EP 26: Jessa Brie Moreno - Creative Midwife

Change the Story / Change the World

Threshold Questions and Delicious Quotes

How do you describe your work in the world?

I often refer to myself as a midwife of creativity... I think of it in my dual roles as an educator and artist, as holding space for the birth of someone else's creative thinking and inquiry. And so I liked that idea that, if something goes wrong here I am to hold the space.

What is happening when young people catch fire in a performance?

..students, who have been marginalized or failing their other subject matters-- suddenly if they're center stage ... performing with brilliance it's a way for even other teachers to have an asset-based understanding of them, to really see them for them, their true selves.

What is the art of teaching?

The art of teaching ... is really this transmission of wisdom, right? If we look at human history, we're talking about a very different frame than the last hundred years of what education is and how we pass on ethics and values and cultures and art forms through education. Those were the primary ...tools for survival and somehow all of that seems a bit out the window with our Industrialized education frame.

What makes Studio Pathways unique?

One of the reasons we left the county office of education was to focus on the concept of reconciliation or reckoning. So taking it from, south African truth and reconciliation --- the knowledge that we really haven't had a practice of reconciliation this country, that's why we're facing what we're facing right now.

...Educators need to be able to do power analysis in the classroom. They need to understand what's happening between teacher and students, between genders and races, and they need to understand what that means and how that plays out and then their own role in either disrupting or perpetuating that.

So that's a real key....And the way that we do it is through the arts.

Jessa Brie Moreno is Co-Founder and Co-Executive Director for Studio Pathways and has collaborated as a pedagogical advisor, instructional designer, and facilitator for leading-edge arts organizations and educational institutions nationwide. Studio Pathways' projects, partners, and clients include: Rise Up! An American Curriculum, The Kennedy Center, Turnaround Arts National, Othering and Belonging Curriculum for UC Berkeley’s Othering and Belonging Institute, Racial Healing Curriculum/WKKF Foundation, Instructional Designers/Zaretta Hammond, Favianna Rodriguez' The Center for Cultural Power, the California Spoken Word Project, Turnaround Arts National CA, California Alliance for Arts Education, Hewlett Foundation, Los Angeles Education Partners, Youth Speaks, Youth In Arts, Museum of the African Diaspora, Oakland Museum of California, and County, District and School Sites.

In addition, Moreno has held posts as Adjunct Faculty with the California Institute for Integral Studies (BA, MFA programs) and San Jose State University (Theatre Dept.) is a founding member of White Educators for Racial Justice (WERJ) and has facilitated with RISE for Racial Justice. Moreno (alongside Rankine-Landers) formerly co-led the Integrated Learning Specialists' Program, professional development in and beyond Alameda County that supported transformative K-12 school change through the arts. Moreno served the California Alliance for Arts Education as a Local Advocacy Field Manager building community leadership networks for Arts Advocacy statewide. She was the founding director of both the Oakland Theatre Arts Initiative and of award-winning student theatre company OakTechRep. Jessa's directorial work has appeared in collaborations with CalShakes, Stanford, UC Davis, and in Edinburgh, Scotland. Professional Awards as a performing artist include an Emmy (Motion Capture Specialist), Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle, Dean Goodman, and Shellie Best Actress Awards.

Moreno utilizes a stance of "creative midwifery" to assist in the ethical "birth" of transformative practices in education, arts, and culture. She wrestles actively with a complex lineage as a sixth-generation settler colonist to Ohlone lands, fourth-generation artist, third-generation activist, and mother to two young women. She is a graduate of Scuola Internazionale dell'Attore Comico in Italy, holds an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts and Creative Inquiry from CIIS, and a English Language Arts Teaching Credential.

Transcript

CSCW EP 26 Jessa Brie Moreno

BC: [00:00:02] That's the sound of children playing together at school. Until very recently all across the globe, those echoing voices, were as common is the wind. Now, not so much. Hopefully that will be changing soon.

There are very few who would disagree with the idea that our children, their safety, their ability to learn are of primary importance to all of us as a community. But sometimes, maybe I should say all too often, what we do in that realm, how we treat our children, does not align with that sentiment. This is particularly true with our schools, which many regard as the clearest reflection of how society values as children, and, by extension, nurtures and grows its future.

The other sound that has been missing from our children's lives is the voice of the teacher. Together with them in the classroom, encouraging, cajoling, pointing the way, providing the substance, the way points, and the glue for their learning journey.

