halverson:

Great values of working in a smaller community is kind of, everybody knows everybody. And many of our performers get "street recognition." They'll be walking down the street and two eight-year-olds will be like, "Whoopensocker."

 

Nathan Holbert:

I saw you.

 

Erica Halverson:

And that is really-

 

Haeny Yoon:

That's really cool.

 

Erica Halverson:

And it's memorable.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yes, it is.

 

Erica Halverson:

For the artists, but also for the audience and the folks who then come to see that as a community of people who tell stories together.

 

Haeny Yoon:

It leaves an impression.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Well, let's talk a little bit about that. Can you say a little bit about Whoopensocker? For those that aren't as familiar, what is it? How do kids get involved? How are the artists involved?

 

Erica Halverson:

Yeah, so Whoopensocker, I will say is part of a larger ecology of programs and organizations. We were talking off mic about Story Pirates, another group.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Love Story Pirates

 

Erica Halverson:

That does this kind of work, started a program. It's now called Playmakers Lab works in Chicago Public schools teaching, writing, and improv and performance. And a few years into doing that work, I got really fascinated by the fact that kids were learning stuff and I didn't know anything. First of all, I didn't know anything about learning, but I also didn't even know that you could learn about learning.

I knew you could learn about teaching. And so I was lucky enough to find the learning sciences program at Northwestern, which is the same program that Nathan went to. And there I was able to develop the kinds of theoretical lenses and methodological tools and ways of thinking and knowing that allowed me to better understand and articulate what was happening for kids as they were engaging with these different kinds of activities and lessons and opportunities and how that looked like learning and what that meant and how that maybe looked different than what we thought learning traditionally looks like, and also how that could enhance and push back on different ways that we define learning.

And so Whoopensocker is an artist in residence program that goes into elementary schools, third and fourth grade primarily, and does during the school day in-classroom artist and residents creative expression program where we bring professional teaching artists to work alongside classroom teachers with kids to create stories using a range of formats. And then we have a performing ensemble that takes some of the writing and crafts a kind of hour long sketch comedy show that we then perform for the kids, for the community. We are lucky enough in Madison to have a youth arts center and we perform there and it has professional theater spaces and opportunities for kids to see their work performed in a professional space, which is really special.

 

Haeny Yoon:

I mean, that's such a powerful thing, right? It's like one thing to write. You always say that we should write for a purpose, but you always feel like the purpose is school.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Right, for kids, yeah.

 

Haeny Yoon:

To write for a real purpose to a real audience and really have your words kind of come off the page.

 

Nathan Holbert:

And valued enough to bring them off the page. Yeah.

 

Haeny Yoon:

That is very powerful.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Yeah, that's awesome. I'm curious, you've been doing this for a lot of years and so I'm sure the list is long, but what are some of the things that these young people like to build stories about?

 

Erica Halverson:

Poop.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Poop has come up so many times on this podcast.

 

Nathan Holbert:

It's come up a few times.

 

Erica Halverson:

In my opinion, if you can't get down with a poop joke, you should not be working with children. We structure the storytelling around big idea themes that so we have more specific genres like personal story, which is both very live and connected for kids. Tell a story about something that happened to you, also connected to things that are expected of kids in schools around that age. You should be able to structure a narrative of personal experience.

We tell stories from pictures, which is something I learned from the great Carol Lee around how images, particularly images that have cultural connections for kids, can spark authentic and meaningful storytelling beyond what is in the image and outside of the typical ways that schools ask kids to share things about themselves. So we do stories from pictures, we do playwriting, so we introduce the tools of dialogue and stage directions and how does that change the way you tell a story if you are mostly using conversation and action rather than narrative description.

 

Nathan Holbert:

And these are for third and fourth graders?

 

Erica Halverson:

Mm-hmm.

 

Nathan Holbert:

That's amazing. I mean, because I have young kids and I think about the kind of work they bring home, and I think they're doing some interesting things that are certainly practicing writing. But I think this idea about dialogue and action and things, it is such a particular way of storytelling that's hard to do. And thinking about a third-grader, it's really cool.

