Episode 222 – Jorge Lucero – Creating Knowledge

Hi everyone! I'm Laura Grundler. And I'm Matt Grundler. And today on K12 Art Chat Podcast, we'll be chatting with Jorge Lucero about creating knowledge, what art making really teaches students. I have to say I'm really excited because not only is this amazing person was wonderful and gracious enough to just jump in on a whim, but...

For a Saturday recording? For just a recording of any sort. But I'm always excited because the level of conversation just... elevates and I'm just I'm just so always honored to have to have our guests with us today I think most guests we want to continue the conversation with and and sometimes it's it's easy to connect and sometimes it's not and Jorge always makes it easy like And the conversation just flows and it's a lot of fun.

Jorge, we're so excited to have you back on the podcast. And for our listeners, you are Dr. Jorge Lucero, and we would love you to just tell everyone a little bit about you, your art education journey. what you are doing right now, and maybe a little bit about your book. Okay. Yeah, I am born and raised in Chicago, Illinois. My parents were immigrants from Mexico, and they were kind enough to support me.

Or maybe recognize that the only thing that I had any competency for as a as a child was for for art. And so they they supported they supported that they were, you know, they had their questions about about what it.

potentially mean you know um but they were very supportive and i i you know i even though i i was terrible student in my K-12 experience, and I've had many years to reflect on that, so I actually have a lot of thoughts about, you know, why it didn't go so well for me, but I also had a lot of...

teachers during that time that went in a lot of grace in my direction and gave me a lot of, let's call them alternative assignments that were mostly art focused. They were doing special arts integration accommodations for me uh that that actually helped me to pass you know from year to year uh and helped me to graduate high school and i don't think that i ever had thought that i would go to college but i ended up going to the

to the Art Institute of Chicago, the one and only school I applied to. And that was only because I wanted to study painting. I wasn't thinking about college. I was thinking about.

resources for making paintings and i think i think the part that got me the most excited about being at an institution was um having conversations like having other people to talk about the thing that that you love right and um yeah and i maybe that has now now that i'm saying it actually i don't know that i've ever articulated it that way but the now that i'm saying it it's making me think that that has been the drive

you know, the last 25 years of my life when I've been, you know, I taught in high school for almost a decade and then now I've been in higher ed for about 15 years. And I think the drive has always been. that these places afford me the opportunity to have discourse about the things that I have a lot of interest, intrigue in, you know, and art is one of those things. I mean, it's... Curiously enough, it's not the only thing. It was the gateway maybe to...

to be interested in all of the things that get offered up in, in educational settings. But yeah, I think at this point, my parents sometimes say that, that the reason I've, I've been, that I've never.

that i was in school for my entire life and then i ended up getting jobs in schools and it seems like my whole life is going to be defined by the school calendar is because i gave because i gave all my teachers such a hard time when i was a kid you know so it's sort of like it's the curse i'm living with is to is to like stay in school forever I think that could be worse things. I love it. I love it. I think it's a great, I actually think as an artist, as a creative practitioner.

a school is like the best place you could be in and i'm talking about any kind of school you know like whether it's a k through 12 school or or a um or a college of any kind i mean i think they're just great places because you get You get more than anything, you get discourse, you get conversation. And the conversation is not always about art, but it's always about it's it is always about the things that make up art, which is.

which is thinking on the go and making on the go. You know, I was sitting there thinking about... I'm glad that you said it's not just, you know, higher ed spaces, that it's any classroom setting, because I'm thinking back to my last year, a couple of years teaching high school before I moved into administration. And there are conversations I still remember with students.

And some of them weren't about art. Some of them were about basketball. But then it turned into like a conversation from there about, well. you know why why do you think this or why do you think that and well how could you incorporate that into the work that you're doing right now and yeah you know it's it's really interesting and i think the next question really is is you know, there's so much that emerges from making art and, and it's beyond just.

the work of art right you you gain a lot of knowledge from that experience and you've had a lot of a lot of different experiences in teaching but mostly in the chicago public schools right Yes. Yeah, I taught in CPS for seven years, and then I went to grad school for a little bit. I went back to grad school, and now I'm at the University of Illinois, and that's where I've been for the last 15 years.

yeah and and i'm just curious as you're working with students how would you describe the knowledge that emerges from their their making of art

