newsletter Fall 2002

Our mission is to champion the arts for children with disabilities and advocate access to the arts.

This newsletter made possible, in part, by a grant from Jewish Heritage Foundation

The Scarlet Pimpernel has returned! Accessible Arts is proud to present The Return of the Scarlet Pimpernel, a fast-paced musical with clever dialogue, delightful songs and plenty of action. Your entire family will enjoy this unique, original play. Please plan on attending one of the public performances at Union Station, Wednesday, April 21st at 7:00 PM or at the Greater Kansas City YWCA, Friday, April 23rd at 7:00 PM. Tickets are only $5 per person and can be ordered for the Union Station performance by calling (816) 460-2020. Tickets for the YWCA performance can be purchased at the door.

During its last tour, over 3,000 children, teachers and family members saw The Return of the Scarlet Pimpernel. The plot focuses on the themes of tolerance, respect and teamwork. Throughout the play, characters of different abilities discover that each of them has a unique voice and skills.

Like many teen-age boys, Percy dreams of heroics and swashbuckling adventure. His imagination is filled with his grandfather’s stories of the Scarlet Pimpernel. But Percy has a disability and despairs of ever becoming a hero. His grandfather points out, however, that both Percy and the Pimpernel have one great weapon in common: a brilliant mind. Percy quickly realizes he must use his gifted mind to help his best friend Margaret. Margaret has a visual impairment and, like Percy, often falls prey to the school bully, Trevor. But Trevor has a secret challenge of his own.

Percy finds himself beset by problems at every turn. He must provide Trevor with homework assignments, rescue Margaret from a fate worse than detention, and even save himself when his own homework mysteriously disappears. Now he must somehow find and retrieve a priceless copy of The Scarlet Pimpernel before a two-ton wrecking ball destroys the old house in which it’s hidden. Percy will need all his wits and all his friends to succeed…and he has less than 24 hours!

For information call (913) 281-1133 or visit www.accessiblearts.org This production has been generously sponsored by: The Kansas Arts Commission, VSA arts, Christopher Reeve Foundation, Theresa Foundation,Muriel McBrien Kauffman Foundtion,State Street Foundation, Kansas City Union Station, and YWCA of Greater Kansas City.

If you’re an educator, artist or youth program provider who believes in the power of arts education, The Art of Learning Professional Development Workshop is for you! This workshop gives artists the tools to work in the schools and educators the tools to work with artists. It features facilitators from the Kansas State Department of Education, Kansas Alliance for Arts Education, Baker University, Storytellers and Accessible Arts. It’s been presented in Wichita, Salina and Kansas City and is going to be offered again June 2-3 in Hays and August 4-6 in Garden City.

The Art of Learning collaborative workshops help improve aptitudes for effective collaborations that benefit students, capacity for teaching and learning creatively, and resourcefulness in providing arts opportunities for ALL students. Session topics include ‘Making Curriculum Connections,’ ‘The Brain & Arts Learning,’ ‘Funding,’ ‘Creating Assessment Tools,’ ‘Learning Styles,’ ‘Youth at Risk,’ ‘Children with Disabilities,’ and many others.

Don’t miss this great opportunity to network with other teachers and artists, learn best practices and expand your strategies for art-integrated learning. The cost is only $20 per person for Hays (one and a half day workshop) and $75 per person for Garden City (two and a half day workshop). Team rates and graduate credits are available. For more information call (913) 281-1133 or visit www.accessiblearts.org

Green and yellow parakeets will soon fly from the Missouri River bottoms. Exotic visitors? No, the Carolina Parakeet was once native to the Missouri River valley. A large flock surprised the members of the Lewis and Clark Expedition when they camped at the confluence of the Missouri and Kansas Rivers in 1804.

Teenagers from the Kansas State School for the Blind, who traveled the Lewis and Clark Trail last summer, will bring the birds back with a public-participation mural for visitors to the Lewis and Clark Expedition commemoration at Kaw Point Bicentennial Park, Saturday and Sunday, June 25th and 26th.

