Tecumseh

Patterns in Nature

Primary Students

with Rebecca Heyl

Visualizing Heroes

Intermediate Students

with Julie McIntyre

Patterns in Nature

In this residency with primary students we began by paying close attention to the natural environment just outside the school. Through mapping exercises we got to know the school grounds, noticing the trees and plants surrounding the school. When the school was forced to move to a new location due to a flood within the building in January, we began to take notice of the environs of the transplanted Tecumseh at South Hill.

This new location offered us even more areas to explore with the large city park- Memorial South Park just adjacent to the school. There students were able to spend time visiting an large pond that is home to ducks and geese. Students were especially mesmerized by seeing the ducks tip their whole bodies over into the water with their webbed feet and tails sticking straight up in the air!

This project unfolded with various material explorations introducing students to languages of these materials. We considered how water and light are integral for life on Earth. We honed in on local bodies of water and explored the plant and animal relationships above and below the surface.

Visualizing Heroes

What makes someone a hero? Weekly presentations of Ancient Greek and Roman myths, Fairy Tales, Indigenous and contemporary stories highlighted the hero’s adventures, virtues, challenges, and aspirations. We discussed the twelve archetypes identified by Carl Jung and students explored offset printing to create their own shadow hero. We also looked at Joseph Campbell seminal book The Hero of a Thousand Faces (1949) that popularized the hero’s journey as a sequence of stages and steps that takes the protagonist into a region of supernatural wonder, encounters fabulous forces, wins a decisive victory and returns transformed. Despite its insensitivities to cultural and feminist nuances, the research did provide a highly influential narrative template especially for Hollywood stories such as “Star Wars,” “Harry Potter” and “Finding Nemo.” We also reviewed Maria Tatar’s response with her book, “The Heroine with 1,001 Faces”, (2021) where she expands our definition of the heroic to include a wider scope of virtues, challenges, and strengths not evident or prized by the goal-driven protagonists of Campbell’s monomyth concept.

Classes in the fall created enticing 3-Dimensional collaged Pandora boxes housing sculpted talismans in clay to ward off the darkness that lay within their cubes. They also created stencils of their classmates’ profiles and created collaborative wall hanging using serigraphy (screen printing) to profile our young heroes of Tecumseh at the threshold of their journey. Unfortunately, a devasting flood in January damaged the work.

Winter students focused their study of the hero to visualizing the life and struggles of former Tecumseh educator, Vivian Jung who was the first teacher of Chinese descent to work for the VSB. We studied the Chinese Head Tax and the Chinese Immigration Act of 1923 to understand the undercurrent of injustices that profoundly affected the Chinese Canadian community. We gathered photographic archival images from her life and transferred them using cyanotypes and serigraphy processes. We also studied meanings of traditional Chinese symbols, colours and imagery and blended them with Western themes to help us create multi-layered tributes to Vivian Jung life. These collages will be reproduced in a book Tecumseh is in the process of publishing that memorializes Vivien Jung’s heroic life.