Contemporary Arts Festival

Goal:

Using the principles of Human-Centered Design, improve Arts Education in your community (aligned with UN Global Goal #4: Quality Education).

Essential Question:

How can we adapt Arts education in our community to utilize creative and collaborative problem-solving skills/methodologies that address the challenges of the 21st century?

Solving the right problem by finding and addressing the root cause

21st-century problems require collaboration not just locally, but across vast regions of divergent people. No one person or organization will be able to solve such complexities. The future requires us to think globally, beyond differences, not separated by borders.
The social, political, and economic models that are most widely adopted globally are built upon self-interest and/or the declared political interests of a nation.
Educational models are rarely built and structured for teaching, modeling, and developing collaboration and creativity as important skillsets that can help to find solutions for 21st-century complexities.

Focusing on people and their context

Designing solutions to help Arts education not only improve towards UN Goal #4, but also target young learners to develop skills and address the root causes of 21st-century problems, will require a user experience within a school setting.

With my 20 years of experience in education, I believe that international schools have a framework already in place that allows for diverse cultures, traditions, and multicultural learners to pilot such a collaborative and artistic experience. The students are the users, the administration and the school are the company, and the product is an arts festival that is centered on collaboration and creative problem solving.

Thinking of everything as a system

How have political and historical models influenced the educational systems in the Middle East?
Does the traditional educational model lack focus on developing collaboration and creative problem-solving and has this deficit influenced the past and current leaders in the region?
Has the lack of a quality arts education been one of the root causes of the many extended conflicts that plague the Middle East?

Working iteratively to try out small, simple interventions.

Designing a user experience in the arts as a festival for young learners in international schools in the Middle East region to converge, collaborate, and creatively problem solve.
1. Many schools and students in the region will be invited to attend
The festival will celebrate the unique artistry and creativity of every student as they collaborate across artistic disciplines to create solutions for expressing their perceptions to specific prompts.
Musicians, Visual Artists, and Digital Artists will work together in small groups as they create multiple iterations of how to express their viewpoints to communicate through a combined expression of their specializations.

Why the arts?

The arts, by their very nature, are collaborative. An artist expresses an idea through a medium, and the interested observer interacts with this idea in some capacity. Arts can express a concept, feeling, or situation where words might fail. The arts are not a competition where there are designated roles of winners and losers. The arts allow young learners to develop confidence to view their world and express their place within it. Collaboration within the arts requires users to listen deeply, develop empathy for one's perspective (empathy does not equate to agreement), and the arts catalyze self-reflexivity. The arts also require creative problem-solving methodologies as a process of expression. How users iterate in the design cycle, with Garrett’s five elements, through a process towards a collective presentation of an agreed expression, is developing creative problem-solving skills.

I believe all schools should have strong art programs, and I wonder about the correlations of regions of the world. Do regions with strong art programs have fewer social and political issues or more? In determining which location I can try to design such an experience, why not start where I currently am? How about the Middle East?

In these modern times, in the Middle East, Contemporary Arts seem perfectly applicable as a way for students to express themselves, collaborate, and create solutions in artistic ways to express their world.

The target users are the people of Jordan, one of the peaceful and neutral countries in the Middle East. Specifically, an international school that educates K-12 students from multiple countries, including the host country of Jordan.
Culturally, what value do the arts bring to the people of Jordan and the wider Middle East?
Educationally, what value do the arts bring to international schools inthe Middle East?

Fortunately, I have been allowed to create such an experience:

Host Country: Jordan
Host City: Amman
Host School: American Community School, Amman

Systems & People

In the current political climate, hosting such a festival at the American International School in Amman is both prudent and politically hypocritical. This is why it is the best choice. The school educates students from several countries, including Jordan, Palestine, the USA, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Greece, Korea, Japan, Israel, and more. It is like a microcosm of the United Nations. I do not wish to have an arts festival that is creating a political statement, aligning with any specific country, or protesting any government. Rather, the opportunity to reach such a diverse group of young learners in a politically neutral and safe territory in the Middle East cannot be ignored. An arts festival where diverse students work together to express themselves is less polarized than a sports event or competition where the outcome requires a winner and a loser. I believe in the power of the arts to bring people together, unite to think and express ideas, concepts, and emotions where words and speeches fail.