The teens, together with Trail friends from the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota, will prepare more than 200 feet of concrete floodwall with primer and outlines of the birds against a background of blue. On the weekend, the teens will distribute paints and oversee the public in painting the parakeets’ portraits. Brochures prepared by the U.S. National Fish and Wildlife Service will give details and pictures of the parakeets, which were hunted to extinction in the early 1900s to provide plumage for ladies’ hats. Some templates on the mural depict the hats.

The Kansas State School for the Blind teens will contribute to two other activities during the commemoration at Kaw Point, June 25th-27th. In the Tent of Many Voices, sponsored by the National Park Service, the teens will present a video documentary of their Lewis and Clark travels. And in a wooded area of the park, the teens will join Indian youth from North Dakota, Missouri and Kansas in a drumming, singing, dancing circle led by Choctaw singer Jay Mule.

The general public, especially families with school age children, will find much to inspire and entertain at Kaw Point Bicentennial Park June 25th-27th.

Accessible Arts, Inc. invites students within the Kansas City metropolitan area to join its new After-School Arts Club. Professional artists engage children of all abilities in a variety of arts projects in a safe and supportive environment. Arts projects include pottery, paper-making, collages, and creative dramatics. Students from ages 9-17 explore their interests and abilities while obtaining new skills and knowledge. The cost is only $5 per class, with some scholarships available. For more information, call 913/281-1133 or visit our website: www.accessiblearts.org.

This column (helpful tips and top-notch topics) is for and by teachers, caregivers, etc. who champion the arts for children with disabilities.
We invite your contributions for future inclusion.

Before coming to Accessible Arts, I had limited experience working with children who were blind or visually impaired. Since I have an adventurous spirit, I found the prospect of teaching visual arts to the students at the Kansas State School for the Blind an exciting challenge. Now, one and a half school years later, I realize I may be learning more about being sighted than I am about being blind.

Allow me to share with you two of my erroneous assumptions. My first assumption was that students who are visually impaired or blind would be very dexterous and have superior use of their hands and fingers. What I found was a culture that used heightened audio/verbal connections. When given a choice, the students prefer to sit with their hands in their laps and talk than to engage in tactile projects. I also found that using their hands to make things and operate tools such as hole-punchers could not be something I took for granted.

My second assumption was that all I needed to do in order to make an art process accessible was to make it tactile. An example of this would be to make 2D pictures using yarn and grains or 3D objects such as animals and cars molded out of clay. You would think this was a safe assumption until you consider the challenge of making an image without a visual reference. This would be similar to asking a sighted person to make a clay model of an alien using only verbal descriptions that refer solely to tactile experiences. My first awakening to this came when a young student was making a bird out of Model Magic and when I instructed her to put a beak on the bird, she asked, “What is a beak?” I had a visual reference to the bird and its beak. She only had her tactile experiences that probably did not include touching a bird’s beak.

On July 28th, 2003, The New Yorker Magazine published an article by Oliver Sacks titled, A Neurologist’s Notebook, The Mind’s Eye: What the blind see. In this article Sacks reflects on the experiences of a number of individuals who lost their sight at different times in their lives. Each individual experienced their adaptation to the loss of sight in varying and unique ways. With the exception of one person, they all continued to use visual memory to construct visually rich mental images. One of the more impressive examples given was an Australian psychologist named Zoltan Torey.

Torey is the author of The Crucible of Consciousness, Oxford Press, 1999. At the age of twenty-one, he lost his sight in an accident at a chemical factory. With the onset of blindness he was advised to develop an auditory mode of adjustment. Instead, he worked to develop what he calls his “inner eye” where he has the remarkable ability to generate and manipulate images in his mind. His sense of orientation is so strong that he is capable of doing things never imagined possible for a man who is blind. For example he writes, “I replaced the entire roof guttering of my multi-gabled home single-handed, and solely on the strength of the accurate and well-focused manipulation of my now totally pliable and responsive mental space.” He later explains that his roof repair caused much alarm among his neighbors when they saw a blind man up on his roof in the dark of night.

