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Bodine School Teacher Uses Art to Teach, Reach Students
By JONATHAN DEVIN | Special to The Memphis News
A DIFFERENT WAY: Lori Wakefield, art teacher at The Bodine School in Germantown, helps bridge the gaps in learning for dyslexic students by offering hands-on, multidimensional art projects.
At right, Olivia Webb of Cordova, Collier Bickel of Lakeland and Bailey Gray of Memphis, all fourth graders, created "earth lodges" and figures made of wooden clothespins to represent Native Americans of the Pacific Northwest. -- PHOTOS BY JONATHAN DEVIN
Lori Wakefield isn’t a geography teacher, but her classroom at The Bodine School in Germantown has been morphing into a 3D map for months. As an art teacher working with students who have reading difficulties, she said getting students to invest in their work means going far beyond paint and paper.
“I try to do things that I would have wanted to do as a kid,” said Wakefield, who has taught at Bodine for 13 years. “I grew up without having art in the school except as the teacher would say, ‘We’re going to do a book report, do a diorama or something visual to go with it,’ and that was the extent of art.”
But the multidimensional nature of art can be an effective learning tool for students who struggle with the flat nature of words and how to decode them.
The Bodine School, set in a wooded neighborhood in Germantown near Poplar Avenue on Yester Oaks Drive, is a private, nonprofit school established in 1972 to teach dyslexic elementary and middle school students new strategies for learning words.
Students come to the school from mainstream public and private schools for an average of two to three years, before returning to their old schools with new strategies for reading.
Art, said Wakefield, is a natural threshold between subjects like history and math, both of which require reading on some level.
“My theme this year for elementary students is American art, starting with Native Americans before the Europeans arrived,” Wakefield said. “I told them Columbus isn’t coming until after Christmas. We’re learning about what they did when they didn’t have horses or guns.”
Wakefield divided her classes by grade into the different tribal regions of North, South and Central America. Students spent weeks researching their assigned tribes and constructing villages and costumes, which spread across a giant map on one side of the classroom.
The project covers every group from the Inuits of Alaska to the Incas of Peru.
“I look at art as a means to looking at other things on the elementary level rather than as a discipline all unto itself,” Wakefield said. “I really don’t like that approach.”
The project includes lessons in spatial relationships, geometry and basic perspective.
“I try to coordinate what I do with the middle school to mesh with their history and language studies,” Wakefield said. “We’re learning different book-binding techniques and producing four blank books. Once we get them made, we’ll spend the rest of the year filling them.
“One book is a sketch book. Then we’ll do a telescoping book that folds up like a pop-up. One can be anything the students want and the last one will be hardbound with a secret compartment in it.”
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