01:00 AM EST on Tuesday, December 28, 2004

BY GINA MACRIS
Journal Staff Writer

PROVIDENCE -- Even the teacher, Elizabeth Hefferman, learned something new when she and her fifth-grade class at the Veazie Street Elementary School explored the significance of making maps over several weeks during the fall.

Hefferman, a veteran elementary school teacher, worked with two graduate students from the Rhode Island School of Design, who showed her how to use art as a teaching tool in ways she wouldn't have thought of, she said.

Rafael Rodriguez, one of her students, said he learned a lesson that transcended the importance of maps or any other single idea.

"I learned that more than anything, [that] if you put your mind to it, you can do it," no matter what the project.

And working at Veazie, the RISD graduate students, Donna Charging and Frank O'Toole, got a reality check on the theories they've been learning about art education and curriculum design in their own classrooms.

Hefferman was one of three teachers at Veazie who received a grant last summer from the Goff Institute at the Rhode Island Historical Society, which encourages elementary and secondary school teachers to use innovative approaches in exploring Rhode Island history and contemporary events and places with their students.

Hefferman said she wanted to use mapping and geography as one way of helping the children understand the concept of community.

Veazie's principal, Nanci Fitzhugh, matched Hefferman with RISD's John Chamberlin and two of his students, Donna Charging and Frank O'Toole.

Chamberlin has been sending art education students to do field work at Veazie for 11 years.

He is an associate professor in RISD's Department of Art and Design Education, which offers graduate programs for art students seeking careers as art teachers or in positions that combine the arts and education.

He says his advice to Charging and O'Toole was to "bring your expertise to the classroom teacher, to integrate it in whatever they are working this with."

Heffernan brainstormed with Charging and O'Toole, focusing on the concept of community the children know through their own experience -- the different neighborhoods where they live and the community they belong to at school.

The two graduate students responded with a proposal for each student to build a box that explored the "form and function of maps," as Charging put it.

The six sides of each box provided separate canvases. The top of each box featured slices of thin cardboard stacked one on top of the other in a three-dimensional rendering of a topographical map, giving the children a tactile sense of the concept of elevation.

Most of the children's research went into the routes they take each day between home and school.

"We went home with a sheet of paper and wrote down what we saw," said Victor Batista.

Christina Cady emphasized that "as we looked at our house we wrote what we see first."

The children's notes became the basis for drawing that mapped their individual journeys, by bus or on foot.

Rafael Rodriguez made sure to include a "little field by my house" on Greeley Street in the North End, as well as a convenience store and a stop sign on the way to school.

Caterina Callahan, for one, didn't have far to go. She lives within shouting distance of the school.

Between her home and Veazie she sandwiched Iola French Park at the rear of the school, one of the landmarks in her neighborhood.

Thanks to O'Toole and Charging, the different shapes of city parks as they appear in Providence street maps served as a bridge to flights of the imagination for Hefferman's class.

O'Toole said he and Charging provided the students with cut-outs of the shapes and told told them to select one to use as the basis for a creature of their own making. The RISD students also provided cutouts from magazines depicting eyes, noses, mouths, legs, hands and arms.

Rafael came up with the Won Skot Basketball Player, who plays basketball every day.

Caterina assembled a creature with horns, shod in one high heel and one sneaker, who "helps kids who have trouble with animals in the woods."

And Daphne Brown created a dog with a puffy tail she says "it uses for makeup."

On the bottom of the box each student wrote what they liked best about the project.

Daphne said she liked making up the creature and cutting the pieces for her project.

"I learned maps weren't as hard as I thought they were," said Caterina.

Rafael concurred. He said that when the project began, he was frustrated. He thought he would never finish. But he discovered that the step-by-step instructions O'Toole and Charging had posted made the project manageable.

For Charging and O'Toole, planning and teaching the box project, one hour a week for several weeks, provided a preview of what they will face next semester as student teachers, when they will have to plan ahead, and be "on" in front of students, for prolonged periods of time.

Chamberlin, who was away on sabbatical last year, said he noticed when he returned to Veazie in the fall that the children were much more responsive than he remembered -- respectful, quiet, and attentive. He attributed the change to the tone set by Fitzhugh, who knows the children in the building by name and doles out hugs to whoever needs one.

O'Toole indicated he found it a little awkward to work with the children until he got to know them.

Fitzhugh then told O'Toole that "getting to know the kids" is all about success in the classroom.

And she said he and Charging had done their job well. The box project was "a very powerful experience" for Hefferman and her class, Fitzhugh said.

"You created that for them," she said.