Tamarack Waldorf High School inaugural mural

The inaugural freshman class of Tamarack Waldorf High School class of 2019

The inaugural freshman class 2019 at Tamarack Waldorf High School, a group of about 25 students, collaborated on this mural together over four intensive days. On the first day students were asked three key questions:

As you look back on your first year at Tamarack, what stays with you?
What is something new you've discovered?
What is one thing you would like to leave behind; to compost for others to discover?

 

We turned their reflections on these questions into a mural divided into three connected sections: the bottom representing what they want to leave behind; the middle representing what they celebrate about their experience now, and the top what they look forward to leaving as a legacy into the future for those that come behind them.

Three working groups in one space was a new endeavor that worked perfectly!

We used the gym as our workspace. This was new for me and I worried at first that they might distract each other, but once they got to work they wanted to keep painting and said it was 'fun'!

The class broke into three working groups, each choosing the theme they resonated with the most. It took several days to bring all the ideas together. One exercise we used involved creating a group poem that was used to inspire the central image in each section. The Legacy group chose to incorporate their poem into their image as a beacon.

 

The mural can be hung together as one tall banner. After completion, it was presented as a class gift to the 8th grade graduating class of Tamarack Elementary School. Several students from the grade school went on to the high school. The majority came from MPS and were new to the Waldorf structure.

I was honored to be invited to work with this class. This project taught me alot about letting go of my expectations, and relaxing my format to be less rigid and more of a direct approach. Instead of spending hours on conceptualizing, the students needed and wanted to get right to work on the canvas sooner than I expected. They also proved to me that it is possible to finish a coherent, conceptual design within the short turnaround of only four days!

The teachers were indispendable and gracious in their support of me because I truly felt as if I was learning along the way, adapting to circumstances in a very on-the-spot way. In the end, teachers and students all shared something they could appreciate about the process, and there were lots of echoes of pride in believing we could do something we didn't know we could do before.