Wow, what a question. I mean, this is exactly what I'm saying. You know, it's like, it's like you get to the fact that I get that I've been able to think about this question for so many decades at this point is is such a gift you know because i i think i think every every two or three years of my life i would probably have answered that question differently um for sure i think the way that i would answer it now is is perhaps by saying that i think art

is, and this is going to be maybe a longer answer than you're wanting, but I think art is a practice of... of reconciliation and and let me let me just uh expand on that a little bit uh my my experience making art but also doing other creative things like like teaching for example or even just having daily relationships is that you make gestures in the world and those gestures are based on what you think

is accurate what you think you know what what questions you want to ask maybe what or what things you want to say so you want to express yourself and so you make gestures in the world but then you you take step back or or you move to the side and you look at that gesture because you know you have to make a follow-up gesture and the follow-up gesture i think in many ways is informed by the first gesture and and it's usually a

an editorial gesture it's a gesture of making either a correction or an adjustment or a pairing or a complementary move or something like that and you you know you can think about this in terms of like making paintings i'm i'm sort of like

i'm imagining the way that you would make a drawing or a painting is like you make a mark and then and then you analyze your mark like no matter how much you've conceptualized that mark in your head it's not until you put it down on the surface that you're able to really see

like it speaks to you in a way and then you make you make an editorial choice which is like what should i add to this what should i take away from this how should i adjust it etc and i actually think that i mean i'm not trying to flatten out what art is but You know, from all of the things that I've witnessed in terms of what kind of learning happens when people make art, it's this kind of behavior of making.

reconciliatory adjustments, right? And that's why I actually think that art in many ways presents itself as a model and this is why I think people for ages now have tried to make the argument that art is is a way of thinking and living in the world making art is a way of living in the world that gives you not only art skills which are you know

great and and i love art you know that is art uh but i also love people who think through that i mean there's a lot of people who don't make art with a capital a who behave as artists with a little a you know um and teachers are a primary example of this right because we not not the you know not only do we constantly make those kinds of editorial adjustments and reconciliatory moves.

um in our lives but here's my favorite part of it my favorite part of it is that we do it for 35 years and or however many years you know like yeah you do it for a lifetime right and that's that's really uh that really echoes the way that artists work i mean i love all of those old pictures of you know louise bourgeois or alice neal or or um

you know matisse or like i mean i love those pictures of them in their in their last the last stage of life like making you know those pictures of matisse like cutting paper from his bed you know yeah yeah because You know, I think it just points to the fact that it's it's a mindset. I mean, that's where that's that's what you learn. Right. You learn to you learn to operate your life in that way. And that doesn't that's not something you ever retire from.

Wow. I just, yeah, I'm like, I just need to think. As you were sitting, as you were talking, I'm sitting there just processing it all. And I think, you know, something that I've learned even just from. my own experiences of making, you know, in my journal, working through things, you know, I found it as a place for...

processing for, you know, as you were saying, kind of making your way through the world and just kind of figuring out things like, you know, I know Laura and I have shared commonality in having our parents pass away. And that's... taken a chunk like I know for me you know that was almost five years ago that um or actually over that but that was me there there's a there's a huge section in my journal that was me working through and processing

just that you know and they weren't they weren't intended to be pieces of artwork it just was me processing it and i think you know that that you you started to hit on something you know the idea of artists making art to help them understand. And I think that's where art educators sometimes get a little uncomfortable because then they're like, well, how do I assess it? How do I grade it? You know, how do you how do you as an educator, those.

intangible things um you know in in your classroom as you're as you're giving this particular assignment or something you're seeing student growth but you can't assess it in a traditional in a traditional way or like a conventional grading system so you know how do you what do you say to teachers to help them try to figure out ways in which to to assess that

Well, I think there's an easy flippant answer to that. And then there's a more nuanced, complicated answer, which I... i take this problem or this question very seriously so so i you know as much as i'm tempted to say you know well i'm you know use school as a use school and use your role as a as somebody who gets to

do life with these kids or these learners as an excuse to just like to live life in the richest way possible. And, you know, whatever hoops you got to jump through in order to get to that, do it. Like I, that's my flippant answer. Right. But, but if I gave you a more nuanced answer, it's, it's, it would be the one that takes up the word assessment, which. it's something that actually it's, did I talk about this already with you? No, I don't think so, but I have a feeling I go for it. Yes. Yeah.