To start collaborating with the Activities Director and arts teachers at ACS to build such a festival, I conducted some initial interviews and research. I learned of an organization that currently organizes systems and structures that bind the American international schools in the region: South Asian Inter-Scholastic Association (SAISA). The purpose of SAISA is to promote and coordinate regional professional development activities, academic and cultural festivals, athletic tournaments, and other events deemed appropriate by the member schools.

International schools associated with Saisa:

American Community School, Amman, Founded 1955
Karachi American School (KAS) Pakistan - Founded 1953
Lincoln School (LS) Kathmandu, Nepal - Founded 1954
Lahore American School (LAS), Pakistan - Founded 1956
International School of Islamabad (ISOI), Pakistan - Founded 1975
American International School Dhaka (AISD), Bangladesh - Founded 1972
Overseas School of Colombo (OSC), Sri Lanka - Founded 1983
American School of Bombay (ASB), India - Founded 1981
The American International School Muscat (TAISM), Oman - Founded 1998
American International School Chennai (AISC), India - Founded 1995

The traditional model for SAISA schools is to have a separate festival for music and arts, as well as their regional sports tournaments. Festivals and tournaments rotate annually within the SAISA schools. The last SAISA music festival occurred in 2019 in Bombay, India. Once pandemic restrictions were lifted, SAISA music is the only SAISA event that has not resumed, leaving a 5-year gap for sound artists and musicians in the region to gather, learn, collaborate, and perform.

The traditional SAISA music format is to have all participating schools learn the same pre-chosen music within their individual school's band and choir ensembles. During the festival, SAISA schools converge upon the host school for two days of intense sectional and whole ensemble rehearsals. The festival culminates with a large combined band/orchestra ensemble and choir as they perform the chosen works for an audience in the host school's theatre. The repertoire chosen is 100% decided by the ensemble directors, who base their decisions on the festival theme, talent within the ensembles, and appropriate difficulty level to scaffold the development of the student musicians.

People and Their Context: Small, Simple Interventions

Because of the 5-year absence of SAISA music, we brainstormed on ways we can try to revive the music festival. If we are to revive the Saisa Music, we need to try something new. Perhaps the transitional model of SAISA music is the reason no individual SAISA school wanted the responsibility of hosting the festival? Was there no longer value in the traditional model for students, parents, or administrators? Arts education in this region, it seems, has not been the priority, and perhaps the pandemic was the final nail in the coffin for SAISA music? How can we resurrect the music festival and help these young learners benefit from the collaborative nature of the arts, and perhaps, address what I see as a core issue in the region: lack of collaboration, creative problem-solving, and empathy? So, in our initial brainstorm, I asked the question:“Why not combine SAISA Music and SAISA (Visual) Arts into one Contemporary Arts Festival?”This raised my constituents' interest to the next obvious question: “What is Contemporary Art?” Fortunately, I just completed an MA in Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada where I discovered art that has been created within the last 100 years to the present, characterized by its diversity, medium, and ideas that often intersect current social, political, and cultural issues, challenging traditional notions of art and its purpose.

Adopting Jesse James Garrett’s Five Elements of User Experience:

Strategy:
- A combined arts festival for young learners in the Middle East to develop collaborative and creative problem-solving skills across diverse cultures and learners
Scope:
- A Contemporary Arts Festival as a breaking away from traditional experiences in the SAISA international schools in the Middle East
- The festival invites students from the SAISA network to converge in Amman, Jordan, where they will collaborate in small groups to find multi-modal ways of expressing their world.
- The festival is focused on creative and collaborative processes and not the final product of these activities. The process of experimenting, creating, and iterating, reflecting, listening, and presenting is designed to exemplify collaboration and creative problem-solving as prime developmental social skill-building targets
- The process is the artistic product. An A/R/Tographical presentation of the process of small group activities using guiding prompts to catalyze collaborative processes.

