Artist’s Statement

When working on my multimedia assignment and working with adult Hispanics to improve their English speaking skills, I ran into problems but also discovered areas that were much easier than I had planned. When I first went out to Escuela Vieau to start my project I was a little worried about what I was going to be doing. I felt that my experience with the Spanish was going to make teaching them English quite hard. Once we began to work together I was working with the class split up into 2 different groups. One group was the higher English speaking group, and the other was the lower skill level group. We sat down with a workbook that had lists of English words and their equivalent Spanish counterpart. The workbook then showed how you would use the word in English. We would go through the list of words first. I would read off maybe ten words then they would take turns reading the words to them- selves and then we would go around in a circle while everyone said an English sentence using one of the words we just went over. We would do this same process until the class was over and it was time to go.
The day I started with my multimedia project I rented a camera from the library and brought it into Escuela Vieau that night. Before class I took some pictures of the school itself, then after class I asked my class if they would mind if I took some pictures for my class project. Mind was not the right word to use, everyone in the class got really excited some of the women in the class even took a quick trip to the bathroom before they would let me take their pictures. We took a big group shot and then they went and did some individual work on their own and I took some pictures of my class working. However, when I went back to school the next day and attempted to retrieve my “saved” my images from the day before none of my pictures had been saved. Therefore, for my project I was unable to use any of my images. Therefore, I went online and googled South Milwaukee and other words or phrases that I felt would help me put together my project. I ended up finding some images online that really captured what it was I had experienced when working at the school. A Google search would not have been something I would have done if I did not lose my images. Although I will not say losing my images was something that made my project better, I will say it made me work in a different way. This is exactly what my entire experience with Escuela Vieau has been, me working in a different way than I am accustomed to.