So it's like, it has a funny etymology, which assessment means it comes, the root of it is to put alongside or to come alongside, to place next to. So if you think about it, if you open up the poetry of what the roots of that word mean, I think it gives a lot of directions for how to do assessment in a way that feels like a creative practice in and of itself, right? The reason I got into this was because one of my favorite...

Well, I shouldn't say favorite, but one of the things that compels me the most when it comes to school as material is the things that people find either. repulsive or or boring or they find them to be like you know the bureaucratic gears of school are the things that artists tend to be put off by the most you know things like assessment things like standards things like uh grades anything that they that we have been sort of uh tricked into thinking are the

are the enemies of creativity or freedom. Those are the things that we don't think about them critically. But I think if you go and you look at all those words and what they actually mean, I think we can find that they have rich permissions to behave creatively with... with what we do as teachers so so back to this alongside thing um you know i i'm actually working on another this is a book this is not the book that that laura referenced at the beginning but i this is a book that i started

I want to say four years ago. It's called Alongside Teacher. And it's based on my investigation of this word assessment. And basically what I... What I did was, because we were in the middle of COVID or the COVID restrictions, I... I made a plan for myself to interview as many artists or creative practitioners as I could. So I ended up interviewing theater practitioners, dancers, and musicians also. poets and visual artists.

and the premise of every one of my interviews i i limited myself to one hour for each one uh and we ended up doing 41 interviews and they they're all transcribed already uh matthew gulish the the dramaturg and right author and performance artists is writing the introduction for the book. And hopefully within the year, we'll be able to put it out. It's a thousand pages long. But each one of the interviews, the premise of each one of the interviews is...

What did you come alongside or what came alongside you to engender who you are as a practitioner, right? And so people talked about. People talked about their parents. People talked about their upbringing. People talked about significant films that they watched. People talked about experiences that they had while they were in school or out of school. Of course, sometimes they talked about art.

other artists and art teachers and all those things but the idea is that that the learning that we do as creative practitioners comes from not necessarily from one specific type of curriculum or one specific group of practitioners that teaches us a specific field or a specific form but that it comes from making constant juxtapositions constant constant gestures of alongside-ness. And I actually think this is a cue for how we could do assessment because truly, if you think about it,

Almost all of the assessment strategies that we have are about making a juxtaposition, like take the one thing, pair it next to this other thing, and then ask ourselves, sometimes the simple question, like, does it match? Or sometimes the question.

How does it compare or contrast to this thing? But then I would... argue take that one step further so like how do you really get in depth into thinking about whether or not students are accessing accessing the learning that you're that you want to be doing or that you want them to be getting, I would say create juxtapositions, create pairings so that you could see whether or not...

what you want to be happening is happening i mean that seems to me like what's at the core of what assessment is but we can there's so many ways to think of it much more creatively you know i mean why And if I were to give you more practical examples from my own experience of, of being a teacher for 25 years is like.

You know, how do you how do you put students into conversation with each other and how do you propose questions that they could be asking each other so that you could really tease out. the core of what they've learned or tease out what you want. It's not really just about checking whether or not they got what you were trying to give them or whether they replicated the thing that you wanted them to do. I mean, that could be part of it. That could be part of it.

Like, I'm not saying that it can't be a goal to say. For example, when you're working with children, you know, did we or did we not teach them how to treat the materials correctly? Or did we or did we not teach them how to, you know, cut on the line, for example? And again, I don't have... i don't really have a value system for those kinds of things i know i know as artists we think

that sometimes, you know, coloring outside of the lines is the preferable way to be because it says something about a kind of myth of expression or something. But I don't necessarily think so. I mean, you have artists. You know, take Sol LeWitt, for example. You know, he's a precisionist. He's a person who his main interest is in getting something as accurate as possible. And not just him.

I mean, you can think about musicians, architects, chefs, you know, so I'm not against those kinds of things. And I actually think they're false myths that we kind of tell ourselves about expression. So I do. Sorry, that's a tangent. But I really do think that you can grade things that you want to see students achieve. I mean, when I used to teach ceramics.

