Images courtesy of identity school
Jessica Glesby is the creator of the knit graffiti classroom project identity school. With identity school, Jessica has taught the skills of knit graffiti to grade 9-12 classes at University Hill Secondary in Vancouver, Canada.
A graduate of Emily Carr University in Bachelor of Media Arts, Jessica has dabbled in film and video. However she found the greatest satisfaction in creative writing, bookbinding, collage, textiles and performance art. Most of all she enjoys interacting with the public and having discussions with strangers. She has just completed a Bachelor of Education, specializing in Art at UBC.
Jessica says that identity project was inspired by a morning walk:
“I was on my way to an early morning course at the beginning of my degree and I found yellow yarn on the ground. Thinking to myself that it was definitely going to get dirty in Vancouver rain, I wrapped it around the nearest pole. The ride to school was glorious as I went over and over my first tagging experience. When I arrived at school, I discussed my experience with my friend Kathryn, and she pointed me in the direction of the yarn-bombing group Knitta. I couldn’t believe that others who were as excited about this idea as I was.
identity school is an idea that I have been developing for years, [it was] created as a response to my own educational experience.
At a time when the definition of art is constantly transforming, a well-rounded education in art history, conventional techniques, conceptualization and contemporary practices are essential to knowledge building. While I am fascinated by how learning is becoming post-institutional, and by how do-it yourself (DIY) culture generates unconventional learning experiences, with so many courses, lectures and learning materials now readily available online, how do I define my role as an educator?
It is important to bring DIY into the classroom (examples of DIY units I have taught in the past include graffiti knitting, independent publishing/zines etc). I have seen how it can make a student grow (and then grow their community) confidence in creating and developing. Students need to be able to increase their complex literacy skills to think outside of the box and I believe DIY can do that.
Identity school is an umbrella or vehicle to house my activities for the public and lesson plans/units for my students. The unit plan posted, so far, on identity school is “i-knit, u-knit”.
In a graffiti-knitting installation unit (“i-knit, u-knit”) I taught forty-seven mixed gender students how to knit and its history. I designed this unit to take knitting out of its traditional domestic context so that the students explored contemporary knitting transformations while challenging stereotypes about knitters and graffiti-artists. Empowered by their ability to revive and expand environments, the class successfully hijacked public spaces with non- permanent urban graffiti installations. They juxtaposed nature with nurture, altered urban landscapes by transforming cold spaces into warm inviting ones, and forced viewers to reconsider the cultural soma around themselves. This classroom project sparked impromptu conversations amongst participating and non-participating schoolmates and teachers alike, eventually becoming fodder for discussion throughout the neighborhood. Graffiti, usually viewed as pure vandalism, and knitting, usually viewed as a craft, had been successfully fused into the realm of art.
Students had a quick learning curve, learning how to cast on, cast off, and garter stitch in three classes. The best parts of those classes were seeing the students helping each other. I then introduced knitting with different materials such as plastic bags, cloth, and even hair.
A challenge we had to work around was that the students during school hours represent the school. After visiting with the principal it was decided that the unit had a green light, but that students had to have permission before they installed their pieces. This led to further classroom discussions of the legalities of using public and private space + whether the assignment and graffiti knitting was an effective social intervention if we had permission. While some students were disappointed, one incredibly bright grade nine student asked a Safeway manager if she could install plastic knitting on their shopping carts, to remind shoppers how many plastic bags are wasted daily.
Ninety-nine percent of students responded positively to graffiti knitting, enjoying the studio time that built community in the classroom, as well as their new ability to graffiti (knit) their neighborhoods with temporary materials/installations. The one percent of students who responded negatively to the project either had problems digesting men knitting (despite videos shown in class on the subject) or didn’t want to do the work (and therefore had someone else do it for them- eep!). Both student guardians/parents and the surrounding community responded positively to the unit, visiting the school to see final results and student’s artist statements.
I started every class showing students different creative forms of knitting to get them inspired. Sometimes this was a PowerPoint full of other graffiti, knitting, and graffiti knitting images, and other times it was youtube videos to draw students back into the unit and away from social studies class, math homework, and anything else weighting on their minds, for the next hour.”
