Jackeline Franco | CIIP 2023 Blog Portfolio

Orientation

What challenged me about orientation is the amount of sitting down and listening there was and difficulty paying attention because I have a short attention span. I did enjoy the numerous speakers from different positions that came to talk about Baltimore overall! It was insightful to hear words of encouragement and motivation from people who have integrated themselves into their community. It was also challenging the amount of pressure to do a change even though it was also emphasized that we are not expected to completely change the world in 2 months, I still want to make minimal mistakes. I also enjoyed the scavenger hunt because it was a more hands on activity to see Baltimore in a true setting rather than being in the Hopkins bubble. It was the best learning experience on how to get around Baltimore and appreciate what they have to offer.

Week 1

The first week gave me an insight on how community service through the art perspective can look. It can be confusing how art can serve the community but based on the first week, it can be seen that other non profit organizations collab with Art with a Heart and ask for art projects when they have certain events going on, This type of interactions creates and fuels relationships and is part of the process of being involved in Baltimore. Art with a Heart also holds sessions for the Baltimore locals to come in and help with certain projects so they can feel involved too. This organization welcomes everybody and anybody to help with the projects and gives a sense of community to Baltimore and allows free expression.

Week 2

A challenge I have been facing this week is the walking distance to and from my job placement. Since Art with a Heart is placed in Falls Rd, in the nearby forest, no buses go near that area and I arrive at work tired and I leave from work even more tired. Since my job is all in person, I need to walk the 5 days a week. However, people in Baltimore have been dealing with this for longer, the lack of access to public transportation. To be transparent, I don’t know how to adjust other than to get used to it, but this gives me a slight insight of the frustration Baltimoreans have because of the lack of access of public transportation.

Week 3

I would catch the JHMI at 9:30am in order to be dropped off at 9:45am in Mount Vernon so I can walk to Enoch Pratt Free Library, the central branch because from 10-12 I assist in a classroom with two other instructors. I help the teens with any questions or concerns they have regarding art projects. On Fridays, we evaluate the students and talk to them to about their behavior and work of that week and that is the chance where the teens confide in me and tell me if something is wrong or if they need anything from me or the other instructors. We close out and I stay to help clean the work space, then walk to the bus to catch the 94 bus to go to the main office of Art with a Heart. I arrive at 1:30pm and I ask my supervisors what projects they need help in and I stay until 6pm to help with any kind of projects they may have.

Week 4

My goals for the summer have changed. At the beginning, my goals in CIIP were more broad, for example, having a positive impact at my site placement. Now, my goals has gotten more specific, like now I want to have stronger connections filled with trust and dependability within the people I work with, including my students, coworkers, and supervisors. My goals for myself have also changed by setting more realistic and smaller goals so they can be attainable within a few months. I feel like I am on track to meet them, because I see my supervisors giving me big tasks to complete and trusting me to complete them on time and with quality. My coworkers and I conversate more and ask me to communicate and send messages to my supervisors because they trust me to accurately complete that task as well. My students confide in me when we do individual evaluations at the end of each week, in telling me personal issues and me requesting feedback so I can be a better resource for them. In the next few weeks, I will communicate more on what I need and what my students need to my supervisors so my students can trust the summer program process. I will also be less afraid to converse more with my coworkers and supervisor to integrate myself more into my job placement and let them know that they can depend on me for any assistance they need. By doing this, I hope to achieve my goal of building a stronger trust between me and anybody I work with. This can then help me achieve my personal goal of contributing something to Baltimore because Baltimore has already given me and taught me many different things that I have been here for the past few years.

Week 5

What I have learned through my internship throughout the summer so far is that a little bit can go a long way. For the first two hours of every work shift, I assist the teacher in a classroom full of teen students and at the end of every week, I have to evaluate my students. When evaluating them, I use this opportunity to ask them how they are and such and typically I would get the responses “good”. When I asked this one student if she had any questions or comments for me at the end of the evaluation, she asked how did I do my eyeliner. I gave her tips and continued evaluating my other students. The next week when I had to evaluate that student again, at the end of it, I asked for an update on how her eyeliner journey was going and she started to answer and then it subtlety turned into a rant session for her where she explained some things that she’s going through. Another time, I asked another student if there was any way I could do or the teacher could do to improve the classroom and she told me this classroom was where she could breathe. There’s an assumption that teens are reserved and prefer to keep to themselves and while it could be true, creating a safe and comfortable space can be effortless and minimal work if you truly care about the well being of the youth. What also helps us consistency, showing up everyday to greet and work with them so we can develop that stronger bond of trust between me and my students and my coworkers. While these two students didn’t ask for advice on their trauma and I didn’t give it to them, creating an environment where they feel welcome to share and breathe can still be something worthwhile for the youth.

Week 7

This week, my students did a mosaic project where they worked in groups of 4 and each person had a specific area to work with in order to complete the entire mosaic. Some groups understood more of the assignment than others, and some groups were more distracted than others. From the beginning, my supervisors and coworkers and I made assumptions of which students would be distracting, or hard to work with. Now that we’re approaching the end of the summer program, the assumptions were wrong. The students that are very focused on their art works and goes beyond the minimum were the most outgoing at the beginning, so with the program , they learned a balance of discipline and having fun in a work space. I think this applies reversely when a student becomes shy and eventually becomes outgoing and distracting. While initially it may seem disruptive to the class, I learned that this means that this classroom has provided a safe space for the youth to become kids again while creating art. In the end though, the kids did not follow instructions on making the mosaic and I have to go back and repair them so that the art pieces can be marketable and make profit for the non-profit organization. I do not think this is a form of erasing their creation but rather supporting them to get to the end result of what they had envisioned the art piece to be. Throughout the process of making the mosaic pieces, the kids had trouble trusting the process because it did not look like how they imagined it to be, but the important thing I noticed them do is sitting down and looking constantly at the art piece in order to reflect and figure out the next steps, so they did not give up entirely.