I always used to give a test right at the beginning. And, you know, I would teach these vocabulary terms. I would teach stages of clay. I would teach how to treat the tools and the materials properly. And then I would give a quiz. Not because I thought, not because.

you know i'm a proponent of quizzes but because in that particular instance a quiz was the best way for me to get to know whether or not they were ready to move on to the next stage of the of handling this material i mean it's like i think it's appropriate to give people a driving test before you let them get behind the wheel of a car, right? So I do think there are, I do, you know, I'm not, I don't have any like blanket.

policies or statements or strategies about how one thing should or shouldn't be done. I do think that at its very core, assessment is about putting things next to each other. And so what's the best way that we could do that so that we can show our students that? The making part, the planning part is a creative part. The making part is a creative part. And the part where you check to see what you got at the end is, or quote unquote, at the end is also a creative part.

I think we should infuse every single one of those aspects with the same kind of mentality. I am so glad that you said that there's not one... one specific solution or one specific answer to make that because you do have to, you know, as we've talked about in Education Forever, building those relationships with your kids and kind of understanding that. But also, you know, I'm thinking about my middle school kids that are like, oh, we have to do a...

We have to do a brainstorming sketch. Why can't we just jump in and start doing it? I'm like, because you've got to have a direction. Yes, that's going to change probably along the way, but you've got to have a direction in which to start to go in before you just... jumped in and just and understanding that that's part of the community and the process and and knowing that those are all important pieces yeah i i'm i also appreciate that

You talk about the idea of, I mean, for me, one of the things that I always struggled with in different roles that I was in in the school district was, to me, assessment is about.

is a student growing and that you've given creative license back to the teacher i also really do love and we've talked about this in previous podcasts but the idea of school is material and just understanding that you are as a teacher an artist that you're working through how do I measure that growth in a way that fits for the moment right or that student or whatever it is i'm trying to assess and come alongside them i just really appreciate that right um and i know

one of the things that we, Matt and I often hear is, well, how, how do you, how do you assess experimentation and what if they fail and, you know, all of those things. And, and for me. Those are those are super important pieces of process. Right. So, you know, how how can we encourage teachers to allow students to be more experimental?

and allow room for failure and not necessarily seeing it as assessment failure like you're getting an F but like you know because I think that I can't think of okay so we have a kid that goes let's go back to the ceramics idea maybe they don't wedge their clay very well and there's air trapped in there and then they go to fire that piece and it you know you know there's little pieces that shart off or whatever

there, there's still growth in that understanding. So I, you know, I was never that teacher with my ninth graders that was like, well, you failed, you got enough for that, you know? So I'm curious, what are your thoughts on that? i wonder if there's a way to i this is just like off the top of my head but i wonder if there's a and and well

It's off the top of my head, but based on the things that I've done before, like I'm a real champion of keeping everything that you do. So like you don't, you don't throw out. Like you could, you know, there's this very like common thing that typically happens, especially when kids get into that. phase where they're trying to really make representation where they they'll do something and then they get really frustrated they crumple up the paper and whatever yeah

So like, I'm, I'm a champion of everybody keeping everything right. And so like, even if you did, even if you do need a new piece of paper, or you need or something busted in the kiln or something. keep it right and but i wonder if there's a way to actually formalize that uh and this you you all are making me think about this like what would happen if the rubric actually said at the end of the project you have to submit

you have to submit one project in three different areas of quote unquote success. And you can tell students to determine that on their own. You can say, you have to turn in a failed thing.

You have to turn in something that you would call average or standard. And then you have to turn in an excellent thing. And I actually remember when I was in my... when i was going through my teaching uh certification i remember that when we were talking about assessment they would have us bring student work from from the yes from classes that we were teaching in where we had to do you know uh

And something that was underperformed, something that was at the average. We've both done that too. Yeah. And it was basically because the professor wanted us to talk through what we thought. the spectrum of quote unquote failure and success was, or, you know, so it was an assessment exercise, but what would happen if we built that into our curriculum so that our students can understand that?

everything all of that stuff has value so that's something that you would maybe consider a failed work you know so now you're now instead of having a critique where you're putting up only your final yeah like your sort of magnum opus the thing that you feel is the most successful You're putting up three efforts, three iterations. And then you can really have a conversation. I mean, I've had so many conversations. I love this. You know, at the college level, whenever I go do a...

studio visits with either grad students or undergraduates. You walk into their studios and they've put up three or four or five things that they want you to really look at. But of course, all the other stuff that they've been doing is in the studio too. And so sometimes you're in the studio and you're like, yeah, let's, how about we talk about this incomplete thing over here? Or how about we talk about those things that I, and then the student is like so embarrassed and they say, no, no.

