Cristina Garcia-Colina--Back Home in Mexico City

Ed.M. AIE

After a look at her current project, a collaboration with fellow HGSE alumni on a series of children's art books, you see what Cristina Garcia Colina's previous experiences were leading to. In the construction of interdisciplinary lessons that encourage the young reader to learn art history, art making, and the associated subject areas that are addressed in the stories (yes, math and science included), you see the subtle integration of an intellect that has been working at this business for a while. The aesthetic, it seems, has been married to the pragmatic. And in the supplemental materials that Cristina has written for the teachers' guide to the books, you see an equal sensitivity to the grown-ups who will direct their own children's and students' use of these books (known as the Little Talentum series) when they become commercially available in 2007.

Before she attended the Arts in Education Program during the 2003-04 academic year, Cristina had already traveled from her home in Mexico City to the HGSE campus on two occasions to attend consecutive summer sessions of the Project Zero Summer Institute. With the widely diverse international constituency of educators who attend the PZ sessions, she spent intensive weeks, on both occasions, in the study of research on multiple intelligence theory and portfolio assessment. "I discovered great affinity with the philosophy while participating in the WideWorld course during the 2000 and 2001 PZ Institutes," she says, "and in two Latitud-PZ Seminars" (referring to Spanish-specific introductions to the PZ research for use in Latin America). 

This led her to "get involved with HGSE in a more profound way," she remembers. "I coached two WideWorld Multiple Intelligence courses, developed the National Children's website of the Arts and Culture for the Mexican Ministry of Education within the Multiple Intelligences framework, and served as Mexican coordinator for the CONACULTA/PZ-HGSE collaborative edition in Spanish of the QUEST Game. From my sub-director position in CONACULTA, I enjoyed becoming a diffuser of the MI theory about school and museum audiences in Mexico."

Not surprisingly, Cristina attended the AIE Program, she explains, "to deepen my understanding of the role the arts play in the community, and to work toward helping the community and students understand it as well." That was founding former director Jessica Hoffmann Davis's final year on the job (2003-04), and Cristina enjoyed the mentorship. During her year in AIE, she also took courses in museum education topics from Project Zero researcher Shari Tishman and "learning from objects" expert Roger Dell, as well as courses in peacemaking and anti-violence strategies for educators. Meanwhile, she maintained her related interest in Tibetan Buddhism and the serene teachings of the Dalai Lama. "These things," she explains, "are all sort of related--working in my private life to be emotionally balanced and without strife and in public through museums and schools to create peaceful communities in the fight against the encroaching sense of cultural alienation."

During the first year after Cristina graduated from the AIE Program, she directed a daycare program in Brookline. But not long into her second year on the job, her father got sick back home in Mexico City, and she went home to help him recuperate. Soon, her father was getting better, and Cristina was putting together a patchwork of education-related positions. She works full-time in the Mexico City Colonia of Condesa as a web editor for Axiom. And in some of her spare time, she helps the federal department of education to implement arts programs as a consultant for schools in northern Mexico.

"I've been spending two or three days of each month in the city of Tampico, in the state of Tamaulipas, implementing an arts program for the special-education program at the University of Tamaulipas," she says of this latter project. "I work with the School of Arts and Music there--on a project called ARCADI [denoting Arts for Different Capabilities--or Artes para Capacidades Diferentes]. Through music and painting and social development activities, we try to develop programs that will result in the advancement of children's language and social skills. It's a teacher-education program, essentially. I organize the entire series of seminars for all 20 of the teachers from Tamaulipas who are enrolled, giving them intensive seminars myself or inviting guest speakers. My students there are teacher-trainers who work with the children in the morning and train other teachers at the university in the afternoon."

When not busy at her web-editing day job or her teacher-education weekend job, Cristina has been working with Little Talentum co-founders Valeria Fontanals (an HGSE grad) and Kennedy School grad Maria Ferreres and their team, including HGSE grads Amaya Aboitiz and Emilia Pfannl, on the children's book series. Addressed to children between ages two and seven, with some books in English and some in Spanish, the series is intended to "develop children's talents using multiple intelligence theory and language and social development theories" in circulation at the Ed School, says Cristina. So far, the team has published seven books in the series, including four geared toward the development of social skills and three toward artistic skills, with plans to publish more on math, natural sciences, music, and other subjects. As many as five main characters, representing five "types" of kids, appear in each book--with a character named Crazer Eraser appearing in each one. ("He's the troublemaker in the group," explains Cristina, "the one who challenges the other children in different ways, because social skills and artistic skills require problem-solving skills.") The books for the older children are roughly 20 pages long, while the ones for younger kids are around 10 pages long.

"I'm co-authoring the text of the stories," explains Cristina, "and am in charge of writing the parents' and teachers' guides for the visual art collection. We have designed rubrics charts for tracking a child's progress. We have created a website"--see http://www.littletalentum.com -- "where the parents and teachers of young children can learn more about us. And we will be giving a presentation at HGSE this spring"--Thursday, March 1, 2007, at 4:00 p.m., in Gutman Conference Center, to be exact--"in hopes of sharing our work and spreading the word about our project to current HGSE students and the wider Harvard community."