Always Start with a Philosophical Stand

We began our brainstorming, determining that we needed a philosophy statement. Once we have a philosophy, we can understand what and why we are trying to design this festival. Our philosophy statement is our guiding light and allows all constituents to understand the why of what we are trying to design.

Student-Friendly Philosophy Statement (Festival Version)

This festival is a space where you get to be more than just a student—you get to be an artist, a thinker, a builder of ideas. We believe art and music are powerful ways to explore the world and express who you are. Here, you can ask wild questions like: What shape does a sound make? What color is a song? What does a feeling look like?

You’ll get to create your own work—whether it’s music, painting, sound art, digital collage, or something totally new—and you’ll work with others across both music and visual arts. We believe in experimenting, imagining, messing up, trying again, and making cool stuff together.

This isn’t about right answers or perfect performances. It’s about exploring, creating, and sharing your voice. Together, we’ll build something that’s part concert, part gallery, part playground—and 100% you.

Philosophy Statement for Parents & Teachers

Our festival is designed to empower students as creators, not just performers. We invite participants to explore the world and the host country of Jordan through the lenses of music and visual art—asking big, imaginative questions like: What color is a melody? What does a shape sound like?

At the heart of this experience is a belief that art and music are powerful tools for thinking, feeling, and making sense of life. We encourage students to experiment, collaborate, and express themselves in both familiar and unexpected ways. This means they won’t just rehearse—they’ll explore, invent, reflect, and take creative risks.

Rather than focusing solely on final performances or polished products, the festival celebrates the creative process: from first ideas to finished and unfinished works, from sketches and soundscapes to collaborative installations.

We’re building a space where students can connect across disciplines, support each other’s growth, and discover that their voices—and visions—matter, and that they are creators who can use their knowledge and experience to express their world through sound and visual art. We believe learning should be meaningful, messy, and full of wonder.

Because of Jordan’s rich cultural history with mosaic arts, we determined that mosaic art was a fantastic metaphor for adopting a non-traditional festival structure.

Structure: Garrett’s 3rd Element

A three-day Contemporary Arts Festival hosted by the American Community School, Amman (ACS) titled: MOSIACS: a Contemporary Arts festival of Visual and Sound Art.

Participating SAISA schools frontload festival prompts in their art classes that inspire students to create a response
Students' response is their mosaic “tile” and can be of any medium. For example, sound artists can record an MP3, visual artists can take a photo of a painting, or bring a drawing. Video artists can upload their work to a drive.

Skeleton: Garrett’s 4th Element

Process and Presentation, Backwards By Design (UbD): What does the end look like?

The festival is focused on Processes of Creative-Collaboration and not a Product.

Can we agree that:

Creative Processes are designed to be experimental and messy.
Creative processes require ideas and attempts that may not work as expected or envisioned
Creative processes only work with effort and the courage to try new ideas
Collaborative processes require some ideas, but not all ideas from every group member
Collaborative processes are designed to create differences in opinions
Collaborative processes require patience and letting go of expectations

What this Festival Presentation (culmination) will NOT look like

A polished full music ensemble performing 5 songs with a conductor
Completed artworks and finished products
More?