This New Yorker article with its numerous tales of adaptation to sight loss made me very aware of the differences between children who are born without sight and those who have limited sight or who were once sighted. Now I approach each art project with the two questions, what visual references am I assuming the student will use and how can I make adaptations to avoid using them?

It is an ongoing experiment but recently I had success in engaging a young student, who has been blind since birth, to make a clay model of a car for me. Cars are his favorite subject to talk about and he can mimic all the sounds from the motor to the seatbelt alarm. Previously he has made model cars by digging holes out of a log of clay and talking about the various features of the make and model of his car. It occurred to me that he would have greater success if he used functional references as a guide.

We began with a canoe shape of clay that was to be the body of the car. I asked him to put seats in the car and from that point he was off and running. There soon was a steering wheel and a dashboard. Next came the hood and the trunk. He asked for assistance with the roof because he was afraid of crushing his creation. Once the roof was on he fitted it with four tires, a grill and headlights. And since this was to be a police car, two big lights were added to the roof. The end result was very pleasing to him because it contained all the functional aspects of a police car. And, to the sighted on looker, it even looked like a police car.

I believe the act of creating art is an attempt to interpret our sense of reality. Our perceptions and the means of perceiving define our sense of reality. Having sight makes me aware of how my sense of reality is infused with visual images and visual references. We may connect with each other through art but not necessarily by the same means.

Valuable Resource Materials
Viewers are encouraged to let us know of other exceptional materials we might consider adding to our collection

At one of the Art of Learning Workshops, the following books were offered as great resources by Liz Kennedy, Program Director, Arts Partners of Wichita.

I See the Rhythm, Toyomi Igus, Children’s Book Press, ISBN 0-89239-151-0 (children’s book about music from plantation songs to hiphop)

The Tree of Life, by Peter Sis, ISBN 0-374-45628-3 (storybook about Darwin – illustrated as if Darwin were the artist)

One Stormy Night… by Yuichi Kimura, Kodansha International, ISBN 4-7700-2970-5 (see description below)

One Sunny Day, Yuichi Kimura, Kodansha International, ISBN 4-7700-2971-3 (best-selling books based on Japanese folktales about how to move beyond stereotypes and have tolerance and respect for others)

More Than Meets the Eye, Bob Raczka, The Millbrook Press, ISBN 0-7613-2797-5 (Seeing art with all five senses)

The Dot, Peter H. Reynolds, Candlewick Press, ISBN 0-7636-1961-2 (how a teacher can move a child from insecurity to creativity to being able to pass it on to another)

The Shape Game, Anthony Browne, Farrar Straus Giroux, ISBN 0-374-36764-7 (picture book demonstrating how a visit to an art museum can impact a child’s life)

Weaving Through Words, International Reading Association, ISBN 0-87207-456-0

As a non-profit organization, we are always looking for donations which help us meet our large commitment to champion the arts for children with disabilities. Our “Wish List” is one way to engage the community. Are you a business or individual who has items you no longer use? Perhaps you know someone who does. Below are suggestions that may give you some ideas of how you can help. Of course, financial donations are also welcome.

Arts Supplies & Other Items
Model magic clay (by Crayola)
Clay tools
Poster board
Glue
Left-handed children’s scissors
Colored tissue paper
Construction paper
Feathers - various sizes and colors
Sticky Wick
Unusual beads and buttons
Percussion Instruments
(all types & sizes)
Children’s costumes, hats, masks
1" white 3-ring binders (w/plastic insert front/spine)
Hat Rack/Clothes Tree

Accessible Arts, Inc. (AAI) and the Kansas State Board of Education (KSBE) collaborate each year to recognize the valuable work of people who include Kansas children with disabilities in art experiences. To honor these individuals, AAI and KSBE established two awards in 1983, one for Distinguished Service in Arts and Disabilities and one for the Kansas Educator of the Year in Arts and Disabilities. On March 10th, in a ceremony at the Kansas State School for the Blind, the following individuals were honored for demonstrating excellence (in the arts) in service to children with and without disabilities.