That's not, I want you to look at that or whatever. I'm like, yeah, but look at how evocative what you've done here because. Maybe because you didn't value them as much. Maybe because you didn't take them as seriously. Maybe because you gave yourself the opportunity to be a quote-unquote experimenter or failure in these areas.

I mean, we just don't have that built in. Well, I shouldn't say we, like as in nobody does. I think there are actually really great examples of teachers who build into their curriculum iterative. uh iterative um analysis right like show me show me the beginning show me the middle show me the failures yeah uh and and actually help students to develop a language not just to talk about

You know, help them to develop a literacy for failure so that they can talk about their own. And then maybe, you know, what's going to happen is what happens to most of us who stick around in it long enough. You stop talking about it as failure. You just talk about it as like attempts or versions or something that you haven't figured out yet. Well, and I want to go back to the statement I was thinking about.

myself actually, because I've been on this journey probably the last six or seven years to get to the current series of work I'm working on. it is iterative and i look back at it and i think oh that like there are pieces that i wouldn't that are in a corner right yeah and um and i've kept them But I've often thought about burning them. But I've kept them. And now I'm going back to that idea of juxtaposition as well. Because I'm glad I kept them.

Looking at them is making me think about how I'm moving forward with this current series in a different and unique way because I'm setting it next to the current place that I'm at and I'm going, okay. Wait, there was some value in this and the process of making it has now pushed me into this new place. That is really interesting. And now I'm going back to that old place and saying, Ooh, I wonder if I could do this with that. And I think that that's what, when you're talking about.

getting the students to understand that iteration and then using juxtaposition and assessment, I think that that's a beautiful conversation. and I'm really excited. It makes me want to be in a classroom right now. Okay. It's summertime. Yeah, right. You know, Jorge, that also brings me up, and especially with what... Laura was just, you know, talking about earlier with the ceramics piece. You know, what I have my students doing is taking progress photos throughout their entire process.

And then what they do is when they are finished with their project, they're putting all of their process photos kind of together and not just turning it into a slideshow, but. Especially with my eighth graders, I'm asking them for a little bit more of, you know, what was happening, like that documentation written piece.

just to say hey this is where they are so that way when they get to their their final photo of their piece and if you have a a snafu an accident of you know it blowing up in the kiln you can at least say hey this is where i worked to and so as they're taking those process photos this is where that got to you know this is it was getting ready to go in the kiln and

then we have i mean and sometimes i've even i had a mishap in the kiln i took a picture of it and i showed it to my students because my students didn't believe that that even happened and i'm like

Yeah, it did. If you think about it, I mean, look, I don't know that I have... My parents have a few things that I made when I was in high school, but the majority of the things that I made in high school, they're nowhere. They're gone, you know?

But the experience that I had from all that stuff that I made and the education that I got from having done all that stuff, I'm going to die with that. Like, I'm going to take it to the very end. And so, you know, I I'm not saying don't value the things. Right. objects are are good they're nice they they they speak you know they have they have a they represent you know uh and that's and they're great um and they're useful sometimes too as markers

But yeah, because again, I'm on a pendulum here. I'm not... i'm not a person who strictly believes in all process but i'm not a person who strictly believes in all object right or all objectives right and so i think they all have their value I get most curious in the parts that we either ignore or dismiss or that we take them as necessary evils, right? So like when we say to ourselves, Oh, well, I gotta, I gotta, you know.

check and see if i'm meeting the standards or whatever because my principal is forcing me or because the school district demands it or because you know my my the chair of my program says that it has to be in my lesson plans or whatever i mean all of that stuff we We just see it as antithetical to the thing we're quote unquote, truly doing. But I think there's a way to, to bring all of that stuff into your practice. It is part of your practice. You know, it's.

