Back to School Icebreakers From Contemporary Art

By now most of the United States schools are back in session. As both new and familiar students and teachers return to the classroom, it is always ideal to get to know one another and develop trust and respect for each other. Icebreakers are a tried and true exercise to build a rapport within the classroom community. Because icebreakers combine social, emotional and cognitive learning, prior experiences and current interests, and allow for the expression of multiple identities; they are ideal activities to get to know one another in a meaningful and productive manner.

Contemporary art is full of examples of endeavors that prompt participants to think about ways in which they can best integrate and bond, participate, motivate and support themselves and others. Therefore, as the school year begins, I thought it would be a fun and apt exercise to create a post about contemporary artists whose work might spur some inspiration and even be adapted into more typical educational icebreaker activities. I have broken these art-centered icebreakers down into categories and cited relevant works of art that highlight each of the specific themes.

Creating time capsules and documentation of the student experience

This is a great exercise to begin and end the year. Making a classroom time capsule can be a truly engaging and fun way for students to hone in on critical and expressive thinking and doing; and be a beneficial way for teachers to measure growth and development benchmarks. Time capsules have the potential to be excellent learning materials because they often combine elements of art, history, language and other academic disciplines in a context that supports social interaction and forward thinking. Perhaps most importantly, they require a well maintained balance of individual and collaborative participation. I have previously written about artist initiated time capsules and their overarching benefits to helping us learn with intention and empathy, so any of the examples mentioned in the post “Timeless Pieces of Art for Purposeful Learning” would be great to use as inspiration in creating a classroom time capsule.

One artist not mentioned in that post (but frequently discussed throughout this blog) is Nina Katchadourian. Her audio installation Advice from a Former Student is a perfect basis for documenting well rounded student experiences. Katchadourian’s work was commissioned by Brown University in Rhode Island, where it is permanently installed in the school’s Stephen Robert ’62 Campus Center at Faunce House. Advice from a Former Student comprises the voices of alumni from classes between the years 1939 until 2010 who offer short pieces of advice. There are more than 800 pieces of advice encompassing seven hours of audio that automatically shuffles and plays randomly. The sound installation is a cacophony of varied and differentiated perspectives that contribute to the campus community. It is a palpable means for representing intergenerational notions of education and students’ life experiences.

Creating a similar type of experiential documentation can be an ongoing activity that students are asked to follow up on throughout the year, as a way of recording their fluctuating thoughts, feelings and insights that develop over the course of a school year. Starting sometime within the first week of school, students can be asked to choose to communicate one of several topics such as one thing they would like to achieve during the academic period, or express how they are feeling in the current moment. This exercise can then be repeated at the halfway point of the year and again towards the end of the year, with an additional prompt for each student to offer one piece of advice during the final iteration of the project (after they have had an entire school year to reflect on various experiences of student life). These recordings should certainly be played back to the class, and can also be a good resource to future generations of students, perhaps via an installation or compilation audio album. The overarching documentation would therefore represent a progression that shows personal and collective narratives about learning.

Situational learning

While time capsules are intended to be a long lasting material and measurement of moments in time, situational performance art focuses on fleeting situations, which may only be experienced once, or that are distinct due to the use of ephemeral materials and diverse participants. Two artists engaging in this type of social and aesthetic focus are Tino Sehgal and Pablo Helguera.

Both Helguera and Sehgal’s artworks are largely about the process over product. In fact, Sehgal’s art is only realized in real-time through participatory based performance that often involves somatic movement like dance. While Sehgal sets up and designs the parameters and choreography for each work of art, the presentation and delivery changes each time because the performers and venues are interchangeable. Sehgal generally works with volunteer performers who he trains to act out the movements within his works of art. These volunteers are encouraged to elicit responses and interaction from whomever they encounter in the site where the work is performed. Therefore each artistic endeavor is reliant on the participation of the viewers within the venue where the work is performed (see: Participatory Learning: Artworks as Experiences). This aspect of Sehgal’s work makes it particularly adaptable to classroom settings where building a community is just as essential as implementing curriculum.

