Americans for the Arts

“When is a bench not a bench?” Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a nationally recognized speaker and early childhood expert, asked the crowd at Summit Education Initiative’s recent, fourth annual School Readiness Summit. This question launched Learning Landscapes, an organization that infuses underutilized community spaces with educational opportunities that supplement and extend school learning. By focusing on public places, this initiative can help bridge the learning gap between low- and higher-income students as children from under-resourced communities regularly enter formal schooling lagging behind their peers.

Inspired by Hirsh-Pasek’s work, Summit Education Initiative has started an Akron Play Book of its own. In collaboration with ArtsNow and The University of Akron’s EX[L] Center, SEI established an internship in which students were to design and implement simple, educational art installations that families with young children could interact with as they go about their daily activities. They would be installed in North Hill, a racially and ethnically diverse community, on September 8, 2019 during First Serve, an event that brings together over 800 individuals of different faiths and backgrounds to volunteer on service projects across the city alongside each other.

Summit Education Initiative has pinpointed sixteen skills that all children should know before entering kindergarten, which can determine their likelihood of graduating high school: (1) identifying ten different colors, (2) identifying common shapes, (3) recognizing uppercase and lowercase letters, (4) retelling stories in order (first, next, and then), (5) using and following location words (above, below, next to), (6) understanding quantities (many, some, full/empty), (7) understanding qualities (hard/soft, loud/quiet), (8) grouping objects together based on various categories (colors, shapes, sizes), (9) rhyming words, (10) recognizing alliteration, (11) holding books in the proper way, (12) counting to twenty by ones, (13) reading numbers zero to ten in numerical and word form wherever seen, (14) count up to ten objects in a pile, (15) compare quantities of objects (less/more than), and (16) think about and solve problems.

I and Julian Curet, both Arts Administration graduate students, and Samuel Elliot, a Biomedical Engineering undergrad student, eventually decided on four projects that addressed some or many of these skills. At Patterson Park Community Center, the First Serve volunteers built Elliot’s wood and plexiglass color wheel, a beautiful piece that uses the sun to teach passing children about mixing colors, and Curet’s stone animal tracks of the Virginia opossum, coyote, white-tailed deer, and striped skunk—creatures common to the Summit Metro Parks—incorporating counting and location words. At the Exchange House, an international hostel and multicultural community gathering space, adults and children alike sanded and stained pallets to construct my musical wall made with thrift store kitchenware, intended to start a conversation about food and music. In front, still more volunteers spray-painted the sidewalk for Curet’s outdoor alphabet game, an interactive path leading on a well-traveled route to the local library featuring shapes, colors, numbers, and letters.

SEI gathered over one hundred ideas for the Akron Play Book during the Summit, so these projects are just the beginning. In the excitement and momentum, the hope is that future endeavors will factor in time and resources to ask the neighborhood for input. Creative placemaking happens when artists and social organizations join neighbors in using their community’s assets, inspiration, and artistic potential to create public spaces that promote residents’ health, happiness, and well-being. Creative placemaking at its best is locally defined and shaped by the people who live, work, and play in that place.

Kids attending First Serve already were banging on the pots and pans before I left that day, the backyard transformed into a concert arena. It was truly joyful. Art doesn’t have to take place on a stage or in a gallery, with a clear boundary between art and audience. It can be an interruption from everyday life. It can instill lessons and develop skills. It can be a Laundromat theatre, or a grocery store card game, or even a bench.