What this Festival Presentation (culmination) MIGHT look like

Group presentations of their creative processes
Demonstration of the process, struggles, and successes
- “This was our journey”
Students’ voice and choice on their “Target Expression” and how they want to express this to others
- Presentation format - dialogic or performative
- Live Performance - both visual and sound, perhaps improvisational
- Recorded presentation on a digital medium
- A Booth or stall, installation

Festival Format:

Frontload

Preparation / Creation

Festival

Collaboration / Revision

Performance /

presentation

Frontloading:

Participating schools/teachers apply “festival prompts” to their current planning to help students create their unique “piece of a mosaic” before the festival.
1. “Festival Prompts” - Teacher-collaborated prompts that all participating schools use in their classrooms
  - Can be applied to any curricular teaching and planning
  - New ideas can be communicated and shared
  - Prompts include ideas, activities, engagements
  - We can change the name “prompt” to any label that sparks student creativity
2. Agreement with the vocabulary “piece of a mosaic”. What do we label “student created work” as:
  - Artifact
  - Tile
  - Piece
  - Something else?
Participating students bring their “piece of a mosaic” or “piece” using the medium of their current artistic subject.

What does this look like?

Any medium of expression that communicates the students’ artistic response/composition to any festival prompt(s).
The expectation is a student brings at least 1 “piece” - Can be any medium, any size
The expectation is that students’ create an original “piece” - can be inspired from but not plagiarized

Subject specific: Possible “pieces” a student can bring -

Music/band/choir/ensembles-
- Written music on staff paper
  - Single melody or phrase
  - Chords
  - Non-traditional notation
- A recorded piece
  - An improvisation
  - A remix of recorded samples
  - Soundscapes, vocalizations, sound effects

Visual Arts
- A photograph / video or digital representation of created “piece”
- A Storyboard, Wireframe, ThinkSketch, MindMap, SiteMap, UserFlow etc.
- Consider travel restrictions with physical “pieces”

Digital Arts
- Can upload “pieces” to ACS google Drive

Prompts:

Prompts can help:

Frontloading - Ideation/creation
- Pre-Festival Prompts - Individual teachers apply prompts to current classroom activities
Organize Students into Festival Groups -
- Specific prompts to gravitate students into areas of “Target Expression”
  - We can place students in groups based on their chosen pathway into a specific “Target Expression”.
  - Overarching umbrella terms might help to find inspiration to choose a “Target Expression”
  - Here are some possible examples:
    - People and Places
    - Time and Dates
    - Thoughts and Emotions
    - School and Society
    - Sound and Vision
    - Animals and Behaviors
    - Air, land, Sea
    - UN 2030 Goals
    - Food and Beverage
    - Sports and Culture Celebrations

EXAMPLES of Interdisciplinary Creative Prompts

1. What Color is a Sound?

Choose a piece of music (your own or someone else’s). What colors do you see when you listen? Create a painting, collage, or digital artwork that shows how the music feels through color, line, and shape.

2. Shape Your Sound

Create a musical piece based on a shape or pattern you see in the world—a spiral, a zigzag, a city skyline, or even a fingerprint. How can that shape influence rhythm, pitch, or dynamics?

3. Soundtrack of a Painting

Choose a visual artwork—your own or a partner’s. Compose or perform a short piece of music that brings the artwork to life. What kind of story or emotion does it tell through sound?

Should all music teachers agree on a comprehensive list of visual arts to use?
Is there value in selecting visual models as compared to students finding their own?
Is there value in using 1 or a few as compared to a wide variety?

4. Feelings in 4D

Pick an emotion like joy, anxiety, wonder, or sadness. Express it through both music and visual art. How do your two creations relate to each other? Do they tell the same story, or show two sides of the same feeling?

5. Nature Remixed

Go outside. Take a photo, make a sketch, or record a sound from your environment. Use it as the starting point to create both a piece of art and a sound composition. How does the environment inspire your creativity?

6. Art Jam: Trade & Translate

Partner up. One of you creates a short visual artwork. The other responds by creating music that matches it. Then trade and repeat—but this time, reverse roles. Discuss what surprised you!

7. Music Map

Imagine a song as a map. Create a visual “journey” of your composition—where does it begin? What obstacles or changes happen? Where does it end up? Use drawings, symbols, or mixed media.