Among many other things, Jessa, Brie Moreno is a teacher of teachers. Through a program. she founded with her colleague, Mariah Rankin Landers, called Studio Pathways. She describes this work as helping educators give birth to the rigor and magic inherent to the art of teaching. As a theater artist and teacher, herself, she knows this territory intimately. She also knows that if we, as a society, are going to deliver on the promise, embodied in all those joyous, unexpected voices. Once again, filling the air back in the classrooms and playgrounds of the world, our teachers will be at the critical center.

We spoke about this and much more in early 2021. This is Change the Story, Change the World, a Chronicle of art and community transformation. I'm Bill Cleveland.

Part One: The Art. Of Teaching

So, Jessa if someone were to put a moniker on you, or your work what would it be?

JM: [00:02:16] I often refer to myself as a midwife of creativity, thought creative energy. Yeah. I think of it in my dual roles as an educator and artist, as holding space for the birth of someone else's creative thinking and inquiry. And so, I liked that idea that, if something goes wrong here, I can hold the space, but, pretty much, it's your experience here? And I've got some guidance for you.

BC: [00:02:46] In the field of creative midwifery, what are some of the skills or capacities that are serve you?

JM: [00:02:53] I guess training I had in theater, I actually did training in Italian street theater a million years ago. And. Something about risk and disruption and attempting to be present with the soul or spirit of a thing is the precise energy that education is in need of.

BC: [00:03:17] Yeah. So, you do have a significant relationship to education. So, before we go into some of the specifics. How did you come to this work that you do as a creative midwife?

JM: [00:03:30] I think, at first, by way of necessity, like most teaching artists, or artists who teach, I needed a way to make a living at the time as a single parent, navigating, moving from being a regional theater artist to something that would give me roots in one place longer than three months at a time.

So, I fortunately, my mother's also an artist educator, taught ceramics her whole life. So I think I had it in my bones, whether I wanted to or not. And then found my way to Oakland Technical High School – A big, comprehensive public high school in Oakland, California, where I got to start the performing arts program that's been there for the last 15 years now.

BC: [00:04:15] So growing up your mom was a maker. (Lisa Reinertson)

And were you interested and excited by that realm of work early on as a kid?

JM: [00:04:26] It’s funny you asked tha,t because I was not. I told her I was going to become the president of a tall building with no art on my walls because art had ruined my life. Yes, rebellion, rebellion.

BC: [00:04:38] Absolutely.

JM: [00:04:39] But I did grow up also daughter of a single mother on the floor of my mom's art studio in clay. And she's the sculptor of primarily public monuments to peace. So, sculptures of Martin Luther King, Today's his birthday. She's his family's favorite portraitists of his image.

(Also) Cesar Chavez, different activists through her art. So, her work was really developing art. That was her activism. So, I was witness to that as the base culture of my life.

BC: [00:05:10] And you couldn't escape it, it rubbed off on you, even though you rebelled.

JM: [00:05:14] I couldn't escape it. It seemed, in the end, it was the most meaningful thing to do with one's life. Yeah.

BC [00:05:20] It is interesting how that, that opposition that occurs, how often it ends up returning to its, its mothership. Very much .

So, talk about education, much of the work I know that you do focuses on making and doing experiential work both with teachers and with students. Could you talk about why you think that's an important element of learning for humans?

JM: [00:05:49] Sure. Yeah. So, I guess I can tell it through a story at Oakland Technical High School. I had the journey from artists to teacher. I think some teachers have the opposite journey. They realize later that they're also an artist and that teaching is an art. But seeing that it was one of the only spaces on campus that was able to operate without being beheld to standardized tests.

It was one of the few places that was not a segregated space. It was large comprehensive high school, very, ethnic racially, diverse school. However, the classrooms themselves are completely segregated and still are to this day. So, the arts and the performing arts were one space. Students were coming together and making meaning of everything else.

So, all the other disciplines were coming together, and this is the place that a young person could grapple with them and make them make sense in their own lives. And so, I think the more I realized that what I was talking about to other teachers was a arts integration or integrating, or doing education through the arts, because it's liberating, because it gives students voice decision capacity to practice being an adult. All of those elements are present in the educational experience outside of this old standardized-test-bound routine. Yeah.

BC: [00:07:13] Did you have a sense, was the school enthusiastically supportive of your refuge that you created there?

JM: [00:07:21] Yeah, no, I think that's the old thing of asking forgiveness, not permission in terms of taking the risks. I went ahead and did things that I felt were important for the students. So, for example, first year when there hadn't been the arts they'd been cut out for so many years, as and we did an open mic Friday.