 

Erica Halverson:

It's hard to do if you don't take advantage of what that kind of storytelling affords. So we often, I would say, you might say we work backwards where we will start with a classic improv where we ask the kids to give the teaching artists characters, settings and a problem. And then those two teaching artists will improvise a dialogue. And then we'll invite the kids to perform that dialogue so that they can get a sense of what embodied work is like. So that then if they start with embodiment, it helps them translate it back in the other direction to like, well, what should the lines be? Well, what should the actions be? If you're taking the actions with your body, it is actually much easier to then-

 

Nathan Holbert:

Figure out how to put that on paper. Yeah. I was actually going to ask you to sing about embodiment in the style of Jesus Christ Superstar, but we'll do it next time.

 

Erica Halverson:

I was already going to do it anyway. This bottle is mine. Nope, sorry. Now it's gone over the edge.

 

Nathan Holbert:

That's super cool.

 

Haeny Yoon:

How do you decide what makes it to the production phase? Or is it basically the stories make it to the production phase? Is it a mash-up?

 

Erica Halverson:

Oh, no. Each residency produces hundreds of stories because one of the commitments that we made early on in Madison was when we do a residency at a school, we work with an entire grade. And first of all, Madison practices full inclusion. And so there are no pull-out classrooms, which I am very passionate about, and we didn't want Whoopensocker to become a special thing that only certain kids get to do.

And so we work with a whole grade, which is typically 70 to 90 kids at a time. And so we got hundreds of stories to choose from. Our teaching artists give feedback, every kid has a journal. And our teaching artists give feedback. Two teaching artists give feedback on every kid's journal. So every kid knows their stories have been read, their stories have been received.

They get some, "Oh, I really love this particular thing." Or I remember when we acted this out some way to remind the kids that they have a legitimate audience for their work, and then the teaching artists select maybe 40 or 50 pieces that they're like, "This could be good." And that's a combination of things that make them laugh, things that are meaningful. And also they know the kids and there are kids who really benefit from having their work recognized. And those are not necessarily the kids who typically have their work recognized. And the teaching artists come to know those students.

And so they'll say, "We should really do this piece or something from this notebook would be great, or this day was a huge breakthrough." Then they'll give those pieces to a director and then the director will further narrow it down. And then the performing ensemble takes 18 hours to put a show together from, "Here's the stories to, it's the Whoopensocker show." And so that all happens pretty quickly and with a lot of openness to Yes, and, to thinking through different ways to tell stories pretty quickly. And with a lot of collaborative practice and a lot of cardboard props.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Such a versatile material.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Oh yes, for sure.

 

Nathan Holbert:

That's amazing. And I'm assuming the show itself is 47 hours long because it has so many.

 

Erica Halverson:

50 minutes is my-

 

Nathan Holbert:

Nice and tight.

 

Erica Halverson:

That is my golden number that I am always like, "Do not make this show longer than 50 minutes." Sometimes it will go to 54, 55.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Well, you could get 40 stories in?

 

Erica Halverson:

No, we get 20. About 20.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Still, that's moving.

 

Haeny Yoon:

It's still pretty good. Holy cow.

 

Erica Halverson:

The aesthetic, it was born out of a Chicago based group called the Neo Futurists, and they did a play that I think in some iterations still exists. I think it is no longer called Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind. It's now called The Infinite Wrench, where they perform their shtick was 30 plays in 60 minutes.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Oh wow.

 

Erica Halverson:

That aesthetic, the Chicago kind of experimental theater scene in the nineties and early two thousands, very much we were shaped by that aesthetic and there was some crossover of artists, but also just being a young person in an art scene means that there's a lot of porousness between, I don't know, approaches and aesthetics and ways of doing.

 

Nathan Holbert:

That's awesome. So to change directions just a tiny bit, I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the podcast. So you've been doing this podcast Arts Educators Save the World for how many years now? Two, three years?

 

Erica Halverson:

Yeah. This is kind of our third year.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Yeah, I didn't want to call it seasons. Now you are recording and producing content every week.

