Pied Piper for Art : Teacher Whose Classes Flourish in an Era of Cutbacks Says Creativity Is ‘in the Center of Everything’

Technically, Corky Dunn is an art teacher. But she thinks of herself as a “mind farmer.”

In her beginning art classes at Temple City High School, Dunn instructs her students in the use of 27 different media. Learning to weld bronze or model papier-mache, Dunn believes, is a way to learn to think. “If we need tools, we make them,” she said of her students. “I want them to know they can do things with their own hands.”

Earlier this year Dunn, 46, was one of 10 finalists for the Music Center’s sixth annual Bravo awards. According to a spokesman for the Music Center’s education department, the awards recognize outstanding achievement in keeping the arts alive in local schools.

Dunn and the other educators were chosen from among 134 nominees from five counties. The winners were Herb Holland, who teaches drama and English at Audubon Junior High School in Los Angeles, and Shanon Fitzpatrick, who teaches fourth grade at Morse Elementary School in Placentia.

Passionate Defender

At a time when the arts are beleaguered in the schools, Dunn is a passionate defender of their place in the curriculum. She is horrified that some people think of art or the performing arts, which she also teaches, as an adjunct to education, an extra that can be dropped when money is tight.

“Art is a basic,” said Dunn, who has taught at Temple City High for 23 years. “We’re not on the fringe. We’re in the center of everything.”

Dunn’s view is evidently shared by the Temple City Unified School District. “The Board of Education and the administration have always been supportive,” Dunn said. Students at Temple City High School can still study individual musical instruments, join the choir or sign up for a dance class, courses no longer offered in many public schools.

According to Miguel Muto, consultant for the visual and performing arts in the California Department of Education, art was in decline in the schools for almost a decade until 1985-86, when about 630,000 high school students were enrolled in visual arts programs, a modest gain of 9,000 over the previous year.

Figures for 1986-87 are not available, Muto said, but arts enrollment may have been bolstered by the state’s requirement, in effect since 1986, that high school graduates must take a course in either the visual or performing arts or a foreign language.

Muto also noted that in 1976 the state had 400 art and music administrators at the school district level. That number has shrunk to fewer than 60.

One of Corky Dunn’s most remarkable abilities, colleagues say, is a gift for reaching students who have not flourished in the schools. Dan Mooney, Temple City’s assistant principal, noted that Dunn often elicits startlingly good work from students who have been chronic truants or troublemakers.

“She has this Pied Piper ability to attract those kids who are marching to the tune of a different drum,” Mooney said, “and once she gets hold of them, she’s inspirational.”

High Expectations

In Mooney’s view, a key to Dunn’s success as an educator is her high expectations for all students, whatever their test scores.

Film, which students can take for three years, is one of Dunn’s most popular courses. Now a mentor teacher in video technology for the school district, Dunn knew little about video or film making until a student came to her eight years ago and said: “I want to be in your art class, but I want to make films.”

“I said: ‘I’ve never made a film, but we’ll try,’ ” Dunn recalled.

“We started out with one Super-8 camera and one light bulb,” she said. Since then, she and her students have built a Spartan but functional production studio, complete with professional editing equipment. Students spend hour after hour there as they put together such projects as the school’s annual video yearbook. Recent student creations include a documentary on soaring called “Dreams” and a fictional short entitled “Boy Scout Zombie From Hell.”

Students’ work is strictly their own. “I’m a facilitator,” Dunn said. “I set the scene, but they have to be the play.”

Early on, Dunn’s young artists wanted a more professional identity for themselves. They formed a student film and video production company called DragonFlicks Ltd. that has persisted on campus. Like many of her students, Dunn is an admirer of dragons, which she described as “grand and noble things.”

Students must get satisfactory grades to join DragonFlicks, which is the name they put on their films. The group also provides technical services throughout the district, including doing the lighting, sound and filming for various school performances. Members, who are paid for some jobs, have DragonFlicks business cards and green-and-gold jackets, just as campus athletes do.

On a recent afternoon the production studio was filled with student animators. The youngsters were practicing “claymation”--the technique that gave the world Gumby and the singing California raisins. The students also learn how to paint cels, the individual paintings on transparent plastic that are filmed in sequence to make traditional cartoons seem to move.

Under the bright studio lights, seniors Kevin Smith and Cathy Mason said that they were filming a battle involving imaginary creatures called “blivits” they had made from clay. They had been manipulating their blivits, moving them a bit, then filming them frame by frame, for two weeks. The result was five minutes of cartoon carnage.

Nearby other students were filming the demise of a unicorn. They stuffed more and more of the one-horned creature into the maw of a menacing clay blob, which would appear to be eating it in the finished film.

“People assume art is so nebulous you can’t grade it or do it on a schedule,” Dunn said. Not so. She gives written exams as well as practical ones and expects students to meet deadlines. She does not, however, grade students against one another.

Instead, students are graded according to how successfully they complete the task they set out to do, be it a wax sculpture or an oil painting. As a result, Dunn said, blind students have done well in her art courses.

“Art is like math or anything else,” Dunn said. “It can be taught.” She teaches it step by step, skill by skill. But creativity doesn’t have to be taught, she said. It’s already there, waiting to be unleashed. “If I can just stop them from saying, ‘I can’t do it,’ then I’ve got them. If I can remove the fear, I can teach them.”

Her courses, senior Greg Clark said, “allow you to be creative beyond the normal boundaries of school.” Without such courses, he added, “the people who have large imaginations have nothing to put them to.”