One World

Last Friday, twelve of my regular students from my after-school English club and I met to work on an art project. The project is called “One World” and the way it works is that my students produce 25 pieces of artwork to send off to this organization who then sends it off to a group of students from somewhere else in the world, and in return, we will receive 25 pieces of artwork from another student group from somewhere around the world. I told the students they could invite their friends, which I feared would end up meaning the whole school, but it ended up working out with 23 students altogether.

We met up at the school around 3, when they were finished with class, and set up the materials. A few of them pulled out notebook paper, not realizing that I’d brought nice cardstock for them to use. They started up with some hesitation, just sort of looking at the paper and looking up at me for instruction. Go for it! I told them vaguely. I told them they could draw anything- something they’ve seen in real life or something that’s just in their heads. They timidly put their pencils to the page: a sun here, a TV there… A couple of students would barely get a shape onto the page before rushing to the front of the room to show me and get my approval. It’s great! I told them. Don’t be afraid to use more color… and see how there’s still a lot of space on the page? You can use that too…

After more timid lines and safe subject matter, they started to get more daring. Angry Bird made an appearance, as did Winnie the Pooh. Some students started drawing more elaborate scenes of rice fields with palm and coconut trees, cows and water buffalo lowing in the background. One of my students drew a horse that blew me away with its accuracy.

Just as a background note, students in Cambodia don’t often get the opportunity to exercise creativity, which is why this project was met with such hesitation and timidness. Any sort of creative activity carried out in the classroom has rigid guidelines and instruction, so having this much freedom was intimidating to the students… at first. It was motivating to see how, in such a short period of time, those walls came down and they were able to produce some really great, original works, totally by themselves. It fed my tiny seed of hope (that easily withers away if not fed regularly) that there may be hope yet for the next generation of Khmer to learn how to think more critically and creatively than the current.