I love hearing when artists go into the minutia of the things that they have to do. uh in order to get to the thing that we love seeing in the museum for example uh because they go you know basically what they're showing is that you know 50 to 70 percent of their life is this other armature that upholds the thing that everybody thinks is so so celebrated and wonderful right and they i love when artists don't shy away from talking about that stuff like

filling out grant applications and going and shopping for materials and building stretchers and, you know, dealing with people who write policy or working things out with government officials or, you know. Teaching, for example, right? There's so many artists who teach who don't talk about the fact that they teach because they see it as something distinct from their creative work. And I really think all of these things are one in the same.

All right. This is one of those moments where we could just keep going. I want to bring it back to the top where I mentioned that you have a book. We wanted to kind of tie in, just discuss. Tell us about what's new in your world. Tell us a little bit about this. I'll talk about it briefly, but I'll also say we put an application. in for

for NAEA, for the NAEA conference in March that's going to be in Chicago for a session surrounding this book. So hopefully that goes through and we'll be able to talk about it at length there. But basically, UIC's gallery for... did an exhibition called Learning Together, where they did a ton of research into the history of art, the recent history of art education in Chicago. They interviewed a bunch of practitioners.

And they put on this exhibition that had a series of, I don't know if it was somewhere between 10 and 12, like stations or not stations, but installations that. Capture different factions of Chicago's recent art education history. So, you know, teaching artists and.

and artists working in school like artists working in schools uh you know uh community programs anyway it's amazing exhibit that they did but um You know, of course, when you're trying to tell the history, even if you limit it to a certain amount of years, you know, even if you limit it to 40 years or 20 years even, you're not going to...

capture it all right you know especially in a city like chicago what's happening is so diverse it's so huge it's there's so much happening there's so many people practicing at so many different speeds and and scopes that Yeah, it's almost a difficult story. It's an impossible story to tell, actually. So the curators of the show actually invited myself and my colleague, Paulina Camacho, to... to do a workshop uh and or

They called it programming, but we held it sort of like a workshop. And basically what we did was we decided to write a book of all the stories of Chicago's art education history.

in three hours and so we invited the entire city uh to to um a session on a saturday we gave them six different writing prompts and we we created a web page where people could enter in their their writing and we gave them three hours and we had 50 contributors we collected all of those narratives and and um and then we put them together into this book which we called all city um and it's um

It's a 300-page book that's now in print. It exists as a published book, but also as a free downloadable PDF, which you can get from the Gallery 400 webpage. And like I said, we're hoping to. to give a presentation about this at NAEA, and we'll bring boxes of the books to either give away or sell or whatever. I mean, we're not in it for the money in any way whatsoever. We just want people to have these stories in their hands.

And so, yeah, that's that's the book we did. And we're we're really proud of it because we feel that. Curiously enough, we feel that even with 300 pages, it's just like a little sliver. It's a little wisp of the amount of work that's happening. But even that feels like an important contribution. you know, primary function of my life is to curate.

the convention i'm learning this about chicago this is you know my third convention to be in this role and i'm feeling very overwhelmed by the amount of connectivity uh excitement, the... Like you said, the diverse programming that happens in Chicago, the arts organizations, the school district, all of the things, there's so much.

that it seems impossible to fit it all in. But it's also very exciting. And it's a very exciting piece as an art educator to look at someplace like Chicago and say, they seem to have figured. most of it out maybe maybe not all of it because i don't think that anywhere has figured it all out but it's a rich it's a very rich history and

And it has contributed a lot to the way that art education is understood around the world. I don't think a lot of people know this, but the School of the Art Institute actually predates the Museum of the Art Institute of Chicago. So like the museum was made for the school.

I think people think about it the other way now, right? But, you know, it isn't just the School of the Art Institute, you know, Columbia College, UIC, Northwestern, Loyola. There's so many different... arts education generators. And those are just the institutions. I mean, there's community organizations, there's artist collectives, there's artist run spaces. I mean, there's just so much grassroots art education and art making in Chicago.

that, I mean, it really is the beating heart of the city. And so I'm... I'm so happy that the conference is going to be in Chicago. I always get happy, but not only because I, it's just a little drive for me because I get just like, you know, stay at my folks house or something, but, but also, you know, because it. I get to, in some ways, brag and showcase about this place that has really inspired me for so many years. And it really is at the core of...