Can Yoko Ono’s Map Piece help inspire us here? https://teaching.ellenmueller.com/walking/2021/05/30/yoko-ono-map-piece-1962-64/

8. Synesthesia Studio

Empathise with synesthesia—a condition where people naturally associate sounds with colors or shapes. (Wassily Kandinsky) Create a project that reflects this experience, using both audio and visual forms.

9. Time Machine

Pick a moment in history—or imagine one in the future. Create a visual and musical piece that brings that time to life. What instruments, colors, or textures would you use?

10. One Word, Two Worlds

Choose one powerful word (like freedom, chaos, silence, rebirth). Create both a visual and a musical response to that word. Then, reflect on what was the same and what was different in each medium.

11. Visual Art & Sound

Thoughts?

Could we make these more specific to Amman or Jordan, while still keeping them open-ended?
Is there room for more open-ended themes?
- Examples
  - Story: Could be told through art, music, digital media and is naturally cross-disciplinary, allow for students to explore multiple mediums or focus on one
  - Shape your sound -> soundscape
    - Students could record soundscapes and create visual representations of them. This would allow them to connect to Amman and the local community, and to create works in response to their experiences on the trip
  - Nature remixed -> Remixed
    - More open ended - students can explore the interplay between multiple art forms, without having it be connected to nature

Festival Architecture / Schedule:

Groupings:

Groups can rotate through the architecture using their “piece” as the template for the iterative process within each “workshop”
Groups should have at least one student from each discipline

Questions:

Is there time in the festival for students to change groups, or is it more productive to keep the same groupings for the entirety of the process?
What size is each group, and how many groups can the format/schedule accommodate?

Workshops:

Sound: Students discover new ways to use their “piece” within the lens and framework of sound.

Collaborating with the musicians in their group and the music teachers in the workshop, their “piece” is explored through the structure and meaning of sound.
Musicians who bring their sound “piece” to this workshop will have the opportunity to explore and revise their work in collaboration with the “non-musicians” in their group. Their front-loaded “piece” will need revising based on the group members' “pieces.”

Visual Art: Students discover new ways to use their “piece” within the lens and framework of Color and Shapes, medium.

Collaborating with the visual artists in their group and the arts teachers in the workshop, their “piece” is explored through the structure and meaning of color, shape, and medium.
Visual Artists who bring their “piece” to this workshop will have the opportunity to explore and revise their work in collaboration with others in their group. Their front-loaded “piece” will need revising based on the group members' “pieces.”

Digital Media: Students discover new ways to use their “piece” within the lens and framework of Digital Media.

I changed Digital Art to Digital Media - this makes it broader and could include a variety of tech

Is this different from visual or sound art, or a combination of both?

Collaboration Workshop: Students discover new ways to use their “piece” within the lens and framework of Collaboration.

Based on the group “Prompt” or “Target Expression” - methods of collaboration to apply creative solutions to creating a mosaic with individual “pieces”
Google Design Sprints: Quick collaborative methods for input from all team members

Documentation of Process:

Festival workbook, paper or digital?
Video, voice, sound, or photo recorded?
Reflection prompts: collaboration, creativity, struggles, successes, failures
Documentation AS Art - Can students use their process documentation as the artwork itself?

Artistic Outcomes (wishlist):

In-depth experience with creative processes and artistic creation/composition
In-depth experience with collaborative processes and creative problem-solving
Increased self-confidence in expressing their ideas, feelings, worlds
Increased tolerance for embracing the unexpected and learning from multiple iterations
A deeper understanding of effort and engagement can make a big difference
Appreciation for multiple modalities of artistic expression
A deeper understanding of current and past artworks
A stronger belief that they can express their unique perception of the world and get others to think, question, relate, and debate

Surface - Garrett’s 5th Element

This will be the festival itself - the experience itself. March 6-8 2026