The 2003 Distinguished Service Award was presented to Mike Toombs. Toombs has demonstrated dedication, leadership, and commitment to the highest quality arts programming for children of all abilities, races and socioeconomic levels and, through his innovative work, has given children the joy of creative expression. An accomplished painter and art activist, he is founder and CEO of Storytellers Inc. an artist collective.

Believing that “Art is a change agent for society’s difficulties,” Toombs has enveloped artists under the umbrella of Storytellers, Inc., to further their careers, explore together how best to effectively challenge the young people they work with, and offer themselves as role models for artists of the future. Storytellers, Inc. has served more than 14,000 young people in arts programming and has received numerous awards for its “interactive community-based art.”

For the last seven years, Toombs has been providing arts education workshops including KIDZONE, TREC Alternative School (KS USD 500), Work Projects with Juvenile Correction facilities, Jobs Programs with the Kansas City, Kansas Housing Authority, and Summer Science Academy with University of Kansas Medical Center. He has been a long-time friend and collaborator with Accessible Arts and other statewide organizations.

Most recently he has been AAI’s partner in presenting The Art of Learning Professional Development Workshops for Kansas educators and artists. He developed and implemented a component for working with at-risk youth that have emotional and behavioral disabilities. He has also developed curriculum for youth on Arts Education and Arts Entrepreneurship for Wichita State University.

Della Molloy was selected as the 2003 Educator of the Year. Molloy has demonstrated dedication and commitment to the highest quality arts programming for children at the Kansas State School for the Blind, allowing them to express their imaginations, gain confidence and experience success. In challenging her students to express their musical abilities to the fullest, Molloy has shown enthusiastic joy in the process and appreciation for the gifts of each student.

She received her BME and MME in Music Therapy at the University of Kansas, and is currently working with the KU Music Therapy Department to better understand the relationship between musical tempo and gait, and methods to adjust gait and speed for multiply disabled blind children. During her eight years of working as music therapist at the Kansas State School for the Blind, Molloy has used music as a therapeutic tool to address and support nonmusical and IEP-related goals for her students.

Superintendent Bill Daugherty said “[We are] highly focused on promoting learning through structured experiences—learning that is often incidental to non-disabled peers who easily observe the world around them and gain the concepts needed to function independently in that world.

Ms. Molloy uses music to teach these concepts and involve students at the core of the creative process.” Her work spans preschool, elementary and secondary music classes, private voice and instrumental instruction, and classes for students with vision loss and additional disabilities. She organizes a yearly music program and her “process before product” approach allows everyone, regardless of skill or talent, a valued place on the stage.

Molloy’s greatest motivation is the fact that making music is and should be a fun and rewarding experience for all students, in which each can feel like a star in the group. Principal Madeleine Burkendine says, “She draws amazing performances out of her students in such creative and unusual ways—she leaves staff and parents in tearful awe. …She inspires us all!”

Objectives:
Children (ages 3 to 7) will learn to identify
personal space and move through space
while maintaining their personal space.
Children will practice using listening skills.
Children will explore the variety of shapes
they can create with their bodies. Children
will explore a variety of locomotion (ways
to move through space).

Low Vision or Blindness. Students create their own personal space but do not move around between statues. They indicate the tempo of the drum by hopping or bouncing in place. When locomotion is explored, the low vision or blind student can move with a sighted friend or can line-up holding hands with other low vision or blind students and be lead throughout the room in a variety of locomotion by the teacher.

