MOVABLE ERY) 1TATI Pop-ups An Adventure In Teaching Barbara Valenta Staten Island, NY
About fifteen years ago, having cycled through post-college jobs as a coffee house waitress (New York City), data analyst and computer programmer (New Mexico), mother, and art school attendee (mostly during eight years in Vienna, Austria), I finally surfaced again in New York City, complete with husband, high schoolage child, south-of-Soho art studio, and bravely entered the field of art education. I had always had mixed feelings about this field. I loved children and their art, its energy,
spontaneity, directness and innocence, but had been direly warned that if I entered the field Pop-up made in a poetry workshop of teaching I could say goodbye to the life of painting and sculpture that meant so much to me. I was told that all my artistic energy would be drained. That I would no longer make my own art. That has not proved to be the case. Although my studio art is abstract, and very different from the work ofmy students do, I find that the energy level, joy, creativity and appreciation of my young students buoys me up. In no other area has this been so much the case as in the area of pop-ups. My activity in this field has led me in the most surprising directions, into the authorship
ofa book, Pop-o-mania: How to create your own pop-ups (Dial Books, 1997) the curating of a children's At the SoHo Children's Museum
pop-up book show for the Ellis Island Museum near the Statue of Liberty,
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addressing a state association of librarians in San Antonio, Texas at their annual conference, and meeting countless people from all over the world during bookstore appearances and workshops and library events.
Most recently it has led to the opportunity to teach college-age students at Pratt Institute in New York City, and share the wonderful
world of paper engineering with an upcoming generation of graphic designers, illustrators, and architects.
Over the years my approach to teaching pop-ups to elementary and middle school House constructed students and to teachers has evolved and developed. I by a Second grader first saw the potential of November 22, 1998pop-ups while working as a part-time artist-in-residence at an elementary school. Teachers wanted an art project that would tie in with the curriculum, which happened to focus on Christopher Columbus. Two different projects were devised. Both hinged on the use ofa step structure made by making two cuts on a the center fold of a page and folding-up, creasing unfolding and pushing the resulting tab-like shape into the interior of the folded page. Most of the classes were led through a structured approach to pop-ups that consisted of the following parts: 1. An introduction to pop-up books, pointing out their structures and the fact that books can also be shaped in interesting and different ways
2. A demonstration of the simple paper engineering required to make a "step." Also an introduction to "spinners" and "sliders." At this time I would liken the construction of pop-ups to building a bridge something where certain structural principles apply. This would be avery "following directions" phase of the instruction (the emphasis changed as my teaching techniques developed, -
as I'll explain later.)
3. The third part of the teaching sequence involved a