Barefoot Artists - Projects

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Beijing, China

The Dandelion School Transformation Project

Background

The Dandelion School is located on the outskirts of Beijing in a heavily polluted, under-developed and high crime area. It serves the educational needs of 520 students from migrant families who subsist on very low incomes. Occupying a former factory, the campus looks inhospitable, barren and harsh.

The Dandelion Transformation Project strives to engage the entire school community of students, teachers and staff in a co-creative process to transform the current school environment into a place of beauty and joy and a place that inspires learning, creativity and exploration.

Environmental Transformation

Providing design and implementation guidance, Lily Yeh worked with hundreds of students, teachers, volunteers and workers to complete the transformation of the school's main campus with mural painting, mosaics, and environmental sculpture. Students participated in every phase and aspect of the project, from retrieving tiles from rubble, making mosaics, mixing cement, transporting bricks to roof tops, painting walls, windows, doors, and creating designs for future murals.

"Ever since I came to this school, it has been improving day by day. It is becoming more and more beautiful, so full of colors. I can feel that students are happy here and teachers work joyfully in this environment."
-Gao Wen-Ying, teacher of 7th grade class 4

Learning through the Arts, two mapping projects for students

1) Storytelling through depicting personal journeys
Dandelion School is composed of migrant children. They all come from somewhere else. There is a sense of uprooting and yearning for their home provinces among the students. The project aims to help the students to express their emotions about their loved ones at home, their childhood and homeland. Expressing their feelings and thoughts often helps to dispel the sense of alienation in a new environment. Healing takes place when their voices are heard and cherished.

We asked students to trace their footprints from their homeland to Dandelion School on a small map of China. Some came directly to be with their parents while others took detours; they traveled by train, truck, and bus.

We asked them to depict what their homeland looks like. That unleashed some deep feelings with vivid and touching details. Below is a colorful drawing by Zhang Ting of 8th grade showing her journey from her homeland in the earthquake region of Xichuan to Beijing. The drawing is accompanied by her writing remembering her childhood.

My loving grandmother
The verdant greens in the springtime
As far as the eye can see
After rain, the land looked ever more enchanting and enticing
Swimming in crystalline streams
Even the fish are smiling
Apple trees bent low with juicy fruits
Here in my childhood paradise
13 years I spent

Then came the earthquake
The mountains broke open
Heavy rain of many days washed away soil and stones.

I came to Beijing to join my parents
Who have been working for years there to make ends meet.

They found me a new paradise, the Dandelion School, where we are encouraged to fly with our hopes and dreams.

2. Turning data into energy and action through mapping; moving from the fringe to the center.
On a corridor wall of Dandelion School, there is a map of China showing its many provinces. The description beneath the map states that Dandelion's community of 678 students and teachers came from 25 provinces. The numbers, though static, express the diversity of the school population. Yeh felt that the power of diversity and potential resources of this migrant school community could manifest themselves through creating a new kind of map.

Based on students' drawings, Fu Tao, the art teacher, created a very big map of China that contains the physical movement of every student in the class, some from neighboring provinces, some from far away places. One student came all the way from Xinjiang, the Uighur Muslim minority region in the Northwest. On the map, Dandelion School, a disenfranchised community, became a magnetic energy center that attracts people from all over China. Thus a fringe place moves into the center.

Expanding the impact of Dandelion School Transformation Project

To honor the sincere effort put out by the students to transform their school, we presented their artwork in a public exhibition. Works presented included large scale canvases, mural designs, story-telling in images and words, mapping of community resources and dreaming of their future. Responses to the exhibition were very encouraging.

"Breath-taking results."
"Superb presentation."
- Beijing Foreign languages and technology High school faculty

Spring branches heavy with blossoms
Love abounds between heaven and earth.
-Quin Hua

We hosted a symposium at the opening of the exhibition. Artists and Educators from Beijing and several other provinces attended. People exchanged views on the importance of art on education, innovation and the "making of a harmonious society," the goal of the central government in China today.

Remarking on the freshness, energy and heart-felt feelings revealed in the exhibition, Lo Zhen, a leading art educator in Beijing, shared a poignant comment:

"Our society today feels restless and without purpose. Prosperity alone cannot answer to our deepest longings. We have lost our hearts somewhere. We need to find and bring back our wondering hearts."

At the end of the project, Zheng Hong, the school principal, summed up her experience:

"This project has opened the mind and heart of teachers, students and myself at the Dandelion School. It raises the basic question about education, its purpose, content, and method. I feel that through creativity and action, this Project aims not only to transform the school environment, but also the mind and heart of all participants. Real education should be about the cultivation of the whole person, mind, body and heart."