Deaf or Hard of Hearing. Give each child a balloon on a string to tie around their wrist. While moving through the room they hold the balloon in their hands to feel the beat of the drum. Use a larger drum if necessary. When the student stops to create a shape they may continue holding the balloon or let it drop and hang off the string.

Cognitive Disabilities. Begin with a simple Stop and Go game using the drum. Separately play a game of making silly statues. When both games are played successfully, combine the games.

The Heart of America Wind Symphony will present a concert to benefit Accessible Arts at 5:00 PM, Sunday, May 16th at Park Hill South High School. The concert is entitled Masterpieces and will feature several masterworks including Frank Ticheli’s “Postcard,” H. Owen Reed’s “La Fiesta Mexicana” and many others. The concert is free but donations will be accepted to benefit arts programming for children with disabilities.

Jason Voos, a Kansas artist with a disability, is headed for Washington – but it has nothing to do with politics. Accessible Arts was proud to sponsor Voos and his art for the VSA arts International Festival Competition. As a VSA arts Collaborator, Accessible Arts has an interest in ‘grown-up children.’ Additionally, one of our primary goals is to help children with disabilities develop their interests into life-long hobbies and, when possible, into a career.

Voos and his mother Kathy, who live near Wichita, are going to Washington, D.C. June 9-13, 2004. Once there, they will join Accessible Arts Program Director Kit Bardwell and Executive Director Martin English in attending all the events associated with the VSA arts International Festival. Voos’ photographs will be on display for a month at Union Station in Washington D.C. His screenplay was also accepted into the Festival competition. Sixty-five nations will be represented and Voos is
one of the few artists whose work was
chosen in more than one category.

The Anatomy of a Kansas Storm is a series of photos taken when wall-clouds, filled with tornadoes, moved over Voos’ house one evening. Just as he ran out of film, a nearby tree was struck by lightning. The force of the blow threw him up against the garage and broke all of his molars. Now that’s sacrificing for your art!

His screenplay Vern is a true retelling of Kathy’s father’s life on a farm in Waldo, Kansas, and how the character traits learned there got him through the war. Voos’ grandfather was the youngest of 22 children with five other brothers already in the military when an uncle signed to get him in the army. Vern is a fascinating screenplay that has already won an award at the Houston Film Festival.

AMC Town Center 20 Theaters
Offer New Disability Services

Closed Captioning and Descriptive Video Services are now available for selected movies at AMC Town Center 20 Theaters located at 11701 Nall Street in Leawood, Kansas. For information call (913) 498-8696.

Patrons who are blind or visually impaired can hear descriptions through headphones at no extra charge. To request the description equipment, stop by Guest Services just inside the drop box by the ticket-taker. Rear-window caption equipment is provided for the deaf and hard of hearing which allows patrons to view subtitles that scroll across a plexi-glass flag on the rear of the seat in front of them. Newspaper notices will say “Rear-window Caption.”

A web newsletter is available at www.mopix.org. Click “Where Can I Go for Theaters and Showtimes,” then search by state. It tells the theaters and cities that offer closed captioning (CC) and Descriptive Video Services (DVM). Current attractions, times, dates, and theaters are noted but may not be kept current. The home website is provided by the National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM) at http://ncam.wgbh.org/index.html. Instructions are included for persons with disabilities.

We are happy to continue sending our newsletter to all persons who wish to receive it. If you would like to remain in our database as a consultant, artist, etc. but no longer wish to receive the newsletter, please let us know. Our new database will allow us to make this distinction. However, if you no longer want to remain in our data base, please help us by letting us know. We will immediately remove your name from our list. If you have any changes or updates for our mailing list, please notify us. You can e-mail us at accarts@accessiblearts.org or drop us a note at Accessible Arts, Inc., 1100 State Ave., Kansas City, KS, 66102-4411 or feel free to call us at (913) 281-1133. We also welcome feedback about our programming, the content of our newsletter, and our web site. Thank you for your help in this matter.