And so I would say, no, not all of the campus was excited about having large rap battles on campus every Friday. But boy, did I get the most amazing performers to show up? They would have never shown up otherwise and become core to the b

building of that program. Students truly with a passion for performing.

BC: [00:08:01] Well, and also there are a lot of things at school that a lot of kids don't look forward to, and it's great to have something that is really exciting. That's happening. That's maybe even surprising, right?

JM: [00:08:13] Yeah., the way that students, who have been marginalized or failing their other subject matter. So suddenly if they're center stage as a star, performing with brilliance it's a way for even other teachers to have an asset-based understanding of them, to really see them for them, their true selves, because they're bringing their true selves to the work rather than trying to fit into a model that wasn't created to serve them at all.

BC: [00:08:40] Yeah. So, 15 years you were there.

JM: [00:08:43] I was there 10. So, I've been gone since 2015. So, I guess six years now.

Part Two: Studio Pathways

BC: [00:08:53) OK, So, you are in your new chapter now, really comparatively, and you've created this Studio Pathways as a advisor to people involved in education and all kinds of areas. Do you want to talk about that?

JM: [00:09:08] Yes, I do. So, it started as myself and one other. Jan Hunter was the only other theater teacher in all of Oakland when I was teaching theater. Which just think about that for a second--- we've got Oakland with incredible artists coming out of Oakland. We can think of some academy award winners, right? And no theater artists, teaching artists in any of the public schools. So, it started with Oakland Theater Arts Initiative, training history and English teachers to become theater teachers at their school site so that students had access. And yeah.

BC: [00:09:42] What a great idea. And you had support for that.

JM: [00:09:45] I had some support for that. Yeah. So, there were some great measures in Oakland that the taxpayers were paying for some arts programming for several years, understanding that they'd been really cut out because of prop 13 and all of that. And so, a couple of measures passed that helped focus funding on the arts for that time period.

BC: [00:10:05] You created, in essence creative leadership among non-arts teachers. And does that persist?

JM: [00:10:13] Several of the teachers are still teaching theater. Several of those programs are award-winning. I'm thinking of, amazing, Awele Makeba, who's at Skyline High School. And she was just in the presenting, the HBO special around the MLK Oratorical Fest that takes place each year and went through that program.

She was already an amazing theater artist, but that was a part of that cohort of folks. That gave me my love for teaching teachers. I think that experience of getting to work with other educators and being in inside---Can we transform education together? That got me very excited about that. And so, I moved on to the Alameda County Office of Education, where I teamed up in co-leadership with my partner in crime now, Mariah Rankin Landers, who's my Studio Pathways Co-director, co-founder. And she and I were co-directors of a program called The Integrated Learning Specialists Program there. And so that was training teachers in arts integration, basically. So, we would go through a series of learning about how to collaborate with their curriculum, how to think about assessment differently as a dialogue with a student, with dialogue, with the material and really just how to engage themselves as artists as educators in the classroom and shift the way they did education.

BC: [00:11:33] so I know one of the tensions that all teachers have is how to fulfill the requirements, the structures, the expectations of the system they work in. And sometimes under difficult circumstances with a lot of shifting demands. And every once in a while, someone comes around with a great new idea.

But one of the things that I know you've worked with the Kennedy center as well. Yeah. And one of the things I've really appreciated about the Kennedy center is they treat teachers like they're very special. And it seems to me that's what you're doing as well.

It's not like here's another continuing education credit for you. It's, “You are an artist and you can be a creator in the classroom.” Is that accurate?

JM: [00:12:18] that's accurate, that's it? I think that's really, it is elevating. The art of teaching to its highest level, which is really this transmission of wisdom, right? If we look human history, we're talking about a very different frame than the last hundred years of what education is, and how we pass on ethics, and values, and culture,s and art forms through education.

Those were the primary functions as well as tools for survival and somehow all of that, including the tools for survival, seem a bit out the window with our industrialized education frame, right?

BC: [00:12:54] Yeah, really tough. One of the other questions I had is that, given your long history, if there's a story that has unfolded that really personifies what you feel is most powerful, beneficial, about your work. Got one for us?

JM: [00:13:11] I guess in, in thinking about the teachers I will point to our most recent work with the Solano County Office of Education, which people don't generally think of county offices of education as particularly transformative spaces.

However, the folks who've come together, there are doing work that. Is taking a long view. So, we invite folks to use contemporary artists as their guides long frame thinking, strategic daydreaming,...