Insights from Teaching Artists

Jamie Romine
Teaching Artist with CPS Project

Who are you and how did you become involved in PVV?
I am Jamie Romine and I became involved with PVV through the THP 511 class and as a research assistant to the program coordinator Stephani Woodson.

What is your current involvment in PVV?
I am currently a collorborating artist in the PVV pilot program working with childrend from the CPS system. I am also the research assistant for Stephani Woodson.

What is the most rewarding part of being involved in the PVV project?
The most rewarding part of being involved with the PVV project is to meet, get to know, and watch the students and how they grow and come to realize how they fit within the social stratus that has been forced upon them. I love the interaction and the forging of new bonds: these kids are hungry for relationships and for people who want to listen, who want to work with them, and for someone they can trust. I have personally become very attached to the one individual in which I am working - even went with another collaborating artist to attend this childs dance recital. It was an amazing and heartwrenching experience. She was so proud that we had come to watch her, something that I don't think happens regularly if at all in her life, and she didn't want us to take her back to her group home.

What do you hope participants in PVV will gain from their experience?
I might be stretching it here and looking at a more optomistic rather than realistic view, but I hope they get to see how special and "worthy" they really are. These are great kids who are not given many chances to excel in this society and I hope that this project will let them see how valuable and intelligent they really are. This maybe the one chance that they, as adolescent children in a state system, will be given an avenue in which to voice who and what they are - my hope is that they will yell as loud as they can!

What is the role of a teaching artist in PVV?
This has been a touchy area for me. Is there one specific role that the teaching artists should inhabit? I don't think so. I feel that as teaching artists we are a soundboard to the students ideas, a mentor that guides rather than dictates, and fellow human beings who can, by our commitment to their stories, relay a message that not everyone is out to get them, to put them down, but there are people who want to know them for who and what they are.

How do you as a teaching artist help young people find their voices through PVV?
I actually don't know if I have. Only time will tell. I don't believe I help them, they are helping themselves by the mere fact that they have volunteered to be in this program, I am there mainly to be an artistic "soundboard" (yes, that word again), a guide, I think, rather than a teacher.