He has collaborated with school-aged children and worked within similar frameworks to education, specifically with his work This Success or This Failure (2007-ongoing). Performed within an art gallery, Sehgal’s volunteers are a group of uniformed students who partake in a seemingly unfettered type of play. One by one the students approached visitors to the gallery, informing them that Sehgal told them to play there for several hours without any objects or toys to stimulate such play. However, as we know from either experience or prior documentation of play, youth can rely upon their imaginations and socialization to keep themselves occupied and intrigued. In this manner, Sehgal and his collaborators effectively transformed the art gallery into a gymnasium that recalls recess periods in traditional educational environments.

Icebreakers in accordance with Sehgal’s art would entice students to work on communication, cooperation and fine motor skills all at once. In fact, there is a popular icebreaker that I am sure many of us are familiar with called “blobs and lines” where students are asked to listen to a rotating set of prompts called out by the teacher and respond by organizing themselves in either a line (i.e. in alphabetical order of last name) or in blob according to something they have in common (i.e. how they commuted to school). Extensions or modifications of this icebreaker that are even more aesthetic and kinetic might include asking students to incorporate coordinated movements like “the wave” or “can-can” within their lines, or create a short chant or song within their blobs based on the similar theme that brought them together (i.e. “we rode the bus to school because public transit is real cool!”).

Pablo Helguera’s art is also largely performative and generally temporal, relying on human communication and skills such as active listening and repetition. Helguera has facilitated storytelling sessions and performances that incorporate cultural narratives from multilingual speakers and speakers of endangered languages. In doing so, he creates awareness around the importance of sustaining and expanding our ability to communicate within a multicultural setting. Listening and understanding to both a variety of verbal and physical prompts is important to building strong classroom communities as well.

An icebreaker along the lines of Helguera’s art would be to have students invent a “signature” movement or sound. This can involve something rudimentary like a clap, grunt, word or gesture. Extend this exercise by asking students to carefully consider their signature sound or movement in a way that represents who they are (i.e. their cultural background or how they identify with the world around them). The class will gather in a circle and the teacher will begin by exemplifying their “signature.” Then each student will take a turn in enacting their own “signature” until everyone has had a chance to be seen and heard. As a finale, the class will test their active listening and observational skills by repeating each person’s “signature” in the order they were performed.

Embodied learning makes the classics relevant

Since icebreakers are within the umbrella of embodied learning, another great exercise (especially one within the art classroom) is to personify a painting. An example is conceptual artist and educator Lionel Cruet’s cooperative lesson based on The Dance (I) (1909) by Henri Matisse. Cruet’s unit on The Dance transforms the classic painting into an embodied art project, where students examined The Dance (I) (1909) on view at The Museum of Modern Art New York and created their own contemporary interpretations of the painting by working collaboratively in groups to pose as the figures in the famous painting. The painting has been associated with the “Dance of the Young Girls” from Russian composer Igor Stravinsky’s ballet and orchestral composition The Rites of Spring (1913). After imparting this information to the class, it would be engaging to ask them to consider what the subjects in the painting might be dancing along to if they were transported into the current era?

In an icebreaker similar to Cruet’s lesson activity, educators can choose a painting from any time period that features groups of people working together and ask students to organize a tableau vivant (French for “living picture”) in response to the painting’s subject matter (I elaborate on this process in a prior post titled “Embodied Learning Makes ‘The Classics’ Relevant”).

The arts are a fulfilling way to express interests and feelings. Art also helps us develop knowledge through experiencing events and reflecting on those situations in a manner that has both individual and societal relevance. Performing icebreakers such as the ones previously mentioned that merge the lived experience with engaging and informative activities, enables students to interact with one another in a variety of distinctly personalized and purposeful ways.

I wish all the teachers and students reading this a very prosperous school year!

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References, Notes, Suggested Reading: 

Hubard, Olga (2007). Complete Engagement: Embodied Response in Art Museum Education. Art Education, 60(6), 46-56.