 

Erica Halverson:

We're trying to be always on. There's so many stories to tell and it is inspiring me to keep pushing forward. And I think the more we worry that we live in a world where the arts are going to be further separated and constrained from our everyday lives, the more I feel the need to keep telling these stories and keep making those ways of knowing and doing and being available to more people.

 

Nathan Holbert:

So what inspired and motivated you to actually sit down and start recording these conversations?

 

Erica Halverson:

So I wrote this book, How the Arts Can Save Education, which when I wrote it, my fantasy of it was that it was like a popular press type book, a book for everybody. And then as you both probably know with academic writing, even as accessible as you try to make it is not a book that tens of thousands of people will read, even though you're like, "But they should and they'll like it."

 

Haeny Yoon:

I mean, I feel like you should do an Audible of that book because I would probably listen to that, just an audio version read by Erica. I feel like you would write such a good audiobook.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Absolutely.

 

Erica Halverson:

Alec, who is my producer and co-host and I, who've been friends for a million years. We're talking about how do we spread the word, how do we get the gospel of arts education going? And he had produced podcasts in the past and does to this day. And so we started talking about what would that be like? What kind of format would we want?

And actually the idea sort of came out of our childhood experiences with Barbara Ames and Lin Manuel Miranda and Bobby Lopez of like, "Oh, we should talk to the people who inspired us, who inspire others." And then luckily, that is quite generative, as you said, right? So many, many people have an origin story in their lives, especially people who pursue a particular passion. There is almost always like, "This is where that passion was sparked, or this is where that passion was nurtured, or here is how I saw myself becoming."

And so we've been really... I was going to say lucky. Some of it is luck. Some of it is due diligence to identify artists from across the spectrum of art form, spectrum of identities, spectrum of locations. We've been in the US exclusively, but all around the country where interesting relationships between being an art maker and having grown up in a space with somebody else have bubbled up and flourished. And so we've been really trying to tell as many of those stories as we can.

 

Nathan Holbert:

It's a really wonderful podcast. The density of tears on your podcast is slightly higher than ours, but I also, as a middle-aged man, I'm often weeping as I'm listening to it on a run or something. Oh, so beautiful. They love each other.

 

Haeny Yoon:

I mean, I do want to go back to something that you said earlier about the idea that you got into a doctoral program because you were like, "Oh my gosh, there's a theory about learning about learning." And that it all comes back to this idea that you were really thinking about, "What can we do to engage kids in classrooms?" And I think that's a through line of your work is that you started these projects because you wanted to get to a space where you can take that learning and think about how to engage children in that or how to engage kids in that.

And I think that's a really important thread that this is how do you reach an audience that really needs to hear this, that will actually impact and influence their daily lives and really make arts a practice that they're going to use to think about learning and engaging and innovating and imagining and creating something very different and very new. And I feel like that's kind of how we started to think about this too. We're like, "There's got to be another audience. The audience that we started with, which was teachers and kids. How do we get back to reaching that audience and what's the mode that's going to get us there?"

 

Erica Halverson:

And I think something I've noticed with my colleagues who are increasingly nervous about the position of public education in general, they're turning to us because we've always had to do this work. We've always had to... Not prove our worth. That's not the right way to say it, but we've always had to work by stealth and work to make these experiences valuable and available and visible. And I feel like, oh, science people, welcome to the resistance, social studies people, come on in.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Come on over.

 

Erica Halverson:

I think artists and arts educators have had a long history of being that inspirational seed while not being publicly valued for what that has done for humanity. And so I think we're all really well-positioned to be like, "Let's tell those stories."

 

Nathan Holbert:

And I think just to add one more rock to that pile here is the centrality of relationships. I don't want to say it's built in, but I think it's more commonly accepted as a part of the arts is relationships between people. And it's very often not at all seen as a core part of other STEM-y type domains. And what you know as a learning scientist is that, "No, no, no. Relationship is a part of cognition. It's a part of learning. And it's not somehow separate depending upon whether you're in science or whether you're in the arts."