I think it's at the core of who I am too. So yeah, if you, if you see me around the conference and you want to get a really good Chicago style hot dog, I will take you to get the real ones. Well, I would like to take this moment just to formally extend an invitation to you and some of your colleagues to continue to pump up Chicago between now and March 5th through 7th. 26th in Chicago, Illinois. All right. We'll do it. We'll do it.

I think Matt has the last question for you. You know, I mean, you've been on here a couple of times, so you knew it was coming. But, you know, our probably hardest question, because you have shared with our listeners so much wisdom.

But what would you like to leave our listeners with, whether it was something we talked about or something we haven't talked about? I mean, I would say... I would say that the ultimate job of the artist is to make... to test the pliability of the materials that they have in their hands and for those of us who happen to be lucky enough to work in schools that's our material right there The material of school is in our hands. And so why not test the pliability of that material?

to the maximum, right? As much as we can, as much as we're allowed. That doesn't always mean we're going to get what we want. Sometimes, as we know, as any artist knows, sometimes the material is resistant and you have to... honor that resistance and you have to slowly either massage it warm it up turn it you know turn it rethink it

You have to do all of those things. If you're a good artist, you stay with the material. And so I would just encourage people, you know, if you're in a school and you are finding that you're... You've had it up to here with school. You know, maybe start thinking about it as a kind of material. And I bet it will re-energize your practice. Absolutely. Oh, wow.

You are always a joy. I mean, it's just, it's just exciting and fun. And I, you always get me thinking in new ways and I really appreciate that. And I, I, I, that's what our hope is to bring to listeners is to get them to, you know. Just be curious and be thoughtful and think about new ideas. So thank you for bringing that to everyone. Well, thanks for having me on again today. So I'm still still processing right now. This is, you know, listeners probably don't know this, but I'm not.

excited to hear my own voice. So I don't generally go back and listen to our recordings. I enjoy recording them in real time and I have a lot of fun doing it, but I don't. generally like to listen um afterwards but this is why i mean i was taking a lot of notes uh and i just There was so much that I almost couldn't process fast enough to ask the next question because it was, it was interesting and it was.

inquisitive and it had me curious about all these different things and you know I I often miss teaching and these kinds of conversations I get to teach but I teach adults now it's different and it's good but it's different and uh I miss teaching you know I'm weird I like I like the ninth graders But I'm thinking about all the things that are still possible. And it's just, it's fun to think about. So, you know, as we were talking about all the things that...

Jorge was sharing with us where where exactly. You know, they may be still processing after hearing this. So where do they find that? Absolutely. So he did share a lot and he has a lot of published material. So I'm hoping that we can. Make sure that he gives us as many links as possible. And then those links can be found and that information can be found next to this podcast on davisart.com. slash k12 art chats and all of the resources that all of our guests share

are available for free to listeners, which is great through Davis Art. So we appreciate them and that space to do that. And so you just go to the website, you find the podcast. You can listen to the podcast there or you can. Just look at the materials, the resources, the podcast episode resources. And it's also a great place to go back and look at all of our podcasts. Did you know?

That we have now over 220 episodes with Davis as our partner. No, I did not. Yeah. Okay. That has not seemed like... 220. I know, but it is. It is. Material there. So I'm just saying that if listeners want to go back, that's a great place to really see everything. You know what? I was on our social media not too long ago. And somebody actually messaged us and told us or gave us a suggestion about...

a topic that we might consider. Well, I mean, I think we ask everyone every episode. We want your feedback. We want to know what you want to learn about. This is something we do for our community, our field of art education. So what is it you need? So to that point, Matt, you know, we want more of that. So if you have something that you want to share with us in regards to a possible podcast guest or a topic or an idea that you want to hear discussed.

then reach out to us via our social media or email. And Matt, can you give this out? Yeah, we are spending a little bit more time on Blue Sky, but all of our... Social medias are Creativity DEPT or If you're not on any of the social medias, sending us an email at thecreativitydept at gmail.com. Love to get an email from me as well.

I think that's it. I think that's it. But there's one more thing to say. Yeah. You want to say it? Sure. Okay. Thank you for listening and have a very creative week ahead.