 

Erica Halverson:

Well, all of the classes I teach, I have the opportunity to teach arts integration for future teachers. So people who want to use arts in their classrooms. I have a program for teaching artists. And then I also work with graduate students pretty regularly from education, but also different disciplines. Everything I do starts with scaffolding, risk-taking in the classroom, and not only doing the scaffolding, but meta narrating that and explaining why you can't learn anything if you're not willing to take a risk. And that for me is an arts practice. Scaffolding or sticking is an arts practice that should be translated to every teaching and learning environment and begins with something as simple in the college classroom as knowing the names of the other people in your classroom. These are human interactions that require people to be vulnerable, and no one is going to be vulnerable if they don't feel seen. And feeling seen starts very basically with knowing what the person wants to be called.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yeah, I mean, I totally agree with that. It's kind of like we focus so much attention on the products of what learning is versus the conditions of what makes all that happen. And there are definitely conditions that you have to intentionally create to promote risk for people to feel safe, for people to be vulnerable and open.

 

Nathan Holbert:

I feel like that's a beautiful spot to end here and this conversation. Thank you Erica, so much for kind of taking us through your history and the various kind of places and people and domains in which you've sort of developed and practiced and then also created for many and many other people throughout the world. So we really appreciate that.

 

Haeny Yoon:

And for your excellent under-the-piano voice.

 

Nathan Holbert:

And for the singing, oh my God, we got singing on this episode. It's amazing.

 

Erica Halverson:

You got what my family refers to as bad opera voice. You're welcome.

 

Nathan Holbert:

And one last question for you. What's poppin' for you? What kind of media are you into? Movies, plays, books, shows, games.

 

Erica Halverson:

So one thing that's happening for me is that I'm on sabbatical.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Woo woo woo.

 

Nathan Holbert:

So jealous.

 

Erica Halverson:

My sabbatical project is I'm writing a novel. My vibe I'm going for is like Richard Russo meets like Curtis Sittenfeld, so sort of like Americana meets pop-lit, chick-lit stuff. So I'm spending a lot of time, and I'll just say very quickly, book is about a small college in Wisconsin that's failing. And so the administration taps a young media studies professor to make a reality show with the faculty.

 

Haeny Yoon:

We have talked about this so many times.

 

Erica Halverson:

And as you can imagine, it's a giant hit. And so I'm reading a lot about the history of reality television.

 

Haeny Yoon:

God, There is a new book out, Emily Nescah.

 

Erica Halverson:

That's what I'm reading right now. I'm reading Emily Nescah's book right now. I'm also a huge reality television fan.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Me too.

 

Erica Halverson:

So I'm a huge Real Housewives fan.

 

Haeny Yoon:

What have we been wasting this episode On?

 

Erica Halverson:

Huge Real Housewives fan and huge fan of the podcast Watch What Crappens, which is a recap podcast. And sometimes, I'm going to be honest, I watch the episode so I can listen to the recap.

 

Haeny Yoon:

See the podcast. Oh my God.

 

Erica Halverson:

I prefer the recap.

 

Haeny Yoon:

That's so great. I love that.

 

Nathan Holbert:

That's outstanding. Erica, thank you so much for being here. Everybody check out her podcast Arts Educators Save the World. It's a delight. Thanks for spending time with us today. Really had a blast.

 

Erica Halverson:

Thanks for having me.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Thank you. Bye.

 

Erica Halverson:

Bye.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Pop and Play is produced by Haeny Yoon, Nathan Holbert, Lalitha Vasudevan, Billy Collins and Joe Rinaferri at Teachers College Columbia University with the Digital Futures Institute. This episode was edited by Billy Collins and Adrian Petullo.

 

Nathan Holbert:

For a transcript. And to learn more, visit tc.edu/popandplay. Our music is selections from Leafeaters by Podington Bear, used here under a Creative Commons Attribution non-commercial license. Blake Danzig and Meier Clark provided our social media and outreach support. Follow @popandplaypod on Instagram. Thank you to Abu Abdelbagi for support with our website and additional materials.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Do you teach about play and pop culture? Check out our topics, collection, organized for the classroom. And of course, don't forget to share Pop and Play with a friend or colleague.

 

Nathan Holbert:

And thanks for listening.